Threshold of Pleasure

Lying there, with her hands above her head, she had never felt more desirable than she did at that moment—not even when she’d been with Charlie—as the dark man’s gaze devoured her from head to toe and back up again.

“Do you give yourself to me?”

Eden didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

His smile was as dark as his bottomless pupils, and he leaned across her and kissed her. First her lips, then her throat, then lower.

“Please,” she sighed, arching toward him. “Please.”

He moved lower until his mouth found her breasts.

“Yes!”

The second his tongue grazed her nipple, Eden jolted with the fiercest arousal she’d ever experienced. Holy hell, if that was what he could do with a mere touch of his tongue, what would it feel like if he touched her between her thighs? Kissed her there? Made love to her?

Eden wanted to find out.

She needed to find out.

With fingers threaded through his dark hair, she pushed him lower. He didn’t need coaxing to leave her breasts as his tongue sampled and tasted all of her—her rib cage, her navel—until finally he hovered between her spread legs, his breath cool and sweet against her thighs.

“Eden?”

“Yes.” She lifted her hips. “Please. Yes.”

One side of his mouth turned up in a smile, one lovely curved fang flashing at her, before her perfect, dark stranger hitched his thumbs beneath the waistband of her panties and tugged.

The silky material slid over her hips and down her legs.

“Open yourself. Give yourself to me.”

Never had Eden been so brazen. Never had she been so uninhibited. She let her thighs fall open and reveled in the hungry expression of the man with the fierce black eyes.

With a long finger, he touched her exposed flesh. “This is how you will forget.” Then he lowered his head and engulfed the most sensitive part of her with his mouth.

It was like being caught between pleasure and pain, ecstasy and torture. Heaven and hell.

Eden’s hips shot skyward. “More,” she screamed. “I need more!”

Then there was another voice in her dream, a deeper one....

“Get away from her!”

Gasping, Eden jolted from her sleep and sat up in bed. What the hell had just happened?

Cold sweat slicked her face and body.

A dream. A fucking dream, that’s all it was. But it had felt so real.

She rubbed her face. Then again, lately all of her dreams had felt real. She shivered in the cool morning air. Her bedroom window was open and the breeze floated in, ruffling her gauzy blue curtains.

Staring at the window, Eden frowned. She couldn’t remember opening it before she’d passed out on the bed. But her mind was so muddled lately that it was possible she had done it.

Rubbing a hand over her sweaty face and into her tangled nest of hair, Eden tried to push the dream out of her mind. It was the same one she’d been having for the past year, except for the dark man. He was an unsettling new addition.

Swinging her feet over the bed, Eden stood on quivering legs and stumbled down the hall to her bathroom. After filling the sink with icy water, she submerged her face until the bite of the cold liquid stung her cheeks and her lungs burst with the need for oxygen. Behind her closed eyes, the comely face of the man in black flashed before her. He was smiling. And blood dripped from his wide, inviting mouth.

Gasping, she flipped her head up. Water ran down her neck and soaked her sweat-stained tank top that she always wore to bed. Shivers racked her body as she grabbed a towel and wiped at her face and throat.

Who was this man? Why was he invading her mind? And why did she find him so alluring? Was she attracted to him because he seemed to be offering her a way out of her consuming guilt?

If only there was a way out.

After drying off, Eden took the robe from the back of the door and wrapped herself in it. Even after seven months she could still smell her ex-lover Charlie’s cologne in the blue terry cloth. She had washed it several times since his departure, but still his scent remained to taunt her.

Just another thing to attest to her past failures.

Eden shuffled down the hall and into her kitchen to make coffee. Strong black coffee. Opening her refrigerator, she took out the white pizza box, opened it up and grabbed the last slice. Taking a bite, she poured a mug of coffee, then took it and her breakfast into her living room. Plunking down on the sofa, she grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV.

There usually wasn’t a hell of a lot on during a Thursday morning, but the background noise was all Eden was looking for. Something, anything, to drown out the incessant thoughts and images bombarding her mind. She only had an hour to kill before she had to head out to work anyway. Flipping through cooking programs, ridiculous talk shows and infomercials was just the mundane sort of distraction she needed.

After she’d folded the last of the pizza into her mouth, Eden flipped to a news station and paused. On screen was a picture of a young woman with black hair and blunt-cut bangs, dark eyes, and a thin, unsmiling mouth. Something about her made Eden shiver. Somehow, she knew that face.

The picture panned back to the newscaster, and he went on about how the woman in the photo, identified as Lilith Grae, had been missing since yesterday afternoon. A phone number flashed on the screen. Eden recognized it as the number for the missing persons’ division.

You tried before...

The woman’s voice echoed in her ears. Eden had no reason to believe that this was the same person, except for the churning and gurgling in her gut telling her it most definitely was.

Eden reached for the cordless phone on her coffee table and dialed a number.

A man answered on the third ring. “Moser.”

The timbre of his voice made her shiver even after seven months apart. Clearing her throat she said, “Hey, Charlie.”

There was silence for a moment, and Eden thought for a second that he might hang up on her. “What’s up, Eden?”

“What do you know about the missing Grae woman?”

“Not much. Twenty-one years old, troubled home life, last seen two days ago, no note, no phone call, no nothing.” He paused, and Eden imagined that he was popping a piece of gum into his mouth. He’d quit smoking years ago and replaced the habit with gum-chewing. “The question is, what do you know about the Grae woman?”

“I don’t know. Nothing probably.”

“Spill it, Swain. You wouldn’t be phoning me otherwise.”

Eden pinched the bridge of her nose. Her headache was getting worse, likely Charlie-induced; he possessed an innate ability to give her one. “I think I talked to her last night on the help line.”

“Are you shitting me?”