Vampire Mistress (3 page)

However, when the vampire slid his hands with possessive familiarity over her latex-clad hips and caressed the bare skin beneath the camisole, she leaned back into him, unable to deny her desire for his touch.

“Play, yes. But if you get hurt, his end will not be pretty. Take care that your toy doesn’t get out of hand. You’ve never wanted to put your hands on him before.”

“On the contrary, I wanted to put my hands on him the very first time he walked through the door. My mouth, every sweet, slick part of my body that you have touched.” She turned her head so she could catch his ear in her teeth. He gave her an indulgent growl, though his muscles hardened, a predatory response that the Mistress in her liked to goad. “You taught me the sweet pleasures of anticipation,” she whispered. “Denying me until I beg, until I would die to have the barest brush of your mouth at my throat. Even if you only intended to tear into it, take my life.”

His fingers dug deep into her hair, tugging so her throat was exposed to him in truth. She shivered as the tip of one of those sharp fangs drew a line unerringly down her thudding pulse. “It would be an unforgivable insult to abuse such a beautiful thing. I would make the smallest possible punctures”—he pressed a sharp tip into her—“and sip until you drifted away, a gift to Heaven.”

She closed her eyes. When she detected a dangerous tension sweep through him, she raised her lashes to see his nostrils flare, his lip curling in a feral warning. “I can smell the blood of his latest kill on you. Have you allowed him to touch you already?”

“No. I’ve been in the room with him. A few minutes ago.”

Daegan’s senses were so sharp, on every level. Though guarding her true feelings for him could be agony at times, the challenge of giving so much of herself to him, and so little at once, of being slave and Mistress both, was irresistible to one with her talents. The reason she took so few sessions now was that every interaction with Daegan was as fulfilling and exhausting as any session she’d ever experienced.

Gideon had called to her in a way she recognized as complementary to both what she had and what she lacked with Daegan. Even for a Mistress, she knew her needs and hungers were more complex and unusual than most, and this was untapped territory. It gave her a shiver of fear and anticipatory pleasure at once. Daegan, she was sure, registered both reactions. His hands cruised up to her breasts, cradled them with deceptive gentleness.

“Gideon Green,” he said, voice laden with irony. “The best vampire hunter in the world. Hard to find, hard to kill. Should I worry over your obsession?”

Using her response to his touch, she gave him a breathless laugh. “I would never destroy Nature’s perfection by allowing him to cut off your gorgeous head. I might ask him to snare you, though. Restrain your body so I could stroke it with the tip of the stake, then slowly, slowly, ease it into your flesh, the way your cock eases into me, my body welcoming and destroyed by it at once. A gift to the flames of Hell.”

He muffled a sudden chuckle against her shoulder, and Anwyn relaxed into his arms, giving herself that brief pleasure as he caressed her throat. “You are such fiery torment,
cher
, Hell would seem like a vacation. Do you know how many vampires would like to capture him, take days to teach him the error of his career choice?”

Where their macabre teasing gave her erotic shivers, that didn’t. A cold ball formed in her stomach as she turned her gaze to the screen again. She studied the tilt of his head, the way his uncombed hair fell in unruly disarray over his creased forehead.
He’s mine. I won’t let any harm come to him.

She masked the unexpectedly vehement reaction with a light shrug. “Good thing you care nothing for such temptations.”

When he gazed down into her face, she held his dark stare. In the beginning, his sensual punishments had been most severe for her refusal to turn her gaze downward, something vampires expected of their servants. But she bore no mark of Daegan Rei’s. She was not his servant. As a result, she had no real idea what she was to him, the strange path of their relationship, while she was all too aware of what he was to her.

He’d described the effect of the different marks. It took more than a vampire bite. The vampire had to release each of the three separate, special serums from his fangs. One mark was merely a geographical locater, allowing the vampire to find the human he had marked. The second mark allowed the vampire access to the human’s thoughts. They knew everything the human was thinking, and they could speak in the human’s mind. Daegan had said the third mark deepened that mind-to-mind link, took it down to the heart and soul. Practically, a second-or third-marked servant could lend strength to the vampire if he was injured, but if the vampire was killed, a third-marked human would die within moments. If that human was killed, depending on how long they’d been together, it could be a powerful emotional blow to the vampire, but he would survive it.

He’d told her that words were not sufficient to describe the third mark, to understand why it differed so much from the second, but she could read between the lines. It was a complete surrender, a giving to the vampire of all that particular human was. But in the vampire world, humans were viewed as an inferior species, the property of their Master or Mistress, slaves in truth. A human servant gave her vampire everything, while in turn accepting whatever part of himself he chose to give to her.

