by Nalini Singh
“Want to keep a knife?” It was a low murmur of a question.
Honor gave the offer serious thought as she removed her gun and harness and stepped back to place them on the coffee table. The thigh sheath and the flashlight tucked into her back, along with a razor-fine blade worked into her belt, went next. She put the whole lot, belt included, beside the gun. Dmitri gave an intrigued look when she reached down her spine and removed a long knife from a hidden sheath, the blade as thin as the width of the nail on her pinkie. The single blade left was in the sheath she wore around her upper arm.
Touching it, she looked at the sensual, dangerous man on her sofa. Thought about cutting him again . . . and was kicked by a sense of rejection so deep, it would’ve shaken her if she hadn’t already been caught off guard by so many inexplicable reactions when it came to Dmitri. “No weapons,” she said as she placed her last knife on the table. “Give me yours.” Vampire or not, Honor knew she was smart enough to turn his own weapons against him.
Dmitri began to hand them over. It was her turn to stare. After they were both done, the pile of knives and guns on the coffee table looked like they’d cleaned out an armory. “I think we have a problem, Dmitri.”
“I’m not finished.” Unbuckling his belt, he began to pull it out.
Her eyes dropped. Maybe it was because she’d been blindfolded while Tommy and the others tortured her, but she had no trouble admiring a beautiful male body. And Dmitri’s . . . oh, yeah. “Same as mine?” she asked, stroking him with her eyes, his T-shirt pulled tight over rock-hard abs.
“Have a look.”
Taking the belt, she saw the thin wire worked into the leather. It could be pulled out with a single tug, used as a fatally efficient garrote. “Clever.”
“Illium gave it to me a couple of years ago.”
“I’d say he doesn’t seem the type”—she ran her thumbs over the leather softened by constant use—“but I’ve known my share of hunters who come across as harmless.”
“Put down the belt, Honor.” A sexy smile. “Unless you plan to use it.”
Stomach clenching, she dropped the belt and stepped back between his spread legs. “I had a feeling you’d be into belts and ropes.”
When she reached forward and pushed up his tee, he remained in his sprawled position, a pasha waiting to be served. His skin was the same dark tan shade on his abdomen as it was on his face. “Is your skin this tone all over?”
“Only one way you’re going to discover the answer to that.”
22
Looking up, she saw hooded eyes, lips curved just enough to tell her he was enjoying himself . . . and a sensuality as lethal as the weapons on the table behind her. Not a man who would be kind to a woman in bed. “Take off the T-shirt.”
He did it with a few economical movements—to reveal muscled shoulders, abs she wanted to lick, and a thin line of hair leading down into his jeans. “Orders already?” he murmured, dropping the T-shirt to the carpet. “I think maybe you’d like to wield a whip.”
“Maybe I would.”
A wicked smile.
Stepping back, she nudged his legs together and moved up to straddle him. He let her do as she would, and she knew why. If Dmitri wanted her flat on the floor on her back, she’d be there before she saw him move. But this wasn’t about force or pain. It was something else altogether. What, she didn’t quite know, but she knew it was important.
He felt quintessentially male beneath her, his thigh muscles rock, his body heat stroking her with a languid intimacy so slow and undemanding that she didn’t fight it—though she knew nothing was that simple with Dmitri. He was a man who would take advantage of every vulnerability.
Touching him with the lightest of fingertips, she began to explore this darkly sexual creature who should’ve driven fear into her heart—and who did still scare her at times with his brutal inhumanity—and yet who also made her feel safe in a way she couldn’t explain. Irrational as it was, she trusted Dmitri.
When she ran her index finger along the top band of his abdominal muscles, he flinched. Only just, but she caught it. So she did it again—and saw the faintest hint of a smile as dangerous as it was sensual.
“Such patience,” she said, leaning forward with her forearms braced against his chest. “I guess immortality gives a man time to learn many things.”
His gaze lingered on her mouth. “Kiss me.”
