Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the MoonImmortal Obsession

by Michele Hauf

  Just now, with her breath coming in great gasps, she wanted a physical culmination of their feelings.

  Just this one last time. At least.

  The scent of his bare skin filled her with heat as he came closer, as he leaned over to place his hands on the pillow behind her head. As she looked at him, taking in the exquisite length of his magnificent body, a beating, soulful longing made her heart soar.

  This was the same longing she’d felt from the first sighting of him on that balcony, in the monsters’ club, magnified a thousand times and manifesting here, inside her chest, and between her legs. If this was to be the last time, with him, she didn’t know how she would cope.

  “So much to do,” she said to him. “And you see only me.”

  “You imagine I could see anything else?”

  His expression was tender, sober, provocative. His eyes captured hers with a glint of blue-black fire.

  “Do immortals remember what to do in times like this, after a fight?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you be the judge.”

  The tickle of silky hair on her cheek made her reach for the wide shoulders she wanted crushed to hers. She sighed with pleasure when his long arms wrapped around her, lifting her from the mattress.

  He sat down beside her, holding her inches away from him for an agonizing minute more.

  “I don’t think you do remember,” she said. “It’s not supposed to take this long.”

  “You’re afraid you will change your mind?”

  “Hell, no.”

  His laughter mingled with the sound of fabric tearing. Madison felt a chill of cooler air, realizing without looking that she’d been rendered as naked as he was, and that she had been the one to forget the details, such as clothes getting in the way.

  Even then, St. John didn’t immediately release her. His lips stroked across hers, sending jolt after jolt of red-hot current through her, each strike turning up the heat and causing moisture to rush to the place she wanted him the most.

  The hungry, completely savage meeting of their mouths came like rapture. The slick dance of their tongues sent her heartbeat into overdrive and her breasts straining upward, hard and aching for the attention of his heat, hoping for just one touch.

  He laid her back without breaking the contact of that kiss. Her arms encircled his neck, muscles contracting to pull him to her until she felt the smooth seduction of his chest against hers at last.

  Skin to skin...

  She had imagined this would be a vigorous taking—his hardness, her need. But his kiss became deeper, slower, producing a similar effect to having his hands slide down her body, covering every inch.

  She arched her back, ran her hands over his shoulders, mindful of the fiery tattoos that had glowed like a bonfire, feverishly tracing the grooves she found between his blades.

  More sound came from her throat when she found those muscled shoulders rippling, and feverish.

  Touching him there seemed to strip from him his ability to restrain himself. He murmured something incomprehensible as his body slid onto hers, stretching them both out on the sheets.

  As he breathed her name into her mouth, his erection found the home that would welcome him. He wasn’t one of the Seven here. He was Christopher St. John, lover, giver.

  He eased only the swollen tip of his cock against her, holding back, seeming to need this kind of restraint.

  Madison’s body opened to him without effort or resistance. Her legs separated to grant him full access. She was damp, anxious and waiting, wanting to see where this meeting would take them, when she had to go home to Florida soon after.

  When her moan of invitation reached him, St. John drew his hips back. Slowly, he sank his cock inside her, one glorious inch at a time.

  It wasn’t enough. Not by far.

  Clutching at him, wanting to shout with the pleasure of the sensation of having him inside her, Madison spoke into his mouth. “Prove how much you want this. Prove it now.”

  Her remark caused another motion of his hips. He pressed into her with a faster, livelier thrust that he followed with more, until he wrenched a series of cries from her lips, locked to his.

  Each sound she made quickened his pace, and drove him deeper between her legs. Madison tried to hold off the pleasure by squeezing herself around him. She didn’t want this to be quick, or over too soon. She didn’t want it ever to be over.

  Mindless of the old injuries he had sustained, she clawed at his back. Her need was endless. He seemed to be sharing every sensation, which was perhaps why he was in no hurry to reach the place inside her that wanted him so desperately.

  When he backed off, she growled. When his fingers traced her collarbone, and dipped between her breasts, she uttered a breathy protest.

  Nothing else mattered in that instant, not her straining breasts, or any other body part. She wanted this. She wanted him. Why wasn’t he listening to her? How could he wait?

  His fingertip was cool against the flush of her overheated skin as it circled the raised pink flesh of her breast. He gave her a devastating smile before lowering his mouth there.

  With a slow lap, his tongue danced over her. In reaction, she clutched at his hair. The draw, as he suckled her, struck all the way to her bones, ending up in a deep place between her thighs, near where his cock waited to satisfy her.

  Writhing on the mattress, she arched her back, liking what he was doing, lost in the sensation of his mouth on her.

  He wasn’t inside her now, but so damn close.

