by Lucinda Dark
Chapter 29
Barbie
This was it. My last chance to back out. His last chance to back out. And he didn’t fucking take it. I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to punch him or ravish him. From the way my body responded, it seemed that the second option was definitely likely. Even before he leaned down and rolled his hips into mine, I knew the fight was over and I couldn’t have been more relieved. I was tired of fighting it, fighting him. This time, when he touched me—when his skin brushed against mine—it didn’t hurt. Instead, it chased the pain away.
I cupped the back of his head and drew him down to my mouth once more. This kiss was different than the first in that it wasn’t quite as damaging—it wasn’t hard, but flexible. His hands burned illicit paths down my body. I didn’t know how my clothes had been changed, but I didn’t care. I was grateful. The ease with which he’d taken the shirt from my body earlier left me wet and panting. I wanted more of him, over me, around and surrounding, and inside me.
In a burst of speed, I shoved my hips up and spun the two of us until I was over him, my white-blonde hair falling over our faces as I ground myself against the hardness pressing up through his jeans. He groaned, the sound transferring from his mouth to mine when I refused to stop kissing him.
“Maverick…” I whispered his name as I pulled away and reached back. I flicked the hooks of my bra open and let the straps holding it up slide down my arms. One breath. It was gone. Two breaths. His eyes focused on me, dropping first to my chest and then raising back to my face. My heart raced in my chest, pounding out an unsteady rhythm.
“Fuck, Barbie.” Maverick moved up, his mouth seeking my flesh as he kissed a path across my naked collarbone. I closed my eyes and sank my fingers through the short strands of his dark hair. I craved this.
When his mouth found my nipple, I jerked in his arms. He shushed me and flicked his tongue against the tight, turgid peak. My hips swiveled, power rising within me. A bolt of lightning lit me up inside. I arched up and cried out. It was a mixture of intense pleasure and sharp, piercing agony.
“I got you, Princess.” His whispered promise only served to make me burn even hotter. I was wet, soaking the front placket of his pants even through the thin scrap of underwear I wore. Panting, I released his head and pushed him back until his spine hit the mattress. I reached for the button of his jeans. I popped it open and slid the zipper down as he came back up on his elbows, watching me with dark, dangerous eyes.
My hand whispered against his skin inside the waistband of his underwear. Grasping him firmly and feeling the heat of him in my palm, my lips parted. “Barbie, let me—” Maverick reached down and unconsciously, a dark, threatening growl slid up from my throat. He stopped and his eyes widened. I tried to warn him. I wasn’t completely in control anymore. I wanted to do this. He’d ignored every out I’d tried to give him. I would take this. He was mine.
I pumped Maverick’s cock in my grip a few times, loving the velvety feel of him in my hand. I moved down, shifting my hips and reaching up with my other hand to snag the top of his pants, pulling them with me. Maverick helped me, shifting his hips up and down, side to side, until I managed to get both his jeans and his underwear off. I had to let go of him to complete the task, but as soon as I was done, I was back, my hands going to his cock. He threw back his head, groaning as I fisted him and leaned down.
My mouth hovered over the tip. Maverick’s head snapped up, his eyes catching mine as I parted my lips and licked the crown of his shaft, tasting him. A hiss pushed through his gritted teeth, veins popped up as he clenched his hands in the sheets beneath him. This was a new kind of power, one I hadn’t felt my first time. Hell, I hadn’t felt much of anything; I was just drunk and tired and lonely. This was nothing like that. For one thing, as much as I wished we were, we weren’t alone.
Open your mouth and take him inside, Satrina’s voice intruded, urging me. And like a good little demon possessed hunter, I did. I let my eyes slide shut as I descended and sucked Maverick deep into my mouth. I hollowed out my cheeks as I let my tongue trail up and down his shaft.
“Fuck!” Maverick’s hips pumped up as if he couldn’t help himself. Another few inches slid inside. I didn’t mind. He tasted good. So fucking good. Delicious on my tongue. Thick and heady. The taste of all the control I had over him.
