by Mandy Rosko
“Okay.” Cedric struggled for patience as Silus explained. All he could think about was that vampire woman, and how she’d barely glanced at either him or Silus while she’d been in their house.
Engaged thirty years ago. That would have been either just before, or just after, Cedric had been born.
And neither of them would have aged a day since.
“Did you love her?”
There was no mistaking that Silus thought Cedric was sexually attractive, and that he loved Cedric, but Cedric wasn’t about to rule out the possibility that his lover was perhaps bisexual. If that was the case, and Silus so much as admitted to being friends with that woman, Cedric didn’t know what he would do.
Silus shook his head. “I can practically see the thoughts swirling through your head. You have naught to fear from her. I did not love her.”
“Then why—” Cedric pointed with his hand in the direction the car had driven off in, unable to finish the sentence.
Silus’s chest expanded in a heavy sigh. “I will admit that I was not in a good place with myself during those days, those years, even, leading up to my introduction to Varinia and her family. I was seventy years old, an age for my mind and body to have long since finished growing and maturing, yet as a vampire, I was still barely older than a child, and was often treated as such. My father and mother made constant hints of the Marcellus family, their wealth, their status, and how wonderful and beneficial it would be for our families to make friendly contacts out of them.”
Silus looked pointedly at Cedric. “Our families were in the same business, you see.”
Cedric nodded. Sun sprites weren’t really into human trafficking like some of the more wealthy vampires were. They liked to stick closer to the stock market, buying and selling houses and all that. Still, a nest of vampires did what it had to in order to ensure blood was always available. For themselves and their not-so-rich tenants, Cedric had long ago forgiven Silus for any part he may have played in such acts, not having much of a choice, considering the family he was born into.
“So they gave you the hint that mating with her would be good for the family,” Cedric said.
Silus nodded. “As I have said, I was not in a good place with myself at the time. Though thirty years ago may hardly seem like much.”
Cedric snorted, and Silus promptly ignored it. “Those were hardly the years of tolerance, and the decades before them were much worse. Neither of my parents knew of my preferences for my own sex until the beginning of the new millennium, and that was after many, many years of battling with myself, living in constant fear of their reaction should they discover my secret. So yes, I agreed to marry her and mate with her.”
“Jesus, Silus.” Cedric had liked to think that, after a year and a half together, he knew his lover well enough. Definitely not everything, not yet, but the fact that Silus had suffered like that for so long and Cedric hadn’t known about it, well, it baffled him.
Silus was one hundred and two years old. If he’d only told his parents, coming out to them at the start of the new millennia, then that was ninety years of hiding.
Cedric couldn’t even contemplate what that was like. And he’d thought he had it bad growing up with his family.
He already knew what happened once Silus finally told his parents. They’d both had this conversation with each other. The how did your parents handle it? sort of thing.
Silus’s parents had basically shrugged it off, taking it no more seriously than a phase or simple curiosity, expecting he would eventually settle down on his own time. A reaction like that probably made Silus go a little mad for a time. All those years of hiding and pretending, and his parents had barely blinked at the confession.
Cedric’s coming out had been a little different. His father, bastard that he was, had basically forced Cedric to promise to never reveal his terrible secret to his mother or anyone else in the family. That hadn’t stopped Cedric from going out and enjoying himself as often as he could with the men he picked up from the bars and clubs he’d liked.
Silus never had any of that for ninety years.
“So,” Cedric began. “The sprites were basically saying that Cecil was kidnapped and eaten alive by vampires. I never believed it,” Cedric added hastily. “I don’t think anyone really did. It always did sound like something the adults were making up to scare the kids away from vampires.”
“Yes, well, it’s lucky for me that you were not so fooled by such stories, otherwise we may have never crossed paths.”
Cedric grinned, and not just because Silus was right. If anything, those stories made Cedric want to catch a glimpse of a vampire even more than what his cousins thought was normal. He’d scared them and his bodyguards on more than one occasion, trying to get away to look for vampire nests.
“How did the vampires tell it?” Cedric asked, getting back to the main discussion.
“Our telling was most definitely different from what the sprites spread around. I met Varinia only once before. Perhaps that is why it took me such a time as to recognize her. She was barely ever in my memories. Though, at the time, I recalled thinking her to be pretty, and that perhaps we could make a decent partnership, even if I could never mate with her properly.”
“But what happened to her?” Cedric pressed.
“The tale given to my parents, and then to myself, was that Varinia had been attacked by sun sprites, and though she would surely like nothing better than to marry immediately to keep the promise of her family, her father made a request to postpone the match until such a time as her delicate condition could be improved.”
The twist on Silus’s mouth as he said it let Cedric know what his lover really thought had gone on. Likely, Varinia was the one to refuse to marry, and her father, with no other choice available to him, had gone to the Veturious house and begged for more time, playing the sympathetic father of a victim in order to put off the wedding until Varinia could be forced.
Cedric’s own family wasn’t much different when it came to that kind of manipulation.
“Well, she obviously never came back to marry you,” Cedric said. “What happened then?”
