by V M Black
He pulled away just far enough to speak, and I felt his breath against my skin.
“‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,’” he repeated softly, “‘or bends with the remover to remove.’”
I shivered at those words. No, nothing I could do seemed to be able to erase the way I reacted to Dorian, no matter how strongly I willed it. I knew I had to escape the terrible bond that held me—but I was afraid that if someone offered me the chance right then, when I was in his arms, I could do nothing but refuse.
And I was also afraid that I wanted more from him than what the words sex or even pleasure could encompass. When he touched me like that, I had a mad urge to immolate myself in him until I was utterly lost, so that I didn’t even know who or what I was anymore. And I was afraid that if I did—when I did—he might not put me back together again.
I felt his hands move to the laces of the corset, and I caught my breath as he untied them, anticipating the cool air. But instead, he put a hand between my shoulder blades and pulled.
The pressure against my ribs and waist increased so abruptly that the air was pushed from my lungs. He moved his hand to my hips and pulled again. I felt the open inch at the back of the foundation garment come closed, pressing on me so that I had to take shallow breaths from my chest.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he tied the laces off again.
He chuckled, a dark, rich sound that made my hair rise on the back of my neck. He pulled me back against his body, his mouth exploring the curve of my neck. “You will see,” he murmured as his lips skimmed my ear.
Dorian wrapped his arms around my waist, but I could hardly feel them through the pressure of the corset. Then his mouth found my collarbone, followed it, and my body trembled against his as he found its hollow. He kissed his way up the side of my neck to the sensitive place just behind my ear. My skin felt hot and flushed, his lips and tongue sending shivering reactions through me that left my legs loose and shaky.
He turned me in his arms, and my body melded to his, fitting so well that it frightened me. He caught my mouth, a light, brief kiss that left my lips tingling for more. My breath came fast against the stricture of the corset, and I let out a little sound as his mouth came down over mine again. The kiss was firmer but still too brief, a mere press of his lips to mine before it was gone. I ached between my thighs, and the satin lining of the corset rasped against my skin. My arms had wrapped around his body, holding him to me. I wanted him closer, closer still....
He gave a sad, distant half-smile as he looked down at me, and at the sight of it, my heart squeezed in my chest.
“‘Love is an ever-fixed mark that looks upon tempests and is never shaken,’” he said, almost to himself. “‘It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.’”
Worth unknown. Again the words meant almost too much. What was the meaning of what I felt? I would have labeled it lust, if I had been forced to give it any name at all, but that didn’t begin to cover it. What I wanted wasn’t just his body on mine. I wanted to erase those flashes of sadness, to melt his coldness, to fill the ancient emptiness within him with myself.
And a part of me wanted him not to admit that he didn’t love me—but to prove that he did.
That discovery froze me in place, struck with a bone-deep terror. I couldn’t want him, no matter what, because what he offered me was nothing but a beautiful prison. What he felt about me couldn’t possibly matter.
Could it? If I really thought that, why did I keep pushing him, asking him?
I don’t care, I told myself fiercely. I don’t. I won’t.
Then Dorian kissed me again, and the shock it sent rippling through me seemed to mock all my resolutions. I could taste him as he dipped shallowly between my lips, and I felt a sudden, half-panicked desperation for more, for everything, and I opened my mouth, begging him in.
But he pulled away, and I gave a tiny, involuntary whimper.
“Well, then,” he murmured, and again that chuckle, as dark and rich as his brandy-flavored mouth. This time, when his mouth met mine, it was everything I had been yearning for. He possessed me utterly, stroking my tongue, my mouth, moving with a slow rhythm that rocked my body, tying my brain and my hips and my lips and my center to him. And the strange desperation twisted into a kind of exulting fulfillment. Yes, this, this and more....
The ache between my thighs deepened to a throb, and he caught me up against him as my legs gave way. Scooping me up, he carried me to the sofa.
