Read Not Until Moonrise for Free Online

years ago, but she recalled the moment perfectly. Jackson’s eighteenth birthday had been a week away. She would still be seventeen for three months. His rusted Chevy station wagon had a bad muffler that sputtered and growled as they left Porter in their rear view mirror. Jackson drove with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He turned to her as they passed the last gas station and said, Hey, Katie, marry me sometime? And she had panicked, hadn’t known what to say, so she’d tried to smile and replied, Sure, sometime. Not yet though.
       He’d asked again on her twentieth birthday, on his knees with a ring, and again when she was twenty-five, only a week before he disappeared. Her answer was always the same: Not yet.
       “Why wouldn’t you?” Jackson asked, not a boy anymore, not even really a man.
       “I guess…” She hesitated. “I was afraid.”
       “Of me?”
       “Of disappointing you. You loved me more than I loved you.”
       “Katie, if that was true, I’d be dead by now.”
       When she looked up, he was smiling again, that peculiar half-twisted Jackson smile that always made her melt. She melted now. The rest—it would matter later, she knew, but for this one moment, she didn’t care.
       She went to him, climbed onto his lap and straddled him, set her nails into his shoulders and dug in hard. “What are you waiting for?” She glared down at him. “Kiss me again already. And for god’s sake, touch me.”
       The smile twisted wider. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”
       Humor laced Jackson’s voice, but not his touch as his arms came around her, as he pulled her down to him. She had just an instant to see that his eyes had gone that eerie silver again, and then he caught her mouth, and he was kissing her hard and hungry. His hands ran down her sides, over her hips. When they slipped under her shirt, Kate felt the sharpness of lengthening nails, and shivered.
       “Trust me,” he murmured, mouth moving to the corner of her jaw, to kiss the skin over her pulse. Then down the side of her throat, kiss deepening as it roughened, until she felt his tongue dip into the hollow between her collarbones. Her heart beat wildly beneath his mouth. His teeth were no longer blunt. She could feel the points of a dozen sharpening fangs, and that only made her heart beat faster. Two years since she’d had a man’s hands on her, and no matter how she’d tried to move on, let the past die, this was the only touch she had ever ached for.
       When she rocked her hips down against him, Jackson’s growled response sent a thrill through her. She knew what she was doing was foolish, and beyond foolish, it was dangerous. But in the deepest part of her, she still trusted Jackson and always would. She thought of the men in the woods who had died for her, and was glad they had died.
       Jackson worked a hand into her hair and pulled out the band holding it back. Loosed, her hair fell in thick waves over her shoulders, the heaviness of it a luxury that felt almost wicked.
       “Kate…” He bit her shoulder hard enough to hurt, and then kissed the bruised skin. “Katie…”
       She couldn’t answer him. The air in the loft had gone thick and hot, shortening her breath. She yanked at his shirt ineffectively until he pulled it off himself, and then she laid fevered kisses down his chest, felt the beat of his heart under her lips. His flesh was furnace-hot; her lips burned from touching him, but she wouldn’t have stopped for anything. She rubbed her body fiercely against him, desperate for his friction and heat. When he groaned, the vibrations from his chest went straight through her, and she ground her hips to ease the building ach within her.
       With something dangerously near a snarl, Jackson flipped them. Kate gasped as she found herself flat on her back, straw prickling her arms, staring up at Jackson. He loomed over her with a silvered gaze, the angles of his face