What remained was to uncover that Gift. He’d then make sure she was one of the few who could attain and withstand eternity.
She’d come back, was lowering herself over him, fresh and hot and urgent, her knee rubbing his erection, her eyes devouring before her lips sank into his. She always came home from work starving for him, didn’t want foreplay in that first slaking of hunger, wanted him wild and rough and assuaging. He always gave her what she needed.
But after the nightmare he’d had last night, he had to settle this tonight. He’d dreamed himself standing at her window, gazing down as she looked up to wave goodbye. Out of nowhere, a car had hit her.
It had driven home that he couldn’t assume he had time to find a solution, counting on her youth and health. An accident could rob him of her. He needed insurance, right now.
He weaved his fingers through her hair, pulled her from worshipping her way down his body to the cock that wanted nothing but the embrace of her hot, talented mouth or her snug, welcoming body.
“Hey!” She looked up in protest. “I’m hungry.” She rubbed him through his pants. “You…feel ravenous, too.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But we need to talk.”
The change that came over her was spectacular. One moment she was the incendiary lover who drove him out of his mind with a glance, the next she was a stranger. In another second she was sitting at the far end of the couch, her face unreadable.
“You don’t need to talk. You don’t owe me a talk. You want to leave, just walk out and never look back.”
He blinked in stupefaction. “What? That’s not what I want to talk about.” His heart thudded in disappointment. “By Loki’s Leer, Kara, you’d just let me go that easily?”
She shrugged, face still shuttered. “You’ll leave sooner or later. I accept that.”
“Well, I don’t accept it. I don’t want to leave. And I don’t want you to leave me, either. I won’t let you go.”
She tipped her face. “Are you going to hold me captive?”
“A very willing one. But I meant I won’t let you go, ever.”
“Uh, you do know I come with an expiration date, don’t you? And if that’s in fifty years, I doubt you’ll hang around till then. You’ll maybe stick with me to my sell-by date.”
He gritted his teeth at her cavalier attitude to what was tearing him up inside. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You mean you’ll stay with me till I’m ninety? Let’s get real here and admit you’ll at best stay until my menopausal mood swings send you flying out that window.”
“I don’t intend for you to reach menopause.”
Her lips twisted. “I do intend to take hormone replacements.”
“Cute. I mean, I won’t let you age.”
“You think you can make me an immortal, don’t you? I thought that was reserved for an elite selection of Gifted.”
“You might be one of them. I believe part of why I was so violently attracted to you was because I sensed you have a Gift.”
Her headshake was adamant, final. “I don’t.”
“That you don’t realize that you have one doesn’t mean you don’t. It might be buried deeper than usual.”
“How can it be buried deep and at the same time be so apparent it drew you so strongly?”
He felt his brain overheat with the validity of her question, with the contradictions, the desperation to find a way. “I don’t know. Yet. But it can’t have all been sexual.”
“Why not? Our sexual chemistry is way off any chart. And then every other sort of passion and emotion was involved, too. I think I fell in love with you the moment you took that guy’s head off for me.”
His head almost exploded. To hear her say she loved him now, when she was cornering him into admitting and accepting he would lose her…
He almost ground his teeth to powder. “How romantic of you.”
“I’m just trying to explain the overwhelming thing you feel from me. Not that it’s anything you should concern yourself with. What I feel is my responsibility, my business, not yours.”