When her back began to arch, Zia shoved a hand between their sweaty bodies and began to stroke herself. The scent of magic was thick in the air — like blood and green things, like Zia and somethingmore.It bubbled between them until he felt like it was trying to press itself into his very pores.
It sought him out, coiled around him,heldhim. It felt… proprietary.
Desperate for her, Harlan reached back instinctively. But the magic was elusive, slipping out of his grasp like smoke the moment he touched it with his own. It danced around him, egging him on.
Zia’s moan was ragged. Her hips rocked out of sync with his, moving as fast as they could as she chased her orgasm.
It took everything in his power to not let his own release overtake him as she began to tense, her muscles rippling around his cock. Only when she jolted, her body locked under his, did Harlan finally let himself go.
His hips moved on their own with a jagged, animalistic rhythm as he gathered a fistful of her wet curls, jerked her head to one side, and plunged his fangs into the fragrant skin of her throat.
His orgasm wasshattering.
Lights danced in front of his eyes as his venom ejected from his fangs and into her bloodstream. In the same instant, he drove himself as deep as he could and came, painting the hot walls of her cunt with his release.
Euphoria wiped out everything but her.
He was not aware of his own body, of the sounds of the birds outside or the warmth of the room. All he knew was the ecstasy of emptying his venom into her bloodstream, sweetening it for him, and the thundering beat of her heart. He knew her breath, her scent, the soft, drugged sounds she made as she went limp. He knew onlyher.
When there was no more ache in the roof of his mouth, Harlan gently extracted his fangs. Slowly, he ground his semi-hard cock into her as he began to suck at the wound, pulling and pulling.
By design, a vampire’s stomach could not hold enough blood to threaten the life of a grown adult anchor. He could gorge himself as much as he was able to and Zia would not feel more than a momentary wooziness when she stood.
But he didn’t plan on letting her stand any time soon. He indulged himself, relishing the rich taste of her and the feeling of beingfullfor the first time in a year.
His muscles relaxed and a content rumble made its way out of his chest as he sipped from her. Zia’s hands drifted down his back, petting him, as she murmured sweet things into his hair. His hips flexed. One of his hands moved between them to circle her clitoris, matching the pace of his deep, blissful pulls.
Eventually, he was able to coax another short, intense orgasm out of her. When Zia went slack under him, he felt the telltale tingle behind his jaw that told him he was full. Instinct took over, shifting gears from the drive to drink to the need to look after his anchor.
The taste in his mouth changed as his saliva did — no longer the sharp, cloying flavor of his venom as it mixed with her blood, but the mellower notes that came with the compounds in his salivary glands.
Those compounds stopped bleeding, working to do the opposite of what the venom accomplished, and helped the wounds heal faster.
Harlan licked the twin puncture marks even after the bleeding stopped. Instinct was a low, satisfied purr in the back of his mind, urging him to stroke her, to kiss her, to make sure she was comfortable and sweetly sated. Aftercare for an anchor was biologically hardwired into all vampires. He couldn’t have gotten up and left Zia even if hewantedto.
Slowly, he worked his way up her throat and over her jaw. When their lips met, their kiss was slow, deep, and luscious. Zia’s arms curled around his neck as he hugged her close. For a while, they just breathed each other’s air and basked in the closeness.
“Are you all right?” he whispered into her damp hair.
“I’mgreat,”she answered. She sounded almost drunk, but in such a smug, satisfied way, he found it deeply charming. “Better than great. I just had the best sex of my damn life.”
Harlan grinned. He was full, warm, and holding his anchor. The hungry, violent little boy he’d been would have marveled at the man he had become.
He used to envy the wealthy. He used to make promises to himself that one day he would not feel like he was below them, and that he too would have beautiful things to wear, to collect. He would never be hungry, or forced to sleep outside, or beaten by the older boys in training again.
But no envy came close to what he felt when he saw people in love. Families. The boy he once was could not have cried for his losses, but he felt the pain anyway.
Now, though, Harlan did not feel pain. He was, perhaps for the first time in his life, entirely content. How lucky he was, that boy would have thought, to have someone as soft and gentle as their Zia.
After several long, blissful minutes, she dragged her lips over his cheek to whisper playfully in his ear, “So, do you still want those panties, or…”
ChapterFifteen
In what feltlike the blink of an eye, Zia’s life bloomed with rich color.
As the weather grew colder and the ground harder, she and her vampire became nearly inseparable. It was not casual. It wasn’t even reallydating.It was the meshing of two lives that, though previously entirely unrelated to one another, were nevertheless made to be one.
Nights blended into days and weeks into months. He was a rock in her life; dropped into her lazy, drifting stream, Harlan provided her a stability she didn’t even know she was missing. In turn, she began to wash away decades of quietly internalized self-reproach and doubt. Warmth blazed between them, and a bond that was one part friendship and one part roaring desire tied their souls together with ever-tightening knots.
