by Aja James
“And look at me now,” she said in her sultry, femme fatale voice.
“The most powerful vampire queen in the world. Who else could have negotiated for the rights to have this?”
She demonstrated her meaning by squeezing his ass possessively and scraping her fangs along his jugular.
She’d meant the words teasingly, even as a compliment, telling him that he was a prize fit only for queens, and the most powerful ones at that.
But his eyes flickered with pain before he lowered them, and she felt uncertain and lost.
She’d offended him again.
But it was not simply his pride she feared she had hurt with her careless comment.
“I didn’t know this is where I’d end up,” she said, more to distract him than anything else.
He looked back at her and braced most of his weight on his elbows, his lower body blanketing hers comfortably.
“How did you get here?” he asked her, his piercing gaze intent on her answer.
She knew that with Seth, she was always listened to. She was always heard.
And she shared herself with him in ways she’d never shared with anyone.
It felt good to be known by him.
“Well,” she began, with something like relish, because she’d never told her story before, “I learned when I was a human that just because you’re the mistress of a warlord who’s on top of the food chain, doesn’t mean you have much power at all. If said warlord was deposed, or turned against you…”
She thought of Lὕ Bu.
“…you really didn’t have much recourse. You had to start all over again. I also learned as a Pure One that hiding who I was and trying to stay away from people weren’t terribly satisfying. I wanted to live life to the fullest. I wanted pleasure. I wanted to be in a position of power so I wasn’t beholden to anyone else.”
She curled her lips in a sardonic smile.
“How do you think I could have lived as a vampire a millennia ago? I didn’t have many skills and I wasn’t educated. I was female, and up until just recently, females weren’t much in power anywhere in the world. I was drowned—mistakenly or not, it doesn’t matter—I was drowned for being suspected of evil deeds like draining men of their souls. I was envied and hated for my beauty.”
She sighed
“All in all, being an attractive female vampire in those days was not an easy thing, especially if I didn’t want to hide myself in a cave somewhere and feed off the occasional traveler who wandered down the wrong path.”
“What did you do instead?” he encouraged softly.
She fairly glowed under his rapt attention.
“I did the only thing I could—I turned my skills into a profession accepted by society no matter the time or place. I became a bordello madam.”
She peered hard into his eyes to see if he judged her, but he simply looked steadily back at her.
“At first I rounded up a few whores who weren’t faring very well with their masters. Either they were being physically abused—besides the nightly fucking of strangers, of course, at least they got paid for that—or they weren’t really getting the cut they deserved from the services they provided.”
“I cleaned them up and helped them elevate their profiles, you might say. We quickly earned a reputation for being higher class. We were more refined, more delicate, and much better versed on sexual pleasures, as opposed to a quick tup against the back wall of a tavern. So we commanded a hefty premium. And when anyone tried to make trouble for us, my new Dark powers came in handy, as did my strength and predatory instincts.”
Her eyes glinted with fierceness and pride as she regarded him.
“It was perfect. I had everything I needed—blood and sex to feed my powers, all while making boatloads of money doing it, and having some of the most powerful men and women in society eating literally out of my hands. It wasn’t even a cover, because I honestly offered the services I was advertising. I had a completely legitimate business going. Best of all, no one owned me. I owned myself.”
“And how did you go from a bordello madam to a queen?” he inquired patiently.
“News travels,” she answered.
“Other vampires heard about my little franchise and thought it was a thing of beauty. Rogue vampires started to join my establishment one by one, either as part of my frontline team—the ‘personal companions’—or my back office team, the security detail that kept us out of trouble so I didn’t have to get my hands dirty all the time.”
“Because of the powerful patrons we entertained, my operations became the center of a lot of political maneuvering. All the things that got done outside official parameters got done in one of my houses. Whether I wanted or not, I was roped into plots of national intrigue, and then international.”
She smoothed her hands covetously up his back, starting from the strip of lean muscle above his hips, to the deep groove of his spine, to his lats.
“I’m rather good at the cloak and dagger stuff,” she confessed a little shyly. “I can negotiate blood from stone.”
“Our negotiations are nothing to judge by,” she hastened to add. “I’m willing to concede a lot for something I really, really, really want.”
She levered up slightly and kissed the dimple in his chin.
He pulled slightly away, not distracted by her play.
“Continue with your story,” he urged gently.
“How did you become queen?”
She sighed exaggeratedly, pouting a bit that he wouldn’t indulge her mood for sensual pleasures just yet.
“Well, I’d lived on many different continents by then. Vampires, like Pure Ones, need to move around every so often to prevent the masses from getting suspicious. It just so happened that I made my way to America in the early seventeen hundreds. I’d already had a large following by then, and there were many wars to profit from, as well as many new territories to establish.”
