Meta:Between the Books: Volume Twentynine

Volume Twentynine
Character(s)	Damali and Carlos
Date	November 2007
After	Battle of Masada and the Manhattan Concert, Between Man and Wife
Before	The Darkness
Location	San Diego at the Neteru Guardian Team Compound/Mansion
Between the Books Navigation
Previous Between Man and Wife	Next Atlantis Rising

Carlos closed his eyes for a moment with a shudder. Normalcy was a gift. Something rare like a jewel; something that he and his Guardian brothers had learned to make the most of in the present tense without question. Being alone with his wife with no demons to kill right now meant blessed freedom, like temporary shore leave, and who knew how long it would last? He didn’t want to think about the thing that might have gotten away after Masada. Nobody in the house wanted to go there any more than they felt like kicking the bullshit together, playing cards, hanging out, or whatever. Even when battling, the team had a chance to eat on the road together and played cards while waiting on sunrise… could catch a movie whenever, technology allowed easy access.

But being with his woman… now that was a solo mission that required taking one’s time. Not a brother in the house would be coming up for air soon, especially not after the adrenaline hype of Masada, backed up with a mad-crazy concert in the Big Apple.

Aw hell to the no, there was no time like the present. Damali had him chasing the energy pearls in her sweat like a junkie chased a hit. In each precious droplet that rose to the surface of her buttery soft skin, he could see blue-white static zinging through it before it evaporated away into steam. Moreover, he felt it… a sizzling, heat producing delirium caused by contact with any part of Damali he touched. His brain had practically melted into heat waves. It had always been like that, but something about her was different… stronger. Damn, he didn’t know what and didn’t care. All he knew for sure was it was getting better between them, if that was even possible. The skin-against-skin contact stole his breath, his mind, till no words would form.

Maybe it was the concert… maybe it was getting out of Masada with the whole team still alive. Maybe it was just that he loved this woman like no tomorrow. Maybe it was all of the above. Right now, the source didn’t matter as he lay beside her sucking in huge gulps of air while tracing her damp skin with trembling fingers, and watching the energy pearl under the tips of them.

“Wow,” he murmured, chasing a bead of energy with his forefinger till it rolled off her torso to soak into the damp sheets.

Damali arched with a shiver, squeezing her eyes shut. “Carlos, you’ve gotta stop, all right.” The plea had come out as a broken whisper that made him smile with lazy satisfaction.

“Say it like you mean it,” he murmured in a sensual rumble, teasing her and finding another energy pearl to torture.

“Por favor,” she gasped and then turned her face away from his like he’d slapped her.

“That bad, huh?” he asked, truly flattered that every part of her that he’d paid homage to was still too sensitive to touch.

She nodded fervently as his hand caressed her slippery inner thigh, then turned toward him and took his mouth. “Yeah. So, give me a minute.”

“That’s the least I can do, when the lady asks me like that.”

She chuckled softly and lazily stroked his chest with her palm. “You know… one of these days you’re gonna mess up and make me seek revenge on you.” She turned into the arm she’d been laying against and nipped his bicep.

“You know where I used to be from, boo. Don’t ever threaten revenge and not be able to back it up… ‘cause fair exchange is no robbery.”

“Who said I can’t back it up?”

She smiled as she sat up and rolled over onto her belly with the slow, sated stretch of a lioness that had been dozing in the sun. He stared at her tussled locks that made her look deliciously wild and allowed his gaze to take in her bedroom-sexy eyes, then slide down to the knowing, deliberate pout that had captured her lush mouth. The way she leaned into him, balancing on her elbows on the bed with her gorgeous breasts lifted high like her regal chin made her seem like a living Sphinx. His gaze swept her back, past the dip in her spine, and languished at the tight lobes of her behind before trailing the rest of the way down her thighs and calves.

“I stand corrected,” he said after a moment with a sly half-smile. “I think you can back it up… but just might not be able to right now.”

“Care to place a wager on that, Mr. Rivera?”

Oh, so she wanted to play…

“How much you got?”

“My chore detail in the compound for a week,” she said laughing.

