Need licked at me. In the ballroom his glamour had muted his raw sex appeal. Now, it battered me like a hot, wild storm.
The pent-up longing of two years swamped my emotions. My fangs pricked out.
I wanted to bite him and drink deep.
I wanted him to hold me down and bite me back.
I wanted to feel his hard body naked and moving against mine.
“Answer me.” He gave my wrist a shake. “How am I supposed to prove I didn’t send those texts?”
I snatched my hand back. “I don’t know. Why don’t you start by telling me why you came on to me in the first place? Why you kept after me until I met you in that pub? Why you asked me for a ‘real date’?”
My voice broke on the last two words. I swallowed and prayed he didn’t notice.
He took the slow breath of a man grasping for the last, tattered shreds of his patience. “Because I wanted you, damn it. Why does it have to be complicated? I. Wanted. You.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”
“Think about it,” he said. “Your mother had every reason in the world to lie. She wanted me gone, and you so pissed off at me you’d never speak to me again.”
I stared at him. Had I been too quick to accept that he’d sent those texts? To believe he couldn’t possibly want me for myself?
Because it was true; Victorine would’ve done anything to split us up. Rafe was the first man I’d ever shown interest in—a Kral. And to put the cherry on the wrong-man sundae, he was a dhampir, too.
My mother wouldn’t have been content with simply humiliating me by bursting in on us like that. She would’ve wanted to make sure I hated Rafe, that I believed everything he’d said or done was a lie.
“It’s the truth, damn it.” He dropped back to the floor and took me by the arms. When Étan had grabbed me, I’d wanted to shove him away, but with Rafe, my knees went wobbly, which pissed me off almost as much.
“Let me go.” I tried to jerk away, but he hung on.
“No. You asked, now listen.” His gaze went to my mouth.
My skin tingled, every nerve ending alive. He was going to kiss me. I touched my tongue to my lower lip.
He drew a ragged breath through his teeth. “I should hate you. I do hate you.”
Hurt slashed me. I jerked in his grip. “Then let me go.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll scream the tower down.”
I should’ve known better than to give Rafe Kral an ultimatum. He leaned closer.
“Go ahead. Scream.”
I bared my fangs and hissed at him.
A feral smile. “That’s my vampire princess. Gods, you’re so fucking hot.”
My frustrated growl came from my deepest self. “I’m not your vampire princess. I’m not your anything.”
“But you want to be.” He stroked my upper arms, toyed with the gold arm bracelet.
I glanced down. Confused. Aroused. When had his hard grip changed to caresses?
His body radiated heat. I leaned into him, soaking up the warmth like he was Apollo, and I was some teenage Greek groupie.
“No, I don’t,” I rasped.
But I was trying to convince myself more than him.
“No?” His mouth curved like he knew I was lying, but he didn’t call me on it. He released me and took a step back.
My hands shot out, latching onto the pleats of his tuxedo shirt and dragging him back. He was right there with me, his reflexes as fast as mine. Our mouths met in the middle.
He immediately took control, his body hard against mine, his powerful arms wrapping around me. His tongue licked into my mouth, slow and deep.
Sanity flew out the open windows along with my self-control. My nipples stabbed against the thin white dress. I twined a leg around his and rubbed against his erection.
The kiss didn’t end, it flowed into more kisses—on my lips, my chin, my jaw. He nibbled his way to my earlobe and sucked on it, sending a thrill down my spine and straight to my clit.
The groan that escaped my throat was pure, raw need.
“Easy,” he soothed—and captured my wrists, anchoring them behind my back with one hand while he stroked the other down my hip to the hem of my dress.
He inched up the hem. “We never finished what we started.” His tone was so low and dark, it was almost a threat.
“No.” I shivered, a good shiver.
He had a firm grip on my wrists, but I could’ve escaped if I’d wanted to.
I didn’t want to. He was pushing all the right buttons, the ones that opened the door to my secret fantasies.
