Velvet Cataclysm (Princes of the Underground 1)

“Actually, I think it’s a different wound,” Saint said mildly. He caught her hand and Christina looked up into his face. When she saw the heat in his blue eyes, she stared, open-mouthed.

Alison cleared her throat loudly. Christina realized several seconds had passed as she gaped at Saint and breathed his scent.

“Are you all right?” Christina looked first at Alison and then back to Saint.

“I’m fine, but I can’t say those three Scourge revenants down in the tunnels are doing so good. Not that they’d notice, without any heads,” Alison mumbled.

“Scourge revenants? Were you attacked again?” She searched Saint’s long, whipcord lean body for wounds before she went back to examining his bleeding arm. Saint stopped her just as he had before.

“I’m okay. Were you two about ready to eat?” he asked, nodding at the smoking barbecue.

“Yes, but that’ll wait—”

“Go ahead and start your dinner,” Saint said. He glanced over at Aidan, who was listening in on the conversation. Christina knew he didn’t want her to make a big deal about his wound and worry the boy. “I’ll just go clean this up and be out in a second.”

By the time Saint came out of the coach house, Aidan had finished his second burger and was starting on a third. Christina wished she knew where he put it.

Alison had seemed quiet and distracted at first, but had rallied. She now ate with as much gusto as Aidan. Christina longed to ask the girl what had happened in the tunnels, but guessed from the girl’s pale face that it wasn’t something that should be discussed over supper.

“Do you want to eat?” Christina asked Saint when he straddled the picnic table bench next to her. For some reason, she blushed when she met his gaze. She glanced away, only to notice Alison watching them steadily as she chewed her hamburger.

“Yeah, I’ll get it,” Saint replied. “I want you three to stay up at the main house tonight,” he said when he came back with his food.

“Why?” Christina asked. “I thought you said it was safe here.”

“It is.” He stepped over the bench with his long legs and sat. Christina noticed he’d neatly bandaged his upper arm. “It’d be even safer up at Whitby. I’d rather you were close to me.”

Christina’s eyes went wide when she once again saw the undisguised heat in his gaze as he regarded her. What had happened? He’d been so guarded against her when he left earlier with Alison.

“Can we, Mom?”

Aidan’s excited question brought her back from the depths of Saint’s eyes. “I…I think…”

“It’ll be better, Christina. I promise.”

Christina forced her gaping mouth shut as Saint’s underlying meaning struck her consciousness. A simmering sensation rippled from her lower belly to her sex. She clamped her thighs tightly together. “All right, if you think it’s best.”

She avoided Saint’s blatantly erotic gaze for the rest of dinner, feeling as self-conscious about looking at him while Aidan and Alison were present as she would had he sat there naked. That’s how transparent, how raw…how undefended she was when it came to him.

If anything, staying up at Whitby should give her the opportunity to get Saint alone to ask him what had happened in the tunnels today.

And to find out why he’d so drastically changed his opinion about them being lovers.

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the elevator, the silence broken only by the low hum of the motor. Aidan had been asleep now for well over an hour. He and Alison had watched a comedy in Saint’s high-tech entertainment studio while Saint and Christina sat outside on the balcony. Neither of them spoke as the sounds of the movie and Aidan’s and Alison’s laughter filtered through the opened French door. In fact, Christina and Saint hadn’t said more than three words to each other since dinner…not out loud, anyway.

But the air between them seemed to crackle with unspoken emotion. Just when he thought he couldn’t stand the unbearable tension a second longer, Christina had reached out and taken his hand. He’d felt her trembling. It had been hell to wait until Alison and Aidan went to bed, but it had been delicious too, surviving the last minutes of what he’d once thought would be a never-ending torment.

Knowing that torture was about to come to a glorious end.

“Why did you change your mind?” she asked softly as the elevator sped them down to his subterranean bedroom.

“I found something today in the deep tunnels after Teslar and the Scourge revenants fled. Actually, Teslar discovered it before me, during all of his digging—a crystal chamber deep within the bedrock.” He shook his head, still amazed by the discovery. “I’ve never known anything like it. A crystal chamber within a layer of limestone bedrock? That limestone used to be the floor of the earth’s ocean, ages ago. That chamber is more ancient than I can even begin to imagine. Who knows how deep it was inside the earth when it formed? Those crystals amplify the earth’s vitessence to incredible levels.”

The elevator slowed and stopped. He reached and grasped Christina’s upper arm when she started to walk out the opened doors. “The strength of it is such that I could live off that energy alone, Christina. Do you understand what that means?”

Her green eyes looked enormous in her face as she looked up at him. “That we can be together?”

“I will never again have to feed,” he whispered, awe flavoring his tone. “I can metabolize the earth’s energy alone and survive. I no longer need to be a parasite on human beings.”