Page 105 of Hunted

Sire, we have a problem.

I go still.

Eira feels it at once. Her lashes flutter open, dazedness clearing by degrees as she tracks the shift in me, the way every line of my body tightens.

‘What?’ she asks, breathless and suspicious. ‘What happened?’

Malachi does not hesitate.

The teleporter. Tezra.

A pause, brief and lethal.

He has been killed.

The words detonate.

Eira’s eyes lock on mine, climax stripping her expression raw even as she tries too late to pull composure over it.

Outside my quarters, I feel Malachi moving closer, mind sharpened for briefing and damage control.

Inside, in the wake of pleasure and threat and death, the room turns abruptly cold.

And in my arms, my little hunter goes rigid with alarm.

22

EIRA

‘What’s happened?’ I demand, because I know in my bones something has.

When he remains silent, I jerk out of his arms, all that lingering, drugging heat vanishing from my body, replaced by something stark and bright and dread-filled.

‘Calm yourself, little hunter.’

He sounds glacially calm, even as his tongue darts out to lick his lips. Licks my essence from his mouth.

Oh my Gods.

I shake off the drugging haze and snatch at my trousers without bothering to look for my panties, because I heard and felt what he did to them.

Heat slams into my face hard enough to make my skin prickle. I try to look away, because there are only so many humiliations a woman can process in one morning before her soul starts filing complaints.

But he holds my gaze with that silver, merciless focus, and I’m no longer entirely sure he isn’t using glamour on me right now, or if this is just what happens when a vampire rearranges your insides with his mouth and then looks at you like he’s memorised every sound you made.

Hell, I’m not sure about anything any more.

I don’t ask myself what I was thinking. Letting him go down on me, making me forget everything I’m trying to protect. Allowing him to pull me into a fire that will consume me whole if he discovers who I am.

Those thoughts highlight my stupidity, and none of them preserve my dignity.

But Gods, it was cataclysmic.

No clever snarky substitute. No sarcastic little phrase to make the truth smaller. He took me clean out of my skin, out of the room, out of every defensive structure I’ve built, until for a few impossible minutes I was nothing but sensation and heat and the unbearable focus of his mouth.

No performance, strategy or detached curiosity.

My first true sexual act.