by Lara Adrian
Perhaps more so. Jehan’s aura burned with a steady, unyielding resolve. He would be unstoppable in all things he set out to do. Honorable to his last breath.
Trygg seemed to know this about his teammate. He seemed to respect it. With a slow exhale, the terrifying Breed male let his shoulders relax a degree. His jaw pulsed, but he did as his comrades demanded, easing back on his heels with a quiet rumble in his throat.
Then he turned and walked away, stalking down the far length of the corridor.
“You okay?” Sav asked.
Melena nodded. “Is his problem just me, or does he despise all women?”
Sav gave her a sardonic look. “It’s not just you. And it’s a long, ugly story. If you have a week or five to spare, maybe I’d tell you.”
No, she didn’t have that kind of time. And the fact that tomorrow Lazaro would be taking her back to the States put a pang of regret in her breast. She wanted to stay a bit longer with Savage and Jehan.
She wanted to get to know them: Savage and his easy charm and gorgeous smile. Jehan, with his intriguing past and enigmatic personality. She wanted to know what obligation awaited him in Morocco, and why was he trying to outrun it. Against her own sense of logic or self-preservation, Melena also wanted to stay long enough to understand what had inspired Trygg’s terrifying animosity toward women.
And Lazaro...
Would there ever be enough time in this life to unravel all of his torment and secrets and dark, hidden thoughts? Would he even allow her that, if by some miracle they did have more time? All those rooms of his upstairs, missing memories...she wanted to help him fill them back up again.
She wanted to be the one to save him this time.
“Come on,” Sav said. “You really shouldn’t be down here in the operations compound. Lazaro will have our balls if—”
The warrior’s words cut short as a gust of cold, dark air seemed to blow in from the far end of the corridor. He was there. Melena waited to hear Lazaro growl his fury at the men, or demand to know what she was doing back in the Order’s domain after he prohibited her from distracting his team.
But he didn’t growl or demand anything. He just stared at her in silence, his sapphire gaze trained on her alone.
Intense. Penetrating. Focused on her with searingly sensual regard.
She trembled a little under that potent gaze, not from anything resembling fear. Seeing him there, looking at her as though no one and nothing else existed but the two of them, it was all she could do to keep from launching herself at him from down the corridor and flying into his arms.
But Melena held back. And now she noticed that there was something different about him tonight. Something different in the relaxed state of his glyphs, in his schooled expression.
“You were gone for a long time,” she murmured. And then she did start to approach him, though not with the jubilation she felt just a moment ago. This was something heavier. Something that stung as the realization began to dawn on her. “You’ve fed. You went out to find a blood Host. A woman?”
He didn’t deny it.
Damn him, he just stood there, watching impassively as she slowed to a stop in front of him. The array of skin markings on his arms under his rolled-back sleeves were calm, satiated. “Did you fuck her too, Lazaro?”
Behind her, Melena heard Jehan quietly clear his throat. There was brief movement in the corridor at her back, followed by the polite closing of a door as the two warriors made a hasty exit.
“Did you?” she repeated, now that it was just she and Lazaro in the passageway.
He swore, roundly, fiercely under his breath. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
She scoffed. “You know what’s ridiculous? Sitting around waiting for you to return. Hoping that I didn’t somehow push you away tonight. But how can I push you away when I never had you in the first place?”
She swept past him on a wounded, furious cry. She didn’t know if he followed. In that moment, she didn’t care.
But he had followed her. She had only made it to the main floor of the mansion’s residential wing when Lazaro halted her by grasping her hand. “Melena—”
“You know what else is ridiculous?” she fumed at him. “Hoping you’d come back and tell me that you realize there’s something serious going on between us too.” She glanced away, giving a shake of her head. “It’s ridiculous to expect that a man who’s been living his life like a ghost for twenty years could ever admit that he actually feels something again.”
