by Stacy Gail
And love it.
With a renewed grip on his straining patience, Kyle returned his mouth to hers. He teased her tongue with his own while he circled her opening with two fingers, before inserting them as deeply as he could, bringing the heel of his hand hard up against her most sensitive core. Her moan, caught in his mouth, nearly broke his will in two even as it made him greedy to wring more sounds from her. He began to stroke her in a slow but relentless rhythm until her legs opened wide, inviting him in while her hips twitched in an obvious hunger that was becoming too intense for her to be still. His own insatiable desire raged like an expanding storm, tightening the muscles in his lower region until the sweet crush of it threatened to push him over the edge. With each insistent throb he grew harder, the sensitized tip of his manhood pulsing with the need to fill her emptiness. Without mercy he ground the heel of his hand into her cleft, intoxicated by the twitching of her thigh muscles even as they moved to grip him in an embrace that wordlessly begged him to take all she had to give.
Delicious flashes of bliss surged and waned as her restlessly rocking pelvis rubbed against his hardness, clouding his mind with a frenzied fever to capture that elusive sensation and wallow in it. With her soft gasps a symphony of building euphoria in his ears, he inched closer to the edge of no return even as he drew his fingers from the hot clutch of her body.
She cried out her protest. “Kyle—”
“Keep saying it.” Capturing her upper lip between his teeth, he sucked hard on it even as he slid the pulsing tip of his erection into her. The slick chamber closed around him in a welcoming embrace, so magnificently hot he almost came right there at her entrance. “Say it like I mean everything to you, like I’m the center of your universe, and I’ll give you more than you’ve ever dreamed.” Just to make sure he had her attention, he positioned his hand on her lower back.
Her desire-drugged eyes widened in instant understanding before excitement lit them from within. “Yes. Kyle, yes, don’t stop this time, please.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” Deeply grateful for her adventurous spirit, he rolled his hips to enter her fully while simultaneously focusing a tiny amount of his energy to excite the sacral nerve cluster. The wild shock of pleasure feeding into her spinal column coupled with the urgent thrust and retreat rhythm he set up, sent her rocketing over the edge. Her scream of agonized rapture sang like a miracle in his ears, her head straining back against the riser on which it rested while her body bowed and bucked in a frenzy that both thrilled and humbled him. His cries joined hers as the delicate muscles around his rock-hard flesh clenched until he thought he might die. It was so good, so right to be joined with her in an airless world of sensual perfection, coiling deeper and deeper into the very core of him and not letting go...
Ecstasy hit, a savage supernova of transcendent bliss so intense it blanked out everything. Like a wild man he thrust all the way to his hilt, straining to bury everything that he was into her, and as the wet heat of his release flowed he knew only an enveloping sense of profound satisfaction.
Still joined, he lifted her now-limp body and moved up the remainder of the stairs to the bed with a speed he no longer needed to hide from her. When her back touched the sheets she stirred, her eyes slitting open in a hazy kind of way that twisted him inside out.
“Bed?” She sighed the word. It sounded like it took the last of her strength to do so.
“Bed. We’ll stay here awhile longer.” He brushed a strand of hair off her damp brow, then kissed her there. Someday, if the world didn’t end, he’d take the time to kiss her everywhere. “Go on and sleep, love.”
She sighed again, warm and pliant beneath him before she shook her head. “You’re not going to distract me with sex forever, Kyle. We need to go back to Miami tonight.”
“Who says I’m doing that?”
“You don’t even realize how transparent you are, do you?” She brushed her lips along his jawline in a tender touch that almost unraveled him completely. “At least in this. Everything else...”
“Don’t think about everything else.” He hiked her legs up until she had her ankles crossed at the small of his back. “Feel how perfectly we fit together. That’s all that matters.”
“No.” The floaty tone dissipated, and when he looked down he groaned inwardly at the sharp glitter returning to her dark eyes. “What matters is that we’re on the edge of the end. Sexing it up won’t change that. And it won’t change the fact that you’re not the man I thought you were, and if we don’t head back while there’s still time, you’re really not the man I thought you were.”
He muttered a curse before bringing her hands over her head, pressing them into the mattress as he locked gazes with her. “You know exactly who I am. I’m the man who will do whatever it takes to keep you alive and well. Remember how reckless you were when you wanted to get Man-Baby?”
She blinked, apparently bewildered at the conversation’s sudden swerve. “Reckless? Me?”
“Admit it, Sparkle—you worked in a dangerous cesspool in North Miami for a week, all alone and without telling anyone what you were up to, just to get that guy. For the money, yes, but I’d be willing to bet you went that far because that worthless bastard’s self-serving actions offended you in a deep and visceral way. And I can’t blame you. I felt the same.”
Some of the outrage in her expression trickled away, and her grudging nod gave him all the answer he needed. “I still don’t see what your point is.”
“My point is that I can read you like a book. Dantalion’s offended you. So here I am willing to make another bet—that he offended you so much you’d like to get back at him any way you can, and to hell with the danger of taking on a demon. That’s part of the reason you’re so hot to get back to the city, don’t deny it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Well, well. Even if I don’t know the real you, you’ve obviously had plenty of time to get to know the real me, haven’t you? But then, that’s to be expected since I never pretended to be something I wasn’t.”
