"You need to work on lying—you suck at it. And what would you do if I really did leave you here?" She watched him frown. "You don't know anyone. You probably don't even know where you are."
"St. Valereye. A village east of Bordeaux."
"Okay, so you know," she conceded. "But how are you going to get anywhere? You're blind, half-naked, and barefoot. You planning to Braille your way through the forest?"
He lifted his face toward the moon he couldn't see. "The forest is my home."
"What are you, Bambi?" She felt like breaking her promise not to hurt him. "There are no people around here for miles. No one to tap when you get thirsty. Your strength will run out before you get to the next working farm. I know drinking from animals doesn't work."
"You know too much," he told her, his voice toneless. "I can take care of myself."
"Yes, you've been doing a bang-up job of that so far, from what I've seen." So much for her dream man wanting her. This was beyond pathetic. "I might as well take you back and brick you in again; you'd live longer."
"Nicola." At last some anguish came through with the low, lyrical way that he said her name. "Don't regret saving me."
She didn't. He was everything she wished she could be: brave, noble, honest. What would he think of her when he discovered what she did?
He never has to know.
"I'm not abandoning you," she said, wrapping her hand around his fist. Slowly he opened his fingers and entwined them with hers. She raised their hands until her wrist brushed his mouth. "Go on. Nobody's coming to look for us; we're okay here for a while. Take what you need."
"I cannot. I will not."
"You won't kill me. I'm your only way out of here." Although it bruised her heart, she made her voice stern. "You have to do it, Gabriel. I need you stronger. I can't carry you, and I'm not dragging you. Take the blood."
Gabriel hesitated so long that she thought she might have to slash her own wrist and rub it on his mouth, and then he bent his head to whisper a kiss across the thin skin over her veins. "A taste, then."
"Exactly." As his mouth opened and his teeth sank into her skin, pain and something else streaked up through Nick's arm. Something warm and wonderful and utterly wicked.
Oh, shit.
A moment later she stopped shaking and braced herself against his bare torso. He needed her as his food, his medicine, and that was all. That much she did understand about them. But as his mouth tugged and she felt the flow of her blood into his mouth, something changed. The disgust and self-loathing she felt were strangled by a turning, tightening need.
It's why they're so beautiful, she told herself, forcing her heavy eyelids to open, watching his throat move as he swallowed. You want them so bad that you don't fight it.
Evergreen made her the lady of the tapestry, enveloping her, holding her there. The night blurred into something dark and green and beautiful. She resisted the urge to wrap herself around him, but only just.
His mouth moved, the sharp ends of his dents acérées grazing the inside of her forearm. He didn't slice her open or break her skin at all, but his lips and tongue moved against her flesh. She waited for the next bite, but it never came.
"Again." Was she begging for him to take more? Hell, she was. "Please."
Gabriel pressed his palm against the punctures in her wrist as his cheek brushed her upper arm. He was murmuring something in French, words too rapid and soft for her to catch.
Nick twisted, restless, wanting but not knowing what she wanted. It didn't happen this way, not to her. Desire came up from some hidden void inside her, dividing into twin, scalding geysers of want and need. "God, is it always like this?"
"Only with you." His free hand landed on her shoulder, lifted, and moved to her waist, then her arm, then her cheek, the jerky, uncertain way someone might touch something they weren't quite sure was solid or real. The way you'd touch a dream. "Only now."
Everywhere his hand landed, her skin tingled and warmed. "This is crazy." An odd laugh escaped her. "What are you doing to me?"
"I don't know." Gabriel kept touching her in that strange, wondering fashion, and the warmth became heat, and the tingle deepened to an ache. Her mouth burned and her body shook. "Shout at me. Hit me. Run away from me, Nicola."
Much more of this and he'd need to run. "Gabriel."
His hands lifted away, and they were shaking. "Forgive me."
"I don't mean…" Incoherent now, she grabbed his hand and pressed it between her breasts. The weight and warmth steadied her, brought back a moment of rational thought. "Keep going.""No." His fingers danced up to trace the hollow in the base of her throat. "As much as I wish to, we are strangers."
"We don't have to be." Not begging, demanding now, but she had to. Every time his hands left her, it hurt. "Please, Gabriel, I can't stand this. Do something."
"Calmez-vous." He used both hands now, stroking them from her ribs to her hips. "I will take care of you."
