by Joey W. Hill
“I wanted to have you the moment I looked up the hill and saw you cheering for me. Fuck, you’re like honey-flavored oil, all slick inside. Is that all for me?” As he made it to the root, he punctuated it with a hard push that had her groaning. “If you know what’s good for you, the answer, inside and out, will be yes.”
“Yes,” she said, and meant it truthfully. “Yes, sir.”
“And there’s the other side of it,” he said, in that near growl.
She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she couldn’t think anyway. Not when he did this to her. He held her as he thrust, retreated, thrust. Thrust harder, his grip near bruising. He was a passionate and considerate lover, always bringing her up with him, but he would take his time letting her release, always reminding her he was her Master.
He made her serve his pleasure, demanded from her, used her hard. She was panting, flushed, her sex swollen with need when he pulled from her. Her response made her thighs slippery. She almost whimpered when he pulled her skirt back down. He used the arm around her waist to take her off the ladder, bring her along with him on her unsteady legs. He hadn’t released either this time, but she was sure he’d been close. It made her feel somewhat better and not, at the same time. She wanted him to find release.
“I will, sweet nurse. That’s just a first sampling I couldn’t deny myself. Pay attention now. This leads to my bathroom, a door that opens into the plumbing access area. Like the trap door, it’s not obvious it’s there. I’ll show you how to get it open. If ever there’s a need to get out of the house quickly, that’s the way to do it.”
“Why would I need to…”
“It’s a precaution. If I tell you to go here, get away from the house, you’ll do it, you understand me? I’ll need to be sure you’re safe. Best way for both of us to stay alive.”
His voice had that tone that told her he wouldn’t be disobeyed in this. She wanted to ask a lot more questions, but he quelled her by stopping her in the darkened hallway, which had widened out enough for them to stand side by side. He turned her toward him, though, and framed her face with his hands. “Close your eyes.”
She obeyed, feeling a tremor at the sternness of his voice.
“Now, part your lips. Hold them that way.”
She did, and let out a tiny sound as his lips and tongue played over them, teasing. Her body swayed, and he made an admonishing noise that stilled her.
You obey my every command, Nina. If I want you to stand like a statue for an hour while I do this, you will. You would eventually release from just that, more of your honey running down your sweet thighs, tempting me to lick it all off, and start again, this time between those lips instead of these. Equally sweet. Tell me why you would release that way. First thing in your mind.
Her mind stumbled over it, at a fork where one way was right there in front of her; the other down the path of reason, logic. Self-protection.
Fuck reason. Answer me. “Now.”
He barked it, low and sharp, and she jerked, the words spilling out of her, against his mouth, since his lips were still on hers.
“Because I’m yours. Because I want…I want to do everything you tell me and I don’t know why. I want to please you and it tears me apart inside.”
“Not a tearing apart. Just an opening of a flower earlier than she expected,” he murmured. “When we get to my room, go to my bed. Lay yourself down. Put your arms over your head, spread your legs, close your eyes. And stay that way as long as I wish, while I do things that will make you scream and ache for more.”
“Do I get to do things that make you want…more?” she whispered to the darkness. To him.
“I never stop wanting more with you, Nina.”
More was the correct word. More and more and more. When she begged him for mercy, he gave her only spare draughts of it, before demanding surrender from her again. She thought The Mistress’s regimen had been brutal, the way it wrung every possible ounce of response from her body. Now she realized it was like basic training to a soldier, making sure she was prepared for actual battle.
If she was a flower, that flower was cut, limp and wilted on the bed. She was sprawled across his chest, her body damp and heated still. His fingertips trailed up and down her back while his heart thudded beneath her cheek. Her hand rested on his flat abdomen, her gaze able to wander over the intriguing terrain of his torso, his thighs, his cock, momentarily at rest in a curve against his pelvis.
“What did you mean?” she asked sleepily. “When you said, ‘there’s the other side of it?’”
