Darkest Temptation

by Sharie Kohler

Holding her tightly, he closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep as well, to escape to where he wouldn’t feel… where the beast would cease tormenting him and he could forget how much he craved the hot press of her body. Not some stranger from a bar that he sought to satisfy his body’s insatiable demands, but this woman. One part assassin bent on his death. Another part dying innocent.

  * * *

  Bone-deep weariness closed its fist around her. Lily struggled through the heavy shroud of her thoughts, fleeing the heat, the flames that licked through her, intent on devouring her. Mom. Maureen. A man with eyes of yellow amber who made her quiver inside.

  Then her thoughts slid into something else, something new and terrifying. Her senses came alive, stretched taut and sizzling with awareness. Yellow fog rose up to surround her. Yet she wasn’t alone. She felt them. In the wild thrumming of her blood, in the huge moon overhead, summoning her, a pearl in the black sky. Shadows crowded her, lengthening and widening… taking shape, becoming them. She tasted their wild hunger, knew it for her own. Silvery eyes cut through the fog, homing in on her.

  She ran. Fled the demon beasts, so real, so terrifying, so… tempting. They surrounded her, silver eyes glowing through a fog so thick she could not see her own hand before her. They were everywhere. They chased her. Hunting her. Tempting her. Her enemies… her brethren.

  She winced at the heat swamping her, at the sensation of her skin tightening and pulling. Shivers shuddered through her despite the terribly wonderful burn. Moaning, she writhed, wiggled as if she could shake the fever free, as if she could lose it—them—herself, this terrible thing that was happening to her. As if somehow she could make her skin stop tingling and itching and aching all over.

  Another burn began to consume her. This one a hurt she could take care of… if the hard body against her would press closer, deeper, ease the clenching ache…

  She opened her eyes to a darkened room… but saw everything with amazing clarity. Colors everywhere. Vivid colors she never knew existed before. The golden brown of a firm chest, rising and falling with deep, even breaths. She lifted her cheek from that chest and inhaled deeply of salty masculine flesh. Her gaze drank him in. Lithe lines and sculpted muscle. Her skin tingled anew, humming with a sort of electricity. Her already pounding heart beat even harder, and she felt dangerously close to fracturing apart.

  While he slept, his lashes cast crescent-shaped shadows on his cheeks. She shook her head and tried to focus on his face, to clear the grogginess from her head, her thoughts thick as syrup.

  Her hand slid down the center of his chest. Down, down, down…

  She knew him. Even in the grip of whatever seized her, she remembered. Remembered the hard hand that had torn her panties in one feral swipe. The steel thighs that had pinned her down, squeezing around her hips. The molten taste of his lips. The liquid caress of his tongue. The gold eyes that drilled into her.

  The fact that she fondled the man she had come to kill did not faze her in the least. His was a body that could make her forget. A warrior’s body that heightened the already throbbing pull between her legs. She shook her head, knowing such thoughts were absolutely not her… and still not caring. Not enough to stop, anyway.

  He was too delicious. And she was too hungry, too achy in all the wrong places. The right places. There was that voice again, its dark little whisper whipping across her mind, directing her in all things wicked and wild. Strangely enough, that voice felt comfortable. Right.

  The hunter, Curtis, had told her lust ruled lycans. And now she understood that. Embraced it.

  With a desperate little moan, she crawled atop him and covered his sleeping lips with her own even as her hand freed that part of him she craved. Needed. Closing her fingers around the satisfying length of him, she stroked him, elated to find him already hard. She gasped her own excitement against his lips, directing the hard tip of him between her thighs, grateful for the lack of clothing.

  A pair of hard hands closed around her arms, stopping her.

  Before she could draw breath, she was flung through the air. Flat on her back, she arched against the hands imprisoning her, desperate for the pleasure she had been so close to claiming.

  She growled, her gaze snapping to his. To a fierce pair of eyes, brutal enough to chill anyone’s blood.

