The sight of Dante evaporated the air in Ariana’s lungs. He was strong, with hard ridges of muscles stretching over his shoulders and down his chest. His hair was flattened forward, his five o’clock shadow darkening the breadth of his square jaw. Her body shivered as his stare drank her in from her boots to her corset, to the length of ponytail draping over her shoulder.
Her gaze swept back to Echo. “If you don’t feed off blood, then what—”
“Ask your boy about the kind of energy we crave,” Echo whispered. “He’s one of us. The one you’ve got to be careful for most, ’cause you already let him too close. Ask him how he feeds before you go anywhere with him alone.”
“I don’t want to ask him. I’m asking you.”
Dante closed in, his hands clenching to fists. If Ariana feared for Echo’s safety, she would’ve told him to scat, leave before Dante reached striking distance, but . . . she really didn’t. She really didn’t know whether she could trust a word that came from his wide, goofy mouth either.
“I gotta run,” Echo said, backing away. “But I couldn’t go before I make sure your eyes open. You smart, Ari, you ask questions. This time, with him, ask with your head instead of your heart.”
“You still didn’t tell me what you told the Primus to get you in here,” she fired as he turned toward the cemetery, back the way they came.
“I said you were in danger from more than Savage, and I told him from who. Ask him, Ari. Ask how your boy feeds and you’ll see. You should stay far away. Be kept under lock and key. I told your Primus that, too.”
Fan-flippin’-tastic. If Ariana wasn’t already a prisoner to Black Moon, the Primus would see that she was now.
DANTE WOULD NEVER get over the sight of Ariana from afar, the way her hair reflected hints of auburn, the way her lips pursed when she talked to others, but he knew, from the second he pushed out the haven doors, that he’d never forget the sight of her standing in the morning sun.
The sunlight loved her, highlighting the soft curve of her cheekbones, twinkling the spark in her eyes. With each step that closed the distance between them, Ariana became more beautiful, more angelic, and seemed to steal the sun’s rays from everyone around her.
When she set her sights upon him, Dante’s chest seized, yet the muscles in the rest of his body felt relaxed and limber. He felt calm . . . satiated. As if he’d had a back-alley beating that had released hard bursts of adrenaline.
The sensation of being filled up was foreign, tingling nerves through his gut.
“There you are,” Ariana said as he approached. “We need to talk.”
He stood before her, taking in her beauty and the subtleness of her strength; it was like the wind. Always there—a gentle caress that warmed his insides—and capable of gusting into something formidable at a moment’s notice. She was a goddess. Regal and powerful. A queen standing in front of her castle.
“Well, here’s the thing,” he said, leaning in to whisper. “There’s time to talk and time to act. And today I’m not in the talking mood.”
If Dante only had half the day to spend in bed with Ariana before the Nightshade wore off, he wasn’t going to spend it talking.
But before he went and did something insanely stupid, he had to know for certain . . . had to make sure the half-bottle dose did the job.
She seemed to shiver from his words, quaking before him like a leaf on a limb. Heat radiated the space between them, evaporating all the breathable air. She inhaled a jagged breath. “There are things we have to—”
“Touch me.” The words jumped out, sounding harsher than he’d meant them.
“What?” She blanched, shaking her head. “I really don’t have time for this. I’m headed to the library. I’d invite you to come with me, but since you’re still not up for talking about what is going on with you, I’d rather spend the day with a steaming cup of Ospresso and a stack of books.”
“Just touch my hand.” Holding his breath, he held it out. “Take it.”
She jerked back. “No.”
“Come on.” Would the voices go away completely? Would they disappear until he could hear nothing but the buzz of his own thoughts? “It’s not like I’m asking you to stroke me off or something, I just want to see if . . .”
“If what?”
The anticipation of her touch was driving him mad. His heart was beating too fast, pounding out of his chest. His lungs were tight and constricted, oddly panicked. But the voices were quiet, humming in the back of his mind.
“Tell me what you were going to say and I’ll do what you ask.” She dangled her hand over his, taunting him.
God, what he wouldn’t give to tell Ariana everything. To tell her about his hunger, the nights spent alone out of fear he’d hurt someone who didn’t deserve it, the way she made him feel like there was hope for his future, even if he didn’t know what it was yet.
“Why do you want me to touch you so badly?” she asked.
He swallowed gravel. “Isn’t it obvious?”
As the air around them stilled, sucking up his words, Ariana’s eyes inflamed. Slowly, torturing his nerves each passing second, she dropped her hand into his.
Sparks burst from his palm, up his arms and through his chest, setting off fireworks in his middle. His mouth dried, and his stomach rolled. And when her fingers curled in his, Dante could’ve sworn the sun exploded, shattering into starbursts of red and orange that cascaded around them.
Losing all sense of place and time, Dante spun Ariana around and pressed her back against the library building. As his knee found its way between her legs and his hand behind her back, her breath hitched.
“What are you doing?” She was out of breath, the pulse on her neck working double time. And her cheeks! They flushed the softest shade of pink. “You can’t. We can’t.”