“It was the perfect place for an enterprising female such as myself. I formed some strategic alliances with other Hordes, and before I knew it, a few hundred vampires decided to support me as their queen, at around the same time that George Washington got elected as the first President.”
She waited for his expression of surprise, that a lowly female like herself could have risen so high.
But none was forthcoming. He only looked at her solemnly and with pride.
“Anything can happen in America, right?” she ventured, giving him the opportunity to explain away her success as something more environmentally related, rather than personally created and sustained.
He shook his head.
“Anything can happen with you in the driver’s seat. You are a natural leader, Jade. Others see that in you just as I do.”
She shrugged, rather uncomfortable with his praise, even as she basked in it.
“I’m practical. I make decisions that allow the most number of constituents to win. It’s the only way to survive. And I’ve become very good at surviving.”
“And now you’re a queen,” he said softly.
“Are you happy where you are? Do you have everything you want?”
“Where I am, is beneath you, wrapped around you,” she growled low, determined to not let him put off her amorous desires a moment longer.
“So, yes, I’m exceedingly happy where I am. As to what I want…”
She squeezed him everywhere with her whole body, her hands tangling in his wavy hair.
“You know exactly what I want, Pure One.”
He held her lust-filled gaze for a long while, searching again for something in her eyes.
She wished she knew what he was looking for.
Finally, he kissed her, slow and sweet, not at all devouring her like she wanted him to do.
She tried to deepen the kiss and thrust her tongue in his mouth, but he only sucked her softly and retreated, pulling away to look down at her again.
“Will you grant me a wish?” he asked softly, his eyes dark and st
ormy.
What was this? Tit for tat?
She stiffened beneath him, assuming that he’d open their negotiations again, at more loss to her.
She really didn’t want to do this while she was needy for his sex. Her wits weren’t very sharp at the moment, her body a quivering mass of anticipation beneath his.
Hell, her wits were never at their sharpest around him, not since three years ago.
He looked away from her and clenched his jaw as if he was wrestling with a decision. When he looked back, she thought he’d put on his unreadable mask to prepare for their renegotiation.
She was wrong.
His eyes were clear and open, bright with an inner light, wet with…tears?
“Not because of our contract,” he said huskily, the thick bristles of his lashes tangled with moisture.
“Because you want to. Because it would make me happy.”
Jade swallowed, suddenly afraid.
Why did she feel every second that she was on the verge of losing him forever? What if he asked to leave now? What if being without her would make him happy?
Her mind whirled in a riot of possibilities, none of them ending well for herself.
But Dark Goddess! If it would make him happy, she’d agree to anything.
“Yes,” she answered, though he hadn’t yet made his request.
Whatever it was, the answer would always be yes.
He smiled.
A real smile. The one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and cut mesmerizing grooves into his cheeks. The one where the dimple in his chin winked at her almost mischievously.
“Spend the day with me as my wife,” he invited.
At first she didn’t think she heard him right, so prepared was she for the worst. But then she heard him.
She heard his heart.
She smiled a loopy, dopey smile back at him, the sort of smile that had never graced her face before, she was certain.
“What does that entail?” she asked, a surge of something like giddiness flushing her skin with pleasure.
“We will treat each other as equals today,” he answered readily.
“We will respect and care for one another. There will be no talk of contracts, no negotiations, no demands.”
“And no talk of Consorts or Mates that I have to choose either,” she added, knowing that she had one more day to make a decision, per their agreement.
“No,” he agreed.
“Okay,” she nodded and vowed to herself to do better than she did the last time they played this game.
She remembered the way she’d dismissed him in the end, before their last day together was even done.
Not this time.
This time, she’d carefully tuck away every moment that she spent with him and try her damnest to make him happy today.
A sudden burst of inspiration came to her: maybe if she succeeded, she could convince him not to leave her.
“And when I’m inside you,” he whispered, flexing his buttocks to rub the head of his sex against the deepest part of her pleasure center where only he could reach, “I am making love to you, do you understand?”
She levered up to nuzzle her face in the notch of his throat.
Finally! They were finally getting to the good part.
“Yesss,” she sighed. “Is that what it’s called between husbands and wives?”
“It’s what this husband does with this wife,” he returned, flexing again and making her moan.
But Jade had other ideas.
She wanted to give him pleasure this time.
She wanted to “make love” to Seth.
She braced her hands on his thick pectorals and pushed a bit. Slowly, he levered off of her, bracing his weight on his arms.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the strange look in her eyes. For once, he couldn’t predict what she wanted from him.
She pushed a little more until he pulled out of her, and she almost grabbed him again to take him back inside, she felt so bereft without him.
But this was for Seth, she told herself.
She was going to “make love” to Seth.
Within the cage of his body, she meandered soft kisses everywhere she could reach. The strong column of his neck, the underside of his sharp jaw, the wide spread of his collar bones, the thick muscles of his chest.
