by Joey W. Hill
“No…” It was a poignant plea, a cry from her heart, but one that her body heeded even less than he did.
Fear gave her the will to twist, to fight. He was far stronger, but instead of inhibiting her movements, he simply matched her contortions, a writhing dance. His tongue was too clever. The swirls and thrusts, the nips from his teeth, had her crying out for different reasons.
He was playing with her, even as he was ruthless, driving her up and up, but he held the peak out of reach, easing back, countering and angling as her body bucked. She cursed him, and he merely chuckled, a growling response. When her legs gave out, he lifted her, gripping her thighs and guiding them over his shoulders, so her back and hips were braced against the wall and her legs were curved over his broad back, heels digging into the valley above his tight arse. He widened her with the pressure of his hands, and she screamed as he worked his way deeper, then slid out and under her clit hood, teasing those hyper-sensitive nerve endings.
He only gave her relief from that when he turned his head to her inner thigh and bit. The pain shot through her, but it was so tangled with the pleasure, it perversely intensified it. Then she remembered how he’d used that sensual stimulant in his fangs, as he’d done for the first mark.
“No…” But it was too late. The erotic surge of response clamped down on every muscle, awoke every nerve she’d thought was already wide awake. She was distantly aware of a fiery burn through her leg that spread out through her lower belly, her chest. It ran through every limb and sent a direct charge to her brain, overwhelming it with colors and feelings, a twisted rainbow ribbon cut loose by a lashing storm.
Though she was already experiencing an intensity of feeling that surpassed that of the innumerable climaxes she’d had this month, remarkably he was still holding her back from release. She hovered on a knife’s edge, moaning, hips tattooing the wall, grinding her sex against him as he sealed his mouth over the bite, his fangs retracting.
When he put his fingers on her, stroked flesh on flesh, she came apart. In the violence of her reaction, she threw her head back without restraint. She should have seen stars from the impact against the wall.
Instead, with that vampire swiftness, he was standing, pressed against her, his palm cupping her skull before it came to harm. He pinned her to the wall with his body even as his other hand remained between them, stroking and squeezing her sex, her clitoris, in all the right ways, so that sensation kept battering her.
When her eyes fluttered open, she was staring into his. The intensity of the blue was indescribable. It was like no color she knew, infused with an otherworldly power no human could understand.
He was devouring her response, her hoarse screams. The steel heat of him pressed against her core, but he didn’t act upon that. Merely watched her go over and shudder through wave after wave of her climax, until she was limp in his arms, her head resting in his palm like an infant’s.
Can you deny me, Nina?
She wasn’t remembering the question. She was hearing it repeated in his voice, inside her head, as clear as if he’d spoken aloud.
The second mark was done. Her mind was no longer hers alone. Tears clogged her throat as she gave him the simple, heartbreaking truth.
No.
He saw her tears, but he didn’t say anything about them. Not with words. Instead, he lifted her. She slid her arms around his shoulders, her legs around his hips, her face buried in his neck. She could fight him, but she knew this battle of her war was lost. She’d take what comfort she could, even if technically she was in the arms of the enemy.
Enemy, hmm?
He paused halfway down the stairs to the lower level. After a weighted pause, he reversed course. He took her back up the stairs to the first floor. Then the second. And the third.
The only enemy you have here is Stanley. After hearing your lovely cries, he will be so envious he would cheerfully tear out your heart. If I’d allow it, which I never would. Your heart belongs to me, like the rest of you, sweet nurse.
She wished he wouldn’t say things that were supposed to mean something but didn’t. He’d been what she needed in Singapore and Bangka. He knew how to say the right things now, to her and to Stanley. But what did any of it really mean to him? She’d stared into his eyes and seen emptiness.
If he was listening to her thoughts, he had no response to that. When he stepped outside, she was curious enough to lift her head. Letting her feet slide down to the wooden platform of the widow’s walk, he directed her to turn toward the polished gold railing. During daylight, this elevated view provided a marvelous panorama of the ocean, miles along the horizon.
Fortunately, right now, the breathtaking view was a brilliant tapestry of stars in the sky, an occasional cloud scudding over them. The surf was a distant white milky line reflecting the moonlight. The noise of it mixed with and was muted by the breeze that lifted her hair and fluttered strands across her lips.
They stood in silence for a few moments. The wind fluttered up under her skirt, teasing her damp folds. She realized her awareness of the connection between their minds was like an open radio channel, only she assumed he was blocking on his end, since she didn’t hear any of his thoughts.
Her Master could listen to any of her thoughts at any time, whereas his mind would only open to her when he permitted it.
“It seems invasive at first, but after a while, not so much. Saves a lot of time. You don’t have to find a phone if you can’t remember what I wanted you to pick up at the market,” he pointed out. “You just ask. Also, no reason to pick or choose words, be diplomatic, when all the emotions are right there. That’s probably the hardest part for a made vampire to handle at first.”
She blinked. “Why would it be hard for the vampire?”
He glanced down at her. They were standing close, shoulder to shoulder, but not touching. “Kind of takes you by surprise, doesn’t it? That any of this servant thing could be problematic for the one with the upper hand?”
