His fangs crowded his mouth.
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured, but the old man kept howling in terror, pleading for help.
He wouldn’t recall any of his ordeal once Darion was finished with him. A trance and a mind scrub would erase all the fear the old man was feeling. Assuming Selene let the human live, he’d return to his boat or his village without a single memory of where he’d been or what he’d endured in the Atlantean queen’s court. It seemed the least Darion could do for him.
But for now the man was petrified with fright.
Darion struck fast and hard. With his hand splayed on the gray head to hold it steady, he bit into the fleshy throat.
Selene gasped, one hand flying to her chest. But she didn’t avert her eyes for a moment as Darion began to drink.
Warm red cells flooded his mouth.
He stared at Selene, gripped by the thought of having her tender neck yielding under his bite. Her blood flowing over his tongue. Her body naked beneath him as he took his fill from her vein and gave her pleasure back tenfold as he drove his cock deep inside her.
The fantasy was so powerful, so shockingly vivid, he snarled with the savagery of his desire.
She had to know what he was thinking. He couldn’t keep the intensity of his arousal out of his hot gaze.
He drank some more, waiting to see Selene break away from his profane stare. But she didn’t flinch. She seemed as unable--or as unwilling--to sever their visceral connection as he was.
And goddamn if it didn’t make him burn with the need to have her even more.
CHAPTER 24
She couldn’t look away from Darion as he fed.
She watched transfixed, riveted when she should be repulsed.
Aroused when she should be appalled.
What was wrong with her?
It was impossible to look away from his scorching gaze. No longer the absorbing brown eyes that made her wonder if she might find any softness inside him, but shocking amber that burned as hot as an open flame. His pupils had winnowed down to the narrowest vertical slits as he drank greedily, his sensual mouth latched onto the human’s throat.
The tunic he’d been given to replace his own clothes hung open at the collar, the linen laces unfastened and loose. It revealed only a wedge of his smooth chest, but what little of it she saw drew her attention almost as magnetically as his eyes.
Breed skin markings curved and tangled across his chest, alive with dark colors. Changing shades of deep red, indigo, and gold, twisting and pulsing.
He was as alien to her as anything she had ever witnessed, beautiful in a disturbingly erotic way.
Yet for all Darion’s coiled power, he seemed to be holding it in check with the aged mortal. His grip on him was almost gentle. The man’s legs had given out the moment Darion struck, and instead of letting him sag or fall to the floor, Darion carefully held the old man’s body upright with one arm.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what it might be like to be pinned under all that power. Utterly at the mercy of those sharp, unforgiving fangs.
It should have unsettled her, even terrified her.
In many ways it did.
Because instead of the sick feeling she had anticipated, watching Darion slake his hunger electrified every cell in her body. Arousal spiraled, unbidden, a deep, liquid warmth she could hardly bear.
As if he sensed what she was feeling, he made a hungered sound while those fiery eyes consumed her with unrelenting heat.
Finally, she couldn’t take another moment. If playing spectator to his hunger wasn’t jolting enough, her strange reaction to Darion’s penetrating gaze was.
She rose, making her way down the steps as swiftly as she dared without breaking into a run.
She fled immediately for the stairs leading up to the royal chambers, her heartbeat hammering at every pulse point on her body.
