A need for something more than sex. A need she felt just as powerfully.
Hypnotized by that need, she stared up into his eyes, admiring the flush riding his high cheekbones, the sensual curve of his mouth, the white tips of his fangs showing between his parted lips.
Raniero picked up the pace, nostrils flaring like a racing stallion’s. Each long thrust jolted her closer and closer to explosion. Gasping, she hooked her heels over his thighs and ground upward, meeting him with rolling hips.
The climax exploded in her core like a blast of magic, primal and savage. As she threw back her head to scream, he bent his arms, lowering himself over her, his black eyes wild and hungry. His lifted upper lip displayed the length of his teeth.
Knowing what he wanted, what he needed, she angled her head to offer him her throat. “Now, oh, now!”
The touch of his hot lips and the cool slice of his teeth kicked her climax even higher. Thrusting heavily, he began to drink. She fisted her hands in the silk of his hair, gasping with the feral intensity of her pleasure.
They lay together in the aftermath, panting, sweat sheening their skin in the moonlight that poured through the window. Amaris stroked his strong back slowly, feeling a sweet contentment she’d never known.
Until he raised his wrist to his mouth and sliced his fangs across the skin. Blood welled as he met her gaze, an odd vulnerability in his eyes. “Will you drink from me?”
Amaris blinked at him in dumbfounded surprise. She’d heard of this in the Garden, but she’d never expected a vampire to make such an offer.
For a vampire to share his blood with his Rose linked them in magic, heart to heart, soul to soul.
“Oh, yes,” Amaris breathed, joy blazing through her like sunlight.
He tasted like love, and she smiled against his skin, knowing neither of them would ever be alone again.
SHIFTING SEA
Virginia Kantra
This one is for Kristen, to read in a hammock.
And to my wonderful readers—thank you!
ONE
Major John Harris squinted between his horse’s ears, willing himself to ignore the throbbing in his knee and the pounding like hoofbeats in his head.
He had survived the bloody siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. He would not die of a hangover now that he was home.
Now that he had a home.
And all his limbs.
He had not expected either outcome. He was a man used to dealing with life’s harsher realities. But he could not be sorry that life, for once, had frustrated his worst expectations.
He lifted his face, letting the wind tatter the remnants of his nightmare and blow his hangover out to sea. The air smelled of earth and sea, brush and brine. Neptune jingled his bridle, bobbing his massive head in approval. The rawboned gray had carried Jack unflinchingly on the winter retreat from Corunna and through the long, blistering march to Talavera, but the Peninsular war against Napoleon had left the big horse scarred and past his prime.
Like his rider, Jack admitted ruefully. At least Neptune seemed to be taking the transition to civilian life in stride.
Lucky beast.
In the weeks since his cousin’s lawyers had found him in a stinking Lisbon hospital, Jack had learned to walk again without a cane and to sleep again in a room with four walls. But he was as ignorant as the rawest ensign when it came to managing his unexpected inheritance.
He was a soldier, not a farmer, determined to carry out his duty to the best of his ability, grimly aware that his tenants’ lives depended on his decisions as surely as his troops’ had. He only hoped his best would be good enough.
The rutted road meandered over hills as worn as his bones. The land—his land, now—swept in a ragged curve around the harbor, anchored at one end by the peaked roofs and chimneys of Arden Hall and on the other by furrowed cliffs. Fishing boats bobbed in the shining flat water. A bleak, spare church, an unprofitable inn, and a score of small dark houses clung like mussels to the rocks, their inhabitants prickly as barnacles and closemouthed as clams.
Jack was used to bivouacking in hostile countryside. But Spanish bandits had nothing on these stubborn Scots. Almost a third of his tenants were Highlanders driven west by the Clearances and carrying a grudge against all things English.
Including their new landlord.
Jack closed his knees, urging his horse onward, leaving the village behind. His thoughts clamored, restless and strident as the seabirds haunting the cliffs. He could hear their plaintive cries slicing the air, the rush of wind drumming in his ears, the waves curling to shore like distant music, like singing.
Actual singing, he registered in surprise.
A woman’s voice, husky and cool, rising and falling with the breeze, tangling him in lines of music, knotting in his soul.
He stopped, searching the shore below for the singer. Just beyond the reach of the tide, in a patch of tangled garden and blowing grass, a cottage nestled in the shelter of the rock.
Jack narrowed his eyes. Who would choose to live beyond the village outskirts, outside the protection of the harbor and neighbors?
A flash of white at the water’s edge caught his gaze, a billow of movement like a sail.
Not a sail. A woman’s skirts, a woman’s hair, flowing loose in the wind, shining like seafoam in the sun.
His breath caught. Her song plucked his heart from his chest. She was all white and gold like an angel in a dream, a vision concocted of loneliness and spray and too much whiskey.
Neptune snorted, his ironshod hooves slipping on the rock.
Jack tightened the reins, collecting his horse, recovering his balance. The angelic vision became simply a girl without hat or shawl, singing a song he’d never heard in a language he did not know.
Who was she?
One of his tenants, he thought, setting Neptune at the descent. A fisher’s wife, a farmer’s daughter, a serving girl perhaps. No gentlewoman went bonnet-less and barefoot on the beach.
At the sound of their approach, the song ceased. The girl turned, pushing back her tumbled hair with one hand. The pose and the wind molded her gown to her body.
Lust slammed into Jack like a bullet.
She was tall and lovely, her breasts high and round, her skin as pale as pearl. Her face was almost savage in its beauty, her broad jaw and level brow balanced by a full mouth and strong cheekbones.
Jack sat like stone, his blood pounding in his head and his groin. Beneath him, Neptune stood like a monument, iron muscles quivering.
He should say something, Jack thought at last. Reassure her. He was a stranger, after all, and she was alone.
“Major John Harris at your service, ma’am.” His voice grated on his ears.
She regarded him without expression, her eyes tarnished gold.
“From the hall,” he said since she seemed not to recognize his name. “And you are . . . ?”
“Morwenna.”
No surname. A servant, then?
He cleared his throat. He was not accustomed to the company of women. But his years of military service had given him the habit of command and some small store of social conversation. “I saw you from the cliffs,” he said.
And promptly plunged down the bluffs like a sailor diving after a mermaid’s song.
She would think him mad.
Perhaps he was.
“You were singing,” he added. As if that explained or excused anything.
“I was not calling you.”
A dismissal, by God. She did not speak like a servant. Despite the absence of gloves, her hands were tapered and smooth. Her dress . . . Well, he didn’t know much about women’s fashions, but the fabric appeared very fine. Perhaps she was a gentlewoman fallen on hard times.