Read Tempted by Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novella (1001 Dark Nights) Online

Authors: Lara Adrian

Tags: #Lara Adrian, #Eroctic romance, #1001 Dark Nights, #Vampires, #paranormal

Tempted by Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novella (1001 Dark Nights) (10 page)

BOOK: Tempted by Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novella (1001 Dark Nights)
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When Lazaro suddenly stopped suckling her and swept his tongue over the wounds he’d made, Melena groaned in protest. “I need you naked now,” he muttered thickly against her throat. “I can’t wait much longer.”

Neither could she. “Yes,” she gasped, her hands still clutching at him as he began to sink down before her into a crouch. He made quick work of her slacks and panties, baring her to him with the clothing pooled at her feet. On a low growl, he moved in and kissed each hipbone, then descended farther, burying his face between her thighs. “Oh, God...”

His tongue cleaved her folds, hot and wet and hungry. In long, knee-weakening strokes, he lapped and suckled, then kissed and nipped, wringing a moan from her as he drew her clit into his mouth and teased it toward a frenzy. She felt his teeth graze her sensitive flesh, felt the sharp tips of his fangs getting larger as he feasted on her with ruthless abandon.

She was quivering with hard need, on the verge of orgasm already, as he slowly kissed his way back up her body. With a deep, rolling growl, he stripped off her sweater and bra, then tossed them aside to gaze on her nakedness with burning amber eyes. Her blood stained his sensual lips a duskier hue, making his diamond-white fangs stand out in stark contrast.

He had never looked more dangerous or inhuman...nor more preternaturally beautiful.

“Lazaro,” she sighed, her voice feathery, as unsteady as her legs. That sigh became a moan as he lavished her breasts and nipples with his hands and mouth, tongue and teeth.

He muttered her name in a fevered, animal-like rasp that sent her blood surging with even greater pleasure and arousal. He needed her now, as much as she needed him. On a curse he released her nipple and drew back to shuck his pants and shirt. He stood before her like an otherworldly god.

Magnificent. Terrifying. And hers.

Melena reached down between their bodies to grasp the jutting length of his cock. His shaft more than filled her hand, thick and warm and pulsing with strength. He purred deep in the back of his throat as she stroked him, then seized her mouth in a wild kiss. She could taste herself on his tongue, her blood and juices an erotic sweetness that only made her burn even more for him. She stroked him harder, craved him with a desperate ache that demanded to be filled.

“I can feel your need in your blood, Melena,” he rasped against her lips. “It’s alive in me now. So fucking intense. Everything you feel this strongly, I will feel too.” He flexed his hips, his shaft surging even more powerfully within the tight circle of her fingers. “I need to be inside you. Put me there.”

She obeyed, guiding him into the slick cleft of her body. He drove home on a savage groan, the fierce thrust making her cry out in pleasure. He gave her more, slamming in hard and urgently, his lack of restraint sending her own control spiraling away. She clawed at him as he fucked her against the wall, orgasm roaring up on her in a shocking wave of sensation.

She came fast and hard, convulsing in tremors that racked her from head to toe. As she shattered around him, Lazaro’s tempo became a storm. He crashed into her with abandon, his immense body taut and shaking, so deliciously wild. He cursed against the side of her neck as his own release roared up on him. She felt him go rigid, driving deeper with every stroke, until a wordless shout tore out of him and he released.

Melena registered the hot blast of his orgasm, a heat she felt in her core and in every tingling particle of her being. She was drained and completed all at once, awash in a pleasure that rocked her to her soul.

But Lazaro wasn’t finished with her yet, apparently.

Instead of pulling out, he guided her legs up around him, lifting her against him, their bodies still joined and vibrating with the aftershocks of release. He brought her into the bedroom, placed her beneath him on the big bed.

Then he began to drive her mad with desire and pleasure all over again.

 

* * * *

 

The temptation to stay with her in his bed had been all but irresistible, but after hours of making love to Melena, Lazaro finally let her sleep. No easy thing, for how much he still craved her. His desire for her soft curves and addicting heat was rivaled only by his newer thirst for her.

He didn’t want to think about how strong those urges were, now that he’d indulged so recklessly—selfishly—in both.

