“Yes,” I rasped. But I wanted to bite him again and again and again.

“Now tell me what you want me to do to you.”

He eased up on my throat enough I could speak, and I said, “I want you inside me, and I want you to talk to me the entire time. Then I want you to let me bite you.”

He stopped stroking me and pushed his pajama bottoms down with one hand, unleashing the eager erection I’d been feeling pressed between my legs. “As you wish.”

As he thrust into me with a smooth arch of his hips, I was barely able to cry out. He used his free hand and the muscular strength of his thighs to part my legs wide for him, but once he was inside me, I wrapped myself around his waist, ankles locking behind his back. If he was going to keep me held prisoner, I would do the same to him.

Continuing to hold me by the neck, he lowered himself onto me so his chest was pressed flush with mine. He found my ear with his mouth, nipping at the lobe, and started to whisper.

“I remember when I first met you, irritating girl you were, all skinny limbs and hair. I thought to myself, this girl is going to die before she sees her eighteenth birthday. And then I saw you kill. I saw a fire in you unlike anything I’d ever witnessed, and I knew I’d been wrong. I knew you were a fighter, and that was the first time I understood what kind of a woman you could be.” With him close and his voice so different, it was like a stranger saying those words. Holden’s words in another man’s voice. Something about that was both off-putting and incredibly sexy.

“More,” I commanded.

His thrusts were gentle, one hand on my throat, the other on my waist, pulling me to meet each pump, then pushing me down as he withdrew, so each time he came into me I felt the full length of him.

“You grew up, and you became beautiful. So goddamn beautiful. Every day I had to look at you it hurt because I was never supposed to have you. I was afraid of you because of your pulse and your stupid heartbeat. Whenever you breathed it reminded me I could lose you, and the longer I knew you, I understood I couldn’t lose you. I can’t.”

He licked the shell of my ear, and his thrusts became more vigorous. I gasped each time he filled me, the pleasure bordering on pain. His neck was close, but the angle he held me at made it impossible for me to reach him. Like a sexual Tantalus, I was inches from what I most desired but forbidden from drinking my fill.

Holden continued to speak, ignoring the way I scratched at his back and shoulders, burying himself into me with such force we both trembled.

“I’ve wanted you for so long. And I’ve watched you give your love to other men. I tried to tell myself it was okay, it was for the best because I loved you enough to let you have your mortal entanglements. I watched you with that stupid human boy who broke your heart, and it took everything in me not to rip him limb from limb when he left you.” It was a poor choice of words on his part, considering what had ultimately become of my ex, Gabriel, but I pushed the thought from my mind, focusing on Holden’s voice and the deliberate, commanding way he filled my body.

“I watched those dogs circle, watched how they treated you like a toy they could share. No one has ever been good enough for you. No one has loved you the way I’ve loved you.” He growled into my ear as if his love were a threat, and the way he spoke it almost was, but I wanted this, I wanted to hear it all.

He released my neck so suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do at first. “I will have you, Secret. If it takes me the rest of my life to show you I’m the one you should be with, so be it. But I will prove it to you.”

He bit me, burrowing his fangs into the tender, bruised tissue of my throat. I yelped, but not from pain. The perfect agony of his bite punctuated his escalating thrusts. When I bit him back, we both came hard, the orgasm spilling over us before the first drop of his blood ever touched my tongue.

I drank from him, and he from me, until all my darkness had been chased away and I let myself come apart, experiencing the aftershock like an explosion. It felt as if our bodies might be melting together, fused for all time. With his blood in me and mine in him, I could feel my own pulse as he must, heard my breath the way he could. I wondered if he was experiencing himself through me, learning how his closeness brought me peace as much as it did passion.

I wrapped my arms around his back, licking the wound at his neck to speed the healing.

“Thank you,” I whispered. Though there was so much more I wanted to say, I didn’t think there was a single human language that could tell him what he’d done for me. He’d saved me.

“I love you too,” was his reply.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Maxime wasn’t the best at keeping a straight face. His smirk when Holden and I emerged from our bedroom spoke volumes about how much he’d heard. At least he had the common sense not to make any cute remarks. I don’t think I could have handled that.

“You guys ready to go?”

As a kindness to Holden I hadn’t worn the Yankees shirt, even if it was the most comfortable thing I had in my current possession. It didn’t seem right to wear something that smelled like Desmond after having mind-altering sex with Holden.

