Crave the Night: A Midnight Breed Novel (27 page)

“A bribe?” Nathan’s voice was cold and level, even while his outrage spiked. “You can’t be serious.”

But Gates was unswayed. “Name your price and it’s yours. She need never know.”

Nathan’s answering curse was ripe with outrage. Dark with fury. “There isn’t enough goddamn money in the world. If you really love Jordana as much as I do, you’d know that.”

Gates reeled back, his head snapping up as if he’d taken a physical blow.

Only then did Nathan realize what he’d said.

He loved her
.

He couldn’t bite the words back, not because he’d already let them out, but because they were the truth.

Holy hell
 … he meant it. He was in love with Jordana.

Gates said nothing, not for a long time. Then, face blanched, hands visibly shaking at his sides, he lowered his voice to a savage whisper. “Stay away from Jordana. Or you will leave me no choice but to make deadly certain that you do.”

A threat?
Nathan saw the menace—and the abject alarm—in the Breed male’s dark eyes.

Martin Gates would have Nathan’s head before he allowed him to continue with Jordana. Or, rather, he would try.

Nathan didn’t want to think about a confrontation between the elder vampire and himself. And Gates had to know that taking on one of the Order, particularly a Gen One Hunter like Nathan, would be tantamount to suicide.

Yet that was his intent. Gates would risk anything, including his own life, to keep his daughter away from Nathan.

“Leave my daughter alone,” Gates ground out. Then, as quickly as the threat had been thrown down, he flashed away, vanishing into the thick crowd.

Nathan understood why in that next instant. Jordana was approaching from behind.

Nathan sensed her like a current in his blood. The air stirred with her bright energy. Her voice drifted to him, vibrant and rich, as she accepted praise and offered thanks to the patrons and museum guests who vied for her attention as she made her way through the throng.

He turned toward her, prepared to explain what had happened with her father. But Jordana’s beaming expression stopped him short.

She didn’t know. She must not have seen them talking while she was at the dais.

And Nathan wasn’t going to be the one to ruin her night. Not when she was looking at him with such exuberance and satisfaction. Despite all the eyes on her, she looked at him as though he were the only other person in the room.

“Still want to make good on that promise?” She reached up and touched his face, just the briefest contact.

Old, battered instincts clenched inside him, but newer ones—the ones she’d awakened in him—responded to her fleeting caress with heat and hunger for more.

Mischief danced in Jordana’s ice blue eyes. Her smile broke slowly, seductively. “Come with me.”

She breezed past him, the sight of her bare back in that red dress, her hips swaying with each fluid stride of her long legs, leaving him no choice but to obey. Nathan stalked after her, out of the exhibit hall and into a gallery outside. She kept going, leading him farther away from the buzz and activity of the party.

He was enjoying the view so much he hardly realized what she was doing until she disappeared into the gloom of a nearby office. When he reached the open doorway, she yanked him inside by the lapel of his suit coat and shut the door behind him.

Her mouth came down hard on his as she pushed him backward against a desk.

No warning.

No waiting for him to make the first move.

Not the slightest trace of uncertainty as she pressed her body against his and pushed his lips apart with her demanding little tongue.

And fuck if that didn’t shoot molten fire into his veins.

Outside the closed door of the office, the drone of conversation and soft music carried from the exhibit hall several yards away. Low light from the gallery filtered through the shuttered blinds of the window behind the desk. A bark of laughter sounded from just outside as a small group of party guests walked the promenade that led to the museum lobby.

He and Jordana were secluded enough in the private office, but there was no escaping the knowledge that the risk of discovery lurked just beyond its four walls.

She didn’t seem to mind.

Hell, she seemed to revel in the risk. As she kissed him, he felt her hands at the collar of his shirt. His mind was slipping, getting pulled under the more powerful force of his need.

He only vaguely registered that his shirt was open, his chest bared to her gaze, to her touch. When she dragged her mouth down along his throat to the
glyphs
that rode his pectorals, he wrenched up off the desk on a lust-filled groan.

“Shh,” she admonished him with a playful smile and a daring glimmer in her eyes. Her pretty pink tongue followed the arc and flourish of his
dermaglyphs
, making them flush with darkening colors. “I’ve been wanting to do this all night.”

Ah, Christ
. Nathan watched, entranced, hard as granite, as she licked and suckled him, each wet kiss igniting a dangerous fire in his veins. She drew his nipple into her mouth, grazing the tight peak with her teeth.

Her touch shouldn’t have been so welcome, so easily accepted. It didn’t fit into the way he lived his life. It went against everything he’d been taught. Defied the years of training and hard lessons that still haunted his dreams, all too often left him soaked in cold sweat, stomach pitching with nausea for what he’d witnessed. What he’d been made to do.

But those nightmares and horrors had no hold on him when Jordana’s lips were warm and questing on his skin. All he knew was the ecstasy of her mouth and his yearning for everything she would give him.

Nathan growled with pleasure, his cock straining with unbearable demand. He brought his arms around her and urged her up to his mouth once more, leaning back onto the desk as he took her in a scorchingly deep kiss.

Her skin was hot beneath his palms, her bare back like velvet under his fingertips. She moved against him as their tongues tangled together, their bodies creating a friction that drove him swiftly to the edge of his need.

He moaned as his cock surged against the warmth of her abdomen. Greedy for more, he smoothed his hands down over her dress and onto her ass. Gripping her firmly, he ground deeper into her heat, angling his pelvis to meet every sinuous movement of her body.

It was torture, plain and simple. All it did was ratchet him tighter, harder.

Made the tether of his self-control stretch taut, near to breaking.

