But she was smiling at this guy. A friendly, open smile that Duke was pretty sure he’d never seen—at least not one he’d ever seen directed at his way.
“I’m sorry, Carter. It’s just been a long couple of days and with Duke being here . . . ”
“Hey, it’s not a problem.” Carter waved it off and focused on Duke again. “Ana doesn’t much like to talk about herself. Are you a friend? Family?”
Duke heard the unspoken question, even though it seemed to pass right over Ana’s head. She started up the walkway and said, “Duke’s a—”
“Friend,” he interjected, unsure exactly what she was going to say, although he could tell what this Carter guy wanted her to say—or rather, what he wanted her not to say.
Their eyes locked. Carter’s brows lifted and then he smiled, shook his head. “Well, I hope you enjoy your trip to Alaska, Duke. Ana, you have a nice night.”
As he headed toward the main house, Duke just barely resisted the urge to bare his teeth at the man. Shit, he’d gone and developed a possessive streak a mile wide. But then he looked back at Ana as she glanced over her shoulder at him. That look, the frown on her soft mouth, the sadness that seemed so much a part of her, was enough to drive the air out of his lungs. Her gaze met his, and then she looked away, heading toward her apartment.
Leaving him to stand there and stare at her. Brood. No. He hadn’t gone and developed a possessive streak when it came to her. He’d always had one.
Neal. Dominic. A half dozen other faces flashed through his mind. Some of the men had wanted her just on a physical level—like Neal. Use her, hurt her if he could, because she was just prey. Then some of them, like Dominic, had a more serious interest, but even that had put Duke’s teeth on edge.
He caught up with her just before she reached the door, standing close behind her as she opened it. He felt a pair of eyes on the back of his neck, and as he followed her into the apartment, he glanced back. Saw the landlord staring out a window and watching them. It was harder to suppress the snarl the second time around, but he managed it.
But once the door shut behind them, Duke didn’t bother suppressing anymore. He followed Ana through the apartment, staying just a breath behind her. She shot him a nervous look over her shoulder as she stopped, putting her purse and a duffel on the counter.
“What . . . ” Ana licked her lips. Her voice was a pathetic, embarrassing squeak and clearing her throat didn’t help at all. “Is something wrong?”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he dipped his head and nuzzled her neck. She hunched her shoulder and tried to ease away. “I need to take a shower, Duke.”
“Later,” he muttered, raking his teeth along her skin.
“Duke, I just left the gym. I’m hot, I’m sweaty—”
He brought up a hand and pressed it against her belly, urging her back against him. “You taste delicious,” he rasped. His voice was a low, hoarse growl and even if she hadn’t already been weak-kneed, that would have done it.
He nudged a leg between her thighs and rested a hand on her hip before slipping it down to toy with the hem of the skirted shorts she’d worn for her workout. He tugged it up and then grunted, straightening away. She could feel the heat of his gaze moving over as he studied her workout clothes.
She turned and rested a hand against his chest, but whatever she’d planned on saying dried up on her tongue as he went to his knees in front of her and leaned forward, pressing his mouth to her stomach. He made quick work of the shorts and under a minute, he had her standing in front of him wearing nothing but the sport tank. “If I hadn’t been here, would you have eaten with him?” he asked, his voice harsh.
Dazed, Ana blinked and stared down at him. “Huh?”
“Your landlord. Were you going to eat with him?”
She frowned. Tried to think. Eat. Landlord . . . oh. Yeah. Carter. Dinner. Yeah, she remembered. Blood rushed to her cheeks and she tried not to squirm as he lifted his head and stared up at her. “I don’t know. Probably not. He likes to talk too much.”
“Talking can be a total waste of time. Better things to do with my mouth.” Then he proved it, leaning in, pressing his mouth against her and licking her.
Ana slapped her hands against the counter behind and braced herself. Her knees wobbled, threatened to give and she locked them. He growled at her and pushed her thighs wider.
“Duke, I’m going to fall.” Her head spun and she clutched at the counter.
