Page 75 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
“You can’t.”
“I want to.”
“Your father—”
“What my father doesn’t know,” she said, dark eyes glittering, “won’t hurt him.”
His heart was suddenly like a wild thing in his chest, gnawing, twisting. She wasn’t talking only about going outside. She was talking about him. About them.
“You don’t mean that,” he said, his voice low and husky.
“Don’t I?” She didn’t blink. He saw something in her face he’d never seen before: steel.
There was no mistaking that voice, that look. He was well acquainted with it, having lived in silent mutiny his entire life. But there was something else too, some ineffable quality, longing or loneliness that stirred the beast inside him to frenzy.
Was he wrong? Was he misinterpreting this entire thing? Was this just—wish fulfillment on his part?
He had to know. He had to. He had to make her say it.
“You can have any male in this colony, principessa. There are a thousand males who’d fight for the privilege, a thousand more who’d take a death sentence just to kiss your hand. You don’t need me.”
Her face softened. “I don’t want them. I don’t want them, Demetrius. I want you.”
A war erupted inside his body. Withering heat, storm and fury, a lightning strike of desire against his fortress of good sense, blasting chunks of caution away.
They stared at one another a long, long while, silent, her fingers on his arm, his eyes searching her face, the sounds of other conversations unheard. He knew she smelled his pleasure and hunger, knew she felt his pulse throbbing beneath his skin, and knew without doubt that though it was stupid and dangerous and utterly forbidden, he was going to take this precious thing being offered to him because he wanted it with every atom of his being, and had for years.
Very low, he said, “When?”
Her eyes flared. “After the Purgare. He’ll be distracted. He’s always distracted then. I’ll meet you at the sunken church.”
That pull between them again, stronger. The need to kiss her was almost overwhelming. To manage it he said something—anything. “Wear black.”
She broke into a smile, brilliant, heartbreaking. “Don’t I always?”
Then she leaned over and kissed him on the lips—swift and soft as goose down, leaving him reeling—and went back to work on his arm.
26
When Morgan awoke sometime in the night—disoriented, thirsty, and sore—she was for a moment completely unfamiliar with her surroundings. The darkened room, the strange bed, the heavy leg flung over both of hers—
Memory came hurtling back, sharp as daggers.
She turned her head very carefully on the pillow, and there he was beside her, large and male and slumbering.
Xander. Her killer. Her lover.
She wasn’t sure which was worse.
She didn’t regret it, though, not really. Well, not yet. Because the Fever still burned like a swallowed sun within her, and even now her hormones were rising again like a tide. She let herself be carried with it, floating toward the inevitable, toward what they’d done over and over until finally they both had fallen into exhausted sleep and the pain she’d felt had—at last—subsided.
Now it was back. She needed him again. She’d worry about the consequences later.
She shifted beneath him, rolled to her side, pushed him to his back with a hand flat on his chest. He made a low sound in his throat and stretched—she felt it, the way his muscles lengthened and pulled taut and shivered, then relaxed—but didn’t wake. She nuzzled her nose into his neck, and his arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her closer.
He mumbled something in his sleep that sounded like her name.
She trailed her fingers over the expanse of his chest, over the field of hatch marks, over the bare mark above his left nipple she assumed would soon be filled. She pushed the thought aside and let her fingers drift farther down, over the bandage still wrapped around his waist, over the hard, flat muscles of his lower belly, over the downy trail of hair that led from his belly button straight down to the curling soft patch of hair and the erection already hot and throbbing stiff against her hand.
