She’d been shocked at the raw pleasure he’d coaxed from her with hands rough and marked from a life carved from the earth, his skin dark from the sun. He’d sipped at her tears, caressed her through the trembling, and then he’d stroked up her dress and bared her to the sun, to the kiss of his eyes . . . his mouth. Yes, he was a beast.
Her beast.
Now, still smiling, he lowered his head to her neglected breast, pushing upward with a thickly muscled thigh at the same time, to grind her delicate flesh in the most exquisite of ways. Oh, yes. Gripping the black silk of his hair, she arced up into his mouth as her body trembled and broke in a burst of liquid heat.
“There,” he murmured against her mouth when she could see again, when she could hear again, though her chest continued to heave, “now you will behave, will you not?”
Stroking one hand down his stubbled jaw, she tugged him down. “Kiss me, husband.”
“Husband.” Honor woke with the word on her lips, the images from the dream as vivid as the tiny spasms low in her body. She moaned at the realization that she’d orgasmed, her thighs clenched tight around a pillow. But instead of jerking away, she rubbed herself against it, trying to hold on to the vestiges of a dream more erotic than any real-life experience she’d had—a dream that returned a sense of sexual pleasure to her she’d thought forever stolen.
“There, now you will behave, will you not?”
Her ni**les tightened to near-painful points, aftershocks rippling between her legs. “Oh, God.”
The strange thing was, she’d never been drawn to dominant men in bed, wouldn’t have expected to find the dream so very sexy—especially after the assault. If she did have sex again, she’d assumed it would be with some man who’d be gentle and patient with her fears.
A brutally beautiful face, dark eyes with an edge of menace.
Yes, Dmitri wasn’t gentle in any sense of the word, but there was no doubting the sexual energy between them. He was, she was forced to admit, the likely inspiration for her faceless dream lover. Her hand fisted on the sheets at the sensory memory of her lover’s weight on her, so heavy and rough, the feel of his callused hand molding her breast, the clever wickedness of his mouth, the hard ridge of a sizable erection pressing against her.
Muscles low in her body clenched, wanting that thick heat pushing inside her.
“Cold shower time,” she muttered, shoving off the sheets to see that she was naked.
Panic spiked and she went to reach for the gun under her pillow—until she saw the clothes strewn on the floor, as if she’d thrown them about in the night. Laughing, she said, “Some dream.” One she wouldn’t mind repeating, if she was being honest. Being tormented to orgasm by a man her dream self clearly trusted . . . yeah, it was far better than remembering that black pit filled only with pain.
The clock showed that she’d actually slept for a serious amount of time—it was half past five in the morning, and she’d fallen into bed at six the previous day. Showering, she got dressed, weapons included, and was about to call Dmitri when her cell rang.
She picked up to find Sara’s deputy, Abel, on the other end. “There’s some kind of a situation in Little Italy,” he said. “Can you check it out?”
Every part of her hungered to get to the Catskills, but she was a hunter and that meant something. “Signal’s going to drop in the elevator,” she said. “Call you back when I reach the ground floor.”
Once there, she headed out onto the street. “So, details?”
“Yeah, not so much,” Abel said. “Cops are out there. No one’s quite sure what’s happening, but if you think it’s ours, call me back and I’ll assign someone—your Tower contract takes priority. Here’s the street.” He read it out.
“Got it,” she said, hailing a cab and sliding in. “I’ll call you after I’ve had a look at the scene.”
The cabbie began to drive. “Hunting?”
She nodded and gave him the address. It felt oddly comforting to be pegged as a hunter, because for months after the abduction, she hadn’t been. “Fast as you can.”
The cabbie’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, down, back again. “Hey, aren’t you that hunter that was missing?”
Her gut twisted. “Yes.”
There was lurid speculation in the eyes in the mirror this time. “I heard you came into the hospital covered in vampire bites.”
The Guild had done everything in its power to tamp down the gossip after her return, but there’d been nothing they could do about the non-Guild personnel involved in her recovery. Add in the numerous tests she’d had to undergo to find out if the bastards who’d taken her had left her with anything other than bruises, bites, a body on the edge of starvation, and more than a few fractured bones as well as a number of internal injuries, and she’d been seen at her weakest by dozens of people.
Most of those people had been good and kind. Some had been like this cabdriver.
The cabbie’s gleaming eyes, his lips half parted, threatened to shove her back into the pit, those ugly, probing hands violating her until there was nothing left. A month ago, she’d have curled into herself and gone silent. A month ago, she hadn’t shot bullets into two of her attackers. “Vampires’ tongues,” she said, sliding her finger carefully over the blade she’d pulled from the sheath on her thigh, “grow back when you cut them off. Humans, unfortunately, don’t have that ability.”
He whimpered and dropped his head. Sweat was rolling down his temples when they arrived at her destination, and he couldn’t even get the words out to ask for the fare. Swiping her credit card, she paid and got out.
Never again would anyone drag her into the dark.
17
“Nicholas!”
Glancing up at the sound of her name, Honor saw a big black cop with distinctive salt-and-pepper stubble that appeared to be a permanent fixture.
“Santiago,” she said, having worked a case with him a couple of years back, one of the rare few times she’d been put on a situation in Manhattan. “What do you have?”
“This.” He ducked under the barrier of crime scene tape to crouch down beside a body lying half on, half off the sidewalk. Lifting away the tarp that covered the victim, he nodded at her to have a look.
“Looks like he got attacked by a dog.” The young male’s neck was shredded, as if it had been gnawed on.