Laughter spilled around her, husky, erotic, alien, dark, purely Adam Black.

“You aren’t falling for me, are you, Irish?” he purred against her ear, that infernal hand finally moving up to toy with the button-fly of her jeans.

“Hardly,” she forced out, her whole body straining with need as she waited breathlessly for his hand to slip inside her pants. With each button that popped, a tiny shudder shook her.

Her eyes fluttered closed and her head plopped limply back against his chest as his hand slid into her jeans and, palm to her skin, he pushed beneath her panties.

The moment his hand touched her bare skin her knees went out from under her.

As she started to go down, he snaked an arm tightly around her waist, holding her up.

“Good. I’d hate to think you were falling for me.”

She didn’t miss the amusement in his voice, nor the absurd reality that she’d indeed just quite physically fallen, from a mere touch. And he hadn’t even grazed her clitor—

“Oooh!” A whoosh of air escaped her and she didn’t even bother trying to stand anymore, just let him have her weight. Dimly, she could hear him panting against her ear, his breathing rough and labored, as if he’d been running for a very long time. Her climax was right there, she was on it, about to go over . . .

“Christ, Gabrielle, you make me—”

“Well, now, isn’t this pretty,” a deep voice mocked. “Looks like she’s primed and ready for me. I can’t wait to finish what you’ve started. Remember how we used to do that, Adam? How you and I used to share? Or is that yet another of those things you like to pretend never happened along with those few thousand years you pretend you never lived? Does she know what we can do to her? Have you told her how we used to play with mortals?”

Gabby jerked violently in Adam’s arms, that oh-so-desperately-needed orgasm dying an instant death, though none of the attendant arousal did. Her throat worked convulsively as the sardonic voice penetrated her sensual stupor. She tried desperately to shake it off, to speak through it, to warn Adam that Darroc had found them again, but her treacherous vocal cords had locked up on her every bit as completely as they had back on Fountain Square. She was frozen from head to toe, rooted in place.

As she stood, unable to manage even the smallest squawk of warning, she was stunned and relieved to realize that somehow he knew.

Yanking his hand from her jeans, he turned her roughly in his arms and pulled her against him, snarling viciously. “Bloody hell.”

Gabby’s eyes fixed with horror on the tall copper-haired Fae standing just beyond Adam’s shoulder. Head tilted back, she stared up at Darroc.

Its iridescent eyes a cool shade of ice, it pursed perfect lips that held a twist of cruelty and blew her a mocking kiss over his shoulder.

Her mouth opened on a scream.

But they were already sifting.

They sifted place for hours.

At first she was still in such a sensual daze that she could hardly even think, didn’t even bother trying to speak. Her whole body was caught in a suspended, painful state of erotic awareness that was taking much too long to dissipate.

Well, at least one part of the Book of the Sin Siriche Du had been accurate, she brooded, the part about: so sates a lass that she is oft incapable of speech, wits muddled.

For not even fear for her life, it seemed, had much of a dampening effect on the storm of desire Adam had stirred in her.

Then again, she half-suspected she might be getting a little numb to fear; repeated exposure and all.

Still . . . the passion he’d awakened in her was like nothing she’d ever felt before. Nothing she’d ever thought possible to experience. Quite simply, being touched by Adam Black made her whole body feel gloriously, intensely, addictively alive.

It was just as she’d always feared: a few Fae kisses and a woman was lost.

And it wasn’t as if she were a novice where kisses were concerned. She’d kissed a lot. In fact, she suspected she’d kissed a whole lot more than most women. Because she was a virgin and men were . . . well, men, her dates had put extraordinary effort into foreplay with her, each determined to be The One That Scored, like it was some kind of competition.

Hours of expert, seductive kissing, and she’d always seen her dates firmly to the door.

Yet after a few kisses from Adam, she’d not only been hovering absurdly close to orgasm, she’d been about to fall—literally—into bed, or rather on the floor, or any damn where he’d wanted her.

He was addictive. It had been bad enough looking at him and wondering what he would be like in bed, but now she had a clear idea, and she was never going to be able to look at him again without thinking about it. In great detail. Now that she’d gotten a taste of him, she was finally able to put into words what she’d sensed about him from the very beginning, what had been wreaking havoc with her senses since day one: Adam Black was more man than most men.