Bloodlust Denied (10 page)

He turned, so swiftly she could scarcely believe it, and knelt between her open thighs. Her breath panted between parted lips.

“Unfair.”

“But not against the rules.” Again he shot her a smile forged from the deepest pit of purgatory. “There are no rules.”

But there was a rule. The most important rule. Her legs trembled as he splayed his fingers against her thighs. She struggled to contain her emotions, to dampen her arousal because if she gave him her orgasm now, she stood no earthly chance of ever gaining his respect.

“Tell me you want me.” His voice was hoarse as his thumbs caressed the swollen folds of her pussy. “And we can reach mutual satisfaction.”

She wanted him. More than ever.

“Untie me.” Her hips ground uselessly against the satin bed sheets, against his restraining hands.

His dark head nestled between her thighs and his tongue flicked over her aroused bud. A shocking sensation of heat and wet and pressure. She bucked involuntarily, hating herself, hating him, but above all hating the thought that he might stop such wondrous torture.

“Honey and cream.” His rumbling voice vibrated against her clitoris, ricocheted along her nerves, curled around her tight nipples.
Unfair
screamed through her mind, but she raised her hips anyway, silently begging for something she would never say aloud.

His tongue invaded, licking her sensitized core as his hands slid up her writhing body and cupped her aching breasts. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, but the dark only enhanced every touch of his fingers and mouth.

The tip of his tongue swirled around her bud with relentless dedication. His hot breath drifted across her wet slit, stirring the heavy ache that throbbed through her channel. She held her breath in a vain effort to dull her senses, but the erratic thud of her pulses only increased.

She would not come
. The thought pounded in her mind but when he squeezed her nipples and grazed her clitoris with his teeth, all sanity shattered. She bucked helplessly, loving the feel of his hair against the inside of her thighs, of his mouth eating her pussy.

And then he was inside her, impaling his length into her welcoming sheath. She contracted around him, sucking him in, shuddering with need and want and mindless abandon. His naked flesh melded with hers, rough against smooth. No barrier between them.

Just as she had endlessly imagined.

Alexius raised himself onto his hands as he continued to pound into Morana. Her pussy was wet and tight. Her climax rippled along his cock in an endless wave, squeezing his rigid flesh. The expression of dazed ecstasy on her face transfixed him, reached deep inside and twisted something long dead and decayed.

A strangled groan scraped along his throat; sweat slicked his skin and he clamped his jaw shut. Pressure thundered through him and his balls hardened and his cock jerked. Release exploded and he pumped his hot seed deep into her body, impaling her onto the bed. Crimson sheets, candlelight and the scent of musky sex filled his senses, blurred his vision. And still he needed more, fucking her the way he had dreamed of fucking her every night for the last three years. Only when Morana gasped and clenched his backside with her ankles did he finally collapse onto her soft body.
His
salvation
.

Her heart thundered, her blood pumped, the sweet scent of her completion drenched the air. Yet no desire to puncture her fragile skin assailed him. No clawing need to suck down her blood, to quench his ravening bloodlust tormented his mind. It was as if this coupling, this primal fucking, had sated him in ways he had never before imagined possible.

Yet, despite how he had freed her hands in the moments before orgasm, she did not touch him.

He would not demean himself to ask.

Moments slid by, and he continued to listen to the hypnotic thud of her heart, the ecstatic rush of her blood through veins. But still she kept her arms above her head.

Finally he rolled off her, an odd disquiet gnawing through his chest. In all his sexual encounters, he finished by tearing himself from the woman’s clinging arms, repulsed by the insistence on holding and caressing when he no longer hungered for the blood or the body.

In this strange velvet silence, Morana’s blood no longer tempted him. But he craved her body and in a shameful, unnatural corner of his psyche he also craved to feel her arms around him, holding him. To feel her fingers caress his flesh and tangle through his hair.

His lips twisted with self-disgust. What the fuck was he thinking? He didn’t want that kind of suffocation. It had been more than two thousand years since he’d wanted a woman to touch him in such a manner, and he had no intention of resurrecting derelict emotions that gained him nothing but impotent grief.

Morana was different from the countless other women he’d taken over the centuries. That was the reason she was here in his bed, the reason he hadn’t already tossed her aside after slaking his twin lusts.

The reason he denied himself her blood.
Even if he no longer craved it.
The hunger would return and he would resist because she intrigued him, fascinated him and it had been too long since another had so captivated his interest.

That was all he felt for her.

But fuck it, why hadn’t she held onto him as he’d climaxed within her? Was that her stubborn way of proving her independence, of showing him that despite being unable to deny her body’s response to his touch she still retained a modicum of control over her damn arms and hands?

Even though he had released her bonds in the shimmering second before she had spilled her own shattering orgasm for him?

A shudder rocked her body. He contemplated drawing the coverlet over her, then derided the thought. She could cover herself. He wasn’t her slave.

He hooked the satin sheet between his toes and yanked the cursed thing over her legs. How much longer would she keep this silence up? Did she expect an explanation as to why he’d broken the wager? Or was she simply savoring her victory, waiting for him to admit that she had won?

Forearm across forehead, he glowered at the intricately embroidered tester. He’d wanted her touch and had released her. And given her opportunity to both deny and disdain him.

If she thought to collect, to leave here without a backward glance, she was sorely deluded. Fuck the wager. He wanted her to stay and there would be no discussion.

So why the devil had he delivered the choice into her hands?

Her breath escaped in a shaky gasp. “Do you intend to keep me tethered for the entire time I’m your captive?”

