Crave the Night: A Midnight Breed Novel (18 page)

His eyes smoldered, locked on hers as he closed the distance, leaving scant inches between their bodies. Amber light sparked in the murky blue-green depths of his gaze. His normally hard-to-read face was harsh with grim purpose, his angular cheekbones seeming more pronounced under the subtle blaze of his mesmerizing irises.

As she looked up at him, his pupils began to narrow, the tips of his fangs just visible behind the fullness of his lips. Along his neck, the intricate pattern of
dermaglyphs
that tracked over his smooth skin and into the ebony hairline at his nape began to churn and surge with rising hues of indigo and gold.

Nathan may have been born and raised a Hunter, but he was Breed as well, and not even his cold origins or discipline seemed enough to mask the desire Jordana saw in his transformation.

His hands still holding her, he moved in closer, crowding her with the delicious heat and scent of him. “Nothing about my being here right now is official in nature. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re currently my best potential source of intel on Cass’s final hours. Why was he at the museum? What did he do there, how long did he stay? What did he say to you? These are all things the Order will need to know. I’m going to need you to tell me everything, Jordana.”

“You already interrogated me once tonight,” she reminded him. “I don’t have anything more to tell you, so you might as well leave.”

His nostrils flared. Eyes flashed with brighter flames. “I didn’t come here to interrogate you.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I came to make sure you were okay.” His expression tightened as his gaze swept over her, fierce yet gentle. He blew out a low curse. “I needed to know that you were safe, and I trust no one else to make sure of that but me. Fuck, Jordana … I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

He didn’t want to see her get hurt?

As tender as his words were—as deeply as she wanted to believe the concern in his voice—Jordana stared up at him, unable to bite back her quiet scoff. “I’m not your responsibility, Nathan. It’s not your job to look after me.”

“No, it isn’t. But by Christ, I’m going to protect you, no matter whose job you think it is to keep you safe. Whether you like it or not.”

She didn’t like it. At least that’s what she tried to tell herself as he held her in his strong hands, in his possessive amber-flecked gaze.

She didn’t want to like that flare of raw hunger she saw in his expression. Didn’t want to ache with want to feel his mouth crush down on hers while he kept her captive in his grasp.

Her shallow breaths mingled with the hot gusts that rolled out of him, her heartbeat pounding furiously, frantically, while his thrummed as hard and steady as a drum.

He was saying all the right things, acting as though she mattered to him. Drinking her in just now as though she belonged to him.

But she didn’t belong to him.

She couldn’t belong to him, not if she wanted to keep her heart intact. Their worlds were too different. She saw that last night.

And no matter how much she wanted to believe him now, to trust what he was telling her with his words and hands and eyes, Jordana
clung to the tiny shred of sanity that warned her she was looking at the very thing that could hurt her more than any other potential threat of danger.

She dropped her head and let a sigh slip out of her, chagrined to hear it manifest as a pained moan. “You don’t have the right to do this to me, Nathan. You can’t come into my home uninvited and say things to me like that. You don’t have the right to appoint yourself my protector. You’re not my anything.”

“That’s true,” he answered, but instead of drawing back from her, he leaned closer.

To her combined agony and delight, he removed one hand from its loose grasp on her shoulder only to bring the backs of his fingers toward her face in a caress so light it robbed her of both breath and good sense.

His touch drifted lower, along the side of her neck, then down the length of her silk-covered arm. “It’s all true, Jordana. I don’t have any right when it comes to you.”

And yet her veins were throbbing as she stared at him, warmth rising up her throat and into her cheeks, igniting in her core. The heavy beat in her veins was nothing compared to the deep pulse centered between her thighs. Her sex ached with a longing that spread through her limbs, making her legs feel unsteady and boneless.

He leaned closer, his mouth very near to her ear. “Tell me how I tormented you.”

She shook her head, all the response she could muster as his free hand moved around to the silk sash that loosely tied the front of her robe.

“Tell me, Jordana.” A command, not a request, even though his deep voice was pure velvet. “I tormented you. That’s what you said. Now tell me what you meant.”

“No.” The refusal rushed out of her, airless and desperate.

