Nightkeepers

‘‘Wait,’’ she said. ‘‘Let me.’’ But instead of undressing him, she slipped off her panties, leaving her naked while he remained fully clothed.

Excitement spike, spearing outward from her center until she felt as though she were lit from within, pulsing gold and crimson with femininity.

‘‘Blondie,’’ he said, voice rasping on the word. ‘‘Gods.’’ Then he broke, moving fast as he swept her up in his arms and carried her to the stone altar.

In some dim recess of her mind, she thought the candles flared and the smoke went from gold to red, but those details were lost in a tidal rush of sensation and need. Hurry, a voice chanted inside her as he fastened his lips on her throat and cupped a hand around her breast, bringing a lightning bolt of heat from her core.

She tugged at his shirt, rushing now, needing to touch him as he was touching her. He rolled her nipple between his finger and thumb, wringing a cry from her, one that echoed strangely inside her skull, as though two voices had shouted, maybe more. She got his shirt off and gloried at the play of his hard muscles beneath the taut masculine skin. Touching her lips to the hollow beside his collarbone, then lower, she went to work on his cutoffs, where the material strained tight across a massive erection. He groaned when her fingertips brushed against his hard flesh, and he thrust against her hand, silently urging her onward.

She freed the buttons and zipper, and then his hands were there, helping strip off his shorts and sandals, until he was as naked as she and they were pressed together, hard against soft, need against need.

The air thickened around them, humming with waiting, with wanting. Then she was finished with waiting. She arched up and kissed him, claiming his mouth with hers and leaving no doubt as to her demand. She tasted his urgency and felt it in the bone-breakingly taut lines of his body, but his hands were gentle when he touched her, when he brushed the soft skin inside her knees, then higher, drawing his fingertips across the acutely sensitized skin of her inner thighs.

She whimpered when he feathered an intimate brush across her center, then nearly screamed when he repeated the touch more firmly, stroking a long, clean line that ended with his thumb atop the nub of her pleasure. ‘‘Come for me,’’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘‘Open up to me.’’

‘‘Let me touch you.’’ She reached for his straining member, but he angled his body away even as he kissed her.

He murmured something against her mouth, something that sounded like, ‘‘We don’t have time.’’ But that didn’t make any sense, she thought. Time for what? Then she couldn’t think at all, because he kissed her long and deep, and the heat rose up to sweep her away.

The hum in Leah’s brain intensified, and her body shook as a strange fracture split her in two. One fragment of her was aware of the press of the stone altar against her buttocks and upper thighs, conscious of the way her legs wrapped around him, pulling him into her, binding them together. A thought tried to break through— a warning—but the spinning in her head and the growing heat beat it back as her body bowed into his touch, welcoming him, demanding him.

‘‘Come for me,’’ he said again, as though her pleasure were the most important thing in his universe. He rotated his thumb and kept that pressure on her nub as he traced two fingers around her opening and then dipped inside in a smooth, liquid glide.

Suddenly, all the restless, shifting energy Leah had been carrying since the dreams first began collected itself at the point of their joining, fisting around his fingers and vibrating deep inside her at a raw, primal level. ‘‘Please!’’ she cried, not sure what she was asking for.

But he seemed to understand, because he withdrew his fingers and moved between her legs, so the blunt tip of his hard shaft rested at her opening. At the first nudge, she opened her eyes and found his face just above hers, his eyes staring into hers. Their cobalt blue depths were dark and intense, and she felt a momentary flicker of fear. But then he was sliding home in one long thrust that had her insides knotting and her eyes closing on a rush of pleasure. She gasped and gripped his shoulders, anchoring herself amidst a storm of sensation. Inhaling deeply, she filled her lungs with the scent of their lovemaking, part incense, part musk. Then she parted her legs wider, accommodating his mass, inviting him deeper, and deeper still.

He thrust once and again, dropping his forehead to hers, his breathing synchronized with hers, his very heartbeat seeming to come in time with hers. He thrust a third time as her body coiled tight around his hard flesh and the humming sound transformed to something sweeter, almost a melody.

Leah cried out as the first exhilarating rush of orgasm gripped her, stopping the breath in her lungs. He thrust deeply in a hard, ever-increasing tempo that matched the hammering in her ears, in her chest. Her consciousness expanded outward until she could feel the press of his mind on hers as surely as she could feel the surge of their bodies. Then everything contracted inward, an exquisite moment spent poised on the brink of explosion.

In that moment, in that breathless pause, she felt something shift, tearing deep within her, ripping away from her even as she convulsed in a hard fist of heat that spun out endlessly. His deep, masculine voice echoed her cries, and he thrust hard within her and cut loose, a groan wringing from deep within his chest—her name, perhaps, or a curse. A prayer.

The pressure in her brain disappeared, leaving only pleasure in its wake. Joy and exultation spun within her, spiraling outward in a rush that made her want to run and dance and leap for joy. But when she opened her eyes and smiled up at him, she saw none of that same joy in his face.

Instead, she saw despair.

CHAPTER THREE

Reality returned with a serious buzz kill. Goose bumps broke out everywhere Leah had skin—not just because he had that oh, shit, big mistake look on his face, but because that expression doused enough of the afterglow to ass-smack her with what she’d done.

Heart jolting, she scrambled out from underneath the guy—a total stranger, for crap’s sake—and backed away in a defensive crouch. ‘‘What. The. Fuck. Just. Happened? ’’

‘‘Nothing,’’ he rasped. ‘‘Everything. I don’t know. Shit.’’ He sat up and dragged both hands through his dark hair, which had come free from its ponytail.

With his hair hanging to his shoulders and the close-clipped beard along his jawline, his body stunningly naked and ripped with a fighter’s muscles, and firelight flickering on the ancient carvings behind him, the whole scenario could’ve come from another age, when all this would’ve made way more sense.