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d to unbutton my jeans; I fumbled with his. Both of us were shaking.
“Screw it.” I rolled away so that I could deal with my own fastenings. He did the same. It was a race. Whoever finished first got to be on top.
I lost. I didn’t mind. Especially when he covered me with his body and filled me so completely with a single thrust I began to come even before he began to move.
I cried out his name, clenching around him, and he buried his face between my breasts, pulling me more tightly against him, slowing down, drawing it out, until I was poised halfway in between, perched on a second edge.
My hips moved of their own accord, taking him more deeply, feeling the tingle start harder, stronger, this time as his lips drew my nipple into his mouth once, twice, the rhythm syncopated—hips, lips, hips, lips.
He nipped me, and I exploded, gasping for breath as he spilled himself into me, body and soul.
When the tremors died, I held on with my legs, my arms. “Stay with me,” I whispered. “Stay in me.”
I didn’t want to break the connection. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
He did as I asked, and we kissed languidly, touched gently. I tangled my fingers in his hair, stroking my thumb over his feather as I tumbled toward sleep. He slid away, but I felt him close, our legs tangled, the scent of his skin all over mine.
I awoke in that strange hour between night and day, no moon, no sun, when everything is frighteningly still and just a little creepy.
The rain had stopped, though trickles of water continued to trace the window. The air felt close and hot. At first I thought he was gone. That he’d crept out of bed, gotten dressed, and disappeared, and I sprang up with a gasp. Then I saw him.
He sat on the side of the bed, head in his hands, hair spilling over his wrists, covering his face. He was breathing as if he’d run ten miles in the heat. His back shone slick with sweat, and he was shaking.
“Nightmare?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
I put my palm against his tattoo. He jerked as if he hadn’t even known I was there.
“What’s wrong?”
His shoulders raised and lowered several times before he spoke. “I see her sometimes when I wake up, hovering, laughing. Not the woman who loved me so much, but the thing that hated me.”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what that was like. To love someone, to have them love me, to lose them so horribly. I’d lost people, sure, Grandmother, Dad, but it was nothing compared to this.
“She’s dead,” he said.
“The Anada’duntaski killed her.”
“No. I did.”
Chapter 31
“You can’t keep blaming yourself. The Anada’duntaski took her life.”
“The first time.”
I began to understand why his eyes were always haunted, why they probably always would be.
“The instant I realized the truth, I—”
“You don’t have to say it.”
He’d cut off her head. He’d made sure she hurt no one else, and even though he knew the body that he’d destroyed had not held the woman he’d loved, what he’d done still tormented him.
“When the body dies and the demon comes,” he whispered, “does the soul go to Heaven? She didn’t want to become what she did, so why do they say the soul of a vampire is damned?”
He was agonizing over something he could never know the truth of. At least not in this life. What was I supposed to say but the only platitude I had?
