Master of the Night

by Angela Knight

  Reaching up her torso, he found one full breast and palmed it. Another glittering alien sensation spun through his nervous system. He squeezed and rolled her nipple. "I think I like this Truebond thing," he murmured in her mind.

  "You do seem to be having a good time. Ooh! Oh, yeah. Right there."

  Knowing exactly what she liked about "right there," he started doing more of it until her spine arched and his own cock pressed, rock hard, against the flying carpet.

  Her orgasm rolled over them in long, delicious ripples that brought him shuddering to his own peak.

  When it finally passed, he rested his cheek, dazed, against the inside of her thigh. "Man. It's true what they say. Women just go on forever."

  Erin lifted her head and gave him an impish grin. "My turn."

  "Your turn? At what?"

  "I want a blow job." She sat up and pounced on him.

  "Well, far be it from me to argue," Reece said as she tumbled him onto his back. "Don't fall off the carpet."

  "Big carpet," she ordered it. "Big, big carpet." It obediently expanded.

  Erin took his sticky, softening cock in her hand and engulfed it in her mouth. Her first, hard suck had them both groaning.

  Her long, cool fingers rolled and caressed his balls as her tongue danced. Now it was his turn to enjoy her experimentation as she drew back to nibble the tiny folds on the underside of his cock, just behind the head. She tongued his length as he hardened in a hot, sweet rush, then tried to take him as deep as possible down her throat.

  Reece threaded his hands through the long gold silk of her hair and held on. Overhead, the Mageverse Milky Way snaked through the darkness, an iridescent ribbon of stars.

  Finally he'd had as much of it as he could take. He tore himself free with a hot groan. "That's enough. I've got another hot, wet place in mind now."

  "Mmm," she purred, and went to her hands and knees as he positioned himself behind her. "I do like the way you think."

  "Good thing, too. You're stuck with me." He found her core, aimed himself. Slid endlessly inside. "Or stuck on me."

  She laughed, the sound half groan. "Definitely. Ooooh, definitely."

  Erin braced her palms on the carpet and her knees apart as Reece stroked inside her. The double pleasure braiding along the Truebond was damn near enough to make her come all by itself. Dreamily she stared at the moon-washed forest sliding by beneath the carpet. The trees looked like props from a toy train set, while the river snaking between them shimmered like a ribbon of light.

  Reece drew out and pumped back in, long and lazy. She shivered at his thickness.

  As he took his time in sweetly endless strokes, spinning them both gently toward another climax, Erin sighed. "I'm ridiculously in love with you."

  "Mmm. It's mutual." Suddenly his arms wrapped around her, and he sat back, pulling her with him as he impaled her to the balls.

  She gasped. In that position he felt about as big around as a baseball bat.

  He leaned down to her ear. "Now who's a pansy?"

  "Ah! Jesus, nobody I know!"

  Reece laughed. "That's what I thought." As he ground up into her, he sank his fangs into her pulse.

  Erin convulsed as her mind swamped with multiple layers of hot pleasure—the feel of his fangs, the heat of that thick, meaty cock banging into her, his fingers kneading and tugging both her nipples.

  She felt as if she was about to explode.

  Flinging out both arms, she let the magic fly. Great globes of red, green, and violet burst soundlessly around the carpet as Reece rolled his hips and fed. Each short thrust jolted them both another increment toward orgasm.

  Until they exploded in a furious climax, writhing together as Mageverse energies popped around them like the Fourth of July.

  By the time he drew his fangs from her throat, she was limp. Cuddling her, still seated deep, he murmured. "It's going to be a big wedding."

  That woke her up. "Oh, is it?"

  "Oh, yeah. We'll have to catch all those vampires first, which will be a pain in the ass. But a wedding will make a nice victory celebration once we do."

  "You really think it's going to be that easy to catch them?"

  "Probably not, but I don't want to spoil the mood."

  "Good point. Got a guest list in mind?"

