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.

"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.

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

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 more insistently against her hip.

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

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 pressed into his chest, 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.

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.

Zavian's 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.

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 in his arms, 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.

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

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

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.