Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 (7 page)

I shivered, whether from fear or need I didn’t know. Dorian cradled my neck in one hand, and the other slid down, over the concave of my belly and the mound below until he found the slit of my opening.

My thighs clenched automatically, but his leg was between then, keeping them opened.
I whimpered, my fingernails digging into his back. I wanted him there so badly, like he had been the night he had changed me, and yet a kind of terror was mixed up with it, too, a memory of the madness of that night and the need that overcame everything.

Dipping his finger between the folds
to catch the slick wetness, he traced my opening up to my clitoris and began to stroke, rolling it against the soft mound. My fingers dug in harder. I could feel him pushing me, pushing me harder toward that edge, and I wanted it and feared it at the same time. And all the time he was watching me, his expression hooded and inscrutable, and I couldn’t look away.

Without warn
ing, he lowered his head again, his mouth against my neck, my lips, my collarbone. And all I could do was rock with him, my thighs loosening under his touch, spreading to welcome him. My body surged to the tempo of his fingers and mouth, as if I had been made for his pleasure.

I bent my face into his shoulder, panting and whimpering as I felt the tension build up inside me, twisting tighter and tighter as the blood rushed in my ears.
Just as I thought I would break, he pushed a finger inside me to catch a place that exploded at his touch, and I ground my hips into his hand as my climax broke over me.

Waves of hot pleasure rolled out, surging from my cl
itoris deep into my core and out into my limbs, my center aching with desperate emptiness even as my body tingled and shuddered under his hands.

“
Dorian
,” I begged.

Dorian reached down, and I felt him pulling at his belt.
A moment later, he, too, was naked. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look. The silky hardness of his erection was startling against my leg.

I haven’t shaved in nearly a week,
some distant, half-mad part of me thought.
He’ll know—

And then that thought was gone as he began to move his hips against me.
His hardness was still against my thigh, and his finger found my opening again, stroking me insistently as his thumb circled my clitoris. I clenched against his finger, but it was not enough.

He slid a second finger inside me, and I gaspe
d, and for a moment I thought I would peak again. But the emptiness still throbbed inside me, and this time it had to be satisfied. He changed the movement of his hand, no longer simply sliding smoothly but pushing, stretching against the inside of me. His mouth on my neck was torture, his hands pushing me right to the edge, where I teetered, caught.

And then he
withdrew his hand and his hips pushed up between my legs, spreading me to him. Automatically, I tightened my thighs, my brain on fire from the madness of it all.

There was no going back.
From the moment I had stepped out of the dressing room into the surgery to face him, this moment had been written. But some part of me still fought it, denying the inevitability, demanding that I keep this part of myself from him, the creature to whom I’d already given far too much.

F
aint spots of color had risen in Dorian’s cheeks, and his voice was ragged as he looked down at me with the same need that held me captive.

“
Open for me, Cora,” he ordered.

And I
rejoiced as I obeyed.

He slipped up my body then, and I felt the smooth head of his erection against my entrance.
He was above me now, resting his weight on his elbows on either side of my head. I clung to his back, my nails biting into his flesh, desire and fear warring in me. I was frozen, wanting to arch into him, not daring to move, my breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps.

Dorian met my eyes.
“Trust me,” he said.

How could I not?
At his word, I would trust him to my doom.

He
pushed against me. There was the briefest burning that twisted into pleasure under his influence as it thrilled up my spine, and then it was gone, and he was filling me, stretching me until I could take no more and the weight of his hips rested against my body.

I gasped for air and shook with reaction, barely believing what I had done, what he had just done to me.
But he just said, “Open more,” and with one hand, he urged my thighs farther to the side. I could not deny him. He settled into the space, pushing even deeper inside.

“
Come with me, Cora,” he said.

I
had nowhere else to go.

He began moving slowing, pushing deep into me and pulling out almost to my entrance,
over and over again, and I lay still and breathless for an instant, shocked at the intimacy of it.

But my body was still keyed up, still close to the edge, and after the initial
startlement wore off, I found myself moving with him, only a little at first, and gradually more, until my hips rocked hard into him every time he came down to meet me. I could feel the strength in him, the need that was tightly leashed even now, and I didn’t dare think what it would mean if he were to ever let go.

I clenched with every thrust.
He pushed against me, into me, insistently against the place that, until now, had only twisted in sympathy with the waves that came from my clitoris. My body burned, as if all my nerves were sparking at once, and deep twists of pleasure pushed out from my center to fill me with the rhythm in me.

He began to build up speed, and he drove me with him, each stroke pushing me to a higher pitch.
I could hear my breath, broken, ragged and harsh, small noises escaping my lips. He slipped a hand down between us and took my clitoris between two of his fingers, and it plunged me over the edge without warning or control.

White heat ripped through me, coming from deep within me, surging out into my clitoris, my nipples, filling my head with tingling euphoria that blocked out sight, blocked out hearing, blocked out everything except for his merciless movements on top of me, inside of me, pushing me deeper and deeper into the orgasm until I thought I would drown.

Someone
cried out, piercingly, and I realized that it was me. Dorian shuddered on top of me, letting out a low sound that was swallowed up in my voice.

Finally, he slowed, slowed and stopped, and the world came back again.

