“Thank you for saving my beautiful neck, Gideon.” She breaks away from me to haul Astor over to my sofa, leaving a long smear of blood across the floor. She sinks into the fabric like it should be grateful for her presence and pulls Astor’s lolling body over her lap. With a wicked grin, she pats the seat beside her.
“We’ve never really been on a real date. Why don’t you join me for dinner?”
I can never refuse her. I slide into the seat beside her, taking some of Astor’s weight. He’s in bad shape – between the injuries from the blade and the werewolf bites that won’t heal over, he’s barely conscious. What Arabella is suggesting is a kindness that he doesn’t deserve, but I know she’s not thinking about him.
I can’t gift her back the necklace. Édouard has already informed me that his client spooked when I didn’t show, and returned to the darkness. But Lord Astor is a much better gift.
Arabella stares down at him, her expression unreadable. She’s remembering. In time, she might tell me about the things he did to her. Or they might remain her secrets forever. But the remembering is important. The remembering is her finally laying his ghost to rest.
She swipes the hair from his face with an almost gentle reverence.
And then she sinks her fangs into his neck.
Astor struggles for a moment, but then the endorphins hit and he sinks happily into her arms. A vampire is no more immune to our bite than a human, which is partly why drinking from each other is forbidden.
Arabella’s eyes meet mine as she drinks deep. I’m mesmerised by the movement in her throat as she gulps and sucks. The room fills with the mingled scent of raspberries and copper – the unmistakable tang of fresh, flowing blood.
When she draws her mouth away, there’s a smudge of his blood across her lip.
I wipe it with my finger. She smiles against my hand, her fang scraping across my skin. And then we’re kissing and sucking and licking blood, our hands everywhere, our fangs entangled, our tonguesravenous. She tastes sharp and tangy – like raspberries and revenge, like myrrh and magic. Her ruined dress falls to pieces in my hands. Or maybe I tear it to shreds like an animal. It’s all a blur of taste and magic andher.
Astor’s blood is like nothing I’ve ever drunk before, and I already drank it once. It’s rich and heavy with his years and his magic. Not even the memory of drinking him back in Paris compares to the hunger roaring through me as I gulp the last of him from Arabella’s tongue. It is salvation and damnation at once, and I have no idea what such a quantity of an ancient vampire’s blood will do to us.
There are reasons vampires don’t drink from each other.
And even more reasons why we’re not supposed to cheat death a second time.
But I don’t care about the consequences now, not when Astor’s blood flows between our lips as we share the last of his life.
It’s wicked. It’s wrong. But it feels right.
When he’s finally drained, when Arabella’s past is a dead, heavy thing between us and our veins sing with his magic, she shoves Astor’s husked body from the sofa and crawls into my lap. Her body – like her clothing – is couture. That triangle of dark hair between her thighs could drive men to ruin.
And of all the men, in this eternity and the next, she’s chosen me to ruin.
I dosoenjoy being ruined by her.
Every night when I woke from dreamless sleep to find she wasn’t beside me, I wished for this second chance. And now that she’s in my arms, I’m not going to waste a single moment. I need to taste every inch of her.
I kiss a trail to the spot behind her ear that always used to drive her wild.
“You remember…” she whimpers.
“I remembereverythingabout you.”
I kiss a trail down her body, pushing her over the arms of the sofa, spreading her legs for me. She tilts her chin down towards me, and her expression is pure haughty goddess.
I lower myself to my knees, exactly where I’ve always wanted to be. I kiss the tiny mole on her inner thigh before I move to the real treasure.
As soon as I taste her, I know that a taste will never be enough for me. I need to devour this woman.
And I do. I feast on her clit, mingling Astor’s blood with the rich, raspberry taste of her. I plunge my tongue inside her opening, tasting the juices of her arousal before pounding her clit with my tongue until she lets slip a stream of foul, delicious curses and then, just my name, over and over…
“Damn you, Gideon…”
She comes apart for me.
Before she has recovered from the orgasm, I sweep her into my arms. Arabella wraps her body around me as I carry her back to my room. Her lips twist in amusement as she takes in the large, revolving coffin-shaped bed and the floor-to-ceiling windows giving us a view across the whole of Sanctus.
