Archangel's Blade

24

Dressed in a crisp white shirt, open at the collar, and black suit pants, he looked like some high-paid executive on his way to a breakfast meeting, his eyes shaded by mirrored sunglasses she wanted to rip off so she could read his gaze.

“I haven’t gotten what I want out of you yet.”

It could’ve been a joke. It could also have been the absolute truth.

“Have you eaten?” he asked, pulling out into the traffic.

“Yes.” Speaking of breakfast—“Who do you feed from?”

“Careful, Honor.” A tenor to the words that rubbed her the wrong way. “I might start to think you were the jealous, possessive type.”

She never had been, but then, he was the only man who’d become an obsession. In the early morning hours today, she’d dreamed not of her faceless dream lover, but of Dmitri, with his experienced hands and sinful touch. “Yes,” she said, knowing she was asking for something he might be incapable of giving. “I think I am.”

Swerving to miss a Town Car that was attempting to nose its way out into the manic traffic, he took his time replying.

“There was a particularly luscious blonde on offer last night. She called me after I left your apartment.”

Honor’s hand tightened on the door frame, her arm braced along the edge. She knew he was provoking her on purpose—he was in a mood, that much was clear—and yet she couldn’t fight the primal possessiveness of her response. “I’d have thought,” she said with manufactured calm, “that you’d have learned your lesson about blondes with Carmen.”

He turned, taking them toward the Lincoln Tunnel rather than the Tower. “Ah, but the sweet, hot taste of blood can mask the most unattractive qualities.” Displaying no impatience with the traffic backed up before the tunnel, he pulled off his sunglasses to place them in a compartment below the dash. “Honor.”

Anger a burn in her veins, she turned her head to find herself sucking in a breath at the intoxicating sensuality of him. The dawn sun, the traffic, none of it did anything to mute the intensity of those dark eyes, the harsh planes of that beautiful face.

“I,” he said in a tone that was pure rough silk, “am possessive, too, little rabbit. Lethally so.”

Her anger transformed into something far more visceral. “That doesn’t scare me,” she said, laying her hand on his thigh, the hard strength of muscle flexing under her palm. “But I’ve seen how vampires your age operate.”

“How is that?” A low purr of a question that might as well have been a stiletto slicing over her skin.

“Moody, aren’t you?” No answer, as he nudged the car forward. “I know,” she continued, “the sexual mores are much more . . . relaxed.” She’d once walked in on an orgy in progress during a hunt. Limbs tangled in sexual abandon, necks arched for a bite, and sighs whispering into air perfumed with the musk of sex, it had been erotic as hell, but she’d had not the slightest inclination to join in—even when propositioned by a pair of ripped Scandinavian-blond male twins, something straight out of a naughty fantasy.

“That’s not me,” she said, because while such fantasies were fun, in reality she fell very solidly into the fidelity camp. “This, between us, has crossed a line.” A line that gave her the right to demand what she was about to demand. “I’ll never accept that you might have other lovers—whether for blood or sex—and if you expect it, then we have to stop this right here, right now.”

Walking away from Dmitri would destroy something vital inside her, but worse would be to watch him bend that dark head over the neck of some other woman. “However long we’re together”—and she wasn’t naïve enough to think she could hold a man like Dmitri forever—“it needs to be exclusive.”

When she would’ve withdrawn her hand from his thigh, he covered it with his own for a second, holding her to him. “Blondes, it seems, have lost their appeal,” he said, increasing speed as the snarl eased.

“Not good enough.”

“No one else for the duration, Honor.” An unambiguous promise . . . followed by a warning. “For either of us.”

Her chest hurt and only then did she realize she’d been holding her breath. Releasing it, she said, “I know it’s unfair, when I might not be able to allow you to feed from me.” A vampire had once told her blood from the vein was as different from stored blood as the most decadent chocolate cake was from a rice cracker.

But Dmitri shrugged those shoulders she wanted to see naked again. “Blood is easy enough to come by.” Clearing the tunnel, he took them out into the suburbs. “It’s the sex I might die without.”

She dug her nails into his thigh, choking on her laugh. When his lips curved in a slow smile that made her think dangerous thoughts, she decided to play him at his own game. Moving her hand, she danced her fingers up the zipper of his sedate black pants. He cursed, but managed not to swerve.

It did something to her that he’d hardened immediately under her touch, made her even bolder. “Try not to drive beside a semi or a pickup,” she said, closing her hand over him and squeezing just enough that his jaw turned to granite, “or they’ll get an eyeful.”

“Fuck that.” He punched something on the dash and the car’s roof unfolded over them with a smooth electronic hum, locking into place in under half a minute. A second press and the windows were up and opaqued.

Good God. “How much is this car worth?”

Putting his own hand on hers, he urged her to pick up the pace. “You can’t have it. Not for a hand job. Maybe if you use your mouth.”

Her toes curled, desire igniting liquid and hot in her abdomen. “You can’t come,” she warned, pumping him with her hand. “Or you’ll have to drive all the way back to change.”

Clenching his fingers on the steering wheel, he hissed out a breath. “I won’t forget this, Honor.” It was a threat.

One that made her nipples go tight, rubbing against the lace of the sexy bra she’d slipped on under the top. However, she didn’t even consider stopping this—she wanted to do it, to seize an experience the broken woman she’d been at the start of this hunt would have never contemplated. “There,” she said, “it’s the entrance to some kind of park.” Green grass, a few picnic tables.

Wrenching the wheel, Dmitri pulled into the small parking lot. This time of day, it was too late for the dog walkers and joggers and too early for anyone else. Unsnapping her safety belt without removing her hand from his lap, she snapped his open and leaned over to nibble at his ear. When he shivered, she knew she’d hit another one of those hot spots on his body. “Don’t suppose the windshield turns opaque?”