Closing his eyes, Dante leaned down into Ariana’s neck and inhaled a deep breath of her hair. “We can.”
Fine strands of her hair that had come loose from her ponytail tickled his nose. They smelled of lavender and something a bit sweeter.
Her body melted against his as her gaze darted to the elders near the bluff. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk. Not here. Elders are watching.”
“Let them watch.”
Not a single hunger pain struck his middle. And although the voices were there, vibrating in the back of his mind, he easily tuned them out. Pretended they were cars on the city street outside his apartment window in the city or pissed-off seagulls squawking as they dive bombed him on the beach.
He inhaled another deep breath, relishing the amount of control in his body. Since he met Ariana, he’d either been due for a drink, on the verge of blackout, or already there. He’d never felt her this way or had the ability to absorb so much pleasure from the silkiness of her skin and the sweet fragrance of her hair.
Maybe Nightshade wasn’t Nightshit after all. If it could dish this kind of effect, he wanted second helpings.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered into his ear.
Waves of chills rolled over the back of his neck and down his body, seizing his balls, curling his toes. He planted his hands on either side of the wall, pinning her in place. Her eyes widened in fiery approval.
“Touch me again,” he said, barely breathing.
When her hands skated to the ridges on either side of his stomach, Dante’s mind wiped clean. He slung her around his side, right onto his back. Squealing, she looped her arms around his neck.
“Hold on,” he barked, shooting her a warning glare. “The ride might get a little bumpy.”
Dante hoped he still had enough strength to do this.
“What ride?” she asked, then gasped as Dante clawed up the face of the building.
He scaled the wall slowly, gauging his strength. He slipped at first, sliding down the few feet he’d gained. But as his muscles
fired, propelling him forward, he moved faster. Faster still. Although the climb was harder than he would’ve expected, burning his muscles with each leap, nothing was going to stop him from reaching Ariana’s room.
Ariana screamed for the world to hear and buried her face into his neck. She held tight. Squeezed her thighs around his middle. Dante couldn’t wait to have her thighs squeezing around him when he was turned around facing her, hip to hip. Chest to chest.
Desperate to reach the ledge, he quickened his pace, leaping and digging in, then doing it again until he reached the balcony a few heart-stopping seconds later. With a final leap, he catapulted over the side and landed on the ground, crouched near the closed accordion wall of her suite.
“When I said let’s go upstairs,” Ariana said, sliding off his side, “I meant for us to take the elevator.”
She pressed a code into a small metal box on the far side of the balcony.
“I’ve never been one for convention.” Dante paced near the railing, his heart thumping slow and hard in his ears. The gurgling tide of voices receded until he could barely make them out at all.
“I think that’s the thing I like about you most.” Ariana looked over her shoulder and smiled, stopping his heart completely. “You’re different from everyone else I’ve ever met.”
“That’s an understatement.” As the wall churned to life, folding back slowly, Dante shoved the two sides apart.
“You look at me differently, too,” she said, laughing at his eagerness and the wall’s grinding protest. “Like you really see me instead of the healing I can do for you.”
“If you let me, I’d like to see a lot more of you.”
Dante pulled Ariana into his arms. She was warm. Supple. Softening against his body. Her melting cocoa eyes bore into him, through the black-on-black clothes she’d chosen for him and the tanned skin he’d never been comfortable wearing. He couldn’t wait to ditch the former and the corset that clung to her body like second skin.
Using both hands, Dante lifted her into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist. He could hear the sound of leather sliding as her boots crossed at the small of his back. The sound of her skirt hiking as it fell open around him, and the promising moan falling from her lips.
He did a quick gut check, listening closely for the demonic racket he’d become so accustomed to hearing. His thoughts remained his own.
Taking full advantage of the quiet, Dante kissed her hard, plunging his tongue past her lips. He opened her mouth wide and swept his tongue inside, rolling it along hers as he carried her into her suite.
She matched his fervor, nipping at his lips, tunneling her fingers through his hair. As their kiss deepened and flashes of heat rushed between them, she became possessive, hungry, consuming him with her mouth and her hands.
“There,” she ordered against his mouth, pointing through the living room.
He followed her command, blind to where he was going, to the things he stumbled over, blind to anything but the softness of Ariana’s lips and the way her kiss seemed to erase the anxious feeling that remained coiled inside him.
Through the only door on the right, Dante found the bed. Ariana was beneath him in a heartbeat. Sliding out of her skirt, breathless and wanting, clawing at his back with greedy hands. He kicked out of his boots, shuffled off his pants, and tore the shirt from his body.
“Maybe we should . . .” She sucked in a breath as he settled over her, skin to skin, flesh to scorching flesh. “ . . . talk first before we . . . oh God—” Her voice hiccupped, cutting off as his shaft poised at her center.
Hesitating, Dante braced himself on his hands. Over her. Looking down upon her radiantly naked body. Her skin was a flawless canvas of the purest shade of porcelain—save for the reddish half-moon brand on her arm—with plump, round breasts and delicate pink nipples that begged to be touched and licked and teased. Her waist was small and delicate, but her stomach was tight with tiny ridges of muscle. She was exquisite, heart-stopping perfection splayed out before him.