“I was led to believe that she had killed herself some six months later. My father was angry, as he was then expected to return the dowry money, but he had no choice in the matter.”
Silus sighed and rubbed the bridge between his eyes. “Though no one can know for certain what happened, aside from Varinia and Cecil themselves, obviously their tale holds some similarity to ours. They fell in love and eloped. The Marcellus family would rather their daughter be dead than be burdened with the shame of a child who chose a sun sprite for a mate, so they disinherited her and spread their tale around for any sympathetic ear to listen to.”
It made sense, but thirty years ago...Varinia didn’t look a day over twenty, and Cecil was definitely a young man when he vanished with her, still a teenager likely. Now he was in his midforties, with the grays to show for it in that golden hair of his.
One day that was going to be Cedric. Silus wouldn’t change, but Cedric would. He was thirty years old now. How much longer until his gray hairs came in?
“I have explained, yet you still appear troubled,” said Silus, looking at Cedric now with a trace of uncertainty. “You could not believe I would harbor some long-standing love for her after that, could you?”
“No! No, of course not, I just...” Now Cedric didn’t know how to explain it. That was one fear explained away just to be replaced by another one, which had been there for the last couple of weeks leading up to Cedric’s birthday and Silus’s proposal. Not to mention the fact that, while he trusted Silus wholeheartedly, that didn’t mean he trusted Varinia in the least.
He could have made some clumsy effort to tell this to Silus, but while his lover, his life partner, had been all patient and understanding as he calmed Cedric’s jealous ego, Cedric wanted none of that patience and understanding now.
He grabbed Silus by the shoulders, push
ed him up against the wall, and kissed him instead.
Silus was openly shocked. Cedric could tell by the way his back hit the wall. He hadn’t expected the coming attack, and so he had been slow to react and keep his balance. His mouth opened in a stunned gasp that Cedric took full advantage of, sliding his tongue inside and starting a battle for control.
Silus would still be confused when it was over, but maybe by then he would ask no more questions, and they could avoid the inevitable conversation of Cedric’s eventual death through ageing for a few more months.
Until then, Cedric wanted to take full control of the time he had now and wanted to enjoy Silus’s hands gripping his hair and stretching the navy cotton T-shirt he wore.
Cedric was taller than Silus, but not by much, but that still gave him all the advantage he needed, despite Silus’s sheer strength, to pin the other man, pushing his legs apart with his knee. Cedric slid his hands down, found Silus’s stiff cock through his trousers, and began a pattern of rubbing with his palm and gripping hard as Silus hissed and gasped.
“Where has this come from?” he asked, his fangs showing as he smiled.
“I just want to touch you,” Cedric said, his voice coming out much raspier than intended.
It was true, too, so he wasn’t entirely evading the real issue here. He and Silus barely touched each other save for when they were alone in the darkness of their room. With the house now filled with servants, it wasn’t like before where they could fool around on the couch or at the kitchen counter or even outside on a starry night or cloudy day. Now they had to be sensitive to the fact that there were other people around twenty-four-seven.
Cedric was having none of that right now. Not. At. All.
He dropped to his knees, pulling at Silus’s belt, wishing he had the same strength as his vampire lover so that he could just tear the damn thing off.
“Gonna make you scream for me,” he said, looking up and delighting in the shiver that passed through Silus’s body.
There was a squeak and a small, dull crash of something that Cedric didn’t bother himself with looking at by the entrance to their sitting room.
Silus snapped at whoever it was, a rare thing for him to do. “Out. Have everyone get out of the house, now.”
There was a shuffle and the quick patter of feet as the werewolf, probably one of the maids, ran off to deliver her master’s command.
Silus promptly returned his attention to Cedric, and as Cedric finally, finally, got that friggin’ belt off his lover’s hips, Silus stuck his hands in Cedric’s hair and gripped a little too eagerly.
“Put my cock in your lovely mouth. Suck me until I come,” he commanded.
Cedric grinned up at him, forgetting all the about the pain to his scalp, pulled those stuffy pants down, and promptly put his lips over the head of Silus’s dick. He had every intention of carrying out two of those three commands.
Silus’s mouth dropped, and as Cedric worked his mouth around his swollen prick, swirling his tongue and tightening his cheeks, he looked up, watching as Silus struggled to watch him. The man was using sheer willpower to keep from closing his eyes and throwing his head back.
Yeah, Cedric definitely hadn’t been the only one to notice their lack of attention to each other, it seemed. Last night hadn’t been nearly enough.
He began bobbing his head, sliding his mouth farther and farther down, and relaxing his throat so he could take in all of Silus’s dick.
Breathy gasps sounded above him as Cedric finally made it to his goal. By now Silus had a firm grip on his neck and hair. He moved his hips back and forth, and Cedric had to hold on tightly to Silus’s hips to keep him from humping too hard and fast into Cedric’s mouth.
Painful in his jaw and neck, but so worth it to hear those sounds again. To smell that smell of Silus’s skin and balls almost right under his nose at this point.
Cedric’s cock was hard and ready, and it throbbed, demanding attention and pulsing harder against his jeans as Cedric’s mouth did the forward-back routine on Silus’s dick.
