“Look at me, Josephine,” Cruce commanded, baring his teeth as pleasure rippled through him.
Sophie raised her head and met his eyes again.
“You are mine,” Cruce said, slamming her down harder, sinking deeper into her heat. “Mine. My mate. Say it!”
“Yours,” she rasped through ragged breaths. She clenched his arms, and her sex tightened around his shaft. “Oh God, I’m going to—Cruce!”
He watched her face as she reached her peak, watched as bliss overcame her features. She trembled in his arms, her inner walls quivering and tugging his cock farther into her body. Heat poured from her and ran over his thighs, her heightened scent reminding him of the delicious flavor still lingering on his tongue; he’d taste it again before the night was through.
Immense pressure built within him, too powerful to contain. Now that he had her, the sensations were too much.
He would never get enough.
A maelstrom of pleasure ripped through him, tensing all his muscles at once. Her body had given freely of her life force when they’d come together before; this time, it demanded something of him, and he relented to its demands with a roar. His hips bucked as his cock pumped streams of hot seed into her.
Sophie cried out, scraping her nails over his back. Her body shuddered with another climax, drawing out more of his essence. Cruce’s skin crackled with electric thrills; her sounds and reactions pushed his need ever higher, made him crave ever more of her. He was not yet satisfied. He had to claim her, to make her his fully.
Cruce pushed her back down onto the ground and swiftly followed, never breaking their connection. He braced himself over Sophie and drove his cock into and out of her, setting a wild, frantic pace. The sensation was so powerful it hurt. His harsh, guttural grunts mingled with her high-pitched moans to punctuate each thrust.
She threw her hands up to his chest and raked his skin, leaving delightful trails of fire in the wake of her fingertips. She arched and writhed beneath him, matching his frenzy, as feral as any of the creatures of his forest.
Their pleasure combined into something overwhelming. It stole Cruce’s breath and made him curl his claws into the ground as it flowed through his veins to suffuse every fiber of his being. He panted through bared teeth, each inhalation drawing her scent in anew, ensuring that all his senses were awash with her.
When Sophie came, she screamed his name into the night. Cruce followed; as his seed exploded inside her again, he threw his head back and roared the name of her heart, of his heart — Sophie — proclaiming to his forest that the lord had found his lady. That he had given himself to her as much as he’d claimed her as his own. That despite his curse, he’d taken what was rightfully his.
He growled softly as they came down from the heights of their joining, the tiny, involuntary movements of their hips sparking fresh pulses of pleasure and coaxing everything from him a little at a time. Finally, the blinding haze of desire faded enough for Cruce to regain control of himself. He brushed locks of her auburn hair from her face and looked into her eyes, admiring their gentle glimmer in the silvery moonlight.
In all his existence, he’d never seen anything as beautiful as his Sophie was at that moment, aglow in the aftermath of their lovemaking. He settled a hand over her heart. Her tender, still-healing, mortal heart. It beat strongly beneath his palm.
“Cruce,” Sophie whispered reverently.
“Josephine,” he whispered back possessively.
She smiled at him, reaching up to place a hand on his chest. Her eyes shone with a reflection of everything he felt within himself — the unspoken emotions, the depth of their connection, the feeling that this moment, this joining, had been fated since the beginning of time. Whatever had drawn them together was unimportant, though; they had each other now, and that was the only thing that mattered.
“What the fuck?” said a male voice from behind Cruce.
Sophie stiffened, sucking in a sharp breath. The light in her eyes dimmed and took on a terrified cast.
That was sign enough for Cruce to know who had just arrived.
Snarling, Cruce withdrew from her, leapt to his feet, and spun to face the human.
The man — Tyler — staggered backward, eyes wide. He dipped a hand into his pocket and withdrew a dark object. A gun. He pointed the barrel toward Cruce.
Immediate, all-encompassing fury roiled within Cruce. This was the human who’d done so much harm to Sophie. The human who had scarred her physically and emotionally. The man who’d nearly killed her. And now he was here, on this night — the one night that Cruce had with her, when she’d finally overcome what Tyler had done to her and begun living again — with a weapon.
