Darkest Temptation (6 page)

Lily opened her eyes quickly, instantly alert, every nerve alive and singing, humming with a vitality she’d never known before. As she sat up, her gaze dropped to the man beside her, who emitted warmth and something else. Something that even while he slept stroked a seductive breath over her.

She pulled the sheets to her chin, her mind racing, tripping over the events of last night. She saw the nightclub…
creatures
. Maureen. Then the hunter’s ratlike face.
Curtis
. Images swam through her head in an unwelcome blur, cramping her stomach. Then her thoughts crashed on the memory of
him
. Them. Together. Liquid heat swept through her as she remembered every detail, every sensation of his body joined with hers.

Wild, uninhibited sex was not something she
did with any regularity. Not since Adam. And even then it had been gentle, exploratory, their movements always tentative, restrained.

He slept as still as a jungle cat, all long, lean lines, ready to snap and spring at a moment’s notice. She sat up, moving as silently, as quickly, as possible. Inching toward the edge of the bed, anxious to flee. She lowered one foot to the floor.

“Where are you going?”

Tightness seized her chest.

He snatched her wrist and rolled her onto her back in one smooth move, the hard press of his naked body a familiar sensation, yet no less shocking.

All her life she’d slept in the same house, in the same room, same bed—her only lover a high school boyfriend, their intimacies stolen moments whenever their parents weren’t around. Never had she woken in bed with a large, virile man, her body sated and sore from hours of sex. A five o’clock shadow dusted his face of carved granite—menacing and sexy as hell.

She found her voice, pretending to forget that she was his prisoner before their night together. “I have to go. It’s Saturday.” As if that made a difference to him. “I have to work—”

“It’s not Saturday.”

“What?” She blinked.

“It’s Monday. You were bitten, infected, on Friday. The change—Initiation—takes a few days. Your body requires that time to regenerate… to become lycan.”

His words sunk in slowly, unbelievably.
Horribly
.

“See.” He nodded to her bare arm.

She glanced down, air hissing from her lips at the sight. The bite, her wound, had miraculously healed. Only smooth skin met her stare—evidence she had no desire to see. She struggled against him, against his words, desperate to leave, to see her mom—

“I can’t let you go.” The great wall of his body pressed her deeper into the bed, stilling her movements.

“Why not?” she panted against the smooth wall of his chest.

His fingers flexed around her. “You have one month less now.”

A month. “And then I’m dead.” Her voice rang flat between them. No question, just a simple statement of fact.

His golden eyes drilled into her. “Maybe. Or
maybe your hunter friend will get lucky and find the alpha responsible for your… condition.”

“How do you know about Curtis?”

“I spoke with him. He was casing the house… waiting for you.”

Hope swelled in her heart. “And he’s going to find my alpha?”

“I explained to him that I’m not who he thought I was and if he wishes to live he can put all his skills and resources into finding the true lycan responsible for your curse.”

“And you think he can?”

“It’s a long shot. He wasted time assuming I was a lycan and bringing you here when he could have been following leads from the site of attack.”

She shook her head. Desperation combined with the suffocating press of his body made it difficult to draw breath. “You don’t understand. I can’t wait here for a month. I have to go. There’s someone—” She stopped herself, hating to mention her mother, to bring her mother into this, hating to taint her with this dark new world from which she might never escape.

His face clouded over. “Someone
who
?”

She shook her head.

He lifted her off the mattress, forcing her face
near his. “A man? A boyfriend?” The light in the center of those amber eyes flickered brighter. “A husband?” His fingers tightened. “You can’t go back. Even if we break the curse before moonrise, you think you’ll be the same again?” His gaze roamed her bare shoulders. Her breasts tingled against the press of his body.

“Let me go. I need to say good-bye. To my life.”
My mom
. “I’ll return. I promise.”

“Good-bye,” he muttered, his gaze crawling over her face, hotly possessive, dipping to where her breasts pressed against his chest. “And how will you explain that? Will you tell him what you are? How becoming a lycan turned you into one hot piece of ass? Will you tell him that you willingly spread your thighs for me? A half-breed lycan?”

