by Anthology
“This doesn’t sound like it’s something I want,” I said unsteadily, even as my body was already yearning for it. It wasn’t something that I should want, at least, and playing along with Dorian was all well and good up to the point where it all turned deadly serious. A kind of electric awareness was already running from his hand into the deepest part of me, where it twisted slowly tighter.
“That feeling is the bond in its purest form,” Dorian said quietly. “It is what it is meant to be. But it’s like playing with fire. Raw power, to be treated with respect.” His hand skimmed up to reach my knee. “You need to know what our bond is, everything that it is. You deserve to know that.”
I knew what it was already, I wanted to protest. It was why I was alive and well, not coughing out my last few days, drowning in the fluids of my own lungs. I refused to believe that it was why I loved Dorian, but the bond might be why I couldn’t imagine existence without him. It made every moment apart from him like a dull, old ache and made everything brighter, sharper, more real when I was with him.
“Even so, I cannot insist that you do this,” Dorian continued.
“Why not?” I demanded, my hands balling into fists around the terrycloth of the robe. “You’ve insisted on a lot of things, you know. That I belong to you, forever. That I give you my blood and my body, whenever you want it. However you want it.”
“I haven’t insisted.” Dorian’s voice was subdued in a way that I had never heard before. “I have…informed. It is our natures, yours and mine, that make the requirements, not my demands.”
I wanted to reject what he said. However he phrased it, the reality did not become less stark. But I couldn’t say anything.
“I need your permission for this, Cora,” he said.
I swallowed. “It’s one of your lines, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
I wished that I could see his face, but all I had was his voice beyond the darkness of the blindfold and the feel of his hand on my leg. He seemed to have a thousand rules for himself, for me—to keep me safe, he said.
But if this was playing with fire, how safe could it be?
“If I refuse, the game is over?” I said, trying to joke.
“If you refuse, that game is over, and the other game…resumed. Forever,” he said. “If you refuse, there was no point to this game.”
All night, he had been putting me in positions where I was off-balance, where I was uncertain, to show me that I was different than I believed myself to be…and to show me that I could trust him not to go too far.
But could I? Oh, I wanted to; everything in me wanted to. But I also wanted things, in the darkest moments, that could never be undone. There was a part of me that had wanted my destruction at his hands from the first moment I’d laid eyes on him—part of me that imagined that was what I’d been born for.
If those were my urges, what must his be like? He called me his light. What, then, was his darkness?
“If I can trust you in this,” I heard myself say in the darkness behind my blindfold, “I can’t trust myself. If I can trust you—”
“At this moment, you can,” he said. No, he swore it, with all the fervency I’d ever heard from him.
“Then do it.”
At that, I felt a surge of triumph. No, I realized—the surge was his, but so strong that echoes of it coursed through my body, too, through the bond that tied us together.
He said, “Feel me, then, Cora,” as his hand skimmed up to my thigh.
And then my mind exploded.
5
There was no other word for it. A ripple of awareness came from his hand where it touched my leg, straight up into the deepest part of my center, where it ignited and tore outward, through my body, every nerve impossibly inflamed. Every nerve was screaming, and I could not even say whether it was pain or pleasure. All I knew before my last scrap of self-awareness was shredded into a thousand pieces was that I never wanted it to end. And then…and then there was just sensation. Nothing but sensation, so strong that I had no awareness of where any of it was coming from.
I didn’t know how much time had passed before I realized that my throat hurt as I swallowed—when I realized that I had a throat to swallow. My hands curled around terrycloth—the bathrobe, I realized—and I swallowed again. Champagne. Distantly, my brain recognized the fizzy burn of it going down.
I unclenched my fingers from around the cloth. They hurt. No, they didn’t hurt. They felt like something else, something I had never felt before. Empty. They had been filled up, and now they felt hollow, like something heavy had been drained from them.
I raised my hands to fumble at the blindfold that still covered my eyes, and the champagne was quickly withdrawn from my lips.
“Allow me,” Dorian said.
Dorian. I realized that he had been there, inside the darkness filled with sensation. He had been in the sensation itself. He was the fire to my tinder. He was my completion—and my end.
I dropped my hands and let him work. A moment later, the necktie was pulled from my eyes. I winced at the light, as soft as it was. Everything was somehow both too little and too much.
Dorian was sitting next to me on an ottoman, silhouetted by the fire. My chest felt strange, loose and tight at once. I prodded at my mind tentatively, like one might probe a sore tooth with one’s tongue. It felt…battered, but intact. If I had any correct memory of what it had been like before.
“So,” he said, his face perfectly impassive.
“So,” I returned. Never do that again, I wanted to say. Do it now and never stop….
“Just once,” he said quietly. “Once was enough.”
I nodded as I wrapped the bathrobe around myself again. Yes, once was dangerously enough.
“Others….” I trailed off. “I mean, other agnates….”
He smiled without humor. “Many do not have my restraint. It works for some. For others, though….” He shrugged. “Their cognates do not last long.”
I shuddered. I knew that I wouldn’t. Not with that.
