Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (7 page)

I took a sharp breath as he pushed in, between my folds, and then he pulled downward, putting pressure against it and sending a jolting reaction up and down the juncture of my thighs. I tightened against him, panting, as the hot tingling reached almost to my tailbone.

Keeping his thumb in place, he began to tease around my entrance with his mouth, planting tiny kisses and nibbles along my folds and—
oh, God
—my clit until I moaned at my fullness.

His only response was that wicked, rich chuckle, the one that sent my heart racing, and I could feel the reverberation of it where his now closed mouth still touched me. And then his tongue was torturing me again, methodically. His touch was frustratingly light, hardly dipping between my folds. I fought the constraint of the corset to try to arch my hips toward him until he took my clit into his mouth and gave it a long suck that tore a cry from me as my shoulders rocked up from the sofa.

His mouth grew harder, more insistent then, pushing deeper. His thumb slid out of me, and I gasped with the sudden relief until he began massaging just below, in time with his mouth, bringing a new tension to my body.

Then he lifted his head, his gaze catching mine as two fingers of his other hand followed the slick path his mouth had made, pushing deep inside as my body made little, shaking spasms around it.

“I’ve wanted to see you like this from the first moment I saw you,” he said as he moved his hand slowly inside me.

It almost hurt to look at him, to let him see everything that he was doing to me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. His fingers were inside me, sliding and rocking against me—my body sang with them, as if they were touching my soul. The corset was an unbearable pressure. I gasped for air, fighting for it, and it only made the sensations more intense, the sharpness of the pleasure edging into pain.

And then something snapped, and I went over into the heat of it, the wave rippling up through me. He smiled as he saw me go—and then he lowered his head again, his mouth joining his fingers. At that touch sensation surged into my center and through my limbs until even my toes and fingers burned with it.

I gulped for air that would not come, fought against the darkness and the stricture of the corset that now added a new torture, as if it seared my skin even as it conformed my body to it. I heard a voice, a strangled and wordless cry, and I realized it was mine. And he pushed me through it, pushed me deeper into it, his hands and mouth driving me onward until I thought I would be lost forever.

Slowly, slowly the sensation receded. Dorian moved away from my entrance, intolerably swollen now, sliding up the length of my body and catching my neck in one damp hand.

Damp from me,
was my dazed realization.

“Taste it,” he said. “Taste how good you are.”

And his lips met mine, and I tasted the flavor of his mouth mingled with my musky, salty sweetness. The shock of it went through me. It should have disgusted me—the thought of it would have disgusted me any time before. But now it made me whimper into his mouth, wanting more, needing even more.

His hips were already between my legs, the head of his erection against the crease of my thigh. I tried to arch my hips toward him, but the edge of the corset just bit cruelly into my belly.

“What do you want?” Dorian murmured against my mouth. “Tell me, Cora. Say it.”

“You.”
I could say nothing else.

And then he shifted and slid into me, and I tilted into him with all the force the corset would allow, sliding up until our pelvises met. I clenched my teeth against my own whimper as he rocked up so that he pressed his weight up against my clit even as he pushed against my deepest place. My palms and my face were burning, and my breaths had little catching sounds at the end as I forced them from my body.

He thrust into me, the rhythm lost in my heartbeat and the throbbing heat that rose up around me. Around us. Because even Dorian’s cool chest warmed against mine as he drove onward, filling me completely, over and over again. It was almost too much, so close to pain, so close to losing myself.

The embrace of the corset was merciless, stealing my breath, stealing my thoughts, keeping me off balance so that when I fell, I went over hard, back into darkness. I clung to Dorian, my nails digging into his skin, and then suddenly his arms went from supporting his weight to holding me against him as if he were afraid that I might be snatched away, and he buried his face in my hair as his whole body shuddered in the grasp of his own climax.

I was still shaking with the aftermath as he slowed, slowed and stopped and lay heavy against me. I lifted my hands to my cheeks and discovered wetness there. My tears.

