by Nalini Singh
Anger and pain caustic in her veins, she wove her fingers into his and shifted into his line of sight. “I’m so sorry, Kaleb.” The words weren’t enough, would never be enough for what he had survived.
“Don’t be.” A calm statement, his fingers still not responding to her touch. “He made me what I am.”
Fear overwhelmed every other emotion. “You are not his creation. You made yourself.” He didn’t answer her. She wondered if he even heard. “Kaleb.”
“When I was sixteen years old, he said it was time I became a man.” The rage had been tempered by a black coldness that was worse than the ice, far more dangerous than the obsidian. “She was a swan changeling only a few years older than me, her hair white as snow—the blood when I slit her throat turned it scarlet.”
Her heart thudded, hard rain inside her chest, but Sahara knew what he was doing, and she wouldn’t permit him to do it. Breaking the connection with his unresponsive fingers, she placed her hands on either side of his face. “Did you put that knife to her throat of your own volition?”
The blackness continued to crawl over his irises, to chill his skin. “Does it matter? I murdered her while she begged for her life.”
“Yes,” she whispered, holding on to this man who saw himself as a monster. “It matters.”
Kaleb’s answer was a sickening portrait of Enrique’s evil. “He’d had free access to me since I was three years old, my shields embryonic; plenty of time to build countless back doors and switches in my mind. That night, he reached in and . . . took everything, while making certain I remained alert and aware of his actions.” Chill emptiness. “It gave him pleasure to know I was screaming inside while he used my body to carve her up. Mine was the last face she saw, my hand the one that drove the knife into her flesh over and over.”
“Enough,” Sahara snapped, terrified that he was going away as he’d done as a child. “You come back to me.” Blinking away tears, she refused to release his gaze. “That wasn’t you, Kaleb. You know that. Mind control takes away volition and intent and will.” It made the victim a flesh-and-blood marionette.
Kaleb’s lashes came down and when they lifted back up, nothing had changed, her Kaleb buried under the blood of an innocent woman who had never known that the boy she saw was another victim, not her murderer.
“No,” Sahara said and, rising up on the tips of her toes, pressed her mouth to his.
Kaleb always reacted to her . . . but not today. His lips remained cold, his hands by his sides. Refusing to cede victory to the serial killer for whom she hoped hell was a vicious reality, she put one hand on his nape and, continuing to cup his cheek with the other, kissed him with a slow sweetness that was an invitation, a coaxing.
Come back, she telepathed. I need you.
His fingers brushed her hips, his hands rising to press flat on her back. One of his hands wove into her hair a minute later, the other pushing up under the thin black of her cardigan to splay on skin. An endless kiss, their bodies pressed impossibly close.
Not breaking the intimate connection, Kaleb lifted her up in his arms and carried her inside. The comforter was soft against her back when he laid her down, his body a muscled, heavy weight that made her moan, his lips on her throat a wet heat. “Kaleb. Kaleb, Kaleb.” The gasped chant was a reminder to him of who he was—not Santano Enrique’s creation, but Kaleb, who touched her with a primal passion and who always kept his promises.
Sinking her teeth into his lower lip when he kissed his way up her throat and back to her mouth, she released him after a quick bite. And when she looked up, it was to see Kaleb’s eyes looking down into her own. There were no stars, but the obsidian was sheened with midnight colors, beautiful and mysterious.
Her fingers clenched on the muscled heat of his back, the fine cotton of his shirt crumpling under her touch. “You came back.”
Closing his hand around her throat, he stroked gently, his mouth demanding on her own. She spread her thighs to accommodate his body, her core slick and soft. When he tugged at her cardigan, she reached down and pulled it off over her head to throw it to the floor. It left her dressed in a bra of delicate lace, her breasts straining at the cups.
Kaleb released her throat to look down at her breasts . . . and her bra straps tore in half, the center of the bra ripping to have the piece of lingerie falling off her body. It was the first time he’d used his Tk in such an intimate way, and her shocked surprise turned into pure pleasure when—still holding her gaze—he ran his fingers lightly over her nipple.