Wrenching out of his light hold, she ran for the stairs. She heard him stalking up behind her, but he didn’t stop her now. Her breath was heaving by the time she found herself in the center of Lazaro’s palatial living room suite.
“I don’t want another blood bond, Melena. I won’t risk it.” His deep voice sounded brittle at her back. “So, whatever you think is happening here between us, it has no future.”
“Whatever I think?” She turned to face him. It stung that he wanted to diminish what they’d shared, but she didn’t believe him. She could see that he cared. But he was also determined to push her away. He truly intended to spend the rest of his life alone, punishing himself for something he couldn’t control. “I know about your family, Lazaro. I know you blame yourself for not being there to save Ellie and the rest of your Darkhaven.”
He glared at her furiously, as if she had violated some boundary simply in speaking of the incident. “They trusted me to keep them safe. I failed them.”
“You weren’t there. That’s all. And that’s a completely different thing.”
“No, not to me. And if you know so much about it, then you should also understand why I left to find a blood Host tonight. After making love with you, if I’d stayed...” He exhaled sharply. “The ifs don’t matter. I don’t want another Breedmate shackled to me and reliant on me for protection, for her sustenance. For her life. I won’t do that to someone again. I prefer to keep my appetites restricted to human females.”
Melena scoffed. “Safe women you can fuck and feed from without the risk of feeling anything.”
He stared, unflinching at her jab. “It is simpler that way, yes.”
“Women who leave you free to walk away and wallow in your guilt and self-flagellation.”
His full lips had compressed in a flat line as she spoke, his expression hardening now. “That’s right, Melena. That’s exactly the kind of woman I prefer. Simple. Safe. Forgettable. What I don’t want is what nearly happened between us today. I’m not going to sacrifice two decades of resolve on a couple of days of passion.”
And she didn’t want to hear him say that. No more than she wanted to acknowledge the regret she saw in his dark gaze, or the grim determination that emanated from the stormy color of his aura. “How fortunate for you and your martyred honor that I’ll be out of your life tomorrow.”
She pivoted away from him on a burst of hot anger and bitter pride.
She didn’t even make it two steps.
Lazaro was suddenly in front of her. And he was fuming. He seized her shoulders, blocking her path with the muscled wall of his body and the power of his sudden fury.
Amber sparks crackled in the midnight-blue pools of his eyes as his gaze clashed and locked with hers. “The fact that you’ll soon be out of my life is fortunate for you too, Melena.” He drew in a breath and more fire leapt into his irises, reducing his pupils to thinning, inhuman slits. “You should be thanking me for my restraint thus far, not stomping off to pout like a petulant child.”
“Let go of me.” He didn’t. If anything, his grip only went firmer. His face was so close to hers now, the bones of his high, angled cheeks sharpening with the emergence of his fangs. She refused to shrink under the full blast of his Gen One fury. “You call it restraint, the fact that you deny yourself the things you really want? Do you honestly think your guilt is ever going to release you if you only keep feeding it with your self-imposed isolation and pointless, hollow honor?”
A snarl cur
led up from his throat. It escaped through bared teeth and fangs. “You’re far too young to lecture me on life and death or guilt and honor. You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” she challenged hotly. And maybe a bit recklessly too, but she was so pissed off at him now, she couldn’t stop. “Twenty years of licking your wounds, hiding from life? Pretending you don’t need anything or anybody? One of us is acting like a sulking child, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”
A low, thunderous growl. That was all the warning she had. Then Lazaro’s mouth came down hard on hers. His kiss was ruthless, punishing. Spiked with raw fury and violent need.
Melena felt his fangs press against her lips, against her tongue when she opened her mouth to his invading kiss. He was holding nothing back now. She felt that hard intent roll through him with the fierce drumming of his heart against her breasts. She felt it in the steely demand of his cock when he brought his arm around her back and hauled her into a brutal embrace, crushing her abdomen into the immense ridge of his arousal.