  "Well, I've got a really big family, and they're all going to want to come." He toyed lazily with her nipples. "And then there's all the Champion business partners. And my FBI and CIA buddies. And that's not even mentioning the Magekind…"

  "Didn't we skip a step?" she demanded.

  He chuckled, knowing exactly what she meant. "Which one?"

  "The one where you go down on bended knee and ask, Double Oh Fang."

  "I am on bended knee."

  "And buried in my—!"

  "Picky, picky, picky." He lifted her off his lap with that effortless vampire strength and turned her in his arms.

  "That's better." She curled her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and settled down again.

  "Now, where was I? Oh, yeah." The moonlight blazed into his face as he looked down at her, his eyes green and glowing. "Will you marry me, Erin Grayson, and be my wife, and keep my heart, and have my children?"

  She smiled up at him and let her love pour through the Truebond. "I will marry you, Reece Champion, and be your wife, and keep your heart. And have your children."

  The kiss was long and hot and silken, illuminated by another dancing fusillade of magic. Neither of them bothered to look around.

  They both knew there was plenty more where that came from.

  Turn the page for a special preview of Angela Knight's next novel

  Master of the Moon

  Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

  The Grand Palace of the Cachamwri Sidhe

  He opened his eyes to see her standing over him in slim and glorious nudity, her body gleaming silver in the moonlight. As is the way in dreams, he didn't question who she was or what she was doing in his chamber. He only gazed at her and felt his need rise.

  She was all lithe muscle, like a young cat, with small, sweet breasts, rose nipples flushed and swollen. But though his male libido automatically registered the curves of her body and the length of her strong legs, it was her eyes that drew him. They looked almost too big for her triangular face, with its broad cheekbones and pointed little chin. They were pale, those eyes, though he couldn't make out the color in the dim light. Pale and wild and shimmering under the darkness of her short-cropped black hair.

  "I'm in need," she said in a low, whiskey voice that seemed to cup his sex. She had the most erotic mouth he'd ever seen: full, sweetly curved, naked of paint. "Will you make love to me?"

  "Yes. Oh, yes." He watched hungrily as she slid onto his bed, oddly weightless in motion, as though she were far stronger than she should be. "We're going to be together," he told her, knowing this was more vision than dream. "We'll meet each other soon."

  "Not soon enough," she said, her eyes going even paler until they glowed like molten silver. "I burn tonight."

  "Come to my arms then," he said, reaching for her. "And I'll make you burn even brighter."

  She slid against him, rubbing herself across the length of his body. Her skin felt so hot and smooth he gasped in pleasure. "You're beautiful," she murmured, tracing her long, slender fingers over the curve of his chest. "Are you real?"

  "As real as you, my dream," he said, and cupped one sleek breast. She sighed and let her head fall back. He sat up and drew her astride him, groaning at the sensual delight of her silken backside settling over his thighs.

  Then her gaze captured him again, silver with magic and feral femininity. Her lids lowered, veiling her eyes with long lashes as she bent to kiss him, her mouth wet and burning. He gasped and hardened in one long, hot, sweet rush. As she moaned against his lips, he set himself to pleasure her, swirling his tongue between her teeth. Her corner teeth felt oddly sharp, but he didn't care.

  H
e caught the back of her head in one hand. Her hair felt as soft as a cat's fur against his fingers, and he stroked her, loving the sensation. Discovering the sensitive whorls of one delicate ear, he stopped to explore. Unlike his own, it wasn't pointed. "You're human," he murmured.

  "Not really," she whispered, and pulled back to look at him with those burning silver eyes.

  It was then that he knew. "Oh," he said, "that's going to be a problem."

  King Llyr Aleyn Galatyn of the Cachamwri Sidhe sat up in his bed to find himself naked and alone, his cock hard as a broadsword. He looked around wildly, but his magical lover was gone, as if she'd never been there at all.

  Which of course, she hadn't been.

  He fell back against his silken pillows with a huff of frustration and eyed his rampant prick. It seemed to eye him back. "Yes, I know, I woke too soon," he told it, smiling in reluctant amusement.