"Good. Great." Relief flooded her with new warmth, until he turned her away from him, placing her back to his chest and bracing her hands against the shiny-smooth bark of a beech tree. "Wrong side."
"Easier." He had the front of her jeans open and tugged them down.
Frustrated, Nick tried to turn. "Damn it, let me—"
"No," he breathed against her ear, holding her in place when she tried to let go and turn around toward him. "This way I cannot enrapture you."
Enrapture? She looked down, saw his hand spread over her abdomen, his palm covering her navel. He'd bunched her jeans and panties around her knees; his damp trousers pressed against her bare bottom. She held on to the beech's trunk and lifted one leg and then the other until she worked herself free of the tangle. She should have been embarrassed by the way she spread her legs for him, but she wasn't.
If she wasn't enraptured, she would be in about five seconds.
Gabriel's left hand pulled her wet bra up, freeing her breasts to his touch, while his right hand stroked down to trail his fingertips through the light patch of hair covering her sex. He touched her slowly, reverently. The burn scars on his arms felt like calluses, gently rasping over her softer skin as he cupped her.
The abrasion of his scars roused her out of the sensual haze.
What was she doing? He was right; they were strangers. He was injured, blind, lost in the dark, probably in pain, and here all she could think about was fucking him.
But his cool, clever fingers were playing between her thighs, parting her and stroking her, and wanting trampled thinking as it threw itself at the rising heat.
"Close your eyes, chérie." His breath touched the side of her neck a moment before his mouth did. "Be with me in the dark."
Nick dug her fingernails into the glossy bark under her hands, her head falling back against his shoulder. Gabriel might be blind, but he knew exactly where he was on her, his long, insistent fingers finding every fold, every recess, painting them with the brush of his fingertips and the slick tempera of her desire.
"Like so." He breathed in. "Ah, chérie. You feel like a garden in the mist."
She felt more like a waterfall studded with rocks. Her breasts weren't large enough to fill his hand, but they felt heavier and harder under the slow massage of his palm. She regretted that she didn't have more for him to touch, because the way he played with her tight nipples made her want to scream.
Nick jerked her hips in reaction when he penetrated her with two fingers and felt his erection press against the small of her back. The edge of his palm nudged the top of her mound, exposing her clit. The contact made her tighten around his fingers and twist against his palm.
"Feel me touching you," he murmured. "Give me what I want."
She felt him, and let him touch what he wanted, and panted and suffered through it, until the friction against her clit and thrust of his fingers into her body brought her to the very edge.
He knew. His hand left her breasts and his arm lifted her, settling the separation of her ass against the thick rod of his penis. His fingers pushed deep as his mouth grazed the outer curve of her ear. "I have you. Come to me, ma bien-aimée."
That did it. Nick bit down on her lip in time to stop the shriek of pleasure, but her body convulsed, out of control now, and the heat exploded inside her, fire and rain and moonlight; she was caught in his arms, coming beneath his hands.
"Again." His voice became a thick, low purr sifting through her hair as he brought her down and back up, relentless, shoving her into the fire until she thought she might collapse. "Très bien."
Unable to take any more, Nick dislodged his hand, thinking she might very well fall on her face and not get up for a week, wrung out and destroyed as she was by what he'd done with only his fingers. But she could still feel him against her, hard and unrelieved, as needy as she had been before he'd blown her mind and given her a personal tour of pleasure hell.
Oh, no, that wouldn't do.
She pushed away from the tree, turning in his arms, her hand slipping between them.
The green glow of his eyes brightened for a moment before he tried to catch her wrist and stop her. "Non, you need not, chérie."
"Quit being polite. You need this." Good thing Father Claudio's trousers hung so loose on him; she didn't have to fumble with buttons or a zipper. There he was, all that stiff, satiny length, and after the first exploratory stroke she gripped him in her fist. "And you owe me."
As soon as she had him, he shuddered. His hips gave an involuntary jerk, pushing his cock through the center of her grip. His foreskin felt like ribbed velvet. "It is not for you to do this."
"In America, we call it payback." She could feel how close he was; a couple of strokes and he'd go over. She leaned in. "Among other things." Working her hand up and down, she caressed him. The delicious friction and the urgency that racked his frame made her smile. "This is where you took me. Feel it the way I did."