His fingers paused, then resumed, more slowly. The tingling of her nerves was like a trail of starlight in her mind. His jaw shifted, and she thought he’d smiled.
“I like that. Starlight.” He tapped one of those fingers on her lower back. “All those times you thought of me, before we came back together. The bits you’ve reflected upon, since I gave you the second and third marks. If they'd been dreams of me as a husband who went to work at the office, coming home to dinner and you, to a normal human life, I would have known that what we had was simply a moment. You had merely plugged me into your true dreams of a husband, part of a human world. But it wasn't.”
She considered that, closing her eyes. “You could be both in my mind. They are my dreams. I don’t have to limit them to one path. They can be a maze.”
He chuckled, the rumble through his chest and deepness of his voice stirring her. She tilted her head up as he cupped the back of her skull, stroked her hair, wound his fingers in it and tightened the hold so she was held in that position. She curled her nails into his chest.
“I’ve enough of your nail marks on my back, sweet nurse,” he said mildly.
“But they disappear far too soon.”
Heat flared in his eyes, his mouth getting that taut, concentrated look she liked. The Mistress had taught her body to rouse to any sexual stimulation, as training. But it was Alistair himself, his proximity, coupled to her third mark, that made the wanting seem endless.
His gaze softened, and he eased his hold, letting her lay her cheek on his chest once more.
He ran his hand down her back again, to her arse, and laid a hand possessively over it, stroking. “You can say it started with the ideas Sher gave you when she described her service. And that those ideas progressed into detailed imaginings because you’re a young woman with a healthy interest in sex. Yet, though you had never been part of my world at that point, what I saw in your mind were things that fit more into a vampire’s life. You, content to sit at my feet while we shared a drink by a fire. You replayed in your mind, over and over, me taking your wrist, only you imagined what it would be like to feed me from your throat." His gaze slid down. "Or from your lovely thigh."
In a move like flowing water, he shifted her to her back, and he was between her legs, sliding down, his hands on her thighs, holding them open. His gaze moved between them, lingered on what he’d enjoyed so thoroughly these past couple hours, then shifted to her inner thigh. She could almost hear the pulse speeding up, beating harder. Drawing him.
"All sexual things,” she managed. “Fantasies. Lust."
"Not sitting by the fire. But yes, a lot of them." He nodded. "Except now I have access to all the layers. The fascination, the physical reaction, they're on the surface. Beneath is a deeper need. You want to give me all I need, be cherished for it, as a servant well should be, no matter what others of my kind may feel about being that straight forward about it.”
Now that thudding moved to her heart, and she swallowed as he pressed his lips to her inner thigh, keeping his eyes upon her face.
“When you came to retrieve my clothes before I even ordered it, I felt the wife in you, wanting to care for her husband by doing that, and packing away my meal for later. But I also saw the quick light in your eyes, because you knew I expected you to respond as my servant, and you were taking pleasure in serving your Master.”
His tone became more serious. “That’s closer to our reality,
so I was pleased to see it take the lead in your mind. For a variety of reasons, practical and…not.”
He knew how to draw them together, heart, mind, her soul. She could pretend it was only her body he claimed most thoroughly, but did he know how potent it was, when he touched upon this part of her?
“I do. And I do not do it to play with you, Nina. I hope you can trust me that much. I have always been honest with you, what I can and can’t be, what I do and don’t feel. Do you agree?”
She thought it through, nodded again. There were times he’d been cruel. When he could have been manipulative instead, he’d chosen honesty, no matter how it cut. It was why, she realized, she trusted him.
He brushed his lips over the femoral artery, then higher, all the way to her mons, teasing her clit with tongue and lips, holding her legs down with his body and arms as she shuddered. He shifted to the other leg, nuzzled her there, his hair brushing her sex, her thighs. She loved the feel of it, wanted to thread her fingers into the thickness of it, lift her body up and rub against it.
