by V M Black
He certainly seemed like magic to me so far. What else could explain the hold he had over me? But I said nothing.
“Take this.” He pressed the laden plate into my hands, and reflexively, I accepted it. “Sit. Eat. My medical staff plumped you up on a feeding tube until you began to come out of your coma, but you will feel better with some real food in you.”
I doubted it, and it occurred to me belatedly that I should be offended that he had chosen the food for me. But I said nothing, instead picking one of the two place settings laid out in front of an array of water-beaded goblets.
Dorian took a second plate and began to fill it—for himself, I realized.
“You ate dinner at the restaurant, too,” I observed tentatively.
He closed a chafing dish with a clang. “We need to eat less than humans, as our metabolism is much slower and our resulting body temperature considerably lower, but we are like all creatures—if we don’t eat and drink, we will die.”
“Right. Not undead,” I muttered, feeling a little stupid. He was so much like a man and yet so inhuman that it was difficult to know how to react to him. I couldn’t imagine the dissonance it must create for those who worked for him. “Does your staff know?”
“About my nature? Of course. They have been with me for a very long time and are completely loyal,” he said, tossing off the statement as if it were painfully self-evident.
“Because of what you are,” I said, not bothering to hide my disapproval. “Because they don’t have a choice.”
“That is a part of it,” he acknowledged, adding an elegantly loaded slice of bruschetta to his plate.
I shuddered. “Don’t you have any shame? People aren’t your toys to manipulate into doing your bidding.”
He turned on me then, so swiftly that I jerked back in my chair. His plate was on the table, and he was standing over me without seeming to have moved through the space between us. The edges of his presence bled into the air around him, pushing through his veneer of humanity.
“Don’t you dare,” he ground out, standing over me. “You, of all people, know better than that, know the lines I have drawn that I will not cross.”
My heart raced. I gripped the arms of the chair so hard that I thought my fingers must break. I didn’t know whether I wanted to flee or to fling myself into his arms. So I just sat, frozen, like a small animal in a hunter’s bright light.
He put a hand on my shoulder, and I could feel the unnatural strength of him through his arm even though his touch on me was light. It stirred up an answering wildness in me that was frightening, a recklessness that countered his anger with blatant need. I swayed, powerless against him.
His voice was relentless. “I could have taken you in my office the first time we met.”
Against my will, I thought of his hand on my wrist, the needle in my arm, the madness that had possessed me.
“Yes.” The word was pulled from me in a whisper.
“I could have taken you on the street, outside the restaurant, against the brick wall.”
His hand on my back, though the thin fabric of my shirt. His body so close to mine, almost touching, and his burning eyes....
“Yes,” I repeated weakly.
“And Friday night—I could have taken so much more,” he said.
Why? part of me asked, the hungry part, the part that wanted him to take me here and now. Why didn’t you? I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying it aloud.
I knew he had taken advantage of my susceptibility. I should have condemned him for doing as much as he did to me, but I couldn’t.
And did I think that his staff blamed him any more than I could? Hypocrite, I thought. Fool.
His words were fast, low, and harsh. “I want you to understand, clearly understand, how deeply I regret the loss of control that I had that night. But however much you wanted me—you must believe me that I needed you far more.”
I swayed slightly under the force of his gaze, the force of his desire that I could feel sweeping through me even now, leaving my nerves raw and jangling. Involuntarily, I leaned toward him, to close the distance between us. But he let go of me abruptly and turned his back, leaving me sitting alone, aching and bereft.
“Don’t tell me that I have no shame, Cora,” he said.
Chapter Six
Deliberately, Dorian stepped away from me and circled back to where he’d left his plate. I took a deep breath to steady myself, but it was impossible with only the table’s width between us. My head was hot and light, my pulse humming in my ears.
I could still feel his need crackling off his body. But he had managed to turn away. I knew I wouldn’t have had the strength for that—not the way I felt, and not the way I sensed that he felt. It was only his self-control that allowed me to sit across from him and eat my breakfast as if my body didn’t answer to his every desire.
If he let me go home, as he promised, it would be because he’d decided to allow it. With him so close to me, it wasn’t a choice I was even capable of making.
My chest felt crowded and tight. I was as powerless against him as I’d been against my cancer.
Dorian gave no sign of noticing my reaction, though I was sure that he did. His face was creased in a frown, and he kept his eyes averted carefully from my face. He picked up a silver fork that had somehow in his sudden charge at me been bent into a sharp curve. Effortlessly, fastidiously, he straightened it in his fingers. The fingers that had just touched me so gently. When he finished, he held the utensil balanced perfectly in his hand for a moment, then began to eat from the plate in front of him.
“The breakfast was prepared especially for you,” he said after a moment when I made no move to join him.
“Heaven forbid I insult you by not eating it,” I muttered, then instantly regretted it. I sounded like a brat.
“Not me,” he said coolly. “My staff. The chef was in raptures at the thought of preparing a meal for you for the first time. He truly outdid himself.”
“The first time,” I echoed.
