He went motionless in a way that wasn't human. "Holly."
She didn't let go despite the warning in his tone. "I'm stubborn," she whispered. "Especially when it comes to people who matter." And he mattered. "You don't get to do the lone viper thing anymore."
"How will you stop me?" A cold purr of sound.
"Do you really think I'd warn you?" A snort. "This is war." Pressing a kiss to his back on a raw wave of affection that scared her with its strength, she drew back . . . but only after running her palms down either side of his chest.
The gauntlet? It was thrown.
*
Venom had fought countless battles, had faced down enemies and dangerous allies alike, but even after his earlier thoughts about how lethal she could be to him, he hadn't been ready for this. For a Holly who hugged him and smiled at him and stood next to him asking him to teach her how to roll the pinwheels.
This woman was . . . soft. Vulnerable.
He knew that was only the here and the now, a time when she felt safe, that Holly was dangerous and tough and a fighter, but even this fragment of vulnerability, it terrified him. "We're not dating, kitty," he said harshly. "I'm not a boy who's going to go steady with you."
Holly's eyes flicked up, the hurt in them an iron-handed blow to the gut. And he knew. It had taken enormous courage for her to lower her defenses and retract the prickles she used in self-protection, and he'd just taught her that it had been a mistake. One more nudge--or just silence--and he'd break her precarious confidence that he was worth her vulnerability.
That was the correct move, the smart move, the move that would make sure the damn switch inside him never turned on. Holly's future was a dark unknown that could end in a single fucking day. If he allowed her in, what would be left after she was gone?
"Fuck." Gripping her face in hands covered with flour, he pressed his forehead to hers. "I'm broken inside," he said, his voice ragged. "I function so well that even my closest friends think I'm healthy and whole, but I'm not."
Her hands came up to close over his wrists. "And I'm the poster child for mental health," she said in a tone so dry, it was dust. "Stop trying to drive me away by snapping like a cobra." Tilting back her head, she kissed him and it wasn't hard, wasn't demanding. It was a lush, feminine type of kiss. The type of woman Holly was below the anger and the rage and all that had been done to her.
She liked color and pretty beads and painting her boots with daisies.
"Even if you survive that monstrous thing in Michaela's turret, you won't survive immortality," he ground out. "Not being so soft inside."
"Maybe not," Holly said with clear-eyed serenity, "but I'll be myself until the day I die. That's good enough for me." A squeeze of his wrists. "The question is, do you like who I am when I'm not sniping at you?"
He bit her. Out of frustration at all that she was asking of him. Out of arousal at the scent of her. Out of a viciously powerful emotion that had been building inside him for years and had burst to the fore only when he saw that she was healing, becoming herself again. He'd never been tempted to take her while she was so badly psychically wounded. But this Holly?
She didn't fight his fangs sinking into her throat, didn't fight that he had a death grip on her hair, pulling her head back to arch her neck taut, didn't fight the hand he shoved under her dress to grip at her hip. Her blood flowed into his mouth and went straight to his cock. He didn't drink. He wouldn't hurt her. He just needed to taste her.
Her blood pulsed with the rapid beat of her heart.
Venom moved without conscious volition. Shifting his hand around to the front of her body, he moved it down . . . to find she wasn't wearing panties. Spearing his fingers through her delicate folds, he discovered she was wet, so wet. Wild, sensual creature. He found the nerve-rich little nub hidden within, pressed hard at the same time that he penetrated her with a finger.
"Venom!"
He removed his fangs long enough to say, "Tushar. Say it." He thrust in and out of her in a demanding coda.
"Tushar." Acid green eyes holding his, her pupils hugely dilated. "Tushar."
He sank his fangs into her again, and then he drove her over. Once. Twice. Until her body quivered and her flesh was liquid for him.
And still she held him, this stubborn and deadly and complicated and soft woman who'd decided to claim him.
