by Sharon Page
As he drank at her neck, he plunged his prick in and out. Erin cried out at the pressure of him inside her, filling her, parting her, reaching her soul. Then she reclaimed her senses and realized his cock was thickening within her. Growing. With each gulp at her neck, his prick expanded inside.
What had started as huge was now colossal; if she’d known this, she might have offered her neck during their first time together.
He moved with pure grace, sending her head arching back with the ecstasy delivered by each long, hard stroke. She wrapped her legs tight around his hips, pushing him into her with her heels. She didn’t care how much blood he took. She clung to him, lifting to him out of sheer sexual hunger. He panted against her neck, groaned into her flesh with each hot breath he took. Erin roamed her hands over his naked back, coasting her palms over smooth, firm skin. His body was growing warmer to her touch. His thrusts sent her whimpering for mercy, and she drove her fingernails into his flesh. Like spurs to a horse, her gouging drove him. Raking his back, she urged him on and on and—
An explosion seared her, racing from pussy to brain. She sobbed with it. Beat his butt with her heels. Shook and shattered and surrendered once again.
This time into blackness.
“Erin, can you hear me?”
Dreamily, Erin giggled at the concern in Michael’s deep, sexy voice. He must be afraid he’d killed her.
If she could die from extreme orgasms, then he almost had.
She’d fainted. Something she’d never experienced as a side effect of sex.
“You didn’t tell me about the side effect of drinking my blood.” Tentatively she touched her neck where he’d bitten her. She felt only smooth skin—no cut, no scab, no scar. Her wounds, too, had magically healed.
“What?” He still sounded scared witless.
Erin opened her eyes and smiled at the sight of sweat on Michael’s furrowed brow, haunting ragged pain in his eyes, and grim tension in the set of his mouth.
He’d been terrified at the thought of losing her, and she saw how much he cared.
“Your cock grows when you feed. Did you know that?”
He shook his head, sending a lock of inky-black hair falling across his eyes. “The feeding is sexually arousing to me, but the other urges are so powerful I’d never realized … that … before.”
“Well, it does. And after tonight, it won’t anymore….”
He ducked his head, his forehead resting on her collarbone, fangs lightly pricking her flesh.
“When you’re mortal,” she continued. Was she promising too much? There was so much she wanted to know about him, to know before giving her heart. She touched his face, fingertips tracing the defined line of his high cheekbone. “If you were raised by Mrs. White, Michael, why is your name Rourke? Was it your mother’s name?”
“No. It was the name I chose for my latest birth certificate.” He shrugged. “I liked it.”
Her brows rose, but she remembered the information she’d found from her search of his records. “You have new birth records created?”
“I don’t have any other option. Hard to explain why I’m two hundred and twenty-one years of age.” He lifted his head. “That’s why you did not discover what I am, even though you investigated me. Because we are hunted, we have an extensive network of well-paid servants and informants. They create appropriate identities and paperwork for us. And if anyone digs into our histories—well, we find out about it.”
Unsettling as that was, she understood the need. “But there’s so much I need to know, Michael, since I presume everything I learned about you was a lie.”
“Not everything. And none of those lies were relevant to how I feel about you. To how much I care about you. Ask me whatever you wish.”
“Do you work?”
“Yes, but I don’t need to. I’m a man of means. As you already know.” He winked at her. “If you’d like to retire, I can keep you in luxury.”
Erin flushed. “That wasn’t really what I meant.”
“But it’s good to know, isn’t it?”
She laughed. “What is vam-pire.com really? Is it a business?”
“A network for the undead. A way to communicate, to protect, to survive in the mortal world.”
“How could vampires require help surviving?”
“I think you can guess. You’ve dealt with the DMV.” He shuddered.
She chuckled at the beleaguered expression on his gorgeous face—as if vampires were poor, caught-in-the-headlights individuals. “But how do you have a Web site and yet keep these things secret?”
“Everyone just thinks we’re playing on our name.” He grinned. “We use the cover of being a company that sucks the lifeblood of less powerful firms, and any references to vampires are considered tongue-in-cheek.”
“If you weren’t facing death, would you want to become mortal again?”
His answer came without hesitation. “To spend my life with you? Yes.”
Before Michael, she’d never had her heart do somersaults in her chest over any man, but she thought of the many divorce cases she’d worked on. They’d all promised “until death us do part,” and some had not lasted even a full year.
And her parents. Twenty-five years together and, according to her mother, they’d never found true intimacy.
Doubt crept into Erin’s heart, cold and constricting. Sure, he knew he loved her when his only option was destruction, but what about after that?
And what about her? She’d taken a leap of faith to believe in him, a bigger one to give him her blood, but could she really promise him the rest of her life?
She was offering her heart to him, and the sweet, uncertain quality of her words went right to his heart. Michael knew he needed to talk to Cymon. If Erin was still uncertain …
How different her touch was now, he thought, as she wrapped her arms around his neck. There was no fear or hesitation. Her fingers stroked him with the tenderness of a longtime lover.
She had nothing to doubt. All he had to do was convince her.
