Chapter 4: Highway Temptation
The engine’s growl was the only sound in the world. Pine trees blurred into a solid black wall on either side of the narrow Tibetan road, the headlights carving a tunnel through the absolute dark. Jaxon’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, his eyes flicking between the uneven asphalt and the rearview mirror.
Morrigan sat perfectly still in the passenger seat, a statue wrapped in one of his flannel shirts. She hadn’t spoken since they’d scrambled into the car, throwing his meager supplies into the backseat. Her gaze was fixed on the side mirror, watching for any sliver of that tell-tale violet light.
An hour bled into the relentless hum of tires on pavement.
“It’s cold,” she said, her voice a quiet shock in the silence. She wasn’t complaining. It was an observation, as if she’d just rediscovered the sensation.
Jaxon glanced over. The dashboard glow lit her profile. A faint, healthy pink had returned to her cheeks. The sickly translucence was gone. “Heater’s broken. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She undid the top button of the flannel, then the next, her movements deliberate. “The cold is… crisp. It means I can feel it.” She opened the shirt fully, letting it fall off her shoulders to pool around her elbows in the seat. The cool air in the car puckered her nipples into tight, dusky peaks.
Jaxon’s breath caught. He forced his eyes back to the road. “You should stay covered. In case…”
“In case what? We pass another car?” A faint, dark smile touched her lips. Her hand came up, fingertips tracing the silvery lines that marred the perfect curve of her breast. “You saw them. You know what they did. Now look.” She pinched her own nipple, rolled it slowly. “See how alive it is? How it aches for touch? That’s because of you.”
She was right. The scars were there, but the flesh was vibrant, lush. Alive. Her other hand slid down her flat stomach, past the waistband of the borrowed sweatpants.
“Morrigan,” Jaxon said, a warning in his voice that lacked any real conviction.
“I’m not feeding,” she murmured, her eyes closing. Her fingers worked beneath the fabric. “Not the way you think. I’m… celebrating. The fear is a few miles back. The memory is just a memory. Right now, there is just this car. This road. Your eyes on me.” She let out a soft, shuddering sigh. “I can smell myself. I’m so wet. It’s all for you.”
She pulled her hand from her pants, her fingertips glistening in the intermittent light of a passing roadside shrine. Slowly, she brought them to her mouth, maintaining eye contact with him. She sucked her index and middle fingers deep, her tongue swirling around them with a soft, obscene sound. Then she drew them out, slick with saliva, and trailed them down her chest, over her nipple, down her stomach, and back beneath the waistband.
A low groan escaped Jaxon. His erection was immediate, a painful tightness against his zipper.
“You want to see?” she whispered. “See what you do to me?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He just gave a single, stiff nod, his throat too tight for words.
In one fluid motion, she hooked her thumbs into the sweatpants and underwear and pushed them down to her mid-thighs. She spread her legs, bending her knees and planting her feet on the seat. The car’s interior light was off, but the glow from the dashboard was enough.
Her cunt was exposed, a glistening shadow in the dim light. She was already swollen, open. The neat folds of her were slick and dark. She used two fingers to part herself further, showing him the deep, pink core of her. “Look,” she commanded softly. “All this juice. It’s yours. Every drop is because of you. Because you didn’t take what I offered out of cruelty. You took it as a gift. You made it beautiful again.”
She began to circle her clit, a slow, practiced motion. Her head fell back against the headrest, her mint-green hair fanning out. Her breath started coming in shorter hits. “I need you,” she gasped. “Not just your life. I need your weight on me. I need you to fuck this memory out of me. I need you to replace it with something real. Something hard and now.”
“I’m driving,” Jaxon managed to say, the words strangled.
“Then pull over.”
He didn’t hesitate. He scanned the dark road, saw a narrow dirt track leading off into the pines, and wrenched the wheel. The car bounced off the asphalt, shocks groaning, and rattled to a stop fifty yards into the forest, enveloped in darkness. He killed the engine.
The silence was immense, broken only by their breathing.