The light smile on his lips was eclipsed by the fierce heat in his eyes as he accommodated her briefly, turning his head to brush his hair against thighs and sex, several times, as she made a soft moan.
She reached down and stroked him, oddly touched when he laid his head down on her thigh, stayed that way. He curved his big hand around her other thigh, thumb rubbing in a back and forth motion over the tender skin.
“Your other servants,” she ventured shyly. “Was it…like this?”
“Yes and no. Nick and Hal were good men. Our relationships had moments of true intensity, and I loved them well. They were bedsport, my closest friends, my brothers. My servants. It's a hard concept to entirely frame in a human way. But you…”
He shook his head against her, nuzzled her flesh. “Sometimes I get lost there a bit, watching through your eyes and mind at the hospital, hearing your thoughts, seeing what you’re doing. You’re subconsciously aware of me, because at times you use my energy, my mind, to center and steady yourself."
He glanced up at her, a smile touching his face. "When I was still human, my parents had the occasional banquet for guests. In England, of course. I came here with some of the first colonizations, so I’ve always thought of myself as Australian.”
He sounded, looked and acted it, so she didn’t disagree.
“There’d be different conversations going on at the table,” he mused, “my mum chatting up the ladies while my dad did the same with the lords. Sometimes they’d have their faces turned away from one another, but I noticed my mother had her hand on my father's arm the whole time. Keeping that connection.”
He lifted a shoulder. “That's the way it feels when I'm in your mind. Even when you've been working at the hospital and there's been distance between us, throughout my day, there's this moment where I'll suddenly think, ‘She's there. We’re connected. I can reach out and touch her mind.’”
He'd just described the elemental thing she would have wished to have from the man she’d chosen to share a life with, raise a family. Her fingers constricted in his hair. “Alistair,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes. She couldn’t forget. Couldn’t ever forget.
But why not? Why couldn’t he be her vampire master and still be what her heart was seeking? It had taken a shape and form that she hadn’t expected, but did that mean it wasn’t what she wanted?
He pressed his lips to her thigh and said nothing. Not because he agreed or disagreed, she was sure. This was something she had to resolve in her own mind.
He cleared his throat, drawing her away from the problem for now. “Thank you for today. I’d forgotten…or made myself forget, about the footy.”
She opened her eyes, looked at him. Her hand was still on his head, her touch drifting along the side of his strong face. “Did it help?”
She didn’t have to clarify about what, and not just because he could be in her mind.
He didn’t say anything for a while. He settled his cheek back against her thigh, his gaze where she couldn’t see it, but she felt the tightening of his face, the set of his chin, when he finally spoke again. “They didn’t make it. None of them.”
Nero had said half. Had he not known? Had Alistair not even told him? She dropped her touch to his nape, massaged there. When he adjusted higher, to rest his head on her upper abdomen, his forehead brushing her breasts, she curved her arm around his shoulders, his broad back. Held him close. He was rigid, but he didn’t tell her not to do it.
“What happened to Rigby and Charlie?” she asked softly. Rubbing her palm against him, hoping to soothe what couldn’t be mended.
“Rigby should have given himself more time, but he went back to the front line,” Alistair said after another weighted pause. “Tried to hold it with the others as long as they could. He was part of the thousands surrendered to the Japs. Died en route to a POW camp, bayoneted when he got sick, probably the unhealed head wound making him more susceptible to the malaria. He couldn’t keep up. Charlie…well, it was what it was.”
He was thinking of how his words might impact her. She could tell, as if she had as much access to his mind as he had to hers. She wouldn’t let him shield her. Even though she dreaded the words, she’d suspected and feared the truth of it, ever since the day she’d had to leave the hospital and board the Vyner Brooke. So she said the words herself, rather than making him do it.
“He was in the hospital when it was overrun,” she guessed. “And even if they’d had any thought to spare them, he wouldn’t have been able to walk, keep up with the other prisoners.”
