Devil's Gate (Elder Races #4.6)(27)

Her lovely, slender throat.

His fangs descended. His face twisted as he fought himself. This was too far out of control. He was a stranger to himself.

Her warm, trembling hands smoothed the material of his T-shirt across his chest. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “I want you to bite me.”

He hadn’t even been aware that he’d taken a useless breath of air until it rushed out of him. The force of his own reaction nearly sent him to his knees.

“Duncan,” she said. She sounded and looked dazed.

He lowered his head slowly, and ran his mouth along the leaping pulse at her neck, tonguing the delectable delicate flesh.

She pushed him, startling him out of his preoccupation. With a husky, drunken laugh, she pointed behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The elevator doors stood open. Ah, right.

The length of the hallway to her front door was all but unendurable. He said hoarsely, “After we go to the opera, what are we doing next?”

“I don’t know,” she moaned. She dropped her keys and bent over to retrieve them. “How about a weekend in bed?”

He blurred, snatched the keys out from underneath her hand and unlocked and opened her door before she could fully react. “Get inside.”

He glared as she exploded with laughter. Then he laughed too. This was crazy, ludicrous. He could say he hadn’t felt this way since he was a teenager, except he was certain he hadn’t felt this way then either.

Then finally they were inside, alone in her shadowed apartment. She tossed her purse onto the couch—he realized they had forgotten her case, in the trunk of his car—and then he lost that thought too as she leaped at him. He snatched her up as she wrapped her arms and legs around him, and he strode for the bedroom.

“Say it again,” he said. “What you told me on the plane.”

Her brilliantly colorful eyes were luminous with emotion and desire. “I didn’t think you heard me.”

He laid her on the bed gently and straightened. He tore off his shirt. “I heard you. Say it again.”

She pushed up to kneel on the bed in front of him, and she met his gaze as she reached for the fastening of his jeans. “I love you, Duncan.”

“That was even better than the last time,” he whispered, smiling as he palmed her full, soft breast. She pulled his jeans open and slid her hands inside them as she eased the material down over his lean hips. An odd sensation slid along his torso and up his arms. He glanced down at her snakes as they journeyed across his skin.

Seremela followed the direction of his gaze and drew back a little, her expression turning self-conscious. She offered softly, “I can wrap them, if you’d rather.”

He said firmly, “No.”

She pulled a few snakes away from him. “Are you sure it isn’t too—tentacley for you?”

He grasped her shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes. “Listen to me. I did not say I was falling in love with you, if only you would hide some part of yourself or change some aspect to try to please me. I said I was falling in love with you—all of you. I don’t want you to curb yourself, deny yourself, cover up your face or head or any part of your body. I don’t want you to lose or gain weight, or watch what you say, or deny how you feel, or try to be anything but who you are, because who you are is the most beautiful person in the world to me.”

As she listened, the expression on her lovely features grew vulnerable, wide open. While he certainly hoped that he had not been the first person to ever tell her such things, he selfishly hoped that he had been the first male to do so. He grasped one of her snakes, kissed it on the nose and looked into its face. “You’re never going to bite me, are you?”

“They would never hurt you,” Seremela said. “They would die first.”

“Oh well,” he said, giving her a crooked grin. “There’s goes that fantasy.”

Her eyes went very wide, and she laughed, a joyous, surprised sound. She unbuttoned her top and shrugged out of it then slipped off her bra as Duncan kicked off his jeans and stood nude, his heavy erection jutting from his hips.

Her br**sts were stunning, lush and full, the soft, plump ni**les several shades darker than the light creamy green of her flesh. He bent, took one nipple in his mouth and sucked at it gently. The muffled noise that came out of her was urgent and incoherent. She cradled his head, ran her fingers through his hair and stroked his shoulders.

As he suckled her, a feather light sensation flickered along the sensitive skin on the head of his penis, creating a sharp, tantalizing pleasure. He looked down, as the sensation spread along the tight, drawn up sac of his testicles, and along the muscles of his lower abdomen.

Seremela’s snakes flickered their slender tongues along his skin.

Seremela cocked her head and looked down as well. “They’re tasting you,” she said, giving him a sidelong smile. “They know that I love you, and they’re curious.” She looked splendid and barbaric, and completely unfettered.

For a moment, the ghost of the human Duncan once was struggled with the image. But Seremela’s snakes were not mundane creatures; they were a part of her, and Duncan had not been human for a very long time.

His fangs descended. Seremela looked at his mouth and her gaze turned heavy lidded. She bared her neck to him in wordless invitation, and he gathered her soft, curvaceous body into his arms and eased his fangs gently into the pulse at her neck.