But there was no longer any need for any of that. Finally he was there and she was able to rewrite all that she had become. But Jasmine worried that it had been too long, too many years and too much pain and deprivation ever to make her right again. She feared she wouldn’t have it in her to be worthy of this connection fate had dropped onto them.
In spite of all those doubts and fears, Jasmine let her hands move slowly up the massive strength of his arms, traveling onto his shoulders where they continued to his neck. Her fingers moved past his collar until the tips were toying with the prominent pulse in his throat. Touching that vital spot was like having someone lick her across her clit. It was stimulating beyond all reason, made her suddenly wet with craving and desire. There was no feeling like it in the world, and she had never experienced it before.
She couldn’t resist pushing herself up onto her toes and touching her mouth to his pulse, her tongue coming out to lick flatly along its length. She could smell the heat of life and arousal on him all at once and it was a potent combination, the perfect Vampire aphrodisiac. She was a little dizzy with it, so she moved away briefly to bite his ear with the tips of her front teeth.
Her mouth ached where her fangs had made a demanding appearance. They knew what they wanted, whether she was sure or not. Instinct and need pressed onto her, making her hungry on physical and spiritual levels. Levels she had never experienced before. There was such depth to it, such stunning dimension.
But before she could move back to his throat, he brought his hand up to her mouth, covering it and pulling back so he could meet her eyes. The jade color had gone smoky with appetite, and he had never seen anything so erotic and compelling in his life. If he had not already been hard from the mere closeness of her body, he most certainly would have become so just looking into her eyes.
“You can feed all you like—after you feed me.”
With that he grabbed the bottom of her shirt and in a single sweep of motion stripped it up over her head. He let it fall carelessly to the floor, his eyes and attention better spent staring at the alabaster beauty of her shoulders, breasts, and midriff. She was like a statue come to life, only not so cold and far more essential. He encompassed her back in both of his hands, the masterful grip on her making him realize that she was actually quite small. Her vibrancy and cocky strength made her seem so much bigger than she was in actuality.
Adam was not intimidated by the realization. He knew there was nothing delicate or fragile about her, and if he entertained the thought for even a second she’d probably take great pleasure in painfully proving to him otherwise.
He was not in the mood for her enmity. He’d had more than enough. Now he was ready for the purity of her passion. An undaunted passion.
“Sweet Destiny, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever beheld,” he breathed over her mouth as he pulled her lips to within an inch of his own. “Then I look again and you have grown even more beautiful. Then again, and you stun me, flood me with urges and craving I cannot control. No matter how I tried, no matter what I wanted my mind to do, it has had its own will where you are concerned, until I no longer know myself. And yes, it does frighten me, too,” he admitted to her. “Or it did. How easy it is for me to give in when it means I will have my mouth all over your skin.”
Jasmine felt her entire body go liquid with need as his words sank into her brain, and deeper still into her soul. He was right. What did it matter anymore? All the struggling and the resistance. Why bother when giving in meant such sublime pleasure awaited her?
Her lips parted just as he pulled her up to his mouth, kissing her more deeply than he ever had before. She realized then how much she had missed the complex pleasure of a kiss. But no others had satisfied her like this. They had only frustrated her to a point of fury, compelling her to edit them out of her life completely because they failed to live up to what they should be.
This was what they should be.
Hot and wet and sensual to the point that her thoughts completely hazed over and thinking became utterly impossible. There was no part of her body left untouched by his kiss as it shifted from wild to sensual to dynamic by turns.
Before she realized it, she was unbuttoning her jeans and pushing them down her legs, kicking them away so she could touch her skin to his. But he was still dressed, so she immediately began to work on his clothes. She encountered his own impatient hands as he helped her in her task, but she was far more familiar with the way his clothes worked than he was, and he lost patience. He turned to water, splashing into her body and face, running down through the length of her hair, the temperature of him just as warm as his body was.
Jasmine barely realized his empty clothes hung from her hands as she felt liquid eddy and cling to every inch of her body. She felt him moving up the insides of her thighs, her body trembling as the water wetness of him combined with the wet need her body had expelled in response to his kisses. The sensation was the same as if a soft mouth and tongue were swirling their way across her flesh, teasing at her clit even as the rest of her was being stroked until every nerve of her body was stimulated at once.
Unable to bear her weight, her legs folded and she found herself on her knees with Adam continually moving over her skin and hair. He slid through her hair from roots to tips, then rained off the ends and onto the small of her back, dripping down onto her backside and slicking his way through every crevice he could find before shifting over her to do it all over again.
Jasmine had only tasted a few instants of this four hundred years ago, but even then she had never comprehended just how overwhelmingly erotic and pleasurable such a thing could be. She found herself on the verge of an orgasm she could barely grasp. She felt him inside her body, felt him flowing into her in a liquid penetration that was deceptively simple, yet nothing of the kind.
