Page 28 of Venomous Lust
Control? Who was he kidding? Control was a white unicorn lost in space where Hazel was concerned. Control was the Midnight God’s mate, as elusive as she was entrancing.
“The Mating Venom cannot be controlled.” Speaking the words made Khal realize how true it was. “All I can do now is delay it.”
He had watched all his brothers fall victim to its attraction, but he had never understood the true pull of it. The irreversibility, the ravaging obsession of it. The Mating Venom was a poison whose effect could not be truly expressed with words. None could understand it before feeling it.
The Mating Venom was like a hook, dug deep in his gut, one that would neither release nor relent.
“Does Hazel know this?”
Hearing her name on the lips of another male unleashed a torrent of bile up his throat and Khal snarled, barely containing the savage impulse to shred the other male to pieces. The instinct would push him more and more toward violence, he knew. His body perceived any other male as a rival until the moment he claimed Hazel as his.
This situation is much more dangerous than I thought. I have to do something.
“She doesn’t,” he stated simply, but put all his strength behind his words. “And she won’t. Nothing is more important than our mission, not even my attraction to Hazel.”
“It’s not just an attraction,” Zaxis pointed out. “You can’t ignore it and continue on the mission like it didn’t happen. The mission is already compromised, like it or not.”
“And what do you suggest we do?” Khal bit out his answer, letting all his frustration out. Because he knew Zaxis was right. He knew the Mating Venom compromised the mission, he knew he couldn’t just ignore its call and, above all, he knew the mission was what mattered most. More than anything else.
Because if he failed, then all those he loved could die in an endless, bloody war. And Hazel with them.
“It’s too late to turn back now. What little advantage we had, we lost when we were boarded by the Mother,” Khal said. “If Knut doesn’t learn of our mission from Captain Roohl, he will from another of his bounty hunters. There are too many now who know about us. We need to hurry, it’s our only chance of success.”
A race against time. A race against himself. This mission was going to be his undoing.
“We need to carry on then.” The Avonie male inhaled deep and long, then nodded. “But how will you resist claiming Hazel?”
“We’ll stick with the plan. I will put her on a ship back to Aveyn as soon as we land on Garana.” Khal knew as he spoke that, as simple as it seemed, that one task would be harder than anything he’d ever faced. It had been two days, and already thinking about being separated from Hazel made him grit his teeth and clench his fists. “Then Earth. She has a sister there. She will be safe.”
Safe from me.
But even as he formulated the thought, he knew it was a lie. Hazel wasn’t safe anywhere, not in the Ring or beyond. He would hunt her down mercilessly, relentlessly, until she was his.
“It’s going to buy us some time, but from what I know about Eoks, it won’t last long.” Zaxis sounded doubtful, but he didn’t contradict Khal. There was no other choice anyway.
“All we have to do now is hope it’ll be enough time,” Khal said.
Enough time before the madness takes hold of me and I’m nothing but a beast.
Khal turned again and walked back toward the control room. Whatever lay ahead, it was nothing compared to the war he would have to wage with himself.
* * *
Hazel
She didn’t know what to think, what to feel. The way Khal had kissed her… it was like she had come home. Never in her life had Hazel felt this intense sense of belonging to someone else, like the fabric of her very being had been crafted for him.
And then he’d left.
Khal had turned away from her and left her there, dumbfounded and alone, reeling after the most incredibly sensual experience of her life.
That fire that had run through her veins, that incredible lust. Where had it come from? As Khal had kissed her, the lust had risen and risen in her mind, in her body, until it was like a brazier, consuming her one bite at a time. Until there was nothing left of her but a shell of herself, a shell filled with a carnal need akin to an unquenchable thirst.
She would have given him anything he’d asked at that moment, just to keep him there. Just so he wouldn’t stop kissing her, touching her. She had ceased to be a person, only a body full of need.
And she hadn’t cared a bit.
Now that he was gone, Hazel did. She cared very much. Hazel paced the length of Khal’s private quarters, alone and restless. She hated everything in the room that reminded her of the Eok, from the bare, sleek lines of the furniture, to the wall that dissolved into the most striking view any living being could hope to see.