His eyes were haunted as he set me down softly upon the leather. “‘Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks, but bears it out—even to the edge of doom.’”
Whose doom? His, or mine?
Could it even matter?
He started to pull away, but I clung to his shirt.
“Don’t,” I said. Don’t leave.
He treated me to a lopsided smile that hurt my heart. “Have no fear, Cora. I’m not going anywhere.”
He loosened my hands from his shirt and slid his away to unclip the white suspenders that held up his highwaisted pants. I sat up and pulled the tail of his shirt out of the waistband of his pants and loosened the bottom stud. I kept my head down as I worked upwards, not wanting to see the shadow of myself reflected in his eyes.
His hands, working down, met mine halfway. He caught my hands in his, and I stilled, my body thrilling at even that small contact.
“Cora,” he said, and my eyes were dragged upward. I saw the shadow there, but over it was a hunger that sent my pulse skittering out of control.
“I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” I said weakly.
“It’s good, Cora,” he said, bending to bring my hand to his lips, just as he had the first time we had been together. I closed my eyes at the silken caress, soft and hard at once. I could feel his breath against the back of my knuckles. “It is the purest thing in my black life.”
And the blackest one in mine?
Dorian let go of my hand and knelt next to the sofa. He captured one of my ankles in his hands and slid the shoe from my foot. His thumbs moved against my instep slowly, methodically, releasing tension that I didn’t even know I had, working into my heel and the across the ball of my foot. I sank back against the sofa’s arm as liquid warmth filled me, all my muscles gone limp.
And something within me let go and surrendered to the moment, whatever it might bring.
I watched with half-lidded eyes as he lifted my foot and bent his head. But it wasn’t until I felt his damp mouth against the arch that I realized what he was doing.
Embarrassment flooded me. How could he put his mouth there, on my foot, of all places? I had the urge to snatch my foot away, but then what I was feeling penetrated my brain, and I couldn’t move.
It should tickle, I thought dimly. Oh, but it did not. The delicious sensations of his lips and tongue and, yes, teeth were anything but ticklish. He kissed each toe separately, then slipped one into his mouth and suckled it in a way that sent a lance of pleasure straight into my groin.
As I was still gasping in surprise, he slipped off my other shoe and repeated the performance on that foot. I had slipped into a pleasant, achy haze when his mouth moved upward, to the space just behind my ankle.
Dorian skimmed quickly over my calves to linger against the tender skin of my inner knee, first one and then the other. The lassitude I had felt was heating to a more tense anticipation, tightening deep in my belly and making my breath come faster against the unyielding clasp of the corset.
He slid his hands up my legs, nudging them apart. His mouth followed, damp and insistent, against the tender skin of my inner thighs. The closer he got to their juncture, the tighter the tension coiled in my center, and aching so much that I grabbed his wrists to keep from touching myself.
Dorian’s mouth reached the edge of my panties, and I inhaled sharply as he kissed it slowly and then ran his tongue under the elastic. There, he was
right there, and my body burned with the intensity of what I wanted him to do next. I couldn’t even think it, much less put words to it, but a part of my brain started on an endless loop: Oh please, please, there, please there, please....
He kissed me softly though the cotton, his hot breath going through it and sending a surge of reaction through my body that left me lightheaded. He hooked his fingers under the band and tugged. The panties slid from under my rear and down my legs. He pulled his hands free from mine and dropped the garment to the side.
Dorian rocked back, and I shook with the withdrawal. But I bit off a noise of protest when I saw his hands at the fly of his pants as he got up. A moment later, he’d toed off his shoes and socks and stripped from the waist down. He stood before me for a moment in nothing but his open shirt, the firelight flickering off the pale, perfect contours of his body, his proud erection darker than the marble purity of his skin.
It still amazed me that such a strange thing had been inside me. And even more astonishing, I had wanted it, panted for it each time, just as I ached for it now.
