Ryder groaned and cupped her head, loving the feel of her perfect white teeth, which she moved to the side of his neck.
He held her head to him and urged his hips against her as she gave him the mother of all hickies, her sweet mouth pulling and sucking on his skin, making his erection swell almost painfully in the confines of his jeans. Making the demon wake as it imagined sucking and biting at her.
He battled to keep the demon away and Diana raised her head.
“You’re getting warmer.”
“It’s…hard,” he said, struggling, especially when she ground her hips against him and teased, “Yes, it is.”
“Darlin’, stop.” He grasped her hips to still the motion.
“Stacia said you were afraid of your demon. Of what it could do,” she said, and sank down onto him, the tight tips of her breasts rubbing his chest.
“I am afraid, Diana. I don’t know if—”
“I trust you.”
A shudder ripped through his body at her faith in him and for the longest time, they lay there together, caught in the midst of passion unfulfilled.
Then she inched up his body to kiss him. The kiss one of tenderness, of apology. It tempered that earlier, almost uncontrollable desire. The passion the kiss created grew slowly, carefully, as they both realized the fine edge they walked whenever they were together.
When they finally broke apart, Diana fingered his nipple again and he did the same in a sexy game of follow the leader. She smiled at that thought, and lowered her hand to trace the defined edges of his abdomen; he ran the pad of his finger along her midsection.
Sensation skittered along her nerves and she flattened her palm on the paleness of his abdomen, made even milkier white by the revealing moonlight.
A breeze brought with it the sounds of the city below. Sounds that failed to mask the groan she drew from him as she unzipped his jeans, slipped her hands beneath his briefs and covered him with her hand. Nor did the city’s clamor obscure her own gasp as he copied her actions and found the center of her.
As she stroked, he stroked, her gaze locked on his as his was on hers. The pupils of his eyes dilated with desire and his breath grew as rough as hers until she bent her head and kissed him again.
“Ryder!” He knew, for he helped her completely undress, until all that remained was a lacy scrap of panties around the fullness of her hips.
Ryder slowly inched the panties down her legs, pausing as he did so to drop kiss after kiss. First on her knee, then on an ankle and, finally, on his way back up, on the tender inside of her thigh.
He smiled as his body lay cradled between her legs. Ryder exerted the barest hint of pressure to part her thighs and brushed his nose against the soft patch of dark curls at the center of her. She raised her hips and tangled her hand in his hair in invitation.
He darted his tongue out to taste the muskiness of her desire. She murmured her pleasure and he sucked at the hard nub, licking downward until he could slip his tongue within her to savor her need for him.
She called out his name and he knew she didn’t want to wait anymore. Nor did he.
He surged upward, drawing his pants down enough to free himself and then he was in her, in that wet he had just tasted. She was tight around him as he drew out of her. The friction of their bodies made him increase the tempo of his loving. She responded, lifting her thighs to hold his hips, grasping his shoulders as he escalated the force of his thrusts, driving her upward on the chaise, drawing a shocked breath from her.
“Are you okay?”
Her breath was ragged, her hands on his shoulders tight as she said, “I’m okay and you’re…human still.”
He was. In all that time, the demon had barely registered. He didn’t really understand why. Maybe he didn’t want the beast there. He wanted to stay human and feel her response, feel her love as she held him.
“I want to be normal for you. I want to give you what you deserve.”
Diana wrapped her arms around his shoulders. As he drove into her, she moaned with the pleasure he created, and told him what was in her heart. “You are what I deserve, Ryder. You are all that I could ever need, querido.”
At her words, he came, spilling himself inside of her, his big body shuddering with his release. She cradled him as he wrapped his arms around her and shifted so that she was lying on top of him, still joined.
“I’m sorry, darlin’. I—”
“Shh, amor. Just kiss me.” He did, his mouth tender on hers, conveying all that he was feeling: his need for her, his satisfaction in her arms.
She answered each kiss, experiencing in his arms what she hadn’t with Alex. Peace. Conflict. Need. Solace. The yin and yang that she so desperately needed. Dark and light. Diana and Ryder.
He grew hard again within her and she moved on him. He caressed her breasts, then replaced his hands with his mouth until the joy he brought her overwhelmed her and she cried out his name as she came.
Chapter 21
T here were long hours to fill before her team assembled for the raid, hours that Diana didn’t want to spend in her office worrying. Tonight wasn’t going to be easy with no one to trust. David would be in a command post and Alex would be within the apartment. ADIC Hernandez wouldn’t be there and they had opted to keep the N.Y.P.D. out of this operation.
The men who would be beside her were unknowns, and Rupert seemed too keen to see her fail.
