“Yes.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “Good.”
She jumped slightly when he wrapped his hands around her neck, his thumbs coming to rest at the pulse points on either side of her throat. His gaze darkened, a kind of predatory seductive energy humming into her. His body temperature always ran hot, but now it turned searing, curling around her like steaming bath water, into her as if the water was laced with a sedative.
Her knees weakened and her womb softened.
“The pain doesn’t last long.” His voice was a low vibration, tickling up and down her spine. “Then Fiinţă takes over and you’ll feel awesome. So don’t worry.”
A sudden tightness pushed into her esophagus. The phrase don’t worry always meant there was something to worry about. She licked her lips. “How bad does it hurt, exactly?” The question sped her heartbeat. The manual hadn’t offered any specifics on that.
He brushed his thumbs up and down her racing pulse, his touch somehow settling the rhythm. “You’ll be fine,” he said.
Nice way not to answer a girl’s question.
“There’s something else,” he said.
Her eyelids drooped, her pulse slowing to a low drub. God, she’d never felt so warm and willing. Ask me if I’ll have a baby now? She’d agree to ten of them. “Are you doing something to me, Dev?”
“It’s a Pure-bred thing,” he said in that deep, hypnotic tone. “Just relax.”
“Well, quit doing it.” Her voice sounded garbled. Maybe she didn’t want him to stop.
“I need you to listen to this. It’s important.” He raised his thumbs to her face, brushing them across her cheekbones. “Once I begin to feed, I won’t be able to stop, Marissa. Even if you ask me to. I can’t. Don’t think I’m an asshole. It’s just that if you experience the pain of a bite and not the pleasure, that’ll mess up our future feedings together. Do you understand?”
A flurry of butterflies swarmed through her belly. The whole how bad is it going to hurt avoidance was really starting to bother her. “I think I just got cold feet.” She tried to step away from him, but he was still holding her face.
“You’ve got to trust the end game of this, Riss.” He curved an arm around the small of her back and hauled her into the vee of his widespread legs, pushing his face into the crook of her neck. He dragged in a deep inhalation of her scent and made a low sound in his chest, then shuddered. “You,” he said in a deep baritone, “are going to taste awesome.”
The perky crowns of her breasts tingled and tightened. Just like that night months ago in the van, it felt like he could smell her all the way down to the depths of her soul. Her spine melted at the intimacy of it, and her head tipped sideways of its own volition, exposing her throat to him.
Moaning, he inhaled again, his soft lips brushing the sensitive flesh on her neck, the silky burr of his goatee tickling her. “So good,” he murmured hotly against her skin, “you smell so good.” He lifted his head and gazed down on her.
Her heart rate spiked. Oh, my God! Fangs. Shock stretched her eyes wide. Yes, all right, yes, she’d had a glimpse of Jacken’s fangs so she should’ve been prepared for the sight, but…Lord! Dev’s seemed so much longer and sharper—as in, extremely sharp.
Do you know about the first bite hurting?
A shiver iced her belly as her cold feet returned full force.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Marissa couldn’t get her heart to stop galloping. Deep, even breaths weren’t doing crap for this situation…now that Dev was undressing.
“I can’t wait to taste you,” Dev breathed as he used the toe of one boot against the heel of the other, wedged it off, then switched to the other boot while he yanked his T-shirt over his head.
She caught only a brief glimpse of toned muscles rippling across his massive chest, along with a frightening array of scars, before he tugged his jeans and underwear off, and all of her attention got diverted there. Her jaw went loose as she stared nearly cross-eyed at his…his… She didn’t even have a name for it. “Oh, frick.”
Smirking, he spread his arms out from his body. “Been trying to tell you.” He took a step toward her.
She scuttled away from him, slapping her arms in a crisscross over her breasts. He shouldn’t just come at her with that thing. A girl needed a chance to get used to something like that.
A spark glinted in his eyes. “Oh, sweetheart,” he drawled, “never run from a Pure-bred, you hear me? Our predatory instincts will kick in and we’ll chase you down every time.” He sauntered over to her, a display of flexing muscles and finely honed sinew. “And we’ll always catch you.” He swept her into his arms and tumbled her down onto the futon.
