Biting Oz: Biting Love, Book 5 (30 page)

And then I did.

I arched into him as I climaxed again. He thrust so deep his balls slapped my butt, contracting hard as bellows. Scorching liquid heat filled me, even as he kept thwacking into me. It flooded me, wave on wave of molten pleasure, until the pieces I’d shattered into burst, an explosion of bright gold.

My muscles relaxed, my mind emptied. I was at peace. Glynn’s fists still trapped my hair, his head bent as he brought his breathing under control. He softened inside me.

I gingerly started to sit up.

Glynn’s cock jerked tight in me. Hardened. “Junior, don’t—”

WTF? I elbowed myself sitting. It drew him from my body. His face seared with intense pleasure/pain as his glistening erection emerged.

Erection, as in fully engorged cock, even bigger than before.

I stared. His controlled breaths weren’t to bring down his heart rate, but to bring down his erection. To meet my human expectations of a single male orgasm.

I touched his cock in wonder.

He groaned. “
Babi
, please don’t—”

“Glynn, please
do
. If you can go again, so can I.”

He gave me an incredulous look. I smiled and patted myself in invitation.

It was all he needed. He threw me under him, rolled my thighs up along my ribs, and with a lion’s roar, drove into me. He started thrusting, pounding with almost animal ferocity.

I’d already come three times, so I simply smiled and relaxed. Lying under him, I had no end in mind, no goal, except to enjoy his beautiful body, his rippling muscles, his skin glistening with desire.

He kept thrusting. My enjoyment sharpened. Desire returned, wrenching a little mewl from my throat.

His eyes burned bright red at the sound—he’d been waiting for it. His thrusts slowed. His fangs lengthened and his mouth opened on my neck.

Hot breath steamed bright need onto my skin. Sharp points pricked, focusing desire. I throttled a moan…throbbing fangs sank in, releasing it.

Ultraslow, I burst. A full-body climax, lengthened and extended by slow rolls of his hips. I shuddered, wave after wave quaking from brain to toes and back again, crisscrossing until the crests were ecstasy and the troughs were peace, and I shimmered into a full, flowering being.

I was still shimmering when he wrapped me in his strong arms and rolled, brought me on top, cradled in his warmth.

Time snapped into place and I knew. Not just that I loved him. But that he could be the one. Mine, the male I’d spend the rest of my life with.

I lay panting atop his impressive chest. His erection nestled inside me, not wilted after that orgasm so much as waiting quietly. If I moved again, it would grow. It made me very aware of just how different vampires were, that the males could have multiple orgasms.

Which brought to mind the questions that should have been foremost in my head from the start.

I might want to spend the rest of my life with him, but would he want to spend the rest of his life with me? And even if he would—
could
he?

Serious considerations for postcoital bliss. But if he was The One, there were things I had better find out.

Breathing slightly less like a bellows, I managed to raise my head, look him in the face and ask my first question. “Are you married?”

“Of course not.”

“With the deal you made about home…girlfriend? Significant other?”

“Junior, no. Not now or in the recent past. I wouldn’t get involved with you even on a temporary basis if I belonged to someone else.”

Not in the
recent
past. Vampires were both long-lived and highly sexual. In a hundred years Glynn might have had thousands of encounters. How many of those women were still alive? How many still pined for him?

Were there any he pined for?

That pushed me off his hard torso. I jumped off the bed and paced away. “How recent is recent?”

“Years. Decades.” His eyes followed me. “Why?”

I opened my mouth to ask the kicker.
How old are you, anyway?
But something else caught my eye.

Something new sat on the little round table.

Just above the center tealight was a single bronzed shoe. Small, not much more than a bootie, with a pointy toe. Under the bronzing was evidence of ornamentation, bands of leather or cloth.

“What’s this?” I moved to pick it up.

“Nothing.” He was instantly there, a restraining hand on my arm. “Please don’t.”

“This shoe wasn’t here the other day.”

“I bring it out when I’m considering something.”

“Like a concentration focus?” Despite the bronzing, or maybe preserved by it, I could see scuffing.

“Something like that. Junior, don’t—”

I turned it over. The sole was worn. “It’s been used.” I set it back on the table. “It’s not a doll’s.”

“It’s not.” The bald statement, his flat tone, screamed pain to me.

But I had to know. Not because of Nixie, or because I was curious. But because maybe I could help. “It’s a child’s shoe,” I prompted. “Yours?”

I meant his child’s, and he nodded, but to my surprise he added, “It’s the first thing that I knew was mine.”

I stifled my surprise. “Who owned everything else?”

“My abductor.”

Ice rolled through my system. I just stood there as Glynn returned to the bed and sat with unnatural heaviness.

He clasped his hands between his knees. “You’ll be curious about that too, I suppose.”

For such a strong male to be so sad… That got me moving. I sat on the bed next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, or tried to. My arm wasn’t quite long enough, so I snaked it around his ribs instead. “Kidnapping is traumatic. Something you should talk about.”

He just sat there, staring at his clasped hands.

I rubbed his spine. “You’ll feel better.”

“Will I?” He laughed, not a happy sound at all. “Fine. A vampire took me from my home when I was too young to remember.”

My hand kept moving on his back, patting reassuringly. But my chest froze.

“His name was Fychan.” Glynn shook his head. “I don’t think it was his real name. He didn’t sound Welsh.”

A vampire had kidnapped Glynn as a small child. I breathed past the shock. Kept my tone normal when I said, “Maybe he took a name from someone in the area, to fit in.”

“Perhaps.” He fell silent.

“So your earliest memories are of this vampire Fychan?” I prompted.