This time, his name whispered from her lips in a soft moan.
Looking up, his hair falling across his forehead, he closed his hand over her breast and settled his weight more heavily on her. Then he kissed her. Until her nails dug into his back and she was so wet between her thighs that her musk perfumed the air. Through it all, he petted and stroked her upper body with a hotly possessive hand that made it clear Kaleb Krychek considered her his.
And still, he didn’t say a word.
* * *
SAHARA under his hands, soft and silky and responsive. Sahara’s touch on his back, her taste in his mouth, the scent of her arousal a drug. Sahara who said his name as if it meant everything. Sahara who was and had always been the biggest fracture in his Silence. “Sahara.”
The deep blue of her eyes shimmered with emotion he couldn’t read, her fingers brushing his lips then her own in a silent invitation he had no intention of refusing. Her mouth opened at the first touch of his, her body arched and her thighs locked around him. He was caged by Sahara and it was the most painfully pleasurable confinement of his life.
Gripping the back of her neck, he tasted her so deep, she’d never forget the taste of him. Mine, he thought, you are mine.
When her hands went to the buttons of his shirt, he let her open them to the waist, slide her hands inside . . . press her lips to his skin in a sweet, hot kiss that splintered the second to last of his outer shields, the cracks going outward in a spiderweb that could collapse at any instant. The part of him that lived in the void, a creature without reason or boundaries, roared with black rage at being denied again, but that part—possessive and violent and of his soul—would die for Sahara in a heartbeat, and it knew he could crush her rib cage, collapse her lungs if he lost his grip on his abilities.
Wrenching himself up onto his elbows, he drew in harsh breaths and made a futile effort to reconstruct the shields. Impossible with Sahara so soft and sensual around him, accepting him though she knew the blood that coated his hands, stained his soul. Perhaps, the twisted, broken mess in the void said, perhaps she won’t turn away once she remembers the hotel room and the pain and the screams.
“How bad are your shields?” Tenderness in her eyes.
“Bad.” A fraction more sensation and the rawness of his emotions would not only be exposed on the PsyNet, his telekinetic and telepathic abilities would slip the leash. But when Sahara would’ve relaxed her legs from around him, he reached back to hold her in place, his hand flexing on her thigh.
She tightened her grip. “Obsidian, Kaleb. Did you go obsidian?”
“No.” The obsidian shields might be impenetrable and unbreakable, but as Sahara knew, they were also absolute. “I’ll be cut off from the flow of information in the PsyNet for the duration.” He had never disconnected from the Net to that extent, had thousands of pieces of data flowing into his mind at any second.
Sahara traced his lips with her fingertip, the lightest of caresses. “If you’re not filtering Net data, can you divert that energy into maintaining a grip on your abilities?”
Kaleb did the calculations, nodded. “It’ll bring the risk of a catastrophic breach down to twenty-five percent.” Not great odds, but not bad, either, not with Kaleb’s control.
“Is there even a hint of anything major on the horizon?”
“No.”
“Can you still be reached via a telepathic call?”
“Yes.”
Sliding her hand
over his nape, the charms on her bracelet cool against his skin, she whispered, “Then let the PsyNet take care of itself for an hour or two, and take care of me instead.”
He didn’t have to choose; there was only one option.
“Not here.” He couldn’t be certain of the security.
Sahara gasped as they ’ported into his bed . . . then pushed aside his shirt and leaned up to place her lips on the skin she’d bared. Slamming down the obsidian shields fed of his telepathy and augmented with the kinetic energy of his Tk, he pushed up Sahara’s leg to make more room for himself between her thighs—and released the leash.
Chapter 26
KALEB TUGGED SAHARA up with a grip in her hair, taking her mouth with a slow, concentrated fury that made it clear she was now the sole focus of all that merciless power and attention and will. Moaning into the kiss, she surrendered, opening herself to anything and everything he wanted.
