Page 100 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
“Oh yes, yes, I love it.” Her fingers were digging into his hips and she was pulling at him, trying to get him to go faster, harder, but he stayed in control, keeping that slow, languorous rhythm.
Then, his voice ragged, he whispered, “Tell me you love me, angel.”
He turned his face and looked at her through hooded eyes, and Lu felt as if her heart would burst wide open. “Magnus,” she whispered.
“Tell me, angel. Say it,” he demanded harshly, his face strained. “I need to hear you say it.”
“I love you,” she said, dissolving, her eyes filling with moisture. “I love you. I love—”
Abandoning all his careful control, Magnus crushed his mouth against hers. His body crashed into hers and he began to pump with hard, powerful strokes, claiming her, possessing her body and her heart and her soul. She met every thrust with one of her own, her hips taking over, both of them going crazy, grabbing, clawing, panting, groaning, all restraint thrown aside.
“God now, please now!” she begged, writhing.
Magnus must have been right there, because he moaned, “Yes!” and thrust one last time. Every muscle in his body went taut.
Lu opened her eyes and looked up at him, this man who’d saved her in so many ways, and watched him fall apart.
She fell apart with him. They stared at each other through it, both of them stunned and wide-eyed, breathless and wracked with full body shudders, glistening with sweat. He said her name, low and hoarse, the word full of wonder. Beyond the curtains, the music rose to a throbbing crescendo, and the crowd roared.
Her heart on fire, Lu thought, I would die for you.
She didn’t know it then, but that simple, impassioned thought changed the course of fate.
THIRTY-ONE
Magnus carried her all the way back to the room. She was as boneless as a ragdoll, worn out by their lovemaking but also by the enormity of her emotions, and the effort not to think about what might be coming next. All she wanted was a shower, and to sleep.
So they shared a bath in the ridiculously huge claw-foot bathtub, running hot water without a thought to the credits it cost. Magnus washed her tenderly, and she washed him, and after they dried off, they fell into bed and slept like the dead.
Lu awoke hours later,
disoriented and thirsty, feeling certain someone had just called her name. But the room was still, the music from before silent.
The ghost of her name came again, raising goose bumps on her arms. Carefully, silently, she rose and dressed. With a last, lingering look at Magnus, sleeping peacefully on his back with his arm thrown over his face, she left the room.
The mansion was as quiet as their bedroom. She wandered aimlessly through vast, echoing corridors and lavish, empty rooms, until finally she came upon the kitchen. There sat Gregor MacGregor alone at a long, wooden table, staring in silent contemplation at his hands, twisting his pinky ring around with his thumb.
He glanced up when she came in, and smiled, looking awfully pleased with himself.
“You rang?” she said, rubbing a fist against an eye sleepily.
“Wondered if that would work. Must be because you were traipsin’ around in my noggin earlier, eh? Now we have some kind of Vulcan mind meld going on?”
Lu shrugged. “Beats me, Gregor. I didn’t come with an instruction manual, and it’s been hell figuring out how this whole contraption works.” She made a vague, sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating her entire body, and its assorted bells and whistles.
He stood, lifting his bulk from the table with surprising agility for such a large man, and went to a refrigerator the size of her bedroom in the house where she’d grown up. “You hungry, lass?”
“Starving,” Lu admitted. “But is that really why you called me?”
He hesitated a moment with his hand on the refrigerator door. “No.” He opened the door, began rummaging through the refrigerator’s contents. “But I find it’s hard to think on an empty stomach, don’t you?”
Lu made no comment, having had to think on an empty stomach her entire life. Judging by his size, MacGregor had never had that particular problem.
He made her a sandwich with cheese, ham, and fresh tomato, of all things, on wheat bread. When he put it in front of her, Lu looked at it as if it had just arrived from outer space.
“What?” he said, affronted.
“I saw a tomato once before. In a book.”