She felt the wall come up against her spine and realized dazedly that he had moved her there using the power of his Breed genetics to propel them both across the floor in an instant. Lazaro fucked her mouth with his tongue, grazed her lips with the deadly points of his fangs. His big body caged her, allowing her no room to escape, even if she tried.
“Now tell me what you know about my restraint, Melena.” His voice had dropped to a timbre so low, so dangerously dark, everything reasonable and sane in her trembled with a dreadful anticipation. His merciless gaze bore into her, daring her to flinch as he bent his head toward her vulnerable throat. “Tell me about my hollow honor.”
She couldn’t speak. All of her senses were drawn taut, coiled to the point of breaking. His breath rushed hot and fevered across her neck, into the sensitive shell of her ear. Her pulse was racing, electricity coursing through her veins everywhere Lazaro touched her. He reached up, ran his fingertips over the scarlet teardrop-and-crescent-moon mark at the base of her throat.
“Tell me you’re not afraid that I’ll take your sweet, frantic carotid in my teeth right now and do exactly what I’ve been dying to do since I first saw you on that boat last night.”
She was afraid. And for all her desire for him—despite her sense that she had been waiting all her life for him and had never realized it until now—Lazaro’s fangs nestled so dangerously near her throat put an arrow of true panic in her blood.
If he pierced her vein, just one sip of her Breedmate blood would create an exclusive, unbreakable bond. He would be tied to her for the rest of his days—or until her death, should that come sooner.
One sip and he would crave no one else.
He would always feel Melena in his blood, even if they were apart. Even if miles or entire countries separated them.
One sip and there would be no other Breedmate for him, even if he drank from another woman with the mark after his connection was formed with Melena.
And if she drank from him in exchange, their bond would be a complete circle. Sustaining. Eternal. Unbreakable, except by death.
Melena held her breath, suddenly understanding the full impact of what she was inviting. Lazaro Archer, one of the eldest, most formidable Gen One Breed males in existence, his body pressed against her from breast to ankle, his enormous fangs bared and poised over her carotid.
And he wanted her.
Every muscled inch of him was coiled with power, all of it at the razor’s edge of breaking. Desire burned in his eyes—desire for her body and for the vein that throbbed so madly near his mouth. Heat and rigid strength pulsed where his pelvis ground so demandingly into her abdomen.
He was feral and wild and nearly unhinged...and she had never known anything hotter in her life.
“Damn you for making me want you,” he muttered thickly. His searing breath skated across her electrified skin like a lick of flame. “Damn you for making me want this...”
She heard his brief inhalation. Felt his head descend, his lips and tongue sealing over her skin. Then she felt Lazaro’s bite.
Sharp.
Deep.
Irrevocable.
CHAPTER 9
The first hot rush of Melena’s blood over his tongue slammed into him like a freight train. Warm, rich, potent. And laced with the sweetest trace of caramel and dark, ripe cherries—her Breedmate blood scent, a fragrance that had tempted him from the moment he’d first encountered it. Now that scent would call him as surely as a divining rod seeking a spring of cool, pure water.
He would feel her in his blood, everything she experienced most intensely would now echo in his veins. Her joy, her sorrow, her fears. Her hungers. Melena owned him now.
The bond he’d just activated inside him was unbreakable. She had been a distraction to his mind, will, and body before; now she would be his lifelong addiction.
And although better than a thousand years’ of logic strove to persuade him that Melena’s blood was a shackle he shouldn’t want and damned well didn’t need, the part of him that was purely male, elementally Breed, roared with the one word Lazaro never thought he would utter again: Mine.
He had known this feeling before. But what he had with Melena now was all the more intense for how desperately he’d tried to resist it. He groaned with possessive pleasure, knocked off his axis with a force that staggered him.
Amazed him.
Holy hell, it humbled him.
He drank more, starving for her. Twenty years of feeding from human blood Hosts went up in flames as he drew greedily from Melena’s tender vein. Her blood surged into his body, nourishing his cells as it wrapped silken bonds around his soul.
