With a low growl, his tempo intensified, and the daggerlike lengths of his fangs stretched even longer behind his parted lips. His cat's-eye pupils thinned to barest slits as his gaze drifted lower, settling on her throat. Heat radiated from that feral gaze, like a hot blade pressed against her neck. His mouth grew taut, full lips peeling back as he drove into her with relentless, mounting aggression.
She knew she should be afraid. She knew that none of this should be happening - not in any kind of reality she could comprehend.
But she knew no fear now. Only an instinctual anticipation as her body cushioned his, her head tilting to the side as though drawn on unseen strings, giving him full access to her neck. "Yes," she heard herself whisper as his strokes became more frenzied. His eyes were fixed on her throat, unblinking, ravenous. Tavia swallowed, feeling an overwhelming need for his fangs to penetrate the tender flesh. She licked her parched lips, hungry for him again too. When she reached up and took hold of the back of his head, he went rigid, hissing as if she'd burned him. He grunted an angered sound, his face contorting in a pained grimace as his pace quickened even more. His gaze grew hotter, searing her exposed throat with a heat she felt running all through her now.
The pressure mounted, building toward something immense and glorious. Tavia rode it with him, awash in amazement and the sudden, swelling bloom of yet another shattering release. He dropped his head beside hers, breath gusting over her enlivened skin and the exposed column of her neck. For the smallest moment, his mouth brushed against the sensitive curve of her shoulder. She waited to feel his lips close over her flesh. Held her breath as her pleasure began to crest its banks and the need to feel his fangs sink into her flesh became a deafening pound in her veins. "No," he rasped sharply. "Goddamn it. No."
And with a dark curse huffed against her ear, everything ended.
He withdrew, rolling away from her so abruptly she felt his absence strike her like a slap. His broad back flexed and rippled as he pivoted to his feet, unmistakable anger in his haste. He pulled up his pants in one ungentle tug and stalked away from where she lay, breathless and confused, oddly bereft. Not to mention humiliated.
Her cheeks flushed with a new kind of heat as she watched him enter the adjacent bathroom without so much as a backward glance. As though he couldn't get away from her fast enough. The door banged closed in his wake, not loud enough to muffle the low roar that erupted from behind the shut panel.
Tavia rose up from the floor in a mute, dazed silence.
Her body was still thrumming with sensation, slower to react to the rejection than the rest of her. Her veins still throbbed, her pulse hammering in a steady, strong beat that was now beginning to make her temples ache. And deep inside her, the power that had awakened within her had yet to ebb.
The burn scars that had covered her for as long as she could remember were pulsing and vibrant. Not the dusky color she was accustomed to seeing but the florid, changeable hues that defied all logic of what she'd been raised to believe about herself. They weren't scars. They couldn't be. Nothing about them - nothing about her body and this power coursing through her - was normal. She knew that now.
She herself wasn't normal.
A miserable groan leaked from between her lips when she felt the sharp pressure of her teeth resting against her tongue. No, she corrected herself. Not her teeth - her fangs.
"Oh, God." She looked down at the blood smeared across her br**sts and abdomen. His blood, dark and sticky from when she'd bitten him.
Between her legs was more blood, but those faint pink stains on her thighs didn't belong to him. Tavia moaned, feeling a twinge of panic beginning to creep up the back of her throat as the weight of what she'd done here - the stunning reality of all that had happened in the last couple of days - bore down on her.
The sex wasn't the worst part. God, not even close. She would likely spend the rest of her life trying to convince herself it was the stupidest thing she'd ever done - better yet, that it never happened at all. But right now, with her nerve endings crackling and the rest of her lifted in a floating, pleasant kind of bonelessness, she couldn't pretend the sex was anything less than incredible.
And unprotected.
Oh, God.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she chided herself under her breath as she scrambled to put her clothes back on, keeping her eyes on the closed bathroom door as she pulled on her pants and righted her bra and zippered hoodie.
No, far more disturbing than throwing her virginity away with total, reckless abandon was biting the neck of a stranger in some fevered daze that had her convinced they both were ... Jesus, the word wouldn't even form in her mind, it seemed so ridiculous.
And yet, it wasn't ridiculous.
She tugged up her sleeve to stare at the scars that weren't scars, their colors still livid and churning, changing from the inky shades of violet and burgundy to a deep russet bronze before her eyes. In her mouth, the sharp points of her canines were still elongated, though not the same fierce presence they'd been before. Her vision was still tinged with amber, but that too was beginning to subside.
No, she thought, stricken and dismayed. Not ridiculous at all.
Her body knew that, even if logic and reason refused to accept it.
She tried to dismiss it all, but try as she might, she could not shake the feeling that she'd never been more aware or present in her entire life. Her body felt - finally - as if it belonged to her. As if a shroud had been lifted from her consciousness, she felt alive for the very first time. "No," she moaned softly, struggling to push the astonishing truth away.
None of this could be happening. She'd been very sick just hours ago. Maybe this was all an enormous hallucination. After all, Dr. Lewis had warned her time and again that a break in her medication - even as much as one skipped dose - could result in unpredictable, but very serious, complications.