Crave the Night: A Midnight Breed Novel Read online

  He could feel her strength in every flex and contraction of her stomach as she breathed, sighed, gasped under his fingers. He lifted the hem of her pajama top so he could touch her without the barrier of clothing and feed his craving for her nakedness.

  He knew her skin would be as flawless as the rest of her, and it was—as fair and smooth as cream. Her breasts, which felt so incredible under the silk, were perfection unclothed. Round and firm, tipped with rosy little areolas the same shade as her kiss-bruised lips.

  Nathan’s gums throbbed in time with his cock, all of his senses fevered with the need to feast on her. He lowered his face to her belly and licked a slow trail along her skin, up the center of her rib cage, before venturing off to the side to capture one of her nipples in his mouth.

  He suckled, groaning with the sweetness of her, the purity of her—something he’d never known.

  Greedily, he moved on to her other breast, his hand following the path his lips had just blazed. Jordana trembled under his touch, against his tongue. Her fluttering pulse rang in his ears and sent hot need surging into his already granite-hard cock.

  As he played the tight bud of her nipple between his teeth, her breath caught. Her hips lifted off the mattress in wordless plea for contact.

  Nathan let his hand drift down her body then and beneath the loose waistband of her silk shorts. She moaned as he cupped her sex. She was wet and scorching against his fingers, her juices like liquid velvet. Her petals bloomed even more as he stroked her. Her folds swelled, slickened with each stroke of his fingertips.

  The feel of her softness was driving him quickly to the brink. His skin felt tight and overheated, his erection straining so heavy and hard within his clothing, he could barely think straight.

  But as demanding as his desire for her was, some distant shred of sanity punched at him with the reminder that she was untried.

  As tempting as he found her, she was not at all prepared for the depth of his hungers.

  She writhed and moaned with need, but she wouldn’t be truly ready to receive him until she was on the other side of that raw ache.

  With a restraint nothing short of Herculean, Nathan drew back from her luscious body, slowly peeling off her pajama shorts as he went. Next, he removed her robe and tank, baring her completely for his fevered gaze.

  A curse leaked out of him, as coarse and dry as gravel. “Ah, Christ … you’re so lovely, Jordana.”

  Lame praise, hardly worthy of her. But it was sincere. One look at him—at his blazing irises, sharp fangs, and very obvious approval of his cock—would be enough to tell her how the sight of her affected him.

  He drank her in from head to toe, a long, unhurried appraisal. Her face was flushed and dewy, her eyelids drooping over the dusky, darkened blue of her eyes.

  He could practically see the blood coursing through her veins. He could hear it, every heavy throb of her pulse, the rush of red cells flowing like a thousand rivers under the milky white perfection of her skin.

  His vision sharpened even more, and he knew that by now his pupils must be all but nonexistent, winnowed down to the thinnest, catlike slits in the ember-bright furnaces of his irises. His glyphs pulsed across his body, churning and alive with the intensity of everything he was feeling and seeing. All the carnal things he wanted to do with this woman.

  His woman, an eager voice promised him from the lowest depths of his consciousness.

  He dragged his searing gaze down to the pale blond curls on her mound and the long legs he couldn’t wait to feel wrapped around him as he rode her, buried to the hilt in her wet heat.

  The scent of her arousal wreathed him as he moved in closer, unable to resist the temptation of her any longer.

  He put his palms on the tender insides of her thighs, exposing her further to him. “Your sex is so pretty, Jordana. So juicy and red and inviting.”

  He stroked her, groaning in approval at the way she flushed a deeper shade for him, her wetness coating his fingers like honey. She squirmed as he caressed her, a soft cry curling up from her throat.

  “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” he told her, his voice deepening, sounding too thick for the presence of his fangs and far less human than he cared to admit. “Your petals are so swollen and ripe. And your clit … I’ve never craved anything more, Jordana. It’s as dark and glossy as a cherry, just begging to be eaten.”

