Taste Me (13 page)

Her taste.
He’d never forgotten it, and god knew he’d tried. Not trusting himself to touch her with his hands, he clenched his fists against his thighs, drinking her like ambrosia, glorying in the gasps and moans he produced using only his mouth. If only he could—

“Lukas, come in.” Jack’s voice crackled through his earpiece.

It nearly killed him to back away from her clinging lips. “It’s Jack,” he murmured, finally stepping back. “I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

He turned his outgoing audio back on. “Yeah, Jack. I’m here.” He gulped as Scarlett turned off the water, squeezed her hair, and casually stepped out of the shower. Rivulets of water flowed over her pale body, over her champagne goblet breasts—

“Is Scarlett secure?”

“Yeah.”

Tense silence. “Are you absolutely certain? Please verify.”

“Confirmed, I have a current visual.” And what a visual it was. Scarlett didn’t seem to be in any hurry to grab a towel. “What’s up?”

“Code Red, fourth floor recording studio. It’s… Annika’s…” Jack’s voice faded out, but Lukas tasted aching grief.

“What? Repeat last message.”

“Annika’s dead, and we found Stephen. He’s seriously injured.”

Scarlett was supposed to be the target, not her sister
. He took a shaky breath before responding. “Okay. Um, okay. I’ll secure Scarlett and get up there as fast as I can. Call Gideon.”

“Already have. He’s on his way. Get… up here. Hurry.”

Scarlett wrapped her arms over her towel-covered breasts. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Failure clawed.
I can’t tell her. I… can’t.
“I have to go.” He saw Scarlett’s purple bathrobe hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door and bundled her into it before speaking into his headset again. “Garrett, Jesse, Chico. Scarlett’s dressing room, please.”

When she put her hand on his forearm, it was all he could do not to flinch away. “Lukas. What’s wrong?”

He opened his mouth to respond, to say something. Anything. But words were beyond useless.

Garrett and Jesse hurried in.

“Someone, tell me what’s wrong,” Scarlett repeated. Lukas nearly choked on her rising hysteria.

Garrett and Jesse each took an arm, sitting down with Scarlett on the couch. As they spoke softly and intently, Lukas headed for the door. Before he could make his escape, Scarlett’s polyharmonic wail slammed into his back.

He broke into a run.

Hours later, Lukas sat alone in Sasha’s cheerful kitchen. Gideon had just left for the hospital, and Sasha and Jack had gone downstairs to verify that Underbelly was locked up tight, leaving him with only the kitschy black cat clock for company. Its black tail twitched off the seconds with annoying consistency.

“Damn.” Shoving to his feet, he washed the mugs and coffee pot, and put away the snacks. After wiping the table and counter tops with a Holstein-spotted dishrag, he walked like a zombie to Scarlett’s room.

Even asleep, her grief sliced him like a thousand tiny razor blades.

He opened the bedroom door. Antonia slept sprawled across the foot of Scarlett’s decadent bed, and Calamity sat sentinel, curled into the crook of Scarlett’s bent knees, his head up and alert. Scooping up his gangly sister, Lukas carried her into the hallway, past Annika’s police-sealed bedroom door to Sasha’s room at the end of the hall. In her smudged makeup and Hello Kitty socks, Antonia looked more like his little sister again—but if tonight had taught him anything, it was that his little sister wasn’t so little anymore. Nope, she’d been steady as a rock.

Maybe she was ready to take her place in the so-called family business after all.

Scarlett whimpered, the chasm of her grief yawning endless and dark. He quickly bundled Antonia under Sasha’s blankets fully clothed, kissed her forehead, and went back to Scarlett.

To do what? What the hell am I doing?

Scarlett whimpered again, reaching out with her hand. When he clasped it in his own, she settled nearly immediately.

The unoccupied side of the king-sized bed, with its soft mound of pillows, beckoned.
Ten minutes. Just long enough to make sure she stays asleep.

It was the least he could do.

***

As Scarlett emerged from sleep, her first sensation was of heat radiating into her from behind. She snuggled back, against a man who had his big arm wrapped securely around her, his hand draped over her heart.

She descended back into the twilight world of textures: the delicate scrape of chest hair, the delicious weight of his arm, the scratch of denim against her ass. If Lukas Sebastiani was back in her bed, why on earth was he still wearing pants?

She tensed as her butt shifted against an impressive morning erection. This was no memory, no fevered dream. Why was Lukas in her bed?