Sophie stood up behind Cruce, and he extended an arm to keep her there, staring at Tyler with teeth bared and brows low. At any other time, dispatching Tyler would’ve been simple. But this was the night that Cruce was mortal. It was the queen’s cruel little tease — a night every twenty-or-so years during which Cruce could end his suffering, knowing that when the sun rose, he’d revert to his shade form and be doomed to two more decades of his curse with no escape.
Tyler’s eyes flicked to the side, and Cruce knew he’d seen Sophie. She was pressed against Cruce, shaking in terror, her warm, rapid breaths flowing against his bare flesh.
“I come to bring you home and find you fucking some…creature?” Tyler spat in disgust. When Sophie didn’t respond, he growled. “Answer me, Josie!”
“She does not answer to you,” Cruce growled back, stepping toward the man.
“Stay the fuck back,” Tyler warned, raising the gun higher.
“You are not welcome here, mortal. Leave.”
Tyler scowled, his thick brows furrowing. “You think you can tell me what to do?” His lips twitched and pressed into a tight line just before he changed the angle of the gun and fired it. Sophie screamed.
Cruce staggered back slightly as pain unlike he’d ever known exploded in his thigh.
“Cruce,” Sophie breathed, placing her hands on his sides as though to steady him.
“Back the fuck up, Josie. Get away from that thing. Now,” Tyler said.
“No!” she cried; Cruce heard tears in her voice.
“No? Did you just tell me no?” Tyler kept the gun trained on Cruce, though he did not meet the forest lord’s eyes. “If you don’t move away from that thing right now, Josie, I’ll shoot it again.”
Cruce bared his fangs at Tyler. Fire blazed from the wound on his leg, but it only served to fuel his rage. The twenty feet of distance separating him from the man didn’t feel like much — he could close it quickly — but the gun complicated matters. If Sophie was hit…
“She does not answer to you,” Cruce repeated.
“Oh, she’ll answer to me. She’ll answer for every goddamned thing she put me through. Do you hear me, Josie? As soon as I get my hands on you—”
“You will not touch her!” Cruce snarled.
The gun went off again, sending a projectile into Cruce’s other leg. He grunted, and for an instant it seemed his knee was ready to buckle, but he would not fall to this human. Only one mortal could bring Cruce to his knees.
“No!” Sophie yelled, darting out from behind Cruce before his pain-delayed reaction could stop her. She positioned herself in front of him, arms splayed wide, her naked body a shield. “Don’t. Please stop, Tyler. Don’t do this,” she begged.
Cruce’s heart quickened, and his breath grew shallow. Even in this vulnerable form, his constitution was much greater than that of a human; if the bullets had been so damaging to him, what would they do to her? Ice pierced his chest and crept through his veins, colder than he’d ever felt even as a shade.
He’d only experienced this feeling once before, and then it had been fleeting and miniscule compared to what it was now.
Fear.
“You’re seriously going to stand there, bare-ass naked with his cum dripping from your cunt, and tell me to stop?” Tyler’s eyes narro
wed on Sophie. “You’re my wife. Mine!”
Cruce reached forward and placed a hand on Sophie’s shoulder, meaning to guide her behind him again, but her feet were planted firmly. Despite his lack of magic, he understood somehow that it was more her willpower than her physical strength holding her in place. He admired her for it as much as he cursed her foolishness.
“I’m not your wife,” Sophie said. “Not anymore. I’m his mate.”
“Mate,” Tyler echoed. He clenched his jaw and titled his head to one side, cracking his neck. “Come here, Josie.”
“Sophie,” Cruce said in a low, warning tone. The man standing before them was worse than the hunters who’d so cruelly killed so many birds; Tyler had taken the concept of love and twisted it into this.
“No. I’m not leaving him.”
“Come here,” Tyler repeated, “or I’ll blow its fucking brains out.”
Sophie’s body trembled under Cruce’s palm, but she kept her back straight and shook her head. “No.”
Why wouldn’t she just move? Why wouldn’t she keep herself safe?