“Sheeit,” he said laughing and flopping back to look up at the skylight. “You know that’ll start the brawl for it all up in here, puhleease. I ain’t doing no double-duty of dishes and bathrooms.”

“Yeah, you will… that’s my revenge.” She laughed hard and rolled over, crossing her arms behind her head as she closed her eyes.

“Oh, I will, huh?” He pushed himself up on one elbow to challenge her, chuckling as he warned to her new love game. “In your dreams,” he murmured close to her mouth and then kissed her gently.

“No, Senor… muy caliente, in yours.”

Before he could hit her with another round of trash-talking and deeper kisses, every place that he’d touched her skin and co-mingled their perspiration simply ignited. A wave of blue-white static pleasure washed over his skin as she stared at him, and the tremor was so subtle yet so profound that for a second his breath hitched and he had to close his eyes.

“Shit…” he whispered after the tremor abated.

“I told you to stop messing with me and to leave me alone, but you wouldn’t listen,” she said in a sly, sensual murmur. “Now, I exact my revenge.”

“Wait a minute,” he said with a quiet gasp as another wave roiled over his skin. “Hold up. You never did that before… how…”

“Every time we’re together I learn something new that I can do.”

She took his mouth with a satisfied grin on hers, but when he went to put his hand in her hair, he couldn’t move his arm.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa… baby, talk to me… whassup?”

“Women are magnetic, men are electric… don’t you know your principles of Qi Gong?”

For a moment he just stared at her and she threw her head back and laughed softly.

“You just blew a lot of electromagnetic cells, baby,” she whispered, kissing one of his nipples. “I just inherited all of that to convert to my magnetic pull… and right now I say you can’t touch me till I say so.”

“Oh, baby, c’mon now, I was just talking shit… was just playing. Let me up.”

“Uh, uh,” she said with a sexy smirk. “Your eyes are turning silver.”

“Okay, now, we’ve gotta talk about this… blindsiding me with ancient Eastern arts or whatever, it’s just not right.”

“We both were in Tibet together, and you’re the one with throne level knowledge to add to all that, so…”

“Yeah, yeah, but I forgot about it,” he said, squirming under her delicate suckle of his belly button. “Like, under the circumstances, how’s a man supposed to even remember his own name, let alone some esoteric arts? Be reasonable, D.”

She lifted her head and smiled at him, her lids half-mast. “And that’s my problem, how?”

Again he just stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “I’m still not doing your house detail and mine. Besides, if I win, you didn’t tell me what I’d get… you ain’t working with aces in your hand, boo. Time to fold at the table.”

“Really?” She nodded and then simply traced his navel with the tip of her tongue. “Okay. We’ll see what the oracles have to say about it, then. Let’s go in deep and see.”

The moment her tongue darted into his navel, pleasure cascaded so quickly down his shaft that he thought his skin would split. Every old fantasy that he’d ever shared with her felt like it was being magnetically siphoned to the forefront of his mind so that he could not only visualize it in hot, blinding mental flashes, but so that he could also feel it practically liquefy his bones. Under normal circumstances, the sensation would have made him sit up in a hard arch, but he was bound to the bed by an invisible pleasure force. His lungs ejected his voice from his throat as the only alternative until he fisted the sheets.

The moment her mouth sheathed him, he braced for the sensation that contracted his scrotum and sent a hard tremor up his spine. But he was totally unprepared to immediately feel his seed being drawn from him in a hard, magnetic pull that crested a blinding orgasm. Then she stopped, but left him hanging.

“Woman, you are so cold,” he said on a ragged breath.

“No I’m not,” she murmured, sliding her body onto his in a searing, wet mount. “Just vengeful.” She looked down at him and smiled. “Tell me that’s not hot the way you like it.”

Every muscle in his stomach contracted as she sat on him with a hard thrust. The only thing he could do was release the pent-up moan with his next rushed exhale.

“So, you ain’t doing dishes, huh?”

He couldn’t answer her and just shook his head no. His eyes were crossing beneath his lids and every delicious sensation that he’d visited upon her in the last few hours, and that had soaked into his skin, was now resurfacing till he was on fire.

