Marked by the Moon (Nightcreature 9)
“He’s dead.” Her hair hung over her face in damp hanks that had begun to freeze into extremely messy dreads.
Ah, hell, Julian thought. Who had she killed now?
He used his free hand to cup her chin, to tilt her face so that her hair slid out of the way. “Who’s dead?”
Her eyes wide and unfocused, she murmured “Charlie” in a voice that, despite his attempts to steel himself against it, tore at his heart.
Julian let his forehead meet hers, and his hair cast over her cheeks, creating a golden curtain between them and the night. “Who’s Charlie?” he asked.
He knew, but he wanted her to talk, to come back from the dream, the memory, whatever had caught her in a grip so deep she seemed frozen by it.
A bank of clouds slid over the moon, painting them in darkness. He could smell her, that scent of sun-ripened lemons that was completely hers. For the rest of his very long life he would be able to pick her out of a crowd by that scent alone.
“Alex?” he murmured. “What’s wrong?”
She moved beneath him, and her nipples, hard and cold as marbles left out in the snow, rolled along his chest. He grit his teeth and waited for an answer. But he didn’t get the one that he expected.
Instead she arched her neck and let her scalding tongue—startling amid so much cold—lick the line of his mouth.
He gasped, jerked back, and she nipped, catching his lip between her teeth and holding on.
The damnable cloud stayed over the moon. He could only see the outline of her face, which served to make every other sense he possessed stronger.
Her scent mixed with the ice and the snow and the smell of the moon—sweet like blue snow cones. The bones of her wrists beneath his palm shifted like sticks trapped in a bag of the most delicate material ever made. Her skin, so cold, refreshed his, which felt like a blistering fever had broken free when he’d viciously put a stop to his change. Her mouth, soft as rain in the precious spring, opened and welcomed him within.
He shouldn’t. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
He did.
That taste—both familiar yet still so new—called. The sex they’d already had, forbidden, dangerous, half remembered with the mind, was fully remembered by the body.
With her wrists trapped above her head, she lay open to him, like the sacrificial maidens of long ago. She could do nothing but accept—his kiss, his touch, him—and the idea made him so hard he wondered momentarily if his dick had frozen solid.
Except his dick wasn’t cold but fiery hot, and she was rubbing her chilled belly against it as if the friction alone would warm her, the murmurs in her throat rolling along her lips and his like a low-level earthquake across the land.
His free hand cupped her hip, his thumb sliding across the bone, his fingernail scraping just a little because when he did that she arched, pressing her breasts with those fantastic marble nipples into his chest and shifting—back and forth, back and forth—until the rasp nearly made him insane.
He waited as long as he could to touch, palm itching, fingers twitching, and when he could wait no longer he swept his hand up, from hip to breast, sliding along the still-cool length of her waist until he could cup the glorious weight and roll that nipple beneath his thumb.
She cried out, and he drank the sound with his mouth, desperate to remain undetected, uninterrupted. Except…
Beneath the moon, they were the only souls left in town.
God. He thought he might explode before he even buried himself inside her.
Then he tasted her tears, salt and heat amid the cool and sweet, reminding him of the first blood he’d ever known.
It had been so damn good.
Julian released her and backed away. She was right. There would always be a beast inside him, one step from escaping and crushing everything.
The moon sprang free, cascading from the sky like a waterfall of ice, turning the tracks of her tears molten silver. Julian lifted a hand—shaking, he saw—and ran a thumb across her cheek.
Her eyes snapped open, seeped of color in the night, their brilliant green now a shade identical to the moon. She looked like a painting, an ice goddess, sparkling white and pewter, her hair tumbling like tousled midnight across her pearly breasts. He ached to lick those tears from her face as he plunged into her over and over again.
“Faet,” he muttered, and began to withdraw his hand.
Her fingers closed around his wrist. “No,” she said, the rumble of her beast rippling near, calling wildly to his own.