Silken Rapture (Princes of the Underground 2)

“Let me touch you, and I will let you pass,” he whispered.

She blinked, sure for a moment she’d misunderstood his request, he’d made it with such restrained intensity.

“Touch me?” she asked, bewildered. “Why? Where?”

He didn’t seem capable of speech. His nostrils flared as though he was breathing her…absorbing her, even though they weren’t touching anywhere. Yet. He lifted his hand and held it an inch over her shoulder.

“If you promise to let me go?” she clarified suspiciously. She could not shake the feeling she was dreaming—Alice dropped down the rabbit hole. These men were so strange, yet so compelling.

“I will let you pass, but you will never escape Sanctuary,” he said.

“Just let me go,” she said through clenched teeth.

He nodded, his gaze fixed on his hand above her shoulder.

“Give me permission,” he said roughly.

“Yes. All right.”

She felt the pressure of his hand. Suddenly he was hissing and stepping back, a snarl marring his handsome features.

“What the—?”

“I grant you your wish,” he grated out, his white teeth clenched. “Go.”

“But what happened to your hand?” she asked, bewildered.

He glanced down at his reddened palm. “It is nothing. It is pain. I will overcome it.”

Isabel glanced back warily over her shoulder as she passed him in the opposite direction of Delraven’s suite. A wild desire to escape had overcome her in those tense moments, a frantic need. She had no idea what had just happened, had no idea why touching her had made him recoil. Aubrey looked up from his palm. She felt his stare on her as she began to run. It frightened her to consider it too closely, but there was a certainty inside her that what he’d said was true.

She’d never just walk out of this fortress on her own.

She raced down gloomy hallways and up stairs, opening doors that led to luxurious salons and bedrooms, and once, a large laboratory, all of them empty. An hour and a half later, she’d still found no exit and encountered no one to either help or hinder her. It was almost as if the residents of Sanctuary followed her movements and took care not to be seen. She felt like a rat being observed in a maze. Fear and desperation built in her until it reached a crescendo.

She did her best to retrace her steps, feeling a grim sense of satisfaction course through her when she once again saw the corridor with the Delraven crest. Aubrey was long gone, probably paying that woman—Margarite—in equal parts money and pleasure.

She must be becoming as mad as this waking dream to be running toward an enigma like Blaise Sevliss, Lord Delraven. She reminded herself that like Aubrey, Titurino, Jessie and the group of men called the Literati, Delraven was a paranormal creature…something not human. But Delraven was different somehow, more than that…

He wasn’t just inhuman, he was beyond human.

She should be scared out of her mind to confront him and demand her freedom. Instead, it confused her to realize it was excitement unlike she’d ever before experienced that twined with fear in her veins. Why did she feel so drawn to him?

At the end of the hall she encountered a pair of closed mahogany doors. She opened them and cautiously entered a study featuring bookcase-lined walls and deep leather couches and chairs. Several maps lined the walls. Some appeared to be detailed maps of London, while others showed overlapping straight, thick lines intersecting squiggly, broken ones. The fire in the hearth had dwindled to glowing embers and was the only source of light besides a dim lamp on a desk. She moved into the room, her footsteps muted by a dense carpet, highly aware of her heartbeat throbbing in her ears contrasting with the thick silence.

“Lord Delraven?” she called in a threadbare whisper. Her attempt was half-hearted. She could perfectly sense he wasn’t in the room.

Just as she knew precisely where he was. From where had this unusual prescience in regard to Delraven come? Was this a new ability she’d acquired when she’d been rendered unconscious by her kidnapper? Margaret had mentioned Delraven touching her. She’d said Delraven had held her. Had his essence somehow transferred to her in some inexplicable fashion?

Her hand shook slightly when she extended it toward the handle on an adjoining door. The door swung open with a low-pitched whine.

He lay on the bed, naked save for a leather harness of sorts that looped around his hips and thighs. It left his genitals fully exposed.

For a full ten seconds, both of them remained unmoving.

He made a sound—a small noise like a choking, hoarse gasp. She glanced rapidly from his erect cock to his face. His unusual dark green eyes seemed to smolder more than the burning embers in the study fire. When she saw the sweat that glazed his long, muscled body and the strange, desperate expression on his bold features, she raced into the room. It suddenly struck her that every fiber of his flesh was straining to move, but couldn’t.

“You’re ill,” she said, her gaze flickering around the room. Do creatures such as he become ill? The question came automatically into her brain, but she quickly dismissed it in the face of the obvious. Blaise Sevliss was sick, in pain, or both.