Thunder and Lightning

Chapter Four

No way in hell are you doing this.

Yet even as the thought popped into his head, Cane was stalking across the porch, descending the short flight of steps and moving quickly toward the Victorian. He could hear the hammering of Bev’s heart, could sense the flow of blood in her veins as though it were coursing through him, burning his insides. The connection he felt to this woman was maddening, his desire for her no longer controllable.

The ornate front door with a cut-crystal center opened before he’d bounded halfway up her steps, his booted feet echoing his determination. His unrelenting need.

She stood in the foyer, looking breathtaking and mystified and completely devourable all at once. Cane’s erection grew, his cock reminding him of the impending danger, but also demanding a satisfaction he didn’t think he could live another moment without.

His fingers itched to touch Bev and he wasn’t even sure where to start. Much as he wanted to rip the holder from her hair and twine his hands in the thick, silky-looking auburn strands, he also wanted to grip her by the waist and crush her to him, melding every inch of their bodies together in a fiery collision of passion and made-for-each-other body parts.

“Cane,” she greeted him in a soft, breathless voice that held a revealing hitch to it.

“Bev,” he replied in a much gruffer tone.

His gaze locked with hers. The shimmering green irises were vibrant and all too telling of her arousal. Conveying an intense desire that matched his own.

He’d waited so long for her. Over two hundred years. It was unbearable to waste another second not touching her, tasting her, pleasuring her.

Regardless of his previous convictions. Despite the perilous situation, the threat she posed to his humanity. His very existence.

He had no idea how he could possess her body without taking her life. But there had to be some way to control his vampire nature as he indulged his masculine needs.

Crossing the threshold of her home was symbolic in so many ways.

A dangerous awakening.

Ironic in nature and yet… A necessity. For Cane couldn’t take one more day of not intimately knowing this woman.

She would belong to him come sunrise. For how long, he couldn’t say. Couldn’t possibly know or predict. But the need was too great to ignore. It consumed him, made him desperate to have her.

“You’ve been watching me,” she said in her sultry voice. It was like warm honey oozing down his spine.

“And you, me,” he simply said.

She drew in a sharp breath. He heard the crack of air so acutely, it may as well have been cymbals crashing together. Her sparkling eyes were multifaceted peridots that caught the chandelier light just right.

“You know very little about me,” he surmised.

“Or you, me,” she countered, borrowing his simplistic yet still intense tone.

Cane let out a low groan. He was flirting with disaster, but there was no stopping this runaway train.

They both seemed to know it.

Slamming the door shut behind him while he kept his gaze on Bev, he said, “We seem to be on a collision course.”

She merely nodded.

“I knew it the moment you moved in.”

Again, she nodded. Her throat tightened, the long chords pulling taut, as though she were trying to suck in a full breath.

Cane’s eyes were drawn to the pulse on the side of her neck. The vein didn’t bulge, but it drew his attention nonetheless.

His vampire thirst intensified. Cane’s fists clenched at his sides as he fought the rising need to sink his teeth into her soft, delicate flesh.

To hold her lush body against his as he drank from her.