by Nalini Singh
He flicked open the cap and, continuing to maintain the intimate eye contact, leaned forward to lick her nipple—just once, just enough to tantalize, to have her sucking in a breath—before upending the bottle and squeezing the sticky liquid not onto her body as she’d expected, but into his hand. He flicked the top closed after he was done, and gave it to her.
She managed to put it somewhere on the table without ever taking her eyes from him.
Dipping a single finger into the thick golden liquid, he lifted it to her lips to trace her with honey sweetness. She sucked his finger into her mouth, swirled her tongue around it as she’d done to his cock in the car. Those sexy eyes told her exactly what he wanted to do to her, but the heat was a slow-burning ember, Dmitri’s fuse apparently very long.
Lucky her.
“Keep doing that,” he murmured in a voice that was the most opulent fur over her skin, “and I’ll have you kneeling between my legs sucking on something much harder.”
She caught his finger between her teeth, a sensual punishment for words that might as well have come from some uncivilized barbarian. “Floor would be tough on the knees,” she said after releasing him, feeling hotly, gloriously female. “Next time I suck you, I want to be kneeling on a nice comfy sofa.”
“I live to grant your wishes.” Finger glistening from her mouth, he dipped it back in the honey and painted both her nipples with a precise, near-delicate touch, before beginning to create an intricate curving pattern on the slopes of her breasts. “Don’t move.”
It was pure torture to sit motionless as he caressed her with long, slow, sticky motions of his finger, his body big and hard and aroused beneath her, his erection so very close that she had fantasies of ripping off his pants and mounting him, his thick flesh pushing into her in rigid demand.
Dmitri’s eyes glittered as they met hers and she wondered what he saw. But all he said was, “Be a good girl, Honor, or I’ll have to punish you.”
A big, rough hand spanking her with erotic heat between her thighs, his fingers becoming slick with her need as she tugged against the bonds that tied her to the bed . . . and allowed her no room to defend herself.
She shuddered as the fantasy formed full-blown in her mind. “Maybe I”—she swallowed as he painted a line down to her navel, drawing a curving design a half inch above the low waistband of her jeans—“would enjoy your version of punishment.”
“Hmm.” He ran his finger back up. “It wouldn’t be punishment then, would it?” A sensual threat from a dangerous creature who knew how to play every facet of a woman’s body. “Now, come here.” Curving his hand around her body, he pressed his palm onto her back.
She gasped as the honey met her skin. “I’m all sticky.”
“Come make me sticky.”
Having no objection to pasting herself against his body, she crushed her breasts to his chest. “We’re going to make an awful mess.” She couldn’t help but claim his mouth, that beautiful, sexy mouth that was becoming her most sinful indulgence.
He let her take him, let her suck on his tongue and ride her body against his cock, but the material of her jeans was thick and she couldn’t feel him like she wanted. When his hands clenched on her thighs, it was a silent demand. Breaking the kiss, she separated their honey-coated bodies with a husky moan and rose to her feet to undo her belt, throw it to the side.
Then, as Dmitri watched, she flicked open the button at the waistband of her jeans and pushed down the zipper to reveal the front of her red panties. Urging her forward with his hands on her hips, Dmitri reached in to trace the tiny black bow, the intimate touch making her want to beg him to move that hand lower, rub harder. Except—“What if I—”
He kissed her navel, right above her panties, the kiss hot and wet.
Her toes curled, and the only reason she remained upright was because of his hold.
“Then,” he said, answering the question he hadn’t let her complete, “we try again. We try all night because I have every intention of taking what’s mine.”
She ran her fingers through the heavy black silk of his hair. “Possessive much?”
The smile he gave her was lethal in its impact. She’d known from the start that she was perilously vulnerable to him, but it was at that moment that she realized she could deny him nothing. It was a terrible weakness, but one that was fused so very deep into her psyche, she knew there was no fighting it, no ignoring it.
My Dmitri.
