Diana's Hound: Bloodhounds, Book 4 (13 page)

She arched away instinctively, but there was nowhere to go—he held her tight, fingers digging in to her skin. But the panic lasted only a moment, a heartbeat, and then sheer sensual pleasure washed away everything else.

Hard. Hot. Diana whimpered and clutched at the bedspread. She tried to say his name, but her voice broke as he shifted his hips the tiniest bit, sending another scalding wave of need coursing through her.

Nate stroked her hip, smoothing his hand up her thigh as he pushed closer, pushed
deeper
, stretching her legs wide as his breath fell against the inside of her knee. “You feel like Heaven.”

“More.” The word rasped out of her before she could think, before she could do anything but beg. “Please.”

He gave it to her, but slowly. A long retreat and a slow advance, then a lingering pause while he ground his hips in maddening circles and used his free hand to toy with her. His thumb grazed her nipple before his fingers returned to tug and pinch, building the sensations from feather soft to the edge of pain as he watched her expression with dark, rapt eyes.

It no longer mattered how much he needed her pleasure, or how much she wanted to give it to him. His touch pulsed through her, every grasp and graze, and everything else vanished.

His breath tickled her skin. “Do you want all of me?”

He’d already buried his cock in her, as deep as he could go. Diana shivered restlessly. “What are you willing to give?”

Even though he turned his face to her calf, his gaze never left hers. He licked her skin and smiled wide enough to show his teeth. “Anything you’ll take. And I’ll take anything you’ll give.”

Still hesitant, even now. “Nate?”

“Diana?”

“You talk too much.” She rocked her hips against his as hard as she could. He met her thrust with his own, met her challenge with a growl as he gripped her ankle and pressed his open mouth to her skin.

And then he bit her.

She’d never liked pain. She still didn’t, though years as a bloodhound had taught her brain to connect it with fighting, with
satisfaction
. That instinctive reaction rolled through her now, turning the slice of Nate’s teeth into an undeniable thrill of excitement that melted into bliss in the blink of an eye.

He’d bitten her before, but not like this. Not while he was already inside her. It multiplied the pleasure of his sharp kiss tenfold, and Diana squirmed in his grasp. “Oh, fuck.”

His voice echoed through her mind, silk on skin and burning hot as his hips snapped forward in his first hard thrust.
“I could be inside you forever.”

Observation or promise? Her head started to spin as the paradoxically lazy ecstasy of his bite collided with the burning hot pleasure of his next thrust.

He licked the spot he’d bitten and gripped her thigh as his speed increased. “Tell me you want this.”

“I want it, Nate.” Had she ever wanted anything else this much? “I want you to fuck me.”

This time, when he stroked his hand down her body, he didn’t stop at her breast. His clever fingers slipped straight to her clit, his touch timed to the rhythm of his thrusts. “Then start coming.”

If she started, she’d never stop. She knew it with a certainty that scared her for a split second, the half a heartbeat before his skilled touch drove away everything else.

She would have screamed as the first wave drew tight and crashed over her, but she had no breath. Nothing but Nate inside her body, inside her blood.

Inside her heart.

He rode her orgasm with shallow thrusts, his voice washing over her in murmured encouragement, words she could barely understand edged with growling pleasure. When she opened her eyes, he was watching her, flashing a rough, feral smile. “So beautiful.”

That smile crashed into and dissolved the first hints of Diana’s bloodhound hunger, sating the gnawing emptiness even as it kindled inside her.
How do you satisfy someone who can only be satisfied by satisfying you?
This was the secret, the elusive thing every hound sought with each dark moon, but so few found.

She opened her mouth to tell him, but another thrust, this one quick and hard, drove all rational thought from her mind. She slipped into that darkness, animal and hot, and reached for him.

Day drifted into night, which gave way to early morning, a progression of time marked only by the trays of food left discreetly by the door. Sunlight was a distant dream, held at bay by the thick curtains that left the room lit by soft, twinkling lights that had been designed to dance and sway in a sweet imitation of firelight.

His mind puzzled over the trick while Diana slept. It wasn’t the sort of invention that would have appealed to Satira, whose logical mind fixated on the practical with brutal focus, but the delicacy and elegance appealed to Nate, even through the haze of his hunger. A bare bulb with a simple filament might serve a necessary function, but how could one not value the way a more diffuse glow gilded Diana’s skin, or the way the flickering light cast ever-changing shadows that begged to be traced with fingers and tongue?

And trace he did, trace and touch and stroke and lick until she stirred sleepily and welcomed him into her body, and then there were no more thoughts of elegant design or clever filaments. Instead, he savored a darker sort of alchemy, the fevered need that sparked when her body clenched tight around his cock, as if the act of fucking created something new and powerful, a chemical reaction more dangerous than anything he’d created in his laboratory.

Her nails pierced his lower back as she tipped over the edge again, the pain sharp but sweetened by her desperate noises and the way they quickened his blood, quickened his pace, quickened the lazy spinning of the world. He fell into her as pleasure spiked a warning up his spine—no, not just fell. He melted, the heat of her body turning the orderly state of his existence into chaos.

He was molten, pouring into her, the parts of him that were bloodhound reveling in the primal marking. Possession, pure and simple, and he’d never been so pleased to be so barbaric.

Diana pushed at his chest, rolled him and followed in a smooth, graceful motion that kept him inside her. She stared down at him, her hair wild around her shoulders, and growled as she began to slowly circle her hips. “Again.”

She’d stolen the words from his lips, but how could he begrudge her the demand when she hovered above him, gorgeous and wild? “You haven’t had enough?” he teased, arching up into her.