Adam drew back and solidified into the burning flesh of a man, his senses inundated with everything he had discovered about her, and his hard shaft buried deep inside her. The alteration from water to flesh was simple and shocking all at once. Adam’s hands were pulling her up onto his braced thighs, seating her astride him and pushing his erection much deeper inside her.
Jasmine gasped in a hard breath, gripping his shoulders with all of her strength, unintentionally pulling at the wound he had suffered and making it bleed afresh. But for the first time in her life, Jasmine had found a call far more compelling than the scent of fresh blood. Even more compelling than the scent of the blood of her mate.
When? Oh, when had she last felt so much pleasure from the physical connection of her body to that of another? Never. Oh, never. She admitted it wildly and freely to herself. She had just come home. She had found the place she had always been searching for. This, she realized, was the place she would always be able to stay. This would keep her aboveground. This would make the world a gorgeous, irresistible pleasure every single day of her life to come.
Jasmine came hard and with incomparable ecstasy.
Adam felt the bliss in her thoughts, and it overwhelmed him even as he was feeling his own wild sense of having come home at last. He felt the orgasm hit him like a ton of bricks and he wanted nothing more than to fling himself into it, to let them both indulge in their realization that they had quite simply been made for each other. As though they had been whole at one point, split apart, and were now reunited at last. It brought tears to his eyes. Partly because he knew how important this sense of coming home was going to be to him in the future as he learned how to adapt to the new world he found himself in. This, he knew, would be what kept him sane, would keep homesickness at bay, would make his losses feel less and his fortunes seem so much more.
“Sweet Destiny. Sweet, sweet fortune. Can a man find love in only a day?” he asked her even as she threw back her head and shouted out to the ceiling. He saw tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, and it made him happy he had held himself back. He wanted to give her that pleasure again. And again.
The locked tensio
n in her body suddenly released and she relaxed in his hold, her torso a liquidy ooze of flesh against his own. She gasped for breath she didn’t need, her hands alternately gripping at the muscles of his arms, then relaxing.
“Is it love or just this crazy genetic predisposition?” she asked softly. He had not realized she had even heard his uncontrolled utterance. He was also surprised she was being so calm about it. The idea of love must be everything she feared the most.
“I don’t fear it,” she corrected him. “I fear being disappointed by it.”
She lifted her head and met his eyes, understanding that the deep green she saw was a reflection of her own now, in more ways than she could possibly think of in that moment.
“I am not afraid,” he heard himself say, even as he surprised himself by saying it. “No, it is true. The Imprinting was such a distant dream for me. So distant I just assumed it would never happen. But the moment I understood it had happened, whether to a Vampire or a speck of dust, I understood it was destined. It was meant for me and it would be right for me.”
“I like that, I’m no better than a speck of dust.” She sniffed at the idea, but he knew she was playing.
“Perhaps you ought to prove to me otherwise, eh?” Adam lurched forward, throwing them both on the floor, her back hitting a tapestry rug and her body swallowed up under his.
“Perhaps I should,” she agreed. Then using the strength of her entire body she pushed him over, reversing their positions on the rug. She sat up over him, a proud and fantastic woman, more than he would ever have asked for, more than he would ever have expected. “Aye, you should remember I am better than a Demon like you deserves,” she taunted him.
“Keep teasing, little Vamp. I am your only source for dinner tonight. Methinks I will not feed you.”
“No?” She moved in a wicked undulation of her body, riding tightly over him, sending chills of delight all over his body. “But you have such mighty appetites of your own. Why not feed together?”
He groaned, reaching to grip her by her long, sleek thighs.
“I might be so convinced,” he confessed on a rough exhalation.
Jasmine smiled.
He should have known just by the smug turn of her lips that she was up to something.
She rose off his body, letting him slip free of her warmth and wetness, making him utter a clear sound of protest, his hands trying to grasp for her before she could escape him further.
But she wasn’t going far. That reflexive breath of hers skimmed his belly as she resituated herself, bringing her mouth to the level of his waist, her tongue darting out immediately to lick the length of him from tip to base and then ever more slowly back again. Adam’s hands fumbled blindly into her hair as his eyes rolled closed with pleasure. She dipped her head and took him into her mouth, a strong seal immediately following as she sucked him hard against her palate again and again. Then she eased up a little, her saliva wetting him as her tongue danced over him in teasing sweeps of pleasure.
Adam had never felt anything like it. He was so hard and heavy, growing more so by the second ... or so it felt. The urge to come flooded over him as sharply as it had when he’d been inside her. His hands fisted sharply in her hair and he ejected a harsh sound of need.
I need you!
And I need you, she countered.
And that was the moment he felt her fangs skipping along his length.
She bit down hard.
Under any other circumstances, Adam imagined his first instinct would have been to backhand her across the room and then curl up into a wounded little ball of damaged manhood.
But this was not other circumstances.
This was his Imprinted mate, and her bite had proved to be the closest thing to nirvana he would ever know. He exploded into her mouth, a mixture of blood and all his most primal essences. He came in a way that went beyond the physical, the orgasm clawing up out of his every blood vessel and every nerve all at once. She drank from him as though she had been denied food all of her life and was finally given the chance to suckle. He felt the pleasure flooding through her mind, felt how it numbed her and invigorated her all at the same time.
