Serpent's Kiss (Elder Races #3)(56)

Then she was able to loosen her grip in his hair only enough to hook her fingers into his T-shirt. She tore the cotton down his back, baring a wide expanse of muscle that flexed as she dug her fingers into him. He dragged his mouth away from hers with a shaken gasp. She had no idea what he said, but it seemed like it was in the form of a question.

“I hate your clothes,” she muttered.

He flattened his hand on her breastbone just under her throat and held her down as he reared back to stare at her. He was so roused, a luscious flush of blood darkening his tanned skin, those lion’s eyes glittering brilliant with desire, his face taut.

“I hate your stupid clothes too,” he said. He took the neckline of the caftan and ripped it wider, baring her br**sts.

The door to the cottage opened, and a chilly rush of wind entered the room. Rhoswen stood in the doorway, clutching the dog under her arm. Rasputin erupted into a frenzy of snarling and barking. Moving almost quicker than sight, Rune lunged forward to cover Carling. She turned her face into his chest, not from any modesty but from the need to continue touching him in any way that she could.

He cupped the back of her head, shielding her face from scrutiny, and growled again, and this time there was no mistaking that low menacing sound. The heavy bones in his broad chest seemed wrong, as though he might have flowed into a partial shapeshift. She thought of Tiago’s monstrous partial shift when he had come after Niniane, both at the hotel and later when Niniane had been kidnapped, and need pulsed through her again. Carling closed her eyes and opened her mouth on Rune’s skin. She drank down his feral emotion like wine.

In her precise, Shakespearean-trained voice that was frigid with bitterness, Rhoswen said, “Apparently this was not the best time to say good-bye.”

ELEVEN

Carling coughed out an incredulous laugh that had nothing to do with amusement. The snarl that came out of Rune sounded infuriated, guttural. “Get the hell out and SHUT THAT GODDAMN DOOR.”

There was a frozen moment, filled only with Rasputin’s frenzied barking. Carling closed her eyes and leaned into Rune’s hot body, and his arms tightened on her in a hard, possessive hold. Then Rhoswen slammed the door, the sharp wooden report echoing through the shadowed cottage.

A corner of Carling’s mind worked hard to process what just happened. The rest of her was shaking with the aftermath of the firestorm that had swept through her. She felt like a drug addict coming down off a high. Rune knelt on one knee as he held her. His heartbeat thundered in her ear. His T-shirt hung in shreds off his tightly bunched biceps, and his body vibrated with such tension he felt poised to attack something.

Then he released the tension on a sigh, and she felt his body flow back into its normal lines. He stroked her hair, threading his fingers through the loose, tangled strands. He said roughly, “You all right?”

She gave him a jerky nod. It was almost a complete lie. Need still pulsed low in her pelvis, a sharp, empty pain that was shocking in its intensity. She didn’t recognize herself in the untamed creature that had launched at Rune.

He said, “I’ll be damned if I apologize for any of that.”

She stirred and managed to find her voice. “What would you apologize for?”

“Throwing my own shit fit. Yelling at Rhoswen.”

“I’ll make a pact with you,” she whispered. “If you don’t apologize, I won’t either.”

“It’s a deal.” He kissed her temple. Then, after a pause, he said, “She interrupted us deliberately, you know.”

“I know.” Carling sighed. Rhoswen hadn’t been caught by surprise. She would have heard them before she ever reached the cottage door. “She was completely inappropriate.”

Rhoswen had achieved her objective, however; she had destroyed the raw out-of-control moment Carling and Rune had been engaged in.

Rune settled his weight back on his heels as he released her. Full night had descended, and the only illumination in the cottage came from the moon that had risen. Even though it had begun to wane, it held tremendous Power, spilling through the windows and limning the edges of their bodies with a delicate lattice of silver. For a long moment she sat still and let him look at her, the fluted wings of her collarbones, the full ripe globes of her bare br**sts with their plump jutting ni**les and the shadowed indentation of her narrow rib cage underneath.

He crouched over her like the giant cat that he was, looking as if he were about to pounce, unblinking intensity in his moon-silvered gaze, his wide shoulders bowed as he leaned on one fist he had planted on the floor beside her hip. An aftershock of urgency rolled out of him and into her, but their earlier frenzy had splintered with such a crash, it left her feeling slightly sick.

She looked down to pull her ruined caftan up her torso, and he helped her to find edges of the material to knot together to cover her temporarily, his long-fingered hands so gentle that the alien, traitorous tears filled her eyes again.

For so long she had treated her own body like a weapon, and yet he treated it like it was a temple. It made her feel ludicrously fragile, as though she might shatter into pieces without his high regard, and she wrapped her arms around herself.

“We need to get to the city,” he said quietly. “And get a move on all the things we talked about.”

Wariness touched her. Reluctant to start the whole ridiculous argument again, she just nodded and kept her tone noncommittal. “Yes.”