“I won’t let you fall,” he muttered against her. “Wanna taste, Ana. Fuck, you’re sweet . . . ”
He lapped at her flesh like a cat, tonguing her clit and then sucking on it. True to his word, when she wobbled on her feet, he caught her hips in his hands and steadied her, easing her back and up onto the counter. She slumped backward, her head banging against the cabinet at her back, but she didn’t care. Curling her fingers into his hair, she stared down at him and shuddered as he parted her flesh with his tongue and then pushed inside.
She cried out, heat unfurling through her, licking at her flesh, drawing her body tight, tighter. “How sore are you?”
She flinched as he circled her entrance with one rough fingertip, pushing just a little inside.
He pulled his hand back and then pressed his mouth to her. “Still sore, baby . . . I’m sorry . . . ”
He kissed her. Soft. Gentle. Teasing. Pushing, working her closer and closer, using nothing but his tongue and his lips. She shuddered, moaned. Fisted her hands in his hair as she rocked and wiggled and moved against him. “Please, please, please, please . . . ” she whimpered, barely even aware she was talking.
Duke growled against her flesh and caught her clit between his teeth. Tugged gently.
She saw stars. Real? Imagined? Who knows? Slamming her head back against the cabinet, she bit her lip to keep from crying out as she came. Duke remained between her spread thighs, licking and lapping at her flesh until she finally sagged backward. Then he stood and wrapped his arms around her, tucked her up against him.
He was still fully clothed. Jeans. T-shirt. Through the denim, she could feel his cock, throbbing and hard, pulsating against her. “What about . . . ?”
“You’re sore,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her shoulder.
Yes. She was. “I’m not that sore,” she said, reaching between them and running the back of her hand over his erection.
“You would be.” He went to pull away.
His breath hissed out between his teeth as she slipped her fingers inside the waistband of his jeans. “Ana . . . ”
She pulled her hand back and inched down off the counter. Holding his eyes, she reached for the waistband of her tank and stripped it off. It fell to the floor as she went to her knees in front of him. His eyes flashed, the pale gray swirling, glowing.
As she unzipped his jeans, he growled. When she leaned and pressed her lips to the rounded, blunt tip of his penis, he groaned.
When she licked on him, sucked on him and fumbled her way through, he threaded a hand through her hair and guided her until she found her rhythm.
“Fuck, that’s sweet . . . damn it, Ana . . . fuck, your mouth . . . yeah . . . ”
He muttered, growled and groaned, talking her through, although it reached a point to where his words became too rough, too guttural for her to understand them.
When he came in her mouth, he made a sound caught between a shout and a growl.
Then he sank down to the floor in front of her, pulled her close and purred.
“YOU purred,” she said an hour later over a haphazard meal of boxed macaroni, sandwiches, salad and pudding cups. Blood rushed to her cheeks as he glanced up at her over the rim of a glass and grinned.
That smile had a decidedly feline slant to it. His lashes drooped low over his eyes and he lowered the glass, leaned over the narrow counter that separated them and covered her lips with his. “You stroke a cat the right way, he’s gonna purr,” he teased, licking her lower lip. “You can make me purr any day
of the week, darlin’.”
He settled back on the stool and she focused on her sandwich, but her mouth was so damned dry, she might as well have been eating sawdust. She was starving, she realized, but even though she had already plowed through half the sandwich, it had no taste. It eased the ache in her belly, and that was enough.
Starving, and thirsty. She went through two glasses of iced tea before the thirst slaked and glanced up to find Duke watching her with a grin. Self-consciously, she touched her fingers to her lips. “What, do I have mustard on my chin or something?”
“No . . . you’re smiling.” His smile faded. He didn’t move, but somehow everything about him changed. Went dark and grim. In a level, flat voice, he said, “You smiled at that guy earlier and I wanted to punch him.”
“Guy? What guy?”
Duke jerked his head toward the window. Through the blinds, she could see the lights from Carter’s house. “Your landlord.”
She blinked. “Why did you want to punch Carter?”
“Because you smiled at him.” He wasn’t looking at her.
