Kiss of Crimson(69)

Dante stroked his fingers over the soft skin of Tess‘s bare shoulder as she slept. He lay in bed next to her, spooning the back of her naked body against the front of his and simply listening to her breathe. Around them, the room was quiet and dark, as peaceful as the wake of a passed storm. The persistent calm was strange, the sense of comfort and contentment something entirely unfamiliar to him.

Unfamiliar, but... nice.

Dante‘s body stirred with interest as he held Tess in his arms, but he had no intention of disturbing her sleep. They‘d made love tenderly after he brought her to bed, at a pace he‘d let her set and control, letting her take whatever she needed from him. But now, even though his body was awake with arousal, all he wanted to do was comfort her. To simply be with her for as long as the night could last.

A shocking revelation for a male unaccustomed to denying himself any pleasure or desire.

But then, as far as this evening was going, shocking revelations were practically a given. It was not unusual for a Breedmate to have at least one extraordinary or extrasensory ability—a gift that also typically passed down to her Breed offspring. Whatever the genetic anomaly was that made the rare human‘s womb capable of accepting a vampire‘s seed and her aging process halt with the regular ingestion of his blood, it also made her something more than her basic Homo sapiens sisters.

For Dante‘s mother, the talent was a terrible precognition. For Gideon‘s mate, Savannah, it was psychometry, the talent to read the history of an object—more specifically, she could also read the history of the object‘s owner. Gabrielle, the Breedmate who‘d only recently come into the Order‘s fold as Lucan‘s woman, had an intuitive vision that drew her to vampire lairs and a strong mind that made her all but impervious to thought control, even by the most powerful of Dante‘s kind. For Tess, it was the amazing ability to heal a living creature with her touch. And the fact that she had been able to heal Dante‘s leg wound meant that her restorative talents extended to those of the Breed as well. She would be such an asset to the race. God, when he thought of all the good she could bring—

Dante clipped the idea before it could take shape in his head. What happened here didn‘t change the fact that he was living on borrowed time or that his duty was, first and foremost, to the Breed. He wanted Tess shielded from the pain of her past, but it seemed unfair to ask her to leave the life she was building for herself. Even more unfair was what he‘d done by taking her blood that very first night, linking them inextricably to each other.

Yet, as he lay there beside her, caressing her skin, breathing in the cinnamon-sweet scent of her, Dante wanted nothing more than to scoop Tess up and carry her away with him, back to the compound, where he knew she would be safe from all the evil that might touch her topside.

Evil like the stepfather who‘d given her so much anguish. Tess worried that killing the bastard had made her as bad as him, but Dante had only respect for what she‘d done. She‘d slain a monster, sparing herself and who knew how many other children from his abuse.

To Dante, Tess had proven herself a warrior at that tender age, and the ancient part of him that still subscribed to things like honor and justice wanted to shout to the entire sleeping city below that this was his woman.

Mine, he thought fiercely, selfishly. As he leaned in and pressed a kiss to her delicate shoulder blade, the phone in her kitchen began to ring. He blasted the device with a sharp mental command, silencing the ring before it could wake her completely. She roused, moaning a little as she murmured his name.

―I‘m here,‖ he said quietly. ―Sleep, angel. I‘m still here.‖

As she drifted off again, nestling tighter against him, Dante wondered how long he had before dawn would drive him away. Not long enough, he thought, astonished that he could feel that way and knowing that he couldn‘t blame his feelings on the inconvenience of the blood bond he had unintentionally forced on them both.

No, what he was beginning to feel for Tess went a lot deeper than that. It went all the way to his heart.



―God damn it, Tess. Pick up!‖

Ben Sullivan‘s voice was shrill, quivering, his entire body shaking uncontrollably from trauma and a fear so intense he thought he might pass out from it.

―Fuck! Come on— answer. ‖

He stood in a nasty pay phone booth in one of the worst areas of town, the chewed-up, crustedover receiver gripped in his bloody fingers. His free hand was clamped at the side of his neck, sticky from the horrific bite wound inflicted there. His face was swollen from the savage pounding he‘d taken, the back of his head screaming with pain from a goose-egg-size lump he‘d gotten from the window of the SUV.