  He moved down and sank onto his knees between her legs. The instant his mouth touched her, she sucked in a sharp gasp, arching high off the bed. “Oh, God,” she sighed. “Nathan …”

  He breathed her in as he suckled her, murmuring against her flesh how delicious she was. He slid his tongue through her cleft, growling as her intoxicating nectar hit the back of his parched throat.

  One taste wasn’t nearly enough. He delved deeper, lapping at her tight opening before licking upward, toward the pert, cherry-dark knot nestled between her folds.

  Jordana bucked now, squirming under his mouth. He stoked her even higher, lavishing her with his whole mouth as he teased her with his fingers.

  Suckling her clitoris with ruthless demand, he eased one finger inside her. “Holy hell,” he muttered roughly, lost to the silken grip of her channel as he worked his digit in and out of her in a tempo he couldn’t wait to find with his cock.

  Jordana panted and gasped. Her sex clenched at him greedily as he drew her clit deeper into his mouth, sweeping his tongue over her in the same urgent rhythm of his fingers.

  She moaned, pushing her hips against him as a tremor wracked her in a head-to-toe shudder. A pleasured scream started to boil out of her, but she stifled it, her head thrashing back and forth on the bed.

  She tried to rise up, tried to reach for him again.

  Nathan growled and put his hand on her belly to press her back down.

  “Let it go,” he ordered her. And he kept his mouth fixed on her trembling flesh, merciless in his command of her body. “Let me hear you, Jordana. Don’t hide anything from me. That was our agreement.”

  She whimpered and writhed as he coaxed her toward a higher peak now.

  And when she came, it was on a powerful roar, unbridled and raw. The sexiest sound he’d ever heard. She climaxed immediately again, grinding against his face in unabashed pleasure, his name tearing out of her throat like a curse and a prayer.

  HER EVERY NERVE ENDING WAS CHARGED AND THRUMMING WITH a current unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Her skin felt seared, her limbs trembling, boneless.

  Deep inside, the very core of her being had gone molten, all of her thought and logic—every last inhibition and fear—obliterated by the shattering intensity of her release.

  And Nathan’s scorching gaze promised even more.

  Breath racing short and shallow, Jordana lay back on the bed and watched, mesmerized, as he began to strip out of his combat boots and clothing in an economy of movement. Just the sight of his muscles bunching and flexing as he tore off his black patrol shirt and bared his arms and chest to her made more wet heat surge between her legs.

  Dermaglyphs tracked all over his light olive-hued chest and shoulders, then lower, along the ridged planes of his abdomen and down below the waistband of his black fatigues. There could be no mistaking he was Gen One Breed. Jordana had seen precious few glyphs on other males, but nothing compared to the complicated pattern of interlocking swirls and elegant flourishes of Nathan’s otherworldly skin markings.

  Nothing so erotic as the way his glyphs followed the contours of his body as she yearned to do with her fingers … and her tongue.

  Her mouth went dry on the thought and she swallowed the urge, her full attention now caught on his hands as he unfastened his dark fatigues. The black fabric slumped loosely on his tight hips. And not so loosely on the massive bulge straining at the front.

  She licked her parched lips, her lungs gone still as he let his pants drop and stepped out of them.

  The glyphs that had her so fascinated with his chest and arms now dragged
her gaze farther south, where their pattern continued into the dark thatch at his groin and onto the thick, jutting length of his penis. His muscular thighs were wrapped in glyphs too, and all of the swirling, arcing patterns that covered him were alive with deep shades of indigo, wine, and gold—the Breed colors of fierce desire.

  Jordana stared at him, at the sculpture of his body and the masterwork of his dermaglyphs, helpless to keep her hungered little moan from escaping her throat.

  In his warrior’s garb and weapons, Nathan was forbidding and lethal. Awe-inspiring by the darkest of definitions.

  Naked and fully aroused, he was all those things and more.

  Immense.

  Terrifying.

  Heart-stoppingly, dangerously beautiful.

  And he was looking at her as if nothing else existed but the two of them in this moment. As if the sight of her nakedness affected him every bit as intensely.