She flattened her palms against the wall of his chest as he bore down on her, his blistering body heat engulfing her, the animal scent of him seeming to thicken in the air. Her lungs became heavy with it, and her head reeled. Something else swam into the space between them that she’d never sensed before; an undercurrent of dark possession and male territorialism. A niggling unease darted up her spine, her every nerve suddenly very aware that the man on top of her wasn’t human. She could hardly breathe. “Dev.” Her chest heaved, thrusting her nipples upward. “Dev.”
“Right here, sweetheart.” He hooked her knees with his hands and spread her legs wide, shoving between her thighs as he sank down on top of her.
Hard muscle and pure masculine power compressed her into the futon, crushing her breasts, her pointy nipples jamming rigidly into his bare chest. She gripped his shoulders as his thick, spongy sex nestled against her core. Her pulse tripped. Jesus, if he was this big soft, what was he going to be like hard?
He pushed his face against her neck and muffled a noise. His jaws widened around the expanse of her throat.
She squirmed, feeling a strange thrumming against her flesh. Was that coming from his teeth—?
He clamped down, and she screamed as a hot, jagged pain sliced through her. “Devid!” she screamed. “My God!” The hard suck of his mouth pulled painfully at her flesh, blood and saliva slicking her neck. She rammed at his shoulders with the flats of her palms. Jesus, it felt like he was biting her down to her vertebrae! “Stop!”
He wasn’t listening. Or maybe he couldn’t hear her around the ecstatic moans he was making.
She dug her heels into the mattress and bucked upward, trying to throw him off. “Get off me!”
He lowered his full body weight on top of her, squashing her back down, stilling her struggles with humiliating ease.
She panted hoarsely, feeling like an insect pinned in a tray. Tears speared into the corners of her eyes. The thunderous roar of her heart echoed through her head next to Dev’s constant moaning pleasure. He was—
The ceiling evaporated into a wash of rainbow of colors, and tinsel sparkles popped all around her like old-timey flashbulbs, floating down on top of her. Her breath lightened in her lungs and swirled up her throat like bubbly laughter. Warmth seeped inside her so deeply, it became a part of her blood and bones. Moaning long and low, she arched her head back into the mattress as her belly filled with cotton candy, her head with jelly beans, and a hot, massaging fist took hold of her vagina. Her internal muscles throbbed a steady rhythm and her folds thickened with liquid desire; she was drawing close to an orgasm. With a hurried breath, she clamped her knees around Dev’s taut buttocks and tilted her pelvis up, encouraging him inside her.
But he was lifting off her.
“No,” she protested hoarsely. Scrambling to keep hold of him, she grabbed at his shoulders, but his skin was slick with sweat, and he slipped out of her grasping fingers.
He reared above her.
And everything changed. Her joy, arousal, need—vanished.
He was a vampire from the horror movies now, his face utterly savage, blood dripping from his fangs, his eyes preternaturally bright with bloodlust. Alarm crashed through her, wrenching her heart. The process of bonding will lead to increased excitability in the Vârcolac, th
e manual had said. What the hell? This was more than—
Dev flung his head back and unleashed a bellow that shook the room, a beastly roar of pleasure so far from human that she cried out. Twisting her fingers into the bed sheets, she clawed backward an inch or two, lungs pumping. What had she done, agreeing to bond with…with a…? She wasn’t ready for this! Rolling onto her hands and knees, she scrabbled to the edge of the futon and stumbled to her feet, leaping into a run for—
She was taken out at the knees in the bedroom doorway and plowed to the floor, Dev’s hard body flattening her to the carpet. A primal snarl came out of him, sending a parade of goose bumps up her arms and nape. Never run from a Pure-bred.
Oh, no.
Grabbing her hips, he flipped her over and snapped his teeth at her.