“I’m not cold am I?” she whispered like a husky threat into his ear.

“Hell no,” he finally breathed back. “Let my arms go, at least, so I can touch you, ‘Mali.”

She shook her head no. “My saying no… now that is cold.”

“Oh, baby… shit.”

“Uh, huh,” she murmured against his jugular, knocking his head back with her jaw and avoiding his attempts to kiss her as she slowly moved against him. “And we can go like this for a couple of hours… until the electric charge that you gave me runs out. Remember how matter can neither be created nor destroyed? This pulse—”

“Not like this… not this close,” he said between ragged breaths, static cracking in his damp hair.

“Okay,” she whispered, biting his sweet spot at his neck tattoo until he cried out. “Then closer.”

Her hips ground him to mental dust as he starting coming, but then was held in state without mercy. Not being able to up-thrust, or hold her, or kiss her, or break the plane of their separation was maddening. His chest and stomach ballooned with rapid inhales and exhales as hot moisture found its way to his eyes. Hovering on the edge of a knifing climax, seed like hot lava in his shaft, and his scrotum contracting so hard that he was sure it might be sucked up into his abdomen, began to make a week of detail not seem so bad.

“Mi, tesoro, stop playing… compassion, por favor. I can’t take it.”

“You give in?” she asked, her expression pained as she looked down at him biting her lip.

He nodded; words were becoming impossible as he felt fangs break his gum line. But she wasn’t done messing with his mind, couldn’t have been as she began to trace his nipples with her thumbs, her thigh muscles contracting and releasing until he was almost near sobbing.

“All right, all right, I’ll do the dishes, the bathroom—your detail… I’ll take your turn… you don’t have to do jack for a week!”

“Promise?” she whispered and then stopped moving. “A wife shouldn’t have to go to all this trouble for a break. You really, for real, promise, Carlos?”

“Yes! Oh, shit, yes!”

“Good,” she murmured with a tender smile, and then in the next breath, he could move.

She knew she’d played with him two seconds past too late, but she seriously wasn’t prepared for the sling-shot reaction—he didn’t even give her a chance to take her next breath; her wings never unfolded from her shoulder blades, which was probably a good thing. One blink and the next thing she knew, she was on her back and he’d bitten her so hard with a pleasure nick that everything she’d absorbed from him imploded on her wail.

When he drew away from her throat she was still coming and he kissed her hard making her taste her own blood. White-hot shards of pleasure stabbed her canal, her womb, and traveled up her spine like white lightening till she screamed.

“Where I’m from,” he said in a low, sexy rumble next to her ear, “we give as good as we get—never forget that.”

All she could do was hold on. Every drop of sweat that dripped from his skin onto hers made her want to shriek as tiny stabs of pure electric pleasure dug into her pores and consolidated into building pressure within her womb. Then from some remote part of her mind she watched him pull back, agony written all over his face.

“Am I still doing the dishes?” he asked, trying in vain to stop moving and reverse the power paradigm.

She arched hard and felt his body buckle into hers, and she released the one word that she knew would end the dispute. “Yes!”

He came so hard she thought the poor man had swallowed his tongue. She almost passed out from being unable to catch her breath. He dropped like a hot stone against her, practically crushing her for a few moments, his body intermittently twitching from hard, stabbing aftershocks of pleasure with hers.

Lying together, gasping, he finally rolled them over without leaving her body and held her against him tightly with his eyes shut.

“Damn…” he murmured.

She smiled with her eyes closed, but was too winded to even laugh. “Was that, damn—that was good?” she asked after a few seconds. “Or was that, damn—I gotta do the dishes and clean the bathrooms double-time this week?”

He chuckled and slapped her on the backside hard. “You get on my nerves, girl. Both.”

Trivia

• L.A. Banks posted on her personal blog on November 21, 2007 that she'd have a new between the books volume up on the Vampire Huntress Legend website before the end of November. This is the earliest known date of availability of this volume.

References

	Edits to this page before January 1, 2021 use CC-BY-SA-licensed content from the Fandom Vampire Huntress Legend Series Wiki.