“Not yet,” Dorian said, the smile playing at the corner of his lips for once unshadowed by darker thoughts.
My eyes snapped up to meet his gaze, and I realized that my hunger had been naked on my face. I bit my lip, and his smile broadened.
“In time, Cora,” he said, lowering himself onto the empty half of the sofa. “In time.”
He swiftly traced a line up from my knee to the crease of my thigh with his mouth, lips and tongue almost unbearable against my sensitive skin.
And then he was there, at the aching entrance to my body, before I was ready yet also too long after. His kiss was a damp, light, closed-mouth caress that sent me reeling. He kissed me again there, his mouth in my curls, my half-open legs baring my folds to his mouth, and I tilted my hips toward his touch.
Never had I imagined, never, never.... The word seemed to tangle with the light pressure of his mouth and the feelings he sent through me. Never, never, never that it could be like this.
My heart beat fast in my ears. I struggled to catch my breath against the tightness of the corset. I could feel his breath on me, and I gripped the corset at my hips, jamming my fingers under the stiff edge, needing something to hold onto for what I knew was coming next.
And it came. The full width of his tongue, pushing between the outer folds at the lowest point of my entrance, moving upward so slowly, too slowly until it stopped to rest against my clitoris. Heat surged through me. I knew that he must feel it, too, feel my swelling against his mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My brain was too full, everything was too full, swollen, aching, needing.
Then he was gone, and I drew a shaky breath, but too soon—already he was back, spreading me with his tongue, moving upward to rest against me again, even more intimately. I whimpered and squirmed into him. His hand slid under me, his thumb skimming slickly over the pad of skin until he reached the bottom edge of my opening.
I took a sharp breath as he pushed in, between my folds, and then he pulled downward, putting pressure against it and sending a jolting reaction up and down the juncture of my thighs. I tightened against him, panting, as the hot tingling reached almost to my tailbone.
Keeping his thumb in place, he began to tease around my entrance with his mouth, planting tiny kisses and nibbles along my folds and—oh, God—my clit until I moaned at my fullness.
His only response was that wicked, rich chuckle, the one that sent my heart racing, and I could feel the reverberation of it where his now closed mouth still touched me. And then his tongue was torturing me again, methodically. His touch was frustratingly light, hardly dipping between my folds. I fought the constraint of the corset to try to arch my hips toward him until he took my clit into his mouth and gave it a long suck that tore a cry from me as my shoulders rocked up from the sofa.
His mouth grew harder, more insistent then, pushing deeper. His thumb slid out of me, and I gasped with the sudden relief until he began massaging just below, in time with his mouth, bringing a new tension to my body.
Then he lifted his head, his gaze catching mine as two fingers of his other hand followed the slick path his mouth had made, pushing deep inside as my body made little, shaking spasms around it.
“I’ve wanted to see you like this from the first moment I saw you,” he said as he moved his hand slowly inside me.
It almost hurt to look at him, to let him see everything that he was doing to me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. His fingers were inside me, sliding and rocking against me—my body sang with them, as if they were touching my soul. The corset was an unbearable pressure. I gasped for air, fighting for it, and it only made the sensations more intense, the sharpness of the pleasure edging into pain.
And then something snapped, and I went over into the heat of it, the wave rippling up through me. He smiled as he saw me go—and then he lowered his head again, his mouth joining his fingers. At that touch sensation surged into my center and through my limbs until even my toes and fingers burned with it.
I gulped for air that would not come, fought against the darkness and the stricture of the corset that now added a new torture, as if it seared my skin even as it conformed my body to it. I heard a voice, a strangled and wordless cry, and I realized it was mine. And he pushed me through it, pushed me deeper into it, his hands and mouth driving me onward until I thought I would be lost forever.
Slowly, slowly the sensation receded. Dorian moved away from my entrance, intolerably swollen now, sliding up the length of my body and catching my neck in one damp hand.
Damp from me, was my dazed realization.