She shaped his lips with a fingertip, lingering on the slight fullness of the lower one. She’d seen that mouth cool with anger, curved in amusement and in mockery. Through it all, she’d wanted to taste it. There was just one thing. “They fed from my mouth.”
Those dark chocolate eyes turned a sudden, deadly black, but all he said was, “Inefficient.”
“Yes.” It had been more about slashing her with their fangs, making her hurt.
Dmitri shifted slightly, muscles rippling in a reminder of his strength, but again, he left the next move up to her. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking it an act of tenderness on his part. No, Dmitri was a predator—and she was being stalked. Slow and easy and determined.
“Stay still,” she said, leaning in until their breath mingled. His face betrayed nothing, so much so that she might have thought him unaffected if she hadn’t been able to feel the tension in that body made for woman’s damnation.
The first touch of her lips against the firm warmth of his was a mere whisper. Her heart thudded and it wasn’t panic. So she sucked slightly at his upper lip before releasing it to run her tongue along his lower, indulging herself with this man who was her own personal aphrodisiac.
His chest rose and fell under her hands, his breathing no longer even. The feminine heart of her stirred in satisfaction. She didn’t have to be able to see into the past to know that Dmitri had tasted every sensual act there was, luxuriated in every decadent sin . . . and yet he reacted to her. The response, she knew, was genuine—Dmitri wasn’t the kind of man who’d bother to pretend.
Pulse beating in every inch of her skin, she opened her mouth over his, taking the taste of him deep within as she slid up her hands to cup his face.
She always did that, Dmitri thought, recalling the way she’d stroked those long, capable fingers over his cheek, his jaw, during that aborted kiss in the forest—and earlier, beside the stream. Only one other woman had he allowed the tender intimacy.
“Why do you kiss me so, Ingrede? As if I’ll break?”
Laughter, husky and familiar. “I’m not kissing you, husband. I’m loving you.”
Honor’s hands pressed a fraction tighter as she licked her tongue across the seam of his lips and into his mouth. Dmitri could feel his muscles straining to painful tightness—being passive in a sexual situation was no easy task for a man who was always the aggressor. But to attempt that with Honor would be to lose her . . . so he remained motionless, patient as a hunting wolf. She would be his soon enough, and then he’d play.
That was when her tongue brushed across one of his fangs.
His cock, already rigid, grew almost painfully hard . . . and Honor froze.
“I want,” he murmured in a tone calculated to entangle her in fantasies as dark as the scents he stroked over her body, “to do such things to your mouth, things that would make you blush.”
“I don’t blush.” A soft whisper, muscles relaxing.
“Oh?” He laid out one of his plans in exquisite erotic detail, indulging himself as much as her.
Heat on her skin, but it wasn’t a blush. “I want to do that.” Shuddering, she very deliberately licked across his other fang. Her body tensed again, but her muscles weren’t as stiff, and when she broke the kiss to draw in a breath, the emotion that glittered in her eyes had no connection to fear. “You,” she said in that quiet, intimate tone between lovers, “have an addictive kind of taste.”
He curved one of his hands over her hip. “That might make up for the fact you aren’t as susceptible to the scent lure as you should be.”
A husky laugh that tangled with one of his oldest memories. “That would hardly be a fair fight.” Making a low, deep sound of pleasure at the caress of fur he teased over her skin, she surprised him with a second kiss, this one not as hesitant. Her breasts pushed full and firm against his chest, her nipples hard points he wanted to grip between his teeth while he fondled her soft flesh.
By the time she broke the kiss with a suckling taste of his lower lip, her breath was ragged. His own wasn’t particularly steady either—but that he’d expected, given the violent craving he’d had for her since the instant she walked into his office. If he’d had a fraction less control, and if she’d been a fraction less terrified, he’d have ripped off her jeans and pinned her to the door of his office before he even knew her name, his cock buried inside her, his fangs sinking into her neck.
Soon.