Which left the leather bustier as the next best option for a top. There was no way I was wearing any of the skirts Holden had packed, so I was back in the leather pants and my knee-high boots. With the leather jacket thrown on, I looked like a dominatrix for a biker gang. The jacket wasn’t optional, though. I needed to wear it to cover my gun holster.

Since we’d be driving to the mansion, I’d insisted on bringing my sword, even though I’d need to leave it in the car. Between a silver knife in my boot, two 9mm handguns, seven spare clips—the only reason I’d ever carry a purse—and a magic fae katana, I felt somewhat protected. I hadn’t fully shaken off the tension from the nightmare. Once I’d admitted I couldn’t lie in bed with Holden for the rest of my life, the reality of the evening ahead had sunk in.

Yesterday this had seemed like a basic search mission. Go to a haunted mansion, try a key in a few doors and maybe find a clue about my father’s whereabouts.

Now it didn’t feel nearly as simple. If I had been in my father’s dream—which seemed more and more likely—this was no longer about finding a missing object. I had to find him and this doctor he’d spoken about, before it was too late. And something told me I didn’t have a lot of time left.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said. “Moonlight’s burning.” I was trying to make my tone light and cheery, but I didn’t have it in me to force emotions I wasn’t feeling. Holden—who had gotten to see the worst of it—placed a hand between my shoulders and rubbed up and down, giving me his support without saying a word.

According to Google Maps it was supposed to take about an hour to drive from downtown San Francisco to San Jose. Google Maps, as it turned out, was a filthy liar whose mother was a hamster and whose father smelled of elderberries. Close to two hours after we’d left our hotel, we pulled into the parking lot of the Winchester Mystery House. Between Google Maps, our GPS and Holden’s backseat driving, I was about ready to turn the car west and drive us all straight into the ocean. Adding insult to injury was the fact the parking lot was so crammed full of cars it took me an extra ten minutes to find parking.

I hadn’t expected moonlight tours through an old mansion to be so popular. Thankfully we’d given ourselves plenty of extra time for the trip, and had prepurchased our tickets online. That spark of genius belonged to Maxime, and seeing the snakelike line of tourists waiting at the ticket kiosk, I was glad I’d listened to him.

I’d have been a lot happier to bypass the tour altogether and just break into the place, but Maxime had shot my idea down in no time. Apparently the house was such a maze, many tourists a day would get lost in it, requiring retrieval. If we went in on our own without a tour guide to bring us to the Tiffany window, we’d end up spending hours going around in circles to find it. I had to admit once he’d explained it, it made more sense to do this the human way.

We queued up in the prepaid ticket line behind a family from Florida. I knew they were from Florida because they all wore identical yellow T-shirts that proclaimed, Wilson Family Vacation Florida to California (or Bust!) in giant black letters on the back.

“Man alive, what a line,” the mother said, laughing at herself like our wait time was hilarious. “Just lines everywhere.”

“Mmm,” I replied. I didn’t want to engage her in discussion. If we were going into the house to steal something, I didn’t want to stick out in anyone’s memory.

“Where y’all from?” Evidently I was wearing my Please talk to me hat today. I thought I’d burned that one.

“New York,” I said.

“Ohhhhh, New York. New York City? The Big Apple! City that never sleeps. Mad-hattan!” Again she laughed at herself as though any of what she’d said had been a joke. If she was angling for a prize because she knew eight thousand nicknames for the city I lived in, she’d be waiting for a while.

“Yup, that’s the one.”

Undeterred by my obvious disinterest in our conversation, she turned around to look at me. She had a sweet face, round cheeks and a short bobbed haircut that screamed mom. In her mid- or late-thirties, she wore the roundness of someone who no longer tried to be skinny but clearly stayed somewhat fit chasing the three rugrats at her side.

“Oh my, you look so young to have a son.” She gave Maxime a once-over.

We’d debated how best to sell Max to humans who might ask. I was twenty-three, but thanks to the blessings of my genetic makeup, I appeared younger. Young enough I’d still be getting ID’d at bars in ten years, and certainly too young to have a thirteen-year-old son.

“Younger brother,” I explained.

Her concerned expression faded. She gave Holden a cursory glance, and at first I thought she was going to ask what role he played in our weird family, but she got distracted by her cursory inspection and ended up not saying anything at all about him.