After his Making . . . A man couldn’t be free, couldn’t love, when he knew his lovers saw only part of him. Vampires, angels, mortals, the women glimpsed his eyes, thought they understood, but no one did, not really. Not until Holly.
Venom didn’t have to hide anything from her.
Not his needs.
Not his movements.
Not the inhuman coldness that was as integral a part of him as his eyes.
And not the human core with its scars and its memories and its devotion.
To Holly, he was all of that and more. He was Venom. He was Tushar.
Prowling up her body, he said, “If I am the menace, then you must be the trouble.”
Delight sparked in her, the fangs she sank into his throat all about play.
“Kitty, I seriously don’t know how you drink through those tiny, tiny things. Are you sure they’re not just for show?”
She sank her fangs deeper in punishment.
Laughing, he tumbled them over so that she was on top. She kissed the wounds closed, detoured to devour his mouth, before slithering down his body to attack the top button on his jeans and undo his zipper. She’d stripped him bare in a matter of seconds, his impatient, fiery lover.
Holly would never treat him as anything but an equal. They both knew he was stronger, faster, but that was simply a consequence of time. All he had to do was be with her as she grew into her own strength. But . . . that was a gift that could yet be stolen, their future torn to bloody shreds.
Not here. Not in this bed.
This time was theirs; he’d allow nothing to destroy it.
Drawing her up over his body on that silent vow, he palmed her breasts again before sliding his hands to the curve of her waist to bring her over his erection. “Come on, then, my wild Holly,” he murmured. “Ride me.”
Teeth sinking into her lower lip, she rose up, then oh-so-slowly took the hard ridge of his erection inside herself. A shudder rocked him. He watched her move with erotic grace, a thin layer of muscle underlying her skin and her pleasure in him unhidden, and he stood no chance. None at all.
“Tushar.”
That was all it took. His name. His long-ago true name on her lips and his back bowed as he lost control for the first time in hundreds of years.
34
Venom and Holly spent the next three days in a cocoon of privacy that shut out the world and all its horrors. They loved, they played, he cooked for her all the things she wanted to eat. When she needed to talk to her family, he sat with her, holding her close and lending her his strength so that she could laugh with them without betraying the battle on the horizon, the fight for her very survival.
“If I die,” she’d said to him, “if the only way to contain Uram is to end me, then I want you to tell my family that I died in an accident. A simple crash that burned my body to ash, a crash I never saw coming.” Her hand in his hair, her gaze telling him she knew exactly what it would cost him to keep that promise. “I want them to believe I went out smiling.”
In pursuit of her goal, she told her family that she’d come to Europe with Venom on a little runaway trip. Romantic and fun. She left out the danger and the horror and the blood. And when it was done, she put away her phone and she curled into him and they didn’t speak of what was to come.
Venom spent hours in bed with her, just holding her as she held him in turn. “I had six brothers and three sisters,” he told her on the third night, the sheets tangled around their legs and their bodies aligned, breaths kissing.
“You were the oldest, weren’t you?”
Venom nodded. “My youngest siblings, they were still children when I decided to become a vampire.” It was hard even now to look back at what had once been, the noisy, laughing family that had once existed. “You see, my father, he was a good man, but he wasn’t the best businessman and he could deny my mother nothing. Not silks bought directly from the best merchants, not jewels that caught her eye, not the most piquant spices.”
Frown marring her brow, Holly asked the question he’d known she would—because, for Holly, love didn’t seek to insulate to the point of blindness. Love was wide-open eyes and a raw honesty that permitted no barriers. “Didn’t your mother wonder where it all came from?”
“She was convinced we were wealthy, but when my father died, we discovered our inn was heavily in debt.” Venom felt the reverberation from that blow through time. “The creditors he’d managed to mollify to that point demanded an immediate sale.”
“You loved that place.”
“I’d worked in the kitchen since I was ten. It was my home.” Closing his hand over hers where she’d placed it on his heart, he took a breath infused with aching memory. “Not that it mattered—by that point, the debts were so substantial that a sale would’ve left us homeless paupers.”
Tears wet on his sisters’ cheeks.
White-faced shock in the faces of those of his brothers who’d been old enough to comprehend the dire reality.
His mother’s grief-stricken wails.
“As the eldest son, I had to make the choice, and the only choice I could make that would save them all was to become a vampire.” He remembered sitting alone in the inn’s kitchen, the accounts open in front of him and his heart cold with realization.
“How?” Holly frowned. “Vampires don’t get a payout until after the century of service.”
“Neha was a familiar face at the inn.” An archangel who had a liking for Venom’s cooking, and whose patronage gave the inn such cachet that, had the inn been managed well, they would’ve never ended up in such grim financial straits. “I spoke to her about our situation in the aftermath of my father’s death—”
“Hold on.” Holly’s eyes were wide. “You just rocked up to speak to an archangel while you were still a mortal? Funny, you don’t look demented.”
His lips kicked up. “The first time she requested to speak to the chef after stopping at the inn because she’d heard good things about it from her squadrons, I’d just turned seventeen and I’m sure my bones clattered from knocking against each other.” Never in his life had he been near anyone who burned with such violent power. “But when she kept dropping by . . . well, a chef has his own arrogance—and what seventeen-year-old boy wouldn’t be puffed up with self-importance by an archangel’s open pleasure in his creations?”
Laughing in an affectionate way that told him she saw the boy he’d once been, Holly said, “So by the time your father died, you were used to talking with her?”
Venom nodded. “She was, I think, sincerely sorry for my grief—I had become a person to her, not just another mortal who’d exist then die in an immortal heartbeat.” He wasn’t so certain she’d been truly aware of anyone else in his family. “When I told her our situation, she reiterated her invitation for me to become a vampire—and offered to advance me three quarters of my post-Contract payout. It was more than enough to cover the debts and keep the inn going.”