Veil of Midnight (Midnight Breed 5)

With deft fingers, he unfastened her jeans and slid them down her thighs. His mouth followed his progress, searing her from hip to ankle as he pulled her legs free and pushed her clothing aside. She cried out as he then bent between her thighs and suckled her, his tongue and fangs bringing on a rush of exquisite torment.

"Oh, God," she gasped, hips rising up off the ground as he buried his mouth in her sex.

She didn't know how he managed it so quickly, but a moment later he was naked too. He loomed over her, something more than human, more than simply male, and everything female in Renata trembled with desire. She opened her legs to him, greedy to feel him inside her, filling the emptiness with his strength and heat.

"Please," she moaned, panting with need.

He didn't make her ask him twice.

Moving to cover her, Nikolai wedged his knees between her legs and spread her wide beneath him. The head of his cock nudged into the slick cleft of her body, then plunged, long and slow and deep.

His growl as he sank down into her was fierce, a roll of thunder that echoed in her bones and in her blood. He pumped slowly, taking his time at first, even though it was clear that patience was torture. Renata could feel the intensity of his hunger for her, the depth of his pleasure as her body sheathed him, head to balls.

"You feel so good," he murmured, sucking in a hiss as he withdrew then filled her again, deeper than before. He thrust hard, shuddering with the effort. "Jesus, Renata...you feel so fucking good."

She linked her ankles around his backside as he fell into a more urgent tempo. "Harder," she whispered, wanting to feel him pound away her fears, a hammer to smash through all her guilt and pain and emptiness. "Oh, God, Nikolai...fuck me harder." His answering snarl sounded as eager as it was wild. Slipping his arm beneath her, he tilted her to meet his strokes, driving into her with all the fury she so desperately needed. He swept down on her mouth for a fevered kiss, catching her cry as her climax roared up on her like a storm. Renata quaked and shuddered, clawing at him as he continued to pump, every muscle in his back and shoulders going as hard as granite.

"Ah, Christ," he ground out between his teeth and fangs, his hips banging against her fast and furious, a reckless rhythm that felt so good. So right.

His coarse shout of release was echoed by her own as Renata came again, clinging to him as she lost herself to this delicious new sense of abandon.

She truly was adrift, but in this moment she felt no fear. She was safe with this wild, reckless man - she truly believed that. She trusted Nikolai with her body and with her life. As she lay there with him in an intimate tangle, it wasn't so difficult to imagine that she could trust him with her heart as well.

That she might, in fact, be falling in love with him.

The knocking was insistent - a frantic beat on the solid oak door of Andreas Reichen's Darkhaven in Berlin.

"Andreas, please! Are you there? It's Helene. I must see you!"

At just after 4 A.M., only a short while before the sun would first peek over the horizon, only a few stragglers in the household remained awake. The rest of Reichen's kin - nearly a dozen in all, young Breed males and mated couples with small children, some of them newborn infants - had already gone to bed for the day.

"Andreas? Anyone?" Another panicked series of knocks, followed by a terrified-sounding cry. "Hello! Some one, please... let me in!"

Inside the mansion, a young male came out of the kitchen where he'd been warming a cup of milk for his Breedmate who awaited him upstairs in the nursery, where she was tending their fussy baby son. He knew the human female who was at the door. Most of the Darkhaven knew her, and Andreas had made it clear that Helene was always welcome in his home. That she had come unannounced at such a late hour, and while Andreas was away on private business for two nights, was unusual.

Even more unusual was the fact that the typically in-control businesswoman was so obviously afraid.

Awash with concern for what may have happened to Andreas's human companion, the Darkhaven male set down the cup of steaming milk and raced across the marble floor of the vestibule, his bathrobe flying behind him like a sail.

"I'm coming," he called, raising his voice to be heard over Helene's ceaseless knocking and tear-choked pleas for help on the other side of the door. His fingers flew over the keypad of the mansion's security system. "One moment! I'll be right there, Helene. Everything's going to be fine."

When the electronic light blinked to indicate the sensors were disabled, he threw the dead bolts and opened the door. "Oh, thank God!" Helene rushed toward him, her makeup in ruins, wet black trails running down her cheeks. She was pale and trembling, her usually shrewd eyes seeming somehow vacant as she made a quick visual search of the foyer. "Andreas...where is he?"

"Gone to Hamburg on private business until tomorrow night. But you are welcome here." He stepped back to give her space to enter the mansion. "Come in, Helene. Andreas wouldn't want me to turn you away."

"No," she said somewhat dully. "I know he would never turn me away."

She came into the foyer and seemed instantly calmer.

"They knew he would never turn me away..."

It was at that moment the young Darkhaven male noticed that Helene was not alone. Behind her, rushing in now before he could do so much as cry out in alarm, was a team of heavily armed Enforcement Agents dressed from head to toe in black. He swung his head around to look at Helene in disbelief. In abject horror.

"Why?" he asked, but the answer was there in her empty eyes.

Someone had gotten a hold of her. Someone very powerful.

Someone who had turned Helene into a Minion.