  He stepped closer to the bed now, skimming his warm palms along the insides of her thighs as he took up residence between them. She exhaled a tremulous sigh at his touch, at the heated, hard presence of his body positioned so intimately against hers.

  “Please,” she whispered, the word shaky, more breath than sound.

  Nathan grunted, low and contemplative, his smoldering eyes locked on her face. “Please, what, Jordana? Tell me.” Demand in his deep, coaxing voice, nothing close to request.

  As he spoke, his hands caressed her, moving upward until he reached her damp curls and hypersensitive flesh. He teased her with long strokes and deft fingers, stoking her so easily back to a state of writhing need.

  Jordana closed her eyes as pleasure swamped her, pulling her under on another dizzying tide. She let it take her, gave herself up to the bliss of his hands on her, his fingers inside her.

  And when she didn’t think she could hold on for another second, Nathan’s touch slid away, leaving her gasping his name, her body vibrating and fevered with an ache she could hardly bear.

  “Oh, God,” she murmured, lifting heavy lids to find Nathan poised above her on the bed now, braced on his fists with elbows locked straight on either side of her.

  His erection pulsed from its upright position against her cleft, the feel of him like warm steel sheathed in velvet. As if he knew how badly her body craved him, he flexed his hips, sliding his hard length through her wetness, cleaving her folds with his heavy shaft.

  Jordana moaned at the torment, growing mad with want. Desire kindled and burned, stronger than ever, and with it seemed to form another awakening within her, this one more elusive but no less powerful.

  Something more than physical need, deeper than simple craving.

  Something queer and unfamiliar to her, an unfolding awareness, reaching out from the furthest corners of her consciousness for what seemed the first time.

  And all of that heat, all of that power, all of that strange, rousing energy arced toward Nathan as surely as a divining rod trained on a font of clear, quenching water.

  She felt it in her blood and bones, in her senses … in her very soul.

  “Nathan, please …” She lifted her shoulders up off the bed, her palms hot and itching to feel him. To touch his skin and trace the tantalizing lines of his extraordinary glyphs.

  But not until after she felt him inside her, filling her with more than just his wicked fingers.

  “Make this ache stop,” she demanded, her voice husky and rough with desire. She reached for him, prepared to take hold and drag him down atop her if he didn’t ease her yearning soon.

  But Nathan moved faster than she could even dream to. For the second time tonight, he dodged her touch and captured her hands in his strong grasp.

  This time, however, he didn’t seem content to merely hold her away from him.

  Straddling her now, he rose up onto his knees above her, his fingers wrapped around her wrists like iron clamps. His eyes flared with amber sparks, something hotter than desire or even anger. Something darker, menacing in its intensity.

  His face was so serious, his pupils nearly swallowed up by the light radiating from his Breed irises. His sensual mouth was unsmiling, merciless, his fangs gleaming and deadly sharp behind his parted lips.

  And yet despite his ferocity and unforgiving hold, he carefully brought her hands toward him, pressing a tender kiss into the center of one tingling, hot palm, then the other.

  His thumb stroked the underside of her left wrist where her Breedmate mark resided, a growl curling up from the back of his throat.

  Jordana didn’t notice he held the tie from her robe until he began to loop the lavender silk sash around both of her wrists, binding her hands together.

  He said nothing.

  No excuse or explanation.

  No request for permission.

  She’d come to accept his dominating nature in most everything he did, but now it took on new meaning. Nathan wanted total control when it came to sex.

  He needed it, assumed it.

  Demanded it.

  Jordana could have broken out of her bonds if she tried. But she didn’t wish to try. There was something wildly erotic about the satiny abrasion of the tie against her skin.

  Even more arousing than that was the idea of surrendering herself so completely to Nathan.

  A shiver raced through her, part in trepidation, part in breathless anticipation. She was a strong woman with a strong head. She’d always chafed against even the lightest reins someone attempted to place on her. But with Nathan it was different. She was different. After tonight, she knew she would never be the same again.