“Enough?” she echoed softly. “I barely know what that means anymore.”

This wasn’t the warm, too-obliging lover of the past night. This was a bloodhound, eyes glazed and voice edged in darkness, and it thrilled him to imagine he was her chosen prey. “Let’s find out, love. Take what you want.”

Her thighs flexed, lean muscle under smooth skin, as she rose over him in a gentle rock. “I want you. I want…” The words trailed away, and she closed her eyes.

“What, Diana?” He released her hips, sliding his hands up to cup her breasts. “I’ll give you anything. I’ll take everything.”

“Shh.” A frown creased her brow. She covered his hand with hers and pulled it over to the center of her chest, where her heart pounded, fast and hard. “It’s more than pleasure. I feel you here.”

His own heart lurched as if it would break free of his chest. “What do you feel? Tell me.”

She started to move, barely swaying at first and then harder, and finally she opened her eyes to meet his gaze. “That it’ll never be enough.”

Nothing
could
be enough until the new moon released them from its grip. He was hard again—impossibly, illogically. Irrationally, given his age. But even as his body surged up to meet hers, he knew she wasn’t talking about the lust pounding in their blood.

He spread his hand wide over her heart, his thumb nestled beneath her breast as his pinky brushed her collarbone. “Never enough.”

She moved suddenly, a firm rock to meet his next thrust, and repeated her earlier command, this time in a low, husky lilt. “Again.”

Her heart hammered beneath his hand, and he swore the beat of her heart set a tempo so commanding, his own matched it. Bracing his feet on the bed, he drove up hard enough to lift her knees from the blankets.

Diana caught her breath in a gasp, then pitched forward, pressing her body to his. She gripped his hair and pulled, the harsh caress contrasting with the delicate trace of her tongue over his jaw. But ferocity pulsed inside her, a feral hunger that grew as his own mellowed. Perhaps this was how she’d felt before, hungry but clear-headed as she watched him devolve into growling, clutching madness.

In her, growling madness was appealing. He freed both hands to clutch the swell of her ass and took control of her movements, setting a rough, grinding pace that would tease them both with sensation but not release. “Do you feel how much I need you?”

“No.” She licked a path to the spot just below his ear and nipped him with her teeth.

He arched his head back, silently inviting her to bite him. “Liar.”

She pressed her open mouth to his throat and muffled a noise against his skin. “You want. You don’t need.”

“I want
and
need.”

She bit him. Not a nibble or a tease, but a hard bite that marked. A bite that demanded, and something primal surged up in response. Snarling, he caught her arms and rolled them, his preternatural strength lacking its usual awkwardness now that his entire being was focused on one thing. One person.

Mate.

Diana groaned and arched beneath him with a shudder. “
Now
you need.”

He laughed and licked her pulse. “Do you?”

She struggled against his restraining hands, but not hard enough to break free. “All the time. It’s all I do.”

“Why?” He tightened his grip and pinned her wrists to the bed. “Why do you need me? Why
me
?”

Another frown. “What?”

She didn’t understand the question, maybe couldn’t understand it if her world had gone as hazy as his had been. There was no room for thought or consideration in the grip of madness, no room for
I’m too old for you
or
You’re too good for me.
There was skin and sweat, the tang of both on their tongues and the slowly building certainty that the same refrain beating in her veins also throbbed in his.

Mine. Mate. More.

“Never mind,” he growled, and kissed her.

Diana strained into his touch with a shaky moan lost to his mouth. Her skin heated even more, something he wouldn’t have thought possible, and her hands flexed against the bed. He almost loosened his hold on her wrists, but something in the hungry arch of her body spoke to an instinct he couldn’t recall ever having felt before.

Slowly, carefully, he clenched his fingers and pushed her hands higher, stretching her arms until her fingertips brushed the massive headboard. “Is this what you want?” he asked without lifting his lips from her own. “Is this what you like?”

Another desperate, incoherent moan, and he had to find his answer in her glazed eyes, in the sudden, greedy clutch of her inner muscles around his cock. Growling—an act that seemed to come easily now—he rolled his hips and savored more of her choked noises. “I could do this all afternoon.” Another rock, easing out and gliding back, just enough to keep her on edge. “Would you like that too? A taste of denial to make the reward that much sweeter?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You think not?”

She hissed in a breath. “Maybe you would. Hours and hours, no matter how much I begged.”

“Nothing, Diana.” He licked her lower lip and rewarded her with another lazy thrust. “There is nothing I would not do if it gave you pleasure.”

That focused her gaze. Sharpened it. “Would you give up your control?” she asked in a whisper. “Let go?”

Not give control over to her, but give up his own. He shuddered at the thought, even as what was left of his brain reeled. “Who would be in control then?”

Her chest rose in a single, shaky breath. “No one.”

No one. No one to haul back on the reins if their lust raced out of control. No one to safeguard their bodies—though that thought was laughable. They were neither of them fragile humans with a tenuous grasp on life, to be harmed beyond healing by a little rough handling.

No, the safeguards they truly needed were for their hearts, and those were already crumbling.

Feeling feverish, Nate shifted his weight to his elbows and gathered himself for one sharp thrust. Diana cried out, and he shuddered again as the waning madness surged up, catching him in the grip of feral hunger. “No one,” he growled, driving into her again. “No control. Just this. Us.”

“I trust you,” she whispered, already panting as she brushed her thumb over his lips.

Yes, she did, which made her crazy and glorious—and perhaps made her his. She surely seemed all three as she met his wild thrusts, and the capacity for words slipped away, drowning in heat.

In pleasure.

In the sweet, maddening clasp of her body.

In
her
.

“Because you let me be both.”