His scowl deepened as he turned to look at her. She returned his scrutiny but there was no triumph in her eyes. It was a trick of the candlelight, could be nothing else, because for a moment he imagined he saw tears glimmering within those dark enigmatic depths.

“Tethered?” What game did she now play? His glance traveled over her extended arms and perception shifted. He rose onto his elbow and stared into her flushed face. “I released you long ago, Morana.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Of course, he hadn’t physically loosened her bindings but at the time, he hadn’t imagined she would notice. He had thought she would simply realize she was free and assume he’d untied her as she writhed beneath him in mindless delight.

When she still didn’t move, a thought occurred to him. She didn’t know she had won. Didn’t know he had, for a reason even he found incomprehensible, broken the wager.

She thought he was the victor.

A smile curved his lips at the knowledge she had no intention of leaving. Her honor wouldn’t allow it and he possessed none, so would never confide the tangled truth.

It was better this way. Far less complicated. He trailed a finger across her collarbone and over her shoulder. “Touch me and see.”

She hadn’t held him because she’d believed herself still enslaved. It was madness to find comfort in such but what the fuck.

Morana remained motionless. “I can’t.”

His comfort level jarred. “I won’t eat you.” At least, not tonight. Not until his hunger returned and she no longer enthralled him.

She swallowed, as if her throat hurt, and his gaze hovered on her pale neck for a split-second longer than necessary. “I can’t feel my arms.”

Alexius frowned and reached for her arm. The unnatural chill penetrated through his hand and with a smothered curse, he leveled himself upright and gently maneuvered the deadened limb to her side.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He rescued her other arm and then gingerly rubbed his hands over her tautly defined biceps.

“Why would you care?” She spoke through gritted teeth, as though his ministrations pained. He hesitated, unsure, and then sent a blast of heat from his mind to warm her chilled marrow. “I thought perhaps it was part of your plan for my shoulders to dislocate.”

He shot her shoulders a sharp look.

“They’re not dislocated.” Why hadn’t she said something? To keep her enslaved was one thing, but he hadn’t intended to cut off her blood supply.
At least not like this
. He pushed that thought from his mind. “Is this better?” He could feel the heat beneath his hands as he continued to stroke her but her creased forehead suggested his medical intervention left a great deal to be desired.

“Yes.” The admission appeared to choke her.

A crazy notion stabbed through his brain. He owed her an apology.

He stared at her in disbelief, as if she had been the one to utter such blasphemy instead of his clearly unhinged brain.

“You must be hungry,” he said instead, his voice gruff. Apologize? To a human? He’d sooner carve out his blackened heart and eat it. “I’ll arrange for a tray to be delivered.”

She stared at him as he backed off the bed and pulled his shirt over his head. Faint whisperings of hunger wove through his mind, spiraling toward his gut. By rights, he shouldn’t need to feed for at least another forty-eight hours, not the way he’d gorged himself earlier, but he couldn’t trust himself to wait.

He didn’t want to fight the need to feast on Morana. Somehow it was good,
clean
, to be with her and not constantly want to sink his fangs deep into her veins.

It wouldn’t last. But he intended to enjoy the novelty for as long as he could.

“Am I confined to this room?” Her question pierced his contemplation and he frowned at her.

“What?”

The tip of her tongue dampened her lips, and another hunger stirred. Gods. Already?

“Do I have your permission to leave this room?”

She was asking his permission? That had to hurt. And then he realized why she was asking.

She thought she had lost the wager. She thought she was bound to his word, under his command until he allowed her to leave.

Unease stirred, an extraordinary emotion he couldn’t quite place. Fleetingly he considered telling her the truth but that was unthinkable because everything in her attitude suggested she’d flee his estate before he concluded his confession.

And although he wouldn’t allow her to escape, for some reason he didn’t want to keep her by brute force. He wanted her to stay of her own accord, even if that accord was extracted through false pretenses.

A dull hammering around the perimeter of his skull vibrated his brain and he dragged on his breeches, avoiding eye contact. It didn’t matter under which circumstances Morana remained on his estate.

So long as she did.

After the duke stamped from the room and slammed the door behind him, Morana sagged onto the pillows in shaky exhaustion. She dragged the sheet around her breasts and hugged her waist, relieved her arms once again felt attached to her body, but overriding her relief was confusion at the duke’s response to her paralyzed limbs.

She didn’t believe he had really released her earlier, although equally why would he lie? And why had he so tenderly brought life back to her hands and arms when he could easily have summoned a servant?

Most of all, why hadn’t he laughed and lorded his victory over her? She’d expected it. Had braced for it. And yet he hadn’t even mentioned it.

He hadn’t answered her question, either. Was she confined to this room? A groan slipped from her lips as she struggled upright, wrapping the satin more securely around herself. From her vantage point, she couldn’t see her gown, and she didn’t trust her legs to support her weight to explore the room further.

The soft pillows enfolded her as she sank back and flung her arm across her eyes. He hadn’t needed to answer her question. Without clothes, she was as securely trapped as if he’d bound her in chains.

But what really twisted her gut and tormented her mind was the knowledge that, despite the inevitability of her health deteriorating the longer she and Thanatos remained apart, she still didn’t want to leave.

A distant, disconnected beat dragged her through endless layers of silken clouds, and with a gasp, her eyes sprang open. She’d fallen asleep. How had that happened? And the beat was a knocking on the door.

She gripped the sheet more tightly. The duke would never knock.