“No,” Sesshoumaru said. “I think not.”

His refusal cored straight through her. Kagome’s face scalded at the intensity of her want and indignation, which seemed to be compounding by the second—and once again she couldn’t breathe for the stranglehold he’d put her in. But around her hips the bands of his fur were coalescing, thick and sinuous, and against the exposed curve of her breast, she felt the rake of his eyes as viscerally as she felt his youki scoring across her tightly-wound nerves. He’d been baiting her, the bastard. Her reiki pitched in counterpoint, and his mouth fell to her ear.

“I’m only here to console you,” he said with cutting smoothness.

Kagome swallowed, a shiver running through her at the graze of his lips. “Well you’re no good at it. You’ve never been.” Straightening, she ground vengefully back against him, feigning the incidental. “I don’t need your half-assed sympathies.”

“What do you need, then?” he asked, though already he was peeling her yukata open at the shoulder, and letting her reddened, abused breast spring free of its confines.

Kagome’s stomach clenched at the sight of her nipple standing so puckered and erect in the lamplight. She could snatch back her collar. She could cover herself and be done with him. She could send him off fuming into the night while she burned alive in her empty bed, soothing herself with her own self-righteous thoughts and keeping herself company with the ghosts in her head.

Cold comforts, both, compared to the warmth of his breath at her temple, and the hot, heavy pulse of his cock at her back.

“Show me what you need,” he said.

Tearing her eyes away from the spectacle of her own quivering flesh, she glared aside. “I need for you to leave now.”

There was a rustle of silken clothes and hair as he seemed to shake his head behind her. “No, I intend to stay awhile yet.”

Kagome stiffened, an angry flush searing her cheeks. “You said you would leave if I asked you to!”

“You don’t want me to go,” he said, and she could practically hear the smirk in his words. “You are welcome to try to make me.”

Kagome bristled. “Don’t think that I won’t—and don’t tell me what I want. What makes you think you have any idea?”

“That your breast is still out,” Sesshoumaru remarked with brisk smugness, “and that your scent has grown even muskier since I said it.”

Kagome ground her teeth. He was such a prick. As if she could help how her body responded to him! The breast remark though, that was something…

Yet as she started to reach across her chest to right her clothing, the sudden rasp of a claw against her nipple had her spine going pin-straight. A lightning flash of pure arousal streaked to her groin. Her inner walls contracted as if from electric shock, a strange animal whine keening in her throat.

Sesshoumaru’s tongue flicked along the curve of her ear, torrid and grating. To the very tip of her breast he poised the very tip of his claw, as though he were balancing the point against her—or attempting to divine with its needling pressure even this most miniscule opening into her flesh. Kagome’s shoulders shook, her chest constricting as she fought against the slightest movement that would cause him to breach her further. But still, the sting issuing from that fine point of contact was driving her steadily insane.

“Is this what you need, Kagome?” he murmured, now flattening the cool back of his claw to her and bumping it over her pebbled, fevered peak.

Kagome’s lungs gave a frightful spasm, on the verge of hyperventilation. “S-Sesshoumaru…”

“I will tell you something else that’s useful,” he said darkly, as he pinched her tortured flesh between his thumb and forefinger and crushed his fangs to her throat. “…I love it when you call out my name.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi