Bane's Choice

by Alyssa Day

  “Teaching a three-hundred-year-old vampire manners and consideration is going to be a full-time job, Dr. St. Cloud. I hope you feel you’re up to it.” His voice suddenly dropped low, all silken sin and seduction, and Ryan pressed down a little harder on the gas.

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” she promised. “Maybe we can start tonight?”

  “Perhaps. But first, we have a ball to attend. I hear you were questioning my ability to dance.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Even stable boys can learn to waltz, Ryan. I look forward to showing you my…techniques.”

  And with that double-entendre hanging in her ears, he clicked the phone off.

  Ryan blew through the speed limit all the way back to the house.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Bane forced himself to take a cold shower, for the third time that day, after talking to Ryan on the phone, just so he’d have some chance of not leaping on her and tearing her clothes off the second he saw her. But, then again, no.

  Could a vampire have sex with a Nephilim? She hadn’t electrocuted him yet, but that was before her powers were unlocked. Maybe a simple touch would kill him.

  Maybe it would be worth it.

  He was so finely attuned to her presence now that his skin tingled with electric sparks when he felt her drive up, but he stayed in the shower, face turned up to the cold spray. He would not humiliate himself over this woman.

  He would not.

  Each step she took—each word she exchanged with someone else in the house, before running to him—was torment. Each moment she spent not coming to him—torture.

  He turned the temperature of the water to icy.

  And then—finally—she was there.

  Framed in the doorway to the bathroom, wearing blue scrubs with pictures of tiny animals on them, looking tired, and beautiful, and hesitant, and beautiful, and shy, and oh so incredibly, fuckably beautiful.

  She bit her lip, and his cock came to fully rigid attention. “Hello. I’m back. Is Hunter doing okay?”

  “He’s still sleeping normally. Not that I’m particularly pleased that you’re looking at me, naked, and thinking of another man.”

  She smiled, her eyes flickering as her gaze skimmed his body. “Trust me, I’m not thinking about anybody but you. Um, do you want company?”

  He changed the water temperature to one that would be comfortable for her creamy, delicious, glowy—glowy? Oh, shit—skin.

  “You have no idea,” he said, repeating his comment from earlier, and it made her laugh.

  He reached out and barely touched her cheek with the tip of one finger, ready for the tiny bite of electricity that snapped at his skin. “You’re starting to glow again.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh! I don’t—will it be safe? For me to touch you?”

  “Please, please try,” he said, and he could hear her heartbeat speed up.

  She stared at him, and he could hear her breath hitch when her gaze reached his cock. “Oh! Is that…are you…”

  He wrapped his hand around its thickness and stroked once, hard. “You do this to me, Ryan. Please come join me. Let me touch you and taste you and fuck you. Let me do everything to you.”

  She blinked several times, and then her hands went to the waistband of her pants, and she slowly slid them off her hips and down her legs. Then she stood and pulled her shirt over her head and stood, shy but undaunted, in nothing but tiny blue scraps of silk.

  He thought that waiting patiently for her to come to him might kill him, but he was afraid to go to her. Afraid he’d frighten her or drive her away. Instead, he held out his hand, in one of the most heroically restrained actions of his entire life. “Please.”

  She stared at him, poised for flight, but then she finally, finally nodded. “Yes.”

  And, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, she walked over to him and took his hand. She still wore her underclothes, which might have felt to her like protective armor against his ravenous gaze, but he could work with that. The glow was still barely there—just a hint of incandescence—but it was growing brighter by the moment.

  He framed her face with his hands, catching his breath at the pinch of her power, already growing sharper. “I’ll try not to overwhelm you. I don’t know how to do this—I don’t know how to feel so much. It has been a very long time since I let anyone close to my heart. But this…Ryan, what I feel for you compared to what I felt before is like comparing a tsunami to a dripping faucet. I am buffeted by what I feel for you. By my hunger for you, whether you’re human or Nephilim or whatever else. Please. Please help me.”

  She trembled in his arms, the electric feel of her power sparkling against the drops of water on his skin, but she didn’t look away. “It’s so much, isn’t it? Maybe too much. I feel so many things for you, too. Things I never expected to feel for anyone, ever. Just touching you is like grabbing hold of a hurricane with both hands and trying to find a way to hang on.”

  He grinned. “Well. If you really need something to hang on to, I have some ideas.”

  He moved his hands, caressing her shoulders, and her arms, and then sliding his hands around her waist and settling them on her lace-covered ass and pulling her body against the unmistakable evidence of his hunger for her, holding his breath in hope that her power would not rebuff him.

  That she would not deny his claim on her body.

  His claim on her heart.

  Ryan gasped. “Wow. I mean, wow. But physiologically, I’m not sure that something that big is going to fit inside my—”

  Before she could start listing the scientific names for genitalia, Bane gave in to the urge he’d been fighting since he heard her car in the driveway.

  He kissed her, and his heart soared in his chest.

  He kissed her and pulled her more fully into the shower. His mouth still covering hers, he moved so that she stood beneath the hot shower spray, which beat on her back and shoulders while she stood with his body wrapped around hers, ignoring the pain of her magic biting at his skin.

