He took the sponge from me and started at the nape of my neck and worked his way down. When he finished with the back, he moved to the front even though I’d already washed those parts, I didn’t stop in. Instead I watched a marveled at how someone so strong could be so gentle. He was a walking contradiction. He could be as unyielding as a wall, and then as soft as a caress.
After he finished washing me, he took the shampoo and squirted it into his hand. I knelt down and leaned back letting my auburn curls fan out in the water. He gathered my hair and washed it, massaging my scalp. I relaxed against the edge of the basin and just let him do his thing. I closed my eyes and melted under his touch. Part of me empathized with Abby. How easy this would be, to just allow yourself to be pampered and cared for at the low, low cost of your free will. If I was a different woman, I might have taken that deal, but I wasn’t and there were things I valued more than my comfort, more than my life.
He dipped my head back and rinsed out the shampoo. I stood up noting a lack of towels. “Do you have anything for me to change into?”
He searched around the room and then walked over to a chest pulling out a couple of t-shirts. They were his, so when I put it on, it fit like an over-sized dress, the other I used to dry my wet hair. “Thanks,” I said tossing the damp shirt at his chest.
“If you’d like, I could borrow some of Abby’s clothes for you.”
I grabbed my boots, slipping them back on. “Those scraps of fabric her ‘Master’ forces her to wear. No thank you. I’d rather go naked.”
He gathered up my dirty clothes along with his wet shirt and tossed them all in a crate. “Why do you assume he’s forcing her to wear it? I’m sure if she hated it he’d buy her new things.”
“Because no woman wants to be some man’s sex object. We don’t want men picking our clothes for us or telling us where we can and can’t go. We don’t want to be handled and if Abby has convinced herself she likes any of it, then it’s a survival mechanism her mind created to endure the constant terror she must have been in.”
Max didn’t seem fully convinced. “I’ll admit vampires tend to take things a little too far, but you’re completely ignoring biology. I’ve never met a woman in my life that didn’t enjoy being handled every now and then.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t.”
He took a step towards me with a look in his eyes that made me nervous. “Never?”
But I hid my fear and stared back at him coolly. “Never.”
“Take off the shirt.” There was a strange change in his tone, as if the shirt was coming off no matter what I said or did.
“What?” I asked laughing nervously.
“Take off the shirt. I won’t tell you a third time.”
I slipped the shirt over my head, standing there damn and naked. Maybe it was a personal favorite of his.
“Turn to the wall and press your palms against it and don’t remove them until I tell you that you can.”
“Huh?”
He didn’t repeat himself. He just stared, his eyes burrowing into me. It was like I faced a different man. Like everything I’d deduced about him was wrong. One horrible miscalculation after another.
Panic flooded my senses as I obeyed his order. Had he been any other man I’d be figuring out a way to take him down. But the past couple of days made it abundantly clear that all I could depend on was his mercy. “Please,” I begged.
He stood behind me, kicking my feet apart until I was spread open before him. Oh God, he was going to take me like a dog, rutting me from behind. His fingers wrapped around my neck and he brought my ear to his lips and whispered in a husky voice I didn’t know he had. “I can smell the fear radiating from your skin.”
I was a doe in the grip of a wild beast. The worst part was how stupid I felt. I thought I had him figured out and he’d played me the entire time with that sweet face and those gentle eyes. He was a monster, just like the vampire.
“But I also hear your heart pounding. Your breath hitching. Even though you’re afraid your thighs are parted wider than I pushed them.”
They were parted wider to keep my balance. If he thought I was turned on by this… okay, maybe a little.
“The shock, the fear, the arousal, it all mixes together, doesn’t it? So should I listen to the woman or her pride?” His warm breath brushed my cheek sending shivers through me.
Were these questions rhetorical?
“Kiera, do you want to come?”
Was he serious? My legs spread a little further, my ass raised a bit higher. Yes. I wanted to come. But not like this. I wanted the Max from before. The one that didn’t terrify me.
His hand trailed across my stomach making its way down. “If you don’t answer me, I’ll stop.”
So all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and all this would end? Done deal. “Yes, make me come.” Oh, fuck you mouth. You had one job. One fucking job.
“Good girl.” His condescension irritated me and turned me on at the same time. I had never been so confused in my life. I wanted him to stop. To let me go, for everything to go back to normal, but at the same time I wanted him to keep going.
His fingers found my nub and rubbed it in slow circles with just enough pressure to make me beg for more. “You think I don’t recognize your strength. I do. But even an alpha female bares her neck to her male.”
All thoughts of escape fled my mind. At that moment there was nowhere I’d have rather been. The things his whispered in my ear as he touched me made me want to be his, to be claimed. He could have fucked me in all three holes and I would have loved every minute of it.
My hips rolled against his erection. He still had his shorts on. I wanted him to take them off, I wanted him to fill me. He was bigger than any man I’d ever been with, it’d probably hurt at first, but I was too far gone to care about that. “I’m coming,” I warned.
