“Well?” A bare whisper, his lips caressing the word. “Bed, or floor, darlin’? Choose.”
Her nerve broke. Simone pitched the opposite direction, and a heartbeat later he was on her.
A spinning, a disorientation, rumpled cloth and mattress sinking under her and the shadow of him looming above, his mouth finding hers in a delirium of hunger. Her claws sprang free, skidding along hard straps and sheaths of muscle, refusing to catch; she squirmed desperately, knowing it was hopeless, helpless to stop. His cock found what it wanted, burrowing into hot slickness, and his hand was under her right knee, lifting.
Her legs parted almost eagerly, her ankles finding each other and locking at the small of his back. He braced himself, a lion-purr rumble vibrating in his chest, and thrust,hard. Her throat filled with a scream, vanishing into his. Greedy kisses, as if he liked it.
As if he couldn’t get enough.
Her body knew what it wanted, eager to blot out the uncertainty, the fear, the constant questioning. She writhed in concert with a monster, forgetting everything but the fire spilling between her nerve endings, the need pulsing in her most secret parts, the desire to be filled. He took direction eagerly, every slight shift and begging twitch of her hips answered without hesitation or resistance, and she actually hissed when he freed his mouth from hers because she wanted to be kissed.
She wanted distraction while he fucked her, so she didn’t have to breathe or think.
But he made a swift movement, and suddenly the scent exploded in her head—warm, delicious, coppery, coating the back of her throat, the fangs popping free.
Blood.Hisblood.
And oh God but it was good, the warmth sliding down her throat, the tastes overlapping and combining as she swallowed, as she squirmed underneath him.
As shefed.
Building and building, taking its time, his rhythm almost leisurely as she gulped at the flood, and finally a burst of lava spread in concentric pulses, every thought and fear blotted from the universe as she came again and again, arched and shameless as a cat in heat, safely trapped underneath a hot, muscular weight.
Simone had never understood how some people could crave sex, do risky, embarrassing things just for the sake of getting laid.
But oh, God, now she did.
CHAPTER 14
How many nightshad he wandered with only the Thirst as a companion, the dust of ages accreting on his body, his perceptions, his very soul? Now the madness was gone, the fractures no longer thinly scabbed but very nearly healed, stray snippets of memory rising at odd moments as he followed his leman from the hotel, aware she was careful to avoid undue mortal notice.
Hovering at her shoulder, drenched in the heavy sweet perfume laced with a smoky tang of his own blood in her veins, throbbing from crown to soles with the memory of her pleasure as she writhed and cried out underneath him—all of it,all,turned the darkness to noon even more surely than sharp sanguinant sight, filled the mortal buildings with secret delight, transformed windows, streetlights, and car-lights into jewels set about the brightest, most beautiful lamp ever made.
Naturally her acceptance was only temporary; he was not fool enough to think her resigned to captivity. Yet at least she had enjoyed his attentions, fed to completion, and settled the new laptop in her bag. The clothes were not inadequate, she declared, but shetraveled light.
He could not argue. He climbed onto a giant, lumbering metal coach after her—a bus, she said, and he stored the term away, vaguely aware of such conveyances elsewhere, pulled by teams of horses. Or had that been in the more-distant past?
It did not matter. His leman was beside him, dropping into a hard plastic seat and gazing outward through a window which would have been prohibitively expensive some few centuries ago. The cleanness of her profile, the line of her throat, her shoulders loose and relaxed under her dark jacket, all so beautiful he could do nothing but stand, struck motionless next to a metal pole, watching as she swayed with the vehicle’s motion.
This was no mere mortal world but a savagely delightful garden, and if every night with a leman were even a fraction so glorious he could spend an untiring eternity thus. Now he remembered other sanguinant proverbs, and the whispers of what it meant to claim a leman.
“God, I miss coffee,” she murmured, staring out the dust-glazed glass. Her hands lay decorously in her lap; her hair was alive with golden highlights against the deep, glossy red-brown.
“Coffee?” He carefully wrapped a hand about the pole as a few other standing passengers did—the vehicle was relatively full, and every wan, lackluster mortal face bore the marks of age, hovering disease, shadowy incipient death-rot.
They had such brief lives. She would have shone among them starlike and glorious, ready to be claimed the moment a sanguinant happened across her path—or perhaps, chance and rarity being what they were, she could have gone unnoticed all her brief mortal days?
That prospect chilled him to the marrow.
“Used to be my favorite thing about the day, a cup in the morning with the paper. Or while looking out the dining room door.” A sigh caught the last word, perhaps unaware, and shehunched her shoulders, glancing up at him. “Can we even drink coffee? I never got around to testing it.”
To be so young, so afraid, struggling with a fledgling’s thirst and no doubt terrified by her introduction to the Gift… he knew nothing of her former life, if her Maker had violently broken it, or if she had been alone there as well. “Mortal food is pleasant enough. Not nutritious, though, and does not help the Thirst.”
He realized, somewhat belatedly, that she had saidwe. It had a lovely ring, that single inclusive syllable, however reluctant.
“What about garlic?” Her eyebrows lifted slightly, ripe lovely lips parted. Waiting upon his answer, and the sweetness threatened to strike him down as battle, glut, madness, the Sun itself could not.
“Mere seasoning. Crosses are useless, flax seeds easy to count at a glance, and silver only affects very young fledglings.” His face felt odd; it was so very strange to smile instead of simply baring fangs in dominance or glut-display. “We do not feel the compulsion to untie nets either. Onlysomefolklore is useful, darlin’.”