She didn’t want to explain how he’d hurt her last night after giving her so much pleasure. It was too humiliating to admit how easily she’d been wounded. Or that she was too inexperienced to participate in the kind of wicked pursuits he seemed to enjoy.

She didn’t want to be that sheltered, untried girl. Not with him.

And she supposed that made her an even bigger fool.

With one deft hand, he worked the knot of her robe’s sash loose, then coiled the twin lengths of silk around his fist, forcing her to step toward
him now, until there was no space left between them at all. Her breasts pressed against the hard muscles of his chest, and lower still, his thick thigh parted her legs to nestle firmly against the molten core of her body.

“How have I tormented you, beautiful Jordana?” When she tried to glance away, he caught her chin in his other hand and guided her gaze back up to him. “You won’t say it?”

When she gave him a wordless, weak shake of her head, his gaze flashed with amber fire and a dangerous smile curved his grim mouth. “Then I’ll have to guess. Was it torment when I kissed you like this?” He bent toward her and took her mouth, swallowing her breathless gasp in a kiss so deep and fevered, she nearly collapsed in a quivery puddle on the floor. His tongue invaded, pushing past her teeth in a profane rhythm that made her hips respond in time with his movements, answering some primal call she had no will to resist.

It wasn’t torment. Not until he drew back, denying her any more than a heart-stopping taste of what she craved.

“Was it torment when I touched you?” he asked, pulling her to his body by the hand wrapped tight in her sash, while his other hand slipped inside her robe and beneath the loose pajama tank to cup her bare breast in the heat of his palm.

He caressed her breast, tweaking the hard nipple with his thumb, pinching it with a pleasure-pain that made her sink her teeth into her lower lip as her body shuddered with excitement.

God, she could hardly take it, the dark need he stoked in her. She was already half mad with desire and mounting pleasure when he abandoned her breast to begin a descending trail along her ribs and abdomen.

He met with little resistance from the drawstring waistband of her silk shorts. His fingers delved between her thighs, into the slick juices of her sex.

“Was the feel of my hands on you last night—inside you—a torment, sweet, wet Jordana?” He stroked the swollen pearl of her clitoris, making her moan in pure abandon. “Tell me you didn’t enjoy what we shared last night. Tell me it was torment. Torment enough to send you running into the arms of another male, is that right?”

“No,” she gasped, too lost in sensation to deny him now. “No, that’s not right. You were the one … you ran to someone else. Not me.”

He reared back as abruptly as if she’d slapped him. His sharp amber-drenched eyes narrowed on her, suspicious and questioning. “I ran?”

“Back to La Notte,” she replied, still panting, her body still throbbing with need.

She didn’t want the pleasure to end, but it was too late to call it back. Nathan was staring at her in a dark, dangerous silence, his jaw clenched.

He released her, let the silk ties of her robe fall away from his grasp. In the sudden quiet, Jordana felt a coldness sweep over her, replacing the heat she’d been enjoying so thoroughly a moment ago.

“I know you go to the BDSM dens at the club,” she said lamely. “I know what you do there.”

He didn’t try to deny it, which was a relief in some small way. “Rune told you?”

Jordana shook her head. “It wasn’t him. It doesn’t matter how I know. I only wish I’d understood how interchangeable I was to you before I let you touch me last night.” She blew out a jagged laugh. “Then again, I knew that today and I didn’t stop you just now.”

“What are you talking about?” Nathan demanded, his deep voice taking on a thunderous edge. “What the hell makes you say I think you’re interchangeable with anyone?”

“I know you were with one of the club’s sex workers after you left me with Elliott last night. I saw you, Nathan. That’s what I meant by torment.”

She tried to pivot from him, but he caught her, didn’t give her the chance to get away. “Are you saying you were there? When? Just what do you think you saw, Jordana?”

“I saw you with her—the brunette,” she blurted, glad she didn’t know the woman’s name for fear that she would sound even more jealous and injured. “You were in one of the private rooms with her. You paid her a lot of cash and the two of you walked out together.”

He listened, more calmly than she might have expected. He didn’t say anything, but as she spoke, the hardness began to ebb from his ruthless gaze. His square jaw was still rigid but no longer seemed on the verge of shattering. “You’re right, Jordana. I did take one of La Notte’s sex workers into the dens with me last night. As you saw, I compensated her for her service.”

