“Not that it’s any of your business, but I feed differently these days… and not as often.”
“Define differently,” Kale pushed.
Kat glowered at him. “I feed off Jake at least once a month, and I supplement those feedings with human lovers twice a month.”
Kale couldn’t help it… he didn’t like hearing her refer to the humans she slept with as lovers.
“You don’t have sex with your Trow?”
“No,” she said quietly.
Kat lowered her gaze to the floor. She didn’t like talking to Kale about the men she invited into her bed. It shouldn’t matter, but it hurt her heart to tell him… not that he cared.
“You can’t sustain on sex with humans… not only twice a month.”
“I do just fine. I’ve survived this long.” She found the courage she needed to lift her gaze to at least look at his face, though she avoided eye contact. She was strong. She had to be, but something about this infuriating Immortal… something she couldn’t explain about him, called to her. Made her feel vulnerable and weak. His presence clenched at her heart and if she stared into those espresso orbs, the pressure would threaten her very existence.
“And let me guess, you were out looking for your next human tonight.”
Kat steeled herself as she answered, finding a little attitude to support her answer. “I’m due for a good romp in the sack, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Kale nodded. “Then you can feed from me,” he said flatly.
Kat stared at him, dumbfounded and a little scared at the thought. She couldn’t… she just couldn’t.
“No,” she answered, trying for the same flatness he’d had in his voice upon the offer.
“You don’t have many options right now and I can see how hungry you are.”
Kat’s nostrils flared… She really was hungry. She was moving towards him before she could think better of it. Her eyes remained like hard emeralds as she came within his reach. Kale moved quickly, pulling her into his lap.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked as she squirmed and attempted to get up.
He was too close—his body and scent too familiar.
Kale wrapped an arm around her waist as he answered, “We’re going to do this my way.”
It wasn’t right, he knew it, but he wanted to feel her against him. He’d longed for her and even if things weren’t the same, he wanted to do this for her. Part of him, the part he hated, wanted to remind her how well they had once fit. That at one time he was all she needed to be strong.
Fear and longing spiked in Kat as she asked him, “And what’s your way, Kale?”
He ran a finger down her cheek and clasped the back of her neck. “You need a real feeding. We were always good at this part… I think we can at least agree on that.”
Anticipation ran rampant through Kat’s body as Kale pulled her face to his. Their lips met in a stiff kiss before the familiarity of everything Kale wrapped around her. His lips parted and she melted into him; her tongue dancing at a frantic rhythm as need and hunger bit at the edges of her sanity.
This was different then all the feeds before… even different than the heat and need that had burned between them all those years ago. It was stronger—binding and heady. He tasted like heaven, sin, and pure pleasurable ecstasy. Satisfaction and a need for more of him hammered at her as she took in the power of his chi.
“Kale.” She groaned his name as she pulled her lips from his and dropped her head.
“What the fuck was that?” Kale muttered against her hair.
So he had felt too. The strength and need of something she couldn’t explain tying them together with a nearly tangible force.
Kat shook her head, lifting her face back to his. “I don’t kno—”
Kale didn’t let her finish as he crushed his lips back against hers. Kat ran her fingers through his onyx hair, pulling him closer while shifting her position to straddle him.
Kale ran a hand between them and pulled free the silk tie around her waist. The fabric fell open, revealing the flat, yet toned, planes of her stomach. The red silk caught only on the round mounds of her perfect breasts.
Kale slid a hand between her legs to cup her ass, lifting her and breaking the contact between their lips. With his free hand, he caressed her leg and pulled it over his shoulder.
“Kale,” she moaned, making him move fast to lift her other leg over his shoulder.
“My way,” he reminded her.
He wanted his lips between her legs. He wanted to taste her… he needed to taste her. His tongue needed to feel her soft skin, to caress her bundle of nerves as he drank in her sweet scent with each stroke of his tongue.
Cupping her ass with both hands, he lifted her to him, his tongue snaking out to circle her hypersensitive bud of nerves. He slid his hands further up her backside, catching Kats’ weight as she arched back. Her hands fell to the arms of the chair to help support her weight; though she knew full well she was in very capable hands. Kale could support her weight without breaking a sweat.
He was more talented then she had remembered, his piercing adding a level of pleasure she wasn’t quite prepared for. Each lave of his tongue was like fire over every fold of her most intimate parts. Kat lost control of her better judgment and simply fell into the searing pleasure each stroke spurred in her.
A long, low moan of his name pushed Kale to move his tongue faster over her clit, slipping his hand down her back to slip two fingers deep inside of her, letting her pleasure coat his fingers. Her climax shoved her into a dizzying orgasm prolonged by his persistent strokes against her seared flesh.
Not fully in control yet, Kat slipped her legs from Kale’s shoulders as he lowered her back down to his lap, his thumb taking over where his mouth had just been.
Kat grabbed his face, crushing her swollen lips to his, taking in his chi, tasting herself on his lips as she rode out the remaining spasms of her orgasm. The orgasm that had just wreaked havoc on her heart, body, and soul. She was sated, but wanted more. Yet her heart was going to get tangled and shredded in thorns of what could have been, what never truly was, and what it was now feeling.