Jaxon unclipped his seatbelt, the click deafening. Morrigan didn’t move from her sprawled position, her pants tangled at her thighs, her body a pale offering in the dark.
He was on her in a scramble, climbing across the console, his mouth finding hers in a hungry, clumsy kiss. He tasted the salt of her skin, the faint, electric tang of her arousal. His hands groped for her breasts, squeezing, his thumbs grinding over her nipples. She whimpered into his mouth, her hips bucking up off the seat.
“Fuck me, Jaxon,” she panted, breaking the kiss. “Fuck me like you’re trying to break the car. I need to feel it tomorrow. I need to remember this when I think of them.”
He fumbled with his belt, his jeans, shoving them down just enough to free his cock. It was thick and rigid, jutting angrily between them. He used his hand to guide himself, rubbing the broad head through her soaked folds, gathering her wetness. He teased her entrance, pushing just an inch in before pulling back, making her curse.
“Don’t you dare be gentle,” she snarled, her eyes blazing in the dark. “After what they did? Give me something real. Give me a fucking.”
He drove into her. One brutal, deep, shearing thrust that buried him to the hilt. The car rocked on its springs. Morrigan’s scream was pure catharsis, echoing in the metal cabin. It wasn’t a scream of pain, but of raw, victorious feeling.
“Yes! God, yes! Just like that! Fill me up!”
He set a punishing pace, his hips pistoning, his body slamming hers into the leather seat with each thrust. The car filled with the sound of it: the wet, rhythmic slap of skin on skin, the creak of straining upholstery, their ragged, animal grunts. He fucked her with a focused, desperate intensity, each drive a negation of Donovan’s cruel slice, each possession an erasure of Anita’s mocking laughter.
Morrigan clawed at his back, her legs locking around his hips, heels digging into his ass, pulling him deeper. “That’s it, that’s it, right there, you’re so deep, you’re in my guts,” she babbled, her voice guttural, filthy. “Your cock is so fucking good, it’s rewriting me, I can feel it…”
She was so tight, so impossibly hot and wet. The scent of her, musky and primal, mixed with the pine air seeping through the vents. Jaxon felt his control fraying, the climax coiling at the base of his spine like a sprung trap.
“I’m gonna come,” he gritted out, his rhythm starting to stutter.
“Do it,” she commanded, her own body tightening around him. “Come inside me. Pump it deep. I want to feel you spurt. Mark me with it. Let me have that part of you.”
Her words were the trigger. With a final, ragged shout, he plunged as deep as he could and exploded. Hot pulses of semen shot into her, each jerk of his hips pumping another thick rope deep into her womb. The feeling of it, of his release flooding her, tipped Morrigan over the edge. Her orgasm ripped through her with a silent, seismic intensity. Her cunt clenched around him in a series of brutal, milking spasms, drawing every last drop from him. She shook, her eyes wide and unseeing, biting down on his shoulder to silence her own cries.
For a long minute, they stayed locked together, trembling, sweat-slicked, breathing in shared gasps. The only sound was the ticking of the cooling engine.
Slowly, he softened inside her. He shifted his weight, but she kept her legs locked, holding him there.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
So he stayed, buried in her warmth, his face in the crook of her neck. He could feel a different kind of energy passing between them now, not the voracious pull of her feeding, but a gentle, glowing circuit of shared warmth. Her scars under his palms felt smoother, fainter.
Finally, she relaxed her legs. He slipped out of her, a mixture of their fluids leaking onto the seat. They dressed in silence, the intimacy now fragile, clothed in the dark.
Jaxon climbed back into the driver’s seat, restarted the car. He backed down the track onto the empty road. The world outside felt different. Sharper.
Morrigan curled into her seat, pulling the flannel tight around her. She looked exhausted, but whole. More present than she’d been since he found her.
“Thank you,” she said softly, not looking at him.
He just reached over and took her hand. She laced her fingers with his, her grip surprisingly strong.