She wanted to see Ryder before tonight’s raid. Just for a few hours…
Okay, so she was spooked about tonight. Sick with worry that things might go horribly wrong. She forced herself not to think about it as if by doing so it wouldn’t come to pass. But if it did…
She had told Ryder that what mattered in life was not the quantity, but the quality of it. How well life had been lived.
She intended to live it to the fullest before tonight.
In less than an hour, she was at Ryder’s apartment. The door opened and he stood there, looking sexy with his sleep-rumpled hair and bare chest. Silk pajama bottoms rode low on his lean hips. “Thought I felt you.” He opened the door wide in welcome.
“Keeping vamp hours now?”
“Actually, trying to catch up on some sleep. Didn’t get much last night,” he replied with a cocky grin.
Heat flared to her face. She was the reason for his lack of sleep. After they’d moved indoors, dawn had crept into the sky before she’d finally closed her eyes for some rest.
“I’m kinda tired myself,” she admitted, unable to voice her real reasons for coming here.
Ryder appraised her carefully, but didn’t challenge her. Instead he slipped his hand around her nape and drew her close. “Well, if you have some time, why not take a nap with me?”
A nap, she thought, had been the furthest thing from her mind. But lying beside him, snuggled in his arms for a few hours might bring peace to her troubled mind. “I’d like that.”
“Good.” With his arm wrapped around her shoulders, he walked her to his bedroom. He immediately slipped into bed, but propped his head on one arm to watch her as she undressed.
It was unnerving to be the sole focus of his attention.
“Can you not watch?”
“I like to watch. See the shields come down.”
“Shields, huh?” She babied her shoulder by removing one side of her holster first and then easing off the other. The Glock didn’t make a sound as she carefully placed it o
n the carpet.
“You change when the suit and weapons come off.”
His words stopped her in the midst of unbuttoning her blouse. “What?”
He snared her waist and pulled her into the vee of his legs. As he removed her blouse, he explained, “You’re always a warrior, darlin’. But without the de rigueur suit and those deadly little toys of yours…” His breath spilled against the skin just above her breasts a second before he undid the clasp of her bra.
“Ryder?”
Her answer, in part, was the way he swept beneath the parted fabric and cupped her breasts, dragging a shaky breath from her. They were still sensitive, so tender that just the touch of his hands drew her nipples into stiff nubs.
“Ryder,” she repeated, only this time she wanted something else.
“You’re more human with the defenses down, darlin’.” He rubbed his goatee across the tip of one breast and then across the other.
She grasped the back of his head and kissed his forehead. “I thought you said you wanted to take a nap.”
Not that she was going to stop him as he dropped a kiss on the spot right above her heart.
“You need to finish undressing.” He kept his hands at her waist as she toed off her shoes and tossed aside her ankle holster to rest against its big brother.
It was then he moved to the center of the bed where he pillowed his head on his hands. “Ready for that nap?”
His position displayed the lean muscles of his chest and abdomen to perfection. No centerfold could come close to the sexiness he exuded, especially when he smiled, displaying perfectly white and totally human teeth. And of course, there was his erection, admirably tenting the silk of his pajama bottoms and bringing a rush of damp to private parts still tender from last night. But not so tender that she couldn’t imagine…
Nap time, he reminded her. In his eyes was the promise of so much more.
She eased into the bed and slipped her thigh over his hard length, dragging a moan from him.
“Nap time,” she teased.
“Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
He wanted her. Badly. Wanted to keep her there until morning when she would be safe. Not that she would stay. She was his warrior and she was needed in the mortal world. She was one of the good guys and she wouldn’t run from her obligations, even when she worried they might kill her. He could sense the fear emanating from her, perceive the distress clouding her mind.
Solace was the reason she had come to him, he suspected. It made him tighten his hold on her.
“You okay?” he asked, not that he expected truthfulness. She’d always kept her feelings from him.
Her long hesitation was followed by the tentative caress of her hand over his heart. Then she surprised him. “I’m worried about tonight. About a raid I need to go on.”
He placed one hand on her determined little chin and applied delicate pressure to raise her face. “I can be there. Watch out for you.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. I think I’m just being paranoid.”
Ryder was sure that her concerns were anything but paranoia. Her self-control wouldn’t let an emotion like that fester. “Trust your gut, darlin’. Trust me to be there and make sure that—”
She covered his lips with her hand. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Por favor.”
As he’d thought, she’d come to him for refuge from her everyday world. He intended to give it to her. “Then let’s talk about…us.”
“Us? As in—”
“You and me. Together. Here.”
Diana shook her head, confused until he clarified his statement. “As in, together more often. As in you staying here with me, sharing a bed and the closet and the dresser.” Tension crept into his body as he waited for her to answer.