He dropped his head back against the sofa when she dipped her head to kiss her way down his throat, luxuriating in the lush weight of her on his thighs, the wet softness of her mouth on a part of his body that was exquisitely sensitive, and yet one he never allowed his lovers to caress. He didn’t trust anyone’s teeth that near his carotid. Then she flicked her tongue over the small depression at the base of his neck.
His hand squeezed down on her hip.
A single jerking move later and she was at the other end of the room, having managed to pick up one of the knives on the coffee table in the process.
It enraged him to see such fear in her, this strong, sensual woman who touched him with a knowledge that belied the fact they were lovers new, but he kept his tone tempered, run through with a lazy sexuality. “Obviously we need to put the weapons farther away next time.”
The glaze of nightmare took several long seconds to retreat from the haunting green of Honor’s eyes. Staring at the blade in her hand, she gave a little scream and threw it to lodge in the wall above his head.
“Giving up so soon?” He crooked a finger once more.
A look that held a thousand unnamed terrors, but she strode back to retake her earlier position astride him, the weight of her lusciously female, her body built for a man’s . . . for Dmitri’s pleasure. When she went as if to kiss him, he shook his head. Raising a finger, he traced the taut line of her jaw, the rigid tendons of her neck.
“Women,” he murmured, “might want to hurt me on occasion, but no one’s ever said that kissing me was a punishment.” Though he could make it one—immortality had given him a long time to perfect the ability to be a bastard.
“Damn them.” Honor collapsed against his chest with that quiet statement that held trembling fury. “It infuriates me that Valeria and the others have made me into this weak, pathetic creature.” Her breath puffed against his neck as her hand clasped his shoulder, nails digging into his skin.
The feel of her full breasts pressing against him stirred his darkest sexual instincts, but immortality had also given him the ability to delay gratification, to find pleasure in every step of the most intimate of dances between male and female. And Honor’s trust, it was an exquisite thing, to be savored.
Running his hand over her hair, he twined the soft locks around his finger. “Yet,” he said, rubbing the strands between his fingertips, “you’re in the lap of a vampire who is their nightmare.”
Her entire body went oddly motionless. “Part of me thinks you must’ve influenced me in some way,” she said, “because it makes no logical sense that I trust you as much as I do.”
Dmitri unraveled a curl, twined it around his finger again. “When I first developed the scent lure,” he said, “I found it amusing to seduce the hunter-born.” His cynicism had grown on the jagged edges of his anger. “I’d start with the scent, then fade it until it was no longer there. By the time I actually took them to bed, they just thought it was—it gave them permission to indulge in sex with a vampire, to pretend I made them do it.”
Honor took several seconds to reply. “It’s what the hunter-born fear, that they’ll fall to the scent lure.”
“No one ever complained.”
Honor heard cool arrogance in those words, and yet the fact that he’d shared the truth with her said he understood that, shades of gray or not, he’d robbed those hunter-born of choice, at least at the start. “Why did you stop?”
He kept playing with her hair in that lazy way that made her want to cuddle up to him and close her eyes. “It was too easy.” A shrug. “I discovered the conquest meant nothing—especially when certain hunter-born began to seek me out.”
“Like a drug.” She could taste the dark eroticism of him on her tongue, her body primed to the satin and champagne and fur of his caresses, could well understand the compulsion that had driven those hunters to return to him over and over.
“The lure,” he said, “is not addictive.”
No, she thought, that was Dmitri.
Dmitri dreamed that night, of a woman with sunshine in her smile and love in her every breath.
“Dmitri.” A shy word, her hands smoothing down her skirts. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He wanted to touch her, kiss her, adore her. But she wasn’t his. Not yet. “I brought you these.”
Her eyes, those brown eyes uptilted at the corners, filled with unhidden joy at the sight of the wildflowers he’d clambered all over a mountainside to collect, feeling like one of the goats who roamed the same range. Yet if she asked him to go out and gather more of the wild blooms, he’d do so without question. Because that smile, it was the reason for his heartbeat.