He sped up, rubbing my clit until the pressure became to much and I exploded, my body racked with the most powerful orgasm I’d ever experienced in my life.
I collapsed to my knees, panting I looked up at him wondering how long before I was ready for round two.
He watched me as he licked his fingers clean. “See. All women like to be handled. Biology.”
His words were a bucket of cold water. None of it was real, just some experiment. Another game to play with his pet human. I’d never been so humiliated in my life. I needed air. To get away from him.
I reached for the t-shirt I’d taken off, but before I could grab it he was behind me with his arms wrapped around my waist. “Don’t be mad.”
Why wouldn’t I be mad? “I’m not a toy.”
“I know. But if I’d just said you were wrong, you wouldn’t believe me. I had to show you.”
“You think you know more about me than I know about myself?”
“Well no, but some things are universal.”
“Yeah, they are.” Or at least I hoped they were. I slammed my heel into his bare foot with all the force I could muster. I heard the bone break and he released me from his grasp.
I turned and kneed him in the nads so hard that even I felt pain and he crumpled to the ground. Yep, some things were universal. “Biology,” I snarked as I ran from the cave to freedom.
CHAPTER 5
A drenaline coursed through my veins as I ran from the cave. I was butt naked and my right leg was already starting to ache from the force with which I kneed him, but I couldn’t have been happier. He misjudged me. Underestimated me. And he paid for it, dearly.
I ran and ran with little thought about where I was going. I had a general plan, slay the dragon and save the princess, but there was a big question mark in the middle of that plan. How do you kill a vampire? Well the first step was not getting caught. Max had all the advantages. He was stronger, faster and he knew the terrain. The only thing I had on him was that I wanted more. Capturing me was something he had to do, but freeing myself and Abby was the difference between life and death for me
.
I continued to run until I came upon a ravine. I stood in the running water and use mud from the banks to cover my scent. I used every strategy I could think of to hide from an animal. But that wasn’t enough because not only did Max have the ability to hunt me down like an animal he had the ability to reason like a man. I crisscrossed over my own tracks hoping that he couldn’t follow me that way. It was too risky to start a fire so I would have to find some other way to eat. I managed to stay hidden for an entire day before that became an issue.
When it did I lifted a large rock and tried not to groan at what was underneath. As I grabbed a handful of grubs I reminded myself that this was a matter of survival and that I was a big girl. I close my eyes and shove the insects into my mouth and tried not to gag. It wasn’t the taste, which was horrible. The part that was unbearable was the feeling of them moving around in my mouth. At that moment enslavement, at least if it involved coffee, didn’t seem so bad.
As I stayed on the move I began to learn the island. Sometimes I could fill Max in the distance searching for me. But somehow I managed to elude him. Something I learned from Max was that sunlight killed the vampire, so all I had to do was find where Julian slept and introduced him to the midday sun. But that was not as easy as it sounded. I was sure that there were multiple protections put in place to stop me. Not to mention if Max couldn’t find me on the island the best place to look for me would be at Julian’s because we both knew that that was where I needed to go before I could leave the island. And even if I succeeded I wasn’t sure how Abby and I would get off the island after Julian was dead. Max might just let us go or he might kill us for destroying his king.
I found a long branch that would serve as a staff. I used a rock to sharpen one individual point. I may not have been the strongest them or as fast as them but at least I had a weapon now. Oddly enough that gave me more comfort than I’d like to admit. In order to avoid Max, I constantly stayed on the move. And when I became so exhausted I was on the verge of dropping, I climbed up a tree and would sleep on one of the large branches. I was turning totally fucking Tarzan in these woods.
After a couple of days and hiding, I was ready to try my plan. I crept towards the main house, listening for the slightest rustle of the leaves. And I heard it, just in time to turn and see Max transforming back into a human as he pounced on me. I hit the ground with a thud. His eyes were filled with absolute glee. “I found you!”
I struggled underneath them. “Get the hell off me!”
“How did you evade me for over two days?” Because he had just shifted he was completely naked and It wasn’t just his tone that indicated he was happy to see me.
“I thought you found nudity sexually neutral.” I squirmed underneath him rubbing his erection even more.
There was a dark glint in his eyes. “You ran from me. You never run from a wolf unless you hope to be chased. Two days I’ve thought of nothing but you, trying to pick up your scent in the wind. That was your plan, wasn’t it? To drive me mad. Another punishment for upsetting you?”
Oh hell no, that hadn’t been my intention at all, but it was easy to understand how hunting me might have this effect on him. I was too embarrassed to admit that I misjudged his reaction to my escape and pretended his infatuation was all part of my carefully sculpted plan. “What you did to me in the cave was wrong.”
“Yes, I know. And I am so sorry. I promise, I won’t do anything like that again. But I do have to ask, if it made you that upset, then why didn’t you tell me to stop.”
Ugh, why did he make me have to think about things like that? And even worse the truth was so disgusting I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. But those big green eyes kept boring into me And I knew they wouldn’t stop until I said something. “Because it was you,” I mumbled.
