She came fast and hard, convulsing in tremors that racked her from head to toe. As she shattered around him, Lazaro’s tempo became a storm. He crashed into her with abandon, his immense body taut and shaking, so deliciously wild. He cursed against the side of her neck as his own release roared up on him. She felt him go rigid, driving deeper with every stroke, until a wordless shout tore out of him and he released.
Melena registered the hot blast of his orgasm, a heat she felt in her core and in every tingling particle of her being. She was drained and completed all at once, awash in a pleasure that rocked her to her soul.
But Lazaro wasn’t finished with her yet, apparently.
Instead of pulling out, he guided her legs up around him, lifting her against him, their bodies still joined and vibrating with the aftershocks of release. He brought her into the bedroom, placed her beneath him on the big bed.
Then he began to drive her mad with desire and pleasure all over again.
* * * *
The temptation to stay with her in his bed had been all but irresistible, but after hours of making love to Melena, Lazaro finally let her sleep. No easy thing, for how much he still craved her. His desire for her soft curves and addicting heat was rivaled only by his newer thirst for her.
He didn’t want to think about how strong those urges were, now that he’d indulged so recklessly—selfishly—in both.
He didn’t want to think about how right it felt to lie next to her, inside of her, to hear her soft cries of pleasure or the quiet puffs of her breath as she slept so sweetly—trustingly—in his arms.
He didn’t want to think about any of that when reality waited for them in D.C. in just a few short hours.
Lazaro slipped away from Melena’s side to shower and get dressed, the predawn morning a prickle in his ancient Breed veins as he headed down to the command center to meet with his team. The warriors were just coming in from the night’s patrol.
Trygg said nothing as he approached with the others from the far end of the corridor. The brutal warrior merely strode into the team’s meeting room for the mission review. Jehan and Sav both slowed as their path met Lazaro’s in the passageway. They greeted him with measured nods and sober, suspicious gazes.
“How did it go out there?” Lazaro asked them. “Any rumblings on the street about the explosion on Turati’s yacht?”
Jehan answered first. “Nothing that we found. It was just a typical night in the Eternal City. A couple of club brawls to break up before they got too bloody and created a bigger problem. Handful of Breed youths feeding past curfew near the train station.”
“No unusual activity at all?”
Sav glanced down, trying to suppress a grin. “Seemed like the only unusual activity going on last night was in here.”
Lazaro glared, but he couldn’t take offense at the truth.
“Is everything all right, Commander?” Jehan asked, ever the diplomatic professional, despite being one of the most dangerous warriors Lazaro had ever seen. “The situation with Melena seemed...difficult.”
Now, it was only more difficult. Not to mention complicated. If she had cause to despise him last night after he’d seduced her then fled to find a blood Host, she had every reason in the world to loathe him for what he did a few hours ago.
And for what he had yet to do, after he saw her safely home to the States.
“Melena Walsh’s welfare is no one’s concern here but mine,” he said, eager to shut down the topic of discussion, even though it weighed heavily on him. “The Order has difficulties of its own to worry about. For instance, does it bother anyone else that no one is stepping forward to claim responsibility for the assassinations of Turati and Byron Walsh the other night? The attack smacks of Opus Nostrum, yet the group hasn’t formally declared it was their doing.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for the right time to own up to it,” Savage suggested.
Jehan grunted, not quite convinced, if the shrewd look in his sky-blue eyes was any indication. “If it is Opus, maybe it wasn’t a sanctioned attack. Maybe it was an over-zealous member looking to make a name for himself among his comrades. Or maybe it was done for more personal reasons than that. Turati was a high-profile businessman with political connections as well. He could’ve had any number of enemies. The same could be said of Walsh.”
Lazaro gave a grim nod. The warrior could be right about any of those scenarios. And the only thing more troubling than Opus making such a bold move was the thought of a renegade agent operating from his own agenda.
Walking into the meeting room with Sav and Jehan, Lazaro couldn’t help but relive the shock and horror of the rocket’s destruction. And the fact that Melena might have been part of the carnage? That she had been mere seconds away from complete obliteration along with the others on that yacht?
Christ. What had shaken him that night—what had outraged him as a man and as the one entrusted with the security of those dead men—now put a cold knot of dread in his chest.
It put real, marrow-chilling fear in his bones.
Now more than ever, he needed to ensure she would be kept far out of harm’s reach. And as bitter as the taste was on his tongue, he knew that anyone in the Order’s orbit, or in that of the ever-expanding number of enemies seeking to incite true war between man and Breed, would always be at risk.
Like Ellie had been.
Like their sons and the dozen other family members living in Lazaro’s Darkhaven who were killed on his watch.
He couldn’t bear to have anything happen to Melena. She’d been through enough pain and loss already.
And so had he.
As Lazaro took his seat at the head of the conference table in the room with his men, Trygg palmed a slip of paper and slid it toward him. “What’s this?”
Trygg nodded his shaved head at the note he’d scrawled. “Located her brother, like you asked.” Lazaro glanced at the Baltimore, Maryland, address. “Derek Walsh is on a plane out of London as we speak. Booked the flight yesterday, after his father’s death aboard Turati’s yacht made international headlines.”