She put her hand over her eyes and face, rubbing them hard. “We just left them,” she said. “God damn it.”
“You were ordered to evacuate.”
“We shouldn’t have listened. If we’d stayed…”
He shifted them, so they were sitting up, her in his arms, and up close to his intent expression. His hand closed on one of her wrists, pulling her hand from her face and gripping it tight between them. “You would have been bayoneted with him,” he said roughly. “At best, you would have been separated from him, treated as an internee, not as an officer, and you would have died in the camps, from illness and starvation. Same as the nurses who survived the boat sinkings and had to surrender to the Japanese at Muntok.”
“Some of that hasn’t been made public yet. How did you know?”
“I have my sources, same as you.” A shadow crossed his face, and he eased her to a sitting position next to him. “But like you, I found out after it was all over. I could have saved some more of them, maybe, but instead I came back here when my mates died, checked out like a goddamned corpse myself.”
His voice went flat as he said it, but she detected the rage and helplessness behind it. They were feelings she knew so well that even someone as poker-faced as he was couldn’t mask them from her.
She wouldn’t let him get away with that, any more than he’d let her shoulder the guilt of leaving her patients. She lifted her hands to his face, held them there, stared hard into his eyes. “You saved me. I was nowhere near the best of them out there, and not a one of them deserved to die. But I am grateful for my life. To be here with you now. I promise.”
“I’m the bastard who insisted on making you be here with me.” His grip on her tightened, his voice roughening in a way that was both the command of a Master and something different, the need of the man who’d gazed with such loneliness at men playing a game on a field, as if he watched from behind a veil, like a ghost.
“I knew giving you up was likely the right choice, for so many reasons. My needs, your needs. But in the end, it wasn’t any of that. I wanted you. And I haven't regretted it,” he said, touching her face. “Not for a single second.”
She remembered what Nero had told her, Alistair’s sudden adamant behavior when it came to the decision of taking a new servant or having her. A completely untrained woman for a Region Master who sorely needed every advantage he could g
et.
“Why? Why me?” She wasn’t fishing for compliments. In such a painfully honest moment, she needed the answer to the question that had gnawed at her in so many ways. At first with pain, and now sometimes with a confusion laced with occasional wonder. What had she done, that could possibly have drawn his attention away from those so better suited, like beautiful Sher?
“The last thing a woman like you would ever do is fish for compliments.” He gave her a light shake, but it was gentle. He didn’t answer her right away, thinking it through. This time, she didn’t think he was choosing words to protect her as much as figuring it out for himself.
“I appreciate all Lyssa does for me,” he said at last, “but an InhServ isn’t something I ever asked for.”
He brought his attention fully back to her, and the look in his eyes, a Master’s look, sharpened her awareness of him, of what he might want next from her. His gaze flickered. Keeping his attention on her face, he trailed his fingers along her throat. They both registered the increase in pulse, the leap when he clasped that slim column, tipped up her chin.
But he didn’t stop there. He drew her away from the bed, drew her down to her knees, watching her every moment of the descent, until she was on her knees. Then she went lower, until she was curled around her feet and he was kneeling over her, holding her and sheltering her both. Without a word or command spoken, she’d known he’d wanted her in the position, the gift she could give him.
She closed her eyes, that calm stealing over her. He made a noise in his throat that was a combination of yearning and dangerous male possessiveness.
"This is what I want,” he said. “A submissive's desire to both serve and be sheltered by her Master's love. And such a gift deserves his regard in return.”
Another long silence, during which she opened her eyes. When she dared a look up at him, she saw a mix of emotions there. Shadows, but also something better.
“That night, when I drank from you for the first time,” he said, “I realized what you said was true. I needed the comfort you were offering far more than the vengeance of making the enemy suffer. You bring me comfort, Nina. A center. You have since the first time I met you. If I’d had to feed myself on the blood of the enemy that night…it might have been more than my soul could handle.”