He didn’t want to think about how right it felt to lie next to her, inside of her, to hear her soft cries of pleasure or the quiet puffs of her breath as she slept so sweetly—trustingly—in his arms.

He didn’t want to think about any of that when reality waited for them in D.C. in just a few short hours.

Lazaro slipped away from Melena’s side to shower and get dressed, the predawn morning a prickle in his ancient Breed veins as he headed down to the command center to meet with his team. The warriors were just coming in from the night’s patrol.

Trygg said nothing as he approached with the others from the far end of the corridor. The brutal warrior merely strode into the team’s meeting room for the mission review. Jehan and Sav both slowed as their path met Lazaro’s in the passageway. They greeted him with measured nods and sober, suspicious gazes.

“How did it go out there?” Lazaro asked them. “Any rumblings on the street about the explosion on Turati’s yacht?”

Jehan answered first. “Nothing that we found. It was just a typical night in the Eternal City. A couple of club brawls to break up before they got too bloody and created a bigger problem. Handful of Breed youths feeding past curfew near the train station.”

“No unusual activity at all?”

Sav glanced down, trying to suppress a grin. “Seemed like the only unusual activity going on last night was in here.”

Lazaro glared, but he couldn’t take offense at the truth.

“Is everything all right, Commander?” Jehan asked, ever the diplomatic professional, despite being one of the most dangerous warriors Lazaro had ever seen. “The situation with Melena seemed...difficult.”

Now, it was only more difficult. Not to mention complicated. If she had cause to despise him last night after he’d seduced her then fled to find a blood Host, she had every reason in the world to loathe him for what he did a few hours ago.

And for what he had yet to do, after he saw her safely home to the States.

“Melena Walsh’s welfare is no one’s concern here but mine,” he said, eager to shut down the topic of discussion, even though it weighed heavily on him. “The Order has difficulties of its own to worry about. For instance, does it bother anyone else that no one is stepping forward to claim responsibility for the assassinations of Turati and Byron Walsh the other night? The attack smacks of Opus Nostrum, yet the group hasn’t formally declared it was their doing.”

“Maybe they’re waiting for the right time to own up to it,” Savage suggested.

Jehan grunted, not quite convinced, if the shrewd look in his sky-blue eyes was any indication. “If it is Opus, maybe it wasn’t a sanctioned attack. Maybe it was an over-zealous member looking to make a name for himself among his comrades. Or maybe it was done for more personal reasons than that. Turati was a high-profile businessman with political connections as well. He could’ve had any number of enemies. The same could be said of Walsh.”

Lazaro gave a grim nod. The warrior could be right about any of those scenarios. And the only thing more troubling than Opus making such a bold move was the thought of a renegade agent operating from his own agenda.

Walking into the meeting room with Sav and Jehan, Lazaro couldn’t help but relive the shock and horror of the rocket’s destruction. And the fact that Melena might have been part of the carnage? That she had been mere seconds away from complete obliteration along with the others on that yacht?

Christ.
What had shaken him that night—what had outraged him as a man and as the one entrusted with the security of those dead men—now put a cold knot of dread in his chest.

It put real, marrow-chilling fear in his bones.

Now more than ever, he needed to ensure she would be kept far out of harm’s reach. And as bitter as the taste was on his tongue, he knew that anyone in the Order’s orbit, or in that of the ever-expanding number of enemies seeking to incite true war between man and Breed, would always be at risk.

Like Ellie had been.

Like their sons and the dozen other family members living in Lazaro’s Darkhaven who were killed on his watch.

He couldn’t bear to have anything happen to Melena. She’d been through enough pain and loss already.

And so had he.

As Lazaro took his seat at the head of the conference table in the room with his men, Trygg palmed a slip of paper and slid it toward him. “What’s this?”

Trygg nodded his shaved head at the note he’d scrawled. “Located her brother, like you asked.” Lazaro glanced at the Baltimore, Maryland, address. “Derek Walsh is on a plane out of London as we speak. Booked the flight yesterday, after his father’s death aboard Turati’s yacht made international headlines.”

Lazaro nodded gravely. He would’ve rather Melena’s brother—Byron Walsh’s only blood kin—had heard the news another way, but there was no fixing that now. At least her brother would be there for her. She would be home again, with family and familiar things. God knew, she had needed someplace soft to fall these past days, Lazaro thought grimly. And she hadn’t exactly found that with him.

