Heart of Obsidian

SAHARA ached deep inside, and it wasn’t an ache that had in any way abated since she’d walked out of the labyrinth. No, it had only grown deeper, day by day. Today, she’d touched Kaleb in a last-ditch attempt to bring him back from the dark place where he’d gone, but now that his skin brushed against her own, she hungered for more. This, in spite of the fact that the darkness remained in his gaze, the inhuman intelligence of him watching her with eyes of obsidian.

It was madness to permit this to continue, to make herself ever more vulnerable to a man she might never understand, but reason had long slipped out of her grasp. Pressing her hand to his cheek, she closed her eyes and parted her lips under his in an instinctive invitation that he accepted without hesitation, one hand gentle at her throat, the other tight in her hair as the taste of him—hot, male, inexorably dark—infiltrated her every sense.

The caress felt raw, unpracticed, but no less addicting for it. The realization that he’d done this act with no other, that it was as new a pleasure to him as it was to her, was heroin in her bloodstream, a shocking punch of sensation, the world a study in passionate red. Stretching her body upward, her weight balanced on her toes, she kissed him with a wild desperation that lacked any sense of finesse.

It didn’t matter.

Kaleb took what she gave and demanded more, until her heart ricocheted in a hard drumbeat against her ribs and air was something she gasped in between indulging in the heated recklessness of the kiss. A kiss that had her pressed between the cool glass of the window and the hard ridges of Kaleb’s body, one of his hands still at her throat.

The physical reminder of his deadly possessiveness did nothing to throw cold water on the conflagration that threatened to consume them both. Kaleb wasn’t cold now, his skin hot enough to burn, the arm he’d braced over her head trapping her in a prison she had no desire to escape. Thrusting her hands into his hair, she held him to her, sinking her teeth into his lower lip in a feral act of passion that should’ve shocked her.

It didn’t. Not in the madness.

His hand tightened the barest fraction on her throat before he echoed the act, and she wanted to scream at the electric burn the primal caress ignited over her body. Too much, this was too much too soon, but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t bear to let him go. The sound of something crashing to the kitchen tiles made her jerk back, chest heaving. “Kaleb?”

“It’s nothing.” His mouth was on hers again the next second, the muscled width of his shoulders hiding the rest of the room from her view . . . but she felt it when something hit the wall with enough violence to make the house vibrate.

Wrenching away her mouth, she shoved at his chest.

He didn’t budge, the look on his face leaving her uncertain if he was rational in any way, his eyes gleaming a black so deep, she’d never seen it in nature. Only in the darkest, most twisted recesses of the labyrinth.





Chapter 18





“KALEB, SOMETHING IS wrong.”

His expression didn’t alter, the flush of passion on his cheekbones and the perspiration that glimmered on his shoulders in the morning sunlight doing nothing to soften the hardness of him. Even the hair she’d mussed with her fingers only made him appear more dangerous, a predator who’d removed his mask to reveal the harsh truth.

Breath still short and shallow, she pressed her fingers to his lips when he would’ve claimed her mouth again, the addictive heat of him pressed up against her breasts. It took a level of self-control that was staggering in its intensity—this man, he could make her his slave, her body his to command. “Kaleb.”

Stroking his thumb over her pulse once more, he finally released her and turned to face the room. Sahara looked around him, felt her eyes widen.

The room was trashed.

It had been the sofa smashing into the opposite wall that had finally broken through the desire that had had them both in its grip. The piece of furniture had created a hole in that wall, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Every single window in the room, aside from the one on which she’d leaned, was spiderwebbed with fractures so deep it felt as if a breath would cause the shards to fall, while the floor was rippled, and a large table lay in splinters near the wide doorway into the kitchen, as if it had been thrown at the doorway and not made it through.

“A kiss,” she whispered, staring at Kaleb’s profile as he took in the damage done by his telekinetic strength with a clinical eye. “One kiss.”

Kaleb, his upper body gilded by the sunlight, angled his face toward her. “I’ll have to refine my shields—they failed against the intensity of the contact.”

Sahara released a shuddering breath, her breasts heavy and almost painful. “Are you safe on the PsyNet?” If his shields failed on the mental plane, his mind would become as vulnerable as hers had been before he’d extended his shields to protect her. “If any of what we’re experiencing leaks—”