Taking the bouquet, she half laughed her delight. “Thank you.” A sucked-in breath, a look of absolute determination.
Running forward, she kissed him on the lips, only reaching him because he was already bending toward her.
Stunned, he didn’t have time to raise his hands, keep her with him.
She was gone the next instant, her skirts whipping past his legs in a burst of color, the scent of her a blend of sunshine and those wildflowers she adored. He dreamed every night of having the right to press his nose against the delicate skin at the curve of her neck, to breathe in that scent as he drowned in the wild, feminine taste of her.
As it was with dreams, the colors shifted without warning until he was no longer standing in a rough barn but inside the walls of the small cabin he’d built with his own hands, a lovely dark-haired woman standing, shy and uncertain, in front of him, her back to his front. He’d touched her between her thighs until she was slick and pink with welcome, kissed her there in spite of her shocked cries, licked up the exquisite musk of her pleasure . . . but never had he claimed her as he hungered to do. Such a thing would have dishonored her.
“Ingrede.” Closing his hands over her upper arms, he tugged her against his chest. “Are you afraid?”
Her response was a whisper, her body trembling until he wanted only to stroke her, slow and easy. “Yes.”
Kissing the soft curve of her neck in the exact place that he knew made her weak in the knees, he found himself pushing his aroused body against her, his control in tatters. Clawing it back, though it was a precarious hold at best, he rubbed his lips over her skin. “I’d never hurt you.” He would tear out his own heart before putting a bruise on her.
Making that little moaning sound in her throat that he loved, she angled her head to give him easier access. “You know so many things.” Husky words. “I know only what you have taught me.”
He shuddered as she pushed herself against him. Control lost, he bit at her pulse as he reached around to cup her breasts with a boldness he’d never before dared, afraid she’d shy. But now . . . now she was his wife, and though her skin burned with color, she didn’t pull away. “You are so beautiful.” He shaped her through the fabric of her clothing, indulging himself in a way he’d dreamed about for years, often waking with his cock hard between his legs.
“And I know,” he said, licking out at her skin because the taste of her was a searing pleasure, “only what we’ve learned together.” Touching an
other woman—he’d never even considered it, no matter the invitations he’d received. “Anything else is simple imagination on my part.”
Ingrede gave a startled laugh, her breasts warm and heavy under his intimate caresses. “Your imagination is a dangerous thing for a woman.”
“For you,” he corrected. “I want to see you, wife.” Releasing her breasts only because he intended to have his fill of them when he’d bared her to the skin, he began to unlace her gown, aware of her breath getting ever faster, her pulse a thudding beat.
But she didn’t raise a hand to stop him, this small woman with ripe curves who had been his fantasy from the day he’d looked up from helping his father in the fields to realize he was no longer a child and neither was she. When he pushed her dress down her arms, she tugged it the rest of the way with a shy touch, the material bunching at her hips.
23
A single push, a small tug, and she was naked in front of him, her back pressed to his chest still. Shuddering with possessive hunger, he stroked his hands over her thighs, along the soft curve of her abdomen and up to cup her breasts again, her skin creamy against his scarred hands.
Full and taut and topped with dark nipples he’d tasted when he’d seduced her into allowing him to tug down her top one hazy summer day, they made his mind spark with ideas he was certain the village elders would term extremely unacceptable. He didn’t care. When it came to exploring what felt good between him and Ingrede, he never had.
“I dream,” he whispered in her ear, “of sliding myself between your breasts.” Using his forearm to plump them up, he sucked his finger to wet sleekness, then inserted it into the warm valley of her breasts to illustrate his meaning.
His wife’s body shook in reaction, her hand clenching on his arm. “My mother warned me you wouldn’t be a manageable kind of a husband.” Turning, she rose on tiptoe to kiss him the way she’d discovered drove him to a glorious kind of madness.