He clenched his jaw. “Fuck it.” Threading his hands through those two holes, he took a good grip on the iron handles. He stared at that stained glass angel, who stared back at him with an unreadable yet mesmerizing expression. He couldn't determine what lay in the winged warrior's face. Compassion, detachment, anger . . . It was like Mona Lisa, every expression and none able to be read there.
“I'm here, damn you. Come back now.” He swallowed. “Please.” Anwyn had returned to her private office, calling up the Queen's Chamber on her monitor in there.
“Let's see what you've got, angry man,” she murmured. When he at last began to clean up her room, not just the dresser, her chest tightened, the constriction increasing as he tried to fold the tapestries, push the flowers back in the vases. As he got down and scraped glass and wax into his hands, her own fingers closed, feeling the pain of the small cuts. He looked so incongruous doing such tasks, and yet she knew this was harder for him than fighting a physical enemy. The most frightening monsters were the ones that lived in your head. The aroma of a red rose, sensory memory, could be as painful an assault as a bullet in the chest.
“You are a strange and unsettling woman,cher . One who plays with a vampire hunter.” She didn't take her eyes from the screen. Anwyn always knew when Daegan Rei was near her. It bemused him, she knew, because in his world, such cognizance was usually accompanied only by a marking. Perhaps because vampires had a physical way to inflict immediate mind, heart and soul intimacy upon humans, they didn't realize that a human foolishly, deeply in love could acquire the same awareness, without a blood-link. His scent wrapped around her like a longing for what could never be. It made the craving even sharper, bittersweet.
“That intrigues you. It's why you like me playing with him.” She stood behind her office chair, which she'd positioned in front of the monitor screen as if it were a barrier between her and what she was watching. Much like the barrier she'd always held between her and Daegan. It was an unexpected discovery, that she felt some of the same wariness about Gideon's impact upon her senses as she did Daegan's.
However, when the vampire slid his hands with possessive familiarity over her latex-clad hips and caressed the bare skin beneath the camisole, she leaned back into him, unable to deny her desire for his touch.
“Play, yes. But if you get hurt, his end will not be pretty. Take care that your toy doesn't get out of hand.
You've never wanted to put your hands on him before.”
“On the contrary, I wanted to put my hands on him the very first time he walked through the door. My mouth, every sweet, slick part of my body that you have touched.” She turned her head so she could catch his ear in her teeth. He gave her an indulgent growl, though his muscles hardened, a predatory response that the Mistress in her liked to goad. “You taught me the sweet pleasures of anticipation,” she whispered. “Denying me until I beg, until I would die to have the barest brush of your mouth at my throat.
Even if you only intended to tear into it, take my life.” His fingers dug deep into her hair, tugging so her throat was exposed to him in truth. She shivered as the tip of one of those sharp fangs drew a line unerringly down her thudding pulse. “It would be an unforgivable insult to abuse such a beautiful thing. I would make the smallest possible punctures”—he pressed a sharp tip into her—“and sip until you drifted away, a gift to Heaven.” She closed her eyes. When she detected a dangerous tension sweep through him, she raised her lashes to see his nostrils flare, his lip curling in a feral warning. “I can smell the blood of his latest kill on you.
Have you allowed him to touch you already?”
“No. I've been in the room with him. A few minutes ago.”
Daegan's senses were so sharp, on every level. Though guarding her true feelings for him could be agony at times, the challenge of giving so much of herself to him, and so little at once, of being slave and Mistress both, was irresistible to one with her talents. The reason she took so few sessions now was that every interaction with Daegan was as fulfilling and exhausting as any session she'd ever experienced.
Gideon had called to her in a way she recognized as complementary to both what she had and what she lacked with Daegan. Even for a Mistress, she knew her needs and hungers were more complex and unusual than most, and this was untapped territory. It gave her a shiver of fear and anticipatory pleasure at once. Daegan, she was sure, registered both reactions. His hands cruised up to her breasts, cradled them with deceptive gentleness.
“Gideon Green,” he said, voice laden with irony. “The best vampire hunter in the world. Hard to find, hard to kill. Should I worry over your obsession?”