Her breath caught.
Annika.
It hadn’t been a nightmare after all.

Behind her, Lukas took a deep, shuddering breath, and then drew her against him, so gently that her chest hurt.

And she let the tears come.

She had no idea how long she cried, or why she stopped. Why her grief shifted to urgency, why her lips blindly sought his, or why his latched on to hers. But the sun was streaming into the room, bright and clean. His bed-rumpled body pumped pheromones, and his tongue delved into the dark corners of her mouth like she was a decadent dessert and he was licking the bowl.

He felt so solid, so warm and alive.

His taste
. Dark, damp, elemental as the sea. She shifted on top of him, prompting a groan from them both. She separated their lips momentarily and dragged the T-shirt Sasha had bundled her into over her head, throwing it… somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was off. She brought her torso back down to his, stroking her breasts lightly against his chest hair.

The sight of his bare chest was no mystery to her. Their families had spent a lot of time together over the years, particularly at the Sebastiani lake cabin, where everyone lived in swimsuits in the summer. In the fall, the appearance of a football would result in a game of Shirts and Skins, where she could covertly ogle Sasha’s unattainable older brother. But to touch him? To run her hands over him, slowly, and in broad daylight? Luxury. The one time they’d slept together, she’d had her hands all over his body, to be sure—but not for long, and because the room had been so dark, she hadn’t seen much.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position and swiped her hair out of her face, his abs lurching momentarily as her weight shifted over his crotch. The daylight streaming into the room lit up his masculine terrain. His musculature seemed hewn of granite, a mountain range for her to explore. She dragged her hands over his shoulders, the slabs of his pecs, his cobbled abs.
No wonder no one else had ever measured up.
This was the body of a man in his prime, an incubus of immense power. Top of the food chain.

And she’d had him—once—before he’d simply walked away.

She wanted to have him again. Now. From her position atop the ridge at his crotch, he certainly seemed up for it. His body was, anyway. Who knew about his mind?

As he watched, waited, she threaded her fingers into the hair that draped across her girly lilac pillowcase, all tawny and wild, and lowered her head to his. He nibbled at the vulnerable curve where her neck met her shoulder, his devastating tongue tracing the tendons in her neck, up to where they connected into a bundle of sensitive nerves behind her ear. He painted her with damp lips, his hot breath puffing gently against the shell of her ear.

Not enough.

He finally cupped her breasts in his big hands, worried their tips with his rough fingers. Pushing her mound against whatever piece of his body she could connect with, she dragged one of his hands down her body, until it rested between her legs. His fingers threaded through her soft pubic hair, streaked over her inner lips, separating her petals. The slight tug and pull of her delicate skin between his diabolical fingers, the way he teased her opening but didn’t quite breach it, was absolutely maddening. He touched her everywhere except where she ached to be touched.

“Lukas.”

At her shaky plea, he finally moved—lifting her and setting her down right over his mouth.

She shattered at the first touch of his tongue. He inhaled madly, filling his lungs with her energy, feeding from her while he incinerated her with pleasure. Scarlett didn’t know how much time had passed when he finally shifted her away from his glistening mouth so she sat poised on top of his upper chest, her legs were spread wide, her quivering flesh open to his gaze. She couldn’t bring herself to care—especially when she caught him licking her wetness from his lips like a cat at a bowl of cream.

His breath was slowing, returning to normal.

Can’t have that.

His eyes flew open as she dragged her wet mound down his torso, marking him with her essence. Slipping off of his body, she traced each lump and bump of his muscled abdomen with her tongue. The flushed head of his penis poked up from under the gaping waistband of his jeans. As she gave it a tiny lick, his midnight flavor burst through her head, a dark, wicked memory.

Lukas groaned.

She finished unzipping his pants slowly, tooth by tooth, dragging her mouth down each inch of him as it was revealed, and finally he was exposed to her view. To her touch, her taste.

“Oh,” she breathed. He was beautiful. She’d felt him inside her once before, but their joining had been fast and frantic—and she’d been so inexperienced that she hadn’t properly appreciated the bounty before her.

Pleasure buzzed in her head. How in the world had she survived without this? Without him? His skin was so soft, silk over steel. Cradling his heavy weight in both hands, she felt him tense and hold his breath as she traced the underside of his cock with her tongue. When she reached the plum-like head, his hips shifted minutely—but toward her mouth, not away from it.

Got ya.