Every gesture she made came not from a place of manipulation, to increase his pleasure for a specific purpose, but from an instinct as old as time.
Out the window went everything she knew about the sexual arts, about how to make a male beg for release, about the power of holding another person in thrall.
She just knew that she was with Seth, and she simply wanted to make him feel good.
She wanted to give him pleasure because it made her feel good.
Like a child at a candy store, she didn’t even know where to start, really start. Those light little brushes she gave his skin were just an amateurish warm-up.
Now the fun was really going to begin.
“What are you doing, Jade?” he asked a little uncertainly when she’d been staring at his left nipple for more than ten seconds.
She licked her lips with anticipation.
“Patience,” she murmured, then flicked her tongue out to taste the dark bud.
He inhaled sharply and the tricep beside her face quivered slightly.
“You’re sensitive all over, aren’t you?” she asked almost to herself. “I was right about you from the first.”
“You are pure ecstasy.”
She took the small pebble between her front teeth and worried it a little.
“Jade.”
His tone held warning, but also the rough edge of passion.
She lapped the bruised nipple with her tongue and glanced the tips of her fingers down his serratus.
“Hush, husband,” she commanded lightly. “I’m trying to make love to you. I’ve never done this before, so I need to concentrate.”
“You don’t have to—”
But whatever he was about to say was lost in a groan when she shifted beneath him and took the head of his penis into her mouth.
She suckled him strongly for a few moments, then said around the fullness of him, “Sorry, got carried away. Should I have worked up to this point? But I’m too impatient by nature.”
He couldn’t speak as she continued to mouth his sex, her plump lips wrapping around the corona tightly, her tongue licking up and down the thick veins that ran along his length.
“You taste delicious, Seth,” she sighed a little breathlessly, as if driving him crazy was driving her crazy as well.
“Your scent here…” she buried her face in his crotch and pulled him closer to her with her hands on his magnificent ass.
“Mmm…I’m orgasming on your smell alone. You’re my oxygen, the only air I want to breathe.”
“Enough,” he rasped roughly, pulling himself back.
She wouldn’t have it. She was just getting started.
She was about to protest when she looked up to see his raw, wild, hungry expression as he looked down at her.
He was just getting started too.
“Open,” he commanded.
She didn’t misunderstand, immediately opening her mouth wide.
Without warning, he shoved his steely erection down her throat, and she almost choked at the sudden invasion.
But oh, how she loved it!
She opened her throat as wide as she could and was prepared this time when he withdrew and shoved inside again, going deep, but not quite to the hilt.
He was too big for her, no matter how skilled she was. But she compensated by wrapping her hands around the base of him, forming a tight tunnel, slicked with her saliva and his precum.
He was so thick he scraped his hypersensitive skin across her teeth every time he plunged in and every time he withdrew, no matter how she tried to prevent it.
But he didn’t seem to care as he worked her mouth, didn’t care that he’d
be scraped raw at the end of this.
She angled her head up to better receive his thrusts, but also to be able to see his face as he looked down at her.
There was no mask over his expression now.
He was unfiltered, undiluted, and unrestrained.
The look in his eyes would be seared into her consciousness forever: possessive, primitive, an intoxicating blend of agony and pleasure, strength and vulnerability.
And she knew right then and there that he’d never looked at anyone this way before.
Only her.
He gritted his teeth and shot down a hand to tangle into her hair, pulling smartly on her scalp.
He was close, so close.
She moved one of her hands to palm his scrotum and rubbed two fingers against his perineum.
His breath stuttered, and his thrusts faltered, as the pressure of his orgasm bore incredibly down on him, breaking free of his control.
At the exact moment of his release, she twisted her head and sank her fangs into the dorsal vein of his cock as he came.
A harsh groan tore through his throat at the unbelievable pain and pleasure that exploded through him as she clamped down on his sex with her mouth, one hand squeezing his thick base tightly, the other massaging his scrotum and exerting more pressure on his perineum.
Blood and seed filled her throat in hot salty and sweet waves.
Jade voraciously swallowed it all, not wasting a single drop of him.
When she finally released him and licked the wounds closed, he collapsed onto his side, and she followed, still meticulously bathing him with her tongue, interspersed with kisses and sucks.
“Jade.”
His husky rasp of her name made her shiver with pleasure from head to toe.
She’d pleased him, she knew.
They’d been wild together, uncontrolled. The pleasure of his orgasm had been magnified exponentially by the accompanying pain.
She knew his secret now.
He liked some pain to give an edge to the sex.
And what do you know? She liked it too.
“Jade,” he said again and pulled a little on her hair when she continued to nurse at his sex with unending hunger.
“Once more, husband,” she coaxed around his swollen, throbbing flesh.