  She shivered and clutched his shoulders, her Nephilim power slowly gentling from electric shock to a soft, buzzing sensation, and he stopped kissing her—just for a moment.

  Just for long enough to say the words he seemed to be forgetting, since his mind was doing cartwheels in sheer ecstasy.

  “Ryan. I want you. Please tell me you want me, too.”

  She shivered violently and stared up at him in silence, her gaze filled with an emotion he wished he could name. She shivered again, and he flicked the faucet to a warmer temperature.

  “Are you cold?” He wondered if the glow flickering along her skin warmed her.

  Wondered if it might consume him.

  Wondered if he cared.

  She looked up at him with those enormous blue eyes that he thought he might drown in. “I feel like I’ll never be cold again.”

  “Ryan—”

  “Yes. I want you, too.”

  Triumph swept through him, but kissing wasn’t enough. “I need to touch all of you. Please. Tell me I can.”

  She bit her lip, and he immediately had to kiss her again, so it was several long moments before she could give him an answer. When he let her breathe again, she smiled brilliantly.

  “Yes. Yes, Bane. Yes to touching me, yes to everything. Please. I want it all.”

  He whooped out a sound of pure joy and then snapped his fangs down and bit through the front of the fabric keeping him from putting his tongue on her nipples. When the shredded fabric fluttered to the ground, he took her breasts in his mouth, first one and then the other, and sucked on them until she shivered like she was about to come right there and then.

  “More,” she moaned, and he was happy to comply. He bent down and bit through the lace side of her underwear and pushed it down her legs and the
n looked his fill of her wet, naked body.

  She opened her eyes and caught him staring, saw the primal possession that must be stamped on his face, and she blushed. “Bane. I want—”

  “And I want to give it to you,” he said, sliding one hand between her legs.

  She moaned again but then put a hand on his to stop him. “No. I want—I want to pleasure you now.”

  Disbelief rocketed through him. “You think it’s not pure pleasure, touching you?”

  “I want to do more.” She smiled at him and slid one still-glowing hand down his chest. “I want to do everything. Bane—I’m safe. Do we have a condom?”

  He blinked, trying to focus. “Condoms. No, I don’t—we can’t catch any human illness or father children, so we don’t need them.”

  She paused and then took a shaky breath. “Okay. That’s a lot to think about. Later. For now…”

  He watched her hand, completely hypnotized, as it continued down his body. As it wrapped around his cock. He jerked, his head falling back from the electric rush of the contact. Her touch branded him with pleasure. Her laughter brought him back to life.

  Her kisses filled him with more warmth than he’d ever known in the bleak emptiness of his entire existence.

  A nasty voice in the back of his mind asked him what he’d do when she finally realized what a monster he was and left him. Or when her angelic father showed up and tore her from him.

  No.

  He grasped her shoulders and pulled her up on her toes until they were face to face. “Don’t leave me, Ryan.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough to counteract the sudden terror that enveloped him.

  “Promise me,” he demanded. “Swear it.”

  She stared into his eyes for what seemed like an eternity, and then she nodded. “I promise.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly for a long, long while, until he could force his traitorous body to stop shuddering. And then, when he finally relaxed his grip, she flashed him a very naughty smile, bent down, and took his cock in her mouth.

  He groaned, long and harsh, and his hands tangled in her hair, holding her in a gentle grip that she could escape at any time—desperate to feel all of it. Everything. Her lips and tongue tasted him, and then she gave a tentative suck, and a stronger one, and a sound he’d never made before wrenched its way out of his throat.

  He was drowning in sensation—sure he might die from it—and then she wrapped one hand around the base of his cock and took his balls in her other hand, stroking and stroking, and licking and sucking, applying pressure and movement and friction, and he was almost certainly going to climb out of his skin, she was driving him mad.

  He bucked against her, helpless to stop himself, sure she’d stop what she was doing since he was basically fucking her mouth, but instead she tightened her grip on his cock and moved her hand up and down in short, strong strokes, sucking his cock, licking the head, still stroking his balls, until he had no idea how he was still standing, and the stars themselves pinwheeled behind his closed eyelids and he shouted, he was coming, he was coming so damn hard his brain would surely burst, and she sucked on him and licked him and sucked it all down, and he convulsively jerked, again and again, beneath her hands and mouth, until finally, he was drained of both seed and strength.

  This time, it had been he who shouted her name.

  He stood there, leaning back against the tile wall, touching her hair and her face, gasping in air, unable to think or breathe or speak, and she stood and put her arms around his neck.

  “Bane,” she said proudly, her beautiful face alight with a smile. “I am a goddess.”

  Before she could say another word, he was fucking her.

  …

  Ryan gasped when Bane yanked her up off her feet, put her legs around his waist, and drove his cock inside her. First, she lost her breath.

  Then she lost her mind.

  And her body—all of it—lit up from within with sensation.

  Lit up with actual, honest-to-angel, light.