Lazaro nodded gravely. He would’ve rather Melena’s brother—Byron Walsh’s only blood kin—had heard the news another way, but there was no fixing that now. At least her brother would be there for her. She would be home again, with family and familiar things. God knew, she had needed someplace soft to fall these past days, Lazaro thought grimly. And she hadn’t exactly found that with him.
No, she’d found tears and anger and hurt.
She’d found a man ill-prepared to give her what she needed, what an extraordinary, tender-hearted woman like Melena deserved in life...and in love.
Instead of offering her comfort during her most vulnerable state, he’d growled and snapped at her. When he wasn’t busy seducing her, that is.
When he wasn’t selfishly slaking all of his needs on her as if he would ever be worthy of her heart or her blood.
He had no business giving in to those urges when war was still brewing all around him. So long as there were enemies killing innocents, his duty was, and always would be, to the Order. How could he have let himself slip so egregiously when it came to Melena? How could he be letting himself fall in love when he knew all too well how easily it could be ripped from his arms at any moment?
Love...
Fuck. Of all the rash impulses he had been unable to resist when it came to Melena, that would be the most foolish of them all.
Loving her would be even more selfish than the blood bond he had no right to claim and no intention of completing.
CHAPTER 10
Lazaro was gone when she woke up that morning.
He had stayed away most of the day, vanished to his command center until the time came for Melena and him to leave for the flight to D.C. that afternoon. Even on board the Order’s private jet, Lazaro had remained distant, his comm unit to his ear most of the time, or his attention rooted to his work and his computer. She would have called him preoccupied, but
his smoky aura had conveyed a deliberate resistance.
Hours later and thousands of miles away from everything they’d shared in Rome, Melena had sat beside him in the debriefing with Lucan Thorne and a few other members of the Order at the Washington, D.C., headquarters, feeling almost as though she were seated next to a polite, detached stranger. He’d introduced her graciously, almost formally, giving no one cause to suspect she was anything more to him than a civilian temporarily placed in his safekeeping following the attack on Turati’s yacht.
He was careful not to touch her, even though heat crackled between them at the slightest brush of contact. He was careful not to let his gaze linger too long, even though his indigo eyes smoldered with awareness every time he glanced her way. He was coolly, determinedly remote.
It had made her want to scream.
She still felt that swamping urge, having since been removed from the meeting to accompany some of the Order’s women in the living room of the headquarters’ elegant mansion while the warriors continued their discussion in private.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink or eat, Melena?” Lucan Thorne’s auburn-haired Breedmate, Gabrielle, offered a warm smile as she indicated a side table laid out with plates of finger sandwiches and tea cakes. Aromatic Darjeeling and chamomile steeped in their pots next to an elegant white china service.
Although her appetite wasn’t there, everything looked and smelled delicious, and Melena was reluctant to reject the woman’s kindness. “Thank you, I think I will have a little something.”
She walked over from the sofa, joined by Gabrielle and two other women of the Order.
All of the Breedmates present tonight at the headquarters had been nothing but kind and welcoming. They were a family. That much was clear. And in the short time she’d been sitting with them, they’d each done their best to make Melena feel at home among friends as well.
Melena had been exhausted from her session with Lucan and the other warriors, to say nothing of the dread she felt every time she looked at Lazaro. Being around other women had helped dissolve some of that anxiety, even if it might only be for a little while.
She couldn’t help watching the hallway outside, waiting for some indication that the meeting had broken so she and Lazaro could finally go somewhere to speak privately. So she could get rid of the awful feeling she had that he was somehow already gone.
Gabrielle handed her a small plate, collecting Melena from her dark thoughts. “If you’d like something more substantial, Savannah made a big pot of jambalaya earlier today. You really can’t go wrong with any of her amazing cooking.”
“I do have my numerous and varied talents,” Savannah said, her doe-brown eyes dancing at the compliment. The beautiful, mocha-skinned Breedmate was bonded to Gideon, another of the warriors present tonight. Where her big blond-haired mate had an intense, slightly mad genius quality about him, Savannah exuded tranquility and smooth confidence.
As Melena put a few cucumber sandwiches and peach tarts on her plate, she found it next to impossible to keep from staring at the third woman in the room with them—the one mated to the warrior named Brock. Jenna looked like neither of her Breedmate companions. In fact, Melena didn’t think she was a Breedmate at all, though she definitely wasn’t fully human either.
Tall and athletic, Jenna wore her brown hair cropped close to her scalp. She was pretty, yet formidable in some indefinable way, and when she leaned across the sideboard to pour a cup of tea, Melena noticed an intricate pattern of skin markings at her nape. Skin markings that looked remarkably, impossibly, similar to...
“Are those tribal tattoos, or—”
“Not tattoos.” Jenna’s hazel eyes were smiling, but there was a note of seriousness in her voice. She turned to provide a better look. The array fanned out to cover the back of Jenna’s neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt. The arcs and swirls tracked upward too, well into her hairline and up the back of her skull. From the looks of it, they continued down Jenna’s spine and onto her shoulders as well.