“I’ve not yet heard why you think it’s difficult,” she said dryly. “And you’ve never been on the other end of it.”
“Yes and no. Lady Lyssa is my sire, which means she has access to my thoughts however, whenever she wants. Sometimes a vampire can learn to block the sire a bit, control the flow, depending on how accomplished he gets. She’s a thousand years old. My chances of ever getting the upper hand with her are right there alongside the lamb with the lion.”
He grimaced wryly. “At first, the novelty of having a marked servant has you listening in all day long. Over time, it becomes more of a functional thing. Or something to intensify the sexual moments. I don’t tune in to every thought. But it depends on the vampire, really.”
“You’ve had a servant before,” she realized.
He nodded. “Twice.”
He’d said he was around three hundred. A vampire didn’t release a third mark from service, so if he had no third marked servant, it meant they were both dead. He’d lost both of them before their full life span.
Since he didn’t volunteer further information about the two servants, and she wasn’t sure if it would be an easy topic for either of them, she stuck with the point. “So why is it a problem, hearing the servant’s thoughts? Trouble blocking at first?”
He shook his head. “People alter their thoughts considerably when they turn them into words. So when you hear something straight from someone’s head, you have to learn not to react so much to the emotional component.”
At her curious look, he expanded, propping his elbows on the railing and tossing her a grimly amused expression. “How many times have you had a situation where one of your patients, one in pretty bad shape, needed you back to his bedside a dozen times? With a hundred other things needing your attention, there’s going to be at least once you think, ‘oh, bugger, there the whiny bastard goes again, needing something’ Even if he’s not whiny in the least.”
“But that’s not his fault.”
“Not at
all. You don’t mean it, and you don’t resent him for it, not really, but your emotions are your emotions. For that moment, you feel despair, resentment, a little annoyance because you’re frazzled, having to work him into twenty other things. A vampire hears all that. We learn to separate what’s the true, enduring emotion amid the noise, if that makes sense. And we do,” he added. “Which is why you don’t have to be self-conscious about any of it. We pick up what you really feel, really mean.”
She stiffened. “Or do you just hear what you want to hear, and interpret it according to your own needs?”
The surrounding night made his eyes dark, hard to read, despite his deceptively pleasant tone. “I expect you’ll determine the answer to that in time. You asked me, that day so long ago, had I ever had dreams of a family. A forever love. I expect you did. Right?”
The truth was there in her mind for him to see. When he gave her the third mark, he wouldn’t even need the cracks in her broken heart to see them. He would see them from the inside.
She turned away, stared out over the rail. It really was a marvelous view, a stunning home. But if she had been in a five-by-five cell with no windows and only a concrete floor upon which to sleep, she wouldn’t have felt any more trapped. Suffocated. Helpless.
She hadn’t really thought it through. All the explanations and logical arguments she’d imagined having with him about why he should help her get free of this? There was no need for those conversations. He could see it all, respond to it as he liked. Or ignore it entirely.
He was behind her, the heat of his body able to penetrate her clothes without even touching her. If she leaned back, she would be against him. Supported by him. Which would be a lie. She stayed standing straight and tall. Holding herself up, no matter that the weight of the world made her want to crumple to the floor, curl up in a ball and never rise again.
He touched her lower back, so that she looked up at him. When he’d carried Mort to the triage station, when he’d rescued her from the surf, his hair had been disheveled, a tangle over his brow. Now, though the wind was playing with a few strands, it was mostly smoothed back, a gentleman’s sharp style. It emphasized the razor cut of his cheekbones and brow. Perhaps it was that which gave his lips a crueler cast than she remembered, as well as that jaded look in his eyes.
When he spoke, she occasionally heard the same notes of kindness and patience she remembered from before. She also vividly recalled his male awareness of her, but now there was another note to it. A knowledge that he could have anything he wished from her, at any time.
The thought brought a shiver, and she turned from him. He shifted, rested his hands on her upper arms, let his palms glide up and down her biceps. She stepped forward, away, her back still to him.
He didn’t follow her, but his quiet words constricted the chains she felt weighing her down. “You’re here because you chose to honor your family’s commitment, Nina. Have you changed your mind about that?”
So it really didn’t matter to him. Or human free will was so outside the realm of a three-hundred-year-old vampire’s thinking, even one who’d once been human, that he didn’t feel it necessary to bring it up. She closed her eyes, tears stinging them. The lump in her throat was going to choke her.
She truly was alone in this.
She had stood hip deep in dying men, survived a massacre on a beach. Survived her twin’s death. Maybe. She wasn’t really sure she’d survived that one. Some days she felt numb as a corpse, an empty place inside her where Sher’s presence had been.
But though Sher’s loss couldn’t be altered, other variables could. Change was the inevitable result of moving forward. It was the only thought that could give her the courage she needed. She didn’t have enough to turn to face him, but she found enough to take one step back, within his reach. And waited, her head bowed. She felt the weight of his gaze on her nape, her shoulders. Though she wore clothes, it didn’t seem that way. She’d never felt so vulnerable.
