Daysider

stroke it in time to the rhythmic motions of his lips and tongue.

Reckless with excitement, Alexia pushed her arm between her chest and his, feeling for the fly of his pants. But he trapped her hand with his free one and, withdrawing his other hand from within her pants, lifted himself on his arms and moved his mouth from her neck.

She groaned in protest, but he silenced her with his lips on hers. They still tasted of her blood. He kissed her, touching her tongue with his, as if he would devour her completely. He pushed her arms above her head and began to lift the hem of her shirt.

Alexia helped him, seething with impatience to feel his mouth on her breasts and something more substantial than his fingers between her thighs.

The shirt came off, and Damon tossed it aside. A second later he was at her throat again, this time biting the other side of her neck, carrying her to that indescribable, euphoric state she hadn’t believed could possibly exist.

It didn’t last. It couldn’t. But when Damon licked the blood from her skin, sealing the wound and trailing his mouth down to her breasts, she remembered that there were a thousand other ways of pleasure she could give and receive without any blood at all.

As Damon’s lips closed on her taut nipple, Alexia laced her fingers in his hair and whispered encouragement he obviously didn’t need. He suckled her breast with the same hunger with which he had taken her blood. He reached down again, finding his way to her waistband, and dragged the pants down to her hips. She wriggled under him, freeing herself to the knees, gasping as he moved to her other breast.

Somehow, between them, they managed to get her pants off. Damon sent them to the floor with a nudge of his knee and rolled his tongue in tight circles around her nipples, first one and then the other. His palm curled under her waist, lifting, positioning her so that her thighs spread wide without any help from her.

Once again he found the almost painful ache beneath her damp curls, but this time he slid his finger past her clitoris and between the hot, wet lips. He stroked his finger slowly from front to back, dipped it inside her and slowly pushed until his finger was all the way in. Alexia strained against him. He began to move his finger in and out as his thumb found her clitoris again. Just when she was certain she was going to come, he withdrew his finger and began kissing his way down from her breasts to her belly.

Even though she knew what was coming, she wasn’t prepared when his lips and tongue replaced his finger. He licked along the same path his finger had taken, sliding between her swollen lips, teasing her clitoris and finally reaching the molten center of her need. He stiffened his tongue and pushed it inside. Alexia thrashed on the cot, lifting her legs higher, knowing she couldn’t stand much more. She had to have him inside her, all of him. Now.

He didn’t make her wait much longer. Suddenly his shirt and pants were gone, too, and his hot, naked flesh was pressed to her body. She reveled in the feel of firm muscle flexing as he positioned himself between her legs.

Before, when he’d entered her, he had moved with urgency and impatience. Now he took his time, teasing her lips with the head of his cock, stroking her the same way he had with his fingers and tongue. He managed to keep it up for a good five minutes before he drove himself to the point where he couldn’t stand it any more than she could.

Still he didn’t enter her. Instead, he lifted her with one arm—obviously no longer troubled by the damage to his wrist—and turned her over onto her hands and knees. Her excitement intensified as he knelt behind her, grasping her hips with his hands. Suddenly he thrust into her, driving deeper than ever before, and she gasped again as she felt his big cock fill her more completely than she had ever been filled before.

As he moved inside her, he leaned over her bottom and bit the back of her neck, his incisors piercing the skin just beneath her ear. He hardly had time to enjoy the sensation before her body released in a flood of hot wetness and throbbing pleasure.

She felt Damon begin to move away and made a sharp sound of protest. He stopped, and she rolled over to face him, holding out her arms. He fell into them, and once again she guided him inside her. Then she bit his neck just to the side of his Adam’s apple, sucking the blood that trickled over her tongue.

He reached his own completion not long after, pumping so fast and furiously that she came again. He rolled over and pulled her close to his side, murmuring senseless words of endearment into her hair.

Sometime later, as she lay there in blissful contentment, Damon gave way to exhausted sleep. Alexia draped her arm across his chest and listened to the night sounds outside the cabin. She couldn’t hear anyone moving about, not even the nearly silent Nightsiders, and she was pretty sure every last human had long since gone to bed.

That didn’t mean they were necessarily asleep.

She sighed and nestled her face into the hollow of Damon’s shoulder. She had thought she’d known what sex was like before she’d first made love with Damon, that day when she had thought her time on earth was almost over. But she’d had barely a taste then, and now she knew what it really meant to give herself to another person in every way, and take everything she was offered. Not as an operative doing a job, or a serf, or one dependent on another for survival. Not even for friendship, or “caring.” This was what she had fought against every moment since she recognized the depth of her attraction to her enemy.

It wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t need or hunger or even comfort.

It was love.

Her throat suddenly tight, Alexia disentangled herself from Damon’s body, rolled off the cot and picked up the tunic that lay on the floor beside the bed. She brushed it off and pulled it over her head, smoothing the soft fabric over her body from chest to upper thighs. Every nerve felt raw, exposed, vulnerable to the slightest sensation from the brush of the almost imperceptible draft coming from under the door to the feel of wood on the soles of her feet.

“Alexia?”

She turned to find Damon propped up on one elbow, the sheets draped over his hips in a way that made her wonder if he was actually trying to be modest. He smiled, his sapphire gaze wandering over her body with undisguised admiration.

Alexia blushed and mocked herself for her self-consciousness. There wasn’t any part of her Damon hadn’t seen, and that included a good chunk of her heart and soul.

“Good morning, I think,” she said, returning his smile.

He tilted his head. “Two a.m.,” he said huskily, “if I’m not mistaken.” He stretched, long muscles shifting under night-pale skin, and lifted the blanket. “Come back to bed.”

There was no doubt that he was ready to resume their sexual gymnastics, but Alexia couldn’t stop her mind from working over everything that had occurred in the past few days and what was likely to happen in the very near future.

First there was the question of the patch, which she and Damon had speculated might be in the settlement. She hadn’t been foolish enough to ask about it outright; if the colonists did have it, they would have responded quite differently when they had first seen her. It would be pretty difficult for all the people she’d met to hide the reaction she would expect.

Assuming her judgment was correct, she and Damon still had to share what they’d learned with Theron and find out what he planned to do. And now that Damon had no orders or direct line of communication to his own masters, he still had a few very important decisions to make.

Alexia didn’t know how much he and Theron had discussed before she had arrived at the Bloodmaster’s cabin, but Emma had told her that the colony had accepted some clandestine support from the Expansionists at the very beginning. Theron had never been under any illusion as to how the Expansionists would react once he broke off their

“alliance.” What Alexia had seen since her arrival made clear why the Expansionists would want to eradicate the settlement.

Not what we believed, the Independent double agent had told her. If that information had reached the Council, there was no telling what they would do about it.

And Aegis? Wouldn’t this colony’s mere existence force them to change their assumptions about Opiri and their approach to Erebus? If there was even a chance the settlement could be a basis for a new kind of