by Aja James
She rose up enough to open her sleep-swollen eyes a sliver and peer down into his face.
“I can soothe the pain if you but let me,” she said reasonably, cajolingly.
“No,” he uttered.
No, she wouldn’t be able to soothe his pain.
Not unless she loved him back.
But she’d taken his response to mean differently, her eyes narrowing with displeasure, though lacking the aggressive heat that used to enflame her gaze upon hearing his refusal.
“Always no. Why are you so stubborn, Pure One? Why not enjoy our contract more? There is so much pleasure to be had. I can give you unimaginable ecstasy.”
Of that, Seth had no doubt. But pleasure without love between them was not something he could ever experience now that his heart and soul were no longer his own but hers.
He shook his head silently and lowered his gaze.
He was breaking inside. He did not want her to see it.
She sighed exaggeratedly, used to his stoic resistance to her game.
But she did not relent, sliding down his body to bury her face in his groin, rubbing her cheeks and lips against his sex, coating herself with his essence, drugging herself on his scent.
“I can’t get enough of you,” she confessed, an undertone of bewilderment in her voice. “Your refusal both incenses and arouses me. No male has ever refused me.”
Seth held her head against him with a hand in her hair. It flexed involuntarily as the agony of her words speared through him.
Just a game. It was all a game to her.
He was a game to her.
With another female, in a different circumstance, he might have quipped back, In that case, if I conceded, what then would you have left to conquer? Surely you would be bored within hours.
But there was no teasing within him presently. Only a suffocating tightness in his chest. He couldn’t form words to spar with her. He could barely draw breath from the debilitating pain of her careless barbs.
So he remained silent and taut beneath her as she began to bathe his cock with her mouth and tongue, lapping at the distended veins that ran along the throbbing length of him.
She was fisting him in both her hands now, squeezing along the base of him in breath-stealing twists, while her luscious mouth opened over his crown, sucking the head of him with increasing pressure.
She was driving him insane.
The penetration was too shallow, her hands not tight enough around him, her leisurely sucks nowhere near giving him the pressure he needed to alleviate the unrelenting ache in his loins.
“Don’t,” he rasped, trying to pull away from her.
She refused to let him go, choosing that moment to strike her fangs into his dorsal vein, making his body jerk violently at the sharp penetration, as his blood rushed down her throat in thick gulps.
He could almost hear her silent retort in his head:
Every vein in your body is mine. You do not command me. I can penetrate you anywhere I want, any time, any way.
He drew a shuddering breath and loosed his hand from her hair.
He would not beg her to stop. She was within her rights to take his blood anywhere she chose. The pain within him was less from her feeding than from the intention behind it.
This was the way she marked what was hers despite the refusal of his body. It was not their shared pleasure she sought but her own dominance over him.
He would no longer fight her on this last day they had together. He hadn’t the strength.
He hadn’t the heart.
Noticing his withdrawal even though he hadn’t physically moved, she nursed more gently at his sex, eased her fangs out of him and closed the wounds.
She moved up his body until she was braced on top of his chest, looking down at him, and saw that his eyes were closed, his jaw clenched tight.
“You know better than to deny me your vein,” she said defensively, feeling guilty for her actions just now. “I am within my rights according to our bargain.”
He didn’t reply, keeping his eyes closed and his face turned to the side.
She wriggled uneasily on top of him, like a chastened child trying to gain his attention.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, though there was a puzzlement in her voice, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was apologizing for, just that she needed to say it.
“Seth…”
She rarely used his name. Always, she called him “Pure One,” ever reminding him of the unbridgeable divide separating them.
Her low utterance of his name now sent an involuntary shiver down his spine.
How easily she said his name, this female who didn’t even know she owned him.
“Seth…” she murmured again, kissing the dimple in his chin, then brushing her mouth gently over his.
Without conscious thought, he turned toward her, his lips parting on their own accord.
Chapter Five
She’d never kissed him on the mouth, not once in the six months she’d laid claim to every other part of his body.
He’d watched her indulge in all kinds of fleshly pleasures with her harem in the early months of his stay in the Cove, but she’d never kissed him.
Somehow, it made all the rest of their intimacies hollow and degrading.
For, he was a whore after all, no matter how he tried to euphemize it in his own mind. He might not have whored his body, but he was her Blood Whore nonetheless.
Her harem shared her pleasures. They came and went of their own volition. But he…he shared nothing with her. It was a one-way street. She took, he gave, and he was paid for his services, not in coins but with power.
He fisted his hands in the sheets beside him and would have turned away again, but her palms cupped his face on either side.
And her mouth came fully upon his.
A shuddering breath sifted out between his still parted lips at the unexpected, exquisite contact.
Shyly, her tongue darted between his lips to lick furtively inside before retreating as her lips rubbed and plumped and kissed at his.
