The Taken

“I’m a mess.”

“Shh…” He placed a hand over her mouth, hard enough to hush her but loose enough to play. When he felt her protest drain from her, he slid his hand to the back of her neck. “I swear, this face is carved in marble somewhere. In Italy or Greece or somewhere goddesses once roamed.”

“Jesus, Grif…”

“But none of that’s why I really want you.” He stilled, and she did, too. “All this rockabilly stuff… you wear it like armor. I get that. It protects you. But you’re strong in your own way, and you don’t need any of it. Fact, I think I’d prefer you in nothing at all.”

And he let go of his fear, his need for control, the distance he was trying to keep between him and his humanity and, pulling her into his embrace, finally allowed his full angelic sense to flood him again.

He saw her with his Centurion gaze, a white halo circling her body, with lavender hooks spearing in as she looked at him. “Your soul is magnificent,” he gasped.

Kit rose, specter-light above him, and pulled him to his feet. Then he lifted her from hers and crossed the room with her in his arms. No way was he going to let go of her now. “Someplace without windows or light. I want to disappear in you.”

He carried her back to her bedroom, the one he’d once studied from the golf course with the flaming eyes of a Pure boring into his back. But Anas was gone, and it was his blood and his flesh that were currently heated-not a burden, but a gift now that he was alone with Kit.

Kit freed him of his jacket, and tugged impatiently at his shirt. Her blood was up, too, evidenced by her swollen lips and heavy lids and all those human signals he hadn’t even known he’d been missing in the Everlast. Fifty years since a woman had looked at him this way. It felt like forever.

More important, the haunted look that’d been in Kit’s face just moments earlier was gone. Now she looked aggressive and demanding and strong. He’d given her that with his need, he knew, and was doing it still. Grif slid the straps of her dress from her shoulders, blindly working the zipper from her back, wanting to do it some more.

Bare skin found his, and simultaneously their hands grew rough. Grif’s mouth dropped lower, lips tugging so that this time Kit arched back of her own accord. A low moan moved from her body into his, and his legs quivered. One of them dragged the other to the bed, Grif wasn’t sure who, and it didn’t matter. They found it blindly and there they fused.

Nothing like it in the Universe, Grif thought. Those born into the Everlast had no idea what they were missing. If they knew, he thought, as her hands raced over his body. If they knew… they’d bow down before us.

A hard nip from Kit had him grunting, then reversing their positions, though their limbs immediately tangled again. Wild suddenly, needing her female heat and taste and scent everywhere, Grif pinned her arms to her sides hard enough to bruise, then went lower. She cried out, she struggled, but it wasn’t in pain. It made him ravenous, and he hadn’t even known he’d been starving.

Minutes later, she took someone’s name in vain. He finally looked up and found her chest heaving, head turned up to the ceiling, eyes unfocused. Grif wiped his mouth over her belly, then felt her jolt as he again caught a nipple.

“God.” Her hands braced his shoulders. “Wait…”

“No.” And he slid his hands beneath, cupped her, and pulled her onto his lap, entering the wetness that was already his. Her release was almost immediate, but Grif held her steady, wanting more. Though his own breath was ragged, though his vision threatened to blur, he kept his gaze hard on her face. He’d been in the Everlast, he knew what it was to be akin to air. Now that he had every sense at his disposal again, he would damn well use them. Levering back, he thrust forward even more.

Her cry, he thought, would outshine the angelic choir.

And her voice-that insistent, cheerful, nonstop voice-was how he found her rhythm. He waited, giving her a series of slow glides on which she could catch her breath, then rose above her, still holding her thighs, and sent her cresting again. He felt wild now, like some sort of animal driven by desperation and an instinctive need to shatter inside of her. The quake moved from her body into his and back again, and she bucked for and with him, also an animal, wholly his.

He waited, quaking and moving and building and thrusting, until the cry was in his sightline, until it pulled back like a cocked arrow in a bending bow. Then he braced himself over her, her thighs still lifted over his hips, and plundered. Heads close, cheeks pressing, breaths strong in each other’s ears, they rode each other in tandem, and let need turn to greed. Kit pushed him to climax even as she fought to get there first. Then the arrow flew and Grif was free, emptying into her as she disappeared in him, and both cries found their targets before spiraling off into the raw, violent night.

Chapter Twenty-One

What just happened?” Kit murmured sleepily. Her head was nestled in the crook of Grif’s left arm, but her gaze was tilted up, soft on the side of his face.

“Honey,” Grif replied, without opening his eyes. “If you don’t remember, there’s no sense in me repeating it.”

She slapped at him lazily. “I mean what just happened to put that frown between your brows. You look like a grumpy bear.”

Grif shook his head. “Just the opposite. This is the first time since I’ve been back on this mudflat that I haven’t woken up totally disoriented.” He did look at her now, brows drawn so low it was as if he was confused to find her there. “You’re like an anchor somehow. A steadying force as the rest of the world just spins.”

Kit smiled. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in a long while. And on the heels of an orgasm that’d shaken her inside and out, it was also the steadying force she needed to believe that maybe, just maybe, things might turn out all right yet.

Of course, that’s precisely when Grif had to open his mouth again. “I think we should leave. Get out of here. It’s not safe anymore.”

“Hmm…” Kit said, because it felt safe to her. “Think we can wait until morning?”

He was silent for a long time. “I think so. I don’t see anything… I mean, any reason why not.”

“Good,” Kit said, nestling in close. “Because we can’t follow our new lead until then anyway.”

“What lead?”

“The one I was going to tell you about right before you seduced me.”

“Oh. That one.”

Kit smiled into his chest.

“Wanna tell me now?”

No. She wanted to disappear under the covers and taste him some more. Yet Grif was going to need a couple of minutes to rest up for what she had in mind anyway, and truth was, so did she. So she gathered the sheet around her waist, and stood. “Be right back.”

But she wasn’t surprised to feel his eyes on her from the doorway as she strode through the house. I could get used to being looked at like that, she thought. To being looked after like that.

The thought worried her, so she pushed it aside and put a smile on her face as she returned to the bedroom, bag in hand. “I found something after leaving my former in-laws’ house. I didn’t want to go anywhere public, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. So I drove.”

The wide, empty streets of a Vegas night always calmed her. She could order events in her mind while driving, as if they, too, were on a map.

“It’s strange, but it’s the old landmarks, the ones with the most inconsequential memories-Laundromats and burger joints and theaters-streets I haven’t been down in years, stores I’ve never even been in, but have seen a million times…” She looked at him. “These calm me the most. They’ve outlasted… lives.”

Grif placed a hand on her arm when she swallowed hard. She gave him a watery smile. Yes, she could easily get used to this. “Anyway, I was driving by this pizzeria I used to go to with Paul-greasiest pie ever, I swear-and, of