by Tessa Bailey
Up ahead, nestled in a dense copse of trees, there was a small structure made of stone, a round, gold dome on top. The door was open, light spilling out from within.
“When did you plan all this?”
His chuckle warmed her further. “I might have had an ulterior motive in compelling you to sleep.”
A smile spread across her mouth. “Sneaky. I like it.”
There was a priest standing at the altar when they walked inside, a bible tucked between his crossed arms and an ample belly. Apart from a slight inclination of his head, the priest didn’t acknowledge them, but she didn’t care, because the interior of the small, gold-gilded chapel was busy stealing her breath. It glowed like a jewel, candles bringing the gold plated walls to life. There were no flowers, save a single bouquet of white roses and Elias handed it to her with so much emotion in his eyes, she was surprised the blooms didn’t multiply and fill the entire magical chapel.
She let the blanket around her shoulders slough to the ground and she pressed the bouquet to her breasts, following Elias to the altar. Briefly, she glanced up to see the moon glowing in an overhead window, a scattering of stars twinkling at its feet. “There are no better witnesses than these symbols of nighttime…” she whispered. “Temnota moya.”
“Please.” Elias stepped closer, eyes glittering, arrested on her face. He handed two gold bands to the priest who placed them in the center of his bible. “Please make this woman my wife.”
The ceremony was traditionally Russian, so Roksana had to translate in quiet murmurs every time the priest paused, but her double acknowledgement of every single word only added to the gravity of what was taking place. She was marrying a vampire. But he was so much more and always had been. Elias was the man she’d once loved, the man she’d fallen for a second time against all odds, a protector, warrior, confidant, lover. The one her soul searched for every moment of the day and night, incomplete until they were close.
And she was all those things to him, as well.
The truth of that radiated from his tall body, the heart she’d convinced to beat again.
It was in the way he kissed her when the priest declared them man and wife, blissfully unaware he’d just united a vampire and a slayer in a union that would shake the underworld.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
His slayer was growing weary of being carried everywhere, but she indulged him one last time, allowing him to ferry her over the threshold of their one-room cabin. They’d only driven a mile from the church to the place he’d rented over the phone during their flight, but it might as well have taken a goddamn month. He needed his mate more with every step he took, every rap of his pulse. She seemed to know it, too, turning her knowing smile into his chest, the bouquet of white roses dangling from her hand.
Everything in the cabin had been prepared as specified. A fire sputtered and crackled in the hearth, the windows were covered with black out curtains and he scented food for Roksana in the mini-fridge. There was champagne, too, chilling in a silver bucket, even if drinking it would only have an effect on one of them.
This woman is my wife.
My mate and my wife.
Images of her swarmed his mind. Roksana fierce and vulnerable in the Brooklyn alley, a stake clutched in her hand, Roksana dancing with abandon on the Vegas strip, running toward him in the bar, sparring with him in the vampire hold.
Becoming a vampire wasn’t the only thing that made him immortal. His union with Roksana was even more substantial than some silencing of organs. Or ceasing to age. His love for her was eternal, enduring, a ripple across time that would continue uninterrupted, no matter what happened.
“You’re kind of an old-fashioned romantic, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. We’re finding that out at the same time,” he muttered, walking them into the cabin and setting Roksana on her feet in front of the fire.
“I already knew.” Eyes locked on his, her fingers slowly undid the buttons of his coat, pushing it off his shoulders. “But you don’t fit any mold exactly. You’d bring a girl to a fancy bar and not bat an eyelash when she orders a chocolate martini.”
A hoarse sound left him, but he disguised it with a cough. Fuck, he would do anything to tell Roksana he remembered their first night together. That he not only remembered it, but he replayed it endlessly, cherished it, counted it as the start of the most important chapter in his life: After Roksana. But with a reckoning bearing down on them faster than a speeding bullet, he couldn’t risk an implosion between them. More importantly, he couldn’t risk her life. Having an untruth between them was agonizing, but for now, leaving it there kept her protected.
