FEAST OF SPARKS (Thornchapel #2) by Sierra Simone
Release Date: August 1st
Cover Designer: Hang Le
Photographer: Regina Wamba
Blurb:
I’m an outcast and a loner, named for death itself. Fate wasn’t supposed to have plans for me.
But then she came back—the girl I once kissed in a thorn-covered chapel in the woods. She came back, and I could no more resist her than I could pry out my own heart. And by some trick of fate, she wants me as much as I want her. The only problem? She also wants the man who owns Thornchapel, Auden Guest.
And so do I.
Eight years ago, I did something to Auden, something terrible. He hurt me back the only way he knew how, and so here we are: our hatred seasoned with pain and my loneliness seasoned with longing. The only thing we can agree on is Proserpina Markham, and she wants us to find a way to be together—all three of us.
If Auden wants to earn her as his submissive, then he has to earn me as well.
But with the discovery of bones behind the altar and the carnal revel of Beltane fast approaching, it’s becoming clear that Thornchapel’s secrets are much deeper and older than any of us could have ever guessed. And no matter how bright and merry a feast of sparks may be, it’s always followed by ashes.
And darkness.
Excerpt:
I can feel that beat, that pulsing, between the three of us so strongly right now, and I know Auden and Poe can too. I know they can feel that what we have together is more than biology, more than our odd little religion, more than years of knowing each other.
Those things we have with the other three in our group.
But this? This holy, ravening, primal, and marrow-deep need for each other? This is something unique to the three of us, and there’s no denying it, no arguing with it.
Fighting it is as pointless as screaming up at a storm on the heath.
Auden reaches down with his other hand; I hear the tear of fabric. The muscles in his arm contract and flex as he works her underneath her skirt. “So wet, little bride,” he purrs. “So ready to be fucked in this little hole.”
He grabs my hand and pulls me forward before I can react, and he guides me to her. Past the tear in her cute librarian tights to the place where she’s wet enough that a man could shove in with a single stroke. My shaft—huge and latex-shiny in the dark—pulses as Auden presses my fingers into her with his own until two of my fingers are curling up inside her and both our hands are wet.
Poe rocks against us both, her hands scrabbling for any kind of purchase until she manages to brace one on the bookshelf behind her and the other on Auden’s shoulder.
“Please, please fuck me,” she begs, and I know at this point she doesn’t care who she’s talking to. Auden or me—or hell, maybe Rebecca or Delphine or Becket.
“Oh, we’re going to,” Auden growls, and I like that we, I like it so much that I couldn’t deny Poe is right about fixing whatever is between the three of us even if I wanted to.
Could I have ever been content without knowing this? Knowing the feel of Auden’s hands on my hips as they are now, guiding me between Proserpina’s waiting thighs as she wraps her arms around my neck? Knowing once again the feel of being between them, as I was that night, of Auden reaching around me and gripping my cock with a casual arrogance that has me shuddering?
He notches my tip against her, his hand moving past me to grip her arse under her skirt, and then he brings us together, like we’re his to join. His pets to breed, his concubines to amuse him. It’s this I’m thinking of as I sink deep into Poe, letting out a long breath as her sweetness grips me, squeezes me.
“How does she feel?” Auden asks in my ear. He sounds bored, but I know that trick for what it is; I know that when his blood gets hot, his voice gets cold. And maybe it’s the thrills dancing up my body from the head of my cock to the soles of my feet, maybe it’s Poe biting her lower lip like she wishes it were my mouth she was nibbling—or maybe it’s the sheer fucking filth of this moment, Auden and me wedging her against the bookshelves in the dark while the others continue to laugh and drink only a stone’s throw away—
Whatever it is, I want to test Auden’s coolness, I want to make him feel for me just a little bit of what I feel for him always—desperate, clawing ache. A pining so animalistic and rough it shames me.
I want him to shame me.
And maybe it’s that last impulse more than anything that makes me do it. I turn my head to his—he’s so close that I can feel his breath on my cheek, so warm in the cool air of the library—and I kiss his throat. Right next to his Adam’s apple, right in the little hollow there. I kiss him and then I part my lips just enough to taste him with a small dart of my tongue. He tastes like clean skin with just the barest hint of sweat, like a man just beginning to get worked up. And he smells—God, he smells how he always smells.
Like this wonderful, terrible place tucked into the wild, wind-whipped moors. Like Thornchapel.
He stills at the touch of my lips, as if he can’t bear to breathe, and then at the flicker of my tongue, he lets out a low sound of fury. For a minute I wonder if he’ll hit me again, and I don’t care how wrong it is, how against the rules of kink, I want to eat up all his passion, all of his energy, I want him to be lost like me and I want to see it and feel it and take it into my body to remember as long as I live.
He doesn’t hit me.
He bites me.
About the Author:
Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.
