action, to kiss and suck and lick the tiny wounds better. Oh, God, so much better!
If they could put this in pill form, they’d addict the world.
As it was, the monster on the wall was bucking and flailing and yelling ‘now, damn you’ within seconds, but to no avail. The long, slow warm, wet torture continued, because he wanted me to lose my mind, I thought, panting. If I lost my mind, I couldn’t think . . . about anything . . . oh, God!
When I could breathe, I pushed him back, caught him behind the neck and sat up, taking him fully inside me as I did so. And groaning as I sat down, straddling his lap as he shivered against me, inside me. He was big, and I wasn’t quite ready, but the stretch and burn were exactly, exactly what I wanted tonight.
When I finally had him all, I stopped, panting, and stared into his eyes as his forehead came to rest against mine. “You don’t have to prove anything,” I said. “Not to me.”
“I know,” he said, and then gasped, because I’d just pulled up again, sliding along the full length of him, giving him no rest.
“Do you really know?”
“Dory—”
“Do you really, really know?”
His face flushed, possibly because I was working him harder now. Or possibly because I had leaned back, supporting myself with one arm on the bed and one on his forearm, giving him a view all the way up my body. Everything from where we were joined to my sweat-slick abs, tightening under the workout they were getting, to his favorite parts of all, which had started bouncing in time to the rhythm I was setting, which meant that they were bouncing hard.
I had never thought of myself as beautiful before I met him. My looks were something I played up when it would help me bring in a bad guy with a decent bounty on his head, but somehow, they were almost something outside of me. Another tool to be used, not something that mattered.
Because, when people find out that you’re dhampir, not much else does.
But with him . . . I saw myself through different eyes. His eyes. And in those eyes, I was beautiful.
Even better, the next moment, his head was thrown back, his own eyes closed, and his face, while still flushed, was somehow calmer. Fiercely determined but also at peace. It was a strange combination.
But it was better than the anguish I’d seen there before, the struggle of a man who insisted on taking the weight of the world on his shoulders, even when he didn’t have to. I loved him, but he drove me crazy sometimes, as crazy as I was determined to drive him. Which wasn’t all that difficult, frankly.
I clamped down, hard, and he growled and rolled us off the bed. We hit the floor, taking one of the lamps with us, which sloshed out enough oil to set the rug on fire. “Leave it,” Louis-Cesare said, and I arched an eyebrow.
Vampires went up like kerosene-soaked tissue paper when exposed to flame, but I guess tonight was about conquering fears. Or something. I was having a hard time concentrating, since I had ended up on the bottom, with the powerful vampire on top seemingly determined to pound me through the floor.
Or maybe that was the door, I thought, unsure of where the hammering was coming from. Or my heart, I thought, getting sloppily romantic, because the orgasm of the gods was about to hit and hit hard. “Louis-Cesare!” I screamed, and I guessed it had been the door, after all. Because it practically blew off the hinges and there they were, half a dozen of Hassani’s servants staring at us.
They had buckets of water in their hands, I didn’t know why. The sprinkler system seemed to be working fine, I thought, as it proceeded to douse us along with the flames. “Get out,” Louis-Cesare suggested, pulling the crimson and gold robe down from the bed to cover me.
The servants just stood there, looking appalled, because I guess Hassani didn’t run a den of iniquity sort of court.
“Get out!” Louis-Cesare ordered, and put some power behind it.
They got out, which I appreciated considering that he had never stopped his current occupation, or indeed so much as broken rhythm.
“They’re definitely going to gossip about us now,” I told him, giggling.
“They would have been disappointed otherwise,” was the blithe response.