the incongruously luminous morning air, her vow unbreakable for all that it was silent. “It won’t come to that,” Venom said, responding to the words she hadn’t spoken.
“Don’t be a liar, Viper Face.” Gentle, chiding words as she walked back up the steps toward him, a small woman in a vivid sundress, bare feet, and a fall of hair as bright as her soul. “There’s no other way.”
This time, when she put her arms around him, he crushed her close. And he knew it was far too late to try to distance himself. She’d already reached that sliver of the man he’d once been. Not only that, but she’d charmed the cobra, twined the viper around her arm. And flipped the switch.
He was hers.
They stood there in silence for untold minutes, until Holly lifted her head from his chest. “I don’t want my pinwheels to burn,” she said with a smile that couldn’t hide the sadness within.
He followed her inside, watched her take the sweets from the oven and put them on a cooling tray on the counter before picking up the small jug of glaze he’d prepared. Glaze drizzled on, she used a fingertip to touch one of the sweets, hissed out a breath. “It’s so hot . . . but I still want to stuff my face.”
Sucking on her burned finger, she shot him a look that asked him to laugh with her.
Venom had no laughter inside him.
Only anger and pain and need.
Tugging her finger from her mouth, he kissed the poison and sugar sweetness of her with a greed that should’ve terrified her. But this was Holly. Who thought his eyes were pretty and who wanted to introduce him to her mother.
Mouths fused and bodies in passionate sync, they ended up in the room she’d claimed. Pulling her dress up over her head and throwing it aside, he palmed her breasts. When he bent his head to caress them with his mouth, she tugged at his hair as if she wanted another kiss.
He resisted, squeezing her other breast to make his point.
A shiver ran through her. Satisfaction a curve on his lips, her pleasure soothing and calming the raw edge of his need, he got to work. She jumped at the scrape of his fangs, moaned when he sank them in without taking blood. She was sensitive there, not just to touch, but to the kiss of his fangs.
He took full advantage of that knowledge to tease and torment her. First, he let the taste of her sink into him, before licking the wound closed. It was only a small one, a wholly sexual thing that had nothing to do with drinking blood to survive. Then he licked his tongue over her nipple before closing his teeth deliberately over it and tugging.
Jerking, she ran her hands down his back, scraping at him through his shirt. When she pulled impatiently at it, he managed to unbutton the shirt without taking his attention from his worship of her breasts. Shrugging it off, he gloried in the feel of her nails sinking into his flesh as he bit and licked and kissed.
Only when her heart was a rapid tattoo and she sounded like she couldn’t breathe did he move his lips to the centerline of her chest and kiss his way back up to her mouth, holding the silken heat of her body close to him.
Small but strong, that was Holly.
Her kiss was a demand and it was a branding. Holly had decided on him and he knew no matter what happened, she was it for him. He’d be like Jason’s vampire contact, that man who still loved his lost mate so many years after her murder.
Some things a man knew.
Breaking their kiss, he nuzzled his way down her throat, nipping at her carotid as he did so. She shivered but made no attempt to stop him. He was lethal, dangerous, could’ve torn out her throat . . . but that wasn’t what they were to one another.
Lifting her up in his arms, he threw her onto the bed.
She laughed, her hair a glorious stain of color on the white bedding, and her eyes so full of pure happiness that it stopped his breath. “Tushar,” she said, using a name no one had spoken in centuries, a name he’d told everyone was of a dead man.
Turned out he’d lied.
“God,” she said suddenly, “imagine if past-Holly could see me now. Naked and about to be led astray by you. The poor