"I've cherished them," she murmured, tracing the hand-tooled hilts with her fingertip.
"I told him that you still had them. He was glad to hear how much they mean to you."
Her tender gaze bathed him in gratitude. "Nikolai...thank you. For doing that for Jack, and for giving these back to me. Thank you."
She came toward him and kissed him. The brief press of her lips slowly melted into something deeper. Nikolai cupped her face in his hands, smoothing his thumbs over the softness of her jaw, the delicate angle of her cheekbones. She parted her lips as his tongue swept along their seam, then moaned sweetly as he delved inside.
His fangs stretched into sharp points as lust ran through him like fire. Between his legs, his sex was a column of granite, rising instantly to the thought of having Renata beneath him. When her hand trailed down past the waistband of his pants to touch him, his greedy cock leapt, surging even harder under the heat of her palm as she stroked him.
"What time is it?" she murmured against his fevered mouth.
He grunted, too engrossed in the torment of her petting to immediately process the question. Through the rough sawing of his breath, he managed to rasp, "It's early. Probably sometime around nine."
"Well, damn, I guess that is pretty early," she murmured, moving her mouth away from his and kissing a trail of heat along his throat, playing over the knob of his Adam's apple. "You can't be out in the sunlight, right?"
"Nope."
"Hmm." Her moist lips descended, onto his bare chest. He leaned back onto his elbows as she followed one of his glyphs with the tip of her pink tongue, tracing the arcs and the tapering swirls around his nipple and across the plane of his stomach. When she spoke, her voice vibrated all the way into his bones. "So, I guess that means we're stuck here for a while, huh?"
"Yeah." The word was more gasp than sound. Her kiss traveled lower now, past his navel, still following the lines of his dermaglyphs, heading for the part of him that was straining, throbbing with the need to feel those moist hot lips clamped around him.
"Stuck here until nightfall, I suppose."
"Uh-huh." She took one end of the waistband's drawstring ties between her teeth and gave it a hard tug. The knot fell loose, and she pulled the warm-ups down, just enough to bare the eager head of his cock. She licked him, watching his face as she swirled her devilish tongue around the fat plum of his flesh, suckling at the drop of slick fluid that beaded there. "Ah, Christ..."
"So," she murmured, her breath skating across his wet skin, tormenting him even more. "What are we going to do in here all day while we wait for nightfall?"
Niko chuckled. "Baby, I can think of a hundred things I'd like to do with you."
She smiled up at him in challenge. "Only a hundred?"
Before he could fire back a smartass reply, she wrapped her lips around his cock and took him deep into her mouth. As Niko's body went nuclear with pleasure, he found himself praying that the day and his time alone with this incredible woman - his woman - could stretch on forever.
Chapter Twenty-six
Renata walked into the back door of the lodge and paused just over the threshold. She had left Nikolai in the shelter, deciding that her need for the bathroom, a hot shower, and a change of clothes that actually fit her was greater than her reluctance to step foot ever again in Sergei Yakut's domain.
Now she hesitated. The early afternoon sun was a warm presence at her back, encouraging her along, but inside the lodge was dim and cold. Shadows played over the toppled furniture and stretched across the rough planks of the floor. She drifted in, and walked toward the place where Lex had fallen.
His body was gone, the blood too. Nothing but the smallest trace of ash left behind - just as Nikolai had promised. The shutters on the bedroom window were thrown wide open, but the sun had since moved past. A fresh breeze carried the scent of pine pitch and crisp forest air into the dank stillness of the place. Renata breathed it deeply into her lungs, letting the fragrance of the new day purge her memories of all the death and blood and violence that had cloaked the lodge last night.
Today, in this new light, so much seemed different to her.
She herself seemed different, and she knew the reason why.
She was in love.
For the first time in a very long time, perhaps in all her life, she knew a sense of true hope. It nestled in her heart - a belief that her future held something more than just bare survival, that she might at some point measure happiness in years, not rare, fleeting moments. Being with Nikolai, whether in his arms or standing by his side, made her believe so many things were possible.
Renata walked into the great room, bolstered by the fact that this would be the last time she'd need to look at the place.
This was good-bye.
When she and Nikolai left here to continue their search for Mira, this lodge, the terrible barn and holding pen out back, Sergei Yakut, Lex, and everything else that scarred the past two years of her life would be history. She would leave all of it here, the ugliness and pain banished from any part of her future.
This part of her life was over.
She strode into the small bathroom she'd shared with Mira, at peace with herself and her surroundings as she turned on the hot water for the shower. As a humid steam began to roll out from the curtain, she unfastened the few buttons left on Jack 's borrowed oxford shirt and stood there for a moment, naked, contemplating her future with new eyes. She didn 't know what awaited once night fell and a dangerous new leg of this journey began, but she was ready to face it head-on.