Just like that—I shoved Satrina away and once again locked her away. Maverick was mine. Not hers. Mine. Mine. Mine.
“Barbie, oh fuck, Barbie.” My eyes popped open when Maverick’s hands delved into my hair. I looked up at him as I sucked him up and down. I couldn’t quite reach the base, he was far too big for that. “No,” Maverick snapped through gritted teeth, his fingers fisting in my hair as he yanked me up and away. Another snarl ripped from my throat, but Maverick wasn’t stopping me. He shoved me back, his hands coming to my panties. He gripped the sides and yanked them down and off my legs.
The fabric left marks on my pale skin where it had been yanked and stretched too hard. I didn’t care. Mav could bruise me as much as he wanted so long as he never stopped touching me. I looked up as Maverick came down over me after retrieving something from his pants. I turned my head and realized what it was. A condom.
“Last chance,” he said.
“That’s my line,” I countered.
The corner of his mouth lifted, but he nodded and tore the package open. As soon as he had it on, my hands slid up and over his broad shoulders. Sweat slicked against our bodies as my chest rose and fell. Mav reached down and lined up, the head of him against my core. He pushed and my lips parted on a moan. My back arched, my head went back. I was lost as he consumed me.
I thought it was the other way around. I was the one with the demon inside her, but he was different as he thrust forward. He found my hips, his fingers digging into my skin. More bruises. My breath sawed through my lungs, making my chest hurt. My head spun as I gazed up at the ceiling, my vision blurring. He withdrew and thrust forward once more, rocking me across the bed. We weren’t even laying down properly—head to headboard, feet to footboard. Instead, we were sprawled across it and for some reason, that made me laugh.
“Barbie?” He slowed in his movements, his fingers tangling in my hair and pulling my face towards his once more. “Are you okay?”
I chuckled, scraping my nails across the back of his neck, eliciting shivers of desire that rolled through him as his eyes slid shut and he inhaled sharply. “Shut up and fuck me,” I demanded.
“Oh, Barbie.” Mav’s eyes opened and centered on me. His pupils were blown wide, the brown of his irises practically swallowed up. His nostrils flared as his chest eased down and his cock pressed inside, filling me up. My throat tightened. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear you beg like that.”
“I wasn’t beg—” He didn’t let me finish the sentence. Maverick withdrew from me almost completely, and automatically my nails dug into him, trying desperately to pull him back. But I needn’t have worried. The challenge I’d thrown down had more than happily been picked up.
My breath left me on a rush of air as he surged forward. My eyes widened. My mouth opened on a cry as Maverick set a pace I didn’t know how he was able to keep up. He slid in and out of me, moving fast at first and then slowing until tears rose to the corners of my eyes. I spread my legs even wider, hooking them up and over his hips as he drove me into the mattress in sharp, jerky movements.
Pleasure raced through my veins, the molten blood beneath my skin heating and warming me from the inside out. “Mav…” I gasped out his name as I felt something crest within me. A brilliant release barreling me towards the edge of a jagged, rocky cliff. Fragments of myself cracked and shattered against the pressure as Maverick thrust once more and I was ripped from his arms and sent hurdling over the brink.
My body locked up, coiling tightly as the release rushed through me. “Barbie,” I heard his responding groan, but couldn’t find it in myself to answer. My head relaxed against the lumpy mattres
s as my body sagged. All of the power left me in a rapid rush, leaving me altogether feeling both empty and satisfied.
My limbs no longer tingled because of the barely contained demonic power. Instead, they tingled for a completely different reason as I lifted my arm and threaded my fingers through Mav’s short strands as he bowed his head down to my chest and pressed a quick, tired kiss to the upper swell of my breast.
This, I knew, changed everything.
Chapter 30
Torin
There was something inside of me tearing into two separate halves. Two pieces of myself. The vampire and the human sides of who I was were both being split down the middle. In one hand, I held a thin letter sized envelope addressed to me from an unknown address in Rome, Italy. It didn’t matter that I didn’t recognize the address, I knew who it was from. In the other hand, the screen of my cell phone flickered as I tightened my hold on it and reread the message that had come in from Maverick hours ago. I hadn’t seen it until now.
