Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

I knew how he felt. Because Mircea’s eyes had just changed, tiny pinpoints of amber swirling up out of the velvety darkness, a signal that maybe, just maybe, I should have thought about this a little more. That maybe I was in over my head.

Way over.

And I didn’t care.

Not enough to stop me from squirming about, getting comfortable, while watching him get less so. Not enough to keep me from groaning when he abruptly hardened inside me, even more than he’d already been, filling me fully, deliciously. Not enough to keep me from beginning to move.

Kit was still droning on, but I barely heard him anymore. And God, if I’d thought the other was heady, it was nothing to this. Watching that powerful body squirm, feeling him moving inside me, hearing his breath speed up as I did, as I undulated on top of him, as I set the pace for once. It was glorious.

Until he suddenly sat up, shifting the weight of him, making me gasp. And grasped the back of my neck, jerking me within a hair’s breadth of his face. And abruptly let his fangs descend.

My heart was beating out of my chest, my breath was caught in my throat, my body was tightening around him enough to make us both gasp.

And I still didn’t care.

“What are you going to do?” I asked breathlessly. “Bite me?”

And, just like that, his eyes flashed gold, the brown of the man completely eclipsed by the power of the vampire.

“What was it Churchill said about Russia?” Kit asked, almost surreally at this point. “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma—”

“Why don’t you go look it up?” Mircea growled.

“What?”

“Go!” he snarled, and simultaneously swept all the items off the center of the desk, sending books, papers, and the smirking, potbellied pen cup flying.

I’d have liked to have seen the expression on Kit’s face just then. Liked to have known how a first-level master took to being ordered about, especially so abruptly. But I didn’t.

Because I was busy.

Hitting the polished surface of the desk even before I heard the door click shut, feeling smooth hardness as my hands spread out, trying to find purchase that wasn’t there, discovering I didn’t need it when a furious master vampire grasped my hips, pulled me to the edge of the desk, and thrust back into me hard enough to make me gasp.

And then to laugh, like the crazy person I was really starting to believe I was, because I’d won. For once, he’d been the one to back down first. For once, I’d actually made the great Mircea Basarab cry uncle.

And then I was the one crying. And thrashing. And screaming as he took me harder than he ever had, harder than he’d ever dared, because human bodies break so easily.

But my body wasn’t here, was it? I was nothing more than a figment, a dream, an illusion. And illusions don’t break.

But they do feel, and this was raw and savage and everything, everything I’d wanted since that damned dream left me hot and aching and desperately unfulfilled.

Which wasn’t really a problem now, I thought deliriously. And then I didn’t think anything else. I just wrapped my arms around him and hung on as power slammed through me, into me, over me, a golden haze sinking into my skin that exactly matched the color of a pair of golden eyes.

“Well,” I said breathlessly, some moments later.

“Well?” Mircea replied, the voice muffled since his face was currently buried in my hair.

“Well . . . I hope . . . that taught you . . . a lesson,” I said, vaguely concerned that there was a flaw in my logic somewhere but too limp to care.

Mircea’s head raised. And I saw with some real satisfaction that he was almost as flushed and sweaty as I was. And his throat was working and his eyes were a little crazed. But he wasn’t out of breath, because he was a vampire and they didn’t technically need to do that.

“I told you, dulceat¸a?,” he said grimly. “I am not in your head.”

“Really? Then what would you call—”

“Any more than I was in your room tonight, or in the shower last week.”

“The shower?” I began, confused.