Christine Feehan - Dark Curse 19

Her orgasm hit her hard, driving the breath from her body and constricting her muscles tightly around Nicolas. He roared, clamping his hands on her hips while her body locked down unexpectedly on his shaft, tearing hot jets of semen from him. The climax continued, a brutal hot release that tore through his body, so that he plunged into her tight depths repeatedly, flooding her with his seed.

When he could move, he rolled them over so she could pillow her head on his chest. His arm circled her possessively, one hand cupping the underside of her breast. It took a few minutes for his burning lungs to manage to get air. «I want to stay here forever with you, Lara.»

She managed a smile. «We might have to.»

His thumb brushed the soft underside of her breast, back and forth. «I love your skin.»

She ran her hand down his chest to his belly. «I love yours.» She stretched her neck to nibble on his chin.

«Thank you.»

Her gaze shifted away from his. «You know what I have to do, don't you?»

She was going to avoid talking about making a blood exchange. Nicolas hesitated, unsure whether to force the issue, but then followed her lead. She needed to come to terms in her own way. Because she had managed to let him take her blood this one time, didn't mean it would be easy the next time-or even that she could. He accepted that in her, just as he accepted his own peculiar quirks, formed from a lifetime of experiences.

«We have to do it together,» Nicolas corrected. «You lured the entity, for lack of a better word, to the surface and Natalya was able to get it out of Savannah, but it was much easier with me there, wasn't it? Admit it.»

Lara nuzzled his chest with her chin. «Yes. I don't mind admitting it. It seems a bit of a daunting task to check every single woman and Francesca said it would have to be done. She plans to try to journey with me so she can learn Xavier's touch in order to help.»

He rubbed his palm up and down her narrow rib cage, savoring the feel of her soft skin, the movement more absent-minded than voluntary. «I do not understand how these things got into the women. Are there more than one?»

She frowned. «It doesn't appear so, at least not in Raven or Savannah. Extremophiles can be very aggressive about defending their territory and basically that's what these mutated microbes are.»

«So once they're gone, everything is back to normal? It seems too fast.»

«I think it is too fast. How did the organism get there in the first place? Whatever the source is, we

haven't found it. I overheard Shea talking to Francesca right before we left. She thought there was a good possibility it was transferred from male to female and that they live in the soil first.»

«She is wrong about the males,» Nicolas said, his hand stilling on her breast. «And they better not think you are taking journeys through every male.»

Her body felt so warm beside his, fit so perfectly and when she laughed, that soft melodic sound, teasing at his senses, he felt absolutely content-right-complete. He had always known he was highly intelligent, that he'd been gifted to be fast with natural hunting instincts, but finding her had made him a better person.

«What about you? If you are infected, then I would become infected as well.»

He swore beneath his breath, a time-honoredo kod belso –darkness take it! The husky male timbre combined with the words made her smile, and she leaned upward to kiss his jaw.

He cupped her breast, his thumb sliding over her nipple. «I did not even consider that.»

«I think all Carpathians have to consider it.»

There was a small silence. «Would you check?»

She frowned and rolled over, pressing her soft breasts into his chest so that his body reacted with a shudder of awareness. «If a single microbe first enters the male body and then is passed to the female, it would leave the male's body open as a host for a second microbe. As long as one resides in the woman, the second would stay in the male. But if Raven or Savannah, who are now without a microbe, have sex with their partners, and Mikhail and Gregori are infected, then they would be reinfected. This could be a very vicious circle, Nicolas.» Especially if she was the only person able to detect the extremophile.

Nicolas sat up, pulling her with him. Her face was pale, dark circles under her eyes. She wasn't eating anymore, not even broth. And he read her mind. What if she couldn't detect the microbes once she was fully Carpathian? Natalya couldn't seem to do it on her own and she had been part mage. That would leave the entire weight of a dying species falling directly on Lara's shoulders.

«I don't understand how this happened, Nicolas. I just got up one evening and decided The Carpathian Mountains was the next area I was going to search for the ice cave, mostly because of the gaps in the memories of those I spoke with about the ice caves. Now I've got you and all this responsibility I never dreamed of. But I'm afraid for us. I'm afraid to look inside of me and see a microbe. I'm afraid to look inside of you.» She framed his face with her hands, coming up on her knees beside him. «I want children and I don't want them to suffer like that, or to ever believe they weren't wanted.»

He leaned forward and took her mouth, his kiss gentle, pouring as much reassurance into it as he could. «They will know they are wanted,fel ku kuuluaak sivam belso .»

She loved the way he whispered «beloved.» The Carpathian phrase had music to it, a tenderness that shook her each time he said it to her. It was always more than just the word, but the true meaning behind that word as well. His overwhelming emotion for her. And she believed him.

Because he made her believe a man like him could love her and accept her, even damaged from the trauma of her childhood, she found the strength to hunt for the microbe, to see for herself if either was infected-and only she was. The one inside of her was newly there, and hadn't had time to establish

itself. Her body was still treating it as an intruder. So that meant either the men weren't infected, and Shea's theory was incorrect, or that because she had only recently gotten together with Nicolas, he had passed her the microbe and had not yet been exposed to reinfection.

«You didn't sleep in the soil, Nicolas, You stayed on the bed with me.»

«We need to go talk to Francesca and Gregori about this,» Nicolas said.

She would never feel comfortable around Gregori with his strange-colored eyes, but she nodded. She had to journey into the other pregnant women this evening and hopefully Francesca would be able to follow the faint trail of the killer to aid in removing the microbes from all the other women. And she wanted the one in her out-this rising.

* * *

Lara felt drained when she came out of the healing cave with Nicolas at her side. She had aided two other pregnant women and also led the microbe within her to the surface for Natalya to destroy. They had experimented, taking both Natalya and Francesca along, but Francesca, try as she might, could not detect that faint, tainted path, and something in Natalya served as a warning to the extremophile and it successfully hid its presence from them, ruling out the possibility of Natalya tracking them.

A microbe was found in Mikhail and one in Gregori. Shea was excited that she might actually be on the right track at last to solving the problem of miscarriage. She, Gregori and a man Lara had never met named Gary, retreated together to try to explore ideas on how to combat the microbe.

Nicolas walked through the village with her. She wanted to visit Gerald and check on Terry while he and Vikirnoff finally searched for another entrance to the ice cave.

«I will not be gone long,» he assured.

«And you won't go in without me,» she added, giving him a quick, warning look.