He opened more to give her better access, and her sleek tongue plunged inside again, tangling with his. He bit back a groan at the carnality and innocence of her sensual assault, a combination of contrasts that devastated him.
He let her take the lead as she learned the shape of him, the wet heat within, the edges of his teeth and the sensitive roof.
Until he couldn’t stand the exquisite torture for one second longer, and took back control.
He thrust into her mouth as she thrust into his, over and over and over again, sucking on each other, nipping with their teeth, desperate to get even closer, plunge ever deeper.
She had the upper hand at first, thrusting from above, holding his face immobile. But soon, he held her too, his fingers curled into her silky, reddish-black mane, cradling the back of her head, as he arched his body upwards and took her mouth as aggressively as she took his, pushing her back until she was soft and pliant in the cradle of his hands, her lips swollen and yielding, her mouth obediently sucking on his tongue when he gave it to her.
Oh Goddess, how he wanted her! Yearned for her!
From the flames roaring within his feverish body to the pulsing, hungry waves of his soul. He clutched her tightly with every fiber of his being, conveying desperately with his mouth fused with hers what he truly felt, how deeply he loved.
Until she became seduced by the moment and came astride him, taking his painful length fully within her wet heat all the way to the hilt.
Caught up in the frenzy and desperation of his emotions, he pumped up within her, clenching his buttocks and thighs, thrusting his hips into hers, and then she said:
“Yes! That’s it. Give in to me. You’re mine now.”
On a ragged exhale of breath he stilled, his body locking in a giant, thwarted muscle cramp from head to toe.
She was still trying to conquer him. This was all just a game to be won to her.
�
��No,” he rasped out, pulling out of her, away from her, until their bodies no longer touched.
He drew into a sitting position and faced her, as she knelt on the bed facing him.
He expected to see seething fury in her expression at yet another refusal from him. But she looked strangely subdued, her eyes cataloguing his painful arousal, his clenched muscles and his impassive face.
Her eyes stayed the longest on his mouth, still swollen and wet from their kiss.
“Always no. Never yes,” she murmured, still staring at his mouth.
He sensed the change in her mood. A seriousness and sadness that she’d seldom shown around him now pervaded her countenance.
“This is our last day together,” she stated quietly, raising her eyes to his.
He nodded, swallowing thickly.
For the longest time she continued to stare into his eyes, silent and considering.
Finally, she said, “I have a request of you.”
He looked mutely back at her, waiting for her to continue.
She tilted her head slightly.
“You’re free to refuse as always, of course. But it would…”
He thought she might say it would displease her, enrage her, if he should deny her, but instead she finished:
“It would make me happy if you granted my wish.”
Happy.
He had it in his power to make her happy. Didn’t she know that in that moment, she could have asked him anything?
“What is your request?” he asked steadily, even as his heart hitched with something like hope.
She seemed to grow shy, her lashes swooping down as her hands fiddled with the bedsheets.
“Pretend I’m your wife for just one day,” she whispered, her eyes still downcast, though her hands had finger-walked to his thighs, as if she couldn’t help touching him when he was near.
“I want to know what it feels like…”
She regarded him through the filter of her long, straight lashes and finished, “…to be yours.”
*** *** *** ***
Jade didn’t think for a moment that he’d actually agree to her out-of-the-blue, hair-brained request.
She didn’t know what his human wife had looked like, but for sure the Egyptian woman would have looked nothing like Jade.
What possessed her to ask him?!
She wanted to take the words back the moment they left her mouth.
But the kiss had addled her brain, apparently. She’d only wanted to express her heart-felt contrition when she started the kiss, even though she staunchly reminded herself that she was within her every right to take his vein however and wherever she chose, but the guilt had been overwhelming and inescapable.
She’d become attuned to his reaction to her every action. He’d become someone…close to her. Perhaps even dear to her.
And when she caused him pain, she regretted it, even though she still couldn’t help the primal need to conquer him.
To own him.
He was hers, whether he admitted it or not. She wanted to mark him with her possession.
When she hurt him, it was to prove that she could.
But somewhere over the past six months, she’d begun to care how he felt. She’d become attuned to his reactions. To the clench of his jaw, the sadness in his eyes, the rasp in his voice when he told her “no.”
It felt like he was teaching her something. Something very important that she’d never been able to learn and never wanted to try.
He couldn’t be conquered or owned, seduced or manipulated. Though she could try her damnest to take from him, she would never have what he refused to give her.
And when she hurt him, she felt it. She hated herself for it.
So she tried to assuage the pain she caused with a simple kiss. Which turned out not to be simple at all.
It was a kiss like no other she’d ever had before. He made her feel things she’d never felt before. She’d wanted it to go on forever, but her body was too impatient and greedy, and she mounted him to take her pleasure, forgetting their bargain, forgetting her own name in the throes of desperate passion.
Not surprisingly, he denied her.