He parted his legs, opening Erin’s wide. He slid his cock into her, his hips sinking tight against hers. Taking her hands in his, he held her arms up and apart, trapping them against the couch. He felt her tense and then slowly relax. Totally under his control, she surrendered her last vestiges of uncertainty, trusting him with her pleasure—just as she had trusted him with her very life.
When Erin climaxed, she sank her teeth into his shoulder. Before she caught her breath, he coaxed her to wrap her legs up around his neck.
She obeyed, and on a sob of pleasure, she whispered, “You are in so deep I feel you are stroking my heart.”
“You own my heart, love,” he responded.
Each time he plunged into her, he went right to the hilt. Sweat poured over him; droplets landed on Erin’s slick body. She opened her mouth to let a drop hit her tongue. And came again.
The instant her fiery walls clutched at his cock, Michael climaxed, too. He cried out her name—she was his savior, his life.
He had never given anything other than his body to sex.
He felt he gave a piece of … of something to Erin with every orgasm. His heart? Couldn’t be his soul.
Damn, he loved her. But he held back the words.
Was it too much to hope that he could have life and the woman he loved?
“So, are you having wild, passionate sex with your soul mate in your last few hours?”
Standing at the window of Erin’s bedroom, Michael held his cell phone against his ear and frowned at Cymon’s question.
Curled up on her side, Erin waited for him to return. A dreamy smile played on her full lips, and she lazily drew circles on the crumpled sheet beside her.
He was letting her rest. She could barely walk after all their lovemaking.
“None of your damned business.”
The vampire elder had been pissed at being woken up—until he’d heard Michael’s voice. Michael had bristled because he knew,
despite Cymon’s sardonic humor, the vampire pitied him. Being hours from destruction bought him sympathy, and he hated it.
It had taken him two hundred years to find the woman he truly loved, but he didn’t want anyone’s pity. He wanted Erin’s love. He remembered her words. Maybe you don’t love me. Maybe you want to believe you do because you’ve run out of time. But he knew, in his heart, he had only now found his soul mate.
“So what do you want, Varkyre?”
“As much as I hate asking advice from a prissy vampire, I need to know exactly how to break the curse.” “Prissy” would irritate Cymon, and Michael could deal with anger instead of pity. Michael often used the insult to deflect empathy. Hell, I might not be immortal, but at least I don’t suck blood out of a bag like a prissy vampire.
“Your existence depends on it, and you never bothered to learn the details?” Cymon’s voice dripped condescension.
Gritting his teeth so hard his fangs punctured inside his lip, Michael asked, “When my soul mate declares her love, it has to be true love?”
“Yep. Otherwise, whoosh, ball of flames.”
“Yeah, thanks for the visuals. Now, does she have to know she’s in love with me? Does she have to be aware of it?”
“All joking aside, Varkyre, unless she’s accepted her love,” Cymon responded, “it won’t be strong enough to break the curse.”
Blasted curses—always required the impossible.
“She has to know and accept it,” Cymon continued. “That’s the deal. You have to explain what you are, how you can be freed, and the fact that you will die if it doesn’t work. Then you—”
“Yeah, I’m clear on the rest of it. We have to join in the most erotic sex imaginable and declare our love at the moment of climax, and our love must be true.”
“You do realize that if it is not, she dies also.”
“What?”
“The flames that destroy you will kill her also. You both die.”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
“Nope.”
The phone rattled against his ear as he shook with anger. “You goddamned vampire bastard. Could you not have mentioned this before?”
“Must have slipped my mind,” Cymon retorted. “But there’s one more thing, Michael. I was entrusted with your chance to regain your soul. That means that your life mate will always be under my protection, but I can’t save her from the flames.”
“Well, that’s just freaking fabulous.”
“Good luck.” Cymon hung up.
Flicking his phone closed, Michael fought the temptation to crush it and shove it through the closed window. He didn’t want to scare Erin. Instead he ran his hand over his jaw, the stubble rough against his palm. He should have known there would be one last evil twist to the curse.
Whether Erin believed she loved him or not, he couldn’t let her risk her life for him. All he’d wanted was to survive and have Erin, but that was an impossible dream. He couldn’t bear the thought of her dying if they couldn’t break the curse.
And if loving Erin meant sacrificing his own life to know she was safe and happy, he’d sign up to be a six-foot-four-inch flaming torch in an instant. He was going to walk out of her life, and dying wasn’t going to seem so bad. Not now that he’d actually experienced love. Too bad he didn’t have a soul to continue on to an afterlife—a soul that would never forget Erin Kennedy and her beauty, her sensuality, and her love.
Glancing back to the bed, his heart jumped into his throat. Erin’s beautiful green eyes met his gaze. She threw back the sheet, displaying her satin skin, her curvaceous femininity, the body he adored.
“The most erotic sex imaginable?” she asked.
“As curses go, not bad, eh?” His smile died quickly. His heart felt like a chunk of lead.
“If I say I love you, but it isn’t the truth, you die, right?”
“Apparently I flame up into a fireball. Not pretty.”
She flinched. “Is that why you were so angry?”