  Only Lily wasn’t anyone. She wasn’t even herself. Not anymore.

  Her blood ran scalding hot in her veins. Baring her teeth, she hissed her frustration, her desire. Desperate to tempt him, she managed to free one hand and wedge it between them. He kept her bound to the bed with his other hand, preventing her from moving an inch. As if she were some wild animal that might devour him given the chance.

  Smiling, she wrapped warm fingers around him, her touch seductively gentle despite the fantastic surge of strength coursing through her. With a purr, she flexed her fingers around his increasing hardness.

  “Stop,” he ground out.

  She pumped him in a deep, languorous stroke. Once. Twice. “That’s not what you want.” She didn’t even recognize the sound of her voice, all thick and guttural in her mouth.

  “Yes. It is.”

  She slid her thumb over the tip of him again, smiling in dark satisfaction at the drop of moisture rising to kiss her. “It’s not what your body wants.”

  He snared her wrist between them, stopping her. “Fortunately, I’m a lot smarter than my cock is.”

  “Are you really?” She rotated her hips, locking her thighs around him tightly. He groaned at the sensation of her hot sex nudging against him. Her scent rose, heady and ripe. Every fiber of her being screamed in need. She had to have him. She would not relent until they were one. Until he was hers.

  Chapter Six

  Silver eyes gazed up at him, and something withered, dying inside of him at the sight. She was one of them now. But then he had known that would happen. Seeing her lovely brown eyes gone just drove home that she was no longer an innocent girl. No longer like the girls in his boyhood village. Girls he could not have had. The ones his family had beaten him for for even looking at.

  She was something else entirely. Something even more exciting. In the throes of dark and primitive lusts, she was overwhelming to him. Something the beast in him could not resist. Every instinct demanded that he claim her, even as his conscience screamed against it—against having her, loving her body only to later destroy it. As he must.

  He flexed his hands around her slender arms, his fingers tightening along smooth limbs that would tear and stretch and twist into something dangerous and terrible in a month’s time. The same kind of creatures that had brutalized his mother and aunt years ago, resulting in his and Ivo’s births. Creating them both—blights on the family.

  Still, he craved her, and he could not keep himself from releasing her hand to continue its sensual assault on his body.

  She resumed sliding slim fingers over his cock, the feverish touch of her skin deliciously hot. Dangerous and desirable. He arched into her clasp, closing his eyes tight and imagining it was her sheathing him.

  He thrust several more times into her hand before opening his eyes and locking gazes with her. The silvery pewter of her eyes gleamed up at him, as wild and menacing as the animal clawing to be freed inside him. Lycan eyes. Beautiful in a way he’d never thought eyes like that could be. She rubbed the head of him against her moistness, teasing it at her opening, sucking the tip of him inside her. Exquisite torture.

  Gritting his teeth, he held back, preventing her from going any further. Any deeper. Sweat beaded his brow at the agony of it. The bliss. She was no longer human. Nor was she a dovenatu like him… like Danae, his cousin’s mate. He had thought Danae loved him, had thought she’d wanted the things he had—had wanted him. Instead she’d chosen darkness. She’d chosen Ivo.

  And he’d chosen this life. A life of solitude. His lip curled back over his teeth. Perhaps not the best choice if it drove him to crave the touch of a lycaness. Clearly he’d gone mad during these ye
ars of self-imposed exile.

  Air hissed between Lily’s teeth and she released an inhuman growl, surging against his hands, struggling to fully merge their bodies.

  Clearly he was not the only one moved to madness. In her right frame of mind—as her proper self—she would never have acted this way. He’d seen that when he’d dropped from the trees and landed at her feet. He’d seen the terror, the revulsion, the wide-eyed stare of a good woman. A woman whose careful, controlled life had unraveled. A woman who would never let someone like him touch her. A woman who would have chosen death over a lycan’s existence. Knowing her only a night, he knew this much about her. She would never choose to live in the darkness.

  No matter what happened, he would lose her.