At least by now Silus had gotten some control over himself and was keeping the thrusts of his hips down to a gentle minimum, trusting Cedric to get him to where he needed to be.
The poor bastard.
When Cedric began to pull back, Silus gripped him tighter, as though to push him back to the matter at hand.
Cedric ignored that and pushed Silus’s hands away. The look on his lover’s face when Cedric stood up was damn near priceless.
“Please tell me you have no intention of leaving me like this.”
“You must think I’m real mean or something if that’s going through your head,” Cedric said, and just because he wanted to hear Silus squawk, he bent down and grabbed him around the knees, heaving him over his shoulder, and walked to the couch with him, fireman style. Silus was practically helpless with his pants around his knees, preventing him from kicking.
Silus made an indignant noise of protest as he was flung down carelessly on the leather sofa. Cedric worked on the button and fly of his jeans, shoving them down and kicking them off before climbing on top of the love of his life, who glared at him in annoyance.
“What in the damned—”
Cedric kissed him before he could finish whatever long-winded thing he was about to say. He pulled away long enough to rasp a breathy“Shut up,” and then he got back to work.
By then Silus melted for him, his body becoming more pliant, his arms coming around Cedric’s shoulders, pulling at his T-shirt, stretching it more and more until it finally ripped apart and the cool air of the room touched down on Cedric’s bare back.
The sound of the material coming apart, and the knowledge that it was being torn from his back in their haste to fuck each other, only made Cedric’s blood run hotter.
It wasn’t like they kept lube hidden around the house for the occasions when they wanted to have spontaneous sex. They hadn’t done that even when it was just the two of them alone on the lake, but they knew how to make do.
Cedric helped Silus to pull the last remaining bits of clothing he wore from his shoulders, lifting himself onto his elbows so that his lover could kick off his pants and throw them onto the floor. When it was skin on skin, Cedric very nearly lost all control.
They spent a good couple of minutes holding each other close, humping and kissing and searching for friction, and it felt so good.
To Cedric, it felt like they hadn’t done this in forever.
Silus pulled his mouth away, dark eyes clouded with lust. “Fuck me, sprite,” he commanded.
Cedric had every intention of doing just that, but he hadn’t forgotten that Silus needed a drink. He presented his wrist. “Bite me,” he said.
Silus immediately complied, drunk on his lust for blood and sex. He said nothing, opened his mouth over Cedric’s willing vein, and bit down until his fangs punctured the skin in their usual place.
The second Cedric felt the flow of warm blood on his skin, he pulled back. “Let go.”
Confusion entered those endless black pools Silus had for eyes, yet he did as he was told, barely the tiniest drop of red to cost his pale lips. “Wherefore would you have me stop?”
Cedric shivered, as always, enjoying his lover’s vampire speak while they were rolling around naked.
He put his cut wrist to his lips and began licking and sucking up the flowing blood. He made a small noise to communicate to Silus that something good was coming, and the vampire nodded and lay back, watching Cedric lap up his own blood with eager eyes.
It stung a bit without Silus’s venom there to numb the pain, but he’d wanted to do this for a while. When he had a sufficient amount of blood in his mouth, he pulled his wrist away, leaned down, and kissed Silus again.
Oh so intelligent and sexy as he was, Silus picked up on what Cedric intended and opened his mouth to the kiss, letting the red, copper-tasting fluid enter and slide down his throat.
Then came the reaction natural to a vamp
ire who drank sun sprite blood.
Cedric felt Silus’s prick jump between them. Silus’s breathing through his nose became hard and heavy, goose bumps prickling over his skin making the dark hairs on his arms stand up straight.
Then he moaned and thrust his hips into Cedric’s. Silus grabbed him around the waist so tightly, pushing them together, that Cedric knew he was going to have severe bruising when all was said and done.
He couldn’t wait. Cedric thrust his cock into Silus eagerly. Despite the cool temperature of the room, their bodies became slick with sweat. The slide of their skin, coupled with the rough pull and scratch of their pubic hair, was enough to stimulate the senses to the point of drunkenness.
They were openly moaning and keening into each other’s mouths as they forgot everything else and just moved.
The first time Silus had ever drunk some of Cedric’s blood, a small sip had been enough to give the man a seizure-inducing orgasm. Now, a year and a half later, Silus was better able to withstand the effects of drinking Cedric’s blood. He didn’t have a seizure anymore, but he damn sure had good time.
And Cedric wanted to draw it out for as long as possible.
It damn near killed him to do it, but he reached down to grab himself firmly around the base of his cock, lifting himself off of his lover. If a stray breeze from an open window somewhere in the house so much as fluttered across his cock, he was going to come.
Silus grabbed him in a near mad craze. “Finish it!” he demanded.
“On your hands and knees,” Cedric said.
Silus spun around in record time.
Cedric would have laughed if he weren’t so damned horny. He shifted back a little, his hands firmly gripping Silus’s hips while he tried to keep his balance on his knees on the plush leather.
He bent down to place a kiss on Silus’s lower back, noting the way the bit of blood left behind from his lips kind of looked like red lipstick.