She laced her fingers with his, her grip surprisingly strong. They drove like that for miles, the silence between them comfortable, filled with the echo of what they’d just done. The road began to climb, snaking toward a high pass.
“My body doesn’t feel like a crime scene anymore,” she said abruptly, staring ahead. “It feels… occupied. In a good way.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.” She brought their joined hands to her lips, kissing his knuckles. “A pleasant surprise.”
The headlights caught a roadside marker, a faded prayer flag flapping in a sudden gust. Jaxon’s eyes flicked to the mirror again. “How far behind do you think it is?”
Morrigan didn’t answer immediately. She released his hand and sat up straighter, a predator testing the wind. Her green eyes lost focus, seeing something else. “It’s not distance. It’s… resonance. Dhylec fed on me. It knows the signature of my essence.” She placed a hand over her lower belly, where his seed was likely still leaking from her. “What you just gave me is pure, untainted life. It’s screaming into the dark. A beacon they didn’t light.”
“So we keep moving.”
“We can’t outrun a resonance. We can only hope to fade before they triangulate it.” She sighed, the weariness returning. “I need to rest. Properly. Not just a fuck and a nap. A deep, healing sleep. My magic needs to knit itself around this new core you’ve given me.”
She shifted, turning in her seat to face him. The flannel gaped open. In the dashboard’s glow, her skin was luminous, the scars like faint silver thread. “But I’m afraid to sleep. The dreams are… vivid. I see the sword’s teeth.”
“I’m right here,” Jaxon said. It was all he could offer.
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded. She moved again, her body curling with a fluid, boneless grace. She turned her back to the windshield, pushed the seat as far back as it would go, and lay down. She wriggled her borrowed sweatpants and underwear down past her hips, then off completely, tossing them into the footwell. The night air in the car was chill.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting comfortable.” She settled herself, bending one leg at the knee and letting the other fall open. She positioned her bare ass squarely on the hard plastic of the centre console, the ridge of it pressing into her cleft. She let her thighs fall wide, a deep, vulnerable spread. Her cunt, still swollen and glistening from their rough use, was fully exposed to him, inches from the gear shift. “I trust your hands more than I trust my dreams.”
Then she closed her eyes, her breathing already deepening. The profound exhaustion of a creature healing from cosmic wounds pulled her under swiftly. Her head lolled against the headrest, her mint-green hair a chaotic spray. She was asleep, utterly surrendered, her most intimate flesh offered to the sterile cabin air and his watchful eyes.
Jaxon drove. He kept one hand on the wheel, his eyes scanning the dark. The other hand, after several minutes, lifted from his thigh. He didn’t think about it. The need was a quiet pull in his chest.
He reached over. His fingertips touched the inside of her right thigh first, feeling the incredible softness of her skin, the powerful muscle beneath. He began to knead there, a slow, circular pressure, working up from her knee toward the junction of her body. His calloused hands were gentle, remembering every bruise and cut he’d cleaned.
He moved to her left thigh, giving it the same tender attention. Her flesh was warm, yielding. In her sleep, she made a soft sound, a sigh of absolute contentment. His thumb strayed higher, brushing the coarse, damp hair at the apex of her thighs.
His touch grew more specific. He let his fingers drift through her folds, not to arouse, but to soothe. He traced the plump, outer lips, slick with their combined fluids. He found her clit, a hardened bead, and merely rested his thumb against it, a steady, warm pressure. He cupped her entire sex in his palm, a protective, encompassing hold, feeling the heat that emanated from her core.
He massaged her pussy with a devoted, rhythmic gentleness. Two fingers slid easily into her channel, just to the first knuckle, and held there, a soft plug, a grounding presence. He felt the faint, sleepy pulsations of her inner muscles around his fingers. This was not foreplay. This was an act of vigil, a silent promise made with touch. He was anchoring her here, in this car, with him, and not in some memory-laden nightmare of teeth and laughing spectators.