Worried he was betraying too much on his face, Elias moved around Roksana and stopped in front of a small table for two, fishing the champagne bottle out of the ice. “It might not be chocolate, but it’ll do the trick. You want a glass?”
Her hands coasted up his back and he dropped the bottle back into the bucket with a loud rattle. “I only want my wedding night,” she said, kissing his shoulder through his shirt. “I don’t want to think about tomorrow. Don’t let me.”
Lust stiffened his cock, beginning a pulsating pressure he associated with his wife, but he didn’t immediately turn and take her in his arms. Back at the church, when she’d said the words that sealed them as husband and wife, something primal and old as time had been unearthed. It howled inside of him to be released, a wildness wanting to complete the ritual of ownership. Possession. To have Roksana underneath him and make her understand he’d be her first, last, forever. To impress that fact on her while she screamed.
But he wasn’t all beast. He’d been teeming with love for Roksana since before their matehood was even known. And she was a human girl who deserved better than a vampire giving in to the call to claim and own and fuck.
“Let me get myself under control,” he rasped, gripping the edge of the table and trying not to snap it. “This isn’t going to be some down and dirty hookup in a dressing room.”
“Don’t blaspheme the dressing room hookup,” she murmured in mock outrage, her hands busy untucking his shirt from his pants. “It was life changing. I can speak Spanish now and I couldn’t before.”
A laugh caught Elias off-guard, but it faded as quickly as it started. “I don’t want to be…mean with you. Not every time. Especially not this time.”
“I think we have differing definitions of mean, vampire—”
“Husband.”
Still facing away from Roksana, he heard her breath catch. “Husband.”
The ripple of his growl vibrated the air around them.
Several yards away, a picture hung on the wall and in the glass’s reflection, he watched Roksana step back and peel the black, leather dress down her body, reappearing when she’d worked it free of her feet and cast it aside. With his mate, his wife standing so close in nothing but panties, Elias obeyed his desperation and turned, devouring the sight of her excited nipples, the slopes of her sides, the lithe strength of her thighs.
Hunger bashed into his self-control like a battering ram, visions of her hair wrapped around his fist, their hips slapping together, trying to usurp his resolve—but he wouldn’t let it. Instead, he stripped off his shirt slowly, focusing on the way the firelight picked out white strands of her hair, made her skin look twice as soft, if such a thing were possible.
“Wife,” he managed around the stick in his throat. “My incredible…hot, little wife.”
“You rang?” Roksana said breathlessly, her tits heaving slowly.
Elias dropped his shirt on the floor and started undoing the fly of his pants. “I bet you’re going to taste even sweeter with a ring on your finger.”
She backed toward the fireplace, the buds of her nipples darkening a shade and Christ, he almost spilled his seed, right then and there. “Good question. H-how are you going to find out?”
He accelerated toward his slayer, fast enough to blow her hair back and make her gasp, but he stopped just short
of touching her. Instead of pinning her to the fire-warmed rug and consummating their marriage in an animalistic frenzy, he called on his reserve of restraint and molded his right hand to her hip, pulling her close and settling his lips against her forehead, gently swaying her side to side. “It’s not dancing in the street,” he said, calling back the wish she’d made before they’d left Brooklyn. “I’m not even sure it’s dancing, because I’m terrible at it.” They both laughed and the soft sound seemed to drift from a perfect dream. “Maybe you can teach me.”
There she was. The girl from Vegas looking up at him. Totally unfettered and free and refreshingly wild, lacking in sorrow or familial duty. Somehow he’d revived the happiness that had been drained out of her. No matter what happened from that moment forward, he would hold on to the way her eyes sparkled and her smile came so easy tonight, like it never left. He’d hold on to the fact that he’d done something to make that happen and he’d be at peace.
Roksana locked her wrists behind his neck, her expression bursting with lightness. Enjoyment. Of this. Of them. “Don’t sound so worried, husband. You are going to love the way I dance.”
“Am I?”
“Da.” Her head fell forward on a laugh. “I was going to tease you for dancing like we’re in church, but it’s kind of nice, you know. We are leaving room for Jesus.”