Then he felt her reach her threshold of pleasure and of physical satiation. He braced for the second bite, but was still unprepared for it. He felt the coagulants and antibodies burning through him, but it was like a whole new act of bliss instead of something practical and helpful. Adam fell flat on his back, his hands leaving her hair and driving through his own. He had to close his eyes because whenever he looked up, the etched stone ceiling and the Moorish arches in her room began to spin around him, making him feel incredibly dizzy and unanchored from his world.
Her tongue brushed over him and he felt the skin on his body flinch. It was all too much. More than any one creature could possibly withstand. The impression must have flitted through Jasmine’s mind, because she immediately backed away from him. She climbed up the length of his body and dropped down heavily over him. She began to chuckle in soft outbursts of humor, rolling a bit to and fro, like a woman deep into the high of her life.
“You know what I like best about all of this?” she asked him.
“Hmm?” he grunted.
“We are never going to have just boring old sex. Neither of us has it in us to be drab and conventional.”
“I should hope not,” he agreed.
“So ... I guess that is kind of cool. I wouldn’t mind that too much.”
Adam laughed. “Well, I am comforted.”
“I am trying to say I accept this Imprinting of yours,” she pointed out.
“I realize that,” he said. He didn’t bother pointing out to her she really didn’t have any choice in the matter. They’d already been over all of that. They were both very aware of it. This was Jasmine’s way of taking control of something she simply couldn’t control. “I am glad. I have decided I really rather like you, Jasmine.”
“You said you were in love,” she pointed out. “And in less than a day.” He opened an eye to see how smug she looked, because she certainly sounded it. She was obviously very pleased with herself.
“That I did. I have to admit, I find your irascible nature, your quills, and your tendency to want to torture those around you to be rather charming.”
Jasmine laughed at him. “True. I am all those things,” she said, sounding very proud of herself for it.
“But you are also more sensitive than you care to admit to others, capable of craving beauty in all the things around you, and loyal to those who have been blessed to earn your loyalty. You are firmly for the moral right, although your methods might skirt the appropriate.” He reached out to push the edge of her hair back. “You are lovely, evocative, and I have never met your match. Tell me what in all of that I could resist loving?”
Jasmine suddenly sat up and moved away, snagging her robe from the hook near her vanity and cocooning herself within the plush fabric, tying the belt extraordinarily tight.
By the time Adam gained his feet she was spinning the crystal ball again, occasionally breaking from her study of it to glance up into the mirror above the table. He felt her insecurity, her fear, and the racing of her thoughts.
Adam came up beside her, reached out to cup the side of her face in his big hand. Despite her resistance, he made her look at him.
“I will not hide or lie. I do not wish to,” he said softly to her. “There can be nothing but truth between us, even when we wish to lie to ourselves.”
Her breath caught.
“I don’t love you,” she burst out, the statement a bit more painful than he had anticipated it would be.
“Love will come when you are ready to let it come, Jasmine.”
But I know it is already here.
“Stop it! I do not love you!” She picked up the ball with one hand and threw it into him as hard as she could. He caught it against his sternum with a grunt of pain. She used the action to push past him, to leap right through the blackened glass
and out the window.
“Jasmine!”
He bellowed her name, racing after her, diving after her even before he heard her scream.
Sunlight.
Everywhere, all at once. Desperation and emotional pain had overwhelmed her instincts, making her forget that the sun was high in the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, but they came as he plummeted after her, falling at breakneck speed down the massive height of the citadel walls. The clouds came with more speed than he had ever managed before, but not fast enough to keep her skin and hair from bursting into flames. He reached out with both hands, knowing he couldn’t grab her, but willing himself to do something. Anything.
And then suddenly he felt a source of water appearing before him. Jasmine, yet more than Jasmine. The fire along her body doused itself as her skin turned liquid, flinging droplets back at him.
They hit the ground, Jasmine first, in a violent splash of water, and Adam second as the same. But Adam knew how to draw himself back into a cohesive shape and Jasmine did not, so he had to gather up all of the water molecules that she had become, and slowly, with his arms around her, he reformed her into what she should be.
Her hair was burned, her skin, too, but she was Jasmine again. Jasmine his mate. Jasmine the beautiful. Jasmine the Vampire.
Jasmine who could become Water.
The clouds sealed away the sun, rain falling to keep her cool and protected as he took her to the nearest entrance of the citadel and finally was able to close her behind a sheltering door. She was groaning in pain, too weak to hold herself upright, staggering as he tried to avoid touching her at first. But he gave up on that, turning to Water and wrapping himself around her in a cooling, protective sheath. He buoyed her, helped strengthen and guide her steps. He didn’t want to change her form while she was so injured and damaged, not knowing what further harm it might do. When Demons were wounded, changing their molecular cohesion could cause a great deal of harm.
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