“I don’t want you playing with him while I’m gone, and yet you know I must leave tonight. If I forbid you . . .”

“I would disobey.”

“Perhaps my discipline wouldn’t be to your liking.”

“There’s no discipline you have that isn’t to my liking.” She made sure her eyes warmed as she looked up at him. “You know that.”

Even without the marks, that edge was between them, whenever they came together. Vampires were powerful predators, so domination was an instinct, even when dealing with their own kind. Her instincts as a Domme were natural, and had been honed by experience, but he had centuries of blood behind his. In the still, sacred privacy of her own mind, she’d realized a long time ago that if she was a cat, then he was a lion, and though he might be more powerful, their aggressive tendencies were similar. She wouldn’t fully surrender herself without complete trust.

He’d always been brutally honest with her, and that meant she trusted him more than she’d ever trusted anyone. Yet he’d made it clear that with the third mark, he would have a limitless ability to scour to the bottom of her mind, know her fears and sorrows, her insecurities and most elemental needs, things she had difficulty facing in herself.

At one time, early on in their five-year relationship, he’d pursued his desire to make her his servant with a single-mindedness that had resulted in volatile, agonizing arguments. He could be terrifying when he was determined, and he’d come so close to winning so many times, knowing just how to undermine her female defenses. He knew so much about who and what she was already.

She’d withstood the assault until the storm passed, but he’d left, disappearing from her life for six months. It was then she’d recognized how much he’d become a part of her. Even moving and breathing were difficult, pretending she was still Anwyn when he’d apparently torn her soul out of his body and taken it with him. In her despairing moments, she’d told herself if he ever came back, she’d give him what he wanted. She would walk into the cage he offered, and somehow learn to trust him enough that she no longer saw the bars.

But when at last he returned, he’d told her he would not ask her again, nor would he permit her to agree to it. Perversely, she’d felt a sense of loss, that he’d turned his back on the bond that his species viewed as the closest possible link with another living being. Ironic, considering that link was possible only with a species they considered inferior.

His fingers stilled against her. Pulling out of her thoughts, she caught her breath as Gideon knelt at the prayer bench. The man’s obvious struggle with himself made Anwyn’s own body clench. He was rigid with tension, from the breadth of his shoulders in his thin T-shirt, down to the braced thighs and taut ass in the worn jeans.

“He keeps a toe blade in those boots.” Daegan’s attention sharpened on the screen.

“I’ll be fine, Daegan. He won’t hurt me. I know it.”

Gideon’s hair fell farther forward across his brow in his penitent position. It only enhanced the fierce resistance in the brilliant blue eyes that flashed through the unruly strands. When she heard his words—
I’m here, damn you. Come back to me
—an insolent demand, her heart soaked up his pain, her pulse accelerating against Daegan’s palm.

He kissed her there, letting his lips linger. His hands had returned to her breasts, and now they were drifting, stroking, plucking so that her body was shifting restlessly, a rhythm to his erotic motions. “I suppose you intend to keep him waiting,” he murmured.

“It’s part of what he needs. Do you have time . . . for me to need you?”

Gideon had touched her own healed wounds with his rabid suffering. It made her willing to let her guard down. Though deep in her heart, she knew she could trust Daegan with far more of herself. It was herself she didn’t trust.

He’d stilled at her soft request, but now his lips increased their pressure against her throat, becoming more insistent. “You so rarely ask me for anything,
cher
. You know I would deny you nothing.”

“I want to keep watching him.”

“I know. You will taunt him with that, too, that another took your body while he knelt in loneliness.”

“Serving me with his obedience. A gift I’ll reward. But with him, I need to hold back. That’s the key.”

“You’re afraid you’ll want to give too much of yourself to him, too soon.”

She couldn’t deny it. It was in the quiver of her body, the way her nipples continued to harden beneath Daegan’s touch, elongating under his skilled fingers. The aching pleasure became more uncomfortable as he pinched them again. She bucked against him, throwing her head back onto his shoulder, the violence taking her by surprise. Sometimes she came to life like the slowest boiling water, tiny bubbles of response barely quivering below the surface, and other times it was like this, as if the time Daegan had spent away from her had turned her blood to lava, such that she would erupt at his merest touch.

He was ready for her, though. Sliding the side zipper of the latex over the curve of her hip, his hand teasing bare flesh, he peeled the pants down but didn’t push the tight garment past her thighs. “Bend over; clasp the chair in front of you,
cher
. I want to take you tight, where you cannot spread as wide for me as you wish.”