No, she’d found tears and anger and hurt.

She’d found a man ill-prepared to give her what she needed, what an extraordinary, tender-hearted woman like Melena deserved in life...and in love.

Instead of offering her comfort during her most vulnerable state, he’d growled and snapped at her. When he wasn’t busy seducing her, that is.

When he wasn’t selfishly slaking all of his needs on her as if he would ever be worthy of her heart or her blood.

He had no business giving in to those urges when war was still brewing all around him. So long as there were enemies killing innocents, his duty was, and always would be, to the Order. How could he have let himself slip so egregiously when it came to Melena? How could he be letting himself fall in love when he knew all too well how easily it could be ripped from his arms at any moment?

Love...

Fuck. Of all the rash impulses he had been unable to resist when it came to Melena, that would be the most foolish of them all.

Loving her would be even more selfish than the blood bond he had no right to claim and no intention of completing.

 

CHAPTER 10

Lazaro was gone when she woke up that morning.

He had stayed away most of the day, vanished to his command center until the time came for Melena and him to leave for the flight to D.C. that afternoon. Even on board the Order’s private jet, Lazaro had remained distant, his comm unit to his ear most of the time, or his attention rooted to his work and his computer. She would have called him preoccupied, but his smoky aura had conveyed a deliberate resistance.

Hours later and thousands of miles away from everything they’d shared in Rome, Melena had sat beside him in the debriefing with Lucan Thorne and a few other members of the Order at the Washington, D.C., headquarters, feeling almost as though she were seated next to a polite, detached stranger. He’d introduced her graciously, almost formally, giving no one cause to suspect she was anything more to him than a civilian temporarily placed in his safekeeping following the attack on Turati’s yacht.

He was careful not to touch her, even though heat crackled between them at the slightest brush of contact. He was careful not to let his gaze linger too long, even though his indigo eyes smoldered with awareness every time he glanced her way. He was coolly, determinedly remote.

It had made her want to scream.

She still felt that swamping urge, having since been removed from the meeting to accompany some of the Order’s women in the living room of the headquarters’ elegant mansion while the warriors continued their discussion in private.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink or eat, Melena?” Lucan Thorne’s auburn-haired Breedmate, Gabrielle, offered a warm smile as she indicated a side table laid out with plates of finger sandwiches and tea cakes. Aromatic Darjeeling and chamomile steeped in their pots next to an elegant white china service.

Although her appetite wasn’t there, everything looked and smelled delicious, and Melena was reluctant to reject the woman’s kindness. “Thank you, I think I will have a little something.”

She walked over from the sofa, joined by Gabrielle and two other women of the Order.

All of the Breedmates present tonight at the headquarters had been nothing but kind and welcoming. They were a family. That much was clear. And in the short time she’d been sitting with them, they’d each done their best to make Melena feel at home among friends as well.

Melena had been exhausted from her session with Lucan and the other warriors, to say nothing of the dread she felt every time she looked at Lazaro. Being around other women had helped dissolve some of that anxiety, even if it might only be for a little while.

She couldn’t help watching the hallway outside, waiting for some indication that the meeting had broken so she and Lazaro could finally go somewhere to speak privately. So she could get rid of the awful feeling she had that he was somehow already gone.

Gabrielle handed her a small plate, collecting Melena from her dark thoughts. “If you’d like something more substantial, Savannah made a big pot of jambalaya earlier today. You really can’t go wrong with any of her amazing cooking.”

“I do have my numerous and varied talents,” Savannah said, her doe-brown eyes dancing at the compliment. The beautiful, mocha-skinned Breedmate was bonded to Gideon, another of the warriors present tonight. Where her big blond-haired mate had an intense, slightly mad genius quality about him, Savannah exuded tranquility and smooth confidence.

As Melena put a few cucumber sandwiches and peach tarts on her plate, she found it next to impossible to keep from staring at the third woman in the room with them—the one mated to the warrior named Brock. Jenna looked like neither of her Breedmate companions. In fact, Melena didn’t think she was a Breedmate at all, though she definitely wasn’t fully human either.

BOOK: Tempted by Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novella (1001 Dark Nights)
5.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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