We sat in silence for a long moment, the gas flames of the fireplace dancing among the fake logs. Dorian sat with his hands loosely in his lap, watching me watching the fire, unmoving, looking as unreadable as he ever had. Finally, I reached out for his hand, took it and gave it a small squeeze.
“Had you planned that?” I asked.
“If you are asking whether I had scripted the entire evening, the answer is no,” he said. “If you are asking whether I had planned to show you that specific thing sometime during this trip, well, that answer is yes.”
I nodded, accepting that. Believing him. “Thank you,” I said quietly. “I needed that…to understand.”
“To understand me?” he asked, the faintest ghost of a smile tugging at his lips. “Or to understand yourself?”
“Is ‘yes’ a correct answer?” I asked.
He squeezed my hand in return and bent over to kiss me lightly on the lips.
“Is the game over?” I asked as he pulled back. I didn’t know what I wanted. I could hear the yearning in my voice, but I didn’t know what it meant.
He chuckled. “We have hours left, don’t we? And I have clothes.”
I smiled at him. “So what would I have to do for your vest?”
He got a peculiar look on his face, then laughed and said, “You mean my waistcoat?”
“Waistcoat, vest, whatever,” I said. “It’s next. I want it.” I paused. “Of course, I could cut right to the chase and simply demand your pants.”
“No, that is most definitely cheating,” he said. “Waistcoat must come before pants or shirt. You could ask for the belt, though.”
I gave a slightly unsteady laugh. “I’m not sure I’m up for that.”
“Waistcoat it is, then,” he said. He held up his necktie again in two fingers. “That went rather a different way than how I’d first intended it,” he said. “If you would be so kind as to submit yourself again….”
<
br /> The teasing light of challenge was back in his icy blue eyes, though they were still haunted by what had passed between us.
I didn’t know, even now, how far I could trust him. I didn’t know how far he would take me except that it was beyond the bounds I would choose for myself. But at that moment, I trusted him in this—either despite what he’d just shown me or because of it, I wasn’t entirely sure which, or whether it could, paradoxically, be both.
“As you wish, my lord,” I said. I’d meant the words to be flippant, but somehow, what would have been a joke, even a mockery if I’d said it to anyone else became deadly serious when it came to him.
His gaze pierced me as only it could, and he bent again to kiss my lips; this time, there was nothing light about it. His hand caught behind my neck, cradling me as his tongue entered at my urging, stroking, tasting, taking until my head was full of him.
Then he wrapped the tie around my eyes again, so swiftly that I hardly had time to react.
No! The word almost bubbled out of my throat in a sudden panic at the memory of what had happened last time. But I swallowed it back, swallowed it down with the fear that I knew would always be a part of being with Dorian.
For a long moment after, there was nothing—no sound that my straining ears caught, no touch, no light, of course, through the tie that bound my eyes. I lay there, my body strung tight, waiting for something, anything.
And then it came, the gentlest of touches on my right foot. Dorian grasped it more firmly, and then his hands were working against the flesh, into the muscles. I smiled with relief.
“Do you remember this?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” I said. On our first real night together, he had started at my feet and finished…I shivered at the memory.
“Good,” he said, his mouth so close to the arch of my foot that I could feel the heat of his breath and the buzz of his voice against it.
“It was only a week ago,” I protested faintly.
He kissed my instep slowly, deliberately. “It’s been a very busy week.”
Busy. That was certainly one word for it.
His mouth was already moving up to my ankle.
“You seem to be in a bit more of a hurry this evening.” I tried to make it an arch observation, but there was a breathiness to my words that I wasn’t able to fully control.
“There are more courses tonight,” he chided. “You should expect the servings to be smaller.”
I giggled at that, more than half out of nervousness. “So far, at least, the only thing being served is me.”
“And you mind?” he murmured as he worked up my calf.
I shivered slightly as he worked against the back of first one knee and then the other. “I didn’t say that,” I said.
“Good,” he shot back as he made a trail of light kisses up the inside of my thigh. “Because there’s going to be a lot more of this before the end. And do be a good girl and be quiet now.”
I drew in an offended breath, only to be cut off by his rich, dark chuckle.
“Or else amuse me and just try to talk.” And with that, he kissed me with absolute precision on my swollen and aching clit.
I managed no more than a strangled noise before his hands took me behind the knees and pushed my thighs apart so hard that I gasped and curled my hands into fists in the terrycloth. His mouth was gentle, thorough, and utterly merciless as he worked it between my folds, sliding his tongue into me, the burning in my thighs intensifying with every wicked stroke of his tongue.
“I could just—” I managed before a shuddering reaction swept through me, taking the words with it.
In reply, his left hand slid up my thigh, and his fingers dipped deep into me as he sucked against my clit until tiny, individual spasms rocked though my body, so hard they almost hurt. After a moment, he lifted his head and let go of me, and I heard his clothing rustle as he shifted positions.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, my nerves jangling with half-fulfilled arousal.
