Laughing at her reference to their antagonistic beginnings, the memories ones he would guard fiercely against time and age, he got on the bed and began to kiss his way down her body, ignoring all her attempts and orders to him to speed it up. Venom had no intention of rushing this, his patience a sinuous, covetous thing focused on marking her as his.
She writhed on the bed, her musk making his nostrils flare.
Crouched over her, his head by her navel and his hands on her hips to keep her still, he flicked up his eyelashes . . . to see her looking down, her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. “You,” she said on a sucked-in gulp of air, “are a menace.”
He felt his lips curve. It had been an eon, forever, since he’d played this way with a lover. Perhaps he never had. Before his Making, he’d had only three lovers, all traders passing through who wanted nothing but a little physical ease. Since all three women were on settled routes, he’d had the pleasure of their bodies in his bed a number of times. They hadn’t been strangers who met only for a single night and never again—but neither had they wanted one another for anything but bed sport.
After his Making . . . A man couldn’t be free, couldn’t love, when he knew his lovers saw only part of him. Vampires, angels, mortals, the women glimpsed his eyes, thought they understood, but no one did, not really. Not until Holly.
Venom didn’t have to hide anything from her.
Not his needs.
Not his movements.
Not the inhuman coldness that was as integral a part of him as his eyes.
And not the human core with its scars and its memories and its devotion.
To Holly, he was all of that and more. He was Venom. He was Tushar.
Prowling up her body, he said, “If I am the menace, then you must be the trouble.”
Delight sparked in her, the fangs she sank into his throat all about play.
“Kitty, I seriously don’t know how you drink through those tiny, tiny things. Are you sure they’re not just for show?”
She sank her fangs deeper in punishment.
Laughing, he tumbled them over so that she was on top. She kissed the wounds closed, detoured to devour his mouth, before slithering down his body to attack the top button on his jeans and undo his zipper. She’d stripped him bare in a matter of seconds, his impatient, fiery lover.
Holly would never treat him as anything but an equal. They both knew he was stronger, faster, but that was simply a consequence of time. All he had to do was be with her as she grew into her own strength. But . . . that was a gift that could yet be stolen, their future torn to bloody shreds.
Not here. Not in this bed.
This time was theirs; he’d allow nothing to destroy it.
Drawing her up over his body on that silent vow, he palmed her breasts again before sliding his hands to the curve of her waist to bring her over his erection. “Come on, then, my wild Holly,” he murmured. “Ride me.”
Teeth sinking into her lower lip, she rose up, then oh-so-slowly took the hard ridge of his erection inside herself. A shudder rocked him. He watched her move with erotic grace, a thin layer of muscle underlying her skin and her pleasure in him unhidden, and he stood no chance. None at all.
“Tushar.”
That was all it took. His name. His long-ago true name on her lips and his back bowed as he lost control for the first time in hundreds of years.
34
Venom and Holly spent the next three days in a cocoon of privacy that shut out the world and all its horrors. They loved, they played, he cooked for her all the things she wanted to eat. When she needed to talk to her family, he sat with her, holding her close and lending her his strength so that she could laugh with them without betraying the battle on the horizon, the fight for her very survival.
“If I die,” she’d said to him, “if the only way to contain Uram is to end me, then I want you to tell my family that I died in an accident. A simple crash that burned my body to ash, a crash I never saw coming.” Her hand in his hair, her gaze telling him she knew exactly what it would cost him to keep