  Then, with a sigh, he took his cock in one royal hand and attended to the problem himself.

  Diana London jerked awake, wet and aching. Automatically she glanced around, but the beautiful blond man was gone.

  She rolled out of bed to stand in the moonlight, naked and sweating, her every nerve burning with erotic frustration. She remembered the way he'd looked sprawled across those dark silk sheets of his, his hair a fan of gold beneath his broad, muscular shoulders. His eyes had gleamed up at her like opals, filled with magical sparks of color. When they'd kissed, his wide, firm mouth had moved against hers with such delicious skill that she ached even more just thinking of it.

  And his cock…

  Better not think about his cock. Not when she was alone with no man in sight, and the Burning Moon blazing in her blood.

  She'd never had a dream so intense, so real. So erotic. She had to do something or she'd explode.

  Diana glanced speculatively at her nightstand where she kept the vibrator that had become her nightly companion since her Burning Moon began. Unfortunately, the dream had ignited a need that couldn't be soothed with cold plastic.

  She needed to run.

  Recklessly, Diana strode naked to the window and jerked up the sash so hard the glass reverberated with an echoing, booming rattle. A cooling breeze blew in, chilling the hot sweat on her body as she stared out at the night.

  The moon rode full over the shadowed trees behind her house. A whippoorwill called, its voice high and mournful in the darkness, sounding as lonely as she felt

  The wooden privacy fences on either side of the yard were higher than a man's head. No one could see her.

  Stepping back, she closed her eyes, concentrated, and turned herself into a wolf.

  Then she leaped out through the window and began to run, trying to escape her own clawing need for the dream man's touch.

  The Verdaville City Council was locked in political mortal combat over window treatments for City Hall. They'd been debating the merits of dusky rose over navy blue for the past forty-five minutes, and Diana wanted to bite somebody. She was still feeling the combined effects of both the Burning Moon and last night's dream, and her patience was not what it should be.

  I'm a professional city manager, Diana told herself sternly. I am polite and in control. Professional city managers do not turn into wolves, leap over the council table, and bite the Mayor on the ass. It's a bad career move.

  "Look at that frou-frou material," Mayor Bill Thompson said, pointing a gnarled finger at a fabric swatch draped across the table. Cabbage roses the size of Diana's hand bloomed against a pattern of swirling leaves. His bony features drew into a sneer. "What kind of message is that gonna send potential businesses looking to move to Verdaville?"

  "A message of taste and refinement," snapped Carry Jeffries. She was a matronly woman with the round, warm face of somebody's grandmother and the cold eyes of a Borgia pope. "Which is just what we need to bring new jobs to this town."

  "Looks expensive," Roland Andrews said, giving the fabric a jowly grimace. "Seems to me we should just stick with the blinds. They've always been good enough before."

  "Those dingy things?" Jeffries shot him a dismissive look. "We've lost three textile companies in five years. We've got to spruce things up if we want to attract businesses."

  The other four members of the council either nodded wisely or looked cowed, depending on their respective personalities.

  Diana resisted the impulse to sigh. The population of Verdaville barely topped five thousand, and its budget only edged up to two million when the fire department bought an aerial truck. That did not, however, prevent the city council from practicing old-style Southern politics: a thin layer of good-'ol-boy over a seething core of backstabbing ambition.

  Jeffries and Thompson in particular had been political rivals for a quarter century, including years when one or the other had been voted off the council. Diana knew neither really cared one way or another about the window treatments. The argument was just another round in their running feud.

  But as far as Diana was concerned, they could have picked a better time of year to squabble. I can handle this, she told herself, drumming her fingertips on the table in front of her. I've done it before.

  Looking down, she realized her nails had just grown beyond the limits of her champagne polish. She fisted her hand. I am calm, she chanted desperately in her head. I am professional.

  Diana had been city manager for Verdaville for the past three years, having managed an even smaller town for two years prior to that. She'd dealt with the Burning Moon all five years without giving herself away, and she could do it again.