“Uh-uh.” He tickled her ribs. “Show me your way.”
“Are you sure?” She went up on her toes and whispered in his ear. “It’s very risky. Our private parts might touch.”
He trailed his open mouth along her bare shoulder. “I’ll chance it.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she hummed, twining her fingers in the hair at his nape, tiptoeing forward to lock her curves to his front. They both looked down as her tits plumped against his pecs, their moans joining together like an erotic refrain, Elias’s hands finding her ass, yanking her up and forward to secure them tightly together. “Move your body with mine,” she whispered, her eyelids fluttering. “Slow and easy.”
Elias rolled his hips, using his grip on her ass to work their lower bodies together and was rewarded by Roksana’s eyes going blank, her head falling back. He did it again, again, again, never speeding up or slowing down, his erection protruding from the V of his unzipped fly to grind against the mound between her thighs. “It’s a damn good thing we kept this wedding reception private.”
He felt her carefree giggle in every corner of his body, his heart slamming into his jugular when she lifted her head, letting him see her flushed, lust-dazed expression. “We would have had a party to remember, though. The first vampire-slayer wedding in history.” She gave a happy sigh. “Think of the fights.”
He shivered. “I’m thinking of Tucker’s best man speech.”
With a laugh bubbling from her lips, she took hold of his collar and pulled herself higher against his body, both of them groaning when she wrapped her legs around his hips, his fingers biting into the flesh of her backside, riding her up and down. “If we do a honeymoon, I guess a beach is out of the question.”
Elias raked his teeth down the side of her neck, the energy between them changing, growing more desperate as she started to pump her hips, creating the kind of friction on his cock that he wouldn’t be able to withstand for long. Not without coming. “Does that bother you? Not being able to be with me in the sun?”
“Are we not in the sun?” His wife breathed against his lips. “I didn’t notice.”
He dropped to his knees and pitched forward slowly, laying his slayer down on the rug, his heart sprinting a thousand miles an hour. “My God, you are beautiful.” His mouth suctioned to hers, pulling deeply, giving her a thorough lick of his tongue. “I can’t believe you willingly bound yourself to me. I can’t believe this is real. Tell me it’s real.”
“It’s real,” Roksana said in a shaky voice, her back arching as Elias began kissing a path down the center of her chest, lapping at each nipple reverently, before traveling lower, past her navel to the wet folds he’d been salivating for since the too-brief moments he’d had his mouth between her legs, last time they were in Moscow.
Laying a kiss at the top of her slit, he breached her with his middle finger, plunging it deeply, gently, drawing her moisture back out and spreading it through the slick valley of her flesh. “Should I pick up where I left off?”
“I won’t mind if you start all over again,” she gasped, clawing the rug on either side of her hips. “D-da. Take it from the top, husband.”
Elias added his ring finger with relish, glorying at the sight of the gold band pushing at the entrance of her sex. He pushed it high and tight, jiggling that coarse spot inside of her. “If we’d gotten this far last time, I’d have known you were a virgin.” He dipped his head, dragging the flat of his tongue over her clit and her inner walls rippled around his fingers. “You still feel like one, don’t you, baby? So sweet and snug.”
“Elias,” she called, voice strangled, hips twisting. “Please, you will drive me crazy.”
“I’d only be returning the favor,” he breathed against her damp heat, working his fingers in and out of her with firm insistence, reveling in the way she parted for him with every thrust of those two digits, so he could memorize her exact shade of rose gold, watch her clit swell and beg for attention. And he gave it to her, curling his tongue around that little bud and making her moan, her hips jolting off the floor. “Fuck,” he groaned when her perfect flavor hit his taste buds, his fangs shooting down, throbbing. “Oh. Fuck.”
“Don’t stop,” she whimpered, her fingers plowing through his hair, twisting and yanking him closer to her pussy in a way that was purely Roksana. Purely his mate. He smiled savagely into his next rough series of licks, then batted her clit with his tongue, side to side to side until she slung her legs over his shoulders, her heels digging into the center of his back, those sexy thighs starting to tremble. “Elias. Elias. Poceluy menya, kosnys’ menya.”
