Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [727]
Because it was a dream, she cast aside the knowledge of all the reasons they should not be together. She knew only the calling of her heart, and as her palm came to rest on the center of his chest, she knew the calling of his heart, too. His pulse hammered against her fingers. His breath was coming fast, heavy, hot with need. Claire looked up into eyes that burned as bright as any flame, his face a tight, tormented mask.
“Yes,” she hissed, almost incapable of words.
She sucked in her breath as the broad head of his cock nudged her, cleaved her. With a slow push of his hips he was sliding inside her, burying himself in a long, gloriously deep thrust. Claire cried out, arching up to take all of him within her, needing him to fill her. He stretched her tight, his length touching her very core.
“Oh, yes,” she panted as they found a familiar rhythm, fitting together as though they’d never been apart.
He was a ferocious lover; she knew that about him already and reveled in his animalistic intensity. Every hard stroke made her shatter just a little, every low moan and growl sent a shiver coursing through her veins.
He knew just how to move with her, just the right tempo to wring every ounce of pleasure from her body. Claire felt the first tremors of release streak through her like tiny bolts of lightning in her blood. She couldn’t contain it, had no strength to resist Andreas’s mastery of her senses.
She could only dig her fingers into the thick muscle of his shoulders and hold on as he steered her toward a splintering climax. She didn’t know if he followed her there. All she knew was the incredible wave of pleasure that rushed over her… then the sudden hollow grief of realizing Andreas was gone.
Claire called out to him in the dream, but he was nowhere to be seen.
And now the garden sanctuary where they’d lain together was gone, as well. She was sitting in the middle of a sun-baked field, daylight blinding her eyes.
“Andre?”
She got up and started walking, holding her arm up to her brow like a visor as she struggled to get her bearings. She didn’t know this place. She couldn’t make sense of the golden light, or the pungent stink of smoke and something worse, something unidentifiable that filled her nostrils and choked her throat. Coughing, Claire stepped over the scorched vegetation.
She stumbled, her foot catching on a charred black lump that lay on the ground.
Horror washed over her even before her senses processed what she was seeing.
It was a child.
A dead child, burned beyond recognition.
“Oh, my God.” Claire backed away, repulsed. Stricken. “Andreas!”
She swiveled her head and cried out with relief to see the broad green lawn and the stone-and-timber mansion that had been Andreas’s Darkhaven estate seated at the top of a gently sloping incline. Claire ran toward the house. She was naked and cold, terrified and confused by what she’d just seen outside.
“Andre?” she called frantically as she walked along the back of the mansion, seeing no light or movement inside. “Andreas … are you in there?”
She went around to the front, her arms wrapped around her nudity as she climbed the steps to the elegant entry. She knocked on the door. It eased open on silent hinges, but no one waited for her inside.
Claire stepped over the threshold and into a strange mausoleum of white. Everywhere she looked—the floors, the walls, the furnishings—all of it was pristine, snowy white. And quiet as a tomb.
“Andreas, please. I’m frightened. Where are—”
He emerged from one of the rooms off the ghostly foyer. He was naked like she was, his eyes still burning amber, his fangs still filling his mouth. He stalked forward without a word and hauled her into a bruising, unyielding grasp. Kissed her with so much heat and desire, her knees almost buckled beneath her.
Then, just as she was