“Let go of me, Nathan.”
“I’d like to.” He exhaled a sharp, humorless laugh. His eyes glittered, sparking with fresh embers. “Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to be able to let you go. I’d like to tell you that I’m every bit the asshole you think I am. I’m no prize, make no mistake there. I did leave here to finish what we started with someone else at the club. Touching you, feeling your tight, wet heat with my fingers made my cock so hard, all I could think about was burying it inside you. God help you, it’s all I’m thinking about right now too.”
His erection crushed into her abdomen, thick and alive with heat. It pulsed through the thin barrier of her clothing, each heavy throb making her own heartbeat pound deeper in response. Awareness made her stomach clench, turned the ache in her core into a molten yearning.
“I’m a Hunter, Jordana. I don’t wait for invitations. I don’t ask for permission. I pursue, I conquer. Then I move on and I don’t look back. That’s how it’s always been for me. That’s how I live.” Cold truth, made all the more cruel when he was stroking her cheek and neck, his thumb moving in maddening little swirls over her throbbing carotid. “I’m not a gentle man. Neither are my needs. You wouldn’t like my methods for slaking them. So when I left here last night, it was because I wanted to fuck my need for you out of my head, out of my system. I had to, do you understand?”
“Stop,” she whispered brokenly.
Despite the harshness in him, despite the fear she knew she should be feeling because of all that he said and all that he was, it was this last admission that was the hardest to accept.
It was all too easy to picture him doing just what he described. His mouth on another woman. His hands giving pleasure to someone else.
Someone else whose heart probably wasn’t as foolish as hers.
“I don’t want to hear any more, Nathan. I can’t do this with you anymore. I’m not like those other females you prefer. Those other females you … fuck.”
The word felt foreign on her tongue, not something she’d ever uttered in front of a man before. Certainly not to a man who’d had his tongue down her throat and his fingers between her legs more than once in the past twenty-four hours.
A man she wanted inside her with a yearning that bordered on sheer, reckless lunacy.
Nathan growled then, low and deep and lethal.
“No, you’re not like them, Jordana.” When she tried to look away, to hide her need from him, he brought her face back up, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I wanted to prove that to myself last night. I wanted to convince myself that you meant nothing to me and that my craving for you could be satisfied by someone else. Anyone else. I wanted to … but I didn’t.”
Jordana gaped at him, afraid to believe. Afraid to hope. “But I saw you with that woman. You said yourself you paid her for servicing you.”
“Yes,” he admitted evenly. “She offered me her vein and her body, for a price. But once I took the woman into the dens, I realized she didn’t have anything I wanted. I paid her because the problem wasn’t with her, it was with me.”
Was he serious? The human female hadn’t been with him at all—not even to serve as his blood Host?
Jordana could hardly contain the surge of relief that flooded through her.
His seductive mouth curved in satisfaction and challenge. “Now tell me you want me to leave.” He put his face beside hers, the rough scrape of his cheek and jaw a delicious abrasion that sent a shiver up and down her spine. “Last night, you had the excuse of Elliott Bentley-Squire to keep you from taking what you really wanted. He may have saved you from me then, but I don’t see him here right now.”
With his free hand, Nathan palmed her breast, then splayed his fingers up toward the base of her throat and coaxed her head back onto her shoulders so he could place a hot, deliriously erotic kiss to the pulse point that kicked into a frantic rhythm under his warm, wet tongue.
He growled against her skin, and for the briefest instant, Jordana felt the sharp tips of his fangs dragging over her vein. “Christ,” he hissed. “Even if the son of a bitch walked in the door right now, I wouldn’t take my hands off you, Jordana. I want him to know he’ll never have you.”
“No, he won’t,” she panted. “And he won’t be coming here anytime soon because I ended things with him.”
Nathan stilled. Then his head lifted, his stormy eyes ablaze with crackling heat. “You ended it.”
She gave him a small nod. “Last night. Just before I went after you and found you at La Notte.”
For a long moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t speak a single word.
When his lips parted, his fangs gleamed, the tips as sharp as daggers.
He muttered something dark and hungered.
Then, without warning or excuse, he scooped her up into his arms and headed toward the bedroom.
15
JORDANA WAS LIGHT IN HIS ARMS AS NATHAN BROUGHT HER TO the bedroom at the end of the hallway.
A delicate crystal chandelier hung from the center of the vaulted ceiling, casting soft light in the room. Beneath the elegant fixture sat Jordana’s sumptuous king-size bed, which was heaped with fluffy pillows, frothy white coverlets, and fine, crisp sheets. The walls were painted in an equally snowy hue, the plush area rug just inside the door crushing easily under his black combat boot as he entered the room.