  “You—ohhhhh,” she said, her eyes rolling back in her head. “Am I hurting you? The electric shock, I, you, ohhhhhhh.”

  “Definitely not hurting me,” he growled, thrusting into her body again and again. Kissing her face, her neck, her lips.

  “You certainly recover quickly. I didn’t think—oh, yes—that the blood supply to the corpora cavernosa could—”

  “Ryan,” he growled.

  “Yes?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  Normally, she would have protested, but her body had different ideas and kept arching up to meet his deep, deep thrusts, and he was holding her and driving his body inside her, over and over, in a timeless rhythm that had little to do with skill or finesse and everything to do with want and need and now.

  She felt her inner muscles accommodate him, pulsing around him, welcoming his invasion into her most private place, and she leaned her head back and moaned, closing her eyes, becoming a creature of pure sensation—pure pleasure—pure desire.

  Slowly, and then with an almost-impossibly rising heat and frenzy, her passion rose to meet his, and they came together in a symphony of magical sensation.

  “More,” he growled. “Take more of me. Take all of me.”

  And she nodded, widening her legs even further, adjusting the angle of her hips to accommodate his size. When he took immediate advantage, thrusting deeper and harder than ever before, she cried out and dug her nails into his back, urging him on. Urging him to take her with him to the next crest, to the next orgasm, to the next adventure.

  This was the most wildly unreliable she’d ever been, and she reveled in it, she wanted it, she demanded it. His body was all long, lean muscle and beauty—so much beauty—and he was hers, blood and bone, heart and soul, in this minute, in the foreseeable future, in her dreams, in her reality. She kissed him, or he kissed her, again and again, drinking in his mouth and his heat and his need and making it her own, until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think—until she turned into a being made up of pure, incandescent desire.

  “Now,” he demanded, gasping for breath. “Come for me, Ryan. I want to feel your hot, wet body squeeze my cock. Come for me now.”

  And she did, she came screaming, and everything that she was and ever had been shattered into a prism of brilliant light that lit the room like the brightest day.

  Almost immediately, he shouted out his own triumph, pounding into her and convulsing, bucking his hips against her, coming and coming, until both of them, shuddering and panting for their next breaths, floated slowly back to earth together.

  When the corona of light surrounding them finally dimmed, she melted against him, and her legs, feeling boneless, slid down from around his waist. He leaned his head back in the miraculously still-hot running water and let it run down his face. Then he pulled her into his arms again and kissed her, long and slow and gentle.

  “Maybe sex is just better with Nephilim,” she mused, barely able to think.

  “Ryan.”

  She kissed him again, leisurely and oh so satiated. “Yes, Bane?”

  The expression on his face was the epitome of smug male satisfaction, but she had a feeling her face carried the female version of that exact same look, so she let it slide.

  He flashed a wicked grin. “How’s that for a corpora cavernosa?”

  Chapter Forty

  Ryan draped her boneless body over Bane’s in his new bed and snuggled up against him and into the multitude of pillows that Mrs. C must have arranged—men never thought of pillows—and sighed in sheer, blissful contentment.

  “I can tell you quite honestly that I have never, ever had sex like that,” she said, her mind still completely blown.

  He grinned. “Just
call me Captain Orgasm.”

  “I’ll never call you Captain Orgasm.”

  “Your Highness, the king of Orgasmia?” He put one arm behind his head and stretched, still with that ridiculously smug grin plastered all over his face.

  She lifted her head and stared at him in disbelief. “You do realize that I have access to scalpels? And sedatives that can quite literally stop your heart, right?”

  In a vampire-quick movement, he flipped her over and pinned her to the bed and then started kissing her neck. “Violent little thing for a baby angel, aren’t you?”

  “Hey!” She poked him in the chest. “I’m not the one who bit your neck.”

  His smile faded. “Ryan. I’m so sorry for that. I promise to never—”

  “No.” She put her fingers on his lips. “Don’t make any promises that might be hard to keep. Let’s play this by ear, okay?”

  Bane dropped his head to her shoulder and groaned.

  “It’s not that I don’t forgive you,” she rushed to tell him. “It’s just—”

  “Not that. It’s Meara,” he said, yanking the sheet up to cover them both.

  “What?”

  The door banged open, and Meara came striding into the room. “I wondered what was taking you so long,” she said, glaring at them. “Bane, get your naked self off my plus-one. We have a ball to get ready for.”

  Ryan giggled like a fool. “We already had our own ball.”

  “I can see that,” Meara snapped, but a smile played at the edges of her lips. “Get up. We need to get dressed.”

  “First, we need to talk about the fact that Ryan is a Nephilim,” Bane growled. “That’s more important than some stupid dance.”

  Ryan, who’d been hiding under the covers, closed her eyes. “I’m not going to the ball, Meara. I’m exhausted, and I’m really not the ball kind of person. Why don’t you take Edge?”

  Meara leapt onto the bed and stood staring down at them. “We’re all going to the ball. Do you want to know why?”

  Bane narrowed his eyes. “Get off my bed, Meara. And why don’t you leave my bedroom while you’re at it?”