“Even if you survive that monstrous thing in Michaela’s turret, you won’t survive immortality,” he ground out. “Not being so soft inside.”
“Maybe not,” Holly said with clear-eyed serenity, “but I’ll be myself until the day I die. That’s good enough for me.” A squeeze of his wrists. “The question is, do you like who I am when I’m not sniping at you?”
He bit her. Out of frustration at all that she was asking of him. Out of arousal at the scent of her. Out of a viciously powerful emotion that had been building inside him for years and had burst to the fore only when he saw that she was healing, becoming herself again. He’d never been tempted to take her while she was so badly psychically wounded. But this Holly?
She didn’t fight his fangs sinking into her throat, didn’t fight that he had a death grip on her hair, pulling her head back to arch her neck taut, didn’t fight the hand he shoved under her dress to grip at her hip. Her blood flowed into his mouth and went straight to his cock. He didn’t drink. He wouldn’t hurt her. He just needed to taste her.
Her blood pulsed with the rapid beat of her heart.
Venom moved without conscious volition. Shifting his hand around to the front of her body, he moved it down . . . to find she wasn’t wearing panties. Spearing his fingers through her delicate folds, he discovered she was wet, so wet. Wild, sensual creature. He found the nerve-rich little nub hidden within, pressed hard at the same time that he penetrated her with a finger.
“Venom!”
He removed his fangs long enough to say, “Tushar. Say it.” He thrust in and out of her in a demanding coda.
“Tushar.” Acid green eyes holding his, her pupils hugely dilated. “Tushar.”
He sank his fangs into her again, and then he drove her over. Once. Twice. Until her body quivered and her flesh was liquid for him.
And still she held him, this stubborn and deadly and complicated and soft woman who’d decided to claim him.
Caressing her down from the edge, he removed his fangs, licked the wound closed. But not totally. He was strong enough to have done that, but he didn’t. He left two bruises that made it obvious he’d bitten her. And though he’d just shown her he wasn’t human, could strike without warning, she smiled at him, her hazy eyes dancing. “Do I have flour on my face . . . and other places?”
“Yes.” Removing his hands from her naked flesh, he lifted her up and put her on an unused part of the counter. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”
Throwing her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips as if he hadn’t just warned her in his coldest voice, she said, “My mom is going to adore you.”
His heart kicked, memories from a lifetime ago crashing so hard into him that he wrenched away—or tried to. Because even with that old anger riding him, he couldn’t hurt her and so he didn’t pull as hard as he should have, and she held on.
“Who was she?” A deadly question.
The viper in his blood raised its head in interest at the reminder of the poisonous danger that lived beneath her feminine surface. “No one.”
A narrow-eyed look. “Spill it.” Poking at his abdomen with a finger, she added, “Don’t make me mad.”
He could take her at her worst, but he found himself opening a box of memory he’d sealed centuries ago. “I was pledged to be married before my Making.”
“And you went ahead and got Made?” Eyebrows drawing together in a dark vee. “That seems like asshole behavior.”
“It would’ve been—but she was to be Made, too. Our marriage was to take place five years after our Makings, on the condition that we were assessed as having achieved full control over our vampirism.”
“So what happened?”
“I was accidentally bitten by one of Neha’s pet vipers a month before my Making. My body’s reaction was to shrug off the bite—the only indication I’d been bitten was a faint soreness at the site of the bite.”
Holly’s pupils dilated in a flare of understanding. “That attracted Neha’s attention,” she said.
“No one knew why I had such a strong tolerance for snake venom—others in my family had been bitten by far less venomous snakes over the years and they’d all had a severe reaction.” Venom had been curious, too, not realizing he’d sentenced himself to a nightmare. “Neha told me she couldn’t waste me, that I contained within me something that might make it possible for her to create a vampire unlike any other.”
“That bitch,” Holly spit out. “She hurt you to satisfy her own arrogance!”
“She is a queen and an archangel.” Venom had never expected her to act human. “The end result is that my betrothed came out a normal vampire. I didn’t.” He and Aneera had deliberately been placed in different parts of the country, to ensure they didn’t breach the rules. It wasn’t until four years after being Made that they’d met again.
Venom’s eyes had only partially changed by then, but one look and Aneera had run screaming, the same horror on her face that he’d seen in the faces of his family when they’d begun to glimpse the depth of the changes in him. Fear had been acrid in their sweat, their refusal to touch him a staggering hurt, the wards against evil they’d made behind his back brutal blows.
He’d been almost glad when one of his sisters had found the courage to tell him he was no longer welcome—at least then, no one could question his honor in walking away. Because that was all he’d had left. “The marriage pledge was deemed invalid since I was no longer ‘human.’”
“Well, duh, you were a vampire.” Holly flashed her fangs. “Is she still alive, this woman who couldn’t handle it when things didn’t go exactly as planned?”
Venom shrugged. “I don’t know. I left the past behind long ago.”
“Then what’s all this baggage you’re carrying, huh?” Tightening her grip on his hips, Holly moved her hands to his hair. “Did you love her?”
“I barely met her. It was a different time.” A time when his parents and hers had made the arrangements and he and Aneera had agreed to it. “With both of us from similar family backgrounds, and all other concerns in alignment, it was considered the perfect match.”
It felt so strange to say that, to think about his parents and about a time in which he’d been the dutiful eldest son who’d seen nothing wrong with pledging to marry a woman who was a stranger to him. “If I’m being honest, I’ve never understood why her reaction hit me so hard.” As if he’d been kicked.
“I know why,” Holly said, her eyes seeing right through him. “You’d committed to her and you’re not a man who breaks his commitments. It left you totally unprepared for her defection.”
A quiet pause before she added, “Especially coming as it must’ve done on the heels of your family’s rejection. That’s what hurts, isn’t it? Not the loss of a stranger who didn’t know the incredible gift she was throwing away. That woman was just the foul icing on the really shitty cake.”
Venom wanted to bite her again for stripping him bare, punish her for making him face wounds he’d thought long-scarred and only now realized were still oozing. Most of all, he wanted to sink his fangs into her and hold her down until even an archangel’s fucking ghost couldn’t steal her life.
Pulling away from her before he gave in to his inhuman nature once again, before he betrayed far too much, he went to wash his hands. “I’ll finish making your dessert.”
33
Holly looked at Venom’s back as he began to work on the pinwheels again. She knew pushing him would gain her nothing. He wasn’t stubborn like her—but he held his ground. And whatever he’d been carrying around for three-hundred-plus years, it wasn’t something he was ready to share. Fair enough.