“I’ve had two years to think about a do-over,” he said against my ear. “Even while I was hating you for setting me up like that, I wanted you. Wondered what it would have been like.”
The room was so hot. Too hot. Even my lungs felt on fire.
“Me, too,” I admitted.
“So you thought about me?” He toyed with the waistband of my panties.
“You know I did.” I dropped my head back, exposing my throat to him.
His breath snagged, and I froze. Baring my throat had been instinctive, a response to his dominance. He didn’t take advantage, though, simply pressed a kiss to the hollow of my neck over the gold necklace.
His fingers slid into my panties, stroking, teasing. “You’re so wet for me.”
I choked back a moan.
His dark eyes glittered in the candlelight like the shadowed heart of a geode. “What do you want? Tell me.”
“That. Touch me. Just like that.”
Without removing his hand from my panties, he walked me backward until my shoulders hit the wall. He still held my wrists. The position arched my back, lifting my breasts toward him. The top of the dress draped in loose folds over my cleavage. I was pretty sure he could see straight down to where the dress’s self-bra barely covered my nipples.
He kissed a line along my collarbone and down to the arm bracelet. “I like this,” he said against the wide gold band while his fingers worked their magic in my panties. “You look like an escapee from a harem. A naughty princess. Is that what you want, Zoe? To be bad?”
My inner thighs constricted. Yes, please.
I tried to pull my wrists free, to pull his mouth to my breasts, but he tightened his grip.
“You do, don’t you?” His voice was a wicked rasp.
“Yes.” This time I managed to say it aloud.
“Poor princess. Maybe I can do something about that.” He nuzzled my cleavage. His cheeks were sandpaper-rough with black stubble. The prickle against my tender skin sent an answering tingle through my blood, made heat flare deep in my belly.
He kissed the top of my left breast, then nipped the same spot with sharp fangs, and Holy Dark Lady, I liked it.
I gasped and clenched my inner thighs around his fingers. So that’s why thralls got addicted to a vampire’s bite. Even though he hadn’t taken any blood, that hint of pleasure/pain sent a dark thrill shooting through me.
He lifted his head and stared at me unsmiling, his cheekbones flushed with arousal. A hot blue halo encircled the iris, his vampire in control now.
Still holding my wrists, he yanked my panties down my hips and gazed down at where I was bared to him.
A beat passed. Two beats. Three.
I couldn’t see myself—not with my back arched—but I felt exposed and even more turned-on. He so clearly liked what he saw.
His gaze came back to my face. A corner of his mouth tipped up. “Breathe, cher.”
Shocked, I realized I was holding my breath, that I had been for a while. Even a vampire needs to breathe every twenty seconds or so. Maybe that’s why my head was swimming.
But the jagged breath I gulped did nothing to help.
Rafe stroked his free hand down my bare ass, over my hips. “You have the most incredible legs.” His gaze followed his hand past the panties bunched up around my upper legs and back up along my inner thighs. “I’ve spent way to
o much time thinking about what they’d feel like wrapped around me while I was buried deep inside you. Or how they’d look if I bent you over…maybe over that stool.” He nodded at the vanity.
A zing skipped up my spine, like he’d tripped a finger up the vertebrae. I could picture myself bent over the vanity stool, unable to touch him, while he could touch me any way or anywhere he wanted.
“Would you like that?” he said in my ear. “I think you would. Me thrusting into you from behind. I could watch you in the mirror as you come. You could watch yourself…”
“Yes,” I breathed.
His fingers were back on my sex again. I instinctively widened my legs as much as the panties would allow. “Yes, what?”
“Yes,” I said more loudly. “I’d like that.”
Because that picture he’d created in my head? It was the hottest thing.
How did the man read me like that? It was as if he could hear my thoughts, which I knew was impossible. Then I remembered how many women he’d had. If you believed Instagram and the tabloids, the man was as randy as a tomcat.
