The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(70)

“Jane!”

Even though this had to be the cruelest joke Lassiter had ever played, V went with it, racing across the shallow space and slamming his body into what certainly appeared to be his shellan’s.

“Vishous?” she said, as if she were equally confused.

He palmed the back of her head, and closed his eyes, and as he kissed her, he prayed that this was not some figment of his imagination, a product of grief meeting the drugs they’d given him.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said hoarsely.

As he spoke the words, he realized that was true not just with her getting shot, but with the distance that had grown between them.

Jane’s arms squeezed him hard, as if she knew he needed to feel that. “Never,” she returned through her tears. “You’ll never lose me…”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care right now—just kiss me again!”



* * *



—

As Jane held on to her mate with desperate strength, she knew she was probably making it hard for Vishous to breathe, but she needed visceral reassurance that she was alive and so was he.

Oxygen was just going to have to take a backseat for a minute.

“Oh, God, I thought you were gone,” he mumbled, his voice reverberating with emotion. “I can’t believe you’re here. What happened? Why are you—shit, I…don’t have a fucking clue what I’m saying.”

Pulling back, she looked up at him. Then she had to touch his face, running her fingers over the tattoos on his temple, and his cheekbones, and his goatee. His diamond eyes were shining with a love so great, she was humbled and full of regret.

Why had they ever wasted the time they’d been given? Why had they lost track of each other at all? How could they have let that happen?

“V,” she cut in urgently. “I’m so sorry I got so wrapped up in my work—”

“What? What are you—no, I’m sorry I was a fucking asshole.” When she tried to speak again, he shook his head. “Can I kiss you again? Please, just let me—”

Without missing a beat, she threw her arms around his neck and pulled herself to his mouth, her heels lifting from the floor. Their mouths met once more and the sensation of soft on soft rocked her to her core.

“Please,” he groaned. “Please, I need you.”

She knew exactly what he was begging for, and she didn’t hesitate. Backing herself up until she felt the wall, she went for the waistband of her scrubs, loosening the bow and letting them fall to the floor. Her boots were a tougher sell on the whole get-off-me thing, but she managed to cross that finish line with the one on the left and kicked it across the Treasury. And that was all she needed to get half her bottoms off.

V took care of his own pant-problems, nearly ripping his fly open, and then she was back to hanging off of his neck and he was pulling her legs around his hips—

His penetration was so fast and deep she yelled. And then she didn’t know what the hell she did—and she didn’t care.

Vishous was dominating by nature, a force in the world that wasn’t to be denied. And he had sex in exactly that way: He pounded her furiously, his body clapping against hers, the structural integrity of the marble wall she’d put her back against the only reason they were still standing.

And even that was a “maybe” instead of a “definitely”: At the rate he was going, he was liable to fuck her right through the stone and out onto the lawn—and she loved it. She loved the near-violence, the knife-edge of pain, the sense that she had walked into the woods and found a snarling beast and laid herself down so it could take her.

He was the out-of-control that she otherwise didn’t let into her life. And she had missed this. She had missed him.

As she began to climax, the tears rolled down her face. The awareness that she had let this connection go made her panic—because what if she had lost it forever? What if she had ceased to exist in the middle of that road? Or worse…what if she had just kept going as she had been with work being the most important thing in her life and everything else slowly fading away.

And it was not just her. There were things Vishous had to work on, too. Things he was going to have to change.

Then again, true love required so much more than the boy-meets-girl stuff—and mutual attraction was the easy part: Life did not sit back politely and not interrupt the conversation between two souls united. It wasn’t a properly raised lady of leisure with a soft voice, ordering the staff to bring canapés for the hungry. No, it was more like a cocktail party of guests where some of them you were happy to welcome into your little clutch of two…and others were drunken frat boys who tripped, fell, and vomited on your collective feet.

Vishous eased up on the pumping. “You’re crying. Oh, fuck, I hurt you—”

“I’m just glad we’re together.” She sniffled as he wiped her tears with his thumbs. “And all I want is more of this.”

“Me, too.” He kissed her. “That’s what I want, too.”

The pain in his face, in those diamond eyes, was a window into the depths under all that cold, calculating intelligence, and she knew the vulnerability wasn’t something he showed even his Brothers. This was a gift to her, a testament to what he felt for her, the foundation of their relationship that thankfully hadn’t crumbled, but only been partially obscured for a short time.