Archangel's Viper

33

Holly looked at Venom’s back as he began to work on the pinwheels again. She knew pushing him would gain her nothing. He wasn’t stubborn like her—but he held his ground. And whatever he’d been carrying around for three-hundred-plus years, it wasn’t something he was ready to share. Fair enough.

She hopped off the counter—and had to do it. “I have to go clean up. I’m all wet and sticky.”

His entire body froze.

Lips curving, she sauntered out of the kitchen, feeling his gaze on her every step of the way. He might be fighting it with all he was worth, but Venom—

Tushar. Say it.

Her heart stopped.

He’d given her his real name. She wasn’t sure anyone else knew or remembered that. And he’d given it to her.

Holly released a quiet breath . . . and her chest, it pulsed.

No. Just no.

Striding into the bathroom, she cleaned herself up—Venom really had done a stellar job of turning her flesh erotically wet—then lifted up her dress to look at her chest. The image of those menacing serrated wings was a faint outline that faded completely toward the edges. “Do what you will, you bastard. And so will I.” The latter words were a vow. “I don’t plan to be easy prey like poor Daisy.”

When she returned to the kitchen, it was to discover the treats already baking and Venom missing. It wasn’t hard to find him. He was standing on the back porch, staring out into the forest as sunshine brushed the treetops.

Padding past him down onto the grass, Holly spread her arms and did a little twirl that sent the skirt of her sundress flying around midthigh. “Okay, that’s enough nature,” she said afterward, the grass soft underneath her bare feet and the air so clean it nearly hurt. “When do we go back to New York?”

Venom’s face was expressionless when he said, “We don’t go back. We wait.”

“For Raphael?”

A curt nod.

Holly’s heart squeezed, the playfulness gone and her dreams of a future in which she seduced Venom into a relationship in ashes. It had all been a fantasy anyway, an illusion the two of them had created with their refusal to refer to the reckoning to come. Because Holly had known how this would end from the moment she’d seen that distorted, monstrous fleshy thing in the crib.

She was a carrier of part of Uram. And now the insane archangel was trying to what, come back to life? The only way for Raphael to make sure that didn’t happen, to absolutely ensure a powerful and insanely murderous being didn’t once more stalk the streets, was to end both her and the receptacle in the crib.

“I won’t run,” she whispered to Venom when he continued to watch her. “I saw what Uram did.” Grief was a bruise deep inside her that had never quite healed. “I watched my friends die. I heard their screams. I’d do anything to make sure he never again hurts anyone.”

Even die.

The unspoken words hung in the incongruously luminous morning air, her vow unbreakable for all that it was silent. “It won’t come to that,” Venom said, responding to the words she hadn’t spoken.

“Don’t be a liar, Viper Face.” Gentle, chiding words as she walked back up the steps toward him, a small woman in a vivid sundress, bare feet, and a fall of hair as bright as her soul. “There’s no other way.”

This time, when she put her arms around him, he crushed her close. And he knew it was far too late to try to distance himself. She’d already reached that sliver of the man he’d once been. Not only that, but she’d charmed the cobra, twined the viper around her arm. And flipped the switch.

He was hers.

They stood there in silence for untold minutes, until Holly lifted her head from his chest. “I don’t want my pinwheels to burn,” she said with a smile that couldn’t hide the sadness within.

He followed her inside, watched her take the sweets from the oven and put them on a cooling tray on the counter before picking up the small jug of glaze he’d prepared. Glaze drizzled on, she used a fingertip to touch one of the sweets, hissed out a breath. “It’s so hot . . . but I still want to stuff my face.”

Sucking on her burned finger, she shot him a look that asked him to laugh with her.

Venom had no laughter inside him.

Only anger and pain and need.

Tugging her finger from her mouth, he kissed the poison and sugar sweetness of her with a greed that should’ve terrified her. But this was Holly. Who thought his eyes were pretty and who wanted to introduce him to her mother.

Mouths fused and bodies in passionate sync, they ended up in the room she’d claimed. Pulling her dress up over her head and throwing it aside, he palmed her breasts. When he bent his head to caress them with his mouth, she tugged at his hair as if she wanted another kiss.

He resisted, squeezing her other breast to make his point.

A shiver ran through her. Satisfaction a curve on his lips, her pleasure soothing and calming the raw edge of his need, he got to work. She jumped at the scrape of his fangs, moaned when he sank them in without taking blood. She was sensitive there, not just to touch, but to the kiss of his fangs.