Waves of warmth drenched his tip, dizzying him so that for a split, euphoric moment he didn’t know whether he was below her, above her, or hovering near the ceiling.
He pulled back as the uncertainty of Ariana’s words settled over him like a wet cloak. “Ariana . . .” He tasted the words before he spoke them; they were fresh, needing to be said. “ . . . are you a virgin?”
“No.” She trembled beneath him, her fingers tracing playful lines over the smoke-like marking on his neck. “Are you?”
Rough bursts of laughter bubbled out of him. “No. I’m not.”
He swallowed hard, shoving the vile truth back down into his gut. Though he knew he wouldn’t hurt Ariana, not now, not when his voices were nothing more than a summer breeze blowing against his skull, if she didn’t want this, he didn’t want this.
“If you want me to stop, if there’s something you want to say, say it.” He brushed his thumb over the vein on her neck, felt it flutter beneath his finger like a trapped butterfly. His fangs hummed, buzzing with a foreign sensation—the urge to drink her blood. But he didn’t like the taste of the red sludge . . . not really. “As much as it would kill me to stop now, we don’t have to do this.”
She shifted her hips beneath him. Just enough. A little shimmy that made his cock jump against her most sensitive flesh. His breath hammered out of him as his ironclad restraint weathered, her innocent seduction taking its toll.
“Dante, I’ve wanted this since the first moment I saw you.” She pressed him down, flush against her. “I’ve wanted you.”
“You have me.”
He crushed his mouth to hers. Sheathed himself inside her, long and deep, groaning as they met hip to hip. She was perfection. Sweet, blissful perfection. He pushed inside her again, drenching himself to the hilt.
Between the intoxicating fragrance of her arousal blooming in the air around them and the silkiness of her skin, Dante’s muscles pulled tight. From his toes to his abs to his neck. Pressure was building. Concentrating and gathering at the base of his spine.
The energy spiraling through his body was his own. He knew it like he knew his cock was swelling with its own hot release. Electric currents of lust hit hard, jolting surges of power through his hips as he pushed deeper inside. Ariana cried out as if she could feel the swell of energy cresting within him. She scratched her nails into his back, rolling and bucking and writhing beneath him.
As their bodies moved as one, sliding skin against skin, Dante plunged into her with relentless need, desperate to reach the crest that had always been out of reach.
Soft tugs of her core began to clench around him. He stilled and captured her heavy-lidded gaze. No energy he’d ever pulled from another had ever felt like this. This—she—was different. What was happening between them was more than sex. Beyond a transfer of energy.
Intimacy.
Ariana was what he’d been missing all along. The pristine yin to his dingy-ass yang. He couldn’t live without her. The realization snapped something in his middle, quick and stinging like a rubber band.
“Don’t stop,” she breathed as her hips continued to churn and roll beneath him.
Time had slowed to a crawl. He could watch pleasure ripple across her face forever. Every second. Every writhing movement, every flex of her long, slender muscles. But his own body went rigid, his muscles seizing into knots, his own pleasure threatening to spill over.
“I can’t fight it anymore,” he said, fully aware he was talking as much to himself as he was to her. He’d never unleashed the clench in his gut. Never allowed himself to take his own pleasure with a woman. “I don’t want to fight it with you.”
“Then don’t.” She arched back, revealing the gentle curve of her neck, rocking her hips, taking more, milking every last inch of him.
He ravished her lips, kneaded her breasts, and watche
d in awe as her body bucked and trembled when her orgasm took her over. She moaned breathless and deep with each hard clench of her core. It spurred him on, driving him closer to the peak he so desperately yearned for.
As he drove into her one last time, he held painfully taut. The crest rose up, building, holding. And when his release finally hit, he cried her name, riding the line between pleasure and pain.
His breath sobbed and his body went limp as he melted over her in total, blissful exhaustion.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I COULD STAY here forever,” he mumbled as he kissed her neck. “Right here.”
Ariana couldn’t agree more. Dante’s heartbeat was strong, true, pounding so fiercely that it rumbled through her chest as if it was her own.
“Yeah, but if I can’t breathe, what good am I to you then?” she said.
He unsheathed his shaft from her core, leaving her feeling oddly cold and hollow without him. Lifting most of his weight off her, Dante kissed her forehead, her nose, then slowly made his way down to her lips. “You are more than good. You are perfection. An angel . . .”
Ariana’s heart clenched around his words.
“An angel with a thousand questions,” he finished, kissing her with so much tenderness, she thought her heart might burst. He lay beside her then, drawing her into the nook between his arm and chest.
“What makes you think you know what’s going on in my head?” She gazed up at the strong lines of his face, the hardness of his jaw, the plushness of lips. He really was handsome, wasn’t he? Easily the most striking man she’d ever laid eyes on.
“I can see the curiosity burning in your eyes, even now. Don’t you ever give your mind a rest?”
“Sure.” Questions about what Echo had said, about how Dante fed, pushed to the forefront of her mind. “It gets plenty of rest when I’m sleeping.”
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