Chapter 8 #4
Paramedics filled the corridor. Margaret woke swearing and tried to refuse the stretcher until Nica threatened to resign, which worked.
Demetri stayed beside Nica through all of it — close, silent, bleeding through his shirt — and let no one examine him, so that by the time they reached the estate the fabric at his side had soaked dark.
Nica followed him through the entry hall. “Sit down.”
“I am fine.”
“That word is banned.” Demetri kept walking. She caught his arm, and he stopped, and the contact sent fire through her palm. “Your room. Now.” She pointed toward the stairs. “Do not make me ask Caelen where you keep the first-aid supplies.”
Something dangerous moved in his eyes — not anger, interest — and he led her upstairs.
His suite was all dark wood and gray stone and windows facing the sea — no photographs, nothing personal but books and an old Russian saber above the fireplace.
A room like the inside of the man: guarded, beautiful, giving almost nothing away.
Demetri removed his jacket, the shirt beneath clinging to his side.
“Take it off.” His gaze lifted to hers, and Nica heard her own words one second too late. “For the wound.”
“I understood.”
“Good.”
He unbuttoned the shirt slowly — far too slowly — each button revealing another inch of heated skin: hard chest, dark hair narrowing below his navel, old pale scars crossing his ribs that should not exist on a man his age, scars that should have killed him.
He pulled the shirt away from the wound, and Nica stepped closer, her mouth gone dry, her professional detachment nowhere to be found.
The blade had cut from his lower ribs toward his hip, deep enough that she should have seen muscle — and the edges were already drawing together.
She watched the flesh close, and her breath stopped.
“Tell me I imagined that.”
“You did not.” Finally. Not an explanation, but truth.
She touched the skin beside the wound, and his stomach contracted under her fingers. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes.” She looked up, and his eyes had gone dark — not red, hotter somehow. “Why wouldn’t you let the paramedics look at you?”
“They would have questions.”
“I have questions.” Her fingers traced the edge of one pale scar, and she felt him go rigid under the light touch, felt the effort in his stillness. “What made this?”
“A sword.”
“This one?”
“Claws.” Her hand stopped.
“Animal claws?”
“No.”
The room tilted, and every impossible thing she’d seen aligned into a shape she wasn’t ready to name. Nica pulled her hand back. Demetri caught her wrist — gently — the broken Chain resting against his skin, the blackened links beside her pulse. “You are frightened.”
“Yes.” His grip loosened. She could have moved. She didn’t. “I should take you back to your rooms.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No.” The answer scraped through her, low and raw and more honest than anything he’d said all day.
“Then stop deciding for me.” His gaze sharpened.
She remembered him lifting the attacker with one hand, and she remembered him stopping because she asked.
Dangerous. Everything about him was dangerous.
But the danger had bent around her. Protected her.
Obeyed her. That should not have been erotic, and her body did not care in the slightest what should have been.
She stepped closer, and Demetri released her wrist as though it cost him blood. “Nica.”
“Do you want me?”
Heat flooded his eyes. “Yes.” The word was barely human.
“Then why do you keep walking away?”
“Because wanting you does not grant me the right to take.”
“I’m not asking you to take.” His breathing changed. She placed her hand on his bare chest, his heart striking her palm hard and fast. “I’m asking you to stay.”
Demetri closed his eyes, and pain crossed his face — not physical. “Nica, I cannot give you something casual.”
“I didn’t ask for casual.”
“You do not know enough about me to promise more.”
“I’m not promising anything.” His eyes opened. “That is the problem.” She almost laughed — of course even seduction had to become a negotiation with this man. “I want you,” she said. “Tonight. Right now. I’m choosing that.”
“And tomorrow?”
“I’ll still be me.”
“That is not what I asked.” His hand lifted to her face and stopped just short. “Nica, if I touch you, it will matter.”
Her throat tightened. “It already matters.”
The restraint in him broke.
Demetri kissed her — no careful beginning, no suspended question, none of the terrible patience he’d shown her for four days.
His mouth took hers with a starving precision, and she felt every one of those days in it, every hour he’d stepped out of doorways and drawn his hand back and held himself still.
Gone now. One hand slid into her hair and fisted.