Stepping back, she shimmied out of her jeans and threw them aside. But when she would’ve straddled him again, he shook his head, nudged her toward the table. A blush crept up her body as she perched on the smooth pine, her knees demurely closed. Shifting his chair closer, he slid his hands down her thighs to cup the backs of her knees, her calves, and it was a tormenting pleasure. She allowed those knowing hands to caress her, to part her knees and spread her thighs as he directed her to put her feet on the chair on either side of his body.
She felt exposed, naked, though she still wore her panties. “Dmitri.” Stroking up honey from her body, she shaped his lips with her fingertip. His jaw was hard under her hand as she cupped his face and kissed him, slow and sweet and a little bit wicked, biting down on that slightly full lower lip.
He moved his hands over her thighs, squeezed. And then he nipped back.
It zinged a ripple of pleasure right through her. Eyes wide, she stared at him, this gorgeous creature more dangerous than any vampire she’d ever before known. She’d thought any hint of a bite would make her freak out. Swallowing, she looked down at his hands. “My thigh,” she whispered. “Do it.”
Not saying a word, he wiped up honey from his chest and ran a line down the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh. It made her tremble, but the tremor wasn’t caused by fear. Not yet. However, the instant he bent his head to her flesh, she froze. Not stopping, he closed his teeth on her. The bite was more a tease than anything, with not even a hint of fang. Trembling, she said, “Do it again.”
He gave her another teasing kiss. Another.
Until her body couldn’t hold the tension any longer and she shuddered, melting into his touch, his seduction. Long, slow licks, small, playful bites, hard sucks, he gave her all of them. But he didn’t sink his fangs into her flesh, didn’t draw up her blood. “When I feed from you,” he murmured, “it won’t be a rushed thing. I plan to savor every hot second of it.” He tugged her forward, reaching up to play with the thin black ribbons on the sides of her panties, his lips a little swollen from her kisses, his bones sharply defined against that warm, beautiful skin. “Lie back.”
Shivering at the dark seduction of him, she took a deep breath and bent over to lie on the table, laughing when her back met the warmth of the wood. “Sticky.”
Lifting up her legs until her knees were hooked up over his shoulders, he ran a finger down the very center of her panties. “Hmm, yes.”
Her brain couldn’t quite process his statement, her nerves short-circuited by that single touch. Again, she waited for the fear. Again, it didn’t come. That was when she made the connection. This, with Dmitri, it was about pleasure.
“Forgive me.”
Never again would he unleash the honed blade of cruelty on her. She knew that to the depths of her soul, had heard it in the cadence of his voice, felt it in that moment when he knelt before her, this man of power and pride, the moment that had been the dividing line between the past and the future.
So this was about pleasure.
The assault had been about pain.
“Are you ready, Honor?”
Yes. But she didn’t have the chance to answer, because that was when he put his mouth on her through the damp fabric of her panties. “Dmitri.”
Half of Dmitri wanted to tear off the last flimsy scrap of Honor’s clothing and plow into her in a single deep thrust, claiming her in that most elemental of ways. The other half of him wanted to use every bit of the sensual skill he’d gained over the centuries to make her his slave.
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Her panties stuck to the plump, flushed curves of her intimate flesh when he drew back, slid his hands under those silly little ribbons that made him insane, and tugged. She lifted up her body and he was peeling that scrap of nothing down her thighs an instant later. He stood to get them completely off, and when he looked up at her, he knew he’d reached the limit of his patience. Leaning down, he licked at the honey over her breasts.
“So now I’m your serving dish,” she said with a smile that kicked him right in the heart. “I knew you had an ulterior motive.”
Laughing—and when had he last done that with a lover?—he kissed his way down her body, to the damp curls between her thighs. And found he had a little more patience after all. Enough to retake his seat, part her, and kiss her, hot and slow and with exquisite care, laving his tongue against the hard nub at the apex of her thighs.
Her back arched, her fingernails scrabbling on the wood. “Dmitri.” Her breath escaped her in a choked-off scream that made him tuck his thumb against the slick entrance to her body and push inside a mere fraction as he covered her with his mouth once more. It was enough. She came apart for him, a sweet burst of feminine spice against his senses.