I had a choice to make. Open the envelope and read it or get to Esperanza’s. It wasn’t really a choice at all. I shoved the envelope into the inside pocket of my jacket, stuffed my cell in my pocket, and snatched up the keys to my motorcycle.
It was them. I chose them.
I raced down the nearly abandoned highway and backroads, pushing the little pointer on my speedometer up to a hundred and then past it. Whenever a car popped up in front of me—regardless of whether or not I was flying down a two lane road—I swerved around them and ignored their outraged honks. Faster. Faster. I had to go faster.
If I were human, I might have slowed down. I might have been afraid that one wrong move would land me in the hospital or worse, the grave. But I wasn’t human and I felt no fear except the fear that my father and Barbie both instilled in me. Did he know about her? I wondered. Was it already too late? Had Katalin told him? I wanted to know what the letter said, but at the same time, I was terrified to read it. It was easier to focus on Barbie.
I hoped like hell my father was still ignorant to her existence. Because if not, she was nothing more than a dead girl walking. Once my father had targeted a threat, it was only a matter of time before they were eliminated. And time was something he had in spades.
I should’ve known something would happen sooner or later. The fact that Maverick had given me no details, merely telling me that she was hurt and they were at Esperanza’s, made my gut clench.
Esperanza’s house was lit up from within. The soft glow of yellow light spilling onto her front lawn. I roared up on my motorcycle, stopping behind Maverick’s familiar black truck, and cut the engine. I was at the front door, my fist raised in less time than it took me to swing my leg over the side of the bike. My knuckles rapped on the hardwood and seconds later, Esperanza appeared in the doorway, gesturing me inside.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
“She’s upstairs.” I froze as Maverick’s voice came down from the stairwell along with … something else.
Tilting my head to the side, I inhaled as he cleared the landing and came to stop at the bottom of the staircase, giving me an enigmatic look. Even as I recognized the scent on him, I tried to repel it. Sex. Lust. Arousal. All of it wafted from his skin. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was the second scent that accompanied his, a softer, feminine scent of need and release. Barbie’s scent.
My fists were in his shirt before I knew what I was doing. Red flashed across my vision and when I spoke, my voice wasn’t mine any longer. “What. Have. You. Done?”
Maverick’s eyes widened as his brows drew down low. I didn’t give him a chance to answer me. I couldn’t. Rage spiraled within me. My vampire rushed to the surface, seeking blood. I growled low in my throat as my fangs punched through my gums, slicing through my lower lip as I snarled at him.
“What have you done!” I yelled.
“It was her fucking choice!” he yelled back. “She needed it or she would’ve died.”
I slammed my fist into his face, relishing in the crunch of cartilage as blood poured from his nose and his skull snapped to the side. I pulled back again, my intent clear—bloodlust burned inside me. My vampire demanded vengeance.
Mine, he snarled. And this was no longer the man I’d once considered a friend. I didn’t recognize him any longer. My anger was too strong. All I knew was that he’d touched what was ours.
“That is quite enough,” the sharp voice of Esperanza reprimanded. The world slowed and froze. My muscles clenched and refused to move, no matter that my enemy’s face was inches from my fist.
Maverick looked back at me, his own anger reflected in the darkest depths of his eyes. I saw it coming before he even did it. As frozen as I was with Esperanza’s thick chains of magic roped around me, I could do nothing to stop it. He reared back and punched me across the jaw. Pain lanced through my skull as my head was forced to the side.
“I said that is enough!” Esperanza’s meager fist appeared between us, her fingers slightly gnarled with her age. She shoved Maverick back a step and another snarl rumbled up from my chest. “If I have to stick a hex on you, Torin Priest, I will not be pleased,” she warned.