Tyler’s face contorted, shifting through a series of convoluted, frustrated emotions. His nostrils flared, the cords of his neck bulged, and he tilted his head in the other direction. “Fine,” he finally said, aiming his gun at Sophie. “If you want to be a whore, you can die like one.”
The cold in Cruce’s blood suddenly expanded; it felt like countless needles stabbing him from within throughout his entire body. His oath was about to be broken. He’d sworn to protect her in his forest, to keep her safe, and the first true threat to have arisen since he gave her that word was going to be her end. And it was happening on the one night during which Cruce was vulnerable, the one night he was wholly disconnected from the senses that linked him to his forest.
The first night he was able to truly touch Sophie was also the night he was going to lose her.
Millennia of immortality blasted through his consciousness in a fraction of a second, filled with beauty and wonder, with contentment and sorrow, with the serenity and chaos of his domain. All of it paled in comparison to the ten days that had passed since he’d first seen Josephine Davis.
Grimacing, Tyler squeezed the trigger.
Cruce didn’t hear the boom; he moved without further thought, lunging forward and shoving Sophie aside to assert himself between her and Tyler.
Something heavy punched into his chest, halting his momentum. Tyler muttered something and fired twice more, producing new points of impact across Cruce’s ribcage.
Cruce glanced down. Dark crimson flowed from three holes in his chest, one of which was directly over his heart.
Despite his determination, his rage, his willpower, his legs refused to support his weight. His torso twisted as he fell, granting him full view of Sophie’s pale, anguished face. When she screamed his name, her voice sounded far-away.
Chapter 13
Sophie crawled toward Cruce’s fallen body. She ran her frantic hands over his face, repeating his name over and over, begging him to respond, commanding him to talk, to say something, anything. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she looked into his sightless eyes.
“No!” she wailed, pressing her forehead against his, shoulders quaking with her heart-wrenching sobs. “No, no, no, no. Cruce!”
She was oblivious to the blood, to the cold, to everything save her mate and the fading heat of the body he’d possessed for so short a time. Pain suffused her as her heart shattered. They hadn’t even had a full night together.
A different kind of pain flared on her scalp as Tyler grasped a fistful of her hair. She screamed and fought the pull, clutching desperately at Cruce; she couldn’t leave him, couldn’t let him go.
Tyler wrenched her head back, tugging her away from her mate.
Sophie grasped his wrist and battled his hold, seeking a way to escape him, to relieve the pain as he dragged her across the ground.
“Let me go, you son of a bitch!” she yelled, kicking her legs and digging her heels into the earth beneath her. Twigs and rocks scraped her bare flesh. The world around her darkened as they crossed into the shadows under the canopy, leaving the moonlight behind.
“Got quite a mouth on you since you left, Josie.”
“You killed him!” She slapped his arm.
Tyler ignored the blow, maintaining his pace. “Would have killed you, too, if it hadn’t pushed you. You made me that mad, Josie! You cheated on me with that…thing! Do you know how much it hurt to see that? To find my wife getting fucked in the dirt by some…animal?” He growled and tightened his fingers, sharpening the pain on her scalp. “Guess you have another chance to learn your lesson now. You can still get put back in your place. You seem to have forgotten who you really belong to. But I’ll show you. I’ll make you remember that I’m it for you.”
Gritting her teeth, Sophie reached higher and sunk her nails into his forearm, raking them downward as hard as she could.
“Fuck!” He released her and jerked his arm away with a hiss.
Sophie wasted no time; she scrambled to her feet and dashed away, ignoring the debris stabbing the soles of her feet. Her arms pumped at her sides and her breath sawed in and out of her lungs as she wove between the shadowed tree trunks. She just had to get back to the cabin.
Then she could even the odds.
A great weight slammed into her back and knocked her off her feet. She cried out before crashing to the forest floor face first, the air exploding from her lungs as something heavy fell atop her. Terror wrapped icy fingers around her heart.
Breath ragged, Tyler chuckled. “Do you really think you can run from me, Josie?”
