Blood Assassin (The Sentinels #2)(74)

Nuzzling his lips down the curve of her cheek, Fane tugged her liquid body tight against his chest.

“Is that good or bad?”

She shook her head. “Don’t try to fish for compliments. You don’t need me to feed your outrageous ego.”

“Ego?” Fane lifted his head to study her with a faux expression of outrage. “I’m a Sentinel. We are trained to be humble.”

Serra felt her heart melt to another level of mush.

She’d thought she knew everything there was to know about Fane. After all, she’d been obsessed with him for years. But who the hell could ever have suspected that beneath his grim demeanor was a secret, mischievous man who loved to tease?

The tangible sensation of just how vulnerable she remained to the man she swore would never hurt her again had Serra instinctively scrambling to repair her defenses.

Great sex was great sex.

But offering up her heart to have it stomped on was a level of self-masochism she wasn’t prepared to suffer through.

Not again.

“You really are hysterical,” she murmured.

His dark gaze studied her suddenly guarded expression. “You can ask the monks if you don’t believe me.”

“I believe they tried to teach you humility, but I’ve yet to meet a Sentinel who isn’t impossibly arrogant.” She lowered her lashes to cover her expressive eyes. “Except for Arel. He has more charm and less ego than most.”

She’d deliberately used the name of the one Sentinel she knew got under Fane’s skin.

Anything to shatter this dangerous sense of intimacy.

She just hadn’t expected his reaction to be quite so . . . epic.

With a low growl he was perched above her, his fists by her head and his knees on either side of her hips.

A rational part of her brain understood he was caging her without using any force that might make her feel trapped. Fane would die before he used his strength against her. But a less rational part understood that she might have struck a nerve that was better to avoid.

His expression was stark as he glared down at her wide eyes.

“Don’t say his name again.”

She met his fierce gaze, ignoring the ruthless beauty of his face. It’d been petty to mention Arel, but dammit, he kept slipping beneath the walls of her defense.

“You pushed me into his arms.”

His jaw tightened, a blast of heat from his body searing over her naked body.

“Do you think that it didn’t destroy something deep inside me every time I saw you together?”

“You made me feel unwanted.”

He sucked in a harsh breath at the low words that were wrenched from her heart.

“Never again,” he swore, lowering his head to seal his pledge with a tender kiss. “Trust me.”

And that was the problem in a nutshell, she silently acknowledged, readily parting her mouth to deepen the kiss.

She trusted this man with her body and with her very life.

But her heart . . .

As if sensing her reluctance, Fane gave her bottom lip a punishing nip before soothing it with the tip of his tongue.

Serra moaned, a ready heat spreading through her body. Christ. One kiss and her legs were parting in open need for his possession.

But even as Fane lowered his body to press his stiffening cock against her lower stomach, his head was jerking toward the side.

She blinked, her body protesting as he leaped off the bed and pulled on a pair of camo pants.

“Fane?”

“Bas is coming down the hall.”

Serra heaved a resigned sigh, heading to the bathroom for a quick shower before dressing in a pair of jeans and scooped stretchy top in a cheery shade of yellow. She added a pair of tennis shoes and pulled her hair into a high ponytail. God only knew where the bastard intended to drag them today.

She entered the sitting room in time to watch Fane pull open the door. He’d added a white muscle shirt to his camos and a heavy pair of boots, but his expression remained grimly unwelcoming.

Not that the too-handsome assassin seemed to care as he stepped into the room, a mocking smile curving his lips as he took in Fane’s barely contained frustration.

“Am I interrupting?”

Serra moved forward, assuming Bas had a death wish. Why else would you taunt a Sentinel on the edge of a meltdown?

“What do you want?” she demanded.

Bas shrugged. “Kaede managed to discover three potential candidates.”

Fane folded his arms over his chest. “Have you tried to contact them?”

“Why would I attempt something so pathetically simple as trying to contact them?” Bas asked, once again tempting death.

Fane took a step forward, the heat from his body blasting through the air.

“Don’t press me.”

Bas lifted a hand, his own composure so brittle Serra sensed it would take very little to shatter it into a million pieces.

Shit.

This could get real bad, real quick.

Reaching beneath the jacket of his smoke gray Armani suit that he’d matched with a pristine white shirt and cranberry silk tie, Bas pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

“I have my computer experts running searches on them and Kaede is out trying to track down any friends or family they might have in this area,” he said, shoving the paper into Fane’s hand.