Page 20 of A Drop of Venom

“I don’t want to wait any longer.” I pulled him close and whispered, “Take me, shelshan. I’m yours.”

CHAPTER TEN

HAZEL

In a blink, he rolled us until I was cradled in his warm coils and he was above me, a king in his own right gazing down at his queen.

“And I am yours,” he said, eyes bright and golden as the sun. “In this life and the next, my light.”

He kissed me until I was breathless and moaning, his hands caressing me everywhere. Every touch made me gasp even through my clothing, and my sex was dripping with need.

His hand found my calf and slid up to my knee. He stilled with his fingers on my bare thigh. “Where are your underthings, my sweetness?” he murmured against my throat.

“In our cave,” I said with a little gasp and shiver as his grip tightened. “Where I left them.”

“Goddess,” he breathed, and I felt the prick of his fangs against the delicate skin of my throat. I moaned and arched my back. “You’ll be the death of me, my shelshi.”

“Not tonight, I won’t be.” I smiled up at him, my chest heaving. “Tonight, I will be your feast.”

Deliberately, I let my legs fall farther open, encouraging his hand to continue its journey farther up my thigh to where I was soaking my chemise. I desperately needed to be touched.

He made a sound in his chest I’d never heard before: a kind of rumbling. But instead of doing my unspoken bidding, he withdrew his hand from under my dress. I whimpered in protest.

“I want to see you, my beautiful mate,” he said, his hands at the laces of the simple overdress I’d worn today over my chemise. “May I?”

I reached for the laces, but he batted my hands away gently. “Please,” he said, and kissed me with so much passion that my toes curled. “Allow me,” he murmured.

With no breath with which to speak, I nodded.

He unlaced my dress quickly, but took his time as he drew its sleeves and my chemise down my chest and arms, baring me slowly to his ravenous gaze. He kissed his way along my collarbone, distracting me with sensation as my clothing slipped past my breasts, baring them to the air.

And then his mouth blazed a trail of kisses and heat to my right breast before he drew my hard, peaked nipple into his mouth.

I cried out, my fingers tightening in his hair to hold him there while his other hand teased and pinched my other nipple until the pleasure turned almost to pain.

“Goddess,” I gasped, digging my nails into his scalp. “Terolon. Shelshan.”

His chest rumbling, he bit my nipple as he rolled the other one between his fingers. I wailed, my hips arching of their own accord. I wanted to slip my own fingers between my thighs and give myself pleasure as I’d only done in the privacy of my own bed in the night, to find some way of relieving the aching need.

Terolon released my nipple and licked it, curling the forked end of his tongue around the sensitive tip. The sight and sensation were so potently erotic that a rush of wetness ran down the folds of my sex.

“I will satisfy you, my shelshi, I promise,” Terolon said, drawing my dress and chemise down further to reveal my abdomen. “Have patience, my love. I am feasting.”

With my hand still in his hair, he pressed kisses to almost every newly bared inch of skin. With a lunar’s good food and ample rest, I was no longer thin, and my stomach had a soft roundness that captured Terolon’s attention for a very long time.

I didn’t realize my clothing had slipped past my hips until suddenly his mouth descended on the dark curls of my sex. He inhaled deeply and groaned.

“Oh, Goddess,” I gasped, my fingers tightening again in his hair. “Terolon…”

In one movement, he drew my dress and chemise down my legs and off. Where they went, I had no idea, because I was bare before my love and nothing existed beyond this hunger we shared.

He rose again over me, his heavy-lidded gaze full of hunger and awe. “Magnificent,” he rasped, his hands trailing from my breasts over my hips to rest on my thighs. “Goddess. Hazel, my shelshi, my light. I have never in my long years beheld such beauty.”

“How many years?” I gasped.

He smiled, and the sight of those fangs made me shiver in delight. “I am a male of seventy-five summers,” he said, bending down to kiss me gently when my mouth fell open in astonishment. “Serpentae live far longer than humans. But once I take you as my mate, my wondrous light, you will share my lifespan. We will not part until the earth reclaims us both.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “That is…good information to know.”