Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“Everything I have is yours.”
Bella smiled, her blue eyes warming. For a moment, he went back, way back, to the first time he’d seen her down in the gym at the training center under the mountain. He’d been alone with just a punching bag and his inner demons. She’d stepped through the door… and brought the world to him.
Then again, she was his world.
Even now, after decades, he still felt like the luckiest male on the planet, in spite of what he’d been through back in the Old Country, and the triggers that still stalked him, and the separation from people that, no matter how many times he talked things through with Mary, he couldn’t quite shake.
“Why are you looking at me like that,” Bella murmured.
“You’re unforgettable.”
His mate laughed. “Shouldn’t that mean you don’t have to stare?”
“On the contrary, you always catch my eye.”
Bella leaned to the side to see around him. “Your phone is ringing.”
“Is it.”
He walked over to her, a predator brought to heel by the female who could overrule even his kill instinct with just a whisper. Brushing his dagger hand over her hair, he followed a strand down onto the robe’s collar, which she’d turned up against her throat. Peeling back the soft flannel, he inspected the bite mark over her jugular.
And felt a familiar shaft of self-hatred puncture his lungs.
She kissed his hand, sending a shot of pure lust into his gut. “I’m perfectly fine, and you know it.”
“I should have been more gentle when I mounted you.”
“I would have been disappointed,” she shot back in a guttural voice. “You were hungry and I wanted to feed you. That is not the time to be gentle.”
Between one blink and the next, he saw her sprawled out on their bed, her breasts rosy-tipped from his mouth working them, her legs spread, her sex swollen, glistening. He’d loomed over her, his arousal in his hand, his fangs descended, his hunger sharp as a blade. Even though he’d been dizzy with the need for her blood, he’d slid into her first, before he’d taken her vein. He hadn’t wanted her to feel even a pinch.
“Your phone is—”
“Always ringing,” he cut in. “The war can wait.”
Z followed the lapel down to the tie that circled her waist. Under the folds of flannel, which were rough compared to the feel of her satin skin, his shellan was gloriously naked, and every time he breathed in through his nose, he smelled his own bonding scent on her body—which was the purpose of it. She was marked as his, and other males of the species would recognize instantly that she was claimed. It didn’t mean she wasn’t her own person, with her own choices and life. It did mean that if you fucked with her? You were going to know who was coming after you with their bare hands.
Oh, and even though he’d had her just twenty minutes ago, his sex thickened behind the button fly of his leathers.
“I want to be in you again,” he said softly. “I like it when you come and I can feel it.”
Lowering his head, his upper lip curled off his fangs in a way that pulled at the scar that curved from the bridge of his nose, onto his cheek, and down to the corner of his mouth. Even though he knew he was ugly, even though he was marked with the tattooed bands of a blood slave at his wrists and his throat, even though his back was roped with the whippings his mistress had given him… somehow Bella always saw beneath his surface, to that place that no one else, even his brothers or his own daughter, got to go inside.
His mate could have been his pyrocant.
Instead, she was his savior. His rahlman.
With a graceful arch, Bella rose up onto her toes and pressed her lips to his. “I like when I smell of your dark spices. When you go, you’re still on me—”
His phone interrupted again and he squeezed his eyes shut. “I swear to fucking God, I am going to stab that thing.”
“I think you have to answer it.” She lowered herself down, her hands resting lightly on his leather jacket. “Someone needs you.”
“Do you really want to ruin this moment.”
“No, but I want to know what’s going on that they’re calling you so much.”
“You and Nalla are safe here.”
“Yeah, and you and the Brothers are always out in the field, and our daughter leaves this house every weeknight to go to work. You know how much I worry about her, even if she hates it—and don’t get me started on you out fighting those undead monsters.”
Z repositioned the collar back where his mate had it, then tucked the robe’s folds tighter over her sternum.
“Tell me,” she ordered.
He hated the war even more than he hated phones. Then again, the two were intertwined. No matter how much privacy he and his mate had here in the quarters they shared with their daughter, there was always an interruption looming, and again, never for a happy reason. Always death and pain and fighting and the reality that some night, he might never come home—some night, that bed they shared might become only hers, his scent on the sheets and her skin nothing but lingering proof that yes, he had lived imperfectly, but he had loved her to perfection, and their daughter was an echo of him to haunt her and keep her going by turns.