  As the argument droned on, she jotted down notes and fought to concentrate. Despite her best efforts, her thoughts began to wander.

  The man's powerful torso gleamed gently in the moonlight, muscle flexing in long ripples. A big hand swept a curtain of silken gold hair back from an arrogantly handsome face. Opalescent eyes gleamed as he watched her come to him. "We're going to be together," he told her. "We'll meet each other soon."

  Just remembering the deep male purr of his voice made Diana's nipples draw into peaks under her silk blouse. It was a good thing she was wearing a linen jacket. When she crossed her legs in the matching charcoal slacks, she could smell her own heat.

  Glancing around the room, she saw a man in the audience staring at her, his eyes hot and glazed. Diana swore silently. Men weren't consciously aware of her scent, but they still reacted to the pheromones her body produced during the Burning Moon.

  "What do you think, Diana?" the Mayor asked.

  Her eyes flicked back to the council table to see all seven of them staring at her. Smoothly, she said, "That decision is up to the council. I'll do whatever you direct." After a delicate hesitation, she suggested, "Perhaps this is a good time to bring the question to a vote."

  An hour later, the last council member was gone and it was fully dark. Diana stepped outside and locked the front doors of City Hall. Looking up, she scanned the red brick front of the narrow building, automatically making sure none of the floodlights had burned out. Doric columns rose to either side of the double doors, looking a little silly on a structure roughly the width of a double-wide mobile home. Once upon a time, the building had been the main office for a textile plant; Diana suspected its resemblance to a Southern plantation had been intended as a subliminal message from company management.

  "Hey, Diana!"

  She turned to see a Verdaville police car pulling up to the curb behind her. She waved. "Hey, Jer! What can I do for you?"

  The officer hooked one arm out his open window. "Chief needs you at a crime scene. Want to follow me?" Jerry Morgan was a short, stocky ex-Marine whose usual expression was a sly grin. Tonight he looked pale and tense in the back spill from the floodlights.

  Diana frowned. Jerry was a Desert Storm vet; he liked to say his tour of the Highway of Death had left him with a cast iron stomach. Anything bad enough to make him blanch had to be pretty damn bad. "I'll get my car," she told him, and strode to the spot where she'd parked her
ten-year-old Honda.

  The trip did not take long—no drive within the Verdaville city limits did. Two minutes after leaving City Hall, they pulled into one of the mill villages that formed the core of the town.

  The little clusters of homes had been built by the town's textile plants as employee housing. Most of the four-room houses dated from the 1920s, when employees rented from the mills, picked up their mail in the mill office, and shopped in the company store. That lifestyle had slowly disappeared as Verdaville had grown. Even so, the town had been left with a gaping economic wound when the plants closed, one that still hadn't healed three years later.

  Plant closures or not, though, the villages were tight-knit little communities where everybody knew everybody. Diana wasn't surprised to see the crowd gathered outside the yellow tape strung around one particular bungalow. Anywhere else, this kind of group would have worn avid expressions of morbid curiosity. Here, they visibly grieved for somebody they'd probably known all their lives.

  She knew there would be relatives in the crowd, too, notified by neighbors the minute the cops pulled up. All of them ready to pounce on the first authority figure to show his or her face. Sighing in resignation, Diana reached into her glove compartment for her badge and gun.

  After she and Chief Gist had reached their understanding, she'd obtained a commission as a reserve officer, training for six weeks in everything from how to shoot a gun to issuing traffic tickets. Such volunteer cops were invaluable to small town departments that couldn't afford much manpower, and Verdaville's ten-man police force was no exception.

  Of course, Diana's commission put her and the chief in a somewhat murky relationship, since she was nominally his boss except when she was wearing a badge. But their relationship was so spectacularly weird anyway that the issue of who gave whom orders rarely came up.

  The point was, the badge gave Diana a legal right to come onto crime scenes. Without it, any defense attorney worth his salt would have asked uncomfortable questions about her presence.