Caressing her down from the edge, he removed his fangs, licked the wound closed. But not totally. He was strong enough to have done that, but he didn't. He left two bruises that made it obvious he'd bitten her. And though he'd just shown her he wasn't human, could strike without warning, she smiled at him, her hazy eyes dancing. "Do I have flour on my face . . . and other places?"
"Yes." Removing his hands from her naked flesh, he lifted her up and put her on an unused part of the counter. "You're playing a dangerous game."
Throwing her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips as if he hadn't just warned her in his coldest voice, she said, "My mom is going to adore you."
His heart kicked, memories from a lifetime ago crashing so hard into him that he wrenched away--or tried to. Because even with that old anger riding him, he couldn't hurt her and so he didn't pull as hard as he should have, and she held on.
"Who was she?" A deadly question.
The viper in his blood raised its head in interest at the reminder of the poisonous danger that lived beneath her feminine surface. "No one."
A narrow-eyed look. "Spill it." Poking at his abdomen with a finger, she added, "Don't make me mad."
He could take her at her worst, but he found himself opening a box of memory he'd sealed centuries ago. "I was pledged to be married before my Making."
"And you went ahead and got Made?" Eyebrows drawing together in a dark vee. "That seems like asshole behavior."
"It would've been--but she was to be Made, too. Our marriage was to take place five years after our Makings, on the condition that we were assessed as having achieved full control over our vampirism."
"So what happened?"
"I was accidentally bitten by one of Neha's pet vipers a month before my Making. My body's reaction was to shrug off the bite--the only indication I'd been bitten was a faint soreness at the site of the bite."
Holly's pupils dilated in a flare of understanding. "That attracted Neha's attention," she said.
"No one knew why I had such a strong tolerance for snake venom--others in my family had been bitten by far less venomous snakes over the years and they'd all had a severe reaction." Venom had been curious, too, not realizing he'd sentenced himself to a nightmare. "Neha told me she couldn't waste me, that I contained within me something that might make it possible for her to create a vampire unlike any other."
"That bitch," Holly spit out. "She hurt you to satisfy her own arrogance!"
"She is a queen and an archangel." Venom had never expected her to act human. "The end result is that my betrothed came out a normal vampire. I didn't." He and Aneera had deliberately been placed in different parts of the country, to ensure they didn't breach the rules. It wasn't until four years after being Made that they'd met again.
Venom's eyes had only partially changed by then, but one look and Aneera had run screaming, the same horror on her face that he'd seen in the faces of his family when they'd begun to glimpse the depth of the changes in him. Fear had been acrid in their sweat, their refusal to touch him a staggering hurt, the wards against evil they'd made behind his back brutal blows.
He'd been almost glad when one of his sisters had found the courage to tell him he was no longer welcome--at least then, no one could question his honor in walking away. Because that was all he'd had left. "The marriage pledge was deemed invalid since I was no longer 'human.'"
"Well, duh, you were a vampire." Holly flashed her fangs. "Is she still alive, this woman who couldn't handle it when things didn't go exactly as planned?"
Venom shrugged. "I don't know. I left the past behind long ago."
"The
n what's all this baggage you're carrying, huh?" Tightening her grip on his hips, Holly moved her hands to his hair. "Did you love her?"
"I barely met her. It was a different time." A time when his parents and hers had made the arrangements and he and Aneera had agreed to it. "With both of us from similar family backgrounds, and all other concerns in alignment, it was considered the perfect match."
It felt so strange to say that, to think about his parents and about a time in which he'd been the dutiful eldest son who'd seen nothing wrong with pledging to marry a woman who was a stranger to him. "If I'm being honest, I've never understood why her reaction hit me so hard." As if he'd been kicked.
"I know why," Holly said, her eyes seeing right through him. "You'd committed to her and you're not a man who breaks his commitments. It left you totally unprepared for her defection."
A quiet pause before she added, "Especially coming as it must've done on the heels of your family's rejection. That's what hurts, isn't it? Not the loss of a stranger who didn't know the incredible gift she was throwing away. That woman was just the foul icing on the really shitty cake."
