Hunger Moon Rising Read online

  There was a hurt look in his deep brown eyes. “I understand. Now that you know what I am you don't want anything to do with me. I don't blame you.”

  “No, Ben—that's not it at all. I just…it's just that…” I gestured to myself. “I mean, look at me, I'm bloody all over. I just, well, I…I need to get a shower. Is there a bathroom in here?”

  He sighed and let me go. “Right through that doorway, I think.” He gestured to a royal blue door that was across from the bed.

  I slid off his lap hastily and stood up quickly—too quickly. Suddenly the room was spinning around me, and I started to fall. Ben caught me and pulled me back down on his lap. I was too weak to protest, even when he brushed a chaste kiss across my bruised cheek.

  “Dani, I think you'd better just relax for a while,” he said. “You've lost a lot more blood than you think, and you're weak right now.”

  “I'm fine,” I said, struggling to raise my head from his shoulder. The world tilted sideways again, and I had to let it fall back. I hit my bruised cheek against the rock-hard muscle of his arm and flinched. “Ouch!”

  “You're not fine. You're hurt.” Ben tilted my chin so that he could see the hurt cheek and my cut bottom lip as well. He bent and placed another gentle kiss on my cheek. This time when his lips met my skin, there was a rush of tingling pleasure, the same sensation I'd gotten when he'd licked and kissed the wound on my arm earlier.

  I pulled back from him. “What are you doing?”

  “Healing you,” he murmured. “Hold still.” His lips continued their gentle, caressing path across my bruised cheek, and the tingling pleasure began to grow again. By the time he finished my cheek and started to kiss my cut lip, there didn't seem to be any way to stop him. In fact, I wasn't even sure that I wanted to stop him, even though I knew I should.

  “Ben,” I whispered breathlessly against his lips as he kissed me. “Ben, I don't think…”

  “Then don't think,” he whispered. “Just feel.” He took my mouth again in a kiss so gentle and intense I couldn't breathe. I felt like a fire was blooming just under my skin as his mouth fed on mine, licking, kissing, sucking, owning me again just as he had the night before at the bar. His kiss was infinitely tender this time, but no less possessive for all of that. He wanted me, and not in a best friends kind of way—I could tell. I could feel it in his touch, in the way he held me, in the hard bulge in his jeans that was pressing uncomfortably against me as I sat on his lap.

  He wasn't the only one being affected by the warm, tingling healing pleasure either. I could feel the need coursing through my own veins like blood, pulsing all the way through me, making me warm, making me want him. My nipples were like hard little pebbles at the tips of my breasts and my sex felt hot and wet and swollen with need between my thighs. God—how could he do so much to me with just a kiss? It felt so good and yet, it felt dangerous too. Wrong.

  “Ben,” I gasped, tearing my mouth away from his with a convulsive effort. “We can't…we shouldn't be doing this.”

  “Why not?” His eyes were drowning deep as he cupped my newly healed cheek in his palm. I still didn't understand how he could heal me with just a kiss, but there was a lot I didn't understand—like the dangerous, frightening new feelings that were blooming in my chest for a man who was supposed to be my best friend and nothing more.

  “I…I…” I shook my head, unable to say anything. My brain felt numb even while the rest of my body was humming with the warm sensations that had been pulsing through me as we kissed.

  “Dani,” Ben cupped my cheek again. “There's so much I want to say to you. So much I want you to know. But right now you're hurt, and I want to help you. Please, just let me heal you. All right?”

  I don't know what made me do it, but I nodded. “All…all right,” I whispered.

  Ben laid me gently on the bed so that my calves were hanging over the side and knelt on the floor in front of me.

  “Wait!” I propped myself up on one elbow, ignoring the spinning sensation my sudden move caused. “What are you doing?”

  “Dani, look where he cut you.” There was sorrow in his voice as well as anger as he traced the line from the inside of my knee leading to my inner thigh. I knew he was blaming himself again for letting it happen, for not getting to me sooner. “I have to be able to reach you in order to heal you,” he said. He placed a warm, tingling kiss on the inside of my knee, where the long cut started. “All right?”

  “I…it's just that…” I bit my lip. “They didn't give me any underwear to wear with this stupid thing.” I gestured at the teddy. “And…and the cuts go up, um, pretty high on my thigh.”

  “Are you afraid I'm going to hurt you?” Ben asked softly, and the pain was back in his eyes. The look that said he hated the part of himself that had frightened me, hated it but couldn't get rid of it.

  “No, no,” I assured him hastily. “It's just, well, I'm, um, embarrassed, that's all.”

  He looked relieved. “Is that all? Dani, you never have to be embarrassed with me. Don't you know that? You're beautiful.” He stroked a warm hand over the top of my thigh, making me shiver. “Every part of you is beautiful to me. Now will you just relax and let me heal you?”

  I don't know if it was the pleasure I felt from his touch or the yearning I heard in his voice, but I just nodded, and lay back down. I needed this—needed Ben to heal me, and I sensed that he needed it just as much, maybe even more.

  He started at the inside of my knee and worked inward, lapping gently at my wounded flesh just as he had when he healed my arm. But this time the shivers of sensation and tingles of pleasure seemed to shoot straight through me to the core of my being. His mouth was so warm—hot almost—and I could feel the scratch of his beard shadow against the tender skin of my inner thighs as he worked his way up. It felt so good I nearly moaned, but I stopped myself just in time. God—what was wrong with me? He was healing me, not…anything else. Right?

  But telling myself there was nothing sexual about the situation didn't help. My body reacted helplessly to his hot mouth on my skin. Once more I felt the wet heat growing between my thighs, clouding my mind and making me clench my hands into fists at my sides. I shouldn't be reacting like this, I told myself. After the things Mitch had done to me, I had pretty much decided I could forget this part of myself forever. That sexual desire was something that happened to other women but not to me. Not anymore. But just as they had the night before, Ben's touch, his gentle kisses against my trembling skin, seemed to wake something in me that had been dormant for a long time, something I had supposed was dead but was maybe only sleeping.

  Ben was moving closer and closer to my unprotected sex, spreading my thighs to get to the place where the cut Savage had made with his knife ended. I was terribly afraid that he was going to notice how wet I was getting just from having him touch me and taste me this way. He only had my left thigh mostly done, and I could feel my arousal building almost to a breaking point. What would I say if I started to come? How could I hide what his touch was doing to me?

  He was lapping at the spot where my thigh joined my body now, his breath hot against my naked flesh. It felt so good I gasped aloud, unable to help myself. My hands, which had been clenched by my sides, were suddenly buried in his thick, black hair. I needed more—so much more, but I didn't know how to tell him what it was I needed, or even if he would be willing to give it to me.

  Ben seemed to understand, though, even though I couldn't say the words.

  “Dani?” he said looking up at me. “I want to do more than heal you. I want to taste you…” I felt him press a light kiss to the damp curls that decorated the top of my slit. “Here,” he said. His voice was deep, almost a growl, and I could feel the need pulsing through him the same way it was pulsing through me. The desire was like an electrical current between us, fed by the pleasure I felt at his touch and his pleasure in touching me.

  “Ben,” I gasped. “I don't…we shouldn't…”

  “I want to k