Allegiance(74)

Her breathing returned to normal, but she was still shivering when he whispered her name. “Robin, look at me.” She opened her eyes and lifted her head. He was poised over her left breast, her nipple still a rosy red from his attention. He licked his tongue slowly over it, circled it, and she saw the fangs just before he bit on the soft underside. This time she didn’t even feel pain, just the drowning, heaving ocean of mindless pleasure.

She came with a great, frenzied call to the heavens and before she was done, he was inside her, filling her as surely as she knew he would, not being gentle or cautious as she feared he would, but grinding her into the mat with every thrust.

And when he came, it was his turn to cry out to whatever being had given them this moment of beauty and joy in the middle of their disintegrating world.





CHAPTER 22

If Nik had come barreling into Robin’s bedroom at the comm-house thirty seconds later, Cage might at least have been wearing trousers. As it was, he had to treat the human to the scenic view while holding his jeans—well, technically Aidan’s jeans—in one hand while holding his finger over his lips with the other.

Nik looked at Robin, rolled his eyes, threw up his hands, and stomped back into the hallway.

By the time Cage joined him in the living room a couple minutes later, Nik had collapsed on the sofa, black shaggy hair askew, clearly in a temper.

“Sorry about that.” Cage patted his pockets, looking for his cell phone. Next hiding spot he checked was the end table, and then the coffee table that had been knocked aside when he and Robin got started on round two of the sexual Olympics—or was it round three?—on the sofa.

“Looking for this?” Nik held up the small black phone. “It was on the floor in the hall. Which I know because it started ringing a half hour ago. Apparently, one of the vampire lieutenants isn’t where he’s supposed to be and it’s a half hour until dawn. No one’s seen him since ten o’clock last night.”

Like he was in any danger of missing sunrise? “We don’t exactly catnap, you know.” Cage stuck the phone in his pocket. “I’m not likely to forget such a momentous event, which takes place daily, by the way. Haven’t missed one in seventy-five years. I’ll make it with five minutes to spare.” Though he had to admit—but only to himself—that time had gotten away from him and he’d have to hurry more than he’d like.

“Yeah, well, expect a lecture from Mirren when you get there. He’s in a temper.”

“I hate to break it to you, but he’s always in a temper.”

“Whatever.”

Mirren wasn’t the only one in a temper, and Cage had to wonder if his being with Robin might bother Nik more than he’d thought it would. After all, Nik was a friend she occasionally had sex with. For Cage’s part, while that fact hadn’t bothered him yesterday, it now bothered him a lot. A whole lot.

He needed to bring the subject into the open. “Look, about Robin. We—”

Nik waved him off. “Robin’s my friend. Nothing you can do will change that. If you make her happy, go for it. You both deserve it. I’m just enjoying a hangover from using the Touch too much yesterday, first going through the burned house and then with the flyer. I need to sleep it off, which is hard to do with insomnia.”

Cage started to tell him to sleep all he wanted because Robin should be plenty tired and sleeping late herself. He thought better of it. “Need anything before I leave?”

Nik waved a hand in the air, which Cage interpreted as a negative, so he let himself out the back door and set off in a straight, speedy clip for the Quik Mart. No time to lay false trails this morning; if a killer jaguar was stalking him—or a coyote—he couldn’t do much about it.

Mirren waited in the hallway, much as Nik had anticipated. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Laying about.” And inside and around and, hell, maybe upside down.

“Well, keep your phone on you next time you”—Mirren reached out and held out the bottom of the brown sweater Cage wore, which now had a big hole in it—“go laying about. Hell, you didn’t feed from her, did you?”

Cage grinned. “And end up accidentally mated? Hell no. I like to forge my own way, and I hear that’s been done already, mate.”

“Fuck you, Reynolds. Here’s a new path for you to forge.” Mirren shoved a forearm against Cage’s sternum and stalked back toward his room.

Cage hit the floor hard and got up rubbing his ass. The look on Mirren’s face had been worth every ounce of pain.

He entered his daysleep thinking of soft kisses and hard, pounding flesh, and he came out of it worrying. What had he been thinking, locking himself away a whole night when the world could be on the verge of coming down around their heads? He’d come back to Penton to protect it and find a home, not let Rome burn while he fiddled away in the old mill with a woman.