“God, baby. Keeping talking like that. Tell me in two languages that I tongue fuck you right. More.” Jesus Christ. He’d never been more hot in his life, listening to her whine in her native language, her wetness dampening his chin. Alternating between gentle licks and dirty grinds of his tongue on top of her clit, Elias caught her hips in a bruising grip, squeezing, sliding his palms up to her tits and pinching her nipples. At the same time, he buried his tongue inside of her, moaning brokenly at the divine taste, texture, flex of muscle—and she screamed, her back arching off the rug, her sex contracting and releasing around his tongue, the taste of her pleasure satisfying him like nothing else, while starving him for more. For everything. “Need to feed,” he growled, pushing her thighs open wide, the sound of her erratic pulse battering his brain, his senses. “Do you know I worship you when I drink you? Do you know I pray to you like a fucking goddess when your taste hits me? God. Let me do it now.”
“Yes.”
His fangs slid into the supple flesh of Roksana’s inner thigh and she sucked in a breath, her body falling flat, eyes blind with pleasure. Her blood was hot and thick, mingling with the taste of her gratification on his tongue and he could do nothing but fuck the floor helplessly, his cock in a state of urgent pain. The source of her life flowed into his own veins, his heart pumping stronger, louder, echoing in his head along with her name. Putting an end to his meal was hard, as always, but he could almost read his wife’s mind. She was desperate for something.
He found out what it was when he retracted his fangs and was immediately shoved onto his back. Fine, he allowed himself to be shoved, went like a willing victim, hedonistic need tensing every one of his muscles as she climbed on top of his body, straddling his hips, her panties a twisted mess, stretched out and tangled to one side of her pussy. God above, she glowed like an angel in the firelight, her blonde hair in disarray, her face so beloved it made him ache. “Mine,” he rasped, raking rough hands up her outer thighs, his thumbs meeting at her exposed femininity to massage the swollen bud he
’d crave with his dying breath. “Mine.”
For a moment, he forgot which of them was the eternal being, because her eyes seemed to blaze with something conjured by magic. “I want…you to be mine like that.”
“I am,” he roared, his chest filling with concrete. “Don’t you ever doubt it.”
“I don’t,” she rushed to reassure him while leaning down over his body, kissing his collarbone. “I meant…you know my taste, but I don’t know yours.”
“Blood.” A wicked pulse pumped between his legs, pushing his cock up between her thighs hungrily. “You want my blood, mate? You make it run. It’s yours. Drain me.”
Roksana eyed his neck in a near-trance, a breathless few seconds ticking past while he held his breath and then she lunged forward, her teeth breaking the skin above his pulse. The energy surrounding them blasted like a stereo, every particle in the air defining itself for his eyes, purpose tearing into him like saw blades. He cupped the nape of Roksana’s neck, begging through numb lips for her to take and take and take. She did so with enthusiasm, lapping at the life she’d put into him, her pussy grinding down on his shaft, her nipples stiff in his chest hair.
Her head lifted and the dazed fulfilment he saw there was life-affirming. It took him by the throat, squeezing, the beast inside him bellowing, violent, out of its mind. “If I fuck you now, Roksana, I’ll kill you,” he gasped, reaching down to position his cock at the slot of her sex, groaning when he found her twice as wet as before. “Take this dick deep and ride it. Please, baby. Show off my blood on your tongue and fuck me as hard as you can.”
His mate was shaking as she impaled herself down to the root of his cock, her hands slapping down on his chest, fingers snaring in his chest hair. “Oh my God. It feels so good it hurts. It hurts.” Eyes glassy, she put her tongue out, showing him the traces of red, bucking her hips once—hard—and the flames in the fireplace doubled in size, the lamps in the cabin blazing bright and fizzling to uselessness. “Elias,” she sobbed, her hips racing up and back, her sweet tits driving him insane with delicious little bounces. “Elias, you’re everything. Everything.”
