Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (6 page)

“How can you talk about it like that? A heart—what can you even know about a heart, other than its blood? That’s not love,” I protested.

He might believe it was, but being a vampire, how could he even know what love should be?

“You know better than that, Cora. There’s more than blood between us. Humans pretend to value unconditional love, but that’s not something full humans could ever understand. There are always conditions—lines that cannot be crossed, words that cannot be unsaid.” He raised the back of my hand to his lips, and my skin came alive under his touch.

“But with you, no line is too far,” I said faintly, through the sensations that he stirred in me. “It never can be. Nothing is too much, even if it destroys me. ”

“I would sooner destroy myself,” he said, and his next kiss fell on my lips.

I clung to him, my body pressed against his, my parted lips inviting him to take me. But the kiss was too soft, over too soon as he moved lower, along my jaw and down my neck.

Need flared up in the core of my being, pushing up my spine and into my brain. I knew what was going to happen next—I knew it, and I wanted nothing else but him. Even though I refused the names he wanted to put to what we had.

F
lames of desire licked across my skin, following his mouth as it traced the neckline of my dress and swirling into my mind. I struggled against its influence, trying to keep a clear head. Maybe my surrender was inevitable, but I wouldn’t give up easily.

“This—this is just lust,” I said. “Chemicals. Like an animal in heat.”

He straightened, standing over me, and my hands tightened slightly, involuntarily on the fabric of his shirt.

“Your greatest poets would disagree,” he said. “Those who are supposed to be able to put words to the human condition with more skill than any.”

I shook my head even as one of his hands found the zipper of my dress and pulled it down, sending a shock of anticipation through me. “I don’t believe you.”

“‘Let not the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’” he recited as the stiff fabric of the dress’s bodice came away from my body. “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

He tugged at the gown, and it slid over my hips to puddle at my feet. His hands came to rest lightly on my waist, still encased in the heavy foundation garment.

“That’s not what those words mean,” I protested even as my body inclined toward his involuntarily. He was changing things around, just like he always did.

“Isn’t it?” Dorian stepped around, behind me. I stood with the dress billowing around my ankles, caught in the force of his darkness. My body felt stretched, tense, waiting for his next touch.

And then it came, and I gasped as his lips touched the nape of my neck, moving down across the prominence of my spine, smooth and cool against my skin. The heat in my center pooled low, where my legs joined. I leaned into him, closing my eyes, losing the edges of myself in the electric reaction.

He pulled away just far enough to speak, and I felt his breath against my skin.

“‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,’” he repeated softly, “‘or bends with the remover to remove.’”

I shivered at those words. No, nothing I could do seemed to be able to erase the way I reacted to Dorian, no matter how strongly I willed it. I knew I had to escape the terrible bond that held me—but I was afraid that if someone offered me the chance right then, when I was in his arms, I could do nothing but refuse.

And I was also afraid that I wanted more from him than what the words
sex
or even
pleasure
could encompass. When he touched me like that, I had a mad urge to immolate myself in him until I was utterly lost, so that I didn’t even know who or what I was anymore. And I was afraid that if I did—when I did—he might not put me back together again.

I felt his hands move to the laces of the corset, and I caught my breath as he untied them, anticipating the cool air. But instead, he put a hand between my shoulder blades and pulled.

The pressure against my ribs and waist increased so abruptly that the air was pushed from my lungs. He moved his hand to my hips and pulled again. I felt the open inch at the back of the foundation garment come closed, pressing on me so that I had to take shallow breaths from my chest.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he tied the laces off again.

He chuckled, a dark, rich sound that made my hair rise on the back of my neck. He pulled me back against his body, his mouth exploring the curve of my neck. “You will see,” he murmured as his lips skimmed my ear.

Dorian wrapped his arms around my waist, but I could hardly feel them through the pressure of the corset. Then his mouth found my collarbone, followed it, and my body trembled against his as he found its hollow. He kissed his way up the side of my neck to the sensitive place just behind my ear. My skin felt hot and flushed, his lips and tongue sending shivering reactions through me that left my legs loose and shaky.