“Indeed.”
I didn’t bother to argue with him. Instead, I looked at my plate and regarded the food there—crepes with fresh fruit, omelets, small gourmet sausages and delicate miniature crab cakes. They should have filled me with delight, but I could feel nothing right now—nothing except the overwhelming presence of the man, the creature who sat across the table.
I began to eat mechanically, tasting nothing. What was wrong with me? I was terrified and still half-dazed with all that had happened to me. I should be clamoring to go home. But I couldn’t force myself to ask.
Shameless, indeed.
He seemed to be able to read my every expression, but I could tell nothing of his thoughts or motivations. Lust and hunger—those were clear enough. But the other flashes beneath his icy demeanor were so fleeting that I could get no handle on them. What did he see me as, other than a way to sate himself?
What did I want him to?
After several minutes, Dorian broke the silence. “You did not like Worth’s clothing selection?”
“I didn’t look at it,” I said stiffly. “Thanks for the gesture, but you’ve done more than enough already. I don’t want to owe you more.”
“There can be no debt between us,” he said.
I took a swallow from one of the goblets in front of me—a bright concoction of seltzer and juices. “I don’t see it like that.”
“You should. You will.” The last word was a promise.
I finished the last bite of crab cake. Intellectually, I could appreciate the delicacy of the flavoring, the extravagance of lump crabmeat with just enough luscious breading to hold it together. But now it lay like lead in my stomach.
Dorian’s staff. I turned the idea over in my mind. There had been the butler, the woman in the gray dress when I woke up, this Worth person, and before that, the people—doctors?—who had attended to me when I was reacting to his bite, and now there was the chef and his helpers. There must
be dozens of people working in the depths of the great mansion. I wondered if they all knew about me. I wondered if they were curious about what I was like.
Not that it mattered, since I wouldn’t be meeting any more of them, I told myself.
I took a last gulp of juice and pushed back from the table, wanting him, wanting home, wanting to be free. I rubbed the small mark on my wrist while Dorian ate on, seeming to be oblivious to my state even though he was the cause.
Finally, I forced myself to speak. “I’ve imposed on you too long. I really need to get back to my apartment. I haven’t even bought books for next semester, and I was planning on doing a deep clean on my apartment, and I need to catch up with all my friends and let them know I’m okay.”
It was too much—I was just babbling, inventing excuses where none needed to be made at all. I shut my mouth.
“All that in the thirty days before the end of Winter Break?” he asked, his voice steeped in irony.
“It’s my life,” I said staunchly. “I need to get back to it.”
“And when I need you?” he asked quietly, that pale gaze looking straight through me and sending my heart into a frantic, skittering beat.
I closed my eyes, swayed slightly against the draw of him. Never, part of me raged. Now, another part begged. I ignored them both, and I spoke the simple truth.
“You know I’ll come. I’ve got no choice.”
“You will want to,” he said, a sharp correction.
My eyes snapped open. “Because you make me?” I demanded. “I don’t see how that’s better.”
He stood from his chair, looking down at me. I couldn’t move. “I don’t need to make you want me, Cora, any more than you can make me want you. You cannot live without me, nor I without you. Not now.”
My mouth had gone dry, half with fear, half with wanting. “You can’t live without my blood, you mean.” The words came out almost as a croak.
A strange kind of smile passed over his face then, haunted but with a glimmer of something like hope. He reached out to trace the line of my cheek and jaw with the back of one finger. “Blood is only the beginning. As long we both live, I will need you in a way that no other can satisfy. All of you.”
“Body and soul.” I hadn’t meant to speak, but the whisper was mine. “Until death do us part.”
“Yes. The bond is thrust upon me as it is upon you. I can escape it no more than you can.”
“You went after it,” I protested. “I didn’t. You wanted it as the end to all your research.”
“An end to the death,” he agreed. “That makes me no less subject to it and its demands.”
“But you give the orders. And I’m the one who has to obey.”
“That is how it is, Cora. It is our natures, yours and mine.”
I shook my head. “I can’t live with that. I have to go. I have to clear my head. You may have lived a thousand years, and maybe you have everything figured out and you’re okay with this, but I’m twenty-one, and I don’t even really know who I am yet. Especially not now.”
I met his piercing eyes, and I knew that he held the power to make me stay. He could lock me up forever, and he wouldn’t even need bars or a key because he could make we want anything that he chose.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “I’ll not keep you here against your will, Cora.”
“Then you’ll let me go right now?” I asked, only half believing it.
In answer, he took a phone from his pocket, tapped it briefly, and said, “Have a car brought around for Cora. She wishes to return to College Park.” He returned it to his pocket.
“Thank you,” I said numbly. Was it going to be so easy?
He passed me and opened the door, his face inscrutable. “Do you have all your things?”
“Not my jacket,” I said. I had run from the room without stopping to retrieve it, leaving it on the bench in the dressing room.
“Then let us fetch it,” he said.