“I want to come.”

“That is for me to decide.”

“Daegan.”

He wrapped his hand in her hair and in one smooth motion, he’d pushed her forward, lifting her around the waist so her breasts were shelved on the top of her office chair and her toes barely reached the floor. Her heels stabbed at the denim of his jeans.

“You will go to him wanting more, wet with my cock, vibrating with the memory of it thrusting hard into your pussy, but you will not release. To be denied will make you cruel, needy. He needs you cruel and needy.”

Anwyn closed her eyes, her breath short. Always he knew her so well. It hurt so much. He was right—to be denied could make one cruel, as well as needy to the point of silent, suffering anguish. If she knew she had all of Daegan Rei’s heart, she would give him anything he wished, without reservation, rather than playing such games.

“For you both, then,” she breathed. “The one who will take me, and the one I will take for myself.”

He opened his jeans with one hand and then brought her back to him with that hand in her hair, the rolling chair providing an anchor point under her breasts as she arched back like a crescent moon. When he drove his cock into her, the thick, turgid length of it, he earned her cry, pleasure in how he filled her. Reaching back, she curled her hands into the open fabric of his jeans and held on, as he leaned forward and enveloped her in the folds of the duster he hadn’t bothered to remove.

She was a Mistress, but he alone compelled her to surrender like this. While he had stopped demanding her agreement to be his servant, she knew the surrender she gave him fell short of how much he truly wanted from her.

Though he’d never said why he stopped asking, she thought she knew why, and it made the pain a little sharper, a blade she willingly drove into herself every time she clasped him to her.

In the vampire world, there was no greater crime than to fall in love with a human.

3

G
IDEON didn’t wear a watch, because digital ones beeped and wind-ups ticked, and both could be heard by vampire ears. He’d gotten pretty adept at knowing the passage of time without one, and though he knew it had been only fifteen minutes since he took the position on the prayer bench, it felt like twice that. The door didn’t open, and with the soundproofing, the only noises in the silent room were his breath and heartbeat. Which increased his tension to the point he was gripping those iron handles as if they were a lifeline.

A strange thing had happened to him, kneeling here. The decision to obey had been spontaneous, a reckless “oh fuck it.” But the more time passed, the more it was as if she was compelling him to stay there. Challenging him. Somehow he knew her eyes hadn’t left him. She was watching him, not one of her staff. He was going to stay here, in this position, until Hell froze over. Because that door hadn’t opened and no one had told him to go home.

The longer he’d remained in this position, the harder he’d gotten, until his cock was a fucking steel bar, aching. It was at an uncomfortable angle beneath his fly, but once he’d grabbed hold of those iron bars, he’d pilloried himself. He wouldn’t let go.

Jesus, he’d fucking lost his mind.

Despairing, he dropped his head so his brow rested on the padded rail. Cushioned velvet, an interesting choice since everything else about the bench was penitential hard wood. He was in that position when the door opened, and he heard her step back in.

He stiffened, but didn’t move, keeping his head where it was, too messed up to make a decision about whether or not he should lift it. He held on to the sound of her coming across the floor, the sharp shot of stilettos, briefly muffled by a throw rug, then back to the wood again. The wet slide of the latex, the whisper of the camisole as her body moved beneath the clothes.

Then her scent and heat were close. He didn’t know about flowers and perfumes. He just knew she smelled totally Female, capital
F
. He wanted to bury his face in her hair, that sable sea of comfort and torment.

“Keep your head down.”

Her hand touched his hair then, stroked along his temple, his skull. He stared at the velvet cushioning, the rich red color filling his vision like blood, the iron handles hot under his sweaty grip. Pain, such as what the other Mistresses had given him, would have galvanized his normal instinct to rebel, but he had no strategy to fight this kind of attack. Lyssa had done it, too, that night long ago. Simply stroked his head, teaching him that a cruel goddess could turn mercy and compassion into a weapon. A treasure a man would sell his soul to experience.

Her touch was gentle, but there was a firmness there, too. She dug into his scalp, massaged. Her thumb had a sculpted nail, painted silver white, that he caught out of the corner of his eye when she shifted it forward, passing over his cheek. It drifted behind his ear, along his jaw. She caressed the scar where a vamp had tried to rip open his throat. He’d nearly succeeded before Gideon’s small crossbow had sent a bolt straight under his rib cage and into his heart.

“You’ve been very ugly to my ladies, Gideon. Been rude and surly as well. I expect better of you.”