He turned me in his arms, and my body melded to his, fitting so well that it frightened me. He caught my mouth, a light, brief kiss that left my lips tingling for more. My breath came fast against the stricture of the corset, and I let out a little sound as his mouth came down over mine again. The kiss was firmer but still too brief, a mere press of his lips to mine before it was gone. I ached between my thighs, and the satin lining of the corset rasped against my skin. My arms had wrapped around his body, holding him to me. I wanted him closer, closer still....

He gave a sad, distant half-smile as he looked down at me, and at the sight of it, my heart squeezed in my chest.

“‘Love is an ever-fixed mark that looks upon tempests and is never shaken,’” he said, almost to himself. “‘It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.’”

Worth unknown. Again the words meant almost too much. What was the meaning of what I felt? I would have labeled it lust, if I had been forced to give it any name at all, but that didn’t begin to cover it. What I wanted wasn’t just his body on mine. I wanted to erase those flashes of sadness, to melt his coldness, to fill the ancient emptiness within him with myself.

And a part of me wanted him not to admit that he didn’t love me—but to prove that he did.

That discovery froze me in place, struck with a bone-deep terror. I couldn’t want him, no matter what, because what he offered me was nothing but a beautiful prison. What he felt about me couldn’t possibly matter.

Could it? If I really thought that, why did I keep pushing him, asking him?

I don’t care,
I told myself fiercely.
I don’t. I won’t.

Then Dorian kissed me again, and the shock it sent rippling through me seemed to mock all my resolutions. I could taste him as he dipped shallowly between my lips, and I felt a sudden, half-panicked desperation for more, for everything, and I opened my mouth, begging him in.

But he pulled away, and I gave a tiny, involuntary whimper.

“Well, then,” he murmured, and again that chuckle, as dark and rich as his brandy-flavored mouth. This time, when his mouth met mine, it was everything I had been yearning for. He possessed me utterly, stroking my tongue, my mouth, moving with a slow rhythm that rocked my body, tying my brain and my hips and my lips and my center to him. And the strange desperation twisted into a kind of exulting fulfillment.
Yes, this, this and more....

The ache between my thighs deepened to a throb, and he caught me up against him as my legs gave way. Scooping me up, he carried me to the sofa.

His eyes were haunted as he set me down softly upon the leather. “‘Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks, but bears it out—even to the edge of doom.’”

Whose doom? His, or mine?

Could it even matter?

He started to pull away, but I clung to his shirt.

“Don’t,” I said.
Don’t leave.

He treated me to a lopsided smile that hurt my heart. “Have no fear, Cora. I’m not going anywhere.”

He loosened my hands from his shirt and slid his away to unclip the white suspenders that held up his highwaisted pants. I sat up and pulled the tail of his shirt out of the waistband of his pants and loosened the bottom stud. I kept my head down as I worked upwards, not wanting to see the shadow of myself reflected in his eyes.

His hands, working down, met mine halfway. He caught my hands in his, and I stilled, my body thrilling at even that small contact.

“Cora,” he said, and my eyes were dragged upward. I saw the shadow there, but over it was a hunger that sent my pulse skittering out of control.

“I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” I said weakly.

“It’s good, Cora,” he said, bending to bring my hand to his lips, just as he had the first time we had been together. I closed my eyes at the silken caress, soft and hard at once. I could feel his breath against the back of my knuckles. “It is the purest thing in my black life.”

And the blackest one in mine?

Dorian let go of my hand and knelt next to the sofa. He captured one of my ankles in his hands and slid the shoe from my foot. His thumbs moved against my instep slowly, methodically, releasing tension that I didn’t even know I had, working into my heel and the across the ball of my foot. I sank back against the sofa’s arm as liquid warmth filled me, all my muscles gone limp.

And something within me let go and surrendered to the moment, whatever it might bring.