It’s just sex to him, Zoe.
I told myself that was all it was to me, too. Because that was all it could be. A fleeting moment in my life before I was bound to another man forever.
“But you’re new at this—maybe I’m going too fast for you. You are new, aren’t you?” He toyed with my clit. A sensual smile played on his lips, but his eyes narrowed. “Did you fuck anyone since me?”
“No. Not anyone. Ever,” I tacked on as if he couldn’t figure that out for himself.
A husky growl. “Ever?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Haven’t been interested.”
They weren’t you.
“Your first. I shouldn’t find that a turn-on, but I do.” He did something with his fingertip that made me gasp. “Guess I’m more of a caveman than I realized.”
I barely heard, my attention on the erotic sensations his fingers were drawing from me.
In the garden below my window, a woman gave a high, excited laugh. A man’s low voice answered her.
It was like being slapped awake from the best dream ever.
I stiffened and recalled the ballroom of people waiting to celebrate my birthday. Any minute, Victorine would send someone to get me, or come herself. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of the scene in the penthouse.
My chest heaved. “Stop.”
Rafe stilled. His thick dark lashes came down. “Damn it, Zoe.”
“We can’t do this.” I set my forehead against his. “My mother—”
His jaw worked. “Right.” He released my wrists and removed his hand from between my legs. His arms came around me in a loose hold. His fingers constricted on my back, like he didn’t want to ever let me go. “Then meet me later. I’ll wait for you here.”
I was tempted. So tempted.
But I couldn’t risk it.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
His hold didn’t loosen. “Please?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, sorrow warring with regret.
“Zoe?”
A bitter taste filled my mouth. I slid from his grasp. Pulled up my panties.
“I have to get back downstairs.”
His lips twisted. “So that’s it? Goodbye, Rafe, it’s been nice seeing you—and by the way, I’m going to choose a mate tonight.”
“I can’t—” I waved a hand between us. “We can’t. I told you. It would never work.”
“Because you’re a coward.”
I took a slow breath, trying not to show how much that hurt. “Because I’m thinking with my brain, not my cock.”
His eyes flickered, the only hint I’d scored a hit.
He dragged a hand over his hair. “Fuck. I need a drink.” He took a bottle of blood-wine from the small refrigerator built into the living room wall and ripped out the cork with his bare hands.
“Help yourself,” I muttered.
Suddenly, I realized something. The signs had been there—the edginess; the feral, angular look of his face; the blue rimming his irises—but I’d read them as lust…sexual lust.
But he was feeling the blood craving, too.
My brow furrowed. “When’s the last time you fed?”
He moved a shoulder and took a long drink. My eyes locked on his strong throat. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and desire stabbed me.
Desire, and a soul-deep, bittersweet sadness.
I smoothed down my skirt. “Will you be all right?”
“I got in here. I can get out.”
That wasn’t what I’d meant, but I let it go.
I went to the vanity and picked up a lipstick. He leaned against the bedpost, the wine bottle in his hand, watching with hooded eyes as I repaired my makeup.
“At least give me this much,” he said. “Keep your mind open. Nose around a little. You know damn well that if Victorine could take me and my brothers out without it pointing back to her, she’d do it in a heartbeat. Zaq”—his voice cracked—“he may not have much longer.”
I briefly closed my eyes. I had to admit that photo had left me shaken. If it wasn’t photoshopped, something was seriously wrong. And I couldn’t help picturing Rafe chained in that cell instead of Zaquiel.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
Rafe’s eyes blazed. “Thank you.” He rattled off a phone number. “You can contact me through that number—anytime. Got it?”
I repeated the number back to him. “I’ll do what I can, okay? But don’t count on me finding anything, because I don’t think there’s anything to find.”
“All I want is the truth. Anything you find, please pass it along—even something small. I’ll stay in Canada a couple more days in case you need me. For anything,” he added.
I set down the lipstick. “I won’t need you.”