“Sorry, Erin, but I—”
“I care about you,” she interrupted. “I know it. But love—it’s so soon, and I’m … I’m a cautious sort of person. I can’t guarantee I love you. I just don’t know. But we can try to break the curse, can’t we?”
“No.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “But you’ll die anyway if we don’t try. And if I do love you but just don’t know it yet….” She reached for his slumbering cock. His stomach tightened as her fingertips skimmed it, ran along his shaft, then cradled his balls. “I want to try, Michael.”
Reluctantly he drew her hand away and sank down on the edge of her bed. He’d found two days of heavenly bliss in this bed—two days that had made a two-hundred-year existence worthwhile.
He had to tell her. At the critical moment when his lips parted to speak the words, her stomach growled. Embarrassed, she pressed her hand over her tummy.
“How about dinner?” He held out his hand. “You need your strength for experiencing the most erotic sex imaginable. There’s a lot of pleasure I want to pack into a few hours.”
Michael held out a box of chocolates with maraschino-cherry fillings.
“I take it you like these? There are five boxes in the cupboard.”
Her secret sin. Erin averted her eyes. “Well, a little.”
He bit into one, then held the chocolate over her breasts, letting the sticky pink fondant drizzle over them. Little droplets sprayed over her curves and clung to her nipples.
She held up her breasts, knowing he liked it, but she couldn’t reach the candy with her own tongue. His eyes glowed with an unearthly sheen as he watched her attempt to put her nipples in her own mouth.
He offered her the opened chocolate, and she scooped out the cherry with her tongue.
Letting out a moan of agony, Michael dropped to his knees and licked the sweet zigzag pattern on her breasts. Alternately giggling and groaning, Erin bit into another chocolate and rubbed the cherry over her nipples until they were coated with sticky syrup. She popped the cherry into her mouth.
Michael cleaned her with his finger, put his finger into her mouth, and she licked him clean.
Then she jumped onto her kitchen counter and parted her legs.
Never had she imagined placing maraschino-cherry chocolates between her legs, but it seemed the perfect idea for dessert.
And Michael was delighted to draw them out of her with his tongue and feed them to her.
“Mmmm, sticky. I wish I could eat … I’d love to try a chocolate that tastes like you.” He sighed, licking her juices from his lips.
“I know what I want to try.” She slid off the counter. “Turn around and bend over.”
As she parted the cheeks of his ass and placed her favorite chocolate right on his puckered entrance, he exploded.
She shrugged, bent, and gobbled her dessert off his tight butt anyway, delighted when her busy tongue got him hard again.
On his second climax, he sank to his knees.
“Should I open another box?” she teased, feigning innocence.
“Okay, you discovered my secret fantasy. Chocolate-covered cherries. Now tell me yours,” Erin whispered.
Michael bent over and kissed the top of her head. All their sweaty sex had left Erin’s hair in a mass of waves and curls hanging down her back. Clad in the sheet and quilt pulled from her bed, they stood hand in hand, staring out her living room window at the night sky and the huge full moon.
“You as my wife. And children.”
He heard her gulp, knew she was fighting tears. He didn’t know where the words had come from, but they were true. Up until tonight he’d only thought of her love and his survival and freedom. Now, with Erin, he wished he could dream of the sort of future a mortal man could have.
“Oh, you meant sexual fantasies,” he teased, fighting to keep his voice light. “Hmmm. You know, that full moon makes me think of this one.” He let go of her hand and tugged at the quilt wrapped around her. When it
fell away, he grabbed her bottom. Which meant his sheet also hit the floor.
She squealed. “Michael, with the kitchen light on, people can see us.”
“Does that make you hot?”
“Uh … oh! Is this your fantasy?”
She turned so fast her hip smacked against his jutting erection.
“It could be.”
“It must be. You are rock-hard. A fact everyone can see.”
“Only the people in the apartment building across the road.”
“Are you accustomed to a bigger audience?” she asked teasingly.
“In my mortal past, I entertained a few fairly large crowds in brothels.”
Her auburn eyebrows arched up. “Are you trying to frighten me away?”
Though he hadn’t realized it, Michael saw that was exactly what he was doing. Trying to push her away from him, trying to make the choice to leave him to his fate so much easier for both of them. But hearing the pain in her voice, he knew he couldn’t stand dying without her knowing how much he truly loved her.
“That’s the man I once was. Not the man I am now.”
She bent down and picked up her quilt, holding it against her breasts so the drape concealed her body.
“Hmmm.” She pierced him with a searching stare, reached out, and grasped his hand. His heart leaped in delight as her fingers twined in his again. Strange how holding hands felt as intimate as sex.
“What if we were to have children?” she asked and bit her lip. “Can you have children once you’re mortal again?”
“I would like very much to have children.” That, at least, was the truth. He wished he could have babies with Erin. “And, yes, if I am mortal, I can.”
“But if we do, what do we tell them about your past?” She studied her window, frowning, obviously considering the problem. “Some people won’t even tell a child he or she was adopted. How do we broach the issue that Dad was once a vampire? That you were born two hundred years ago?”
“I don’t want my children to know what I was.”
She looked back at him, eyes wide. “You want to lie.”