His for a Price

Nicodemus thought he might die, then and there, if he didn’t get inside her. If he didn’t taste her. If he didn’t do something about the thing that howled in him, fanged and clawed and desperate for more.

He ordered himself to set her aside, to hold off, to wait until he had every last bit of the power he was after, but Mattie shifted against him and made a small, needy sound in the back of her throat—

And he was only a man. He could only take so much.

He lifted her arms from around his neck and guided her toward the leather couch along one wall of the jet. He sat her down then knelt between her legs, shouldering her knees apart so he could see every part of her.

“Wait,” she said, her eyes fluttering open then, sounding as breathless as she was flushed. “Are you—?”

“Hold on,” he ordered her, bending down to her, inhaling the rich scent of her arousal, the sweetness of her skin.

“Nicodemus.” But her voice was so insubstantial, a token protest at best when she was still open and arched before him, and he was so close. Too close. “I don’t—”

“I do,” he muttered, the way a religious man might utter a fervent prayer.

And then he simply worshipped her. He pulled her long and lovely legs over his shoulders, wrapped his hands around her hips and buried his face in her heat.

The way he’d longed to do for a thousand years. More.

She made the most beautiful noise he’d ever heard, something like a gasp and a scream at once, and Nicodemus growled against the slick, hot core of her. She tasted sweet and wild. Like honey. Like his. He could feel her quiver beneath his hands, and he licked his way into her, teasing her and tasting her, until he felt her hips begin that lush dance against his tongue.

“Oh, no,” she moaned, but even as she said it, she raised her hips to meet his mouth. She threw her arms over her face, hiding right there in plain sight, and he was too lost in the exquisite pleasure of tasting her at last to do anything but let her.

And then she was crying out his name, tense and even more beautiful as she bucked against him. She sobbed out words he didn’t understand, almost as if he was bringing her to this delectable edge against her will when he could taste her need—

Until she shattered. Into a million pieces the way he’d always dreamed she would, long and loud and calling out his name.

All mine, Nicodemus thought with a deep satisfaction that felt like something else. Like a truth he didn’t know how to name—so he didn’t try.

Not here. Not yet.

* * *

Mattie hated herself.

It took her a long time to open up her eyes. When she did, she found she was curled up on the leather couch, her sweater jacket draped over her like a blanket and Nicodemus sitting beside her with his long legs taking up the whole of the aisle and an air of smug confidence she didn’t have to look at his face to see. And he was turned, she found when she dared sneak a look, anyway, so that he could watch her with those stark, too-incisive, dark eyes of his that seemed to burn straight through her to all the places she most wanted to hide.

She pulled in one breath. Then another, just as shaky as the first. And she still didn’t understand how she’d allowed this to happen. How had he done that? It was as if he’d used her own body against her—and in that moment, Mattie couldn’t think of a single thing that frightened her more.

She shoved her hair back from her face with one hand, using the other to keep the sweater in place, which she didn’t need that small gleam in his gaze to tell her was absurd, at this point.

Ruined, she thought then. She felt utterly ruined. Wrecked from within, like a stranger inside her own skin.

The silence stretched out, filling the jet, drowning out the sound of the engines, not comfortable in the least.

And beside her, Nicodemus radiated that heat and menace that made him who he was: the most dangerous man she’d ever met. She’d always known he was exactly that—and now he’d proved it. His dark eyes tracked her, and she was afraid to look too closely—afraid of what she’d see.

“Is this what it takes?” he asked in a quiet voice that seemed to crack her foundations deep inside her. “This is what I must do to see behind all the masks you wear?”

She was terrified that he really could. She was terrified of what had happened here, full stop, especially because she could still feel his mouth against that most private part of her. She could still feel the aftershocks. The lush, impossible wave of joy and pleasure that had rent her in two. She shook her head—once, hard, as much to snap herself out of this fugue she was in as anything else—and found she was scowling at her lap.