“Better lower your expectations. This is as good as it gets.”

As she shifted her hand, he saw a flash of metal. He should have ducked away, swept her legs, knocked her to the ground and pinned her. It was how he reacted to the appearance of a blade, but for some reason this time he merely went still. It was a razor blade, cut and fitted to the underside of that long nail. When it followed his jawline again, the fiery sting, concentrated and precise, told him she’d drawn up a thin line of his blood. What would happen if she bent, licked it away? He clenched his fists against the metal handles, fighting to banish such sick thoughts.

“Maybe you should have gotten your ass in here and done the job right the first time.” He tossed it out, a desperate Hail Mary. “Though I guess you make more money being wrong.”

She tightened her fingers in his hair, making him grunt as she put her knee in his lower back. The only thing that kept her stiletto from staking his calf to the floor was the protection of his jeans as she leaned in. Her lips, her blessed lips, were so close to his ear he scented the gloss. A dark fruit of some kind, juicy, sweet and rich, but with a bite. As she held his head down to the rail with brutal efficiency, her breath caressed his jaw and cheek as if she’d rubbed her pussy there, moist and heated.

“Many men resist when they come here. It’s part of what they need, so even if their resistance is violent, we can subdue them, because that’s what they expect. They want to be here, want to be dominated. You, on the other hand, feel compelled to be here, forced by something in yourself you despise. That’s why the other three only fed into your anger.”

“Sounds like you’re into dogfighting, sweetheart.” He wished she’d use the razor again, take his mind off what was happening at a lower altitude, the twisting in his gut, the unabating throb of his cock. Jesus, nothing but her voice and the pain of that jabbing spike heel made his organ convulse, dampen thin cotton. “You threw a couple cats and a golden retriever in the ring to get my blood raging. You’re the prize bitch, here for the real fight.”

“Hmm.” Trailing her fingers down the back of his neck, she teased the small, fine hairs so an unexpected shiver ran down his spine. She kept going, down the back of the T-shirt, the pads of her fingers caressing the tense range of muscles layered on either side of that center column, the branches of ribs. Only when she got to his waistband did he realize the purpose of taking her thumb down that center line. He muttered a curse as she used her knuckles to nudge aside the sliced fabric, but he couldn’t prevent another, different type of quiver as her nails scraped his bare skin.

“That’s one of two shirts I own.”

“I’m sure Goodwill has plenty more where this one came from.” Letting the fabric fall away from his tense flesh, she moved around the rail, between him and the stained glass alcove with its peaceful fountain. She eased a hip onto the cushioned rail, the long thigh encased in latex no more than an inch or two from his nose. The folds of the silky camisole gathered just above it, making it hard to swallow. The fabric was nearly sheer, giving him the hint of bare flesh so close.

He had a death grip on the handles, knowing her ass had to be hanging just over his knuckles on the right. Lifting one of her booted feet in an astonishingly flexible movement designed to reduce a man’s mind to a puddle of lust, she threaded it between his forearms so she was straddling the rail. One boot was planted on the prayer bench between his knees; the other remained on the outside of his body. His head was now essentially between her legs. If he turned his face, his mouth would be mere inches from the slick black juncture of her thighs, shadowed by the folds of lace.

Despite that temptation, he lifted his head, following the fall of her hair up to her implacable face, those blue-green eyes that studied him with powerful intent. “I’m not going to try to force you to do anything, Gideon,” she said, her voice a ruthless, feminine murmur. “I’m not going to manipulate you. You don’t need that. It’s a shield. I’m taking away your shields so you can face what you really need.”

“What’s that?”

“I also won’t give you answers you already have.” She leaned in, and the camisole slid away from her body, so that he was staring at two perfect breasts, the tips just beyond the range of his vision. Her hair brushed his face as she whispered in his ear. “There will be no money between us, Gideon. You will pay for your drinks, you will pay for any damage you do, but there will be no paid sessions. I am not your employee, nor your whore. When we are in this room, you are here to serve me, and you serve as I choose or you get out.”

“What am I, then?
Your
employee? Your boy toy?”

She straightened, tipped up his chin. When she did, he stilled, realizing she’d brought that blade right under his throat, was casually stroking it back and forth over his windpipe. He swallowed against the pressure of the razor edge.

She could kill him. All this time spent fighting vampires, and this night, weary and hungering for something only she could provide, he could be ended with barely a flick of her thumb.