  His hand glided over her stomach, and between her hip bones. At the same time, his talented tongue aided his next draw on the tip of her breast. Her insides began to ache. She felt each throb of her pulse, and couldn’t tell which sensation mattered most: mouth, fingers, lips? She refused to give up or give in to the whole, not wanting to miss any part of this.

  It was so very good.

  It might be the last.

  God, not the last!

  His lips gave a last soft pull on her breast before his face came close to hers. His eyes sought hers with an intensity that drove her mad with desire for the promise she saw there.

  “Don’t even presume to read my mind,” she murmured.

  His eyes were all black now. She heard the drop of his fangs.

  It was as if their souls knew what came next.

  His plunge struck hard, rocking the bed on its foundation, reaching her core. Her breath whooshed out. Emotion released, spiraling upward within her to meet with the largeness of her need, crashing into it, spilling the emptiness out, filling it with something altogether new.

  The air on her face became a colorful burst of brilliant light. Electric blue. Pink. White. She became one with that light as it ripped through her, scattering her senses to pieces.

  Her body rose upward in a violent jerk of intensity. The edge of her physical pleasure was joined by her mind, and soon after that, her soul. She and this special being were wrapped together, not just along some nebulous thread, but everywhere possible. In all ways possible.

  One more slight move of his hips, and he had her completely. Swept along by the explosion that rocked her was the ultimate gratification of a need being beautifully fulfilled.

  Her lover began to shine. His back began to burn white-hot, scorching her fingertips. Madison felt as if they were lifted from the bed, from the world, wrapped intimately together.

  There was a sensation of wind, or maybe the air caused by the movement of wings, on her face. The place St. John took her to was brilliant, colorless, and yet filled with light.

  Images filled her mind.

  Knights riding on black horses. Black shields emblazoned with crests of fire. Stern, pale faces of men fighting, then gliding through gardens of grass, red roses, and gurgling, water-filled fount
ains. And in the center of that fountain sat a sparkling golden cup, its rim covered in blood.

  Her cry of ecstasy went on and on, echoing in the room, mingling with the visions, as her orgasm merged with St. John’s long, deep groan of satisfaction.

  It felt like hours before the climax backed off, and faded. It felt like hours before she even began to come down to earth.

  The room had gone quiet after their cries and shouts. In the new silence, neither of them moved...until that quiet was severed by the unmistakable crunch of splintering wood.

  Madison opened her eyes to find herself not beneath St. John, but on top of her lover, straddling his naked body as she had done once before, but this time holding a narrow length of wood, its sharpest edge centered on St. John’s chest, where his unearthly heart continued to thunder.

  His hand surrounded hers, on that stake, the weapon she’d sworn never to possess, as if he’d stop her from using it. As if she might have used it.

  Bewildered, dazed, Madison blinked and met his eyes.

  “Instincts,” he said.

  A slow grin lifted his face, a damnable expression she immediately adored, and a sign of his new ease with her.

  The tips of his fangs gleamed from between the fullness of his lips. And though she wasn’t so sure how she felt about the fangs, she loved those lips, loved the way shadows caressed his angular face.

  In a Slayer, this would have been a problem. She didn’t want anyone to remove St. John from the equation, from her future, by using such a weapon—especially herself, due to hidden instincts she refused to accept.

  But she hadn’t shown any tendency toward being a vampire hunter. So how had she ended up with a stake in her hand?

  “We’ll probably have to invest in a furniture store until you learn to control those instincts,” he said. “You just destroyed the bedpost.”

  “I’m no Slayer,” Madison protested. But she had pointed a weapon at him before realizing she had moved, seconds after they had climaxed together.

  “No Slayer,” she repeated.

  His grin remained fixed. His eyes were softening, showing a hint of blue in the center. His tender expression registered empathy, because he also had become something other than mortal, once upon a time.

  “You said that you can make monsters,” she said breathlessly. “Will you make me one?”

  “Like me, you mean?” He removed the stake from her fingers.

  “Can you do it? Make someone like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever?”

  “It is forbidden.”

  “Will you do it to me, anyway?”

  “No, Madison.”

  “Because I’m something else already?”

  “Even if you hadn’t held that stake in your hand, I’d refuse.”

  “How else can we be together?”

  St. John’s smile wavered. Madison saw on his face dueling emotions of satisfaction and suffering that made her chest tighten.

  “Are you saying you might learn to love me, Slayer, as the monster you may think me, or that you merely want a rematch?” he asked. “For old times’ sake.”

  In response, Madison again found the crude stake clutched in her fingers. Swore to God, she didn’t remember moving. Finding the weapon a second time had been as automatic and mindless as the first time.

  St. John, able to move much faster, didn’t stop her when the point of the stake touched his skin. His expression didn’t change from that gentle, sad, knowing smile.

  “Do you want to bite me?” she asked him. “Not will you do it, but do you want to?”