“No.” His mouth curled in another of those mocking smiles I was coming to hate. “I don’t suppose you will.” He took another long drink. “You’ll be sorry if you mate with that prick. You know that, don’t you?”
I settled my mask over my eyes without replying.
“Tell me something. Are you mating with him to escape from Victorine? Because if so, you have your head up your ass. Mate with Étan, and you’ll have two watchdogs, not just one. He’s your mother’s man.”
I shook my head and turned toward the door.
“Thanks for the wine—and the kiss.” He lifted the wine bottle to me in a mocking salute. “You can pretend all you want, Princess. But you want me as much as I want you. You’re going to spend the rest of your life wondering what it would’ve been like.”
I swung to face him. “My loyalty is to the Tremblay Syndicate. Yours is to your father’s. Which of us would have to give?”
His jaw set. “We could figure it out. If you wanted it enough.”
“Goodbye, Rafe.”
I felt his gaze on me the whole way across the living room. I stopped, and without turning, said, “Drink another blood-wine if you want. I have the security feed set to look like no one is in here. But don’t be here when I come back.”
His only response was a grunt.
I let myself out the suite door. Security might wonder why the cams hadn’t picked me up walking from the bathroom to the door, but a small glitch like that wouldn’t be enough for them to send someone to investigate, especially when they could see me on the cams now.
It wasn’t until I’d hit the pad to engage the lock that I realized Jean-Michel was coming up the winding stairs.
Damn, damn, damn.
I stared at him as he ascended the last few steps, his thin, handsome face impassive.
Had he heard me and Rafe? We’d kept our voices low, but he seemed to have a sixth sense about these things.
I squared my shoulders and waited for him to ask who was in my suite.
He tipped his head at the stairs. “Victorine will be wondering where you are.”
“Yes.”
He knew. He knew there was a man in my suite.
Something in his very stillness gave him away, but for his own reasons, he’d decided to pretend he didn’t.
I drew a calming breath and, hoping this wouldn’t come back to bite me, started down the spiral staircase. But when I reached the second floor, my feet turned toward the conservatory.
“Zoe?” Jean-Michel asked.
I didn’t look at him. “I need a little time. Ten minutes.”
A sigh. “As you wish.”
The lights in the conservatory glowed at a low level comfortable for vampire eyes. Leaves brushed my arms—ficus, corn plants, palm trees, ferns. I’d deliberately placed the plants close together in an imitation rainforest.
I kept walking until I was out of sight of Jean-Michel and the entrance, then sagged against the gazebo. Ten minutes, that’s all I needed.
Ten minutes in this oasis I’d made for myself, enfolded in its moist green air.
Jean-Michel had told me that my father had loved plants, too, that he’d designed the night garden as a gift to Victorine. I’d hugged that information to myself, a connection to the man I barely remembered.
Sometimes I wondered how my life would’ve been different if Father were still here. I’d been so young when Karoly Kral had sent him to his final grave. I couldn’t even picture him clearly—all I had were fragments; images that, like a puzzle with too many missing pieces, I couldn’t form into a whole.
Mikhail Romanov.
A Russian prince, and not just in the vampire world. He’d been a distant cousin to the last czar, the one executed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. My father might have lost his life, too, if he hadn’t been a vampire. He’d escaped Russia concealed in the shadow dimension.
Memories flitted through my mind: A darkly handsome man helping Victorine into a little red sportscar.
Tiger-gold eyes that could be hard as metal but that warmed for me.
Strong arms lifting me from my crib when I woke at dusk and carrying me to a window to view the last orange fire of the setting sun.
That Victorine had smiled. Not often, but when she had, it had been genuine, not a cool, calculated curve.
I fingered a palm’s broad fronds, thinking about what my mother had said the other day: “I only made peace with Karoly to save you.”
Craved: A Vampire Syndicate Paranormal Romance (The Vampire Syndicate Book 2) Page 8