Without a word, he reached out to touch something on the dash. The windscreen was a smoky black a second later. “Is that even legal?” Licking at his earlobe, she insinuated her free hand through the open collar of his shirt to play her fingers over the hollow at the base of his throat, felt his muscles lock.

“The offenses are mounting up.” Dark, dangerous words.

They made her thighs clench, images of the most erotic of punishments running through her head. Dmitri would be no easy lover—like the faceless man she’d seen in her dreams, he would demand and control and possess. “You,” she murmured, using both hands to undo his belt, “are the sexiest man I have ever met.” He made her think bad thoughts simply by breathing.

Undoing the button on his pants after successfully releasing his belt, she pulled down the zipper. And slid her hand inside to close around hot, rigid flesh covered with velvet-soft skin. He threw his head back against the headrest, one hand still on the steering wheel, the other curving around her body to fist in the back of her top. The taut line of his throat was an irresistible temptation. Continuing to caress him with firm strokes that had the tendons in his neck turning white against the warm seduction of his skin, she kissed her way up one of those tendons . . . and then she bit him.

His hand flattened on her back in a single, sudden move before fisting in her top again. An instant later, they were kissing. It was no light brush this time, no exploring touch. This was all tongues and teeth and wicked wetness as he kissed her like a man who had rough, sweaty, dirty sex on his mind and didn’t care if she knew it.

Gasping in a breath when they parted, she fisted him, stroked hard and fast. Once. Twice. His eyes glittered. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d say you’d been taking lessons in how best to please me.”

“I should stop this right now for that comment, but you’re in my blood, Dmitri.” Not giving the fear a chance to rise, she dipped her head and took him into her mouth.

“Fuck!” His hand fisted tighter in her top but he made no move to shove or otherwise direct her head, as if he knew how thin a line she was walking.

Dmitri had tasted every sexual pleasure there was to taste. He’d slid into empresses and queens, rolled out of beds with more than one other body in them, been pleasured by the most experienced of courtesans and the most dissolute of immortals. For a short, sharp instant of time, the depravity had made him forget.

Then it had become a game, to see how far he could go, how much excess he could indulge in without destroying himself. However, for the past hundred years, even the erotic had failed to satisfy—he’d played the game, but with cold calculation, little heat. Yet at this moment, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been consumed with such ennui. It was all he could do not to fist his hand in Honor’s hair, teach her exactly what he liked.

Keeping his hands where they were was an exercise in the harshest self-restraint. He didn’t dare look down, see that gorgeous mouth working him with lush confidence. Then Honor hummed in the back of her throat and his body arched, his spine curving as pleasure arced from his cock to crash through him in a brutal cascade.

She didn’t take her mouth off him as he came apart, lapping up his seed with a sensual openness that made him wonder who she would be when she was fully whole, no more fractures in her psyche. No longer breaks, he thought, chest heaving as she stroked her mouth off him with a final lingering suck, but fine hairline scars.

Bracing herself with her hands on his thigh, she faced him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a deep, passionate green, her lips plump and red. Releasing his hold on her top to set himself to rights, he watched her watch him. The instant he finished doing up his belt, she twisted over the console between the seats to curl up in his lap, her head on one shoulder, her hand tracing designs on the other through the fine fabric of his shirt.

He curved one arm around her, placed his free hand on her thigh. “The last time I made out in a car, there were no cars.” It had been in a cart loaded with vegetables. Somehow he’d talked his scandalized new wife into the back, where he’d tumbled her most thoroughly and satisfactorily.

But his favorite memory was of Ingrede turning up in the cart on her own one sunny day, an invitation in her brown eyes that she’d never enunciate. Not then. Later, when they’d been together several years, when Misha was walking, then his wife had sometimes whispered the most sinful of welcomes in his ear.

As another woman now nipped at his earlobe and said, “I want your mouth on me, Dmitri,” in a low, husky tone that was as good as a touch. “I dreamed about it, woke up with the sheets tangled around my legs and my hand between my thighs.”

Stroking his own hand higher up her thigh, he insinuated it between her legs. She trembled, but didn’t fight him. Instead, she did that thing she did—sliding one arm around his shoulders, she used the other to cup his jaw as she tugged his head toward her.

He made the kiss a slow, languid seduction as he pressed up with the heel of his hand, pushing the seam of her jeans against her clitoris. Just that. No other intrusion. A simple, inexorable pressure that had her breath changing, her body attempting to ride against his touch. “Want me to rub, Honor?” he asked, lessening the pressure. “Be a good girl and say the words.”

She bit down on his lower lip. Hard. Mouth curving, he began to rub—tiny, tiny up-and-down motions that had her squirming, the hot scent of her rising to infuse the air inside the car. Sensitive as he was to scent, he’d catch hints of her for days to come. He was fairly certain his cock would go rigid every single time.

“Dmitri.” Her hand gripping the side of his neck, she went stiff.

He could almost see the ripples of pleasure rolling up over her body, made a note to watch her come as she lay naked in his bed one day soon. When she went limp against his arm, he propped that arm against the door, letting her sprawl across both seats, one long leg bent and braced on the passenger seat, the other on the floor. The flushed curves of her breasts rose up and down in a ragged rhythm that was the most potent of seductions.

Seeing that her eyes were drugged to near blackness with pleasure, he spread his hand over her abdomen. No flinch, no hint of fear. So he slid that hand up to cup her breast, maintaining eye contact the entire time so she would know this was him, no one else. A jagged breath, her hand clenching on his side. “Like to push, don’t you?”

“If I don’t,” he purred, leaning down to kiss her while he plumped and shaped her breast with a proprietary hand, “how will I ever get you to a point where you’ll let me tie you up and use a whip on you?”