  “I want to,” he admitted.

  “Will you always want to?”

  “Just as you will want to point that thing at me,” he replied.

  “I didn’t want to point this at you.”

  “You are waking to your destiny. It takes work, effort and vigilance to tamp those instincts down and then learn to control them. We will learn to adapt.”

  He’d said we. A flutter resulted, close to the place he had just found and conquered.

  “I want to go home. Take Stewart home,” Madison said.

  “There are vampires in the States,” he pointed out.

  “I don’t care if there are. I don’t want to care.”

  He nodded, and said in a manner that told her he had considered the question before, “I wonder if Florida really smells like oranges.”

  Gauging the meaning of this caused Madison to feel anxious for a very specific reason. Back to that term...we.

  There should have been concern over this. Yet the marvelous being beneath her had proved trustworthy several times over in the brief time she had known him. He had helped to lead the authorities to the missing girls. He had reunited her with her brother.

  Christopher St. John had rid the world of one set of very bad vampires, and in the process, had saved her ass a couple of times. And he was better than brilliant in bed.

  Better than anything in bed.

  Her immortal lover had well earned her trust. As strange as it seemed, he also filled the pockets of emptiness that she had long harbored.

  He was smiling, damn him.

  He’d read that in her mind, too.

  “Some of Florida smells that way,” she said, answering his question long after he’d asked it. “Do you have a sudden craving for fruit?”

  “Ever since I met you,” he said.

  Madison smiled, widely, fully, expectantly. That simple reply was his way of telling her that he would go with her to America. He didn’t seek permission because he knew what her answer would be. Communication along the thread binding them worked both ways.

  They were going to be together. Their unique relationship, merely beginning, had a long way to go, but looked promising.

  Understatement.

  Madison’s face flushed. Intelligence warned that she should be running in the other direction. St. John’s task in London had finished. She assumed he’d have another. He was, after all, the Protector.

  Maybe that new task would be aimed at taming her and her terrible new instincts. Maybe he was her Protector, after all, and had been meant for that particular task, all along.

  “In time, you’ll tell me about my genetics?” she said.

  Maybe he’d tell her what his title actually meant, and about his life before and after being granted immortality. Maybe he would tell her about that image of the garden, and the fountain she’d envisioned in it.

  She’d given up trying to picture St. John the mortal, the man, but there were enough of the good parts to make her realize with perfect certainty how badly she wanted him with her, whether she accepted her own bizarre destiny, or not.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I can do that. I can tell you some of what you want to know.”

  “Some?”

  His smile met her.

  And well, damn. She had no idea how to make this work. More questions would arise. More answers would come. In the meantime...

  There were vampires in Florida.

  And plenty of beds.

  Florida. A state large enough that freaks like Stewart and St. John and herself might go unnoticed if they behaved. With two Slayers and an immortal the likes of Christopher St. John about to descend, Miami’s rogue vampires didn’t stand a chance.

  Mere centimeters above her lover’s pale skin, Madison moved the tip of the stake, drawing her name in the air.

  Slayer.

  She said, “If that’s what I’m going to be, whether I want it or not, I’d better face facts.”

  When St. John smiled up at her in earnest, the light in his face eager and hopeful, the blue in his eyes again receding into a flat, liquid black, Madison knew what this meant. She knew it before a
cknowledging the feel of his erection.

  Handing him the stake, and with his hints about forever in her mind, Madison tossed the hair out of her eyes, squeezed her legs tighter around his hips...and smiled back.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from BEYOND THE MOON by Michele Hauf.

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  You harbor otherworldly desires…. Harlequin Nocturne stories delve into dark, sensuous and often dangerous territory, where the normal and paranormal collide.

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  Prologue

  Verity Von Velde’s mother, Amandine, had the ability to determine the origin of a person’s soul. So when Verity was born in the 1860s, Amandine had known her child’s soul had once belonged to a witch—who had died twice.

  Knowing she possessed a reincarnated soul helped Verity to understand the strange compulsions she experienced on occasion. The first time, at fifteen, had been on that horrible night she’d been compelled to rush to the forested village of Clichy, just outside of Paris, and had spied the bonfire. Amandine Von Velde had been betrayed by the witch hunter to whom she had unknowingly promised her heart. “Witch!” the crowd had shouted, and they’d laughed and clapped as the flames had consumed her mother’s screams.

  That night, left alone in the small cottage she had shared with her mother, Verity had fallen into a deep sadness. Years later, the compulsion had once again led her to the aqueducts beneath Paris where her grandmother, Freesia, had apported out of a Faery portal to hug the granddaughter she hadn’t visited for years. Freesia had been born with a faery soul. Of all the witches in the Von Velde family, she was the only one with sidhe ichor running through her veins.