Her heart was thudding so loudly, he almost missed the words she breathed against his forearm. “You have me.”
He bit down, his teeth breaking the skin of her neck before he stopped himself. “Not here,” he snarled. He didn’t want to stop. Wanted to take her right there, right now, and to hell with the consequences. But he wouldn’t do that to her.
Her fingers clenched on his shoulders, digging into muscle with the strength of a warrior. “Here,” she said, her hold going from a caress to a demand. “Right here. You need blood, you need your strength. We don’t know what’s waiting outside.”
“Layla.”
“Now,” she insisted. “You can fuck me later—and you’d damn well better—but you need blood now.”
He was weaker than he could ever remember being, but not so weak that he couldn’t have resisted her if he’d tried. He didn’t try. Sinking his teeth in her neck once again, he pierced her vein and moaned in a pleasure that was deep and heartfelt as the delicate silk of her blood flowed down his throat, heating his body like a furnace, while his parched cells stretched with new energy and eagerly drank up more. He could have lain there for hours, sipping the life-giving nectar from her vein, sliding first his fingers and then his cock into the succulent heat of her pussy.
But he forced himself to stop, to close off his senses against the temptation of her body. Withdrawing his fangs in a smooth glide that left the two small wounds already closing, he hastened the healing with a long, slow lick of his tongue. Then he stared down her.
She was still panting beneath him, overtaken by the chemical in his bite that had sped the most exquisite pleasure to everywhere blood flowed in her body. Which was everywhere. She cried when he stopped, bucking against his weight in demand, her glassy eyes staring up at him and filled with anger.
“How are you?” he demanded, biting back a groan as the soft heat between her thighs cradled his erection.
She finally seemed to focus on his face, stared for a moment, then said, “I’m . . . fine. How’re you?”
He wanted to laugh at the polite, almost trite, response. “Feel that,” he snarled, taking her hand and pressing against his unrelieved erection. “That’s how I am. I want you. But there are several humans who I hope are your people standing just outside that door, and Chuy will wake at any moment. I don’t think you want any of them to see us naked and entwined, to put it poetically.”
She tried to conceal an amused smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re right.”
“Of course I am,” he grumped.
She made a disgusted noise. “Good God, Brian just commed me. I told them I would be fine. How long before Chuy—”
Xavier sent his lieutenant a telepathic order, rousing him to wakefulness only slightly earlier than he would have on his own. “He’s waking now,” he told her.
“You’ll have to open the door,” she said as they rolled away from each other and sat up as much as they could before crawling off the bed to stand on the narrow strip of concrete floor at its foot.
“That won’t be a problem.”
“It’s pretty well sealed shut, so—”
“Fix your clothes,” he said, then stomped to the vault door, and with a quick glance over his shoulder to be sure she obeyed, shoved the door open to find three people standing in a concrete hallway, staring, as if waiting for him to start raving like a lunatic.
“Layla,” he said in a flat voice.
“I’m here,” she said and shoved in next to him. “I’m fine. I told you I would be.”
The human male named Brian, who she’d insisted had never been more than a friend, was talking. He fought back an instinctive wave of possessive rage that was no more appropriate for the moment than it would have been to let the human fighters discover him balls deep in her pussy.
When the others stepped into the elevator taking Layla with them, he waited until the door was about to close, then reached out and pulled her to his side, his glare daring them to try and stop him.
“Go,” Layla said calmly. “Send it back down. We’ll be up in a minute.”
Xavier bent to her ear when the door closed, leaving them alone. “You’re mine,” he murmured. “Tonight and every night.”
She pulled back and gave him a searching look. “We’ll see.”
With an angry snarl, he yanked her against his chest and kissed her, his mouth hard. And as his tongue swept between her teeth, his fury filled her throat. “Decide now,” he ordered. “You’re mine or you’re not.”
She lifted her head with an angry glare to match his. “It has to go both ways. You’re mine, too.”
He grinned, flashing fangs that were still fully visible and dripping with hunger. “Of course,” he replied silkily. “Just remember, cariño. I don’t share, ever. Not for an hour, not for a moment.”
“Same goes,” she snapped.
His grin broadened as he took her angry mouth, rumbling with satisfaction when she softened into his embrace, when her arms circled his neck to hold him tightly.
They broke apart at the sound of furious howls from inside the vault, turned to see Chuy crawl from the shreds of his tent and flow gracefully to his feet, as if his bones moved differently than a regular human’s.
“Sire?” he asked, gazing around the empty hallway, before looking to Xavier for guidance.
“The elevator, Chuy,” he said when the thing dinged open. “We’re leaving.” When they stepped inside, he looked at Layla and said, “Sakal?”
“Gone.” She continued speaking over his sharp curse. “There’s a garage exit in the basement,” she explained. “We think his remaining bodyguards spirited him out as soon as he went downstairs. It would have been a simple matter to park a shielded vehicle in there and take him out that way. Now we just need to figure out where he’ll go.”
“He’ll run home, like the coward he’s always been.”
“Where’s home?”
“I don’t know, yet. Though I do have suspicions, and if necessary, I can contact my fellow vampire lords. After all, that’s why I’ve spent so much time courting their friendship and alliance. It’s time for them to step up and prove themselves.