The other pulled her flush against his bare body, and she felt the fever-heat of his skin and the hard ridge of him against her belly, and a sound broke out of her that he swallowed whole.
He lifted her. Effortless. Her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, and he carried her across the room without breaking the kiss, his mouth slanting over hers, his tongue sweeping in to taste her.
The bed caught her back. He followed her down, braced above her, his body hard and enormous between her thighs, blotting out the light.
Too many clothes. She dragged at his belt.
His hand closed over hers. “Look at me.”
She did. His eyes had gone red — fully, openly red now, no hiding it, twin coals in the dark. “Tell me to stop,” he said, his voice a rasp, “and I stop. This instant. No matter how far we’ve gone.”
“I know.”
“Say it.”
“If I tell you to stop, you stop. Immediately.” She dragged in a breath. “Even if you object.”
A breath of laughter escaped her. “I’m sure you’ll object very politely.”
His mouth moved against hers, almost a smile — and then his hand slid beneath her sweater, and every thought in her head went dark.
His palm dragged up her stomach, hot enough to make her own skin feel cool by comparison, and she arched into it. It found the lower edge of her bra and stopped. Waiting. Asking, without asking. Nica arched harder, pushing into his hand.
Permission.
His fingers closed around her breast, and pleasure struck fast and sharp, and she gasped. Demetri watched her face as his thumb dragged over her nipple through the lace. Again. Slower. Watching what it did to her.
“You are so beautiful,” he said, low and reverent, and Nica turned her face away on instinct.
His hand left her breast and caught her jaw and brought her back. “No.”
Heat rushed to her cheeks. “This is a strange time for an argument.”
“You do not hide from me.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“You are.” He kissed the corner of her mouth.
Her cheek. The small scar above her eyebrow, the one she touched when she lied.
“Beautiful when you fight me.” His fingers slipped beneath the lace, skin on skin now, and rolled her bare nipple, and her back bowed off the bed.
“Beautiful when you want.” He caught the tight peak and pinched, just short of pain, and a broken sound tore out of her. “Beautiful when you let me see it.”
“Demetri —”
“Yes.” She pulled his mouth back to hers.
He undressed her without hurry — sweater, bra, jeans, each piece gone over the side of the bed — until she lay beneath him in nothing but a scrap of black lace.
Then he sat back on his heels and looked at her.
Really looked. And Nica fought the urge to cover herself as his gaze moved from her face to her breasts to the flat of her stomach to the damp lace between her thighs, slow and possessive and reverent and starving all at once, until her core clenched on nothing and her thighs pressed together against the ache.
“You’re wearing too much,” she said, unsteady.
He stood. The belt opened. His trousers followed. No underwear — of course not — and Nica’s mouth went dry.
He was hard. Thick. Longer than she’d expected, jutting heavy and flushed from a nest of dark hair, and the sight of him sent a hot pull straight through her center.
Demetri saw her looking, and his body flexed under the attention, his cock jerking against his stomach, and a low sound of pure male satisfaction rolled out of him.
She pushed herself upright and reached for him.
He caught her hand. “Not yet.”
“Bossy.”
“Yes.” He lowered her back onto the mattress and spread her thighs wide with his hands, baring her to him, and Nica felt the cool air and then the heat of his gaze.
The lace had gone damp, soaked through, and his eyes flashed brighter, and a growl vibrated through him — not a rough breath, an actual growl, a sound that started deep in his chest and raised the hair on her arms.
She should have been afraid. Instead she lifted her hips as he hooked two fingers beneath the lace and dragged it slowly down her legs and off, and then he knelt between her open thighs and looked at her, bare and wet and flushed, and his nostrils flared as he dragged in the scent of her.
“Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I don’t.”
“Good.” Smoke ghosted across the word. “Because I have wanted my mouth on you since you fell into my arms, and I am going to take my time.”
His mouth covered her, and Nica cried out.
The first stroke of his tongue was slow, flat, deliberate, a man with all night and no intention of hurrying.
The second drove every coherent thought out of her skull.
She fisted both hands in the sheets. Demetri held her hips pinned with his forearm and traced her clit with the tip of his tongue, unbearably light, and then closed his lips around it and sucked, and pleasure tightened low and hard and merciless.
“God —”