“As in me living here? With you?”
“Look, I know it’s not really living with me ’cause I’m not living, but…I want to be with you. All the time. I want to go to sleep beside you. Wake up beside you.”
Diana knew there were still many unresolved issues between them. In time, they would have to deal with their fears about her mortality and the brutality of the vampire world that surrounded them. But his attempt to provide a small sliver of normalcy in the midst of that was something she couldn’t refuse.
She smiled. “I’d like the same thing.”
He grinned then, his smile bright against the dark hair of his goatee. “So where do we start?”
“Start?”
“Hmm.” He cupped her breasts and her nipple peaked against the palm of his hand.
The desire that had already been simmering between them flared to life. “That’s a good start.”
He kissed the tip of her other breast, rubbed his beard against it. “And this? Is this good, also?”
She raked her fingers into the long strands of his hair and held him to her breasts. “That’s an even better start.”
“Good.” He finally took her into his mouth and suckled her. His actions were gentle, slow, building passion bit by bit as if to reinforce that they had all the time in the world.
Only they didn’t, she thought as she kissed him back, thinking of tonight. If this was going to be the last thing she ever did with him, she wanted it to be perfect. She wanted to give him all of herself, without restraint, without any doubts.
She tempered her own response, banking her need so that there wasn’t a spot on him she didn’t caress. She told him with her hands and her mouth what she still couldn’t with words—that he was the only man in her world who could fill the empty spots in her heart and make her happy.
They were both trembling, breaths rasping unevenly when he sat up and grasped her waist, slipped inside her. She held him to her as if he was the only stable thing in her world. Which he was. Always.
Ryder buried his head between her breasts, his ear pressed in the gap above her heartbeat, erratic with their passion, madly beating with life. “I love you, Diana. Forever.”
She smiled. “I love you, too. I can’t imagine my life without you.”
Which unfortunately brought him a vision of life without her, of losing her. Possibly tonight, came the thought broadcast by the fear within her.
Not tonight, darlin’. Not tonight.
No, not tonight. She gripped him more tightly.
He opened himself to her so that their thoughts merged and became one in much the same way their bodies were already one.
“Not even death will keep me from loving you.”
As the words echoed in his skull, he didn’t know which of them had said the words. It didn’t matter. He was a part of her soul as she was his. Her love was the only thing that had sustained him in more than a century of existence.
He wouldn’t allow anything to take that away from him.
Chapter 22
T he teams loaded on the bus had no idea of where they were going. Only she, her ADIC, David and Rupert knew.
And Alex. After their last talk, she had no doubts he would guard her back.
At the lower West Side location—a condemned apartment building slated for demolition—she instructed the team on their positions.
Rupert and one other agent had taken the roof of the building across from the apartment. David and two others manned a command center in a lower floor of that building while a half-dozen other agents surrounded the location to safeguard anyone escaping the raid. Which left her and two o
ther agents to break through the door of the apartment where Alex and two other CDA members were supposed to be guarding the weapon.
After the team dispersed, Diana slipped her wire into her ear. “David.”
“Clear as a bell. We’ve got an unobstructed view. All other units check in.” One by one, each unit confirmed that they were in place.
Unlike the two agents with her, she wasn’t wearing full body armor, only her vest and an FBI windbreaker. The armored agents would break through the door before she entered, just as they now took the point, sweeping ahead of her through the deserted building.
They moved swiftly to a dark stairwell that smelled of urine and the refuse left by assorted squatters. By the fifth floor, she was sweating, but it wasn’t from the climb. She was too physically fit for that. The cold sweat of fear made her palms damp and twisted her insides as they slowly approached the apartment.
She raised her fisted hand to signal the other two agents to stop. Across the way, she noted a dim light. David and the two other agents were there.
Her partner confirmed his presence by saying, “We’ve got you in sight.”
She glanced toward the roof. A fleeting burst of light, like that from a muzzle, caught her attention for a moment, but then Rupert’s voice came across the line. “All ready, Reyes.”
Turning to the two men with her, she could see nothing in the face masks they wore aside from her own pale reflection. A line of sweat dripped down the middle of her back. Her heartbeat skipped in an awkward rhythm as she motioned for them to assume their positions.
Taking a place beside one of the men, she called out, “FBI. Open the door.”
Silence greeted her.
She repeated the warning, louder and more forcefully than before. “FBI! Open the door!”
Again there was no hint of activity. With a wave of her hand, the two agents picked up the small battering ram they had dragged up the stairs.
They needed space to swing the heavy compact tool. She stepped back, toward the ledge of the open-air hall to give them room and prepare herself for a running start into the apartment.
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