  His most primitive self rose from within him in a hot surge of rage. But you can have her now. For this night. Take her, take her.

  An answering growl emerged from deep in his chest.

  Of all women, this was one he should not touch, yet his hands loosened their hold. The last of his will crumbled. His hands dropped to his sides.

  She lifted her hips, impaling herself on him with a satisfied moan.

  Buried deep, he groaned at the slick heat of her tightening around him. Not since Danae had he felt this. Perhaps not even then. So feral and yet so right. As if she’d been made for him alone, her fit so perfect. He felt the tightening of his face, the telltale pull of his bones, and knew he was losing himself… letting the beast come out.

  She worked her hips, her nails scoring his chest, oblivious that he was more beast than man in this moment. He gripped the softness of her hips, one hand sliding around to squeeze her plump cheek. Clenching his teeth, he held his passion in check and shoved the beast back into darkness, but hers was on the rise. He watched her in her frenzy, wondering how much she would remember later.

  He gripped her face with both hands and brought his head down for a kiss, his lips gentling over hers, tender, thorough, opposite from the beast in him that scraped to be free. Different from the beast in her that struggled into… being.

  He took her… her old self dying, the new self emerging. He took her death inside himself, kissing her with his eyes wide open, watching as her pewter eyes drifted shut.

  “Look at me,” he commanded against her lips. Her lids slid open over those steel eyes, clinging to his gaze. He claimed her lips again as she took her pleasure of him, gyrating and working toward her own release with single-minded intent.

  At last she reached it, crying out into his mouth. She stilled. Unfinished, he surged inside her, earning a hot little whimper against his neck. Again and again, he moved. Close now himself, he hooked a thumb beneath each knee and spread her wider for his pleasure. Mewling sounds tore from her lips and she writhed beneath him, roused again.

  They cried out together, the sounds sharp and desperate—as desperate as the painful wringing of his heart. Too long. He had been too long without a woman. That had to be it. There could be no other explanation. No reason why it seemed like he would never get enough of this. Enough of her.

  Suddenly, in that moment, she became everything to him. The one he had been waiting for all these years of hiding, pretending the world did not exist. All his life he had been holding his breath, time propelling him toward this moment, toward her—where he could draw his first breath.

  Luc cradled her for a long moment, allowing himself the weakness, allowing a moment during which he could pretend he was normal. Just a man. And she was just a woman he’d asked out on a date, and then another, and another… until everything had traveled its natural course, leading up to tonight.

  He stroked her spine, running his palm over the sweet arch of it, caressing each and every tiny bump of vertebrae with his fingertips. Danae had not felt so good. So trusting in his arms. There had always been something missing, a rightness that he now felt with Lily.

  Sighing, he released her. Lying on his side, he watched her for several moments. She still breathed quickly, chest lifting and falling as if she had jogged a great distance. It would be that way until her transition was complete. He could leave her while she regenerated. She wouldn’t rise from this bed for days.

  And yet he didn’t move. Even as dawn crept upon them, vivid fingers of red and gold clawing through the bedroom toward them, he remained where he was. Beside her.

  Chapter Seven

  Lily opened her eyes quickly, instantly alert, every nerve alive and singing, humming with a vitality she’d never known before. As she sat up, her gaze dropped to the man beside her, who emitted warmth and something else. Something that even while he slept stroked a seductive breath over her.

  She pulled the sheets to her chin, her mind racing, tripping over the events of last night. She saw the nightclub… creatures. Maureen. Then the hunter’s ratlike face. Curtis. Images swam through her head in an unwelcome blur, cramping her stomach. Then her thoughts crashed on the memory of him. Them. Together. Liquid heat swept through her as she remembered every detail, every sensation of his body joined with hers.

  Wild, uninhibited sex was not something she did with any regularity. Not since Adam. And even then it had been gentle, exploratory, their movements always tentative, restrained.

  He slept as still as a jungle cat, all long, lean lines, ready to snap and spring at a moment’s notice. She sat up, moving as silently, as quickly, as possible. Inching toward the edge of the bed, anxious to flee. She lowered one foot to the floor.