Fire erupted in her cheeks, and she beat against his chest and shoulders. “Bastard!”

The light at the centers of his eyes grew, eclipsing the amber. As if he didn’t feel her blows at all, his hands moved, skimming down her arms to her waist.

She stilled, feeling herself drowning in those eyes, mesmerized.

He nudged open her thighs with alarming ease
and slid his hardness inside her heat. “You can add that you called me names while you gladly fucked me.”

Her mouth opened on a protest, an assurance that there was no one else, but the words never made it past her lips.

Her hands curled into his shoulders. Already she worked her hips beneath him, gasping when he thrust again inside her.

She lifted a leg and locked it around his waist. Her inner muscles squeezed, milking him, racing her toward orgasm with single-minded purpose.

He groaned against the side of her face, one of his hands coiling in her hair. A wild cry ripped from her lips. She shuddered beneath him as he surged inside her several more times, reaching his own climax. Spent, she sank even deeper into the mattress, a boneless puddle beneath him, small ripples of rapture eddying out through her body.

With a groan that sounded part sigh and part curse, he flung himself off her. Pressing her legs together, she scooted as far from him as she could, her fingers digging into her thighs. “You’re an animal,” she hissed.

He stared at her darkly, one arm tucked behind
his head. “So are you, baby. Better get used to it.”

“There’s no man! No boyfriend. No husband. I just need to go!”

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter either way. “Well, I can’t let you do that. Look. Let’s make the best of the month. I’ll show you a good time.” He scratched his square jaw. “And given your new condition, you’re going to experience urges. Why not experience them with me?”

His words sounded cavalier enough. And simple. But she knew there would be nothing simple about it. In a month’s time, she would either shift into a werewolf… or die—by his hand.

She had opened her mouth to resume arguing when her stomach rumbled.

“Let’s take care of that appetite of yours.” He held up a hand to stop her protests. “And then you can keep trying to convince me why I should let you go.” His gold eyes fixed on her, hard, probing. “And why I should believe you when you say you’ll come back.”

*   *   *

“This is beautiful,” she murmured, sipping her coffee on a deck overlooking miles of wooded
hills. “I don’t get to see this in the city.” She gazed again at the stretch of countryside. “Doesn’t appear that anyone besides you enjoys the view, either.” She arched a brow and nodded around them. “No neighbors.”

“I like my solitude.” He bit down on a buttery croissant, identical to the one she had just consumed.

She reached for another croissant and stared out at the sea of treetops. She couldn’t even spot a road. “More like isolation.” At the sudden quiet, she glanced across to find him staring intently at her, no longer chewing, no longer moving at all.

“I’m not human,” he said succinctly, each word a hard bite on the air. “I have no business being around humans.”

She nodded slowly, nibbling her croissant as she studied him, knowing he meant her to take some sort of lesson from those words. Swallowing, she asked, “I suppose you think I should do the same?”

“Yeah. You especially.”

“Why me especially?”

He leaned back in his chair. “I’m a dovenatu, a hybrid lycan. I can control my impulses. Can
fight the urge to feed at every moonrise. You can’t. I shift at will. You can’t. Every full moon, you will shift and you will kill—”

“Yeah, Curtis covered this already,” she snapped. “I get it.”

“Do you? Because you have no business going out into the world until this is… rectified. One way or another.”

One way or another
. She couldn’t stop the shiver from trickling down her spine. “So instead I should stay here and keep you company.”

His eyes glowed. He idly traced the rim of the glass of juice before him. “The company was good, wasn’t it?”

She felt herself blush, the burn crawling all the way to the tips of her ears. She stabbed at a chunk of pineapple and replied quickly, “As you’ve said, I have a month. I won’t hurt anyone until then. I’m going home.” Popping the fruit in her mouth, she chewed. It was all bravado. She knew he could chain her downstairs again. Could seduce her with a look or crook of his finger and keep her happily in his bed. But she was hoping he wouldn’t. Hoping that whatever impulse had motivated him to free her of that dark basement still held true.

“Very well. You insist on leaving the premises. Fine.”

