Only anger and pain and need.

Tugging her finger from her mouth, he kissed the poison and sugar sweetness of her with a greed that should’ve terrified her. But this was Holly. Who thought his eyes were pretty and who wanted to introduce him to her mother.

Mouths fused and bodies in passionate sync, they ended up in the room she’d claimed. Pulling her dress up over her head and throwing it aside, he palmed her breasts. When he bent his head to caress them with his mouth, she tugged at his hair as if she wanted another kiss.

He resisted, squeezing her other breast to make his point.

A shiver ran through her. Satisfaction a curve on his lips, her pleasure soothing and calming the raw edge of his need, he got to work. She jumped at the scrape of his fangs, moaned when he sank them in without taking blood. She was sensitive there, not just to touch, but to the kiss of his fangs.

He took full advantage of that knowledge to tease and torment her. First, he let the taste of her sink into him, before licking the wound closed. It was only a small one, a wholly sexual thing that had nothing to do with drinking blood to survive. Then he licked his tongue over her nipple before closing his teeth deliberately over it and tugging.

Jerking, she ran her hands down his back, scraping at him through his shirt. When she pulled impatiently at it, he managed to unbutton the shirt without taking his attention from his worship of her breasts. Shrugging it off, he gloried in the feel of her nails sinking into his flesh as he bit and licked and kissed.

Only when her heart was a rapid tattoo and she sounded like she couldn’t breathe did he move his lips to the centerline of her chest and kiss his way back up to her mouth, holding the silken heat of her body close to him.

Small but strong, that was Holly.

Her kiss was a demand and it was a branding. Holly had decided on him and he knew no matter what happened, she was it for him. He’d be like Jason’s vampire contact, that man who still loved his lost mate so many years after her murder.

Some things a man knew.

Breaking their kiss, he nuzzled his way down her throat, nipping at her carotid as he did so. She shivered but made no attempt to stop him. He was lethal, dangerous, could’ve torn out her throat . . . but that wasn’t what they were to one another.

Lifting her up in his arms, he threw her onto the bed.

She laughed, her hair a glorious stain of color on the white bedding, and her eyes so full of pure happiness that it stopped his breath. “Tushar,” she said, using a name no one had spoken in centuries, a name he’d told everyone was of a dead man.

Turned out he’d lied.

“God,” she said suddenly, “imagine if past-Holly could see me now. Naked and about to be led astray by you. The poor girl would be shocked, shocked.”

Laughing at her reference to their antagonistic beginnings, the memories ones he would guard fiercely against time and age, he got on the bed and began to kiss his way down her body, ignoring all her attempts and orders to him to speed it up. Venom had no intention of rushing this, his patience a sinuous, covetous thing focused on marking her as his.

She writhed on the bed, her musk making his nostrils flare.

Crouched over her, his head by her navel and his hands on her hips to keep her still, he flicked up his eyelashes . . . to see her looking down, her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. “You,” she said on a sucked-in gulp of air, “are a menace.”

He felt his lips curve. It had been an eon, forever, since he’d played this way with a lover. Perhaps he never had. Before his Making, he’d had only three lovers, all traders passing through who wanted nothing but a little physical ease. Since all three women were on settled routes, he’d had the pleasure of their bodies in his bed a number of times. They hadn’t been strangers who met only for a single night and never again—but neither had they wanted one another for anything but bed sport.

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.”