Page 81 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
He sat up, taking her with him. He sank so deep inside her they moaned together, his own husky sounds muffled by her breasts. She wrapped her thighs around his hips and rocked against him, shaking and breathless, her heart pounding against his chest, keeping time with the furious beat of his own.
“Namorada,” he whispered, gazing up at her face in rapt amazement. “Namorada minha.”
She looked down at him, their eyes locked, and Hawk felt as if time itself had stopped, and all of the universe had shrunk down to the few inches between their faces.
“We’ll always have this,” she whispered back, her voice shaking with emotion, the look in her eyes almost tortured. “No matter what happens in all our tomorrows, we’ll always have tonight. Promise me you’ll never forget tonight.”
Hawk slowly nodded.
He knew in the darkest part of his mind, where he kept all the truths that were too hard to bear, that his life had reached its peak in this moment, and there could be nothing in all those tomorrows to come that would ever compare to this. To her, so fine and fierce in his arms, to the way his soul seemed to have expanded to encompass everything around them, the room and the trees and the forest, the world itself.
He’d never felt so alive, or so humbled. Or so full, as if he’d been empty for all eternity, and it had taken this one human woman to breathe life into him until he was real and complete, the Tin Man who’d finally been given his heart.
Jacqueline nodded back. A silent pact was sealed.
Tonight would brand them—for better or for worse—forever.
As gently as he could, Hawk eased her down to the mattress. She told him with her eyes and her smile that it was fine. It didn’t hurt. Still inside her, he bent and kissed her and she wrapped her arms around his back, raising her legs and crossing her ankles around his waist to cradle his body with hers. She coaxed him to move with a fluid motion of her hips when all he wanted to do was stare down at her, memorize the pattern of freckles across the bridge of her nose, count each golden eyelash, note every fleck of blue and green and silver in her eyes. But his body was a slave to her, subject to her will, and that motion of her hips coerced him in a primeval, irresistible way.
He began to thrust. Slow, shallow strokes as he watched her face for any signs of pain.
“Deeper,” she breathed, running her hands down his back and arching against him.
He complied, flexing his hips, the animal inside him roaring with pleasure when she gasped his name. He thrust again, and again, each time with added force, until she was clawing at his back and crying out, her head tipped back and her hair spread wild around her.
He began to lose himself.
Sensation pummeled him from every direction. The warm, clean scent of her hair and skin, the heat of her, the satiny curve and weight of her breast in his hand. The sound of the rain and her cries and his own, ragged breathing, the feel of the blood rushing through his veins. Pleasure, searing, white-hot, surged up his spine, and just as she opened her eyes and looked up at him and gasped, “Yes, now—please—with me now!” Hawk slid over the edge of reality, utterly abandoning himself to her, to the magic they made together.
He pumped deep. Once, twice. He felt her sex clench around the length of his shaft, felt the rhythmic pulse and throb of her orgasm begin, and he shouted, jerking, as his own orgasm ripped through him and he spilled his seed inside her.
The intensity of it stole his breath.
It went beyond pleasure, closer to pain, a burning that scorched his body and emptied his mind and spun him off into wordless oblivion. He could only make hoarse, haggard cries as he throbbed and twitched, delirious, his head thrown back, every muscle in his body tight.
She whispered his name. He looked down at her. They stayed like that, panting, gazes locked together through the final, furious waves. When their bodies slowly began to relax, still they stared into one another’s eyes as the trembling and the tautness eased, rocked by the occasional pulsing aftermath until those too had stopped, and the only thing left was their labored breathing.
He rolled her atop his body, pushing her hair from her face and bringing her head to his chest where he cradled her, and stared up at the shadow-streaked ceiling in wonderment as his heart continued its wild, ragged beat, its song of ecstasy and madness.
“So strong,” she whispered, her cheek pressed to his breastbone. “You have such a strong heart.”
Hawk gently kissed Jacqueline’s forehead. He wanted to say, It belongs to you. It will belong to you forever, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.
He could never let her know how she’d wrecked him for any other woman, or how he knew they were doomed, a modern cross-species Romeo and Juliet, or how badly he suddenly wanted to cry.
All he could do was hold her.
Love her.
Surrender himself to the beautiful ruins of their unhappily-ever-after.
So that’s what he did, all night long.
Watching a daddy longlegs pick its way with graceful deliberation up the wall of the conference room in pursuit of an unsuspecting fly at Section Thirty headquarters in Luxembourg, Thirteen idly wondered if there was anything so ridiculous in the entire world as a religious fanatic.
No, he decided, listening to the man barking like a rabid dog on the other end of the phone line. Miley Cyrus is more sensible than this dummkopf.
“Jahad,” he interrupted patiently, “be reasonable. I understand your predicament, and the goals of your organization.” In Thirteen’s mind, the word “organization” had air quotes around it—Jahad’s band of psychopathic brothers who’d hunted the Ikati since the Inquisition were more akin to a serial killer fraternity than anything else. “But the surest path to success is partnership, even if our objectives seem to be at cross purposes.”
