CH. 5

Emmeline's name had never sounded like that before. On the lips of parishioners or the convent superiors, it was always formal and entirely professional. But on his lips, it sounded like a dark, desperate prayer.

She shivered as her treacherous body betrayed her once again.

His voice carried the easy command of a man used to absolute obedience, yet beneath that dark authority, she heard a predator clinging to his sanity by a fraying thread.

Shaking her head in a frantic motion, Emmeline fought the intoxicating pull of his proximity.

This man was temptation incarnate. He was a walker of iniquity sent to drag her down into a den of ruin.

She squeezed her eyes shut and desperately summoned the ultimate shield of her faith to combat the heat pooling in her belly.

"Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. First John chapter four, verse four." She gasped the scripture in a breathless rush, clinging to the verse as a frantic reminder that the holy spirit within her was supposed to conquer the sinful flesh of the world. Yet her body continued its rank betrayal.

Zavian's hand slid from her jaw down the column of her throat, fingers splaying possessively across the rapid flutter of her pulse.

Not choking, but claiming. The touch was cold. Controlled and utterly silent.

His eyes had gone completely black, pupils swallowing the color until nothing human remained.

He watched her with the fixed intensity of a predator deciding exactly how to devour its prey.

"Flee also youthful lusts, but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Second Timothy chapter two, verse twenty-two." Emmeline continued, forcing the prayer through numb lips, hurling the sacred text at him as if she could build a fortress out of syllables and hide safely inside it.

She pushed at his solid chest, twisting in his hold to wrench even a sliver of space between them.

It was the worst possible thing she could have done.

Every frantic movement only made her more agonizingly aware of him.

Her struggles shifted her nightgown, the thin fabric riding up her thighs. Her writhing body ground directly over the rigid length of him, creating friction that made them both groan.

Zavian's hand shot down to grip her hip, stilling her movements with bruising force.

The pressure was just shy of painful. A warning delivered without words.

His jaw clenched. That was the only sign of the war raging inside him.

But Emmeline was too panicked to listen, too desperate to escape the overwhelming sensations flooding her system.

She twisted again, and Zavian's control shattered.

In one fluid motion, he rolled them both. Suddenly Emmeline found herself on her back, pinned beneath his considerable weight.

His hips settled between her thighs, spreading them wide to accommodate his body.

The position was obscene. Intimate and terrifying.

And her body sang with it.

Zavian's breathing turned heavy and ragged, sounding as if each breath were violently torn from his lungs.

The rigid heat of his length pressed directly where she was wet and aching, separated only by the thin barriers of their clothes. Even through the fabric, she could feel every thick inch of him, the way he pulsed with need.

He rocked his hips once and deliberately.

The slow, filthy grind made her back arch off the bed with a strangled sound escaping her throat.

Zavian said nothing. His face remained a mask of cold control, but his eyes burned with dark hunger.

His jaw clenched with such force she could hear the faint grinding of his teeth, while the massive arms caging her trembled with the monumental effort of restraint.

One hand slid down her body, pushing the nightgown up to her waist.

The movement was efficient. As if he were simply claiming what already belonged to him.

Emmeline gasped, trying to push the fabric back down, but Zavian caught both her wrists in one large hand and pinned them above her head.

The grip was iron. Unbreakable.

He didn't ask. Didn't explain. Simply took control with the absolute certainty of a man who'd never been denied anything in his life.

His free hand traced the newly exposed skin of her thigh, trailing fire up the sensitive inner curve. Higher. Higher still.

Until his thumb brushed over the damp fabric of her undergarments.

Emmeline's hips bucked involuntarily, a strangled sound escaping her throat.

Zavian's eyes darkened further as he pressed more firmly, feeling the evidence of her arousal soaking through the thin cotton.

He circled that aching bundle of nerves through the fabric, applying just enough pressure to make her writhe beneath him. Not enough to satisfy, just enough to drive her mad with need.

His expression remained cold. Detached. As if he were conducting an experiment rather than unraveling her completely.

What Emmeline didn't know was that every panicked twist of her body pushed Zavian toward a precipice his kind feared and reverenced in equal measure.

He hadn't simply awakened into consciousness. He had plunged straight into the all-consuming fever of Rut.

