Jeaniene Frost - Haunted by Your Touch

“This is what I’ve waited for,” he muttered thickly when I tore my mouth from his to take in gulps of air. He stroked my hair away from my face, still holding me with his other arm, the flickering candlelight revealing a look of triumph and possessiveness on his face.

Confusion and embarrassment competed with euphoria from the spine-tingling orgasm. So much for “acting” with Rafael! Ten minutes into making out and he’d blown away anything my two former lovers had made me feel—all without taking off his pants or kissing me below the neck. If this was what he could do to me with foreplay, I might die from pleasure overload if I actually had sex with him.

But these circumstances weren’t real. Oh, if only they were, I’d be giddy instead of fighting off a stab of guilt. Yet despite how I wished to do anything except what lay ahead, chances were Rafael was using me for even more sinister purposes than what I had planned. I might want to believe his interest was genuine, his passion without ulterior motive, but then I’d be ignoring the pile of evidence that suggested he was involved with Purebloods. Rafael might have been the man of my dreams since I was fifteen, but that didn’t change the fact that he had a dark cloud hanging over his activities.

Otherwise, hell, I might have even been tempted to move to Nocturna to be closer to him. Electricity was overrated, plus cell phones and gas fumes were bad for my health. But here, I could be with Rafael and neither of us would even age. I wouldn’t be saying good-bye to my family, either. They could still visit me and I could go back to see them.…

I gave my head another shake, harder this time. One orgasm and I was mentally picking out wallpaper to redecorate Rafael’s home with. So much for moonlighting as a tough undercover Partial operative. The word pathetic applied to me right now.

With relief, I felt the carriage shudder and sway as it went over a particularly bumpy stretch of road. We had to be on the drawbridge outside Rafael’s home. That was an obvious indicator that the person whose arms I was still curled inside had nefarious connections. Rafael lived in a castle surrounded by a moat , for Pete’s sake. Even for a demon ruler, that was piling on the creepiness.

“We’re here,” he said, giving me a kiss that still incited shivers even though I’d managed to patch up most of my tattered self-control.

“Good. I-I want to finish things,” I stammered when he lifted his head.

His smile was dark, wicked, and tempting. “Oh, we shall. As soon as we’re inside.”

I shifted to unseat myself from his lap, feeling suddenly clumsy and awkward as I buttoned my blouse without bothering to rehook my bra. The bumps from the carriage kept swaying me into him, hampering my progress. He lifted me, setting me back onto the bench with his usual smooth, controlled movements, not even a grunt to show for it. The strength and grace I’d so often admired in Rafael would prove to be my biggest obstacle soon. I’d have just one chance to take him down or the jig would be up.

It’s the only way , I reminded myself, forcing a smile as he leaned down to brush his lips across my temple. I knew it was true.

Yet if I knew that, why did it still feel so wrong?

Rafael didn’t bother buttoning his shirt or his vest. Both hung open, revealing the hard lines of his chest, with its impossibly smooth flesh. I tried not to stare as he jumped out of the carriage and held out his hands to me, his clothes gaping open even further with the action. I accepted his help down, determining then and there to make my move before he took off all his clothes. Otherwise I might be too busy drooling to do anything else.

The warm pressure of his body taunted me as we walked up a narrow outdoor corridor. I glanced around discreetly, noting the torches set up in various places along the high walls and the deep shadows between them. If he had guards, they were concealed in the various darkened recesses of this medieval castle knockoff. I kept taking mental notes as we walked further inside the stone behemoth. Two lefts past the fancy sword display, a right at the ancient-looking tapestry, up two flights of stairs, then left at the flame-eyed gargoyle, up another flight of stairs, left at the blacked-out window, and then through the second wide door on the right .

It opened up into a room that looked like a snapshot of a gothic fantasy. Candlelight made the dark gray walls appear welcoming, while the ceiling had to be twenty feet high, with designs carved into what looked like opaque glass. A large leather chair had a book perched on its arm, facedown and open to mark its place. Boots I’d seen Rafael wear before were carelessly tucked into an open alcove next to more pairs of masculine footwear. Another archway, a smaller one, opened to a dark space that I couldn’t see inside but assumed must be a closet or bathroom.

And of course, in the center of the room was a large bed with sumptuous pillows and thick blankets in varying shades of indigo. A nearby fireplace cast low lights onto the bed, revealing that it was unmade, an indentation from a large body still visible in its surface.

Rafael’s room . By all accounts, the place he never brought anyone back to.

His arms encircled me from behind, pulling me against him. For a moment, I closed my eyes, absorbing the feel of his body and the heat sinking into my back from the bare skin of his chest. If circumstances had been different, I’d have turned around, pressed my mouth to his, and tumbled us both onto that inviting navy bed.

Instead, I stroked his arm with one hand while I surreptitiously dipped the other one into my gun belt. He brushed aside the hair on the back of my neck with his mouth, tracing his tongue into the sensitive dip there. Erotic tremors broke out across my skin, increasing when he breathed my name into the same spot with a voice gone scratchy from desire.

Damn, damn, damn him for making me feel this way, when he might be involved with Purebloods!

I unfastened my belt, letting it drop to the floor with both guns still in their holsters. Then I turned around, wrapping my arms quickly around his neck. His mouth came down onto mine, scorching me with passion, while his hands tightened on my waist to bring our bodies closer.

Those hands clenched convulsively in the next moment. I froze, my heart rate tripling, braced for pain but unable to extricate myself from his embrace. He didn’t strike out, though for the space of several heartbeats, I could tell he was lucid enough to. Then, slowly, his hands relaxed and he pulled away, a look on his face that I didn’t want to name.

Finally, his legs buckled and he fell to the floor with more grace than someone unconscious had a right to. The end of an empty syringe still protruded from his neck, a little something I’d carried in my gun belt for months in the hopes that I’d get to use it on Ashton one day. I’d never thought I’d use it on Rafael, and certainly not like this.

It paid to have a Partial relative employed at an animal reserve. That needle had been filled with enough sedative to fell a small elephant—or the two-hundred-pound ruler of Nocturna, as it turned out. I stared down at Rafael, guilt once more swirling inside me, before pushing it back with all the ruthlessness of my supernatural heritage. I’d had to do it. Somewhere in this castle that few ever saw the inside of had to be a link to Rafael and Purebloods. He couldn’t have ruled Nocturna for over two centuries without knowing far more than he claimed to about the kidnappings.

And I doubted that any of his people here would dare to disturb their master for the next several hours, at least. Not with what everyone had to assume we were doing. If I was stealthy enough, I could soon find out more about Rafael than anyone else had in decades. That information might mean the difference between life and death for some unlucky young Partials who ventured into Nocturna even though they, like me, knew the dangers.