She slept deeply, her body relaxing into his touch. The tension that always seemed to coil in her shoulders finally melted away. Her spread thighs, an act of profound trust, remained open. Jaxon drove on into the Tibetan night, one hand on the wheel, the other keeping watch over her, a lighthouse keeper tending his only, strange, and wounded flame. The road ahead was black, but the rearview mirror remained blessedly, terrifyingly dark.
The road ahead was black, but the rearview mirror remained blessedly, terrifyingly dark. Jaxon’s fingers, resting gently within her, were the sole anchor to the present. In her exhausted sleep, Morrigan’s hips began a subtle, rolling counterpoint to the car’s vibration.
A soft whimper escaped her lips. Her back arched slightly, pressing her sex more firmly against his hand. “Don’t… please…” she mumbled into the void of her dream, her brow furrowing. Then her breath hitched, the fear in her sleeping voice shifting into something else, something low and wanton. “Oh… yes.”
Her hips started moving with more purpose, a slow, grinding rhythm against his stationary fingers. She was humping his hand now, her sleeping body seeking friction, chasing a sensation her mind had conjured. Jaxon remained perfectly still, letting her use him, watching the play of agony and ecstasy on her face in the dashboard glow.
“Jaxon,” she moaned in her sleep, the name a slurred, sensual prayer. Her inner muscles began to flutter and clench around his fingers, a insistent, rhythmic pulse. Her hand slid down her own stomach, fingers tangling in her damp pubic hair, searching for her clit.
She found it. A sharp gasp tore from her throat. Her hips stuttered, then pistoned faster, fucking herself on his fingers while her own fingertips circled her swollen nub. The wet, rhythmic sounds filled the car. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she chanted under her breath, lost in the dream, her body coiling tight.
He felt the exact moment her climax broke. Her back arched violently off the seat, a silent scream stretching her mouth. Her cunt clamped down on his fingers with brutal, convulsive force, a series of pulses that felt like a heartbeat. She shuddered through it, a long, quaking release that left her trembling.
Then she went limp, her breath escaping in one long, satisfied sigh. Her eyes fluttered open. They were clear, aware, and somehow younger than he’d ever seen them. A giggle bubbled up from her throat, a genuinely girlish, surprised sound.
“Oh,” she said softly, feeling his fingers still nestled inside her, soaked with her release. “That… wasn’t a nightmare.” She smiled, a lazy, sated thing, and carefully extracted his hand. She brought her own slick fingers to her lips, tasting herself with a thoughtful hum.
Without a word, moving with fluid, unselfconscious grace, she turned in the confined space. She knelt on the passenger seat, facing the window, then nestled backward, wiggling until her bare ass was elevated on the center console. She rested her head and arms on the dashboard, presenting the full, pale curves of her backside only inches from Jaxon’s face.
The scent of her, musky and sweet, filled his immediate world. Her skin gleamed in the dim light. He could see every detail: the delicate pucker of her anus, the glistening, parted lips of her cunt below, still swollen from her dream and their earlier fucking.
“You’re right there,” she murmured, her voice muffled against the dashboard. “I can feel your breath. It’s warm.”
Jaxon’s own arousal was a tight, insistent throb. The intimate vista before him was an undeniable command. He let his eyes trace the silver scars that marred the tops of her thighs, the lingering testament to Dhylec’s teeth. His hand, of its own volition, came up and rested on the warm swell of her cheek.
She pushed back gently against his palm. “They didn’t take this,” she whispered. “They thought they took everything. But they just made me… empty. You filled the emptiness with something better. Something messy and alive.”
His thumb stroked the inner seam of her thigh, then moved higher, through her damp folds. She was so wet, a hot, slick mess. He gathered her arousal on his fingers, painting it over her skin. He traced circles around her entrance, teasing, not entering.
“Please,” she breathed, pressing her ass back against him. “Not gentle. I’m not fragile. I need to feel you claim this. Claim all of it.”
He leaned forward, his restraint snapping. He didn’t use his fingers first. He pressed his mouth directly against her soaked cunt, his tongue driving into her in one deep, lashing stroke. The taste of her, sharp and complex, exploded on his tongue.
