by V M Black
I knew how it was. Every line of his body had told me. But I wanted to hear his words—I wanted to make them mine, too.
“Very good,” he said, his voice rough with reaction. “Very, very good, indeed.” His eyes glinted with a light that made my breath hitch. “And now, I believe I owe you.”
Chapter Twelve
I laughed, lightheaded. “I think the debt is still in your favor at the moment.”
“Be that as it may, even though I’m an agnate, I am not up for another go quite yet,” Dorian said, his eyes hooded even as he smiled down at me. “But you... Women—of all races—are different. For you, there is no arbitrary limit.”
“Limit?” I asked as I rocked back on my heels, pretending coyness even as my heart began to thrum in my ears. “What do you mean by that?”
He leaned down, bringing his face close to mine. “If I keep you right at the edge, I could keep you coming all night long.”
“How?” I demanded, a little amazed at my own audacity because I knew I was challenging him, and I didn’t doubt that he could do exactly what he said.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I don’t know that I should,” I said.
He gave me a slow, languorous smile that liquefied my insides.
“But I think I’d like to try,” I added, giving into recklessness again.
He stood and looked down at me. “Then the first order of business is to get you out of those clothes.”
Oh, yes, I agreed silently. Let’s do that.
Dorian stood and pulled me to my feet to meet him, his arms coming around me as his mouth found mine. His kiss was slow, methodical, and complete, plundering my mouth with dizzying deftness as he stroked me with his tongue.
He drove me back toward the bed. I offered no resistance—because I chose not to, not because I couldn’t. This was the game right now, and I wanted to play it. I felt the mattress against the back of my thighs, and then his hands were under my rear, and he broke the kiss as he boosted me up and tossed me lightly onto my back into the center of the bedspread.
I giggled despite myself and began wiggling to turn parallel to the headboard, but he said, “Don’t move.”
I froze, and he lay down next to me, resuming the kiss as my head flooded with hot need and my center began to send little throbs down between my legs.
Dorian lifted my shirt a mere inch and moved down to kiss my stomach where it was exposed. It should have tickled, but instead, it drove another shivering spike through me. He moved up slowly, his mouth staking claim to every inch that his hands exposed until the shirt was at my neck. He pulled it off then, tossing it to the ground, and moved to my bra.
This time, he didn’t unhook it, instead kissing along the arc formed by the underwire as he pushed it up, millimeter by millimeter, over my breasts. I was shaking by the time his mouth began working against my areola, shamelessly rocking my hips into his hard thigh. I felt the underwire pull up against my hard nipples, stretching them fractionally as his lips and teeth teased the lower edge...then they pulled free, and I moaned as his mouth found them, still blocked by the edge of the bra from forming the suction I craved. And up the bra went, up a little more, and then he was fully over them, his mouth and hands stroking, pulling, teasing them until I was mad with it all.
“Please,” I begged squirming against him, “please.”
The suckling suddenly turned into a sharp bite, and I gasped, feeling it all the way down into my clit. Oh, it hurt, hurt so good, as only Dorian could make me feel....
He released me, and then he was pulling off my bra, over my head. I lifted my arms to free them, then slid one hand brazenly down into my pants, finding the hard, swollen nub of my clitoris—
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Dorian said, capturing my hand. “Not tonight.”
He let go of me and pulled away abruptly. I sat up, dazed, just in time to see him disappear through the door that led to his dressing room.
“Dorian?” I called. Had I offended him somehow? I was baffled, dazed, throbbing with unfulfilled need—
Just as I was about to roll off the bed to find him, he reappeared in the doorway holding a gold silk cord. I recognized it as the tie to his smoking jacket.
My heart sped up. “I’m not so sure—” I began.
“Did you like it when you wore the corset and I made you come so hard you couldn’t breathe?” he asked bluntly.
Wordlessly, I nodded.
“This is much the same idea.” He reached the bed. “A loss of control.”
“I never feel in control with you,” I said shakily.
His smile was predatory. “Good. Now, wrists.”
There was no compulsion in those words, no more than the ordinary force of will that he wore around him like a dark cloak, but I held out my hands, wrists together. He bound them together, the silk cutting a little into my skin.
“And up,” he said, and he scooped me up and deposited me closer to the head of the bed.
I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, he was pushing me back into the pillows as he lifted my hands over my head. I tilted my head back and watched him tie the ends of the cords to the closest bedpost, so that I was stretched out on the bed with my breasts bare and vulnerable to him.
“And now it’s my turn,” he said, lowering himself between my legs.
He turned his attention to the flesh that he had already bared, moving over my mouth, my neck, my breasts, my belly, sucking them, nipping them, then kissing away the tiny bee-stings of pain. I whimpered, trying to bring my hands down, to cling to him or guide him or shield my body from the dizzying onslaught, I didn’t know, but the bindings only cut harder into my skin.