She still loved Kale.
Pressing one last, lingering kiss to his lips, she pulled her robe tightly closed, pushed off him, and disappeared down the hall.
Chapter Seventeen
Kat fell against her door, her breath coming in shallow, unsteady breaths. Tears threatened, prickling in her emerald eyes.
It was not possible!
She pushed off the door and moved to the bathroom mirror. A gasp stifled the threatening tears. There staring back at her were glowing eyes—glowing, green eyes. She knew that intense feedings could cause the appearance of glowing eyes in Succubi and Incubi, but not like this. They were freaking green flashlights shining from her face.
It meant one thing as far as she knew. She opened the front of her robe to reveal the pale outline of a small infinity sign atop a pair of wings just below her left breast. She’d never seen a true mate marking, but from what she’d learned there were no two the same. However, she knew that they looked like tattoos and while this little mark was only an outline, she had no doubt that her true mate marking had just appeared on her skin and it meant just one thing.
Kat shook her head, glaring at her own reflection with eyes that had faded to their normal amount of shine.
She’d only been twenty-four when Kale turned her over to Darion. A year before her body would have even begun to call for her true mate. She was well within the range now. She had wondered from time to time why she hadn’t felt the call for her true mate—why she had never started her Mata—why she hadn’t struggled through a feeding frenzy.
Now she knew; the proof was staring her back in the form of a magical tattoo. She had already found her true mate all those years ago. And now all it took was one moment of weakness, one earth-shattering orgasm, for her body to recognize the man who was meant to be hers for eternity—a
man who had betrayed her and thrown her away.
It was ridiculous and crazy, but she shed her robe, grabbed a washcloth and scrubbed her skin nearly raw in an attempt to remove the mark.
This could not really be happening to her. Life could not be this cruel!
Kat nearly leapt from her skin when Kale called to her from the other side of her bathroom door.
“Kat? Are you alright in there?” Kale asked, a soft quality to his voice that she wasn’t convinced he still possessed.
“Go away, Kale,” she said, trying to hold back the fear and anguish she was feeling.
“I don’t think so, Kitten. We need to talk.”
Grabbing her robe and cinching it tightly to her body, she threw the door open and glowered at him.
“I told you not to call me that,” she all but screamed at him.
Kale didn’t flinch at her anger. He merely arched his brows and smirked at her.
"Not quite the emotions I’d expected from you, usually a good romp calms you… and I know that was good.”
He knew he wasn’t the only one who thought it was beyond good. He nearly lost it himself out there.
“Fuck you, Kale,” she snarled. “Get the hell out.”
Kale continued to stare at her, surprised, but only slightly angered, by her attitude.
“For a brief moment out there in that living room, I swore I glimpsed some of that Succubus I used to know. What happened to that carefree, beautiful creature? Was it really all an act back then? Where’d the Kat I used to know go?”
“An act?” she scoffed. “No, that Kat loved you but she was beaten and raped out of me,” Kat said, not making eye contact as she pushed past him in a hasty retreat out of her room.
Kale stood dumbfounded. He may have been angry, even furious at one point, with Kat, but he had held his belief that she had a least cared a little. But he was nowhere near prepared for her to admit she had once loved him. Even more so, he was murderous and beyond incensed to think anyone had believed that they had the right to touch her in any way.
Kale turned to follow her. It was time all their truths came out. He found Kat standing at the open front door, her head hung in defeat as she was held up by a wall of magic.
“Kat,” Kale said her name softly as he resisted touching her, his hand hovering over her shoulder. “We need to talk.”
“Why do you care now? Fifteen years later, Kale. I was doing fine; I was coping.” Her words were stifled by the lump forming in her throat.
She was serious. Fifteen years was a long time and though she had been free of the torture that came with being Darion’s slave for many years now, she had yet to say it out loud… she had been raped on a regular basis and had been beaten nearly as often.
Kale didn’t know what to say without sounding like the bastard she had accused him of being.
Uh, because I want answers. Mmm yeah, that would go over well. She could add selfish ass to the list of insults to throw at him.
Kale turned her so she faced him, lifting her chin and brushing her wavy blonde locks off her tear-streaked cheeks.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked with so much emotion it ripped at Kale’s very soul.
“Do what?” Kale asked, his thumbs moving over her pink cheeks.
“Give me to that monster.”
Kale stared at her, his thumbs stalling on her beautiful face. Her high, striking cheekbones, her full lips, and doe eyes begging for him to explain something he didn’t even understand.
He didn’t know what she meant. Did she think he hadn’t lost it when he was told she’d been executed? He didn’t understand what she had expected him to do.
“I don’t understand, Kat. You went to Darion.” Kale spoke the almost accusatory statement, and yet it felt wrong. Something was scratching at his memories. Some things just did not add up and were nagging at him—Kat’s anger towards him, her telling the Trow to let him go in that alley, the fear in her voice that very same night, the fact that she was now living in the Human World—none of it truly added up. What web of lies had been woven around them?
“Kat, what happened that day? Where were you when we were supposed to meet at the lake?”
“What?” she asked, confusion mixed with a hint of anger.