If they didn’t stop soon, nothing was going to keep him from taking her right there on the desk. Shit, he was already past that point of no return. And if anyone from the party had the bad judgment to come looking for Jordana—if anyone walked in on them now or in the next few minutes—he wasn’t sure he’d be able to reel in his urge to kill.

“Christ, you feel good, Jordana,” he muttered through gritted teeth and fangs. “Just the sight of you makes me wild to fuck you. To feel you on me like this, knowing how sweet your body is going to be when I get you naked and drive into you—” He sucked in a sharp breath and moved against her in a more fervent rhythm, astonished that their combined heat didn’t incinerate their clothing. He stared into her eyes, the dim light from of his transformed irises gilding her in an ember glow. “If you think you can tease me like this then walk away, you’ve got a hard lesson coming.”

A snarl rumbled out of him as she drew out of his embrace to stand between his legs. “Who says I’m teasing?”

Her mouth was kiss-bruised and glossy, her eyelids heavy over the now dusky blue of her eyes. Without further words, she reached for his hand and urged him to his feet. He stood, breath caught in his lungs as she began to unfasten his belt. It jangled softly as it fell loose, the only other sound besides her soft, shallow panting as she undid the button on his pants, then let down the zipper.

Her hand slipped inside, cupped his rigid shaft. Nathan hissed, steeling himself to the bliss of her gentle touch.

He’d been raised not to require touch or comfort, feeling or emotion … least of all pleasure. He had been brutally conditioned to reject all these things, and so he had.

But he’d never known Jordana’s touch. He’d never known her kiss, or how silky and hot—how utterly perfect—it could feel to lose himself in the one woman he wanted above all others.

The only one he would ever want again.

Jordana stroked him briefly, catching her lower lip between her teeth as she palmed the head of his cock, smoothing the bead of slick moisture along his length. He groaned when she released him, but then her hands went to the slack waistband of his opened pants and his throat suddenly went dry.

With her gaze locked on his, she freed him in agonizing increments, until the fabric slid down his legs to pool at his feet. His cock jutted out,
thick and heavy, dripping with need. The
glyphs
that encircled its base and tracked onto his shaft throbbed with furious hues of darkest indigo and bloodred wine, the colors of extreme desire.

Jordana stepped forward and wrapped her hand around his nape, dragged him down for another deep, unhurried kiss. He obliged, parting his lips to let her in, savoring the sweetness of her tongue and the hunger of her mouth.

His heart was hammering, his fangs filling his mouth by the time she released him. Jordana ran her fingers along the underside of his swollen shaft, wringing a hiss from him as she squeezed the head and slicked him with his own juices.

“Fuck,” he whispered raggedly. Her touch would be the death of him. A death he’d gladly welcome.

Through blazing eyes, he watched her lower her head and place tender kisses across his chest. She stroked him some more, then began a downward trail of warm, wet heat with her mouth.

“Ah, fuck,” he snarled again, incapable of anything more.

Her lips and tongue skimmed down his abdomen, over every hard ridge and muscle, along one path of churning
dermaglyphs
to another. Sensation electrified him, left him shuddering with fevered anticipation. All centered on her.

He speared his fingers into her pale blond hair, needing something to hold on to as she slowly sank to her knees before him.

She tilted her head and gazed up at him, her dusky blue eyes holding his searing amber gaze as she moved forward and took him into her mouth.

“Jordana … holy fuck,” he rasped out savagely as her lips and tongue closed around his cock.

JORDANA HAD NEVER FELT MORE AROUSED, OR MORE ALIVE, THAN in that moment as she watched Nathan’s pleasure mount while she suckled him deep into her mouth.

He dropped his head back on his shoulders and moaned, his muscled thighs braced apart and trembling as she worked her lips and tongue along the entire delicious length of him. His fingers lightly caressed her skull where they’d sunk deep into her hair, his broad palm curved along the back of her head as she took him deeper with each stroke of her mouth.

With the slightest change of tempo or flick of her tongue, she quickly learned how to make him growl in sensual agony or shudder in passion.

Nathan, the lethal warrior. The remote, unreadable Hunter. The Breed male who so easily assumed the lead in any situation, who dominated in everything he did.

The solitary man who’d stormed into her world and changed everything.

Changed
her
.

Here and now, Jordana had absolute control over him, and something about that knowledge made her feel both humbled and drunk with power.

She held him in her hands, stroking his velvety shaft as she drew him deeper into her mouth. He gasped as she leaned in and took all of him, hissed when she slowly withdrew all the way to the smooth, plum-shaped crown.

“You taste good,” she murmured, running the tip of her tongue through the hot, silky fluid that coated the engorged head of his cock. His hips bucked when she enveloped him in her mouth again. His curse was raw, ragged, as she abraded him lightly with her teeth. She smiled, pleased with this newfound power. “You taste good enough to eat.”

“Damn, Jordana,” he bit off harshly, his already visible fangs elongating like bone-white daggers behind his parted lips as she sucked him even harder. “Gonna make me fucking lose it …”

His voice was gravel, little more than a coarse rumble in his throat. Just hearing him so close to the edge made wet heat boil in her core.

He grunted, his pelvis knocking forward in a spasm she knew he couldn’t control. “Christ, that sweet mouth of yours …”

She moaned around his girth, thrilling in his response and taking far too much satisfaction in the torment she was delivering.

As she rode his length with her mouth, he clutched at her, tremors raking his immense body. His gorgeous face became something darker, otherworldly. His stormy eyes went volcanic, nothing but pools of amber swallowing up the catlike slits of his pupils.

His full lips peeled back on a feral snarl, his angular cheekbones sharpening to bladelike slashes as he stared down at her. His pulse drummed against her tongue and the roof of her mouth as he slid in and out of her lips, making her own heartbeat spike into the same hard tempo. Between her legs, she was drenched, aching to be filled.