Venom wanted to bite her again for stripping him bare, punish her for making him face wounds he'd thought long-scarred and only now realized were still oozing. Most of all, he wanted to sink his fangs into her and hold her down until even an archangel's fucking ghost couldn't steal her life.
Pulling away from her before he gave in to his inhuman nature once again, before he betrayed far too much, he went to wash his hands. "I'll finish making your dessert."
33
Holly looked at Venom's back as he began to work on the pinwheels again. She knew pushing him would gain her nothing. He wasn't stubborn like her--but he held his ground. And whatever he'd been carrying around for three-hundred-plus years, it wasn't something he was ready to share. Fair enough.
She hopped off the counter--and had to do it. "I have to go clean up. I'm all wet and sticky."
His entire body froze.
Lips curving, she sauntered out of the kitchen, feeling his gaze on her every step of the way. He might be fighting it with all he was worth, but Venom--
Tushar. Say it.
Her heart stopped.
He'd given her his real name. She wasn't sure anyone else knew or remembered that. And he'd given it to her.
Holly released a quiet breath . . . and her chest, it pulsed.
No. Just no.
Striding into the bathroom, she cleaned herself up--Venom really had done a stellar job of turning her flesh erotically wet--then lifted up her dress to look at her chest. The image of those menacing serrated wings was a faint outline that faded completely toward the edges. "Do what you will, you bastard. And so will I." The latter words were a vow. "I don't plan to be easy prey like poor Daisy."
When she returned to the kitchen, it was to discover the treats already baking and Venom missing. It wasn't hard to find him. He was standing on the back porch, staring out into the forest as sunshine brushed the treetops.
Padding past him down onto the grass, Holly spread her arms and did a little twirl that sent the skirt of her sundress flying around midthigh. "Okay, that's enough nature," she said afterward, the grass soft underneath her bare feet and the air so clean it nearly hurt. "When do we go back to New York?"
Venom's face was expressionless when he said, "We don't go back. We wait."
"For Raphael?"
A curt nod.
Holly's heart squeezed, the playfulness gone and her dreams of a future in which she seduced Venom into a relationship in ashes. It had all been a fantasy anyway, an illusion the two of them had created with their refusal to refer to the reckoning to come. Because Holly had known how this would end from the moment she'd seen that distorted, monstrous fleshy thing in the crib.
She was a carrier of part of Uram. And now the insane archangel was trying to what, come back to life? The only way for Raphael to make sure that didn't happen, to absolutely ensure a powerful and insanely murderous being didn't once more stalk the streets, was to end both her and the receptacle in the crib.
"I won't run," she whispered to Venom when he continued to watch her. "I saw what Uram did." Grief was a bruise deep inside her that had never quite healed. "I watched my friends die. I heard their screams. I'd do anything to make sure he never again hurts anyone."
*
Even die.
The unspoken words hung in the incongruously luminous morning air, her vow unbreakable for all that it was silent. "It won't come to that," Venom said, responding to the words she hadn't spoken.
"Don't be a liar, Viper Face." Gentle, chiding words as she walked back up the steps toward him, a small woman in a vivid sundress, bare feet, and a fall of hair as bright as her soul. "There's no other way."
This time, when she put her arms around him, he crushed her close. And he knew it was far too late to try to distance himself. She'd already reached that sliver of the man he'd once been. Not only that, but she'd charmed the cobra, twined the viper around her arm. And flipped the switch.
He was hers.
They stood there in silence for untold minutes, until Holly lifted her head from his chest. "I don't want my pinwheels to burn," she said with a smile that couldn't hide the sadness within.
He followed her inside, watched her take the sweets from the oven and put them on a cooling tray on the counter before picking up the small jug of glaze he'd prepared. Glaze drizzled on, she used a fingertip to touch one of the sweets, hissed out a breath. "It's so hot . . . but I still want to stuff my face."