I had to be free. But how on earth was I ever going to give him up?

D
orian smiled above me and kissed the tears away.

“That bad?” he said, and the tone of smug self-satisfaction betrayed it for the joke that it was.

“That good, and you know it,” I said hoarsely. I was too weak, too spent for a better retort than that.

He pulled back, and I ached to feel him go even as I couldn’t imagine pressing on. He stood, then bent and lifted me in his arms as if I weighed nothing at all.

“Let’s get you dressed, and then I’ll take you home,” he said. But his arms around me tightened at that last word.

Home, to my apartment at the University of Maryland. To the life that I had there. The idea of separation came as a physical pain.

“But I want to stay,” I said. “Please, let me stay with you.”

They were stupid words, but I couldn’t stop them. They were the wrong words—I shouldn’t want to stay. I needed to go, to get away, to escape from the future that was laid out in front of me—even to the edge of doom.

There was a flash of something across his face then, pain or joy or regret, or perhaps all three. He looked like he was going to speak. But instead, he kissed me, slowly and deeply, whether to silence me or himself, I didn’t know. And his arms relaxed.

When he pulled back, his face was closed again. “No, you don’t, Cora. Perhaps at this instant you feel that you do. But tomorrow, you’ll be filled with regret and anger, and you’ll wonder whether you wanted to stay at all or if I had merely wanted it for you.”

“And do you?” I whispered. I knew what he could do to me—I knew it all too well.

“More than anything right now,” he said, and for a second, the shutters drew back from his eyes, and what I saw there made my head feel light. “Which is why you must go. I don’t trust myself with you tonight.”

He was walking toward a bookcase on the side of the fireplace. He freed a hand and pressed a hidden button, and it swung outward to reveal a spiral stair, a soft light coming on as the concealed door opened.

A secret passageway. Of course he had one.

“Why?” I asked, my heart rising into my throat even as I clung to him. “What are you afraid that you will do?”

“Change you, so that you will never want to leave,” he said simply as he mounted the stairs.

“You changed me today,” I challenged. He’d changed me, and I knew he would do it again, if the stakes were high enough. “I didn’t want to go to your Lesser Introduction or whatever it was. You even took away my fear of dancing. Why wouldn’t you change me again?”

I remembered not wanting to go to the introduction, but even now I couldn’t capture the feeling of resistance that I’d had, only the anger and fear that he’d taken that choice away from me.

Choices. It had seemed like I had so many, but when all roads but one were dead ends, what did a choice even mean? All I wanted was one real choice, one viable alternative. But in Dorian’s world, my future had been mapped out even before I had been changed, and now there was no escape.

“I’ve already told you that missing the introduction simply was not an option,” Dorian said. “And I thought I was helping with the dancing. I didn’t mean to cause you distress.” His eyes tightened at the last word. “But there are circumstances in which I think even you would call certain alterations justified.”

He reached the top of the stairs and pressed a latch, and another door sprang open. I recognized his bedroom from my glimpse through the door the other day.

“I don’t think so,” I said, frowning up at him as he crossed the room.

“Before my research made our offer appealing to those humans whose need was great enough to overcome the obvious risks, many agnates with objections to killing the innocent chose our candidates from among the dregs of society,” Dorian said. I blinked at what seemed an abrupt change of subject. “The desperately ill, the hopelessly mad, and the criminal. Do you remember meeting Zhang Wei?”

I nodded. He was a cognate, one of the handful among the guests who weren’t some admixture of European, Middle Eastern, or North African descent, and he’d shared Isabella’s dead-eyed gaze.

“In his human life, he lusted after his brother’s wife,” he said, opening the door that led to my bedroom and carrying me through. “He seduced her or raped her—the story isn’t clear, and at that time in China, there was little attention paid to the difference. When she threatened to tell her husband, he killed her children and splayed out their bodies on the marriage bed that he had defiled with her for her to find, and after she made the discovery, he attacked and killed her, too.”