He sighed. “Nikita—”
“Look, can you blame me for wanting to get that monster? At the very least I can help track him down. I am the best bounty hunter in all of South Florida, after all.”
“Second best. I made more money than you last year.”
“I’m better at finding jumps, you stupid cabrón!”
“The point is, when you get personally offended, you get reckless. I don’t know how to stop you from haring off like some crazy-ass unguided missile, except for one way.”
He couldn’t blame her for the wariness that narrowed her eyes. “And what would that be?”
“You know what they say—if you can still walk after a night of sex, you’re not doing it right. I’m going to tire you out in the best way imaginable.”
She stared at him, and he couldn’t tell whether she was excited or flabbergasted. “Really? That’s the plan you’ve come up with? My God, do you even listen to the words that come out of your mouth?”
“Not really, it slows my whole man-of-action process down.”
“You know this demon is here. We don’t have time for this.”
“We do, actually. Dantalion can’t get his final death without a proxy, and Paul Hardy is now too dead to make anyone else the same way. Nikita,” he went on when she swore a blue streak at him. “We’ll return to Miami in a couple hours, I promise, because you’re right—as long as Dantalion is here, there’s no place on earth that’s safe.” He moved his hips, his softening flesh once again lengthening within her, and before she could toss him off he reached a hand for her lower back. “I’ll tear him apart to make this world safe for you. But the one thing I can’t do is concentrate if you’re in the line of fire.”
“You don’t know that I will be.” But her tone was distracted, and he shivered in a delight he couldn’t deny when her hands caress
ed a path along his back. “After this, we go back. Understood?”
“We’ll go back when that no-walking thing has been officially achieved.” As he fed a gentle pulse of electricity into her and reveled in her feverish cry of ecstasy, he didn’t tell her that his stamina would far outstrip hers. If it made him an asshole or a control freak to do all he could to dissuade her from launching at Dantalion, a foe she couldn’t possibly take down, then so be it. He was a control-freak asshole. He could live with that. As long as Nikita stayed alive, he could live with anything.
Chapter Eighteen
She’d kill him. Absolutely kill him.
Nikita’s face tightened with a scowl as they drove through the early-morning streets, heading east on the MacArthur Causeway toward Miami Beach. Overhead, the rainy sky was barely lightened by the sun rising behind a thick veil of storm clouds. Every cell in her body screamed for sleep, and it hovered around the edges of her wavering consciousness with promises of sweet oblivion. Oblivion would be preferable, considering her body didn’t feel like her own. Her nerves still jangled in a strange state of overstimulation, as though Kyle had retrained them to think they were stuck in a perpetual orgasm. Damn him to hell, just the hum of the car was enough to make her catch her breath. So what if it was the best sex she’d ever had? So what if she’d lost count of how many times he’d had her screaming her pleasure and tearing the sheets into confetti with her bare hands?
That was one hell of a first. Cautiously she flexed her achy fingers in her equally achy lap. She still couldn’t believe she’d torn actual sheets apart. She could barely even hold onto the memory of it. All she could remember with any clarity was a shattering release he wouldn’t let her out of until...until...
Damn. Had that been the first time she’d lost consciousness? No, wait. That may have been the second time. Or the third...
Just her luck. Here she’d found the most perfect lover imaginable, with a magic touch that added new dimensions to the proven science of electro-erotic stimulation, right when the world was ending. Fate obviously had a sick sense of humor.
“Nikita. You awake?”
“Fuck off.”
“That means yes.” The growl of his souped-up muscle car’s engine competed with the rain spattering the windshield as he slowed for a turn off the causeway, with Miami Beach still in sight. “I can’t believe they rented a place out on Star Island. I guess they thought I was making a light-hearted joke when I told them a big-ass hurricane was barreling this way.”
“We’re headed to Star Island?” With tremendous effort, she lifted her head off the passenger seat’s headrest. “There’s nothing but super-mansions and people richer than God out there. Who are you meeting with, the Queen of England?”
“My friends have rented a property there for the time being. Nate, with his lady Ella, was the first to arrive, along with a Bostonian by the name of Menlo. I got a text as we were getting gas that Sara’s also arrived with her husband Gideon. I think Zeke and Kendall should be in town by now as well, but they were flying in all the way from San Francisco, so they’re probably trying to catch up on their sleep.”
“Sleep. I wish I was asleep.” She blinked groggily at the borrowed khaki shorts and T-shirt covering her body. A rope-style belt held the shorts up, but since the clothes were Kyle’s she was practically swimming in them. “These are the uh...the people like you, right? The Nephilim.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hands tighten on the wheel. “Right.”
“What was that I heard about you not wanting them to come here? Something about a rule they were breaking?”
“Ah. That.” To her surprise Kyle grimaced and shot her a leery glance. “There’s this pesky rule about the Nephilim congregating. Specifically, it’s actually about us not congregating. Ever. Are you sure you want to know about this? It’s kind of alarming.”
