Storm's Heart (Elder Races #2)(46)

She reached between his legs. Her slender wrist brushed against the heavy muscles of his inner thighs. He broke into a fine sweat, his thinking crumbled into a wasteland, and his rigid c**k strained toward her plump, smiling lips.

She pulled the two lengths of leather around his thigh and tied them together. “We’re supposed to be upstairs in five minutes,” she whispered. “We have no time right now. But when we do—”

She leaned forward to put her arms around his hips. His hands fisted in the air above her head, and he broke into a fine trembling as she nuzzled the pulsing bulge at his crotch. She rubbed her cheek against his cloth-covered erection, and it was such a happy, sensual, affectionate thing for her to do, he almost fell to his knees in dumbfounded worship.

He gasped her name, an incoherent hymn.

“When we do have time,” she said against him, her breath warming and moistening the cloth over his cock, “I want it to be just like this.”

The penthouse suite was just three flights up from their floor, but one needed a key to access it by elevator. Rogers was still doing guard duty in the hall. The tall policewoman offered the penthouse key to Niniane as they stepped out of the suite. Niniane paused to have a brief exchange with the other woman that had Rogers’s pleasant freckle-sprinkled face alight with pleasure.

He didn’t pay attention to what the females said. He was too busy struggling to get his raging hormones under control, to actually let Niniane walk away from the hotel suite and not drag her back inside, throw her on the floor and do what he had threatened to do. Each step they took down the hall was an uncertain, hard-won triumph.

Then his brain started working again, really working, and he began to think about the attendees of the upcoming meeting.

Not one of those elegant elderly piranhas was going to welcome his presence, and wasn’t that just too f**king bad. There wasn’t a Power on Earth that could keep him from guarding Niniane’s back.

One of the two guards at the stairwell already held the elevator open for them. They stepped inside. After Niniane inserted the key and pressed the button for the penthouse floor, he took her hand and threaded his fingers through hers. She gave him a startled smile that faded as quickly as it had bloomed. Her sparkling sensuality had vanished again, leaving her a pale, sober stranger.

The elevator purred to a stop. He reached out to punch the door-closed button, and she looked at him in surprise.

“This time you listen to me, faerie. Everything will be all right,” he said to her small, tense face that was turned up to his so trustingly. “No one who will be in that room will hurt you. We go in as a united front, and we leave as united front. Got it?”

She nodded. “Got it. Thank you, Tiago.”

“You’re welcome.” He smiled at her, let go of the button, and the doors opened.

He couldn’t have been more wrong on all counts. They walked in to the penthouse, and their united front got slaughtered.

NINE

Niniane squeezed Tiago’s power-corded hand and then released him as they stepped into the quiet, cool luxury of the penthouse.

Carling’s attendant Rhoswen appeared in the foyer, blonde hair pulled back in a sleek chignon and face smooth, serene. In profile she resembled a perfect cameo. The Vampyre had been young when she had been turned, perhaps eighteen or twenty. What had been so compelling at that age to make her seek out vampyrism, and what had convinced the Vampyre that had made her? Young humans were much like any other species, Niniane had found. They were all sure they would live forever. Whereas when she had been eighteen, she had been sure she would not live out the year.

A weight settled on her chest as Rhoswen walked toward her across a polished parquet floor. The problem with forging ahead with the Niniane of the future, she realized, was that she still loved reading Elle, still loved every shade of those damn pink lipsticks in her purse every bit as much as her old persona, Tricks, had, and she felt woefully inadequate for the challenges she faced.

She had to come up with a better coping strategy and fast. Why was she struggling with the thought of meeting again with the Dark Fae delegation and Carling? Tiago towered behind her, a menacing black-clad figure that promised death to anyone who dared to threaten her.

Not that anybody would threaten her to her face. If the attacks weren’t two separate incidents, if there was an actual mastermind behind both of them, that someone would wait until she was alone and vulnerable before trying again. And besides, when she had worked for Dragos she used to have meetings all the time with heads of state and senior government officials, from both the human domain and the Elder demesnes. She’d had no problem dealing with them, even when her life had been in danger from her uncle Urien.

She tilted her head and pursed her lips. Maybe that was it. She should just pretend she worked for someone else. She would work for the real Niniane, who read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; who also read works of literature with deathless prose and haunting, tear-jerking endings (bleck); and who managed her own portfolio of stock options. That chick was a well-dressed bitch in a strand of pearls you didn’t want to cross.

The fake silly Niniane smiled. “Hi, Rhoswen,” she said. “Are all of you except Cowan settling in all right downstairs?”

For a brief moment the Vampyre looked disconcerted. It was a good strategy to keep Vampyres off balance whenever possible. “Thank you, your highness,” said Rhoswen. She had a lovely speaking voice, a low, pure contralto. “We are doing well. We regret any distress Cowan’s actions may have caused earlier.”