D
orian sat up and gathered me into his arms, pulling my body against his and kissing the top of my head softly, over and over. Limply, I stared up at the bed’s canopy above me for a long moment, struggling to catch my breath, to pick up the broken pieces of myself and put them back in some kind of order.

And the order that it showed was painfully clear.
What had occurred was a deliberate, planned, devastatingly thorough initiation into sex.

“
How did you know?” I asked.

“
That you were a virgin?” Dorian asked, an unexpected note of humor in his voice.

Oh, God
. I had just popped my cherry with a thousand-year-old, blood-sucking vampire. As far as
first time
stories went, this must top them all. I nodded mutely, aware that some part of me I could not yet fully feel was shuddering in horror.

What could he have done to you, Cora?
What might he have done if he’d lost that iron control, only for a moment?

He chuckled softly into my hair.
“I have had a few centuries of practice at reading women and their reactions, Cora. Less changes than you might think.”

Centuries of reading women—centuries in which the women who were with him died.

He turned me slightly so that we faced one another. As the afterglow faded, self-consciousness returned. Stiffening, I crossed my arms over my breasts, curling my legs under me, even as I felt the tug that his presence always had on me.

W
hat had I done?

“
There is no reason to be embarrassed,” he said, reaching out to stroke the line of my jaw with one knuckle.

Right.
Because him saying so made it true.

It could, though,
a part of me whispered. Wouldn’t that make everything so much easier?

I
pushed back to the foot of the bed, pulling up a corner of the bedspread and wrapping it across my body. My legs shook slightly, an echo of an ache in my thighs, gone as soon as I recognized it.

“You held back.
I could tell you were trying to be…gentle.” I almost choked on the word. It sounded like some kind of cheap promise from a villain in a bad movie. But he wasn’t a man, treating a less experienced partner with smarmy condescension. He was a vampire, and I had no doubt he could break my body in his hands as easily as he could tear my throat out.

“
And was I?” He looked almost impossibly self-satisfied, leaning on one elbow against the bed, his exquisitely sculpted body stretched across the bedspread.

“
Sure. This time,” I said, scowling at him. He could have attacked me with all the finesse of a bull in season, and under his thrall, the pain would have been turned to pleasure. A dark thrill went through me at the thought. Fear, I chose to call it.

He laughed again, his voice stirring a small shiver from me.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to.”

“
But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” I said stiffly. There wasn’t much he couldn’t make me want, at least in the heat of the moment.

He slid off the bed.
I tried to keep my gaze on his face, but it was dragged downward, across the perfect contours of his chest and belly to the length of his penis, now lying heavy but quiescent in its nest of curls.

I was staring.
Oh, crap. My face flamed.

“
Get used to it, Cora,” he said, the words still colored with amusement.

I closed my eyes for a moment to break my stare,
then managed to meet his gaze again. Did I want to get used to it? I wondered. I wanted him again, right then, but how much of that was the madness that he had infected me with, and how much was real?

“
I want to get dressed now,” I said in a small voice.

He nodded, and the flicker of compassion in his face made me eve
n more conflicted. Dammit. I wanted—I needed—to hate him, at least in some part of my brain. Some emotion had to be a counterweight to his thrall over me.

“
If you plan on leaving, you’d better go,” he said.

If another man had said that, I would have thought that he was pushing for a one-night stand.
As it was, I knew the unspoken conclusion to his sentence: Otherwise, he might change my mind for me.

He
closed the distance I had put between us, and I stiffened, but all he did was tilt my chin up with one hand to plant a brief kiss on my forehead. I closed my eyes and sighed involuntarily at it, anyway.

Dorian
released me and turned away. Leaving his clothing on the floor, he went to one of the doors that I hadn’t opened before. As he stepped through, I saw a different bedroom beyond, the mirror of this one, decorated in the dark red of old blood. His room. The door shut behind him, and he was gone.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and went to retrieve my pants and underwear.
Something warm and wet slid down my thigh, and I realized what it must be. Seized with sudden horror, I grabbed a corner of the bedspread and scrubbed it between my legs. The pale beige fabric came away darkened with moisture.

I could be pregnant.

Panic suddenly overwhelmed me. I wasn’t using any type of birth control, and Dorian certainly hadn’t used a condom. How could I have not have thought about it? It wasn’t like it happened all at once—
Oh, look at that, he’s coming inside me, what a surprise.

But he was a vampire, after all, and it wasn’t like pregnancy was the first thing you thought about when being seduced by a vampire.
And perhaps he hadn’t wanted me to think about it. Could he do that to me? I wasn’t sure.

Could not-quite-humans and vampires even reproduce?
He said that vampires were born, not made, but he didn’t say how. Maybe they could only reproduce with female vampires, and once-humans were nothing more than a toy for sex and blood. I thought of Dorian with another woman, inside of her, his mouth on her.... It made me sick.

I’ve gone crazy,
I told myself. That was the only possible conclusion.

I grabbed the rest of my clothes and went into the bathroom, where I used a wash cloth to
clean myself up and got dressed as quickly as I could, shrugging into my jacket last. I went back into the bedroom, squared my shoulders, and knocked hard on the door that led to his room.