Tempted by Midnight: A Midnight Breed Novella(20)

Lazaro watched her as she came, his eyes locked on hers. She couldn’t look away. The power of the connection was too intense. He felt it too—he had to have felt it.
As his own release built, then broke on a coarse shout, he kept his gaze fastened on hers too. It was so intense, so startlingly real, this thing coming to life between them.
If anything had the power to terrify her, it was this.
The feeling that she had already given herself to this man. A man who had pretended he barely remembered her when he first saw her on Turati’s yacht.
A man who warned her not to get close to him, all but threatened that he would only hurt her.
And here she was, giving him her body.
Staring into his eyes as she surrendered the most intimate part of herself to him, and imagining that she could so easily let herself fall. That maybe she already had. Maybe the men in her past had been right. They would never have been good enough for her.
Because all along, what she wanted them to be was someone like Lazaro Archer. Brave. Loyal. And yes, heroic, even if he refused to accept that truth.
She didn’t need him to be perfect, because even through the haze of affection and searing desire, she knew he would never be perfect. He didn’t need to be. Not for her to want him like she did. Not for her to feel so right, so safe and contented in his arms.
Oh, God...could she be falling so fast?
Did she dare?
Melena finally broke his gaze then, turning her head away from him to the side, bewildered by her epiphany.
Her heart was pounding hard, making her carotid tick palpably in the side of her neck.
She didn’t have to look back to him to know that Lazaro’s amber eyes had drifted to that fluttering vein. She felt the heat of his stare. Then she heard a dangerously low growl curl up from the back of his throat.
She went very still, terrified he might bite her.
Terrified he wouldn’t.
“Lazaro?” she whispered, uncertain what she was about to ask him to do.
She slowly pivoted her head back to look at him and saw torment in his handsome, otherworldly face. And fury. He drew back from her on a hiss.
His expression was wild looking, intense...and his smoldering aura told her he was balanced on the razor’s edge of a rigidly held, but tenuous, control.
 
* * * *
 
What the fuck was he doing?
Lazaro came to his senses as if physically struck. He was still buried inside Melena’s hot, wet heat, his pulse still charged and racing. His cock was still hard, still greedy, even after the climax that had ripped through him with brutal ferocity.
And he’d been reckless enough to let his fevered gaze drift to the vein that throbbed so enticingly in the side of her vulnerable throat.
Christ.
He’d nearly lost control—something he never allowed to happen. Not once in twenty years had he even been tempted. His guard was always up, his will impenetrable.
Even then, he’d made a habit of avoiding women like Melena, females with the Breedmate mark. To drink from one of her kind would tie him to her singularly, irrevocably. He would always crave her. He would always feel her in his blood, in the root of his soul...unless death severed the bond, as it did when he lost Ellie.
Why the thought didn’t freeze his thirst or shrivel his desire for Melena, he didn’t want to know. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to sit there pondering that fact as she gaped at him in mute terror.#p#分页标题#e#
“Damn it.” He pulled out of her on a roar. As difficult as it was to deny himself the feel of her silken grip on his shaft—as much as he wanted to have her now, still, again and again—he needed the separation more.
What he needed was to put as much distance as possible between her soft, inviting body and the blood hunger that was suddenly twisting him in vicious knots.
He got off the bed to collect his clothes.
“What are you doing?” Melena asked from behind him. When he began to dress, he heard her slide across the sheets. “Talk to me, please.”
He couldn’t form words, let alone push them out of his mouth. He still wanted her too much, and he feared that if he let himself cave to that need now, he might not be able to reign it back in. He zipped up his pants, ignoring the persistent bulge of his uncooperative arousal. His hands moved hastily, aggressively, as he donned his shirt, then bent to retrieve his boots.
He had plenty of human females he could call upon to slake his needs. A pity he didn’t think to do that before he made the mistake of putting himself alone in the company of a Breedmate as tempting as Melena.
And what a feeble fucking rationalization that was.
Nothing would satisfy him more than to dismiss his near-mistake as something that might have occurred with any female sporting the teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark. Far more troubling to realize that it was this woman who tempted him like no other.