He slid a hand around her, grasped her throat just under her jaw, and forced her head back. Sophie whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut.
“I’ll always find you and bring you home,” he rasped. The sour smell of alcohol washed over her. “Back to me. You know, you were easy to find once I knew where to look. Small town folk talk. I just needed to tell that nice old lady you were my wife, that I was back from the reserves and I couldn’t get hold of you, and she gave me directions to your house.” He pressed his face into her hair, inhaled, and groaned. “Do you know how much I missed you?”
Revulsion filled Sophie as he slipped his free hand under her to cup her breast and grinded his pelvis against her backside. She could feel his erection through his jeans.
He kissed her hair. “I might forgive you. Eventually. You’ll have to prove yourself to me, of course, and beg for forgiveness.” Withdrawing his arms, he pulled away from her for a moment before pressing a hand to her back, pinning her to the ground. He kicked her legs apart as something jingled.
He was unbuckling his belt.
“But right now, I need you, Josie. I need to…to undo this taint.” Tyler moved his hands to her hips.
Panic seized Sophie.
“No!” She kicked at him and clawed the dirt, struggling to drag herself away.
Her foot connected with yielding flesh, and Tyler grunted. She gained a few precious feet, but it wasn’t enough. He clamped his hand around one of her ankles in a viselike grip and dragged her back to him. She screamed, digging her fingers into the ground, but her strength couldn’t match his.
He flipped her onto her back and fell upon her, wedging his hips between her thighs. Sophie didn’t cease her struggles; she slapped and clawed at him, screaming all the while, though she knew there were no neighbors to hear her. She poured all her fear, pain, and hatred into her effort. She would not — could not — allow Tyler to do this. She couldn’t let him try to erase the last memory she had of Cruce.
She belonged to the Lord of the Forest, and she’d die before allowing Tyler to sully her again.
“Enough!” Tyler yelled into her face, capturing her flailing arms. He transferred them to one of his rough hands and pinned them to the ground. He swung his other arm downward, slapping her across the face. Her vision blurred as stinging pain exploded from her jaw to he
r temple, silencing her cries.
As he drew back to hit her again, a blood-curdling roar echoed through the forest, unlike anything she’d ever heard from man or beast. It was filled with pain, anguish, and rage. It sounded from everywhere and nowhere at all.
Somehow, Sophie knew what that sound was.
Tyler hesitated, tearing his gaze away from Sophie to scan the surrounding woods, face paling. “What the fuck was that?”
His distraction was enough to allow her to pull her hands free. She thrust her palms against his chest and shoved, but he barely budged. She didn’t allow that to deter her; after drawing in a deep breath, she screamed as loud as she could.
“Cru—”
Tyler clamped his fingers around her throat, cutting off her call, and turned his attention back to her with a glare. “Not. A fucking. Sound.”
A chill wind swept through the forest. Trees groaned, leaves rustled, and branches snapped. Tyler lifted his gaze again, eyes going wide. Keeping one hand on her throat, he reached around his back and drew his gun, leveling it at something outside Sophie’s view. He fired once, twice, and then released her to take the gun in both hands and stand up.
She twisted away, swinging her attention in the direction he’d fired. A large, dark shape was slowly advancing toward them, a shadow with long antlers and wisps of darkness flowing from it like a tattered cloak. Tyler fired several more shots at the figure until the gun clicked, dry-firing.
“Shit,” he spat.
The shadowy figure swayed to the side, disappearing into a tree.
Sophie turned to Tyler. He was fumbling with shaky hands to change the magazine in his gun. When the spare magazine slipped from his grasp, he bent forward, darting his hand out to catch it. Sophie didn’t waste a moment; she kicked his hand as hard as she could, knocking the firearm from his grasp.
“Goddamned bitch!” He fell upon her again and raised his fist. Sophie tensed, bracing herself for the blow.
Something thin and dark coiled around Tyler’s wrist, halting his arm. For an instant, she thought it was shadow — Cruce’s shadow — until she noticed the little leaves along its length.
His Darkest Craving Page 14
