Exclusive Extra: Free Guild Hunter Short Story
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A Sip of Eternity
Author’s Note: This short story began life as a scene in an early draft of Archangel’s Shadows. It focuses on Dmitri & Honor, so there are no spoilers for the Archangel’s Shadows storyline (however, if you haven’t yet read Archangel’s Blade (Honor and Dmitri’s story), then save this to read later). I hope you enjoy!
A Sip of Eternity
Nalini Singh
After Janvier left, shutting the door behind himself, Honor turned into Dmitri’s arms, her eyes on his face. Though he was handling a grim incident, he didn’t look strained or stressed. “You like the challenge, don’t you?” she said.
“Eternity is a long time to be bored.” Warmth in his eyes, he tipped up her chin with a finger under her jaw. “That, however, is no longer an issue.”
Honor went to joke about him getting tired of her, but something made her stop. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the wound was still fresh. He’d lived a thousand years without her, and he had loved her through all of it. Rising on tiptoe, she claimed his lips, the kiss a luscious pleasure, the taste of him making her heart beat.
Hand curved around her throat, he nipped very lightly at her lower lip with his fangs.
Honor sucked in a breath.
“You need to feed,” he murmured, and nudged her toward his neck and the open collar of his white shirt.
“So do you.” She slipped another button out of its hole, luxuriated in the dark tan glow of his skin. “You are so beautiful.”
He wove his hand through her hair and drew her closer to the living beat of his pulse. “I don’t need to feed as often as you.” It was a purr against the side of her face.
Nipples tight, and skin hot, Honor rose on her toes and sucked the skin over his pulse. He shuddered, his fingers tightening on her skull. “Orange juice.”
She laughed softly. That was what he’d said the first time he’d coaxed her to feed after she woke as a vampire. She’d needed to do it, felt the pounding, erotic urge, but she’d hesitated. He’d told her it felt just like drinking orange juice. She’d laughed then, too, her nerves easing. And then she’d tasted him, the shock of ecstasy a hit to her system that had almost thrown her into unconsciousness.
“Wow,” she’d whispered when she could speak again. “Is it always like this?”
“It will be for you.” It had been a darkly sensual promise.
Honor had come to realize that he was so potent for two reasons. The first was that she loved him until she couldn’t breathe. The second was that he was a thousand years old and powerful with it. Even now, she only needed a sip to give her enough energy to last the entire day. Sometimes, she took more, but it left her a little drunk.
Piercing his skin, she took her sip, felt her head spin and her cells jumpstart, then forced herself to stop. “I want to drink,” she complained as she licked over the mark. He didn’t really need it, was more than strong enough that the fang bite would’ve closed over in a single minute or less, but she liked giving him that small pleasure to erase the erotic hurt. “I want to gulp you down.”
Hard as rock, he pressed against her. “It’ll take time,” he said, his voice rough. “The older you get, the more you’ll be able to drink without the power going to your head.”
Time, in the immortal sense, Honor had learned, didn’t mean years. It could be decades or centuries. “What a tough life I have,” she said, kissing his throat and the dip formed by his collarbones. “Sipping on you for eternity.” Another kiss, a suck of that sensitive spot above the pulse in his neck, her fingers brushing his neck.
Groaning, he lifted her up and put her on the desk, moving to stand between her legs. “I think a certain hunter is trying to seduce her husband.” He dropped his head to her throat and nipped sharply.
She hissed out a breath and gripped at his hair, but he didn’t sink his fangs into her. Dmitri was very careful with how much he allowed himself to take from her—young as she was, her body couldn’t replenish all of what he needed. Since she hated the idea of him feeding from anyone else, and he didn’t have any inclination to touch another as intimately, they had bottled blood in the fridge upstairs.
Curious, she’d tried it once, realized exactly how delicious Dmitri was; the bottled stuff was serviceable but flat. “Taste me,” she coaxed. “You haven’t for two days.” Stroking his hair, she ran her hands down over his shoulders and chest. “Or maybe we can work out the tension another way.”
He gripped her wrists right before she would’ve reached her goal. “I have a meeting with Raphael in fifteen minutes.”
Waggling her eyebrows, she grinned. “Race you to the finish line.”
It was fast and hot and wild and it wrecked her. “You’re lethal,” she whispered, lying on her back on his desk, his papers and pens scattered on the carpet.
Pressing a kiss to her bare abdomen, her shirt gaping on either side of her, her dangerously sexy husband rose and zipped up his pants. God, the sound of metal against metal. It made her toes curl. He had himself set to rights in about thirty seconds, while she lay there hotly ruined.
When he sat down in his chair and pulled her forward, she blushed, suddenly aware of how exposed she was to him. There was nothing she wouldn’t do with him, but sometimes, his carnality still sent a flush through her. Now, she held her breath as he rubbed his jaw against her thigh and finally gave in to his own blood hunger.
But not before he looked up, held her eyes, said, “It was always you. It will always be you.”
Her chest squeezed, her eyes burned, and her heart fell once more into the hands of the beautiful, deadly, and violently loyal man who was her eternity.
© Copyright 2014 by Nalini Singh
If you enjoyed this deleted scene and haven’t yet read Archangel's Blade, you can find an excerpt here.