No force in the universe could have stopped her eye roll. “And the rest of this mess isn’t?”
“First off, you should know there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to the Nephilim,” he said, apparently not wanting to argue the point. Probably because she was right. “The first stems from the Old Testament, where the Nephilim were just sort of hanging out in the background—mentioned a couple of times as ‘heroes of old and men of renown.’ Nice guys. But they were still understood as, shall we say, the ultimate in unplanned pregnancies. Because they weren’t as God intended, almost all of them got wiped out in the Great Flood.”
“If the Nephilim weren’t part of the master plan, why were some of them spared? I mean, how does any deity overlook people who were as gigantic as, say, Goliath?”
Kyle shrugged. “Beats me. My buddy Zeke, a descendant of an angel of death, is convinced the survivors somehow managed to hide their presence from the celestial extinction event, but I’m not sold on that theory. Maybe some were spared so they could play the role of a last-resort ace in the hole—kind of like what we’re doing now. Or maybe it was a matter of a case-by-case judgment call, and my ancient ancestors were deemed to be about as threatening as a John Cleese silly walk. That makes sense to me, considering what the second school of thought is regarding the Nephilim.”
“Which is?”
“There’s another source of information on Nephilim. It’s called the Book of Enoch, and while it’s not a part of the Bible it was supposedly written at the same time. While it agrees there was once a race of angel-human hybrids going by that name, Enoch’s description of them is...” Again he grimaced, and he shifted in his seat as if his clothes were suddenly too tight. “Bad.”
She frowned. “Bad how?”
For a long moment his sigh was the only answer. “Monstrous. Evil. They were best described as spawns of The Fallen.”
“The Fallen?”
“Fallen angels.”
Okay, then. “I thought demons are what the fallen angels became.”
“Exactly. That’s why it’s assumed their progeny were destined to be evil, like their sires.” As they came to a stop at a guard hut at the entrance of Star Island, he slid her a searching glance. “That’s not me, Nikita. I don’t know which story is true, but you’ve got to know that’s not me. You know who I am.”
Before yesterday she’d thought she’d known him. A fun-loving beach bum and business rival who could eat his weight in fish tacos. All she knew now was that he took wicked delight in making her scream like a sex-maddened, sheet-shredding banshee. But then, he’d no doubt be happy to admit that to anyone who would listen.
That didn’t make him evil. She just didn’t know for sure what it did make him.
“So,” she said after Kyle gave their names to the guard at the gate, “I enjoyed the history lesson, but what does it have to do with that rule you mentioned?”
He lifted a shoulder as the window slid up with a push of a button. “According to legend, thousands of years ago the Nephilim gathered in one place and wound up being a bunch of dickheads to normal humans. Since they weren’t part of the plan to begin with, this bad behavior was the tipping point for the universe’s head honcho. So boom—a flood happened.”
“You mean...?” Wide-eyed, she pointed skyward as they headed into the exclusive island neighborhood, where celebrities and captains of international industry took refuge behind ornate walls and gates.
“In a nutshell, yeah.” Kyle slowed to a crawl on the deserted road so he could double-check the GPS for the address. “Because of this, scattering to the four corners of the earth and never again congregating has been a rule that’s been handed down from generation to generation. As far as I know, this is the first time in thousands of years a physical gathering of my kind has taken place. So, I guess you should know it’s entirely possible my fellow Nephilim and I are about to be destroyed for doing this. Oh cool, we’re here.”
“Oh cool?” Niki
ta’s jaw unhinged as he wheeled through an open-gated brick driveway belonging to a property surrounded by thick walls and lush, junglelike vegetation. She didn’t see the sprawling two-story Spanish-style mansion with its terracotta roof tiles, wrought-iron balconies, or the ornate fountain in the middle of the circular drive. She was too busy waiting for a bolt of lethal retribution to hammer Kyle out of existence.
That can’t really happen...can it?
That thought of heavenly retribution would never have occurred to her a day ago. Lots of things hadn’t occurred to her a day ago. Then her dead mother appeared, and she discovered there was far more to the world than she’d ever imagined. Anything was possible now. She shook her head, trying to clear the suffocating panic as they rolled past a luxury motor home and a professional-looking black satellite van and into an open slot in the garage. It didn’t help. It was hard to believe Kyle could suddenly be lost to her, this familiar stranger who now claimed he loved her.
Not that she believed him on that front. No way. Kyle had let her think she’d lost her mind when he knew the truth behind it, then tried to kill her via orgasm to make sure she was a malleable puddle of goo. Now here was another godawful surprise—he’d probably just driven himself to his own death. Were these the actions of a man in love?
Hell, no.
So, fine. There was no way he could love her. Nikita bit her lip hard, focusing on the pain to quell the urge to just sit there and bawl. She had no clue why he’d say such a thing when it so obviously wasn’t true. Nor did she understand why that hurt so much. She shouldn’t care one way or another. The only thing she should feel is betrayal at his many transgressions. And she did. But...