After a long pause, his hands returned to her arms, but this time he closed the distance between them, his chest against her shoulder blades. Nudging her hair to the side, he put his lips on her throat.
Her head tipped and her pulse sped up. His grip tightened, slowly, and when he eased back, he drew her arms with him, keeping his hold on them, so her spine was arched, her breasts tilted up. Her head dropped back on his shoulder fully as he suckled her neck, grazed her with his fangs, used his tongue along her carotid.
He'd done things like this moments ago, and yet her body was already responding to his again. Like a drug. Her breath escaped in a harsh sob, making his hold on her tighten.
“I remember how to touch you, Nina. You know I know how to do it. To give you the pleasure you seek from a Master. Have you found that from a man’s touch yet?”
At the InhServ training facility, men had handled her, taught her, but only women had been in charge of her release, her orgasms. “No.”
“You’re still a virgin.”
“Not sure if you can call it that, except for the technical definition.”
He moved his grip to her jaw, and she was pierced by his gaze, her pulse thudding against his hold. “Are you a virgin?” he repeated, with more emphasis.
He could read it from her mind, but he wanted it from her mouth. That felt significant to her, though she wasn’t sure why. “Yes.”
“All of it?” His thumb swept her lips. “Your mouth, your cunt, your arse. None of it has been stretched by a man’s cock?”
It would have sounded crude, like Stanley, but for the way he said it, low and husky. She shook her head, though she was aware her cheeks were flaming. “No. None of it.”
She remembered asking her roommates about it, because clearly the other InhServs were being sexually initiated before leaving the school.
“We were told your Master-to-be ordered you to be delivered to him intact,” Edith had told her. “A virgin in all ways. You’ll get your first full sexual experience at his hands.”
At the time, Nina had bit back a harsh laugh. Edith had a different definition of full sexual experience, because a month at the school had been a thorough initiation into all sorts of debauchery she’d never even imagined.
But now, she realized the significance of it. Alistair would be her first. She might not have a choice, but he’d ensured that it would at least be with him. Had he done that out of kindness? Or as a gift he was bestowing on himself? She wasn’t sure how she felt about either explanation.
“Good.” He’d straightened, his demeanor casual again now that she’d given him the honest answer. “You have a pretty blush. So they jammed the rest into a month of training?”
“All twenty years of it.” When he turned her to face him, she pressed her lips together, stared at his chest. “They should really consider having a policy manual. Something they can send off with the new InhServ for quick reference. Particularly those of us who get the crash course.”
When she found enough strength to look up into his face, she saw some humor there. It might not count for anything of substance, but she found the reserves in herself to pick up their conversation where it had left off.
“You know my thoughts on it. I don’t know yours. About whether you wanted a family or not. Before you were turned.”
He drew her by the hand to a wooden chair with sturdy broad arms that likely served as a place to put a drink or snack plate. As he sat down, he settled her arse on one of them, her feet on the chair seat between his knees, his hand resting with intimate familiarity on her hip.
He didn’t respond right away. Instead, he propped his head on the chair, closed his eyes. They sat that way for a while. Her hand’s natural resting place was his shoulder, and her fingers wanted to make small patterns on his neck, slide through the strands of hair brushing her knuckles. She made herself stay still, though.
“I did think about it,” he said at last, surprising her. “Home and family. But then… Do you remember how you were before the
war? Even before becoming a nurse?”
A younger version of herself flashed through her mind. Laughing, biking with friends, dreaming of handsome men and wedding dresses. Writing in a diary that had flowers drawn on the front.
A poignant smile touched his lips. “It’s like a dream, isn’t it? Another person entirely. You had long legs. Knobby knees.”
“My brothers nicknamed me Colt. For a while, I could outrun all of them. Then they caught up, became taller than me.”
She turned her gaze to him, and emotion surged hard into her chest. “Alistair, can’t we talk—”
“I thought becoming a vampire wouldn’t change my humanity,” he said, cutting across her. “I ignored the inescapable fact that I was being changed into another humanoid species entirely. With far different moral imperatives and motivations. What I want as a vampire isn’t the same as what I wanted as a human. I possess you because I want you, Nina. Because you are mine.”
His look told her he knew what she wanted to say. He stood inside her mind like a circus ringmaster, driving back the unspoken pleas with words disturbing as the snap of a whip. All the more so because he spoke them in an even, quiet tone.
When she would have averted her face, he cupped it, brought it back to him with a firm hold. “When I mark you three times, you’ll change, too. And understand better. I also don’t think it will be as alien to you as you fear.”
“You would take that which is not given to you willingly?” she said, trying to hold back the anger, but it wasn’t like she could hide it from him. Her spine had become ramrod stiff, even as his hand glided up the rigid track and down again.
“You made a choice to be here,” he pointed out.
“Because the choice is be here, or my family suffers. To a person of conscience, that is not a choice.”
“To a person of courage,” he corrected. “But your family isn’t unwillingly bound to our world. They have a long and distinguished history of devotion and service to it.”