“Having a conversation,” he said. “Because you wanted to talk to me so badly.” My feet were still hitched up near my backside, my knees in the air, and I felt fabric against the sides of my legs and pressure with them. What on earth was he doing? Were those his arms, pushing my legs apart? The fabric was wrong.
“Your pants,” I said suddenly.
“Pardon me?” he asked.
“Those are your pants that I feel against my legs,” I said. I tried to figure out what he must be doing. His voice was still at the other end of my body….
“Astute observation,” he said, and the pressure on my knees increased.
He had to be sitting between my feet, I realized. To test my theory, I moved them slightly to the center—but that proved to be a mistake, for in so doing, I angled them and lost my purchase on the fabric of the robe, allowing him to press them out several inches farther.
I hissed with the pain—but my suspicions were confirmed, for the soles of my feet came up against was what most definitely Dorian’s well-shaped ass in his perfectly tailored dress pants.
So he was sitting between my feet, his own feet hooked over my legs and up near my hips, using the leverage of his legs to push my knees outward…but why?
“I thought you would have more to say now,” Dorian said. “Since you seemed to be so determined to speak before.” His hands grasped my ribs and then skimmed down across my waist to rest on my hips.
I tried to remember what it was that I’d wanted to say, but his hands were distracting me.
“They’re free,” I blurted.
“What?” Dorian asked, going suddenly still.
“Your hands,” I said. “They’re free.”
He chuckled again. “Very astute, Cora, but not exactly what you appeared so eager to discuss before.” One of his hands skimmed over and found my clit to roll it in his fingers. “Was it?” he asked.
“I think…” I said breathily, trying to do just that. “I think that I was going to call you a name.”
“And why would you want to do that?” He trailed a finger of his other hand lightly against the crease of my thigh.
“I’m trying to remember,” I said.
On its way back up, the finger wandered slightly inward, and I shivered.
“You really can’t think of a reason?” Dorian asked. “Perhaps I need to give you another one.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said, because now his finger had worked its way over so that it was resting lightly, teasingly, right at my entrance. “I remember.”
“Tell me, then,” he ordered as he began to press with excruciating slowness inside.
“It’s because you told me to be quiet,” I said all in a rush. “Like a good girl.”
He chuckled, and I realized then that he’d done it to get exactly the reaction I had given him. “I’m not telling you to be quiet now, am I?”
I didn’t answer immediately, for my attention was caught by the second finger sliding in beside the first. But he halted, and I realized that he would do nothing more until he got an answer.
“No,” I said.
He began moving his hands again.
“You bastard,” I added with feeling. “What do you want me to do, recite the alphabet?”
He laughed wickedly. “Whatever you’re inspired to do, my dear. You were so irritated when I told you not to speak, so here I am, indulging you.”
“You can’t possibly…” I lost the thread of what I was saying as he began to slowly slide his fingers in and out. He began to stop, and with a shake of my head, I tried it again. “You can’t expect me to talk while I’m…you know.”
“Coming?” he suggested. “In the throes of a climax? An orgasm? Le petit mort?”
“Loo-what?” I said, trying to keep my head clear.
“Le petit mort,” he said. “It’s French for ‘the little death.’”
“How romantic,” I managed. “I took Spanish. And I don’t remember any of it.”
&nb
sp; He chuckled. “Mine is, I’m afraid, a few centuries out of date.”
He curled his fingers up against the sensitive place, and I shivered.
“This is terrible pillow talk,” I said in a strained voice.
“Better than you insulting me,” he shot back, increasing the pressure on my thighs as his hands sent a deep shudder into my body.
Oh, I was going to pay for that, was I? Then so was he. How, exactly, I hadn’t quite figured out.
I concentrated every fiber of my being on saying the next words in the most neutral tone of voice I could manage. “I think I’ve put up with enough to get your vest or your waistcoat or whatever.” On the last word, he sent another delicious shiver of reaction through my body, and the pitch rose out of my control.
“You’re bored, then, are you?”
I clamped down on it with all that I had and managed to get the next few words out in a single rush: “It’s not exactly my favorite way to spend an evening.”
“Well, then,” he said, “I am most certainly getting mixed signals.”
With that, he altered his rhythm and sent me effortlessly up to a peak so abrupt that it snatched the air from my lungs, shattering my weak attempt at a witty reply. It was all I could do to clamp down on the cry that tried to escape from my throat. I fought against the orgasm, trying to push it down, but he only intensified his torture, and the heat came rushing out of my center to pulse in my ears and behind my eyes until my world was full of white light and the sound of my own breath and my thrumming heartbeat. He held me there until I gave up my fight with a cry and surrendered to it. When it finally subsided, the first thing I heard from the outer world was his chuckle again as he pulled away, leaving me limp and panting.
“If that was boredom, I’d love to see you interested in something.”
“Maybe…” I panted, tugging at the loops of the blindfold. “Maybe if you give me your damned waistcoat, you’ll find out.”
There was a stirring, and the pressure on my legs released. I groaned as I straightened them. I felt something drop onto my chest, and I blinked my eyes as the necktie cleared them.
