Chapter Thirteen
WINTER SURGED FROM her chair and staggered the dozen or so paces that bought her, almost blindly, to Sebastian’s first class suite. She clutched the opening.
Both men were hunched over, heads together. Now they looked up, surprised.
“You should know,” she said, her whole body shaking, “that there is a weird sound dynamic in here, and I just heard everything you said about me.”
Nial sat back, his chest rising and falling as he drew a deep breath.
Sebastian closed his eyes briefly and stood up. “Winter…”
She shook her head. “Nial’s right. You should have just asked, Sebastian. I would have said yes.” Her voice shook. “All those men in my bed. Know why they were there?”
He pushed a hand through his hair. “Winter…”
“Because you weren’t, and I had to watch you with all those other people, night after night.”
He licked his lips. “Would you have said yes to—” and he stopped.
“To a vampire, Sebastian?” Nial finished.
Sebastian turned his head away, but not before Winter saw pain fill his eyes.
“You’re the only one who couldn’t live with being a vampire, Sebastian,” Nial added. “Your humanity comes with quite a price tag, doesn’t it?”
“Shut up, Nial,” Winter told him.
He shook his head. “My apologies,” he replied. “But there have been many long days and nights spent listening to Sebastian rail at me for giving him immortality. I couldn’t help hitting back for one small moment. I have my weaknesses.”
“You do,” Winter agreed coolly. “Like never dating humans.”
The tiny furrow between his brows appeared. “I’ve never—”
“Yes, you did say that, Nial. You told me you don’t date humans when we were in Ireland. You were distracted and worried about Sebastian, so I’m sure it slipped out without thought and it’s therefore a basic truth. But you’ve got a slippery mind, so what you define as human and “dating” is open to interpretation. Me, for instance. I’m mortal. Am I human?”
Sebastian leaned an elbow on the top of the suite divider. “She’s right. And you’re surprisingly exclusive, too. No bed hopping, that I recall.”
Nial’s furrow deepened even further. “And this has what to do with anything?”
Winter crossed her arms. “If you dare to presume something about me so casually, Nial, such that I’m mortal and soon gone and that Sebastian will run back to you after that, then you can damn well sit still while we dissect your life, too. If I can stand it so can you.” She could feel her eyes burning with tears and hated the female weakness for crying right then. Even her voice was wobbling and giving her away.
Nial didn’t move from the chair. “If you presume to eavesdrop, then get it right, Winter. I wasn’t speaking about you.”
“You might as well have been.”
His hand curled over the arm of the chair and his jaw rippled. “I don’t consider you human. Not exactly.”
“But I am,” Sebastian pointed out. “And just like Winter, I’m going to shuffle off this mortal coil in sixty or so years if a bus doesn’t get me first. I think that’s something you’ve forgotten, Nial.”
Nial turned his gaze out the window. “Yes,” he said flatly. “It’s something I keep forgetting.”
Sebastian tugged on Winter’s elbow. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. Let’s leave him to sulk.”
He pushed her gently down the aisle toward the nose of the plane where the bar was located.
“I don’t really want a drink,” she protested.
“Then drink ginger ale,” he told her. “Leave Nial to sort it out for himself,” he advised. “Trust me.” He poured himself a whiskey and after checking with her, a glass of vintage red wine for her. They found a pair of seats by the window that were empty and settled in them.
“Sláinte,” Sebastian said and drank.
“And that means?”
“’Cheers,’ basically.” He grinned.
She smiled and sipped her wine. Then she gasped. “Oh lord.” She grimaced and looked at him. “That first feeding in New York. It takes on an entirely new meaning now. If you loved me even then…”
Sebastian lowered his glass, his smile fading. “Don’t feel too guilty, Winter. I haven’t been behaving very well through all this, either. Nial has a point. I could have handled it much better if I’d been straight with you.”
“Like I was with you by telling you about my talent?”
A shadow passed over his face. “You need to be careful, Winter. There are already many vampires who do not think of you as a person. Those who think of humans merely as food they must parade amongst on a daily basis and be careful not to alarm unless they startle the herd. If you can make vampires human again, there will be even more among the undead who will think of you as the answer to their prayers and will not care what you think about the matter. They will make you their slave and use your talent for their own gains.”
“You sound like every cliché in every bad B-grade movie ever made, Sebastian.” But Winter couldn’t laugh at his expression.
He shook his head. “It’s not a joke, Winter. Nial’s been treading soft around you because he knew I probably filled you full of warnings about him and vampires in general and he didn’t want to send you running. And Nial’s one of the good guys.” He put his glass down. “This is going to sound weird, Winter. You have to watch Nial, but at the same time, you can trust him.”
“That is weird. How can you trust and not trust someone at the same time? And how can you of all people say that?”
“Because I know him best,” Sebastian said simply. “I know his intentions now. But I also know the power circles he moves in. They’re scary. I don’t—” He looked away for a moment, then brought his gaze back firmly onto her face. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”
For something to scare Sebastian, it had to be terrible indeed. Winter nodded. “I’ll be careful. But won’t you be in on this job until the bitter end, Sebastian?”
