good vampire, except because I wasn't really a vampire, but something else, something more and less. I couldn't use my gaze to make him do what I needed, but I could use the ardeur to tie him to me. I could put him in the place that Haven had been trying to get to all these months. I could make him my lion to call.
It was supposed to be an honor, something done with deliberation and care, like a marriage, but I didn't have time for the niceties. It was going to be the metaphysical equivalent of a shotgun wedding. I wanted to ask Micah's and Nathaniel's opinion of it. I wanted Jean-Claude to talk to me first. I wanted my men, but in order to have them alive at the end of the night, I needed help now. That help was nude in the moonlight, and seeing him nude almost made me forget there was a plan. He was beautiful, all that muscle and eagerness painted in stark light and shadow, my moon and stars and darkness. I realized something I hadn't before, the process had already begun. It was about to the point where Haven had stayed. I wanted him, and touching him felt unbelievably good, but I'd kept the Rex out of that last bit of me. It was almost as if by holding the spot open so long I'd left a vacancy sign, and the first new dominant lions I met had both tried to fill it. Shit.
I held my hand out to him. He didn't need any more encouragement. He just came to me, wrapped his hand around mine, and let me lead. For tonight that was nearly perfect.
I opened the ardeur and realized that there was a thread of it attached to him already. I even felt another thread out in the night hanging on to Jacob. He was fighting it so hard. There was a small part of me that wanted to force him to come to us, but he didn't share. He would never be able to fit into our lives. He would always have to be king, and I had enough kings in my life. I needed men who were okay with being the power behind the throne, not the ass on it.
Nicky's mouth found my breasts, lifting me in his arms so he could suck them while still on his knees. He sucked and bit until I cried out. Then he let me slide down his body, and I felt him so hard, so eager, that even him brushing against me made me cry out again. He stood up, and it forced that soft, girl sound from me; half startlement and half the feel of his hardness pressed against my body. He sat down with the wall against his back, put his hands on my thighs, and tried to angle me onto him, but in the end I was too impatient for it and wrapped my hand around him. I squeezed just enough for him to make a sound for me, then I guided him between my legs, and he began to push his way inside. The ardeur made me wet and ready but only real foreplay made me open.
"So wet, so tight, God!" he said, and his hands let go of my legs and went to my waist, my hips, helping guide me where he wanted me. The sensation of him sliding inside me an inch at a time was the pleasure it always was; there was something about that first entry, that first hard push deep inside me that just did it for me. When he was as deep into me as he could go, so that I felt our bodies wedded as close as they could be, I shuddered around him, my fingers finding the rough of the wood wall that was at his back.
The shudder had thrown my head back. I had to recover enough to look at him. I put my hands on either side of his face at the same time that I began to move in his lap, with him inside me. His hips moved with me, his legs pushing into the ground to give him more movement, and we began to dance together up against the wall in the summer dark.
"Your eyes, they're glowing. Brown and black, like brown glass with light behind them."
There were other colors he could have said that would have scared me, too, because I'd been possessed by