Silken Rapture: Princes of the Underground, Book 2 by Beth Kery Page A

bookcase-lined walls and deep leather couches and chairs. Several maps lined the walls. Some appeared to be detailed maps of London, while others showed overlapping straight, thick lines intersecting squiggly, broken ones. The fire in the hearth had dwindled to glowing embers and was the only source of light besides a dim lamp on a desk. She moved into the room, her footsteps muted by a dense carpet, highly aware of her heartbeat throbbing in her ears contrasting with the thick silence.
    “Lord Delraven?” she called in a threadbare whisper. Her attempt was half-hearted. She could perfectly sense he wasn’t in the room.
    Just as she knew precisely where he was . From where had this unusual prescience in regard to Delraven come? Was this a new ability she’d acquired when she’d been rendered unconscious by her kidnapper? Margaret had mentioned Delraven touching her. She’d said Delraven had held her. Had his essence somehow transferred to her in some inexplicable fashion?
    Her hand shook slightly when she extended it toward the handle on an adjoining door. The door swung open with a low-pitched whine.
    He lay on the bed, naked save for a leather harness of sorts that looped around his hips and thighs. It left his genitals fully exposed.
    For a full ten seconds, both of them remained unmoving.
    He made a sound—a small noise like a choking, hoarse gasp. She glanced rapidly from his erect cock to his face. His unusual dark green eyes seemed to smolder more than the burning embers in the study fire. When she saw the sweat that glazed his long, muscled body and the strange, desperate expression on his bold features, she raced into the room. It suddenly struck her that every fiber of his flesh was straining to move, but couldn’t.
    “You’re ill,” she said, her gaze flickering around the room. Do creatures such as he become ill? The question came automatically into her brain, but she quickly dismissed it in the face of the obvious. Blaise Sevliss was sick, in pain, or both.
    “Tell me what to do,” she insisted.
    Anxiety grew in her when she saw him strain to speak, but his lips didn’t even part. His eyes flickered over to a credenza next to the door where a pitcher and glasses rested. Isabel hurried over to the table where she poured a tall glass of cool water.
    “Let me hold up your head,” she said quietly when she approached him again and saw that even more sweat had beaded on his brow. He obviously was trying to raise himself and was weakened even by that effort.
    She sat on the corner of the bed, her knee bent close to his shoulder, and lifted his head. He drained the water more rapidly than she would have expected, given his nearly paralyzed state. When he was done, he looked up at her. The message in his eyes was like a complicated, coded language. It bewildered and scared her, but she didn’t move away from him. She glanced down at her gloved hand. His wavy, thick hair gleamed next to the black velvet, more lustrous by far than the inexpensive fabric of the glove.
    She wanted to feel it twining through her fingers. It shocked her, this sudden desire. She’d recoiled at the thought of touching another being for so long now.
    She tried not to recall the vision of his beautifully shaped, erect phallus highlighted by snug straps of leather. How could he be so ill and debilitated when his cock was so hard?
    For a stretched moment, they just stared at one another. She felt strange—torpid and warm, and yet energized and prickly as well, as though the nerves were singing out a plea to be touched. After a moment, she forced herself to inhale. The desperation she’d seen in his rigid face was fading, slowly being replaced by a stony, fierce expression.
    “Are you better now?” she asked as she turned to set the glass on a bedside table. When he didn’t speak, she tried to gather herself. What was it that she was doing here? Why had she come? It was so difficult to think, when her vision was so full of him,