Defy the Dawn

Holy fuck, did she ever.

That kiss they’d been denied a short while ago only made the heat reignite all the hotter now.

Their mouths joined in undeniable need, Zael skimmed his hands over her arms, then traced his fingers along her sides. She shivered as he slid his palms under her blouse and onto the soft, bare skin of her torso.

The intricate lines of her glyphs throbbed beneath his fingertips, warm and pulsing. Unearthly and alive. Their pattern created a tempting, tactile roadmap across her belly and rib cage—one he craved to follow with his tongue.

He wanted to uncover and devour every sweet inch of her body.

But first, he wanted to hear her say the words.

“Now tell me there’s nothing happening between us,” he rasped against her kiss-swollen lips.

As he spoke, Zael reached around her and deftly unfastened her bra. The lacy cups slackened, freeing her naked breasts into his hands. She sighed deeply as he caressed her. Moaned sharply as he rolled the tight beads of her nipples between his fingers.

“Tell me you haven’t been wanting this as much as I have, Brynne.”

Her pleasured gasp tore out of her without resistance, but it wasn’t good enough.

Pushing her shirt and bra out of the way, he bent his head and pulled one rosy nipple into his mouth. Each tug of his tongue and lips made the colors of her dermaglyphs intensify, their patterns churning and transforming in response to her rising desire. Brynne arched against him as he sucked and licked her. Her spine bowed, she plunged her fingers into his hair, her legs trembling beneath her.

The scent of her arousal filled his nostrils. Spicy and sweet. Ethereal and bold. Like earth and heaven combined.

Damn, she was lovely. Sexy as hell. Although he had bedded many women over his long lifetime, he had never been with a woman who was Breed. He never imagined he could want any woman the way he wanted Brynne.

The cynical part of him tried to dismiss this need he felt for Brynne as nothing more than sexual novelty, just his libido craving a new diversion. But if that had been the case, he never would have denied her back in London. Refusing her had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. And he wasn’t about to let her act as if he was alone in that torment.

“Tell me you want me, Brynne. Tell me what you said to me the other night on that dance floor. Now, when there’s no whisky to hide behind. Nothing but you and me, and the truth between us.”

He skated one hand down the length of her body, into the parted cleft of her thighs. The tiny scrap of black silk that covered her sex was soaked and so hot against Zael’s fingertips he groaned with the need to touch her, to taste her…to brand himself on all of her senses.

He cupped his hand over her mound, one finger slipping beneath her panties to the silken heat of her naked folds. Her sex was slick and lush, her juices coating his fingertips as he caressed her swollen folds and the hardened bud of her clit.

“Tell me now,” he said, “when you can’t take it back later or tell me I’m insane for thinking you feel this need too.”

She whimpered, a tremor shuddering through her as he stroked her wet satin flesh. He teased the tight entrance of her sex, stopping just shy of penetration, despite that her thighs clamped tight around his hand in unspoken demand.

He wanted to hear her admit the truth out loud, once and for all.

“Say it, Brynne. Tell me you haven’t been wanting to feel me inside you from the moment we first saw each other right outside on that terrace last week.”

She made an anguished sound and he glanced up to find her eyes blazing with fiery amber, her Breed pupils narrowed to thin slits. Her fangs gleamed from behind the plush line of her upper lip.

She was beautiful under normal circumstances, but like this, she was primal and otherworldly, so fiercely sexy that she defied any description.

Holding his gaze, Brynne licked her lips and the truth boiled out of her in a single word. “Yes.”

CHAPTER 12

Everything he’d said was true.

She was trying to run away. From him, from what he made her feel.

From what he’d made her want.

After witnessing the latest attack by Opus Nostrum, a surge of panic had gripped her. She couldn’t get out of that room fast enough. The world was on fire, under siege from so many new and deadly terrors. She had watched the fresh footage and felt swamped with shame that her biggest personal problem was an unwanted attraction to a male she shouldn’t desire and who would probably only break her heart.

She ran because she realized that she needed to get her priorities straight—something she seemed unable to do whenever Zael was near.

It wasn’t because she felt there was nothing between them.

It was because, sooner or later, she knew she’d be unable to deny him.

And now that her admission had left her lips, there could be no turning back.

She wanted him.

She had been trying to convince herself otherwise since that morning she saw him standing in the thin light of dawn—inhumanly handsome, gilded in sunshine like some strange, golden angel.

She had wanted him then.

She had wanted him the other night too.

“It wasn’t the whisky,” she murmured now, captivated by his hungry stare as he held her close, his fingers stroking her sex in exquisite torment. Her breath was shallow from desire, every nerve ending in her body lit up with need for this man. She shook her head, sending her loose sable waves shifting around her shoulders. “When I said I wanted to be with you last night in London…that I wanted you to take me home and to bed with you… Zael, it wasn’t because I’d been drinking. It was the truth.”

His low reply was less a word than a masculine growl of satisfaction.

Of triumph.

Taking her mouth in another searing kiss, he began unfastening the buttons of her shirt. When he tore his lips away from hers, his breath was sawing out of him, his blue eyes darkened with desire.

“Do you have any idea how hard it was to say no to you last night?” He grinned, but it was a hungered smile. “I wanted to bite these buttons loose with my teeth on that dance floor.”

With that, he took off her blouse, then slid her undone bra off her arms as well. Brynne watched his gaze drink in the sight of her glyphs. Being something even purer than Gen One, her skin markings arced and twisted all over her torso and onto her limbs. Smaller flourishes danced along the undersides of her breasts and around her erect nipples.