Yet again.
She was so used to his rejection by now, it barely registered. She didn’t even take it personally any more.
Everything within her was focused on a new experience she’d never encountered before—more than the heady, sensorial pleasure, it was the closeness they shared during the kiss that held her enthralled.
Even as her body all but vibrated with sexual starvation, her mind and heart focused on a different kind of gratification.
Love.
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men had professed to love her over the course of her long existence.
They’d showered her with gifts, words, physical pleasures. But in the end, they’d betrayed her, one by one, until she cursed the very notion of love and treated all those who claimed to know it with cold contempt.
But Seth Tremaine was different.
He’d loved his human wife. He’d sacrificed his own life to protect those he loved. He resisted her considerable, unparalleled seductive powers because of that love.
Oh, she wanted desperately to know, just a smidgeon, just for a moment, what it was like to be on the receiving end of it.
The kiss had given her a ravenous taste for more.
“Very well.”
His answer in the affirmative was so surprising, she blinked rapidly and stared at him in confusion.
“What?” she blurted inelegantly.
He regarded her with his ever solemn expression.
He’d said before that he had a laughter-filled, easygoing marriage in his human life. He’d certainly never shown that side to her.
“I will treat you as if you were my wife for this one day,” he enunciated carefully, “if you treat me as if I were your husband.”
She pulled herself closer to him with her hands on his thighs and shifted so that she sat in his lap, winding her arms around his neck.
“What would that entail?” she asked, truly curious.
She’d never seen a happy marriage up close and personal in all the thousands of years she’d existed.
She’d been an orphan as a human. The earliest memories she had was taking care of the elaborate, expensive hats of high-ranking officials, as a handmaiden in a wealthy household, in the Eastern Han dynasty of China. Because the hats had sable tails and jade decorations in the shape of cicadas, she was given the name Diao Chan, or Jade Cicada.
She never knew her birth name. Most orphans left in baskets at monasteries and nunneries, and on the doorstep of upper-class households, never had names. She supposed she was fortunate to have received a rather unique moniker, for most of the maids were called Little One and Little Two, and so forth.
The household she grew up in was peaceful and polite, at least on the surface, to noble visitors who often came by, but no one would accuse the governing couple of being “loving.”
It had been a political marriage, like most marriages in those days for the high-born. Even farmers and peasants married with purpose—to extend the borders of their farms, or to acquire fertile wives who would produce sturdy laborers in their sons. Daughters of poor women were of little use. Just another hungry mouth to feed.
Jade supposed she was doubly fortunate not to have been drowned for being born a girl in such times. The woman who birthed her at least had the decency to see the pregnancy through and deliver her to a household who could afford, and was willing, to take her in.
Thus, she’d learned at a very early age that “love” was for fairytales. The exchange of goods and services was the only reality.
Lust and power and manipulation. They were real too.
He held her gently with his hands around her small waist, his long fingers spanning the circumference easily.
“Treat me with respect,” he said in answer to her question. “Treat me as an equal. Trust me to take
care of you. Trust me with yourself.”
“Is that all?” she murmured.
It didn’t sound like an insurmountable list. The trust part would be tricky, but she could try out the other things.
“Treat me the way you want me to treat you,” he rumbled low.
Hmm. She’d have to think on this one. How did she want him to treat her?
She decided to test him a little.
Leaning close, she kissed his mouth in a brief, warm press.
And sat back expectantly, wondering how he’d respond.
A silvery light entered his gray orbs, and she had the sense that he was smiling at her, though his expression stayed the same.
He squeezed her waist and brought her back to him, kissing her mouth the way she’d kissed his.
Lightly. Playfully.
And full of something like affection.
She couldn’t help the smile that curled her lips, delighted at their new game.
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled back at her, and mesmerizing grooves appeared in the lean cheeks beside his mouth.
Oh Dark Goddess! If this was how Seth looked at his wife, the woman must have been the happiest soul on earth.
Jade’s heart thundered in her chest at the sight of his smile, even as her breath shortened into giddy, light-headed gasps.
What a strange, thoroughly uncomfortable feeling, she thought with an inner grimace. Best get a hold of herself before she did something embarrassing.
Like beg him to actually love her the way he did his wife.
“What do you do with your wife when you have a whole day to spend together, just you and her?” she asked, focusing her attention on maximizing the time they had left.
His eyes turned dark and full of promise for a moment before clearing again just as quickly, like clouds moving to reveal the sun.
Even though Jade would have loved to delve deeper into those stormy gray clouds. Passion-drenched clouds that harkened torrential ecstasy.
But he had already moved on to safer territories.
“I’d take her out about the town if weather permitted. Stroll hand-in-hand with her as we wound through the bustling city streets. Buy her treats and trinkets that caught her fancy, and find a place high up on a hill to hold her in my arms as we watched the sunset together.”