Relief rushed through her. Her words spilled forth in a giddy rush. “I promise I’ll come back—”

“I know you will.” He cocked his head to the side and relaxed back in his chair. “Because I’m going with you.”

Luc followed her into the Sun Valley Rest Home and was instantly assailed by the odor of astringents and decaying mankind. He understood how some people could be uncomfortable with the reminder of their own fleeting mortality. It only made him wishful. Wishful to have lived a life wherein he’d…
lived
. Instead of merely existing. It made him yearn to age and die in the natural order of man. As God intended, not some witch who’d started the lycan curse over a thousand years ago.

You’ve lived since Lily crashed into your world—your bed
.

He shook his head and watched Lily smile and nod to both the staff and the wizened infirmed trudging down the corridors with their walkers and wheelchairs. She showed no sign of discomfort. She seemed right at home here.

“Where are we—”

“This way. She’s in the TV room.”

They entered an airy room with several well-worn sofas and armchairs. Three women played cards at a table. Another sat alone on the couch, staring vacantly at the television set.

Lily eased down beside her. Luc hung back, leaning against a bookshelf of paperbacks so old and worn that the titles on the spines could hardly be read.

“Hello,” Lily greeted the old woman on the sofa.

The woman looked startled for a moment, blinking warm brown eyes several times.

“Hello.”

Lily glanced at the television before looking back at the woman. “I like Paula Deen, too.”

The woman gave an eager nod. “She doesn’t skimp. Fried is fried. Like it should be.”

“Absolutely,” Lily agreed.

“Do you like to cook?”

“A little bit. My mother’s an excellent cook.”

The woman patted Lily’s hand. “Well, you should get her to teach you.”

Lily blinked fiercely and glanced away, the back of one hand swiping at her eyes. And in that
moment, Luc knew that the woman with whom she was conversing wasn’t a stranger.

“She did teach me how to make a mean turtle cheesecake,” Lily offered.

“Hmm, I love turtle cheesecake.” Her brow wrinkled in concentration. “I think I might know how to make that.”

Lily gave a shaky smile. “I bet you do.”

He looked hard at the woman on the sofa, studying her face, the confused gaze, the melting brown eyes—and knew it was Lily’s mother.

In that moment, he didn’t know what was worse—being alone and not having anyone to love or having someone you loved no longer know you.

*   *   *

“She wasn’t always that way.”

He flexed a hand on the steering wheel and weaved through traffic. “I’m sure she wasn’t.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

He snorted. “Any pity I feel for you has nothing to do with your mother.” Only partially true. The stark sorrow, the total loneliness he had seen in Lily’s face as she’d sat on that couch, had struck a much-too-familiar chord. It echoed the way he
had felt growing up, when he’d endured the hatred of a family that did not want him. When Ivo had fallen to darkness. When Danae had chosen his cousin—and darkness—over Luc.

“So you
do
pity me?”

“What do you expect me to feel for you, Lily? You’re in a shitty situation here.”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t I just lock myself away every full month? Or sedate myself?”

“That’s a hell of a burden to carry. If you slip up, innocents die.”

She jammed her eyes in one tight blink and rolled her head side-to-side against the headrest with a heavy sigh.

He continued, “You would need one hell of a friend to pull something like that off. Someone to confine you three nights out of every month and then free you. Someone to sedate you if needed. They could never fail. To fail would mean innocents dying.”

“Innocents?” she bit out. “Like me.”

He nodded. “Like you
were
.”

Her face tightened, the smooth features pinching in distaste at the truth of his words. Her new ugly reality. “Yeah. I don’t have anyone like that in my life.”

Her words resonated deep inside him. Maybe because he didn’t have anyone, either.

He glanced to his right. The bright sun struck her hair, bringing out the buried highlights.

“Even if you did find someone you could trust like that, he wouldn’t live long enough. Not generations like you. The years pass quickly. Sooner than you think, you would need to replace him with someone else.”

“So what I’m looking for is a keeper who’s reliable, trustworthy, and immortal?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Great. Can’t be too many of those walking around.”