Sins of the Soul

The sensation was lush, sensual, pain mixing with pleasure. He hadn’t expected that, the erotic element to her feeding from him.

She arched toward him, her head and shoulders coming up off the ground, her hands clamping on his forearm. Widening her mouth against his skin, she swept her tongue across the cut, lapping at his blood.

The pull of her lips teased his senses.

Arousal stirred, base and instinctual. All the restless parts of him exploded into life. He wanted to claim her. He wanted to take her, feed her his blood as he thrust his cock deep inside her.

She gave a final hard, sucking pull, then tore her mouth away from his forearm, breathing hard, as though it cost her much to give it up.

He pushed her back onto the ground. Eyes locked on hers, he ran his hands along her arms, her breasts, down her belly to her legs.

Panting, she watched him, her lips red with his blood, a line of it trickling from the corner of her mouth to the angle of her jaw. With a groan, he leaned in and licked her, tasting his blood. He nipped his teeth along her jaw and then down, along the muscle and tendons of her neck.

He kissed her mouth. Wild. Imperative. The last, tenuous thread of his control was severed, his lust and pain and fear set free. All that mattered was that he hold her, taste her, take her beneath him and drive into her until the demons eased.

“I thought you were gone,” he rasped. The words were insignificant, inconsequential. Too small to express what he felt for her, the great, writhing balloon of his emotions that swelled and swelled until he thought it would burst. More words were there, right there in his throat, stuck like a fishbone.

But she must have understood, because she reached for him and laid her palm against his cheek and looked at him as though he was the most precious thing in her world.

Maybe he was.

Somehow, she’d become the most precious thing in his.





NAPHRé RESTED HER PALM against Alastor’s cheek and tried to think of a way to explain what she felt, to say it, to make him understand. He’d made her care. He’d stood outside her window with Butcher’s darksoul bobbing because he’d had to make certain she wasn’t followed…by anyone but him. He’d weighed the merits of her arguments and brought her with him on this journey, though he hadn’t wanted to. He’d shown her the respect of letting her make her own decision. He’d stepped in to save Marie in the alley, though he definitely hadn’t wanted to do that.

He’d made her care. But it was more than that. What she felt was elemental, the caring mixed with, if not precisely a sense of ownership, a sense of possession and right. He was hers. Hers to love. She would kill for him. Die for him.

And she need only be brave enough to reach out and grab him.

Emotion mixed with instinct in a bubbling slurry, frightening, powerful. Logic told her such depth of feeling was impossible. That she didn’t know him. Hadn’t spent enough time with him to build such nuanced feelings.

But logic was weak in the face of the onslaught that surged inside her.

Somehow, he’d made her love him.

She’d known him for only days. She’d known him forever. Like a stop-motion picture, she relived that moment when she’d first seen him outside the Playhouse Lounge, the way she’d felt as though she knew him.

And he knew her.

Hungrily, her gaze roamed his face now. His jaw was shaded by several days’ growth of dark gold beard, his features etched with lines of tension and fatigue. He looked raw and wild. There was nothing left of the controlled, impeccable facade he preferred to present. He was stripped bare, primal and male and so beautiful Naphré’s heart ached.

“I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again,” she whispered. “I couldn’t bear not seeing you again.”

His gaze locked on hers; his eyes darkened, the pupils going wide, leaving only a thin rim of blue.

The way he looked at her made her shiver. There was something inside him, something dark and animalistic. The walls had come down; the beast was free.

She wanted to say something. She didn’t know what.

He didn’t offer her the chance.

His mouth was on hers, hard, hungry, demanding. No gentle kiss. A claiming. A marking. His teeth nipped her lower lip. His tongue stroked the hurt. She moaned and reached for him, her hands fisting in his hair, her body responding on a level she hadn’t even known was part of her.

She’d had his blood. She wanted his sex.

They were alive. What better way to celebrate than to take him and let him take her?

He dragged her up against him, his hands working their way under her wet T-shirt, his palms wonderfully warm on her icy, wet skin.