She gaped at his ferocious expression. The man she knew wasn’t recognizable anywhere in that face, in those dilated pupils. She tried to strain away from him, but his powerful grip wouldn’t give. She wracked her brain for what to do. Had this been in the manual…?
With a wordless growl, he hauled her forward onto his lap, the wide head of his sex banging against the side of her opening. She gasped. He was erect, hugely erect, thick and long almost like a rolling pin, with heavy sacs beneath.
An incoherent noise spilled from her throat. “Dev.” She tried to peel his hands off her hips. “You need to l-listen to me…”
Panting heavily through his open mouth, his hands quaked against her flesh as he probed almost frantically for her entrance. Saliva slid down the length of one of his fangs onto her thigh.
No. Everything inside her rebelled against what was happening. She jackknifed into a sitting position on his lap and threw herself against his chest, clasping him tightly to her body. Okay…okay… Think, Marissa…think, think, think. Dev was in some kind of primitive craze that hadn’t been explained—he growled, and she clutched him harder—in the manual, so she had to assume this was outside the bonding norm. She had to—
His hips surged upward.
“Stop it!” She had to believe he was somewhere inside. “You’re frightening me, Devid, and I need you to hear that.”
Air vented from his nostrils.
“Something’s happening to you. I-I don’t know what. I got nervous and ran from you, and then you turned very…vampiric. Please listen.”
He shuddered. His breathing fractured.
“Bring yourself out of it, Dev. I know you can.”
She felt some of the tension leave his body. He inhaled, then again, deeper.
She loosened her hold on him.
“You ran?” he asked hoarsely.
“Unfortunately.”
“Shit, I must’ve gone predator on you.” His hands slid from her hips to her ribcage, and he eased her back to meet her eyes. “Did I hurt you?”
She felt her bones shift, her relief was so profound. Dev was back. “Uh…almost.” She pressed a hand to the throbbing side of her neck. “Besides that damned bite.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that.” He frowned. “You’re shaking.”
“Yes, um…” She climbed off his lap. “Do you mind if we take a little break before the sex?” She pointed toward the futon. “I’m just going to go over to my clothes. Okay?”
He paled a bit. “Yeah, of course.”
On the way to the futon, she detoured to the closet, where she’d already unpacked some things, and found her bathrobe. “Is that, uh, something that’s going to happen often with you?” she asked, belting her robe in place.
Dev crossed to his pants and pulled them on. “I can usually control it,” he said, looking mortified. “On a normal day, that is, when I’m not running so low on blood and thoroughly fucked in the head.”
She threaded her bathrobe belt through her fingers. “This has been a very tough week,” she conceded. “My mother died, then you and I couldn’t bond because you got thrown into jail for six days. That was really hard on me, so it must’ve been horrendous for you. Then there was all that stuff about your dad. I know that churned you up pretty badly.”
He faced her, hands on his hips, bare-chested. He was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe…” He glanced down, shook his head, then looked back up. “Do you think we can start over?”
The pressure in her chest eased. She summoned a smile. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“All right.” He exhaled broadly. “Why don’t we have some wine? I brought that bottle of Château Cuvier III with me in my duffle bag. What do you say we open it, have a few glasses, and talk? We don’t have to do anything more than hold hands. We’ll just be together. How does that sound?”
She widened her smile. “Perfect.”
“Okay, then. I’ll be right back.” He went downstairs and returned in a moment with his bag.
She went into the bathroom and found a couple of water glasses. “I hope it’s as good as its reputation.”
His brows lifted as he rummaged through his duffle for the bottle of Cuvier and a corkscrew. “You mean you’ve never tried it?”
“Nope. So, it’ll be a perfect way to celebrate our union.”
He smiled. “Absolutely.” He stepped forward to pour.
She held out the water glasses. “Oops.” The wine sloshed crazily in the glass. “What—?”
Dev’s hand was shaking violently.
“Dear God, Dev…” She looked at him, and… She could hardly believe what she saw. He’d gone from mildly sweaty to completely drenched in the span of two seconds. “What on earth is happening to you?”