He took full advantage of that knowledge to tease and torment her. First, he let the taste of her sink into him, before licking the wound closed. It was only a small one, a wholly sexual thing that had nothing to do with drinking blood to survive. Then he licked his tongue over her nipple before closing his teeth deliberately over it and tugging.

Jerking, she ran her hands down his back, scraping at him through his shirt. When she pulled impatiently at it, he managed to unbutton the shirt without taking his attention from his worship of her breasts. Shrugging it off, he gloried in the feel of her nails sinking into his flesh as he bit and licked and kissed.

Only when her heart was a rapid tattoo and she sounded like she couldn’t breathe did he move his lips to the centerline of her chest and kiss his way back up to her mouth, holding the silken heat of her body close to him.

Small but strong, that was Holly.

Her kiss was a demand and it was a branding. Holly had decided on him and he knew no matter what happened, she was it for him. He’d be like Jason’s vampire contact, that man who still loved his lost mate so many years after her murder.

Some things a man knew.

Breaking their kiss, he nuzzled his way down her throat, nipping at her carotid as he did so. She shivered but made no attempt to stop him. He was lethal, dangerous, could’ve torn out her throat . . . but that wasn’t what they were to one another.

Lifting her up in his arms, he threw her onto the bed.

She laughed, her hair a glorious stain of color on the white bedding, and her eyes so full of pure happiness that it stopped his breath. “Tushar,” she said, using a name no one had spoken in centuries, a name he’d told everyone was of a dead man.

Turned out he’d lied.

“God,” she said suddenly, “imagine if past-Holly could see me now. Naked and about to be led astray by you. The poor girl would be shocked, shocked.”

Laughing at her reference to their antagonistic beginnings, the memories ones he would guard fiercely against time and age, he got on the bed and began to kiss his way down her body, ignoring all her attempts and orders to him to speed it up. Venom had no intention of rushing this, his patience a sinuous, covetous thing focused on marking her as his.

She writhed on the bed, her musk making his nostrils flare.

Crouched over her, his head by her navel and his hands on her hips to keep her still, he flicked up his eyelashes . . . to see her looking down, her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. “You,” she said on a sucked-in gulp of air, “are a menace.”

He felt his lips curve. It had been an eon, forever, since he’d played this way with a lover. Perhaps he never had. Before his Making, he’d had only three lovers, all traders passing through who wanted nothing but a little physical ease. Since all three women were on settled routes, he’d had the pleasure of their bodies in his bed a number of times. They hadn’t been strangers who met only for a single night and never again—but neither had they wanted one another for anything but bed sport.

After his Making . . . A man couldn’t be free, couldn’t love, when he knew his lovers saw only part of him. Vampires, angels, mortals, the women glimpsed his eyes, thought they understood, but no one did, not really. Not until Holly.

Venom didn’t have to hide anything from her.

Not his needs.

Not his movements.

Not the inhuman coldness that was as integral a part of him as his eyes.

And not the human core with its scars and its memories and its devotion.

To Holly, he was all of that and more. He was Venom. He was Tushar.

Prowling up her body, he said, “If I am the menace, then you must be the trouble.”

Delight sparked in her, the fangs she sank into his throat all about play.

“Kitty, I seriously don’t know how you drink through those tiny, tiny things. Are you sure they’re not just for show?”

She sank her fangs deeper in punishment.

Laughing, he tumbled them over so that she was on top. She kissed the wounds closed, detoured to devour his mouth, before slithering down his body to attack the top button on his jeans and undo his zipper. She’d stripped him bare in a matter of seconds, his impatient, fiery lover.

Holly would never treat him as anything but an equal. They both knew he was stronger, faster, but that was simply a consequence of time. All he had to do was be with her as she grew into her own strength. But . . . that was a gift that could yet be stolen, their future torn to bloody shreds.

Not here. Not in this bed.

This time was theirs; he’d allow nothing to destroy it.

Drawing her up over his body on that silent vow, he palmed her breasts again before sliding his hands to the curve of her waist to bring her over his erection. “Come on, then, my wild Holly,” he murmured. “Ride me.”

Teeth sinking into her lower lip, she rose up, then oh-so-slowly took the hard ridge of his erection inside herself. A shudder rocked him. He watched her move with erotic grace, a thin layer of muscle underlying her skin and her pleasure in him unhidden, and he stood no chance. None at all.

“Tushar.”

That was all it took. His name. His long-ago true name on her lips and his back bowed as he lost control for the first time in hundreds of years.