For a moment, he wished she would do it. Almost wanted to beg her for it. She’d taken him right into a dark part of his soul he tried to ignore, but always knew was there. Growing larger every day. There was a flicker in her gaze, a tightening of her mouth, as he saw her recognize it. But her voice was terrifyingly mild.

“There’s a segment of society that serves, but is not paid. That’s what you are to me. In this room, you are my slave.” The edge of the blade dug in, but he found himself more agitated about the fact her words had accelerated his pulse than any physical harm she could do.

“I know you’re big, brave and strong.” Her voice changed, hardened. “Come in here with your hidden knife, with your predator’s eyes and clenched fists. Would you use them on me? Turn all those weapons against me?”

“No,” he muttered, wondering how she knew about the toe blade. When her hand dropped, he shuddered as her fingers stroked his fly, caressing the aroused beast beneath. She hadn’t even looked, had known exactly how and where to touch. As she teased the ridge of his head underneath the strained denim, his breath got ragged.

“You think this is a weapon, too, don’t you? But I could make you come like a boy in your pants.”

“Talk is cheap—”

She slapped him. She did it quickly enough it caught him off guard, and it was no girl slap, either. His ear was ringing. If his hand had been over the rail, he would have caught her wrist in reaction, but he’d kept that death grip on the iron handles. So he just stared at her, his nerves singing along his jaw and cheek, his blood boiling.

“That’s enough, Gideon. Do you understand me?” Her voice remained cool, but her eyes could laser skin. It wasn’t uncontrolled anger. In fact she felt perfectly, frighteningly, in control. “Say, ‘Yes, ma’am’, if you understand. You will call me nothing other than
ma’am
or
Mistress
. I hear anything else, or you push me once more, I get up and leave. This time I won’t come back.”

He held her gaze a full minute, his jaw tight. “Yes, ma’am.”

He was going to get up. Demand her name. Leave. Break more furniture. He didn’t have to take this shit. He wished she’d stroke his head some more. He wanted to throw her down on the ground and fuck her, feel her body struggle beneath his, because he knew he was stronger. But as he looked up the slope of her abdomen, the rise of her breasts and slim column of throat, all delicate, feminine features, he couldn’t make himself move. Instead, he lowered his head, pressed his lips to the inside of her thigh, turning so his temple rested on the opposite one, his forehead pushed into the curve of her stomach.

She lowered her hand to his head again, a slow, slow stroke now, one that followed his hair from his brow all the way to the ends at his shoulders. The movement brushed the lower curve of her breasts against his head, and he was fine with that, as well as with the flex of the muscles beneath his cheek. “I’m going to have three ladies come in now. They’re going to strip and restrain you, at my direction.”

He tensed, but her fingers kept up their soothing and implacable motion. “If I sent in three men, you’d fight them, bloody their faces. Your choice now is to submit to what I want, or disprove my theory about your chivalrous nature.”

“You can do anything you want to me without restraints.”

“Yes, I can. But the restraints aren’t for me. They’re for you.”

“I can’t.” The rawness of his own voice disturbed him, but he couldn’t move as long as she was touching him this way, the comfort of her thighs against his face, the reassuring, intimate female scent of her so close. Arousal. She’d been aroused when she came in here, and that scent was still there, as well as the hint of a different musk, one that seemed familiar but he couldn’t quite place. He wanted to lift his head, use his mouth to find out if her nipples were hard, stiff little points that would welcome the wet, demanding heat of his tongue, the bite of his teeth, the pressure of a suckling squeeze with his lips.

“I know you think you can’t. But you will, anyway. Because you are my slave, and that is what I demand. In here, you fail no one if you submit, if you give in to what you want. I accept everything you are. There is no dark room inside you that I won’t open.”

“I want to fuck you. I want that to happen.”

He knew that never happened with a hired Dominatrix. But she’d said there’d be no money between them, hadn’t she?

“That’s up to me. We’ll see how well you obey, and if you deserve something that special.” Her fingers tightened, a warning. “In this room, you are not in control, Gideon. You are not God here. I am. I am the only one allowed to pass judgment on you. Your Mistress.”

A Mistress. An owner of his soul.
Guardian of his soul.
The insidious whisper came from that sly part of his mind that knew what buttons to push. Seductive, misleading.
You are not in control.
She’d called him her slave. But she would walk into those dark, secret rooms inside of him and find other names.
Murderer. Coward.

With a painful growl, Gideon let go of the handles. The loss of her mesmerizing touch was his punishment, a deprivation he deserved, but which filled him with rage. At her, at himself. As he surged up, he shoved against the railing, splintering it on its base.