Is he calling me to him like a dog? My annoyance breaks through the strange haze I had fallen into, at least, and I shake myself before getting to my feet. “Very well.” I curtsy to Viktoria. “It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having us.”
“Of course.” She takes my hand and kisses the back of it. “I hope to have you in the future, as well.”
I flush at her wording, and mumble a goodbye to a still-smirking Jonah before heading for the door, brushing right past Claude and the hand he’s holding out to me. He trails after me silently, out the door and to our waiting car.
The stumble in my step tells me I either drank more than I thought, or was drunkfrommore than I thought, or both. I clamber into the limo and rip my heels off, tossing them to the floor.
After the door shuts behind Claude, we sit in silence. I rub my aching feet and refuse to look at him.
Claude slides closer, reaches out to close slim fingers around my ankle. “Let me…”
I swat his hand. “No.”
I catch his wounded look out of my peripheral vision. “You’re angry with me.”
The snort that leaves me is far from dignified. “Perpetually observant, Lord Claude.”
“Why?” He leans forward in his seat, elbows resting on his thighs as he stares at me. “You wanted to sleep with her?”
“I… wanted…” I’m not even sure what I wanted, except— “I wanted to have some choice in the matter.”
A beat passes. When Claude speaks again, his voice is lower, with a sharpened edge. “Then you shouldn’t have signed a contract to bemyvalentine.”
I ignore the way it makes my heart beat faster to hear him call mehis. “The contract didn’t stop you from having your mouth all over someone else’s valentine.”
“All over…?” He huffs a laugh. “I bit his wrist. And Nora, you said—” He shakes his head, looking stupefied. “You said you didn’t want intimacy with me. If it bothered you, you should’ve said something.”
He’s right. I didn’t—don’t—want that with him, and I’ve been very clear about it. But I’m too drunk to suppress my feelings right now, especially the clawing monstrosity that is my jealousy. “When should I have stepped in, precisely? Before or after he started writhing like an animal in heat?”
Claude throws up his hands, exasperated. “You’re acting like I fucked him.”
“Well, you looked barely a step away from it,” I snap back.
“I was within sight of you the whole time, you know I didn’t do anything indecent.”
I let out a harsh laugh. I can’t stop remembering the way Claude threw a leg over Jonah’s hips, the sounds the other valentine made. There is a bubbling heat within me, and I am both annoyed and annoyingly turned on. “Oh, so you call thatdecent?”
“Yes! In fact, I know it is, because our contract is clear that biting someonedoes notcount as intimacy!”
There’s a pause after he speaks. A shift in the air between us as we both realize what he said. What it means.
I’m not sure which of us moves first, but all of a sudden I’m on his lap. My fingers tangling in his hair, his lips against my neck. Both of us clutching at each other with the same desperate need. This is dangerous—we’re both drunk and sexually frustrated—but I need him, and this is the only way I can have him.
“Yes,” I whisper, before he can even voice the question.
His teeth sink into my neck. I arch against him, crying out, as pleasure floods every nerve in my body. It’s bliss, pure bliss, my body trembling against him as the ache between my legs becomes a pulsing throb. Claude moans into my neck, drinking from me like a man dying of thirst even though he’s been thoroughly glutted tonight. Each pull from my veins sends a new wave of need through me. I feel feverishly hot, panting on his lap, so close to the orgasm my body has been craving all night.
Claude shifts his weight, and one of his knees slips between my thighs. The gentlest pressure where I so desperately need it. And I come apart instantly, crying out his name and grinding against his leg.
As the blinding pleasure recedes, I realize Claude has stopped drinking from my neck—has already sealed the punctures with his blood-tinged kiss—and is frozen beneath me. I pull back, pushing hair out of my face, to look down at him. His eyes are shut, his expression a pained grimace.
“Please,” he whispers. “Move.”
I jump off his lap as quickly as I can, scrambling into a seat opposite him on still-wobbly legs. “I’m so sorry,” I blurt out. “I didn’t realize— If you didn’t want—”
“I did want,” he says, his eyes remaining closed. His hands are braced on the seat on either side of him. “I do want. Very much. Thus the problem.”
My eyes drop to his trousers, and I blush. I felt it beneath me on his lap, but seeing the size of his bulge is another story altogether. “Oh,” I say faintly. I pause, swallow. Then, “Claude…”