“You would do well to be thankful to the woman who saved your life,” I growled at Maverick as he shook out his fist. I was pleased to see that his knuckles were already red and would most likely bruise. I, on the other hand, already felt the tingle of my healing abilities rushing to correct the damage done to my skin. The pain of his fist was fleeting. Though the pain of his betrayal would haunt me for eons to come. “How could you?”
Maverick blinked at the words as they rasped from my throat. With Esperanza’s expertise, I felt the struggles of my vampire subdued under her bindings. And though it felt like I was choking with each breath I inhaled, that was nothing like looking at the man I’d protected. The one I’d thought of as my brother. He wasn’t the only one, I knew, who should be thankful to Esperanza. Had she not stopped me, I would have killed him.
“Torin…” Maverick gritted his teeth and looked down for a brief moment before he looked back at me. “I’m sorry. I fucking am, but she was hurting. She was dying. She needed it.”
“You enjoyed it,” I spat back.
“I can’t deny that,” he said. “But you can’t say if you weren’t in my situation you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”
“It’s different,” I said. “She’s my vampire’s mate.”
“What?” The corners of his mouth turned down as his eyebrows pulled together. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Esperanza answered, “that Torin’s vampire has chosen her as his eternal love. He will not be able to love another, even if she were to die. A vampire mate is quite rare and gives a vampire an extra boost of power as well as a weakness. Vampires who find their mates often experience high emotional activity as well as the introduction of special abilities.” Esperanza turned her cloudy gaze my way and for a moment, I felt her magic hum beneath my skin, searching. I allowed it. I, too, was curious as to what she would find. “I see nothing that has developed thus far save for the heightened potency of your current abilities,” she said.
Maverick looked from Esperanza and back to me. “Wait,” he said, shaking his head even as he reached up and wiped the blood from beneath his nose. He winced as his fingers touched his face. “Barbie’s your vampire’s mate and that means … what? That you’re fucking bound to her or something?”
I nodded, not surprised that I was beginning to retain the use of my limbs. In the next instant, I felt my body sag as Esperanza’s magic left me completely. “She is mine and I am hers. Forever.”
“Or as long as a dhampire lives, right?”
The three of us looked up as a hard feminine voice spoke from above us. Barbie descended the stairs dressed in a t-shirt that reeked of sex. I had to shove back my snarl of denial. Even after what I knew she’d done with Maverick, however, she was beautiful to me. Her skin practically hummed with vitality. No, it was someth
ing else. Power. Her eyes were sharp. I hadn’t even realized it until that moment, but the strain and stress had pulled at her skin before—sunken in her eyes, curled premature wrinkles into her brow and around her lips. Those markings were gone. She looked good—no, better than good. She looked positively delicious.
Chapter 31
Barbie
She is mine and I am hers. Forever.
I didn’t show the effect Torin’s words had on me as I descended the staircase. My thighs were sore and I didn’t show that either. Two sets of eyes, one an intensely rich brown and the other a violent red that slowly dimmed down into a somewhat luminescent hazel green, bored into me.
“Well?” I prompted as I stepped off the last stair and crossed my arms over my chest between the two of them. Maverick looked rough, his gaze glittering dangerously above a bruised and bloodied nose. I looked to Torin, irritation forming even as my stomach tightened with attraction. I couldn’t help but remember the last time I’d seen him. Standing before him was like standing in the path of a high-speed train just before it ran me down. I tried as hard as I could to remain calm and to keep the truth from being revealed, but as Torin closed his eyes and inhaled deeply—causing a responding shiver to pass through me—I knew I’d failed. I was attracted to him, and that fact wasn’t a secret. This, however, was all my own attraction—none of it was based on my demon. She had been firmly locked away for the time being and the consequences of using her powers purged from my system thanks to Maverick.
“You’re my mate,” Torin finally said.
“You’ve called me that before,” I replied. “Or at least, your vampire has. What does that entail exactly?” My fingers clenched against my elbows and I held them against me as Torin took a step closer.
“It means,” he began, “that I cannot and will not love another. You’re it for me, Barbie. My vampire has chosen you and so have I.”