He hesitated. “Yes. I will. But that doesn’t mean I will be joined at the hip with you. You have to watch your back. Promise me?”
“You’re mortal now,” she pointed out. “I’ll watch my back and yours, if you’ll do the same for me. I don’t want to repeat Singapore, Sebastian. I really don’t want to have to put your heart back together again a second time.”
His gaze was direct, his eyes locked on hers. “Stop breaking it, then,” he replied softly.
The air between them shifted and became still, thick and sludgy with energy and heat. Winter drew in a slow, miasmic breath and could feel it sizzle as she drew it into her lungs.
Her heart was scudding along.
All she could seem to focus on were Sebastian’s eyes. And his voice played on her mind. Falling in love with Winter was the easy part. It was the being in love with her that killed me. All those endless men. One after another, after another. So I fucked men, women, endless, faceless hoards of them, to try to drive her and the men in her bed from my mind.
And the images of Sebastian and the faceless hoards he had entertained over the years flittered through her mind as he stared into her eyes.
Her body didn’t just throb, it was a hard, painful knot of need. If he touched her she thought she might just explode. She was surprised he couldn’t feel the heat of her arousal from where they sat.
Winter sat very still, trying very hard not to signal by so much as a millimeter anything of her need.
“I like you as a redhead.” Sebastian’s voice was hoarse, thick with desire.
“It goes with your eyes,” she replied.
“Sorry about that, but I like my eyes on you, too. You make them look much nicer, somehow.”
“It’s called makeup.”
“Should be outlawed,” he whispered.
“In some countries, it is.” Her own voice wasn’t much above a whisper, either.
Her mind connected up odd free associations and she remembered, abruptly, that on many jobs, she had stripped down naked in front of Sebastian to change into other clothes, costumes or special clothing or outerwear for the next stage. It had never occurred to her that he might mind, or that he would find it a burden, or that he had anything other than a professional interest in her. He’d been that good in covering up.
“You’re blushing,” Sebastian murmured. “I’ve never seen you do that until today when Nial made you do it. Why now? Why for me?”
Her body seemed to crank up that much more tighter at the way his accent caressed the two little words ‘for me’. Winter drew in another shuddering breath of the miasmic air between them. “All those times we stripped down for a job… Have you stored up those memories, Sebastian? Are you using them for fantasy material?”
His eyes widened and his lips parted in surprise. He hesitated. Then: “Are you?” he asked, his voice low. His knuckles on the hand holding the armrest between them were white.
A hand came to rest lightly on her shoulder and if she hadn’t been on high alert already, Winter might have jumped. As it was she twisted her head sideways and up to smile at Nial, feeling like a mechanical doll.
“My apologies to you both,” Nial said. “I was grumpy and out of line. What I said was unforgiveable, but I hope you will forgive me anyway.”
He had placed his hand on her shoulder so that she could read his sincerity for herself.
“I’ll forgive you if your brooding is over and done with,” Sebastian said, straightening up in his chair and facing Nial.
Nial lifted a brow. “I have come to some conclusions, yes.”
“Care to share?” Winter asked.
“He won’t,” Sebastian told her.
Nial smiled. “We seemed to be in uncharted waters. New rules have to be made. The old ones no longer serve. So I’ve made some new rules.”
“Very obscure,” Winter groused.
“I shared,” Nial pointed out.
“I warned you,” Sebastian said.
Nial picked up Winter’s hand. “May I speak to you for a moment?”
“Of course.” She glanced at Sebastian. “Excuse me.”
He held up his glass. “This is fine Irish stuff. I’ll stay right here.”
Nial held her hand as he led her back to his suite and she could feel pulsing waves of erotic excitement through his touch. As her own body had barely subsided from the hard pressure of Sebastian’s gaze, she responded to Nial’s touch with a silent moan.
He backed into his suite, drawing her in and shutting the doors behind her. There was a glint in his eyes that made her shiver.
“Nial…”
He plunged his hands into her hair and pressed his mouth against hers, his tongue pushing inside. This time, not to taste, but to invade softly and sweetly. She moaned and melted against him, unable to help the feminine surrender.
His lips travelled down her throat as his hands travelled down her back, unhooking her bra through her camisole and removing her bra and jacket, before trailing down to the hem of her skirt.
“Your hair is getting longer and thicker,” Nial murmured, his voice thick with arousal. “Very sexy.”
“What?” Startled, she blinked, trying to feel for herself.
“It’s down to your hips now. I don’t mind a bit, by the way.” He smiled.
“I’m not doing it,” she said.
“A reaction to good sex?” He reached under her skirt and tugged at her panties. “I’ll have it under your derriere by the end of the week, in that case. Come here.” He cupped her ass under the skirt and touched her forehead with his. Their hips bumped and between them she could feel his cock, heavy and thick, throbbing with promise.
His blue eyes gazed into hers. “It was not my imagination, was it? The sexual tension between you and Sebastian just then was enough that if I had been even more circumspect in my approach you would have jumped like startled rabbits.”
Winter drew in a shaky breath. “Nial, it wasn’t what you think.”
