“Ah, shit. God damn it.” Every muscle in his body had ceased moving now. His scowl deepened. He started to withdraw from her. “Nova, I’m sorry--”
“No.” She clutched his shoulders and swallowed back the raw lump that was blocking her voice. When he continued to shift his weight off her, she wrapped her legs around the backs of his thighs to hold him in place. “No, Mathias. That’s not what I mean. I’m not crying because you did anything wrong. It’s because this feels so incredible. You feel incredible inside me. I wasn’t prepared for this--for how we’d feel together. I didn’t expect it.”
In his silence, he stared at her, unmoving. His fiery gaze warmed her face with its heat. “You feel all right, then?”
“More than all right,” she assured him. “I feel...alive. With you inside me like this, I feel whole. For the first time, Mathias, I feel like the rest is really behind me. You’ve given me that.”
He swore again, something low and reverent. Then he kissed her with more tenderness, more aching pleasure, than her heart seemed able to contain.
When he finally broke the contact, he was grinning, fangs glinting.
She frowned up at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” he murmured, giving his hips a meaningful grind against hers. “I just think it could be amusing, doing other things you’ll enjoy but might not expect. Finding ways to keep you guessing, for a change.”
He was still moving within her, still hard. Getting harder, in fact.
Nova caressed his face, his handsome, otherworldly face. She wondered how long it would take for her to tire of looking at him.
Longer than she dared imagine.
A lifetime and then some.
She held on as he found his tempo once more. Sighed with pleasure as his rising rhythm steered her toward the edges of another crest of sensation. Closing her eyes, she let him take her there, rode with him as his large body began to go rigid and tense, his hips pumping harder now, furious and deep.
She cried out his name. Heard him mutter hers on a coarse shout beside her ear in that next instant, as heat exploded within her and he shook with the force of his orgasm.
Nova’s heart was pounding like thunder in her ears.
Then she heard the rumble again--a rapid drumming, urgent and unsteady. Coming from the other room.
Mathias heard it too, no doubt before she had. He reared back abruptly.
“Nova.” Eddie’s voice sounded oddly thin outside the apartment door.
“Something’s wrong.” Mathias said it before she could voice her concern. His face was grim, nostrils flaring. “There is blood.”
“Oh, God.” Alarm jolted her off the bed. She hurried back into her tank and sweat pants and was racing out to the living area in the next instant. She yanked open the door and shock hit her like a punch to the gut. “Eddie...oh, my God!”
The boy was white as a ghost, his eyes dilated with shock. Blood stained the front of his T-shirt and jeans. A lot of blood.
Nova grabbed him and hugged him close. She felt for injuries, but he seemed unharmed. Her hands came away sticky and red. “What happened to you? Where’s Ozzy?”
“In the shop,” he murmured, his voice thready. “I couldn’t do anything, Nova. He told me to hide. I wanted to help him, but he wouldn’t let me.”
Panic seized her. “Ozzy?” she shouted into the silence of the building.
Mathias stood behind her now, bare-chested, dressed only in his black pants. Nova swung her gaze up at him, a raw sob hitching in her throat.
“Oh, God. What the hell is going on? Oz!”
She lunged past Eddie, only to be halted when Mathias took hold of her arm. “Nova, stay here. Let me--”
She wrenched loose on a miserable cry and bolted for the stairs leading down to the studio.
CHAPTER 8
“Ozzy...oh, no. No!”