He drew a bushel of air, let it out slowly. “Fychan, and the road. Sleeping in hay lofts and open fields, moving at night. Staying a day or two but never very long. Always hungry…for food, but for simple human comfort too.”

I wrapped my other arm around him, an awkward hug. “Why did he keep you?”

“I was his early warning system while he slept. Also a decoy to catch humans unaware. A watcher for witnesses while he drank. And sometimes, when he was particularly inept at the catching, his source of fresh blood.”

I couldn’t help it, I jerked. “That’s…that’s horrible.”

“It was my life.” Glynn’s voice was hollow. “For eight years he dragged me across Wales and England and Scotland, barely one step ahead of the lynch mobs. One night he got drunk on whiskey piss without hunting first. He drank blood from me, too much. It killed me, and I woke like him.”

We sat in silence. I rubbed my cheek against him, giving and seeking comfort. “You were turned as a boy? How did you survive?”

“I found others like me. Young, just turned. We watched out for each other. I grew to manhood with them…vampires become their ideal age, no matter how old they are when they die. My little gang…we did the best we could, but we weren’t a family.” He sighed. “Because of the vampire, I had no family, no home, and no childhood. Except…” He gazed at the table and his face softened. I thought he looked at the cookie press.

The love in his eyes was evident even after all these years. I wished with all my heart that I could inspire such a love. “Who was she?”

“A farm wife. A big woman with an even bigger heart. Her name was Nesta.” His voice warmed from that hollow, distant tone. “We stayed in her barn one of the last summers I was human. Fychan pretended to be a farm hand. He did some work at night and I did the rest during the day.

“It was the best summer of my life. Not only did I get enough to eat, but we stayed in one place long enough for me to get to know people. Nesta made cookies for me. That was her stamp. She gave it to me.”

“And the pipe?”

“Her husband John relaxed with a pipe of the evening. I found the smell soothing.” He swallowed several times. “One night, in the barn, John discovered Fychan drinking from his wife’s neck. John stabbed the fool vampire with a pitchfork. While John went for the axe to sever Fychan’s neck…well, one of my duties was to save the vampire from his own stupidity. I pulled out the pitchfork and we fled.”

“Was Nesta okay?”

“For all his faults, Fychan wasn’t a killer, or not intentionally. Both John and Nesta lived to a ripe old age. They had a small army of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When I went back to Wales as a young vampire, I…watched over them from afar. Helped them as I could.”

He’d watched over them. Despite never having a family, he knew how to care for one. “That was good of you.”

“It felt…right. When the family died out, I bought the holding. I live there two months out of the year as my home.”

He traveled to Wales every year. Called the only place he’d been happy his home.

I could see the yearning for a true home in every tense line of his body, every gesture and word. In the glistening of his eyes. He still felt like he was on the outside, looking in. Vulnerable. So strong, so caring…yet he had no center.

It made my heart ache. He was right—I was lucky to have a home, a center, a base of strength. A place, as a youngster, to push against, safe enough to define not only who I was, but who I wasn’t.

Glynn had none of that. Like his tchotchke table, his center was only a mist of unknown. Although that would make him even more dangerous, because he had no stake in anything at all.

But it would take its toll.

I stared at the mementos on the table, the cookie press, pipe and dragon… “If you wandered all of Great Britain, how do you know you’re Welsh?”

“I had a blanket, long since rags but fresh in my memory, embroidered with a coat of arms bearing three heads. I looked it up later. It’s Ednyfed, who was Welsh. A few half-remembered baby words… I don’t know absolutely that I’m Welsh, but it feels right.”

“But what about the vampire? Couldn’t he tell you your name or where you came from?”

“Fychan claimed he didn’t know. In a drunken stupor he once mentioned that I came from a large Welsh homestead, and that the Ednyfed blanket had come with me. But my family could have been anything from the landowner to a visitor to a peasant who worked the land.”

“So the vampire named you.”

“No.” Glynn barked a laugh. “He called me ‘boy’. I adopted my own names, for people I admired. Rhys for Lord Rhys ap Gruffydd of Deheubarth. Glynn for Prince Owain Glyndwr, though he came later. And Jenkins because…” He took a breath, slightly hitched. “That’s what Nesta called me. It’s…like Johnny, or little John. I guess I hoped one of those names was truly mine.”

How terrible not to even know your own name. “Did you try hiring a detective? I know this happened a while ago, but kidnapping usually makes the papers. Maybe there are records—”

“Junior. I died in 1240.”

I blinked at him. Mishela had alluded to such immense age, but what he was saying was bigger than my brain. “Twelve forty? As in before the Renaissance? As in your life playing out against huge historical events? Queen Elizabeth I, the Inquisition, World Wars I and II—”

“I was there for it all.” Glynn’s smile was tired. “But mostly I just tried to stay alive. Or undead, I guess.”

Now I knew why home was so important to him. And Wales was his home.

Not New York.

I couldn’t ask him to come to New York with me, not now. Not after hearing what Wales meant to him. How could I be so selfish as to ask him to give that up?

Although maybe he would ask me to come with him to Wales.
 

But no. How would I earn money to send to my parents?

God. Maybe some things were not meant to be. I swallowed my pain and wrapped him in my arms. We sat in silence until it was time for me to go home.

The more I knew him, the less important how he made me feel was, and the more I just wanted him to be happy.

Entr’acte

When Junior left, Glynn missed her so much that he was out his door and into the garage before he realized what he was doing, the urge to follow an actual physical tug on his heart.

He reminded himself it was better she’d gone. He had much to think about.

The strength of his feelings troubled him. He’d spent centuries looking for love. He could hardly believe he’d found it in the arms of a woman he’d just met.