“You don’t know what I am thinking,” Nial replied.
She licked her lips. Her heart was thundering now.
“Sebastian has always wanted you. You have always wanted him. Did you talk about that?”
She shook her head.
“He had an erection he was doing his best to hide from me. Something had him powerfully aroused. What was it, Winter? Tell me.” Nial nuzzled the nape of her neck, licking and sliding his tongue over her flesh, making her shiver. His teeth snagged the strap of her camisole, pulling it off her shoulder. The camisole sagged, almost exposing her breast on that side.
“Tell me what you were talking about, you and Sebastian,” Nial coaxed, and began to nibble and lick his way down toward the point of her breast, nudging the camisole out of the way as he went.
Winter clutched at his head, her eyes closing, anticipating that exquisite moment when Nial’s mouth and teeth would close around her nipple and tug…but the moment didn’t come.
She opened her eyes. Nial was staring at her. “Tell me,” he murmured, his damp forefinger running in little circles around her nipple, but not touching it.
“Nial, people can hear,” she pleaded.
“I don’t care.” He lifted her foot to the seat of the chair and slid his other fingers along the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, to flutter at the opening of her pussy and the delicate folds of flesh lying over her clit. Winter gasped.
“Tell me,” Nial crooned. “What made that delicious tension between you?”
Winter let her eyes close as her body writhed and twisted, wishing the torture would end. “Fantasies,” she breathed.
“Each others?” Nial clarified, his fingers closing about her nipple.
“About each other…from when we worked together and didn’t know…” She moaned as his fingers slipped inside her vagina.
“Didn’t know…?” he prompted
“Didn’t know how we felt about each other.”
“You were trading stories?”
“I wanted to know…if Sebastian used memories of those times as material for fantasies.”
“Ah…an understandable concern. But why the tension?”
And finally Nial’s lips closed around her nipple and tugged. Winter moaned hard and concentrated on her fast building orgasm. It shattered over her, but before she could so much as draw breath to recover, Nial lifted her and pinned her back against the curved wall of the plane. His blue eyes drilled into her as he quickly opened his trousers and his cock sprang free.
He lifted her thighs and thrust into her with a deep stroke that made her body ripple with joy.
“Sebastian wanted to know if you fantasize about him, didn’t he?” Nial asked, his voice thick with lust. He slid into her again with slow control, making her shudder around him.
“Yes.” She whispered it.
“Do you?” His blue eyes blazed with hot passion as he thrust his cock back into her a third time.
“Nial…”
“I know you do,” he told her. “I know you spent two years fucking other men and pretending they were Bastian. Honesty, Winter.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you do that with me?”
“No.”
He came with a deep, low almost inaudible cry and it set off her own stunning climax, one that caught her by surprise because she hadn’t thought she was even close to coming. Nial’s orgasm sounded almost victorious. And as he lowered her to the floor once more he kissed her. Hard.
Winter staggered a little.
He was smiling and he brushed her hair from her face with a gentleness he had never used with her before, except when kissing the back of her hand, and that was simply a gesture in her mind. A courtly act made out of habit from an age long gone.
He sat on the chair and set her on his knees, her back against his shoulder, kissed her cheek, then slipped both straps of her camisole down her arms, exposi
ng her breasts.
“I would give rubies to have been there when you told Sebastian you fantasize about him,” Nial said. His fingers trailed over her breasts, teasing softly, with no direct intent. Not yet, anyway. The physical man’s way of doodling. All the tension had gone from his body for now.
“I didn’t tell him,” Winter said, trying to relax despite Nial’s stroking fingertips. “You arrived right at the point where either of us would have said anything revealing or damaging.”
“Perhaps you should,” Nial said. His fingers brushed over her nipples, making her gasp. She wriggled, her body coming alive all over again. She had never had a bed partner who could make her response so quickly the way she did with Nial. She felt sexier, was greedier for sex and responded faster and recovered faster.
Her clit pounded. Winter lifted herself up on the arms of the chair and reached back for Nial’s cock, then slid down onto it, drawing in a slow breath of pleasure as she impaled herself.
“Why should I tell Sebastian?” she breathed. “It’ll just stir up angst and trouble.” She began to rock her pelvis, squeezing her internal sheath around Nial’s shaft, milking it.
He groaned, his hands holding her hips in a fevered grip, directing her movements.
Winter slid her fingers down around her clit and stroked it, softly moaning her rising pleasure.
“Yes, bring yourself around me,” Nial encouraged. “Let me feel it.”
The husky quality of his voice, the raw excitement, was enough to tip her over into a spamming, arching climax that made her buck and the pleasure to fizz and spear through her in shooting sparks. She moaned desperately as her fingers worked her clit.
Her pussy clenched around Nial’s cock and she heard him gasp as the muscled walls of her pussy undulated and coaxed him to a unique climax.
When her heart was once more quiet, Nial lifted her from him and drew her back so her head was resting on his shoulder and her feet were tucked between his thigh and the side of the chair and the arm. The contact allowed her to read him and let him see her face by simply looking down. His arm was around her back, but the other roamed over her, touching here and there where he wished.
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