He was staring at his hands, she realized, flexing them, clenching them into fists and then relaxing them again. Over and over.
“You don’t smile much, Ana,” he said softly. His gaze cut to hers and he added, “At least, not around me.”
Ana squirmed on the barstool. “I . . . ”
Shaking his head, he said, “You don’t need to say anything or explain it. I know why you don’t smile. Or at least I think I do. You don’t feel safe. You feel too guilty. Or you don’t feel like you should let yourself be happy—even long enough to smile.” He waited half a beat and then asked, “So which is it? Or is it all of those reasons?”
Those gray eyes, they saw too much. Even if he didn’t have a witch’s ability to feel or sense emotions, even if he didn’t have any telepathy or the mental gifts a lot of vampires had, he saw too much. Tucking her chin against her chest, she focused on her plate. Her sandwich was gone, she realized, absently. No, not just the sandwich, but all of her food. The sandwich, the bland macaroni and cheese that he’d jazzed up a little with some canned tomatoes and red chilies and extra cheddar, her salad and the pudding cup. Her belly was nice and full, satisfied. It wasn’t sitting like a stone in her belly, either.
“So which is it, Ana?”
There was nothing accusatory in his voice, but still, she felt defensive, wrapping her arms around her middle and fighting the urge to get up, walk away. She hated confrontation. “I’m sorry.”
He cocked a brow at her. “For what . . . not smiling at me? People smile when they are happy. You and me, we haven’t exactly had a whole lot of chances to be happy around each other, have we?”
“Duke . . . ”
He slid off the stool and came to stand behind her as she fumbled for words, not even sure what she wanted to say.
“Maybe we should go ahead and have this out.” He laid his hands on her shoulders and from the corner of her eyes, she could see them flex, then felt them curl and tighten. “We both got shit inside us that we need to get rid of. If I want to see you smiling at me instead of your fucking landlord, we need this out of the way.”
He turned her around on the barstool and she felt the weight of his stare bearing down on her. She didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to hear whatever he had to say—it was going to hurt—
A long-fingered hand cupped her chin and he tipped her head back. “I don’t like your methods, Ana. I don’t like how you let a monster use you.”
She flinched even as he stroked a thumb over her lip. Yeah. It was going to hurt.
But . . . it didn’t. Instead of yelling at her, instead of demanding a damn thing from her, what he did was dip his head and nuzzle her neck as he whispered, “But part of me understands why you did it. You wanted to protect Brad, and you wanted to live. I’m a big fan of surviving myself, so even if I don’t care for the route you chose, I can understand it.”
She blinked, fighting the tears that burned in her eyes. She gulped, trying to breathe past the knot in her throat. He curled a hand over the back of her neck and kissed her while she sat there, too frozen to move, because if she moved, she was going to shatter. Splinter into a million pieces.
“You should hate me for what I did.” Her hand shook as she reached up and traced the scars on his chest through his T-shirt. She didn’t have to see the scars to know where they were—the pattern was emblazoned on her mind. She saw it when she tried to sleep and her dreams were plagued by the blood he’d shed. Blood he’d shed because of her cowardice. “You could have died. I know that. I knew it even when I took you to her that you could die. But Brad . . . ” Unable to find the right words, she just whispered, “You should hate me.”
He reached up and curled a hand over hers, pressed it flat against one of the scars. She could feel the ridged flesh under the cotton.
“Yeah. And I figure I would have died if you hadn’t gotten it into your head otherwise. We know what Cat wanted with me. Until she knew about my connection to Kendall, all she wanted from me was as much pain and blood as she could get before she got impatient and just killed me. You knew it was coming and so did I. You could have just stayed away and let her do what she wanted, but you didn’t.”
“Don’t make it sound like I was doing anything heroic, damn it. I chose to take you to her for a reason. She didn’t care if I brought her a mortal man, a vamp, a shapeshifter. She just wanted a man. I knew what you were, and I knew it before I went up to you in that bar. I didn’t figure it out after the fact or anything like that, even though I know that’s what Kelsey, Kendall and a bunch of people think. They’re wrong—I knew what you were the second I saw you. That’s why I chose you. I knew if you went missing, people would take notice.”
