Read Poison Kissed for Free Online Page B

taut muscles warm under my palm. My fingertips brushed bare skin, and beneath them something dark and hungry shifted and groaned. “I’d have liked it if you told me to.”
    “Mmm. And what else, if I told you to?” The briefest kiss, just a faint brush of his lips on the corner of my mouth, so soft, I might have imagined it. Helpless, I followed, but he pulled back, just an inch from my reach.
    “Anything.” Desire throbbed tight and wet between my legs, so hard, it made my head swim. I pressed closer and gasped at the steely pressure of his hardness against my belly. He liked it when I surrendered. Liked the power.
    I liked giving it to him.
    Now I ached for his body, hard and shifting against mine, his teeth on my nipples, the scorching pleasure-pain of him entering me, his bitter venom seeping in my mouth. I didn’t care if it was sick. Whatever it was, this weird lust-hate-punish-me attraction sizzling between us, it was past time we purged it. Take me. I’m empty without you. I’ll beg for it if you want. I don’t care. Fuck me, and let’s get it over with.
    His grip tightened on my chin. “Anything?”
    I grabbed his hair and pulled myself up to him, thirsty for contact. My mouth hovered so close to his, I could taste delicious scotch and mint. My mind swirled, drunk, and my whisper cracked with desire too long denied. “Everything.”
    His fingers closed light and steely around my throat.
    Shock flickered my eyes open. His hot green gaze hardened like glass, and he twisted from my grip and softly pushed me aside. “Sounds expensive.”
    My bowels heated, and an angry flush rushed straight to the top of my head. Always he tempted me. Always, once he’d won, he rejected me. Like there was never any question I’d submit.
    I swallowed, burning, trying to halt the stupid tremble in my lip. He was just my boss. I shouldn’t care what he thought of me, so long as I did my job.
    But I did care.
    His gaze met mine, cold, impassive, and too-familiar shame crunched in my guts. His arrogant little games hurt me. And he didn’t care. Wouldn’t be kind to me. I’d cry afterwards, in the bathroom where he couldn’t see or hear me. I’d done that before. And Joey paid me more to guard him than the assholes who sold my body ever did.
    Once a whore, always a whore.
    I yanked my hand from his and scrambled away, my cheeks scorching like poison.
    Deep in the shadowy mezzanine, where fairies tumble and bite and pleasure each other and vampires lick thick scarlet rivulets from bleeding skin, a willowy golden lady named Ivy tumbles a vial of sparkling green liquid over long-jointed fingers, a satisfied smile creeping over her long scarred face. She glides forward to the rail on ragged icewhite membranes, her wingjoints warm and alive with the pleasure of watching the snakeman squirm.
    It’s him, no doubt about it. Joseph the fat black serpent, wriggling like a fish on the barbed hook of his own stubbornness.
    Ivy laughs, and humid breeze flutters her long silver dress, teasing her smooth gold-dusted brown skin. The prickly blue banshee yearns for more than the slim regard he shows her. She’s pretty like a doll, smooth young cheeks and perfect red lips, and sour jealousy ripples Ivy’s skin. She can smell the girl’s desire, sliding like oil on the warm updrafts that tease her wings and stretch her silvermetal hair away from her face. And she longs to whisk the poor girl away from the evil snakything before it’s too late.
    Ivy understands desire. She’s hidden in darkness for years, too ashamed of her scars to come out into the light, but her yearning never ceased in all that time. So many nights of sleepless tears, her mind screaming for help and her body afire. Her memory isn’t what it once was. Always struggling to remember what she’s lost, always an ache between her legs and a hollow, empty place in her heart.
    But she remembers Joey.
    Her blood bubbles with sick yellow malice, flushing her torn white