Buttons tore as he ripped off his shirt, and then the naked heat of his chest was crushing her breasts. A slight shift and he closed one of his hands over her left breast, fondling and squeezing with unhidden possession as his tongue rasped over her own, his mouth slanting to create the perfect fit.
Fingernails digging into the heavy muscle of his back, she met him kiss for kiss.
My Kaleb, mine.
His thumb rubbed over her nipple, his fingers strong and sure on her flesh, his hold that of a man dead certain of his welcome. When he broke the kiss to plump up her breast in his hand before sucking the top part of it into his mouth, she cried out and attempted to get impossibly closer, the hot suction a dazzling pulse of sensation. Releasing her throbbing flesh after she was halfway to madness, he looked down at the shining wetness of her skin, her nipple furled into a tight, begging point that he plucked with his fingertips.
Her womb clenched.
Running her mouth down his throat, her need for him a feral thing, she made a vocal complaint when he lifted his body off hers. A hot look, a strong male hand in her hair as he branded her with his kiss, then drew back again to rip open the zipper of her jeans, pull them off. His belt buckle bit into her abdomen when he returned to her mouth, his erection an aggressive demand against her that made her want to squirm.
Except he was deliciously heavy, pinning her in place. No one else would she have trusted in such a position of power, no one but the most dangerous man in the world. Unable to get enough of his kiss, of the connection that was a fist punching through her diaphragm to grip her heart, she locked her ankles tight at the base of his spine and spread her fingers on his upper back.
“I want to kiss every inch of your back,” she managed to say between kisses.
“Later.” Thrusting his hand into the rear of her panties, he cupped her lower curves, taking her startled cry into his mouth, his voice a dangerous, seductive blade in her mind. Soft and smooth and mine. Always mine.
Sucking in desperate breaths when he set her lips free to kiss his way along her throat before coming back up to claim her mouth once more, she ran her nails down his back. It was harder than she’d intended, his mouth and hands doing things to her that left her devastated, the marks ones he’d wear for a day at least.
Breaking the kiss, he threw back his head.
When those obsidian eyes met hers again, they were matched by a smile that held nothing calculated about it—it was lethal . . . in a way that made her body rise toward his. But he was already moving with the powerful grace of a cardinal Tk, kissing his way down her body to tear off her panties, push her thighs apart, and rub his jaw against the ultrasensitive inner surface of her thighs.
“Kaleb!” Her mind exploded outward to slam up against his shields, her body bowing. “Don’t stop,” she begged. “Don’t—” A soundless cry, her synapses fried, his mouth hot and demanding on her damp flesh, his hands a little rough on her thighs as he held them apart.
Sahara knew about the mechanics of sex, though the Silent didn’t indulge in the act either for procreation or for pleasure, but never in her education had she been taught that there were levels of intimacy even in sex. This, what Kaleb was doing to her, it was nothing she’d ever imagined, and oh, but she liked it.
Arching into his mouth as he licked at her, his tongue exploring her with a thorough attention to detail that made it clear he’d be as relentless in bed as he was in every other aspect of life, she held him to her with one hand in the heavy silk of his hair. That hand clenched without her conscious volition when he would’ve shifted his attention from the slippery, throbbing nub at the apex of her thighs.
Lifting his head, his eyes a storm of midnight, the shadow of that lethal smile on his lips, he said, “Does that feel good?”
Her toes curled.
Nodding, she held her breath as he dipped his head . . . and gave her what she wanted, fixing his mouth on her clitoris and sucking hard, his hands clamped on her inner thighs to keep her spread for him. Every so often, he’d move his thumbs on the delicate, sensitive flesh, adding to the tumult of sensation that had her gripping at the sheets, then at the muscled warmth of his shoulders.
Even as she sobbed her ecstasy, her nerve endings shredded with the sweet, hot pain of sexual pleasure, his voice was a dark caress in her mind. Harder? Softer? Like this? Or do you prefer this? Each question was accompanied by an erotic demonstration, her body her lover’s instrument. What about this? Strong white teeth grazing the swollen flesh of her clitoris . . . then pressing down the barest fraction.