“What happened? I went to the lake to meet you. Where were you?” Kale asked softly.
“Darion—he had me in the dungeon.” She seemed to be finding her strength again. The tears had stopped and her posture was more erect then slouched in defeat as it had been.
Kale’s gaze hardened, even he could feel it… She was with Darion when she was supposed to be meeting him. Anger wanted to rise in him, but he was going to get to the bottom of everything that had happened that day.
“Did you go to him and tell him that I was waiting for you?”
Fire flashed behind her eyes and slowly turned to something altogether different. “Of course not! Why would you ask me that?”
“Because a Pixie working for Darion met me at the lake instead of you.”
“Why would a Pixie come looking for you?”
“To lead me onto Darion’s land so he could capture me.”
Kat’s head started shaking. “No, no, Rowan and you went to Darion and told him that I bewitched you.”
It was Kale’s turn to shake his head, though much slower than Kat had. She was nearly manic while he was calm. The light of reality was blinding him. The thoughts he’d shared with Cree were apparently right on the money… If Darion was searching for Succubi, Kat was the perfect trophy for him. Darion had probably known about them for some time before he took her and put his plan into action. Kale took a deep breath—knowing he would need to remain calm or he was going to burn the Dark Fae leader down.
“No, Kat, Rowan and I did not go to Darion.” Sadness infused his words. “I went to your home, where Darion and his men were waiting for me, at which point they took me. Rowan and my brothers came for me. Rowan convinced Darion to release me.”
Kat stared at him, searching for any sign of deception in his words. She searched for a hitch in his tone, a flicker of his gaze, or a line of trickery on his face. There just simply wasn’t any. He wasn’t lying; he wasn’t covering up. He was bearing the truth he had spoken of earlier. But Darion wasn’t known to simply let someone he had tossed in his dungeon go.
“Darion let you go? Just like that?” There was accusation in her tone and she needed to hold on to it.
They were both running a gauntlet of emotions.
“Rowan promised a war if he did not.”
“You thought I set you up?” she asked softly.
Kale felt every bit the bastard she had called him. He had denied the words Darion spoke at first, the words that meant his Kitten had deceived him, but over the years he had no choice but to move on and accept what was.
“Yes,” he final admitted.
“I thought you knew better, but you were never able to look past my being Dark Fae—my alliance was always in the back of your mind.”
Kat grasped his wrist and pulled his hands from her face. “It was never going to work,” she whispered so softly he could barely hear her.
“Kat, wait,” Kale said as she moved past him.
“No, Kale, just leave it alone.”
“Let me pose one question to you.” She stopped, her back to him as he continued. “You believed Rowan and I went to Darion and turned you in, right?”
Kat closed her eyes. Why had she been so stupid? Why had she believed anything her King had told her? She should have known better. She should have gone to Kale, to find the truth after she had escaped. But she hadn’t. She had believed the lies she’d been told about the man she had claimed to love. With her back still to him, refusing to turn and look at his stunningly handsome yet still baby face, she nodded slowly.
“Seems neither of us had enough faith in the other,” he said before heading out the front door.
Chapter Eighteen
Lothar sat acros
s from Jake, the Trow. His fingers tapped in a repeated, dull rhythm. He was bored. The only words Jake would say were, ‘I want to talk to Katarina’. They’d been here for nearly four and half hours and that was all they had gotten from him.
“I want to talk to Katarina,” Jake said again.
Lothar nodded. “Yes, I know, and I told you to answer my questions and then you can talk to her.”
Jake sneered at him. “And I told you I wouldn’t answer any of your questions until I talked to her.”
“Then we’re at a standstill. So now the question is—what to do with you… either return you to Darion or you can become a guest of the Light.”
Jake’s eyes showed fear for the first time in the hours he’d spent in Hawk’s Eye’s ‘conference room’.
“I’ll go out on a limb and guess you don’t want to go back to Darion,” Lothar said with a smile. “I’ll be back.”
Cree smiled as he watched Lothar through the one-way mirror.
“Nicely done,” Cree said to Lothar as he joined him in the observation room.
“Did you see the fear in his eyes when I mentioned Darion?”
Cree nodded. “Yeah, I imagine you could feel it rolling off him.”
“It was tangible in there. He’s afraid of his leader.”
“It’s not surprising.” Cree crossed his massive arms across his chest. “Darion views defection as the highest form of insult—any Dark Fae that is here without his express permission is asking for severe punishment.”
“There’s something about this guy. I don’t know, Cree. I didn’t feel anything but genuine concern and then fear from him. He’s worried about Kat and he’s afraid of Darion.”
“I agree,” Cree stated.
“Do you see anything—any info you’d like to share?”
Cree sighed. “It’s a weird thing. When it comes to anything concerning Katarina, I’m blind to it.”
“Still nothing?” Lothar said, shaking his head as he watched Jake sit like a stone statue on the other side of the mirror.
“Nothing. I saw Izzy coming. I saw the issues with Esperanza coming. I see random things in our day-to-day lives. Hell, I know secrets about all of you that I’d rather not be subjected to.” He chuckled. “But Katarina and all things concerning her are just beyond my reach.”
Immortal Craving: Immortal Heart Page 7