Morrigan cried out, her hands slapping against the dashboard. “Oh, fuck! Yes! Just like that!” Her words dissolved into incoherent moans as he ate her with a rough, starving intensity. His tongue fucked into her hole, then lashed at her clit, then delved deep again. He gripped her hips, holding her still for his assault, his face buried in her.
“Your tongue… god… it’s so good,” she babbled. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop, make me come again, make me forget my own name…”
He could feel her building quickly, her thighs trembling around his head. He focused on her clit, sucking the hard bud into his mouth, flicking it relentlessly with his tongue. He slid two fingers back inside her, curving them upward, fucking her in time with the rhythm of his mouth.
“I’m there, Jaxon, I’m right there!” she screamed, her body bowing. Her climax crashed over her, a raw, shuddering wave that made her gush against his mouth. He drank her in, letting her ride his face until the last tremor subsided.
He pulled back, breathing hard, his chin gleaming. Before she could recover, he unbuckled his jeans, freeing his aching cock. He didn’t guide it to her waiting, dripping entrance. He pressed the thick head against the tight, forbidden pucker of her anus instead.
She froze for a fraction of a second, then pushed back with a low, needy groan. “Yes. There. Take that, too. It’s yours.”
He spat into his palm, slicking himself, then pressed forward. The resistance was immense, a hot, tight ring of muscle straining against him. He pushed steadily, relentlessly, feeling her body yield incrementally. With a final, soft groan from her, he popped past the tight guard and sank into the impossibly tight, clenching heat of her ass.
They both gasped. It was an act of raw, brutal possession. She was so tight it was almost painful. He gave her a moment, letting her adjust, feeling her inner muscles flutter around the invasion.
“Move,” she begged, her voice ragged. “Fuck my ass. Make it hurt the way I like.”
He obeyed. He pulled back until just the tip remained, then slammed back in. The slap of his hips against her flesh was a loud, sharp report in the car. He set a brutal, driving pace, each thrust a deep, claiming punctuation. She met him thrust for thrust, pushing back, taking him deeper, her moans escalating with each plunge.
“You’re so deep,” she chanted. “You’re in my guts, you own me, you own all of it…”
He pistoned into her, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise. The car filled with the sounds of their sex: their ragged grunts, the wet, obscene noise of his cock pumping her ass, the creak of the seat under her knees. He felt his own end approaching, a torrent building in his balls.
“Where?” he grunted, his rhythm faltering.
“Inside!” she shrieked. “Fill me up, mark me inside, I want to feel you flood my ass!”
With a final, animalistic roar, he drove as deep as he could and erupted. Hot, pulsing ropes of cum shot deep into her bowels, each spasm of his cock wringing a corresponding cry from her throat. She came again, a second, devastating orgasm milking him dry, her body clenching around him in vicious, rhythmic pulses.
He collapsed forward over her back, spent, his forehead resting between her shoulder blades. They stayed locked together, joined in the most primitive way, breathing in shattered unison. The engine ticked. Outside, the high, cold wind of the pass whistled around the car.
Slowly, softening, he slipped out of her. She winced slightly but didn’t move from her position, her head still resting on the dashboard. A contented, utterly satiated smile played on her lips.
“Well,” she breathed after a long moment. “That should leave a mark.”
Jaxon sagged back into the driver’s seat, fumbling for a rag to clean himself. He watched her, this ancient, terrifyingly powerful creature, now giggling softly as she carefully knelt upright, a fresh, vibrant light in her eyes.
She turned and settled back into her seat, not bothering with clothes, letting the cool air dry the sweat on her skin. She looked at him, her gaze clear and focused for the first time. “I can feel it knitting,” she said, placing a hand low on her belly. “My core. It’s solidifying around… you.” She reached over, her hand finding his. “But that resonance is a two-way street now. We’ve shone a very bright light into a very dark place.”
She looked out the windshield at the yawning black of the mountain road ahead, her playful demeanor dissolving into something sharp and strategic. “We need to get off this road. Now. I know a place.”