She lapped at him, over and over again, for endless minutes, learning his textures and tastes with long strokes of her hands and tongue, noting which touches made him writhe, and which made him relax. When she added the slightest purring vibration from her vocal cords, his hips jerked, pheromones blooming ever more dark and damp.

Lifting her head away from the drugging scent, she shook it to clear away the woozy buzzing. The movement swept her hair over his violently engorged cock. He moaned and grabbed her head.

Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Lukas glared at the ceiling in exasperation before reaching for the mini-comp pulsing and chattering on her bedside table. “It’s Gideon,” he said softly.

Gideon Lupinsky.
Annika.

It all came crashing back.

She shrank away from his hand and stumbled off the bed. His cock was wet from her mouth.

“Scarlett?”

Whirling away, she ran to her bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind her.

Finally.

After days of unnatural silence, of a poise so flash-frozen that it seemed she would shatter if anyone so much as touched her, Scarlett was finally crying again.

Annika’s funeral service at Fontaine House, the family’s ancestral home located on the rugged cliffs of northwestern Ireland near Donegal Bay, was finally drawing to a close, and when Lukas rose from his front row seat, he felt like he’d popped up his head while under sniper fire. All eyes on them, he nudged Scarlett up out of her chair, escorting her to where his father and Claudette stood in the aisle waiting for them.

He knew speculation was running rampant: Was he at her side as a family friend? A lover? Her bodyguard?

All three theories contained at least a grain of truth.

Seated in the row behind him, Rafe, Sasha, and Antonia would host the after-funeral reception until he, his father, Scarlett, and Claudette returned from performing the ceremony’s final steps: casting Annika’s ashes into the ocean. In the front row on the other side of the aisle, Wyland discreetly supported Valerian, visibly sagging under the weight of his resplendent ceremonial robes. Underworld Council members and their families filled the next rows of reserved seats. Behind them sat Scarlett’s band mates and their families, except for Stephen, who remained hospitalized back in Minneapolis. After that, rows and rows of friends, both Annika’s and Scarlett’s, filled the ballroom. Most of them had also attended Scarlett’s homecoming show, which had simplified the funeral’s security arrangements somewhat; most of their background checks had already been performed.

Lukas refused to think about the long hours he and Jack had spent on pre-funeral logistics. While he couldn’t begrudge Annika the service, the arrangements had taken even more time away from the hunt for her killer, who was still at large. As he escorted Scarlett, he felt every accusing eye.

When the small group reached the back of Fontaine House’s ballroom, the massive terrace doors were thrown open to the elements. The Atlantic Ocean crashed and pounded into the nearby cliffs, and yes, the sky was the color of clay. In choosing Sting’s “The Wild Wild Sea” as the final song to be played at her funeral, it seemed as if Annika had somehow choreographed the weather to the lyrics.

Annika had planned her funeral in as much exacting detail as many young women planned their weddings, and listening to Wyland read her will at the Underworld Council meeting called within twenty-four hours of her death had been brutal. Though Annika had taken a maddening number of liberties with the document’s required contents, her funeral preferences had been documented to the last explicit detail, requiring Claudette and Scarlett to make very few decisions—certainly her intention. She’d designated the location of the service, the decorating scheme, the music to be played at both the ceremony and the reception… layers and layers of details, right down to the brand of tequila she wanted poured into shot glasses for the final toast.

Who could have predicted that the Council’s newest and youngest member would be the first one to die? Lukas swallowed around the lump in his throat. With his lack of attention, he’d not only cost Scarlett her sister, but probably her career. Now that Annika was dead, Scarlett was the new Siren Second—a job she had no interest in performing.

Footsteps tapped against wood, a dozen tiny hammers, as the siren choir and the kind-faced, white-robed woman who’d performed Annika’s service with Valerian filed past them and started walking down the dozens of twisting, weathered stairs leading from Fontaine House’s second floor ballroom terrace to ground level. Lukas grabbed Scarlett’s arm as she tottered toward the steps in a pair of fuchsia high-heeled boots which were completely unsuited for the weather or the rough terrain.

“You’re going to break your neck,” he muttered softly.

Her only response was a small pulse of pain-laced annoyance—not much, but it was more emotion than she’d directed toward him in a week. She allowed him to support her as she walked down the slippery steps, and didn’t pull away as they made their way across the damp wildflower lawn to the winding dirt path, worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, which led from Fontaine House to the oceanside cliffs where the last part of the ceremony would be performed.

