“Mon coeur,” he whispers. “Mon amour.”
I cuddle against him, gripping his arm where it holds my waist, unable to form coherent words yet. I don’t know if Ihavewords for what I just experienced.
After we lie together a while, Claude insists on slipping out of bed to make me breakfast, worried about my blood loss.
“It felt like you hardly fed from me,” I protest, touching my neck, where he’s already healed the puncture wounds.
He flashes me a smile, fangs lending the sweet expression a hungry edge. “Oh, but I intend to eat plenty more today,mon chou.”
Even after mythoroughpleasuring, that look still sends a coil of heat through me. I mirror his wicked grin. “Promise?”
He returns a short while later with a tray, still naked, to serve me in bed. A decadent feast is laid out for me: golden French toast with dripping butter and a dusting of powdered sugar, heaped with whipped cream and fresh berries. He watches me eat for a while, smiling as I hum in appreciation. Then he slides between my legs and enjoys his own breakfast from my thigh. When I move the tray aside and grasp his hair in wordless demand, he pulls his fangs out and eats me again, two fingerscurling inside of me while his tongue strokes me relentlessly toward another world-shattering orgasm.
“This isn’t fair,” I pant, lying back on the bed. “I’m all sweaty and disgusting and you’re… perfect.”
He licks sweat from my stomach as he climbs back up my body. His kiss is salty and sweet, tasting of my own pleasure. “Never disgusting,” he murmurs. “But I’m happy to clean you up, if you like.”
True to his word, he soon carries me to the shower in a boneless bundle. It starts off innocent as he gently massages shampoo into my scalp and holds me against him beneath the warm water. But soon enough he’s on his knees in front of me, one of my legs hooked over his shoulder as his fingers work inside of me.
I press myself against the wall, whimpering. “Claude… I can’t… I can’t possibly…” I can’t even finish the sentence. My body is weak, my head spinning.
“Of course you can,mon chou.” I hate how even his voice is, his smile sharp and mischievous as he makes a mess of me again. “But maybe this isn’t enough for you?” He slides a third finger over my slickness. But instead of pushing it inside of me to join the others, he glides it back, teasing at the tight rim of my ass before pushing inside.
I cry out at the new sensation, my body shaking as he begins to pump his fingers again.
“Come for me,” he whispers.
And I do. Again as he fucks me against the shower wall, again as he carries me to bed, again and again until I’m delirious with pleasure.
I must have passed out at some point. When I stir again and reach for Claude, the bed beside me is empty. I rub my eyes and lift myself up on my elbows with a pang of concern, but it doesn’t take much searching to find him. He’s still in the room,situated beside the window with his easel and his paints. He is concentrating so fully, he doesn’t even notice me stir, and his face is open and relaxed in a way I haven’t ever seen before as his brush glides across the canvas.
I lie quietly in bed, watching him for a while, the delicate way he holds the brush, the slow and decisive strokes of paint. I doze off with my heart full.
* * *
Not all nights are as perfect as that one. As the weeks pass, there are times when Claude is up all day painting in a manic frenzy, and evenings when he can’t drag himself out of bed. Sometimes I catch him pressing his palm to his chest without seeming to realize he’s doing it, as though his heart is in physical pain. Maybe it is. I can’t pretend to understand the bond between a sire and a fledgling, but it’s obvious that it is painful to lose, no matter what a monster Ambrose once was.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” he mumbles one day, burrowing beneath the covers long past the time we usually get out of bed. “If I could have just painted something, then…”
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “I know you’re not a violent man, Claude. He drove you to this. He would have killed you if you hadn’t killed him. He would’ve killedmeif you hadn’t stopped him.”
I run my fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him, but when he gets in these moods, he feels impossible to reach.
Henry and other vampires from the Vulpe Court come to visit the house a few times over the following weeks, and Claude spends long, tense hours with them and then emerges from the room looking exhausted and strained.
“Will you stay with the Vulpe Court?” I ask him one night after they’ve left, when I’m massaging the tension out of his long fingers in bed. “With Ambrose gone, I doubt you have to fear retaliation for leaving, right?”
“I could leave if I wanted to,” he says. “But…” He sighs, rolls over to lay his head on my lap. “Lady Elizabeth and some of the younger vampires have asked me to stay. To help change things from within, now that Ambrose is no longer here to force his ideals upon the rest of the court.”
“And is that what you want?”
He considers it for a few moments. “I’m afraid I’m not up to the task,” he says, “but I think I’d like to try.”
I lean down to kiss his brow. “Then try.”
I take care of him as well as I can: rubbing his back, urging him to feed from me, coaxing him down to the beach when he retreats into the bedroom for too long. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but I know that killing Ambrose left a wound in him that I fear may never heal.
Plus, the end of our contract is coming up, a subject I don’t know how to broach.
