Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [894]
Her light brown eyes drank him in, unfaltering. She stroked the mutating glyphs on his chest, following the pattern with a light, learning touch. She reached down farther, smoothing her palm over his thigh, then back to the erect length of his cock. He exhaled a wordless growl of pleasure as her fingers lovingly caressed him.
Through her blood, the precious part of her that swam inside him, feeding his cells, he read the depth of her desire for him. There was no fear or uncertainty in her as she gazed at him. There was only a soft but fevered demand as she reached up to grip the nape of his neck and guide him back down to her mouth.
“Make love to me again,” she whispered against his lips.
It was a command that Kade was more than willing to oblige. He gently rolled over her as she parted her legs to welcome him once more. He entered her slowly and tenderly as he brought her into his arms. Their kiss was long, passionate, fevered as she traced her tongue over his fangs and his sex erupted deep inside her. Kade shouted with his release and crushed her to him.
God help him, he knew now what the other mated warriors had said about the pleasure—the humbling rapture—of the blood bond. With Alex, with this woman who had awakened feelings in him he’d never wanted to risk before, now Kade knew what forever could be. He craved it, with a ferocity that stunned him.
In that moment, with Alex wrapped around him so warm and content and open to him, he wanted to hold the feeling close … even if the wildness within him whispered insidiously that it couldn’t last.
The fire that had been slowly dying on the grate a few hours ago had long since gone cold. Jenna Tucker-Darrow lay tightly curled on her side on the floor of the cabin’s main room, shivering as she roused from the depths of a dreamless, unnaturally heavy sleep. Her limbs were listless, uncooperative, her neck too weak and tender to let her lift her head.
With some effort, she managed to crack her eyelids open and peer into the darkness of her cabin. Dread crawled up her spine on talons made of ice.
The intruder was still there.
He sat on the floor across the room from her, his head tipped down. He was a massive, menacing presence, even at rest.
He wasn’t human.
She still struggled with that awareness, wondered if what she was seeing could be blamed on the single-malt Scotch she’d been drowning herself in—Mitch’s favorite, and the crutch she leaned on every year around this time to get her through the awful anniversary of his and Libby’s deaths.
But the immense intruder who broke into her home and was now holding her prisoner there wasn’t some type of alcoholic hallucination. He was flesh and bone, though she’d never seen flesh like his before. He’d shown up unclothed despite the subzero temperatures outside, and his skin from head to toe was hairless, covered in a dense tangle of red and black markings that were too extensive to be the work of a tattoo artist. And whatever he was, he was stronger than any man she’d ever come across in her time in law enforcement, even though he was unarmed, and nursing some grievous injuries.
Jenna had seen her share of gunshot wounds, enough to know that the shredded chunk of flesh and muscle blown out of his thigh and the smaller one in the side of his abdomen must have been the result of shotgun blasts. His other injuries, the blisters and seeping lesions that covered most of his skin, were less discernible, particularly in the dark. They looked like radiation burns, or a seriously intense sunburn—the kind you could get only if you did your UV baking under a full-body magnifying glass.
Jenna couldn’t even begin to guess where he’d come from, or what he wanted with her. She’d thought he meant to kill her when he forced his way inside her house. Truthfully, she wouldn’t have cared if he had. She’d been halfway there on her own, anyway. She was tired of living without the people she cared about most. Fed up with feeling so damned useless and alone.
But the intruder—the creature, for that’s what he was—did not break in with the