I shrank back in his arms. “Damn.”

He continued the story. “Ling-Ling visited him the night before he was to be executed. He survived the feeding and was bonded to her. She needed him, wanted him, loved him, as she must—but he was a monster. Until she wiped all of that away.”

He set me on my feet in the center of the room.

“How?” I demanded, a cold horror in the pit of my stomach. “How could she love someone who had done something like that?”

“I have killed so many more, Cora,” he said sadly. “How could you want me?”

He was right. I knew he was, but still I needed him, craved his touch, his voice, his presence. The bond was a kind of madness, but at that moment, I couldn’t even want to get away, as I knew I should.

I shivered. I really was crazy.

“And what about you?” I challenged. “What if I were a doll-woman, too? Could you feel for it what you claim to feel for me?”

“Cora, I don’t want you to be an Isabella,” he said. “Unlike Etienne, I do not believe that is the best for you. But if some terrible accident befell you and crippled your mind or disfigured your body in a way that couldn’t heal, I would not—could not—change.”

There was a peculiar reassurance in that, a security that was frighteningly inviting. At the same time, how real could a feeling be if it were so completely involuntary? Could he even love, if the love wasn’t based on who I was but on some strange chemical reaction? How could that be a love at all, if it didn’t matter what I was? How could it be more than a compulsion?

And what did I feel for him? What name should it have? If I could call it lust and stop there, I wouldn’t be so afraid.

“But you’ll change me anyway,” I said. “In other ways, if it’s important enough to you—or if you want it badly enough, maybe you’ll change me without even realizing it.”

“You also change me,” Dorian said, his voice low. “When we agnates are alone, the burden of existence becomes crippling. So many years, one after another, days that feel like they have been lived before, when even the hours feel used, so heavy and empty at once....”

He trailed off, then continued more matter-of-factly. “It wears on you until you chase the rush, doing anything to get a momentary thrill so that you feel, at least for a moment, alive. Or you shut out everything and everyone and slowly descend into the kind of isolation that you never come back from—the senility of the agnates is not something that is ever recoverable. The only escape for that crushing isolation is a cognate. A bond. The other, missing half. You. And the bond is never entirely one way.”

Not me,
I thought.
Not me, specifically, but any cognate, any girl who didn’t die....

But how many human men in the world might I fall for, if I were free from Dorian? How many chance meetings might, under the right circumstances, fill a human definition of true love?

How different was I from him, really? Did it matter that he might have bonded to another if the one he ended up with was me?

I didn’t even know whether I could trust that thought, whether it was truly mine at all.

Dorian turned me away from him and untied the corset laces. This time, he worked them loose so that the hooks on the front could be slid apart. I sighed with relief as the garment dropped from my body, and he pulled me back against him for a moment and kissed the top of my head.

He released me, and I turned back around. I was naked now except for his jewels in my ears, at my wrist and my throat. And I was increasingly aware of the wetness that was running down my leg.

I cleared my throat. “Um. If you don’t mind, I need to use the bathroom.”

He grinned then, an expression I’d never seen on him before. Standing there, with his hair tousled and that look on his face, he almost seemed human, as if he hadn’t been confessing his own atrocities just moments before.

“Be my guest,” he said. “I will join you in a minute.”

M
y heart sped up, and I ducked quickly into the bathroom. I should have been acutely self-conscious, I thought. I’d felt that way on Wednesday, my first time with him. And what had happened in the study had been more intimate than that, more intimate than I’d imagined possible. But now any sense of embarrassment seemed to have gone.

Could it be because he didn’t want me to feel it? I tried that idea out in my mind. I didn’t think so. I thought that I was changing on my own, or at least in my own response to whatever held me to him.

But it didn’t matter why. Change was dangerous. He was dangerous, desperately so, a threat to everything I was or ever wanted to be. And yet when he’d grinned at me, I’d smiled back, as if he were an ordinary man. As if he didn’t threaten everything I cared about.