Rising to his feet even as the final tremors shimmered over her body, he stripped off his remaining clothing and sat back down before pulling her to the edge of the table. “On me, Honor.”
“I can’t move.” It was a breathless complaint.
He kissed her hip bone, felt her shiver. Tugged a little more. She flowed into his arms, all liquid and pleasured and boneless, her legs spreading to either side of his body. Lazy, she kissed him before reaching down to squeeze his turgid arousal with strong, knowing fingers.
Hissing out a breath, he tugged off her hands. “Later.” He pulled her forward, lifted her using his considerable strength . . . and slid her down oh-so-slow onto his cock. Scalding heat and exquisite tightness.
His mind blanked for an instant.
“Oh.” A long, breathy moan. “You feel . . .” Hands thrusting into his hair, cupping the back of his head as she settled more firmly onto him, rolling her hips and using tiny inner muscles to squeeze his cock.
Dmitri swore a quiet blue streak, his hands clenching on her hips. When she continued to make the small sensual movements about to rip his control to shreds, he dipped his head and sucked one taut nipple into his mouth. She cried out and lost her rhythm, letting him regain a piece of his sanity. Licking her one more time, he insinuated his hand between their bodies to lightly circle her clitoris as he began to move inside her in the shallowest of strokes.
“You’ll kill me.” With that, Honor found his mouth.
Lost in the wild passion of her kiss, he stood, taking her with him, and perched her on the edge of the table, their bodies still joined. Her legs were wrapped around him, her mouth fused to his, one hand cupping his jaw, the other in his hair. He felt surrounded by her, adored by her. A startling thought . . . but welcome.
Kissing his way across her cheek and down her jaw when she broke the kiss, he moved his hand to her hip, angling her exactly how he liked. Then he began to move. Their gazes locked. Stayed locked.
Her eyes were shimmering midnight forests, her cry a single word. His name. He fell with her, so much pleasure rocking through him that it felt as if he’d broken into a million iridescent pieces.
31
A very sexy shower later—Lord, but Dmitri was inventive— Honor cuddled up next to him, amused at the thought of cuddling up to a vampire so lethal he scared others of his kind. “You’re a very clever man.”
He ran the fingers of one hand down the side of her face. “I know.”
Honor laughed because what else could a woman do when the man in bed with her had driven her to so many orgasms, she was still seeing stars? “That position—letting me be on top, while handing you all the power. I’m playing way out of my sexual league, aren’t I?”
“Don’t worry.” He wove his fingers into her hair. “I’m an excellent coach.”
Yes, she bet he was. Kissing her way up his body, she snuggled her face into his neck and drew in the warm scent of him. It felt like coming home.
The awakening was as rude as the sleep had been pleasurable.
“Amos has been spotted,” Dmitri told her after reaching out to answer his cell just before a misty gray dawn.
The vampire wasn’t on the grounds of Jiana’s Stamford estate when they arrived, but he’d left pieces behind—several of his organs sat in a glistening pile on the grass, covered with droplets of the fine, fine rain that beaded on their hair, dampened their clothing. Heavy steel spikes encrusted with blood betrayed where he’d been pinned to the earth, purple zinnias and sunny chrysanthemums crushed and splattered with blood congealed to black in pockets where the rain couldn’t reach.
“Whatever I might have dreamed of doing to him,” Honor murmured to Dmitri as they stood on the small rise overlooking Jiana’s home, the moisture-laden early morning wind lifting their hair off their faces, “this is worse.”
“He had to have been otherwise compromised or he’d have escaped those steel pegs before he was gutted, his intestines removed,” Dmitri said, eyes on the flesh and blood ropes that looked obscene surrounded by flowers struggling to reach for sunlight that wasn’t there.
“Or maybe,” Honor said, looking at the blood-soaked woman who sat rocking not far from the site of the carnage, runnels of red dripping from her arms and legs into the earth, “he didn’t want to escape . . . not until he realized she wasn’t planning to stop.” And still he’d been unable to end the life of his attacker, this woman he both loved and hated.