The back of Lukas’s neck itched. Seconds later, when they reached the cliffs, he saw light glinting off long-range camera lenses nestled in the rocks just beyond the Fontaine estate’s property line.
Fucking paparazzi.
Did Scarlett even notice them? Or was she so used to being watched that they simply weren’t on her radar? Lukas took Scarlett’s chilly hand and shifted them so their backs were to the photographers. They might be on the legal side of the property line, but damned if he’d make their job any easier.

And where were Scarlett’s gloves? Christ, it wasn’t fifty degrees out, and the blowing wind, saturated with moisture, cut to the bone. He didn’t remove his hand, hoping some of his body heat would transfer to her—and because, he admitted to himself, he wanted to hold it. To feel some sort of connection, because if the time they’d spent together in Scarlett’s bedroom had burned into her psyche the way it had into his, it certainly wasn’t showing. Nope, since Annika’s death, Scarlett had shut down, had gone through the motions like an automaton, even as she’d signed the document formalizing her as her sister’s successor.

If he’d been concerned about her health at their first meeting back from tour, he was even more concerned now. To his discerning eye, she looked even thinner, if that was possible, and she moved slowly, like a sleepwalking wraith. According to Sasha, Scarlett had spent the days between the Council meeting where Annika’s will had been read and the flight to Ireland closeted in her bedroom, uninterested in food, in the cards and flowers that streamed to the penthouse, or even in her beloved Crackhouse Blend. Sasha bullied her into eating a few bites here and there, but she accepted comfort only from that feral black cat, who hissed and bared his fangs at anyone who made the mistake of knocking on her bedroom door.

Her silence had continued during the excruciating transatlantic flight that brought them to Ireland, her energy ebbing at such a low level that she barely registered.

A burst of wind buffeted the small group as they assembled on the edge of the rugged cliff. Lukas instinctively leaned in to shelter Scarlett with his larger body. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed his father doing the same thing for Claudette as she stood in her family’s ancestral worship area like a poised ivory statue, her face locked in a rictus of control. In this thin, milky light, her hair looked more gray than red, and her white mourning trench coat whipped around her legs. She cradled a fuchsia suede bag about the size and weight of a sack of sugar in both arms.

Her daughter’s ashes.

Compared to her mother, Scarlett blazed with defiant color. She’d made no attempt to harness her hair, and it billowed behind her like a red sheet on a clothesline. Her calf-length wool coat was bright turquoise, her pink boots glowed, and her face was blotchy with tears.

Grief and sadness poured out of her like blood from a wound. Lukas clenched his jaw and held on to her hand as the siren choir gathered around them in a loose semicircle.

“Let us sing our sister home,” the Celebrant intoned. She turned her substantial body to the pounding sea and extended her arms to the sky and waves, singing the first haunting notes.

He thought he was prepared. He really did. But when the other women joined in…
Jesus
. Dissonant harmonies shrilled up and down his backbone, and he grasped Scarlett’s waist more tightly—whether to support her or to be supported, he didn’t really know. Scarlett was as much moaning as singing, her incomparable voice rising above the others as she extended her arms to the sea and tipped her head up to the sky. The collective mourning energy swirled above them like a whirlwind as the sirens sang the Fontaine family lineage, imploring the wind and the waves to accompany the brave siren Annika to her final resting place. Annika, daughter of Claudette, daughter of Signe, daughter of Siobhan, daughter of Siann, of Sorcha, of Catraoine. Of Sinead, Maire, Ceile, and Fiona. On and on, back through the generations, the sirens recited the names the unbroken Fontaine matrilineal line back to Canola, Goddess of the Harp.

It was up to Scarlett to ensure continuity of the Fontaine line.

On and on the singing went, the sirens acknowledging sisters lost to history, sisters who’d protected their families and ensured their species’ survival by luring marauders’ ships into the cliffs with no weapon but their voices. Lukas surreptitiously popped an antacid and tried to focus on the waves pounding against the cliffs, the swooping gulls—the fall sumac blazing between the rocks, where the paparazzi crouched like fucking jackals. Something, anything, to distract himself from the taste of Scarlett’s saltwater mourning mixing with her mandarin essence.

Or how his seed boiled at the thought of fathering Scarlett’s child.

Finally, the plaintive song came to a close, and the Celebrant stepped back, gesturing to the churning water.

“I… can’t do this,” Scarlett whispered brokenly, the first words she’d spoken to him in nearly a week.