“People . . . as in my people. The Hunters,” he said slowly.
“Yes.” She wanted to hide. Instead she stared into his eyes and waited for the condemnation.
“Did you have any idea what might happen to you if I ended up dead?”
“Yes.” She almost told him she’d expected it to happen no matter what. But for some reason, she doubted that was the best thing to tell him right now.
“If Cat had found out . . . ” Duke stopped in midsentence and took a slow, deep breath. His eyes, glowing and hot, locked on her face and he shook his head. “That was a damned stupid way to get our attention. Why didn’t you just lay it out to me that night? If you knew what I was—”
“And leave Brad alone there?” Ana interrupted. She pressed against his chest. She needed to move, couldn’t hardly breathe. “I couldn’t do it that way—if I left him alone and didn’t come back one night, she would have hurt Brad.”
“She would have tried. Ana, that brother of yours is more capable than you think. Even back then he was.”
“He’s a kid,” she said, her voice cold and harsh. “Just a kid. I was supposed to take care of him and nothing was going to stop me.”
Her hands shook as she reached for the waistband of her tank-styled pajama top, shook so bad as she stripped it off it was a miracle she even managed it. Turning away from him, she gathered her hair in her hand and exposed her back. “You wanted to know about the scars. I’ll tell you. I got some of them because Cat wanted me aware of just what might happen if she ever suspected that I was trying to get help. Even in the most circumstantial way.”
She reached up and brushed her fingers over one of the marks higher up on her back, shivering as she remembered the pain. It hadn’t been the first time Cat had cut her, but it had been the worst. Worst, because she had threatened to do the same to Brad.
Ana shook as she remembered the pleasure she could feel coming off the vampire as Cat used the knife to draw blood. “I tried once, to get help. There was this guy, a werewolf, I think. Older, had a kind smile. Made me think of a big teddy bear. He was in the area and I snuck away from Cat, found him and talked to him. He wasn’t a Hunter, but I’d hoped he knew . . . ”<
br />
She stopped and took a breath. Shivering, she drew her shirt back on and turned to face Duke. “I’d hoped he could find a way to get word to somebody. Cat knew. I don’t know how. She was psychic, but I never really understood just what kind of psychic skill she had. It doesn’t matter, either. She knew what I’d done . . . and she tracked the man down that very night and killed him. Then she came back and made the first cut on my back. Every so often, she’d do it again and remind me that the scars on my back would seem like a paper cut compared to what she’d do to Brad.”
Duke was staring at her, his eyes unreadable. She could feel his anger though, humming just above her shields, scalding and hot. She licked her lips and took a deep breath, braced herself.
“Then one night, a few nights before we met, she had me bring a guy to her. She killed him. Right in front of me. And I knew I couldn’t keep doing it. I felt it when you and Kendall arrived. I made up my mind what I was going to do and I did it. I knew what could happen, to you. To me. But none of it mattered if it meant getting somebody there who could help Brad. Get him away from her before she got to him like she did to me.”
“She didn’t get to you, Ana.”
“Didn’t she? I brought you to her. I brought that other guy. Hell, I brought men to her just so she could screw them and feed from them—even if she didn’t really hurt them, it doesn’t make right. I knew how crazy she was and I still did it.”
“You did it for your brother, baby. To keep her from hurting him, from hurting you.” He pulled her against him.
She fought at first but then she sagged, letting him take her weight. “I knew you could end up dying, but I couldn’t let that stop me.”
“I know.” He nuzzled her neck, stroked a soothing hand down her back. “Shhhh . . . it’s okay.”
But Ana didn’t want him soothing her—she wanted him mad. She wanted him as mad about the choices she made as she was. Mad and disgusted at how weak she was. Shoving against his chest, she glared at him and said, “Okay? She could have killed you—I wouldn’t have been able to stop her. But it’s okay.”
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