Then he moved to the button of my jeans, and I braced myself, knowing what was coming next. He twisted it open, then kissed it for a long moment, his fingers digging into my butt, before he slid the zipper down, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers hooked in my underwear and drawing them with it.
When he reached the end of the zipper, he lingered there, his mouth in my curls, so close to my aching clitoris that I bit my lip against my pleas until I tasted a tang of blood.
His hands slipped under my waistband and pulled, slowly, too slowly, until the top of my pants was bunched below my hips. And then, only then, did his mouth find the tight, aching place, coming full against my clitoris and tearing a grateful cry from my throat.
Sensation swirled up through me as I jerked down against the cords that held me tight, and I came against his mouth, rocking my hips into it, needing even more even as the orgasm shook through me.
“That is only the beginning,” he said, and he pulled my pants lower still, to my knees, so that he could kiss and nip the insides of my thighs—and then, oh yes, then, he licked me hard from the base of my entrance all the way to my clitoris. And then, somehow, he was pressing against it, rocking it even as his tongue pushed between the folds at the top of my opening, and one of his hands slid up from cradling my butt to slide into my entrance just behind it and pull down, stretching me as I clenched hard against him.
I was still at the edge, and that tipped me over again, into the heat that buzzed through my body. My clit throbbed, my nipples, my lips, my anus—everything buzzed and crackled with it, and when it dissipated, I was left breathless, raw, and whimpering.
“I have something for you.” It was Dorian’s voice, a velvety, dangerous caress. “Do you think you’re ready?”
I shook my head, then nodded, afraid of what he could mean but craving it, nevertheless.
He extended his body over mine, leaning over to the bedside table. He pulled open a drawer, then extracted a small case, which he opened.
I could make no sense of what lay on the silk-lined interior. They looked rather like three alligator clips, except that they were shorter and had no teeth, and they were joined together with a Y-shaped chain.
“You like how it feels when my mouth is on your nipples, your clit,” he said. It was not a
question.
“Oh,” I said, my eyes widening instinctively as I understood what these were for.
“Yes,” he agreed, looking down at me with a glittering gaze.
My breath came fast as I realized that I couldn’t stop him from using those on me even if I wanted to, not with my arms tied helplessly above my head. I shook my head, trying to decide, among my warring feelings, which was the strongest—which the uppermost. I couldn’t.
“Tell me no, Cora,” Dorian said. “Tell me no, and I’ll put them away.”
I could hear the tension in his voice—how much he wanted to use these on me. And I wanted it, too, though I was more than half afraid that it was another step into the darkness from which I would never return.
“When?” I asked, not looking away from them. “When did you get these?”
“Christmas Eve,” he said.
After the first time we’d slept together. He’d gotten them for me. I should be horrified. I should be horrified and disgusted and afraid....
But I wasn’t.
“I want you to do it.” I barely recognized my own voice, strained and high. “Do it.”
“First, I must make you ready again,” he said, and his mouth found mine.
The kiss started slowly, but then it grew harder, almost frantic. He tongue all but attacked me, his teeth nipping at my lip. I gasped under the onslaught, staggered. When he pulled away, he was shaking.
“Oh, God, Cora, blood,” he said. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“I—I don’t know,” I said, yearning for him and frightened at the same time.
His eyes burned. “I will not go too far,” he said, and for a moment, I wondered if he was trying to convince himself or me.
But I had no time to think about that, because then he was kissing me again, on the throat, the collarbone, across the top curve of my breast until he found one nipple and teased it, hard, until I cried out with the throbbing ripples that it sent through my body. His mouth lifted, and then something cold and hard slipped around it and squeezed so that echoes of the pleasure continued to reverberate through my body.
I shuddered, hardly noticing that his mouth was moving on until it closed over my other breast, and he repeated the action. This time, the reaction was intensified by the unrelenting pressure on my other breast, and I moaned and writhed against him until he pulled away, slipping the other clamp over the nipple as his mouth left it.
He pulled back and looked at me for a long moment. I lay there, tugging futilely on the cords, aching to touch myself as the clamps continued to send shivering reactions through my body.
“Do something,” I pleaded.
And he did, though not what I had expected. His hand went down between my legs, two fingers pushing inside of me, finding that place again and pressing rhythmically into it as his mouth returned to my swollen nipples, his tongue and teeth teasing, rasping the exposed tips that stuck out above the metal bands.
It was terrible and wonderful, too much and yet not nearly enough as the place deep inside me ached with emptiness. But I peaked again, shattering, mindless, and I felt the throbbing of my blood against the clamps, in my head, down in my clit and in that place where his fingers pressed, pressed me onward, my pants still tangled around my knees, my arms yanking uselessly at the unforgiving cords.
And then he was tugging, pulling at the chain as I rocked with my orgasm, sending me deeper into it, whether with pain or pleasure, I couldn’t tell.
Finally, it receded, and I was almost weeping with the force of it, so much that my brain defied me to take it all in. The fingers inside of me withdrew, sliding over my aching clitoris, and he was kissing me again, softly now, across my arms and neck and belly and legs as I tried to regain my bearings.