Pleasure wracked her, left her a ruin.
Rising to kneel above her quivering body, he curved his hand around her throat in an act of possession that had become darkly familiar, and bent to her mouth. The taste on his lips was her own, and it was an intimacy that should’ve been shocking, but nothing was shocking, nothing was taboo when it came to the man in her bed.
A slave to him, her body soft with pleasure, she said, Let me do these things to you.
His hand releasing her throat only to close over it again. We may have to build up to that. Even obsidian won’t hold if you put your mouth on me. Not yet.
The black velvet of his tone made her shiver, her body undulating toward him on a fresh wave of need. She had waited so long for this, for him, and now her flesh was ravenous, her soul greedy. Please.
Tell me what you need. He moved his hand from her throat to between her legs.
Sahara flinched as his thumb brushed her clitoris, her fingernails digging into his upper arms. It’s too sensitive. The realization frustrated her—it felt so good when he touched her there that she wanted only to experience the sensations again. But there was something she wanted even more.
“You should know this pleasure, too,” she whispered as he put his palm over her damp flesh, the rough warmth of him a subtle caress. “Teach me what feels good on your body.” She ached to kiss and pet him as he was doing her, burned to see those cardinal eyes drenched in the same storm that had sucked her under.
Watching you orgasm gives me extreme pleasure, was Kaleb’s unvarnished answer as his lips sought hers once more. Feeling you sticky and damp against my tongue, my fingers, your body soft under mine, your aroused nipples rubbing against my chest, that’s what feels good.
Sahara’s breath turned jagged, her breasts rising and falling as she fought not to drown under the erotic onslaught. Until this instant, she hadn’t known words could be as sensual, as arousing, as touch. Even more so when she knew Kaleb wasn’t saying the words with that intent—he was simply stating facts, her pleasure his own.
He tapped her clitoris again. Still sensitive?
Yes, she managed to answer through the acute bite of sensation.
Let’s try this instead. Breaking the kiss to focus his attention lower on her body, his expression steely in its intensity, he pushed at the tightness of her entrance with his finger, and when she shivered, hands falling to fist in the sheets, worked that finger slowly inside. Yes? Hair tumbled over his forehead, he looked up, their eyes locking.
So much power, she thought, such unyielding control. It should’ve made her feel at a vast disadvantage. It didn’t. Because this was Kaleb. “Yes.” A moan of discovery as he slid his finger out, then pushed it back in just as slow. “Yes, please.”
A second finger, and all at once she’d had enough, her womb contracting with an emptiness that hurt. She might not ever have done this act before, but instinct told her what experience didn’t. “You,” she said, and it was an order. “I need you.” Only Kaleb.
His responding kiss was a naked demand, his tongue licking deep. “Spread your legs wider,” he commanded when he released her mouth, withdrawing his hand and rising to rid himself of the rest of his clothing at last—to reveal a body that made her feminine core clench.
Gloriously naked, his erection heavy, he settled between the legs she’d spread for him, one of his hands on her thigh, the other palm-down beside her head. Their gazes locked again as he began to push inside her with the blunt tip of his penis, her hand on his nape, her body slick and ready but still so tight against the thick intrusion of him. A painful kind of burning had her hissing out a breath, but below that was a need that wanted, hungered.
Are you hurting?
I want this hurt.
Sweat dripped down Kaleb’s temple, his jaw a brutal line, but he maintained the slow, inexorable push of his body until his erection was buried to the hilt inside her. Sahara. Passion-flushed cheekbones and eyes stormy with so much power it was akin to looking into the heart of a thunderstorm.
I feel . . . perfect. Tight and full to the point that it was almost pain and exactly where she was meant to be.
When he shuddered and pulled out an inch, she cried out, the friction of his rock-hard penis against her sensitized flesh an erotic shock. Kaleb thrust back in, only to repeat the withdrawal and reentry, the hand on her thigh shifting to her hip to pin her in place as he dipped his head to kiss her breasts, sucking on one of her nipples before releasing it through his teeth.