Dmitri’s gaze followed her own, but there was a cold consideration in it that didn’t seem to fit the circumstances. Jiana had, after all, attempted to execute her son in the most brutal fashion. The only reason Amos wasn’t dead was because he’d apparently managed to rip out one of the spikes and hit Jiana so hard across the face with it she’d ended up unconscious with a broken cheekbone, a deep gash marring that mocha skin. He was long gone by the time she alerted the guards.
“Payment for his crimes,” the female vampire had whispered when Honor and Dmitri arrived on the scene.
Honor wouldn’t have believed the woman’s violent change of heart if not for the fact that quite aside from the damage done by Amos during his escape, Jiana’s face was horribly bruised, the elegant silk and lace of her nightgown all but torn off her, her ribs cracked.
“He looked at me,” Jiana had added, eyes dull, “in a way no man should look at his mother.”
That, Honor thought, was what had pushed her over the edge—it seemed there were some things even the most devoted of mothers couldn’t accept. However, it was clear Dmitri had a different view of matters. Waiting until he shifted his attention back to her, she said, “What do you see?”
“It’s not what I see. It’s what I smell.”
Rather than asking him to elaborate, she considered all the facts, hazarded a guess. “Some kind of a sedative or tranquilizer in his blood.” There was more than enough of the latter splashed around, thinned though it was by the rain, to make a determination.
A clipped nod. “This was no act done in unthinking rage. It was calm, cold, calculated.” His eyes lingered on Jiana. “Consider the fact that in spite of her ‘cooperation’ earlier, she made no mention of the culvert that allows covert access to this property.”
“A mother’s instinct to protect trumping her rational mind,” she said, playing devil’s advocate. “As for the drugs, could be she’s lying and he didn’t only say or do something she couldn’t accept, but actually succeeded in assaulting her.
“Traumatized, she put something in his drink, waited for him to get disoriented, weak, and then she did this.” Amos could’ve easily stumbled to this part of the estate, even drugged and less than lucid. It was less than a hundred yards from the house, and with the guard at the front door having been knocked unconscious, while the others were situa
ted around the perimeter, no one could refute that version of events.
“Plausible.” Dmitri’s eyes lingered on the pile of organs that were still pink with health, evidence of the vampirism that meant Amos would recover as long as he had a steady supply of fresh blood and a place to hide.
“Except,” Dmitri continued, interrupting her thoughts about how a man came back from being gutted by his own mother, “whatever happened here, it wasn’t simply about execution, was it?”
She looked at the scene again, consciously putting aside her impression of Jiana as a loving mother pushed to the brink, and focused only on the facts. One of which was that this had taken time. A lot of time. Because the organs . . . they’d been removed with neat precision, sat in a tidy pile.
Heart chilling at the realization, she was about to turn toward Dmitri when she glimpsed the torn and bloody piece of cloth flung a couple of feet away. “He was gagged.” And from the near-black quality of the blood caught in the wrinkles the rain hadn’t penetrated, he’d bitten through his tongue, likely shredded his lips. The ground where he’d been pinned was drenched in so much of that same blood it appeared wetter than the surrounding area, pale pink dew gleaming on some of the chrysanthemums hanging from broken stems.
The conclusion wasn’t an easy one, but it had to be said. “She enjoyed this.”
“There is every indication.” Turning, Dmitri walked to Jiana, a sleek shadow in the black jeans, boots, and black T-shirt he’d pulled on during a quick stop at the Tower.
Honor forced herself to follow, though it tormented her to think of a mother taking pleasure in the murder of her child, no matter the evil done by that child. It was something she simply had trouble comprehending, the maternal instinct within her a staggering force . . . though she had no children of her own.
Shaking her head to clear it, she came to a standstill beside Dmitri as he looked down at Jiana’s apparently tormented form. “You were too clever, Jiana,” he said in a purr of a voice that wrapped ice around Honor’s throat.