  If she was being honest with herself, she hadn’t been the same since the moment she took that first impulsive kiss from him. Nor did she want to go back to the life she had before.

  And for now, she was right where she wanted to be—safe with the most dangerous man she would ever know.

  Jordana let him ease her back down onto the mattress. Allowed him to push her arms up, so that her bound hands rested above her head as he moved off her.

  She submitted to him willingly, unabashedly, when he parted her trembling thighs and gazed upon her, naked, open to him, for the longest moment of her life.

  His eyes roamed unhurried over every bare inch of her, a slow lick of flame that left her quivering and overheated, restless for him to quench the burn. He tangled his hand in her loose hair, lifting the pale strands, watching it sift through his fingers and settle back down around her shoulders and naked breasts.

  Eyes blazing, fangs glinting as sharp and white as diamonds, he lowered his face to the front of her throat, sending her pulse into a wild hammer.

  His breath skated over her tender skin, then his lips closed over the vein that throbbed like a drumbeat pounding in her temples and in her ears.

  His tongue soothed, but she could feel the hunger radiating off his immense body. His kiss was gentle, sensual, seducing her body into a boneless state of passion, of fearless, wanton trust.

  “Yes,” she gasped, giving him the submission his skilled mouth and hands demanded.

  At her carotid now, a faint graze of his fangs—whether in his own temptation or to demonstrate to her how totally she was at his mercy right now, Jordana couldn’t be sure.

  Nor did she care.

  He could have sunk his sharp canines into her in that moment, and she would have been helpless to stop him.

  God save her, but there was a reckless part of her that would have welcomed Nathan’s bite … and the eternal blood bond that would come with it.

  Jordana moaned his name, caught between pleasure and frustration over the fact that he’d denied her the ability to touch him and kiss him too. She wanted to run her hands over him as he moved, feel the power of his muscles as his strong body covered her. She wanted to feel his hard shaft filling her, claiming her.

  She wanted Nathan to do whatever he pleased with her, a wish that should have terrified her but only made her need wrench tighter.

  And that peculiar, unfurling coil
of energy deep within her seemed to agree.

  It rushed up from the center of her like a live current, jagged and white and consuming.

  “Now,” she said, astonished to hear the growled command push past her lips. “Nathan … oh, God … I can’t bear this. Please, I beg you … do it now.”

  His head came up sharply from her throat, his face hard and impassive. Maddeningly, unbreakably in control.

  But his eyes … they gave him away.

  She wasn’t alone in the violence of her desire, not even close.

  Nathan snarled a curse, amber light flaring hotly in his transformed irises. He moved between her legs, his erection standing thick and upright, terrifyingly large.

  Doubt flickered through her mind, a sudden fear making her brace for certain pain. Her breath stopped, heart rate speeding now, as he shifted his hips and the blunt head of his cock slid through her wet cleft, coming to rest at the virgin opening of her body.

  Nathan stilled above her. “Open your eyes, Jordana. Let me see you.”

  She obeyed at once, not even aware she had closed them. Nathan stared at her, eyes locked on hers as another subtle pivot of his hips seated him more fully at her entrance.

  “You’re so slick and hot,” he murmured. He pushed slightly, testing her. Studying her. Patiently allowing her to prepare for his invasion. “Your body is ready for me. I need to know you are too.”

  “Yes,” she replied, her stifled breath gusting out of her on a tremulous sigh as he moved against her, teasing her with the promise of what was still to come.

  She bit her lip but kept her gaze trained on his as he’d demanded. Another nudge of his hips coaxed her untried channel to accept more of him. A flood of liquid heat pooled in her core, all her fears drowning quickly in that rising tide.

  Nathan’s mouth curved in a knowing, wicked smile. His hips drew back slightly, then pushed forward in one sure thrust.

  Jordana’s body bowed as he entered her, filled her. There was pain, but it was as fleeting as it was sharp. There and gone in a few instants, obliterated by the incredible feel of their bodies pressed tight together, naked and joined as one.