I nodded weakly. He was being so reasonable, but I could feel the roiling hunger radiating from his body, and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to change my mind by force, if necessary. I was half afraid that was what I really wanted—that I wanted to be with him but didn’t want to take the responsibility for the decision.
He opened the breakfast room door and stood aside for me to go out first. He could have called for a servant to see me back to my room, or I could have asked that one take me. But I didn’t. As much as he frightened me, even the idea of being apart from him made my heart twist up into my throat in sudden panic.
So I exited the room and followed the colonnade out to the stair landing with Dorian as a silent escort at my side. The inches of air between us seemed to hiss with energy as I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, but I ignored it and started down the open-sided hall.
I stopped in front of a door and put my hand on the knob—only to pause. Was that the right one? The doors all looked the same.
“One more farther down,” Dorian said.
I risked a look at him. “Whose room is this?” I nodded to the door I had almost opened by mistake.
“Mine,” he said simply.
Next to the one he had given me. Of course. I bit my lip and went on to mine, opening it and stepping inside.
Dorian followed and shut the door.
Only then did it hit me that I was alone in a bedroom with a devastatingly handsome vampire who quite definitely wanted me naked. Just as much I wanted him.
Damn, Cora. Not much for good decision-making today, huh?
I forced myself to tear my attention from him and focused on the room instead. All I had to do was grab my jacket and get out. I’d get in the car, go home to my apartment, and I’d never have to see him again.
I knew that wasn’t true even as I thought it, but I didn’t care. I needed a goal. Otherwise, I was very much afraid that I’d never leave.
So. The closet.
I walked past the bed, which was already remade with all trace of medical equipment gone—doubtlessly the work of Worth or some other unseen member of the household staff. The door to the dressing room was standing open, as I’d left it. I went inside to find my jacket still folded neatly on the bench. I grabbed it and hooked it over my arm.
Done, then. All I needed to do now was get out of the room, go downstairs, and get in the car. How hard could that be?
But my footsteps dragged even as I passed the section of clothes that Worth had selected for me. Looking couldn’t hurt, could it? After all, I wasn’t ever coming back....
You’re not even good at lying to yourself, I thought, but I stopped anyway, just for a moment, to take a peek.
There was, I discovered, a little bit of everything, from blue jeans to ball gowns. Surreptitiously, I checked a label—and blanched. One pair of pants was probably worth the sum total of my own wardrobe.
“They are all yours.”
I turned to see Dorian lounging in his effortlessly graceful way in the doorframe. My heart hitched ever so slightly. Damn him.
“I’m not for sale,” I said.
“They’re a gift, not a bribe, Cora,” he said, amusement twitching at the corner of his lips.
I dropped the sleeve of the sweater that I had been admiring as if it had stung me. “I still don’t want them.”
“Are you going to tell me that you’re above worldly riches?” His tone was gently mocking.
“Puh-lease.” I went up to him with the intention of pushing past into the bedroom. But when I got close, I lost my nerve and stopped. His body still hummed with that alien energy, and I didn’t trust myself this far from him. God only knew what I’d do if I actually touched him. “Who doesn’t want to be rich? This—all this, it doesn’t even seem real to me. But if it did...it still wouldn’t be mine. Not really.”
“It is now.”
His eyes burned into mine, and my breath quickened. Go now, part of me urged, but I couldn’t listen to it anymore.
I shook my
head to clear it, clinging to what I knew from my old life. “You don’t even know me. And I don’t know you. All I know is how you make me feel. That’s not a good enough reason for any of this.”
He caught my wrist in his hand, and I gasped as my senses came alive to his touch, heat spiraling out of my center. He raised my hand, turned so that the teardrop was visible against my pale skin.
“That is reason for anything. Your human ceremonies in all their pomp and circumstance are not as real as this.”
I swayed in his grip, wanting him, believing him even as I rebelled against it.
“I can’t,” I said. It came out as a plea. “I can’t give up my life.”
“I will never ask you to.”
“You won’t have to,” I whispered.
He lifted the mark to his lips and kissed it, softly. And I knew I would not leave that room as I had gone in.
Chapter Seven
The touch of his lips sent a hot surge through my brain, my skin prickling with acute sensitivity. A soft sound escaped me, and he lifted his head.
Dorian’s hands slid around me, one catching the small of my back, the other tangling in my hair and tilting my head back as he pulled me hard against his body, crushing the jacket between us.
I couldn’t resist him. I didn’t want to.
“You should have gone the first time.” His voice had a ragged edge. “I shouldn’t have come up here with you.”
“I know.” Oh, God, how I knew—and how little it mattered now.
My head felt light, and the room seemed to lose its substance, wavering around me, around him. His chest was the only solid thing in the world. My gaze was locked in his as he bent toward me, his mouth coming down towards mine. My blood roared in my ears, my lips already parting in anticipation of his kiss.
I gasped against his mouth as it met mine, lurching against him as something in my center twisted hard. His lips were cool, but they set me on fire. I opened for him, frightened at my own need for him to be inside of me. And he was, taking me with his tongue, pushing me to a rhythm that shook my body with its force.
