Now that he’d said the words, the image sprang to vivid life in his head. Naomi spread beneath him, her slender throat bared and arched to him like an offering. His mouth lowering to her, his fangs piercing her vein.
He could almost taste the sweetness of her blood in his mind. It would be delicate like her scent, and bold like the woman herself.
He squeezed his eyes closed and set his jaw, fighting off the ache there that signaled his need to feed. Now more than ever, he was almost desperate for it. That animalistic strike.
The hot, dark taste of blood—Naomi’s blood—flooding into his mouth. The sensation of pounding deep inside her as he drank, her tight channel squeezing him as she came.
He growled and shut his eyes, trying in vain to bar the images—and the thirst—from his thoughts. The necessity to find a blood Host was getting urgent the longer he was in Naomi’s presence. At least if his physical hunger was slaked he might have the strength to hold one of his needs at bay when it came to her.
Not fucking likely, but he’d be damned if he took anything more from her than he already had.
Cain’s reminder last night of what Asher had been—and everything he could never be—had been well-timed. Asher had been getting too comfortable with Naomi. He’d been finding it too easy to imagine what his life might be like with someone to share it with. Someone like Naomi.
No. Notlikeher.
Only her.
He’d told himself that keeping Cain’s appearance from her was only to soothe her fears about Slater closing in on her or Michael. But Asher’s motives had been selfish too. Naomi didn’t know about his past. She didn’t know how many lives he’d taken, including too many innocent ones.
His lie burned, but every minute that had passed since his confrontation with the other Hunter only made it harder to find the words he needed to say to her.
She continued to kiss and lick and nip her way down his torso. He lifted his head to watch as she drifted lower, and the look in her eye sent a battering ram of lust slamming into him. His already swollen cock pulsed and leapt, clear fluid weeping onto his stomach in anticipation of what she intended for him.
“You’re gorgeous,” she murmured, her eyes caressing him as admiringly as her hands. “I could never get tired of looking at every inch of you, Asher.”
He wanted to reply. To tell her that he was nothing compared to her. He wanted to shower her with all the words that couldn’t possibly do her justice, but all he managed was a strangled groan, lost in her warm grip as she wrapped her fingers around his shaft. Then she began to slide her hand up and down his length.
Her long, unhurried strokes had his pelvis rocking as he strained toward her, into her grasp. “You’re killing me, angel. God, I’d do anything as long as you keep touching me like that.”
“Anything?” She laughed softly. “Better not make promises you may not want to keep.”
She was teasing, unaware of just how apt her warning was. He had a hundred promises he wanted to give her, but had no right to speak a single one.
And then he had no words at all, once he felt the heat of her warm, moist breath on the head of his cock.
“Naomi—” Her name was hardly more than a broken snarl as she closed her lips over him and drew him deep into her mouth. “Ah, God.”
He bucked, reflexively driving his fingers into her dark hair. Her tongue was pure fire and she was burning him alive as she stroked and pulled and sucked. She couldn’t fit the full size of him in her mouth but that didn’t stop her from trying. He almost had to peel himself off the ceiling as she deep-throated him, those tight muscles gripping him like a warm, wet fist.
All the while, she made sexy little sounds, moans and hums around his girth that told him more than any words could that she was as equally consumed with pleasure as he was.
If he couldn’t taste her now, he needed to get inside her at the very least. He quaked with the effort of letting her continue, taking her tongue lashings like a martyr would, suffering this sublime torture in silence.
But then she began sucking in earnest, pulling back until she’d almost expelled him before drawing hard and deep, working the base of his shaft with her fingers, urging him to thrust with her hand around his hips.
The rhythm was like a heartbeat now, relentless, impossible to control. He tightened his grip on her hair.
“Jesus,” he ground out, his vision blurring in a haze of red, his fangs extending even further as his climax bore down on him like freight train. “You have to stop before I . . . ah, fuck . . . Naomi—”
He broke off as he realized his warning had the exact opposite effect. She only tightened her grip and moved faster, moaning now, desperate, needy sounds that short-circuited his brain.
“Fuck!”
He bellowed her name as every nerve ending fired at once, sending shockwaves through his body. He came harder than he ever had before, hot jets scalding him from inside as she suckled him mercilessly.
A sensation he’d never felt before wrapped around him, squeezing tight in his chest as he stroked Naomi’s hair and surrendered to the heat of her mouth. The feeling he had for her went far beyond lust. It was something profound and elemental, something primal and undeniable. Something possessive and permanent.
Mine, he thought, as he pulled her up to lie next to him.