The look of utter satisfaction on his face made me want to knee him in the nads again.
And then we had a moment where time stopped and birds sing and flowers bloomed and I knew he was going to kiss me and I didn’t have a problem with that. With my eyes half closed and my lips puckered, I waited for his mouth to reach mine. The right before he could kiss me a bloodcurdling scream came from the house. He immediately sprung into action, running inside. And I was right behind him.
CHAPTER 6
I knew that voice from anywhere. Abby.
I rushed through the open doorway. A headless body in medieval fantasy garb lay in the middle of the room. A few feet away was a dagger covered in blood. Did Julian manage to behead him with a knife? That seemed a bit messy.
It wasn’t until the gleam of the sword caught my eye that I realize that’s what had beheaded the man. So that meant that the blood on the dagger could belong to anyone. The man, Julian or… Abby.
I ran past the body calling out her name. I didn’t have to get far to find her. Julian sat on the living room floor with Abby curled up in his arms. Her silky lace undergarments were drenched in blood. A line of blood that started at her neck. She drank from his open wrist and I knew that was the only reason she was still alive. Whatever had happened in that house had almost cost me my best friend.
Suddenly, everything else became small. What was the point of escape if some theme park wannabe managed to kill my best friend? “Who was he? What did he want?”
Julian looked up at me and stated flatly, “Me. Dead.”
So this was about Julian, and yet it was Abby who had almost died. She had no business in this world. It was too dangerous. I had to get her out. I had to get us both out.
“Did you see what he was wearing? He’s one of your subjects.” Max paced the floor with his broad shoulders hunched. It was like he couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at.
“I have to go back there. I have to find out who sent him and why.”
“Believe me, I want to know who’s behind this, so I can tear out the spine and show it to them. But I can’t send you. I need you here guarding Keira. I’ll have to send some of the other men.”
Max slammed the side table in frustration. “None of them are as good as me. You need me on this and you know it. Find someone else to babysit your human.”
Babysit? How dare he talk about me that way. From the looks of it, this was an investigation which made me ten times more qualified to go than he was. Wait. That actually made sense. “Why don’t I go with him?”
All three of them stared at me as if I had just suggested the moon was made pizza.
“How do I know you won’t go running off at the first opportunity?” Julian asked.
“I thought you were a mind reader. If you can see into my head than just look for the answer. I think if anything, it’s become abundantly clear that if I tell people what you are that not only am I putting myself and Abby in danger, I’m putting the whole world in danger. So believe me when I say your little secret safe with me. But what just happened… Abby got caught in the crossfire and that can’t happen again, so if we need to take down some guy trying to kill you as much as I support the spirit of his plan I have serious issues with execution.”
Julian’s eyes narrowed and I could almost feel him looking into my mind. I knew exactly what he would find. He’d see that I was telling the truth, that there was no way I would reveal their secret.
With Abby fully healed Julian rose off the floor and helped her to her feet. He turned to Max. “She’s telling the truth, she won’t reveal her secrets. She does still fully intend to kill me, however she would do anything to protect Abby including stopping my would-be assassin. You should take her with you to our realm. She could be of help to you. But most importantly, she can’t wreck anything over there.”
Abby looked so fragile, her blood-soaked silk clinging to her small frame. I had to protect her.
I folded my arms looking between Julian and Max. “I’m going to need my weapons back.”
CHAPTER 7
M ax called for a witch to be brought to the island to open a portal for us. That gave me time to take a long need
ed shower. I’d become far too comfortable walking around in nothing but mud.
During my time in hiding, Abby had retrieved my clothes from the cave and washed them. Wearing nothing but mud had become too easy. When I stepped out of the shower my clean clothes and supplies were waiting for me.
Ever since the attack, Max seemed on edge. As he paced back and forth in the waiting room I decided to distract him while getting some much needed answers.
“In the cave, you were very convincing, even though I knew that wasn’t you.”
He somehow understood what I was driving at and answered my unspoken question. “I used to be with a vampire.”
“What? Are you telling me you tried to seduce me with moves you picked up from your ex-girlfriend? Okay, I changed my mind I seventy percent hated that.”
Julian entered the room and announced, “It’s time.”
We headed outside where a silver haired woman was running her hands over the air. Everywhere she touched, sparks would fly. She moved the sparks in a circle again and again until something new appeared on the other side. Once the portal was stable, she took a step back and gestured for us to go through.
I didn’t know how I’d fair in their realm. I might have been allergic to something or unable to breathe the air. I could think of a thousands things that could be different enough not to bother them but kill me instantly. But Abby was in danger, so I pinched my nose and dived in like it was a swimming pool and I was aiming for the deep end.
Pushing through the portal was like breaking through a membrane. Magic tingled across my skin. When I reach the other side I could sense I was on a different world. The sun had a strange purple hue that reflected eerily on the leaves. The air smelled crisp and clean but also little metallic. I spun around with my arms stretched out and awe of everything around me. “I can’t believe I’m on another planet.”
Moonstruck (Warring Hearts Book 2) Page 3