Sucking on her burned finger, she shot him a look that asked him to laugh with her.
Venom had no laughter inside him.
Only anger and pain and need.
Tugging her finger from her mouth, he kissed the poison and sugar sweetness of her with a greed that should've terrified her. But this was Holly. Who thought his eyes were pretty and who wanted to introduce him to her mother.
Mouths fused and bodies in passionate sync, they ended up in the room she'd claimed. Pulling her dress up over her head and throwing it aside, he palmed her breasts. When he bent his head to caress them with his mouth, she tugged at his hair as if she wanted another kiss.
He resisted, squeezing her other breast to make his point.
A shiver ran through her. Satisfaction a curve on his lips, her pleasure soothing and calming the raw edge of his need, he got to work. She jumped at the scrape of his fangs, moaned when he sank them in without taking blood. She was sensitive there, not just to touch, but to the kiss of his fangs.
He took full advantage of that knowledge to tease and torment her. First, he let the taste of her sink into him, before licking the wound closed. It was only a small one, a wholly sexual thing that had nothing to do with drinking blood to survive. Then he licked his tongue over her nipple before closing his teeth deliberately over it and tugging.
Jerking, she ran her hands down his back, scraping at him through his shirt. When she pulled impatiently at it, he managed to unbutton the shirt without taking his attention from his worship of her breasts. Shrugging it off, he gloried in the feel of her nails sinking into his flesh as he bit and licked and kissed.
Only when her heart was a rapid tattoo and she sounded like she couldn't breathe did he move his lips to the centerline of her chest and kiss his way back up to her mouth, holding the silken heat of her body close to him.
Small but strong, that was Holly.
Her kiss was a demand and it was a branding. Holly had decided on him and he knew no matter what happened, she was it for him. He'd be like Jason's vampire contact, that man who still loved his lost mate so many years after her murder.
Some things a man knew.
Breaking their kiss, he nuzzled his way down her throat, nipping at her carotid as he did so. She shivered but made no attempt to stop him. He was lethal, dangerous, could've torn out her throat . . . but that wasn't what they were to one another.
Lifting her up in
his arms, he threw her onto the bed.
She laughed, her hair a glorious stain of color on the white bedding, and her eyes so full of pure happiness that it stopped his breath. "Tushar," she said, using a name no one had spoken in centuries, a name he'd told everyone was of a dead man.
Turned out he'd lied.
"God," she said suddenly, "imagine if past-Holly could see me now. Naked and about to be led astray by you. The poor girl would be shocked, shocked."
Laughing at her reference to their antagonistic beginnings, the memories ones he would guard fiercely against time and age, he got on the bed and began to kiss his way down her body, ignoring all her attempts and orders to him to speed it up. Venom had no intention of rushing this, his patience a sinuous, covetous thing focused on marking her as his.
She writhed on the bed, her musk making his nostrils flare.
Crouched over her, his head by her navel and his hands on her hips to keep her still, he flicked up his eyelashes . . . to see her looking down, her breath coming in short, desperate gasps. "You," she said on a sucked-in gulp of air, "are a menace."
He felt his lips curve. It had been an eon, forever, since he'd played this way with a lover. Perhaps he never had. Before his Making, he'd had only three lovers, all traders passing through who wanted nothing but a little physical ease. Since all three women were on settled routes, he'd had the pleasure of their bodies in his bed a number of times. They hadn't been strangers who met only for a single night and never again--but neither had they wanted one another for anything but bed sport.
After his Making . . . A man couldn't be free, couldn't love, when he knew his lovers saw only part of him. Vampires, angels, mortals, the women glimpsed his eyes, thought they understood, but no one did, not really. Not until Holly.
Venom didn't have to hide anything from her.
Not his needs.
Not his movements.
Not the inhuman coldness that was as integral a part of him as his eyes.
And not the human core with its scars and its memories and its devotion.
To Holly, he was all of that and more. He was Venom. He was Tushar.