I watched with half-lidded eyes as he lifted my foot and bent his head. But it wasn’t until I felt his damp mouth against the arch that I realized what he was doing.

Embarrassment flooded me. How could he put his mouth there, on my foot, of all places? I had the urge to snatch my foot away, but then what I was feeling penetrated my brain, and I couldn’t move.

It should tickle, I thought dimly. Oh, but it did not. The delicious sensations of his lips and tongue and, yes, teeth were anything but ticklish. He kissed each toe separately, then slipped one into his mouth and suckled it in a way that sent a lance of pleasure straight into my groin.

As I was still gasping in surprise, he slipped off my other shoe and repeated the performance on that foot. I had slipped into a pleasant, achy haze when his mouth moved upward, to the space just behind my ankle.

Dorian skimmed quickly over my calves to linger against the tender skin of my inner knee, first one and then the other. The lassitude I had felt was heating to a more tense anticipation, tightening deep in my belly and making my breath come faster against the unyielding clasp of the corset.

He slid his hands up my legs, nudging them apart. His mouth followed, damp and insistent, against the tender skin of my inner thighs. The closer he got to their juncture, the tighter the tension coiled in my center, and aching so much that I grabbed his wrists to keep from touching myself.

Dorian’s mouth reached the edge of my panties, and I inhaled sharply as he kissed it slowly and then ran his tongue under the elastic. There, he was right there, and my body burned with the intensity of what I wanted him to do next. I couldn’t even think it, much less put words to it, but a part of my brain started on an endless loop:
Oh please, please, there, please there, please....

He kissed me softly though the cotton, his hot breath going through it and sending a surge of reaction through my body that left me lightheaded. He hooked his fingers under the band and tugged. The panties slid from under my rear and down my legs. He pulled his hands free from mine and dropped the garment to the side.

Dorian rocked back, and I shook with the withdrawal. But I bit off a noise of protest when I saw his hands at the fly of his pants as he got up. A moment later, he’d toed off his shoes and socks and stripped from the waist down. He stood before me for a moment in nothing but his open shirt, the firelight flickering off the pale, perfect contours of his body, his proud erection darker than the marble purity of his skin.

It still amazed me that such a strange thing had been inside me. And even more astonishing, I had wanted it, panted for it each time, just as I ached for it now.

“Not yet,” Dorian said, the smile playing at the corner of his lips for once unshadowed by darker thoughts.

My eyes snapped up to meet his gaze, and I realized that my hunger had been naked on my face. I bit my lip, and his smile broadened.

“In time, Cora,” he said, lowering himself onto the empty half of the sofa. “In time.”

He swiftly traced a line up from my knee to the crease of my thigh with his mouth, lips and tongue almost unbearable against my sensitive skin.

And then he was there, at the aching entrance to my body, before I was ready yet also too long after. His kiss was a damp, light, closed-mouth caress that sent me reeling. He kissed me again there, his mouth in my curls, my half-open legs baring my folds to his mouth, and I tilted my hips toward his touch.

Never had I imagined, never, never.... The word seemed to tangle with the light pressure of his mouth and the feelings he sent through me. Never, never, never that it could be like
this.

My heart beat fast in my ears. I struggled to catch my breath against the tightness of the corset. I could feel his breath on me, and I gripped the corset at my hips, jamming my fingers under the stiff edge, needing something to hold onto for what I knew was coming next.

And it came. The full width of his tongue, pushing between the outer folds at the lowest point of my entrance, moving upward so slowly, too slowly until it stopped to rest against my clitoris. Heat surged through me. I knew that he must feel it, too, feel my swelling against his mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My brain was too full, everything was too full, swollen, aching, needing.

Then he was gone, and I drew a shaky breath, but too soon—already he was back, spreading me with his tongue, moving upward to rest against me again, even more intimately. I whimpered and squirmed into him. His hand slid under me, his thumb skimming slickly over the pad of skin until he reached the bottom edge of my opening.