He showed her a set of gritted teeth. “I fed on you, but we didn’t have sex, so, uh…” Wine flung out of the spout of the bottle, and she hurriedly took the Cuvier from him. “I’m stuck in a half-bond. Didn’t think it would happen this fast, but…”
She blinked. A…? “Lord, something else?” She pressed a palm to her forehead. “Was that in the manual?”
He tried to smile, but it wobbled off his mouth. “P-probably not. D-doesn’t tend to be an issue. Everyone just…you know.”
Has sex. She set the wine bottle down. “All right, we need to get busy. Quickly, by the looks of it.”
“I don’t want it to be b-b-bad.” His teeth clattered together a couple of times.
“Jesus, Dev. At this point, that’s hardly the primary concern.”
“And I u-u-upset you.”
“Not on purpose. And it’s upsetting me more to see you suffer.” His body language was getting really weird, like he was on the verge of crumpling in on himself. She marched over to the bureau. “Come here and take me from behind. That’s the quickest way to get it done.”
“S-such a s-sweet-talker, you are.”
“We’ll worry about making it pretty later. Come here.” Hiking her bathrobe up around her waist, she turned toward the dresser and planted her palms on top of it, presenting her naked hind end to him.
A breath came out of him, a catch of air that turned into a deep growl.
She shivered. Okay, soon, she needed to get used to those animal sounds he made. “Don’t get shy on me now, Vampire.” She arched her back and lifted her rump, offering him a better view of her lady parts.
He was on her so fast she had to stifle a gasp. How the devil did the man move that quickly?
His strong hands grasped her waist and pulled her back against him. She felt the heat of his hard length brush across her bottom, and she squeezed her eyes closed as the wide head of his sex found her entrance. He plunged inside.
A sharp, barbaric howl came out of him, his body spasming so hard, he stumbled slightly sideways.
She exhaled raggedly and flexed her fingertips into the top of the bureau. The depth of his penetration was unimaginable. Thank God, his Fiinţă had prepared her sheath, or what might’ve been painful was only uncomfortable.
Hissing, he scrambled to right himself, then surged into her, setting a crazy tempo. The power of his pistoning hips jerked her chin up and down and clacked her teeth together. The pleasur
e rumblings in his chest were volcanic. She stared at a torn piece of wood veneer on the dresser and forced deep, even breaths. Just ride it out… God, the man was fricking huge.
She nearly sagged in relief when she felt him stiffen. A sound of utter astonishment tore out of him as his hips made a final, jerky push against her. His fingers dug into her flesh and a guttural roar of completion filled the bedroom. He collapsed on top of her, winded, shaking and sweating, his heart hammering against her spine. After a moment, she heard him gulp, then he raised himself slowly off her, a hand set on her lower back, and pulled out.
She straightened and let her bathrobe fall back into place, turning around in time to see him sit down heavily in the folding chair across the room, his jeans half-buttoned closed.
The other chair was by the bureau, and she perched herself carefully on the edge of it, her hands cupped together in her lap.
An awkward silence sank down between them.
“So I suck in bed,” he said at length. “There have to be worse things than that, right? Ah, fuck.” He leaned forward and slapped a hand over his face. “Somebody just stab me in the throat.”
“You don’t suck,” she said quietly.
“Really?” His eyes flew up. “You enjoyed that?”
“That was just the mechanics of sex, Dev. We weren’t sharing our love, so it wasn’t good or bad, it just…was what it needed to be right then.” She scrubbed a hand over her cheek. “This is my fault, honey. That was your first time, so it was my job to make it go smoothly. Instead, I didn’t keep my wits about me, so I ran from you, pushing you into a predatory state, and then made you go into a half-bond on top of that.”
“Shit, Riss, the Vârcolac culture is totally new to you. You couldn’t have expected to know all that crap was going to go down.” He flung a hand out. “Especially because that fucking manual is a work in progress. I’m the one who should’ve kept my head on straight.”
She gazed at him, and a slow smile spread across her face.
His eyebrows inched up. “What?”
The Community Series, Books 1-3 Page 60