This wasn't a human kind of urgency. It was the full, brutal weight of a supernatural mating drive that overtook his species with the force of a natural disaster.

Rut wasn't a passing mood or a fleeting desire. It was a biological imperative that turned rational thought into useless background noise, stripping even the most disciplined of his kind down to raw instinct and overwhelming need.

Her scent, the feel of her beneath him, and the rapid flutter of her heartbeat all collided inside Zavian.

The combination built into a perfect storm of desire and memory that threatened to tear apart what remained of his sanity.

Every fiber of his being screamed at him to claim her, to mark her, and to make Emmeline his in every way that mattered.

His fangs throbbed painfully in his gums, aching with the urge to pierce the delicate skin of her throat.

He wanted to taste the hot slide of her blood and seal a bond that would echo for eternity.

His thumb hooked under the edge of her undergarments.

Just barely. Not removing them, but the promise was there. One small movement and he could touch her directly, feel the slick heat of her arousal without any barrier between them.

Zavian's hands trembled where they held her, shaking from the sheer, agonizing effort of holding back.

Rut didn't merely suggest. It commanded. It devoured patience and fed on restraint, roaring through his veins and demanding satisfaction with the inevitability of the tides.

He released her wrists, but only to slide both hands under her nightgown, palming her breasts with possessive hunger.

The touch was firm.

His thumbs found her nipples, circling the peaked buds before pinching with just enough force to make her gasp and ground his hips down again.

The friction made them both groan, but Zavian's expression never changed. Only his eyes betrayed him, burning with hunger.

His enhanced senses were completely drowning in her.

He could hear each stutter of her breathing and every tiny hitch when his hold shifted.

He could separate the flutter of her pulse at her throat from the quickened beating of her heart deeper in her chest.

The scent of her fear tangled with the sweeter, more dangerous perfume of her arousal.

Every breath he drew was torture. Every second that passed without claiming her was an agony beyond what he believed himself capable of enduring.

His mouth descended on her throat.

His tongue traced the line of her pulse, feeling it race beneath his lips and his teeth scraped over the sensitive skin, making her shudder.

The touch was methodical. As if he were mapping every vulnerable point on her body for future reference.

His hand slid back down between her thighs, this time pushing the fabric of her undergarments aside.

Skin to skin.

His fingers found her wet heat, and they both groaned at the contact.

Zavian's eyes closed briefly, his jaw clenching as if the sensation physically pained him. When they opened again, they were pure black. Inhuman.

He circled her entrance, gathering the slickness before dragging it up to that swollen bundle of nerves.

He circled and pressed.

His movements were controlled. Precise. Each touch calculated to drive her higher without giving her release.

As though this torture wasn't enough, Fate found a way to add another layer of cruelty to his suffering through the devastating reality that she didn't remember him.

The woman beneath him, the soul he'd searched for across centuries of despair, looked at him with terror instead of recognition.

She quoted scripture at him as if he were a demon instead of the man who'd once held her gently, who gave her comfort when she was broken, and who'd loved her with a devotion that transcended death itself.

Zavian's body screamed for the fierce, sacred rightness of joining with the one woman his soul recognized.

His instincts howled for him to sink his teeth into the soft place where her shoulder met her neck, to pull Emmeline down into the mattress, and to fill her until every sliver of distance between them was erased.

His finger pressed at her entrance, just barely breaching her.

So tight. Virgin tight.

Something flickered in his eyes. A possessive satisfaction.

He pressed deeper, just the tip of one finger sliding inside her.

Emmeline cried out, her body clenching around the intrusion.

Zavian watched her face with intensity, studying every micro-expression as if committing them to memory.

His finger remained still inside her, letting her feel the invasion, the claim.

However, he refused to yield to the urge while she looked at him like a stranger.

Claiming her now, while she trembled beneath him from fear rather than desire, would be an act of taking rather than sharing.

With monumental effort, he withdrew his hand.

The movement was slow, as if it cost him everything.

It was as though the universe had decided to make a grand spectacle of his suffering. It dangled paradise before him, close enough to taste, and then bound his hands behind his back while his body burned from the inside out.

The frantic rhythm of her pulse beneath his fingertips served as a brutal catalyst that violently dragged Zavian back to the exact moment he'd lost her in their past life and the memory crashed over him with suffocating force.