Archangel’s Blade (Guild Hunter #4)(52)
Author: Nalini Singh

“Yes.” It had been more about slashing her with their fangs, making her hurt.

Dmitri shifted slightly, muscles rippling in a reminder of his strength, but again, he left the next move up to her. She didn’t make the mistake of thinking it an act of tenderness on his part. No, Dmitri was a predator—and she was being stalked. Slow and easy and determined.

“Stay still,” she said, leaning in until their breath mingled. His face betrayed nothing, so much so that she might have thought him unaffected if she hadn’t been able to feel the tension in that body made for woman’s damnation.

The first touch of her lips against the firm warmth of his was a mere whisper. Her heart thudded and it wasn’t panic. So she sucked slightly at his upper lip before releasing it to run her tongue along his lower, indulging herself with this man who was her own personal aphrodisiac.

His chest rose and fell under her hands, his breathing no longer even. The feminine heart of her stirred in satisfaction. She didn’t have to be able to see into the past to know that Dmitri had tasted every sensual act there was, luxuriated in every decadent sin . . . and yet he reacted to her. The response, she knew, was genuine—Dmitri wasn’t the kind of man who’d bother to pretend.

Pulse beating in every inch of her skin, she opened her mouth over his, taking the taste of him deep within as she slid up her hands to cup his face.

She always did that, Dmitri thought, recalling the way she’d stroked those long, capable fingers over his cheek, his jaw, during that aborted kiss in the forest—and earlier, beside the stream. Only one other woman had he allowed the tender intimacy.

“Why do you kiss me so, Ingrede? As if I’ll break?”

Laughter, husky and familiar. “I’m not kissing you, husband. I’m loving you.”

Honor’s hands pressed a fraction tighter as she licked her tongue across the seam of his lips and into his mouth. Dmitri could feel his muscles straining to painful tightness—being passive in a sexual situation was no easy task for a man who was always the aggressor. But to attempt that with Honor would be to lose her . . . so he remained motionless, patient as a hunting wolf. She would be his soon enough, and then he’d play.

That was when her tongue brushed across one of his fangs.

His cock, already rigid, grew almost painfully hard . . . and Honor froze.

“I want,” he murmured in a tone calculated to entangle her in fantasies as dark as the scents he stroked over her body, “to do such things to your mouth, things that would make you blush.”

“I don’t blush.” A soft whisper, muscles relaxing.

“Oh?” He laid out one of his plans in exquisite erotic detail, indulging himself as much as her.

Heat on her skin, but it wasn’t a blush. “I want to do that.” Shuddering, she very deliberately licked across his other fang. Her body tensed again, but her muscles weren’t as stiff, and when she broke the kiss to draw in a breath, the emotion that glittered in her eyes had no connection to fear. “You,” she said in that quiet, intimate tone between lovers, “have an addictive kind of taste.”

He curved one of his hands over her hip. “That might make up for the fact you aren’t as susceptible to the scent lure as you should be.”

A husky laugh that tangled with one of his oldest memories. “That would hardly be a fair fight.” Making a low, deep sound of pleasure at the caress of fur he teased over her skin, she surprised him with a second kiss, this one not as hesitant. Her br**sts pushed full and firm against his chest, her ni**les hard points he wanted to grip between his teeth while he fondled her soft flesh.

By the time she broke the kiss with a suckling taste of his lower lip, her breath was ragged. His own wasn’t particularly steady either—but that he’d expected, given the violent craving he’d had for her since the instant she walked into his office. If he’d had a fraction less control, and if she’d been a fraction less terrified, he’d have ripped off her jeans and pinned her to the door of his office before he even knew her name, his c**k buried inside her, his fangs sinking into her neck.

Soon.

He dropped his head back against the sofa when she dipped her head to kiss her way down his throat, luxuriating in the lush weight of her on his thighs, the wet softness of her mouth on a part of his body that was exquisitely sensitive, and yet one he never allowed his lovers to caress. He didn’t trust anyone’s teeth that near his carotid. Then she flicked her tongue over the small depression at the base of his neck.

His hand squeezed down on her hip.

A single jerking move later and she was at the other end of the room, having managed to pick up one of the knives on the coffee table in the process.

It enraged him to see such fear in her, this strong, sensual woman who touched him with a knowledge that belied the fact they were lovers new, but he kept his tone tempered, run through with a lazy sexuality. “Obviously we need to put the weapons farther away next time.”

The glaze of nightmare took several long seconds to retreat from the haunting green of Honor’s eyes. Staring at the blade in her hand, she gave a little scream and threw it to lodge in the wall above his head.

“Giving up so soon?” He crooked a finger once more.

A look that held a thousand unnamed terrors, but she strode back to retake her earlier position astride him, the weight of her lusciously female, her body built for a man’s . . . for Dmitri’s pleasure. When she went as if to kiss him, he shook his head. Raising a finger, he traced the taut line of her jaw, the rigid tendons of her neck.

“Women,” he murmured, “might want to hurt me on occasion, but no one’s ever said that kissing me was a punishment.” Though he could make it one—immortality had given him a long time to perfect the ability to be a bastard.

“Damn them.” Honor collapsed against his chest with that quiet statement that held trembling fury. “It infuriates me that Valeria and the others have made me into this weak, pathetic creature.” Her breath puffed against his neck as her hand clasped his shoulder, nails digging into his skin.

The feel of her full br**sts pressing against him stirred his darkest sexual instincts, but immortality had also given him the ability to delay gratification, to find pleasure in every step of the most intimate of dances between male and female. And Honor’s trust, it was an exquisite thing, to be savored.

Running his hand over her hair, he twined the soft locks around his finger. “Yet,” he said, rubbing the strands between his fingertips, “you’re in the lap of a vampire who is their nightmare.”