“Taste it,” he said. “Taste how good you are.”
And his lips met mine, and I tasted the flavor of his mouth mingled with my musky, salty sweetness. The shock of it went through me. It should have disgusted me—the thought of it would have disgusted me any time before. But now it made me whimper into his mouth, wanting more, needing even more.
His hips were already between my legs, the head of his erection against the crease of my thigh. I tried to arch my hips toward him, but the edge of the corset just bit cruelly into my belly.
“What do you want?” Dorian murmured against my mouth. “Tell me, Cora. Say it.”
“You.” I could say nothing else.
And then he shifted and slid into me, and I tilted into him with all the force the corset would allow, sliding up until our pelvises met. I clenched my teeth against my own whimper as he rocked up so that he pressed his weight up against my clit even as he pushed against my deepest place. My palms and my face were burning, and my breaths had little catching sounds at the end as I forced them from my body.
He thrust into me, the rhythm lost in my heartbeat and the throbbing heat that rose up around me. Around us. Because even Dorian’s cool chest warmed against mine as he drove onward, filling me completely, over and over again. It was almost too much, so close to pain, so close to losing myself.
The embrace of the corset was merciless, stealing my breath, stealing my thoughts, keeping me off balance so that when I fell, I went over hard, back into darkness. I clung to Dorian, my nails digging into his skin, and then suddenly his arms went from supporting his weight to holding me against him as if he were afraid that I might be snatched away, and he buried his face in my hair as his whole body shuddered in the grasp of his own climax.
I was still shaking with the aftermath as he slowed, slowed and stopped and lay heavy against me. I lifted my hands to my cheeks and discovered wetness there. My tears.
I had to be free. But how on earth was I ever going to give him up?
Chapter Seven
Dorian smiled above me and kissed the tears away.
“That bad?” he said, and the tone of smug self-satisfaction betrayed it for the joke that it was.
“That good, and you know it,” I said hoarsely. I was too weak, too spent for a better retort than that.
He pulled back,
and I ached to feel him go even as I couldn’t imagine pressing on. He stood, then bent and lifted me in his arms as if I weighed nothing at all.
“Let’s get you dressed, and then I’ll take you home,” he said. But his arms around me tightened at that last word.
Home, to my apartment at the University of Maryland. To the life that I had there. The idea of separation came as a physical pain.
“But I want to stay,” I said. “Please, let me stay with you.”
They were stupid words, but I couldn’t stop them. They were the wrong words—I shouldn’t want to stay. I needed to go, to get away, to escape from the future that was laid out in front of me—even to the edge of doom.
There was a flash of something across his face then, pain or joy or regret, or perhaps all three. He looked like he was going to speak. But instead, he kissed me, slowly and deeply, whether to silence me or himself, I didn’t know. And his arms relaxed.
When he pulled back, his face was closed again. “No, you don’t, Cora. Perhaps at this instant you feel that you do. But tomorrow, you’ll be filled with regret and anger, and you’ll wonder whether you wanted to stay at all or if I had merely wanted it for you.”
“And do you?” I whispered. I knew what he could do to me—I knew it all too well.
“More than anything right now,” he said, and for a second, the shutters drew back from his eyes, and what I saw there made my head feel light. “Which is why you must go. I don’t trust myself with you tonight.”
He was walking toward a bookcase on the side of the fireplace. He freed a hand and pressed a hidden button, and it swung outward to reveal a spiral stair, a soft light coming on as the concealed door opened.
A secret passageway. Of course he had one.
“Why?” I asked, my heart rising into my throat even as I clung to him. “What are you afraid that you will do?”
“Change you, so that you will never want to leave,” he said simply as he mounted the stairs.
“You changed me today,” I challenged. He’d changed me, and I knew he would do it again, if the stakes were high enough. “I didn’t want to go to your Lesser Introduction or whatever it was. You even took away my fear of dancing. Why wouldn’t you change me again?”
