Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

Lucan waited, obviously tuned in to the fact that something intimate had passed between Dylan and Rio. He cleared his throat. "So, if you've got something to tell me, my man..."

Through the lengthy silence that answered, Dylan unconsciously held her breath. She didn't know what she was waiting for Rio to say: That he was prepared to challenge Lucan's rule? That he loved her and would fight to keep her at his side, no matter what the rest of the Order thought of her?

But he didn't say anything like that.

"I need to talk to Dante," he told Lucan. "And I need to talk to Tess. There's something important I need to ask her."

Lucan considered him through narrowed eyes. "You know what I expect, Rio. You let me know if anything changes."

"Yeah," Rio replied.

When Lucan turned and strode back to converse with Gideon, Rio lifted Dylan's chin on the edge of his hand. "I promised you that I was going to try to help your mother," he reminded her gently. At her nod, he went on. "I don't know if it can be done, but before we can talk about you and I, that question needs to be answered. I know I can't ask you to stay with me when you're hurting to be near your family. I wouldn't ask that of you."

Hope flickered in her chest. "But do you...want to ask me to stay with you?"

He caressed her cheek, smoothing her hair back behind her ear. "God, yes. I want that, Dylan, very much."

Rio bent his head down and kissed her, right there in front of the other warriors. It was brief but so, so sweet. When he drew back, Dylan felt the eyes of the Order on her - on both of them. But it was Rio's eyes that held her spellbound. They were heated with desire and tender affection, the huge irises flashing with sparks of amber light.

"Let me take you back to my quarters and get you something to eat. I have to talk to Dante and Tess, but I won't be long."

Chapter Twenty-nine

Rio's quarters were quiet when he returned to them a short while later. He could smell the trace scents of the other Breedmates who'd been there not long ago to bring her food and keep her company, but it was Dylan's juniper and honey essence that drew him through the empty rooms toward the bedroom suite. The shower was running in the adjacent bathroom, and it didn't take much for him to imagine a lot of rolling steam and sudsy hot water licking her beautiful body.

He approached the partially open door and discovered that the reality was even better than his imagination.

Dylan stood beneath the double heads of the huge walk-in shower, her hands braced on the tiles, spine arched in a graceful curve that caught the drenching blasts of the sprays. Her chin was tilted back, eyes closed. Her fiery hair was soaked to a dark copper shot with gold, clinging to her like wet silk as she rinsed the shampoo from its length.

Frothy white suds ran over the round cheeks of her backside...Cristo, down between them too, into the tight cleft of her ass and onto her long, slender thighs.

Rio licked his lips, his mouth gone suddenly dry. He felt the ache of his emerging fangs, and the answering throb of his cock as hunger rose within him for this female.

His female, answered an impulse that was purely male, purely Breed.

He wanted her. Wanted her wet and warm beneath him, and he didn't think he could wait too long to have her.

He must have made some kind of noise because Dylan's head came down sharply and turned toward him. Her eyes snapped open, then she smiled at him through the glass...a slow, seductive smile that made him wish he was naked right now, climbing under the water with her.

But making love in the darkness of a small church alcove was a far different thing than doing it face-to-face, body to body, in the bright yellow light and mirrored expanse of where they were now. In here, he had nowhere to hide. Dylan would see him - all of him, all of the scars she may not have noticed when they were making love in the dark several hours ago.

Shame made him want to douse the dozen recessed lights overhead. He flicked an irritated glance upward, but Dylan's voice distracted him from the thought.

"Rio...join me."

Madre de Dios, but the sound of that husky invitation was almost enough to distract him from all thought completely...except for the one that urged him to take his clothes off and do as she was asking him to.

He met her eyes through the glass of the shower door, his own heavy-lidded and sharp with the flood of swamping amber that was surely turning his pupils into thinnest slivers of black.

"I want you in here with me," Dylan said. She held his stare as she ran her palms up her flat belly and over the buoyant swells of her breasts. "Come in here with me...I want to feel your hands on me. All over me."

Holy...fuck.

Rio's jaw was clamped so tightly his molars should have shattered. It was damn hard to wallow in self-doubt or shame when the only woman he wanted - a woman he wanted more than anything ever before in his entire existence - was looking at him like she intended to devour him whole.

He got rid of his boots and socks, then stripped out of his shirt and pants and boxers. He stood there, naked, fully erect, his dermaglyphs pulsing with all the colors of his desire. Hands fisted at his sides, he let Dylan take a good long look at him. It was excruciating - those first few seconds as her darkening eyes lowered and her gaze swept slowly over him.

He knew what she was seeing. Hell, he could see it well enough for himself: his battered torso, the skin of which was glossy and tight in some places, rough in others, where he still carried tiny pieces of shrapnel embedded several layers down into his flesh. And farther down was the thick red scar that ran down the length of his left thigh, the gash that had almost cost him the limb entirely.