He pushed down my pants, pulled them all the way off with the socks and shoes I hadn’t even noticed that I was still wearing. They joined my shirt on the floor, and his shirt followed.
“I’m ready now,” he said softly as I stared at the ceiling, half in a daze. The compression against my nipples still sent little slivers of sensation shivering through me, keeping me aroused even as my body ached with it. “Are you?”
“I think you could do it,” I said. My throat was raw.
“Do what?” he asked.
“Keep me coming all night long. But I don’t think you should,” I added.
“And why is that?” he asked, a dark humor in his rich voice.
“Because,” I said distinctly, “I don’t think I’d survive.”
He laughed then. “The grand finale, then?”
My blood was already heating again. “Yes,” I said. “Definitely, yes.”
He kissed me, avoiding my blood-touched mouth, his body over mine as he moved up my throat to the sensitive place just below my ear that made me gasp and grind my hips into him. He slid a hand between us, caught my clitoris and rolled it, teased it in his fingers until it was full and throbbing. Then there came a cold pressure, the third clamp bearing down. And the sensation of the others redoubled as that one joined it.
I whimpered, opening myself to him, needing him to fill me now, now.
“Here I am, Cora,” he said, and I realized that I had said the last word aloud, a demand and a plea in one. He took my knees, pushed them apart, and my folds opened fully as he thrust into them with force enough to startle the breath from my lungs. My clit and nipples throbbed, and I shook.
“Go,” I demanded.
And he did, pushing my knees up almost into my chest as he thrust into me, relentlessly, again and again until I came apart so hard that I lost myself in the searing pleasure of it, a hard black edge that sent me crashing harder into the grip of the climax. I let my mind go, my sight, my hearing, everything except the screaming of my nerves that were overloaded with something like ecstasy and something very much like pain.
I didn’t even feel him come, so entrapped was I, and it was only his voice calling my name that brought me out of myself:
“Cora, Cora, oh, God, my Cora,” my name like a broken plea on his lips.
And I lay stunned as he stopped, pulled back, and I felt the sudden, tingling release as he removed the clamps from my body.
My vision focused upon him replacing them carefully in their box, and then he tugged for a moment at the knots at my wrists before tearing the cords with two deft movements. They dropped away, and my fingers tingled as the blood rushed back into my hands.
“Well,” I said, somewhat stupidly, rubbing my chafed wrists.
He shut the bedside table drawer and he kissed me again, slowly, lingeringly, as if he were trying to speak with his soul through his lips.
“How are you?” he asked when he broke away.
“Good,” I managed, as my brain battled to provide fitting superlatives: amazing, terrifying, awesome, mind-blowing, superb, petrifying.
He kissed me one more time, rested his forehead against mine for a long moment, just breathing, the echoes of pain in his eyes as he held me a little too tightly.
“Go to sleep, Cora,” he said finally, straightening. “We have a busy day tomorrow.”
“Of course,” I said. Impulsively, I slid under the covers. He hadn’t said whether he meant for me to take my bed or his, but I didn’t want to be alone.
He just smiled. “Good night, Cora.” He circled to the other side of the bed and reached next to it, flicking off the lights.
“Good night,” I said aloud.
I love you.
Oh, shit. My eyes were wide in the darkness. Where had that come from? Was it even true? I didn’t know.
I stiffened as I felt him get into the bed next to me. He reached out, found me, and pulled me against his body, his chin resting in my hair.
Did I love him? If so, what did it mean? Not that he gave me pleasure—not that alone. Until that night and his explanation about his struggles, his life, about his lonely vigil as Alys died...I would not have said that I loved him. Wanted him, certainly, needed him, even.
But this was different. It was more. Was it really love? Did it matter?
I wasn’t sure. I was just afraid that he had ruined me—ruined me for anyone else by driving me further into the dark world of his pleasure that no mortal man could give to me. He was marking me as his alone with his body as surely as he had marked me with his blood the day the bond-mark had been made.
Where did it end, this darkness? What were its limits? And did I dare to find out? Did I even want to, or was that a foolish game of moth and flame?
And what about Geoff and my old life—my real life? I didn’t want to let them go, either one. I felt the cage door closing; the arms that gently held me might as well have been iron bands. But I didn’t know if I had the strength or will to leave.
Before it was too late.
The story continues in...
Blood Price
Aethereal Bonds
On Sale August 2014
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Saved from death by the billionaire vampire Dorian Thorne, Cora Shaw is bound to him, body, mind, and soul. She can free herself from his eternal demands—but only by breaking everything that is between them, forever. Never again will she feel what only he can do to her, never again touch him, speak to him, be with him—and never again must she give her blood or fear her will being overcome by his.
It is a decision that can be made only once. Does she want her old life enough to give up Dorian and his new world? Or is the cost of losing him too high?
Even while she hesitates, there are those who wish to take her choices away all over again....
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