She was his. Even if his mind and will were reluctant to accept that fact, his body knew it with a ferocity he could hardly contain now. And where his desire for her had been consuming nearly from the moment he first laid eyes on her two nights ago, now it was a raging inferno that demanded its own satisfaction.
He wanted her savagely.
Needed her with a fury that left him shaking.
He realized in that moment that it wasn’t only the blood bond that lashed her to him. Melena would have owned him even if he hadn’t given in to his thirst for her tonight.
As unwelcome as that thought was—as unnerving as he found it, to think that she had obliterated his long-standing, iron resolve—it was a truth Lazaro could not deny.
And right now, he could not get enough of her.
* * * *
Oh, God, she was lost to this man.
She’d never known what it would be like to have a Breed male drink from her. Like so much where he was concerned, Melena hadn’t been prepared.
With her head dropped back and Lazaro suckling with long, hard tugs at her carotid, she dissolved into a state of pure, boneless bliss. She held him as he drank from her, cushioning his big body as he thrust against her where they stood.
Her veins were on fire. The core of her had gone molten as well. Each demanding pull at her throat sent arrows of pleasure and need shooting through every cell of her being.
When Lazaro suddenly stopped suckling her and swept his tongue over the wounds he’d made, Melena groaned in protest. “I need you naked now,” he muttered thickly against her throat. “I can’t wait much longer.”
Neither could she. “Yes,” she gasped, her hands still clutching at him as he began to sink down before her into a crouch. He made quick work of her slacks and panties, baring her to him with the clothing pooled at her feet. On a low growl, he moved in and kissed each hipbone, then descended farther, burying his face between her thighs. “Oh, God...”
His tongue cleaved her folds, hot and wet and hungry. In long, knee-weakening strokes, he lapped and suckled, then kissed and nipped, wringing a moan from her as he drew her clit into his mouth and teased it toward a frenzy. She felt his teeth graze her sensitive flesh, felt the sharp tips of his fangs getting larger as he feasted on her with ruthless abando
n.
She was quivering with hard need, on the verge of orgasm already, as he slowly kissed his way back up her body. With a deep, rolling growl, he stripped off her sweater and bra, then tossed them aside to gaze on her nakedness with burning amber eyes. Her blood stained his sensual lips a duskier hue, making his diamond-white fangs stand out in stark contrast.
He had never looked more dangerous or inhuman...nor more preternaturally beautiful.
“Lazaro,” she sighed, her voice feathery, as unsteady as her legs. That sigh became a moan as he lavished her breasts and nipples with his hands and mouth, tongue and teeth.
He muttered her name in a fevered, animal-like rasp that sent her blood surging with even greater pleasure and arousal. He needed her now, as much as she needed him. On a curse he released her nipple and drew back to shuck his pants and shirt. He stood before her like an otherworldly god.
Magnificent. Terrifying. And hers.
Melena reached down between their bodies to grasp the jutting length of his cock. His shaft more than filled her hand, thick and warm and pulsing with strength. He purred deep in the back of his throat as she stroked him, then seized her mouth in a wild kiss. She could taste herself on his tongue, her blood and juices an erotic sweetness that only made her burn even more for him. She stroked him harder, craved him with a desperate ache that demanded to be filled.
“I can feel your need in your blood, Melena,” he rasped against her lips. “It’s alive in me now. So fucking intense. Everything you feel this strongly, I will feel too.” He flexed his hips, his shaft surging even more powerfully within the tight circle of her fingers. “I need to be inside you. Put me there.”
She obeyed, guiding him into the slick cleft of her body. He drove home on a savage groan, the fierce thrust making her cry out in pleasure. He gave her more, slamming in hard and urgently, his lack of restraint sending her own control spiraling away. She clawed at him as he fucked her against the wall, orgasm roaring up on her in a shocking wave of sensation.