Jordana stared up at him. Had she really felt relief that he hadn’t tried to spare her feelings by lying about what he’d done? Hearing him admit it all so casually seemed to chip off tiny pieces of her heart with each detail he confirmed.

“I think it’s best if you go now, Nathan. I hope you’ll respect my wishes and not come back again.”

He gave the slightest shake of his dark head. “I don’t think so.”

Jordana frowned. “I want you out of my house.”

“No, you don’t.”

His hand was still wrapped around her wrist. With one flex of his powerful arm, he drew her toward him. Their bodies contacted, his hard and unyielding, hers boneless and melting at the feel of so much hot male power pressed against her.

“You don’t want any such thing. You want me to tell you I didn’t do things with the human female at the club that you want me to do to you. You want to hear that I didn’t fuck her. That I wouldn’t have used you last night the same way I’ve used the workers at La Notte. As a meaningless, interchangeable tool for my release.”

“Let go of me, Nathan.”

“I’d like to.” He exhaled a sharp, humorless laugh. His eyes glittered, sparking with fresh embers. “Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to be able to let you go. I’d like to tell you that I’m every bit the asshole you think I am. I’m no prize, make no mistake there. I did leave here to finish what we started with someone else at the club. Touching you, feeling your tight, wet heat with my fingers made my cock so hard, all I could think about was burying it inside you. God help you, it’s all I’m thinking about right now too.”

His erection crushed into her abdomen, thick and alive with heat. It pulsed through the thin barrier of her clothing, each heavy throb making her own heartbeat pound deeper in response. Awareness made her stomach clench, turned the ache in her core into a molten yearning.

“I’m a Hunter, Jordana. I don’t wait for invitations. I don’t ask for permission. I pursue, I conquer. Then I move on and I don’t look back. That’s how it’s always been for me. That’s how I live.” Cold truth, made all the more cruel when he was stroking her cheek and neck, his thumb moving in maddening little swirls over her throbbing carotid. “I’m not a gentle man. Neither are my needs. You wouldn’t like my methods for slaking them. So when I left here last night, it was because I wanted to fuck my need for you out of my head, out of my system. I
had
to, do you understand?”

“Stop,” she whispered brokenly.

Despite the harshness in him, despite the fear she knew she should
be feeling because of all that he said and all that he was, it was this last admission that was the hardest to accept.

It was all too easy to picture him doing just what he described. His mouth on another woman. His hands giving pleasure to someone else.

Someone else whose heart probably wasn’t as foolish as hers.

“I don’t want to hear any more, Nathan. I can’t do this with you anymore. I’m not like those other females you prefer. Those other females you … fuck.”

The word felt foreign on her tongue, not something she’d ever uttered in front of a man before. Certainly not to a man who’d had his tongue down her throat and his fingers between her legs more than once in the past twenty-four hours.

A man she wanted inside her with a yearning that bordered on sheer, reckless lunacy.

Nathan growled then, low and deep and lethal.

“No, you’re not like them, Jordana.” When she tried to look away, to hide her need from him, he brought her face back up, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I wanted to prove that to myself last night. I wanted to convince myself that you meant nothing to me and that my craving for you could be satisfied by someone else. Anyone else. I wanted to … but I didn’t.”

Jordana gaped at him, afraid to believe. Afraid to hope. “But I saw you with that woman. You said yourself you paid her for servicing you.”

“Yes,” he admitted evenly. “She offered me her vein and her body, for a price. But once I took the woman into the dens, I realized she didn’t have anything I wanted. I paid her because the problem wasn’t with her, it was with me.”

Was he serious? The human female hadn’t been with him at all—not even to serve as his blood Host?

Jordana could hardly contain the surge of relief that flooded through her.

His seductive mouth curved in satisfaction and challenge. “Now tell me you want me to leave.” He put his face beside hers, the rough scrape of his cheek and jaw a delicious abrasion that sent a shiver up and down her spine. “Last night, you had the excuse of Elliott Bentley-Squire to keep you from taking what you really wanted. He may have saved you from me then, but I don’t see him here right now.”