“Women,” he murmured, “might want to hurt me on occasion, but no one’s ever said that kissing me was a punishment.” Though he could make it one—immortality had given him a long time to perfect the ability to be a bastard.
“Damn them.” Honor collapsed against his chest with that quiet statement that held trembling fury. “It infuriates me that Valeria and the others have made me into this weak, pathetic creature.” Her breath puffed against his neck as her hand clasped his shoulder, nails digging into his skin.
The feel of her full br**sts pressing against him stirred his darkest sexual instincts, but immortality had also given him the ability to delay gratification, to find pleasure in every step of the most intimate of dances between male and female. And Honor’s trust, it was an exquisite thing, to be savored.
Running his hand over her hair, he twined the soft locks around his finger. “Yet,” he said, rubbing the strands between his fingertips, “you’re in the lap of a vampire who is their nightmare.”
Her entire body went oddly motionless. “Part of me thinks you must’ve influenced me in some way,” she said, “because it makes no logical sense that I trust you as much as I do.”
Dmitri unraveled a curl, twined it around his finger again. “When I first developed the scent lure,” he said, “I found it amusing to seduce the hunter-born.” His cynicism had grown on the jagged edges of his anger. “I’d start with the scent, then fade it until it was no longer there. By the time I actually took them to bed, they just thought it was—it gave them permission to indulge in sex with a vampire, to pretend I made them do it.”
Honor took several seconds to reply. “It’s what the hunter-born fear, that they’ll fall to the scent lure.”
“No one ever complained.”
Honor heard cool arrogance in those words, and yet the fact that he’d shared the truth with her said he understood that, shades of gray or not, he’d robbed those hunter-born of choice, at least at the start. “Why did you stop?”
He kept playing with her hair in that lazy way that made her want to cuddle up to him and close her eyes. “It was too easy.” A shrug. “I discovered the conquest meant nothing—especially when certain hunter-born began to seek me out.”
“Like a drug.” She could taste the dark eroticism of him on her tongue, her body primed to the satin and champagne and fur of his caresses, could well understand the compulsion that had driven those hunters to return to him over and over.
“The lure,” he said, “is not addictive.”
No, she thought, that was Dmitri.
Dmitri dreamed that night, of a woman with sunshine in her smile and love in her every breath.
“Dmitri.” A shy word, her hands smoothing down her skirts. “You shouldn’t be here.”
He wanted to touch her, kiss her, adore her. But she wasn’t his. Not yet. “I brought you these.”
Her eyes, those brown eyes uptilted at the corners, filled with unhidden joy at the sight of the wildflowers he’d clambered all over a mountainside to collect, feeling like one of the goats who roamed the same range. Yet if she asked him to go out and gather more of the wild blooms, he’d do so without question. Because that smile, it was the reason for his heartbeat.
Taking the bouquet, she half laughed her delight. “Thank you.” A sucked-in breath, a look of absolute determination.
Running forward, she kissed him on the lips, only reaching him because he was already bending toward her.
Stunned, he didn’t have time to raise his hands, keep her with him.
She was gone the next instant, her skirts whipping past his legs in a burst of color, the scent of her a blend of sunshine and those wildflowers she adored. He dreamed every night of having the right to press his nose against the delicate skin at the curve of her neck, to breathe in that scent as he drowned in the wild, feminine taste of her.
As it was with dreams, the colors shifted without warning until he was no longer standing in a rough barn but inside the walls of the small cabin he’d built with his own hands, a lovely dark-haired woman standing, shy and uncertain, in front of him, her back to his front. He’d touched her between her thighs until she was slick and pink with welcome, kissed her there in spite of her shocked cries, licked up the exquisite musk of her pleasure . . . but never had he claimed her as he hungered to do. Such a thing would have dishonored her.
“Ingrede.” Closing his hands over her upper arms, he tugged her against his chest. “Are you afraid?”
Her response was a whisper, her body trembling until he wanted only to stroke her, slow and easy. “Yes.”
Kissing the soft curve of her neck in the exact place that he knew made her weak in the knees, he found himself pushing his aroused body against her, his control in tatters. Clawing it back, though it was a precarious hold at best, he rubbed his lips over her skin. “I’d never hurt you.” He would tear out his own heart before putting a bruise on her.
Making that little moaning sound in her throat that he loved, she angled her head to give him easier access. “You know so many things.” Husky words. “I know only what you have taught me.”
He shuddered as she pushed herself against him. Control lost, he bit at her pulse as he reached around to cup her br**sts with a boldness he’d never before dared, afraid she’d shy. But now . . . now she was his wife, and though her skin burned with color, she didn’t pull away. “You are so beautiful.” He shaped her through the fabric of her clothing, indulging himself in a way he’d dreamed about for years, often waking with his c**k hard between his legs.