“Say it again,” he said. “What you told me on the plane.”
Her brilliantly colorful eyes were luminous with emotion and desire. “I didn’t think you heard me.”
He laid her on the bed gently and straightened. He tore off his shirt. “I heard you. Say it again.”
She pushed up to kneel on the bed in front of him, and she met his gaze as she reached for the fastening of his jeans. “I love you, Duncan.”
“That was even better than the last time,” he whispered, smiling as he palmed her full, soft breast. She pulled his jeans open and slid her hands inside them as she eased the material down over his lean hips. An odd sensation slid along his torso and up his arms. He glanced down at her snakes as they journeyed across his skin.
Seremela followed the direction of his gaze and drew back a little, her expression turning self-conscious. She offered softly, “I can wrap them, if you’d rather.”
He said firmly, “No.”
She pulled a few snakes away from him. “Are you sure it isn’t too—tentacley for you?”
He grasped her shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes. “Listen to me. I did not say I was falling in love with you, if only you would hide some part of yourself or change some aspect to try to please me. I said I was falling in love with you—all of you. I don’t want you to curb yourself, deny yourself, cover up your face or head or any part of your body. I don’t want you to lose or gain weight, or watch what you say, or deny how you feel, or try to be anything but who you are, because who you are is the most beautiful person in the world to me.”
As she listened, the expression on her lovely features grew vulnerable, wide open. While he certainly hoped that he had not been the first person to ever tell her such things, he selfishly hoped that he had been the first male to do so. He grasped one of her snakes, kissed it on the nose and looked into its face. “You’re never going to bite me, are you?”
“They would never hurt you,” Seremela said. “They would die first.”
“Oh well,” he said, giving her a crooked grin. “There’s goes that fantasy.”
Her eyes went very wide, and she laughed, a joyous, surprised sound. She unbuttoned her top and shrugged out of it then slipped off her bra as Duncan kicked off his jeans and stood nude, his heavy erection jutting from his hips.
Her breasts were stunning, lush and full, the soft, plump nipples several shades darker than the light creamy green of her flesh. He bent, took one nipple in his mouth and sucked at it gently. The muffled noise that came out of her was urgent and incoherent. She cradled his head, ran her fingers through his hair and stroked his shoulders.
As he suckled her, a feather light sensation flickered along the sensitive skin on the head of his penis, creating a sharp, tantalizing pleasure. He looked down, as the sensation spread along the tight, drawn up sac of his testicles, and along the muscles of his lower abdomen.
Seremela’s snakes flickered their slender tongues along his skin.
Seremela cocked her head and looked down as well. “They’re tasting you,” she said, giving him a sidelong smile. “They know that I love you, and they’re curious.” She looked splendid and barbaric, and completely unfettered.
For a moment, the ghost of the human Duncan once was struggled with the image. But Seremela’s snakes were not mundane creatures; they were a part of her, and Duncan had not been human for a very long time.
His fangs descended. Seremela looked at his mouth and her gaze turned heavy lidded. She bared her neck to him in wordless invitation, and he gathered her soft, curvaceous body into his arms and eased his fangs gently into the pulse at her neck.
The moan that came out of her was full of sex and surrender, the sound shivering along his heated senses as hot blood spilled into his mouth, and it was so strange, so strange. He was twisted up inside, his desire for her out of control. He growled as he drank from her, while she arched against him, gasping. Her blood was stronger than human blood. It punched through him and made the world spin.
He lifted his head away from her, breathing raggedly, and only then realized she was struggling in his arms. For a terrible moment he felt sickened and disoriented—until he realized what she was trying to do.
“Help me get out of these damn jeans,” she whimpered.
His fingers shook as he helped her to ease the jeans down to her knees. Then she lay back on bed and raised her legs so he could tug them off the rest of the way.