Lukas bracketed her chilly face in his warm hands, trying to pour whatever strength he could into her. “You can.”

She clutched his wrists with her hands for a long moment, her eyes locked on to his. Finally, she stepped away from the shelter of his body and joined her mother at the edge of the cliff. And as the other sirens chanted, “All that was… all that is… all that shall be,” they reached into the bag with their bare hands, casting Annika’s ashes to the wild, wild sea.

***

Stephen’s head throbbed. The scent of alcohol wipes, dinner trays, and overcooked coffee stung his nose as he slowly walked past the patients’ solarium and the empty nurses’ desk on his way back to his hospital room. Televisions murmured out of almost every room—talk about a captive audience—and far too many were tuned to a so-called journalist with Miss America hair who breathlessly reported the Latest! Breaking! News! on the tragedies which had befallen singer Scarlett Fontaine: the death of her sister, and the senseless attack on her drummer, who “at this moment was lying near death” in an unspecified hospital. “We mourn with you, Scarlett,” the anchorwoman emoted like the lead in a bad community theatre production. When she queued up footage of a small group standing on the cliffs—clearly filmed from a helicopter buzzing the site—to the tune of “Wind Beneath My Wings”—Stephen just about puked.

Yeah, he felt like shit, but at no point had he been “lying near death.” And there was absolutely no news, breaking or otherwise. If there was one thing he’d learned in the week he’d been hospitalized, it was that when Lukas Sebastiani established a communications blackout, he created a black fucking hole.

He was being well-protected, perhaps too much so. His fan mail was screened, all deliveries to the hospital were searched, and Garrett had told him that packages were piling up at the office. He didn’t have computer access, and every visitor on his approved visitor list was scanned head to toe by bodyguards posted at his door.

Keep walking.
He did laps around the hospital several times a day, skulking around the ER, the NICU, the morgue, tailgating enough secondhand energy to keep the beast from snapping its teeth. Between the blast of mojo that Annika had hit him with as she died, and the pain and death energy that saturated the hospital itself, his tank was still half-full.

His sleep cycle was all screwed up. Anyone who thought people could actually get some rest in a hospital was nuts, and needless to say, after a year on the road, the hospital routine didn’t exactly coincide with his body clock. He really should have asked for a bed on the vamp floor. But he hadn’t, so it was blood pressure and temperature checks at six in the morning and breakfast an hour later, whether he was hungry or not. Shower, shave, and then up and at ’em with both physical and occupational therapy, which he’d tried to charm his way out of with absolutely no luck. Surprisingly, he enjoyed the time he spent making woven plastic key chains with three chattering kids. The children didn’t know who he was, and they didn’t ask questions he didn’t want to answer. Instead, they seemed fascinated by his hair.

Maybe Garrett could raffle the key chains off for charity, or give them to fans.

He weaved on his feet. “Whoa,” he muttered, slapping a hand against a doorjamb for support. “Sorry, ma’am,” he called to the elderly woman lying in her hospital bed.

She lifted her nut-brown head up from her creased pillow, peering at him with rheumy eyes behind thick, thick glasses. Her TV was tuned to the same channel as everyone else, except now the vapid journalist yammered about the supposed Brad-Angie-Jen love triangle.

“You look like that drummer,” she said, fingers plucking at her colorful quilt.

“Nah. Do I look like I’m lying near death?” Phlegmy coughs rattled her chest as she laughed. “Are you okay?” he asked, stepping into her room to push the nurse call button.
Damn your flippant tongue.
She was the one lying near death. It wouldn’t happen this minute, and probably not today, but the process was well under way.

When he reached her bed, her hand latched on to his with unexpected strength. “Don’t bother, son,” she rasped. She accepted the water he handed her from the table by her bedside, sipping from the straw. When she finished, she laid her Brillo-haired head back against the pillow. Her voice was weak, but her dark brown eyes snapped with annoyance. “Thank you. Dying’s a tiresome business, boy—don’t let anyone tell you any different.” She patted an empty space on the quilt. “Sit down before you fall down.”

He sat before he was conscious of doing so. There was more than enough room on the bed. The old woman’s gnarled body was so wasted away that it barely created a bump under the covers, but her wrinkled lips were painted a bright, defiant red. Despite her failing body, a formidable brain clicked behind her eyes. Somehow he felt stripped naked before her, but instead of wanting to leave, he leaned closer.