  “Where are you going?”

  Tightness seized her chest.

  He snatched her wrist and rolled her onto her back in one smooth move, the hard press of his naked body a familiar sensation, yet no less shocking.

  All her life she’d slept in the same house, in the same room, same bed—her only lover a high school boyfriend, their intimacies stolen moments whenever their parents weren’t around. Never had she woken in bed with a large, virile man, her body sated and sore from hours of sex. A five o’clock shadow dusted his face of carved granite—menacing and sexy as hell.

  She found her voice, pretending to forget that she was his prisoner before their night together. “I have to go. It’s Saturday.” As if that made a difference to him. “I have to work—”

  “It’s not Saturday.”

  “What?” She blinked.

  “It’s Monday. You were bitten, infected, on Friday. The change—Initiation—takes a few days. Your body requires that time to regenerate… to become lycan.”

  His words sunk in slowly, unbelievably. Horribly.

  “See.” He nodded to her bare arm.

  She glanced down, air hissing from her lips at the sight. The bite, her wound, had miraculously healed. Only smooth skin met her stare—evidence she had no desire to see. She struggled against him, against his words, desperate to leave, to see her mom—

  “I can’t let you go.” The great wall of his body pressed her deeper into the bed, stilling her movements.

  “Why not?” she panted against the smooth wall of his chest.

  His fingers flexed around her. “You have one month less now.”

  A month. “And then I’m dead.” Her voice rang flat between them. No question, just a simple statement of fact.

  His golden eyes drilled into her. “Maybe. Or maybe your hunter friend will get lucky and find the alpha responsible for your… condition.”

  “How do you know about Curtis?”

  “I spoke with him. He was casing the house… waiting for you.”

  Hope swelled in her heart. “And he’s going to find my alpha?”

  “I explained to him that I’m not who he thought I was and if he wishes to live he can put all his skills and resources into finding the true lycan responsible for your curse.”

  “And you think he can?”

  “It’s a long shot. He wasted time assuming I was a lycan and bringing you here when he could have been following leads from the site of attack.”

  She shook her head. Desperation combined with the
suffocating press of his body made it difficult to draw breath. “You don’t understand. I can’t wait here for a month. I have to go. There’s someone—” She stopped herself, hating to mention her mother, to bring her mother into this, hating to taint her with this dark new world from which she might never escape.

  His face clouded over. “Someone who?”

  She shook her head.

  He lifted her off the mattress, forcing her face near his. “A man? A boyfriend?” The light in the center of those amber eyes flickered brighter. “A husband?” His fingers tightened. “You can’t go back. Even if we break the curse before moonrise, you think you’ll be the same again?” His gaze roamed her bare shoulders. Her breasts tingled against the press of his body.

  “Let me go. I need to say good-bye. To my life.” My mom. “I’ll return. I promise.”

  “Good-bye,” he muttered, his gaze crawling over her face, hotly possessive, dipping to where her breasts pressed against his chest. “And how will you explain that? Will you tell him what you are? How becoming a lycan turned you into one hot piece of ass? Will you tell him that you willingly spread your thighs for me? A half-breed lycan?”

  Fire erupted in her cheeks, and she beat against his chest and shoulders. “Bastard!”

  The light at the centers of his eyes grew, eclipsing the amber. As if he didn’t feel her blows at all, his hands moved, skimming down her arms to her waist.

  She stilled, feeling herself drowning in those eyes, mesmerized.

  He nudged open her thighs with alarming ease and slid his hardness inside her heat. “You can add that you called me names while you gladly fucked me.”

  Her mouth opened on a protest, an assurance that there was no one else, but the words never made it past her lips.

  Her hands curled into his shoulders. Already she worked her hips beneath him, gasping when he thrust again inside her.

  She lifted a leg and locked it around his waist. Her inner muscles squeezed, milking him, racing her toward orgasm with single-minded purpose.