Jordana exhaled softly, her brows lowered over her tender gaze. “My God, Nathan. How long did this training go on?”
“It took me longer than some others to conform, to submit.” He paused, considering. “I guess I was about seven when I left the labs for good.”
She gasped. “You were just a child—a little boy.”
“I never recall a time when I felt I was anything other than what they made me: a Hunter. A killer. A weapon at Dragos’s disposal.”
“You never tried to escape?”
He grunted. “There was no escape. I had a collar that made any disobedience punishable by death. Every Hunter had one. The ultraviolet collars were locked onto us from the time we could walk. Venture too far, defy an order, attempt to escape …” He shook his head. “I saw more than one Hunter ash himself when his collar detonated. Some deliberately.”
Understanding filled her horrified gaze. “So, if you refused to do anything your handlers demanded …” At his grave nod, Jordana briefly closed her eyes. “They trained you to fear tenderness. You learned to hate anyone’s touch. They taught you that.”
“They taught me that control was the only way to survive,” he said. “I learned to dominate every situation thrown at me. Or die.”
“You’re free now,” she pointed out. “You don’t have to let your past keep you in the prison they made for you, Nathan.”
Slowly, but without waiting for his permission or approval, she leaned toward him and placed her mouth at the base of his throat, where the cold weight of the UV collar once chafed his skin. He braced himself as her warm lips closed on him.
Unrushed, impossibly sweet, she kissed a trail around either side of his neck. Tender empathy for what he’d been through, or undeserving absolution for all he’d done, he didn’t know.
Nor did he know how he could ever be worthy of the affection—the love—Jordana gave him so openly. She had changed him. His old methods for coping, for surviving, were obliterated from the moment she first stepped into his life.
She’d captivated him with a kiss.
She’d challenged him, gentled him.
Now she owned him.
Nathan growled in pleasure as her mouth completed its slow circuit of his neck, her tongue following the lines of the dermaglyphs she found there. His blood was thrumming through his veins, breath coming harder as arousal ignited like a wildfire within him. He tilted his head back on a low, shuddering moan as her kiss traveled lower, down across his bare chest.
“I wish I were a better man for you,” he murmured, taking her face gently in his hands and tipping her gaze up to his. He was so hungry for her, his voice was gravel, thick with desire. And tight with love for this woman. “I wish I could promise you a peaceful, normal life … a tranquil future. I can’t give you those things, Jordana.”
“No, you can’t.” She smiled and reached up to caress his face, her fingers tracing lightly over the furrow now creased in his brow. “But I don’t want those things. I want you. I want the storm I see in your eyes when you look at me. I want the high cliff and the breathless leap into the dark, which is how I feel when I’m with you. All I want is you, Nathan. I love you.”
His heart swelled in his chest. She knew everything now, his ugliest sins and pitiful, ignoble past. And she still wanted him.
She still loved him.
Swamped with emotion and need, he took her mouth in a fierce claiming. His fangs surged out of his gums. Amber light exploded behind his eyelids as his irises transformed.
Jordana wrapped her arms around him as he drew her up onto his lap on the edge of the large tub, their mouths still joined and hungry for each other.
On a low moan, Nathan pulled his head back and looked at her. “You’re mine.”
“Yes.” She stroked his cheek, and he nuzzled deeper into her touch. She watched him, her smile softening. “And you’re mine.”
Nathan nodded. “Always.”
“Then take me,” she told him. “There’s one more leap I’m ready to make with you.”
His veins responded before he could find his voice. Kicking as though lit with a jolt of electricity, his pulse hammered, more than eager to seal the bond that would make Jordana his woman forever.
His eternal mate.
With his eyes locked on hers, Nathan brought his wrist to his mouth and bit into his flesh.
“Drink,” he said, the word dry as sandpaper as he watched her lick her lips.