“They’re dermaglyphs.” Melena frowned, astonished and confused. Females born Breed had been unheard of for millennia. They might never have come into existence if not for the genetic experimentations conducted in Dragos’s labs in the decades before he was killed by the Order. Even then, there were only a handful of women known to bear the glyphs and blood appetites of the Breed.
Melena found herself staring harder now, watching Jenna pile her plate with a healthy assortment of sweets and sandwiches. “You can eat all of that?”
Jenna grinned. “I’ll probably come back for seconds.”
“I’m sorry,” Melena blurted, immediately feeling stupid and rude for letting her curiosity overrule her manners. “I just thought...”
“You thought I was Breed?” Jenna popped a tiny pastry in her mouth and gave a shake of her head. “Not quite. But I haven’t been fully human for a long time either. I guess as long as Brock loves me, it doesn’t matter where I end up. Together we can handle anything—and we have.”
Her two friends nodded in agreement, and Melena smiled even though the sentiment was bittersweet for her. She’d believed she and Lazaro were heading toward something special like that too. Her father’s death was still a raw ache in her heart, and would be for a very long time. The attack she’d narrowly survived still held her in a cold grasp. But Lazaro had helped her through.
He’d been her rock, her comfort, whether he wanted to accept that role or not. And ever since they’d left Rome, she felt that support slipping away. No, she felt pretty damned certain that he wasn’t slipping—he was running away. Cutting her off with his forbidding silence and maddening stoicism.
When she finally heard his deep voice approaching with Lucan and the others, Melena’s heart started pounding in a heavy, expectant tempo. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified when he strode to the threshold of the drawing room and those penetrating dark blue eyes found her, locking on with the intensity that would probably always kindle an instant heat in her blood.
“Melena. May I have a word with you.” Not a question, not an invitation. A sober demand.
She rose and walked to meet him as the rest of the group fell into easy conversation behind them. Lazaro led her down the hall to another formal parlor. He carefully closed the door, keeping his back to her for longer than she would have liked.
Melena didn’t have to see his impassive face to know he was about to crush her heart when he finally turned around to look at her. His aura was a dark cloud, the shuttered gunmetal gray from before.
Before the first time he’d touched her, kissed her.
Before he’d shown her such incredible passion and tenderness when he made love to her. And when he bit her vein and took her blood into his body, into his soul.
All of those moments seemed to evaporate as she looked at him now. They became nothing under the regretful look in his ageless eyes.
But the moments they had weren’t nothing. He’d felt everything she had. He wanted her. He cared for her. He cared maybe even as much as she did for him. She could see that diamond-bright truth breaking through the muddy resistance of his aura.
Everything they’d shared in Rome had meant something powerful and extraordinary to him too. But it wasn’t enough.
“Why?” she murmured, her throat dry as ash.
He didn’t pretend not to understand. “I told you from the beginning, Melena. I wasn’t looking for this. I don’t have a place for this in my life.”
“For this,” she said. “You mean, for me. For us.”
He gave a somber nod. “For everything you deserve. For everything I can’t give you.”
“I don’t recall asking you for anything, Lazaro. I didn’t even ask for your heart.”
“No, but you have it,” he admitted quietly. “I think you owned a piece of my heart from the night I first dragged you out of that frozen pond in Boston.”
“Then why?” Damn
him, but those gentle words hurt all the more when she knew she was about to lose him. “Why are you pulling away from me now? Why are you acting as if I don’t mean anything to you?”
He held her gaze, his own haunted and filled with remorse. “Because it isn’t fair to you, letting you think I could ever be any kind of mate worthy of you.”
She couldn’t help herself. She scoffed brittly. “A shame you didn’t arrive at that realization before you drank my blood.”
“I told you I wasn’t looking for a bond, Melena.” His tone was tender but firm. As resolute as his aura. “I knew I couldn’t give you that promise.”
“No. Because you prefer simple arrangements. No entanglements or complications. No one to tempt you into throwing away twenty years of resolve on a couple of days of passion. Isn’t that what you said?”
He said nothing for a long moment, staring at her grimly. “I’d resisted the temptation for a very long time, Melena. And it was easy. Until I found you.”
Maybe she should have been moved by the confession. Maybe, if he hadn’t been standing there giving her all of his reasons for why he was intent on breaking her heart. Instead, she thought back on everything they’d said to each other in heated anger and passion last night.
It was true, he had tried to resist her. He’d tried to push her away before he lost his damnable restraint. She hadn’t helped, but she wasn’t the one pretending she could walk away from what they had—from what they might be able to build together as a couple.
Lazaro had tried to warn her that he wasn’t a hero come to save the day.
He tried to warn her that she might not be safe in his arms.
And she’d ignored him every time.
Yet for all his rigid honor and long-lived control, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from claiming her.
He’d pierced her vein, swallowed her blood...created a bond that no other woman would ever be able to break for as long as Melena drew breath.
And wasn’t that a convenient benefit of his colossal slip of self-discipline?