When he tracked her to the Appalachians with Mason’s help and had Elijah drive him there, he began to read her thoughts again, once he was close enough. But she was elusive, so that he only heard snippets. Sharp, brittle pieces of thoughts, quick syllables cut off. Sometimes there was a stillness to her mind, so full of nothingness it was like she had found a way to compress it and make it tangible, keeping everything else crowded out of her brain.
During one part of the drive, he’d felt her fear. A blast of fury followed by physical exertion. As if she was running…being chased. Knowing he was too far away to do anything to help her, he’d only been able to sit there in the second seat, frozen with rage, wanting to rend, to tear…fighting for control as the sound of Elijah’s blood pumping through his heart nearly drove him to madness.
Now that he was in the forest, narrowing the distance between them, he still sometimes broke into a swift run on his treks at night, trying to get even closer. He felt her restlessness. Aching want. Sometimes tiredness. Once or twice even illness, when it seemed she tried a food that wasn’t the best source of prey.
He began to feel her physical reactions. The way water moved smoothly down her throat as she swallowed it from a flowing creek. Leaves fluttering against her skin as she curled up in the most dense part of a tree to sleep.
She was so close. She’d been watching him for several days now. He could have tried to see her, find her, but he had to be patient. The humanoid part of her kept her staying close. The instinctual part, the creature, was mistrustful, uncertain whether he was friend or foe. As he’d feared, she’d allowed that part of her to take over a significant part of her reasoning functions.
Because she was close, he could wait, be still and silent. The nature of a vampire was not to rush. He understood it now. He could be patient, not only because he had time, but because there was nothing beyond his reach to acquire. The gift he wanted was her trust.
Tonight would be the night. He was sure of it. There was a stillness in him that was far from empty. It was filled with everything.
“You seek the aberration among us.”
Jacob’s head snapped around. He came to his feet in a lithe, quick move as the man stepped out of the shadows of the forest on the other side of the creek.
Not a man. Not exactly. A Fey male.
Jacob had never seen a member of the Fey other than his lady and the depictions in the books given to her by her mother centuries before.
All of them were associated with an element. Like his lady, this one was a creature of the earth. His wings reminded Jacob of the brown leaves that drifted to the ground in fall, the edges curled. The delicate inner web of veins was like gold thread against the smooth silk of the brown. His long black hair did not completely cover the point of his right ear, which was curved back. He was tall and lean, his face elegant and chiseled, reminding Jacob somewhat of Mason. The aura of magical power told Jacob not only was he facing a man of some class distinction, but a Fey who had nothing to fear from Jacob’s speed, quickness and power.
“The Fey can completely kick our asses any day of the week,” Brian had told him. “They consider us beneath their notice most of the time. An irritant. However, what’s odd is your lady’s Fey form is unknown to us and possibly to the Fey themselves. Quite frankly the two species, vampire and Fey, have never been able to procreate, before or since Lady Lyssa’s parents.”
Irritant or not, Jacob wasn’t going to let the insult pass. “I seek my lady. The Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth, Queen of the Far East Clan. Daughter of a Fey lord and a vampire princess. I seek no aberration.”
The man cocked his head, his eyes gleaming like almond- shaped moonstones.
“She has wandered this area for a week or so now. I have chosen not to drive her out as my kind have in other territories she’s passed through.”
Jacob took a step forward, anger flashing through him. Feelings of fear, pursuit…“She should be welcome anywhere.”
The Fey ignored that. “She is liked by our little ones. Our pixie fairies are our more simple brethren, but their hearts are pure and playful. They will not tolerate proximity to anything that is not good. Well, except chocolate.” A faint smile touched his lips. “I do not suppose you brought any with you.”
Jacob shook his head, nonplussed. “Pity,” the Fey male said. “They will likely wreak mischief with your belongings as a result. If they had not championed her, I would have killed her.”
Then he was gone into the forest again, just like that. As if he’d never been, his words hanging in the air like a warning.
Jacob stood silently, watching the movement of the trees where he’d disappeared. He wondered how many Fey lands he’d passed over unmolested the past two weeks. Lands his lady had been driven out of as if she were unwelcome vermin. A queen.
Control, Jacob. He remembered Mason’s admonishment, though he didn’t think the vampire lord would argue with his desire to go back through those same areas and pluck wings off the Fey as if they were oversized flies.
Moments of great emotion will be the worst…
Then the anger was gone. Everything was gone except his awareness of what was in this clearing. She was behind him.
He knew it, because her proximity was like the brush of hands on his mind, moving outward onto his nape, his back. How he’d missed that touch. Even her touch as a Mistress. The mark of her nails, her hands restraining him. The vulnerable woman lying beneath him, her body open to him.
She would not vanish on him this time. She would be there.
Please, God.
As he completed the turn, he stopped and gazed upon the one thing he’d wanted and needed to see more than anything else over the past four months.
She sat in a tree, her wings at half-mast, gazing at him out of her luminescent dark eyes tinged with red, her fangs curving under her chin. She blinked at him. The tail curled once around the branch, the excess flicking slowly from side to side.
The desire to touch her was so strong he had to fight it down like the bloodlust. He stood there, his hands clenched, counting, waiting, regaining control. She watched him curiously. Wary.
“My lady? Are you there?”
Her brow winged up and she cocked her head. A questioning croon came to her mouth. Rasping. The noise seemed to puzzle her, as if she’d meant to form words.
“My lady.” Jacob controlled the compulsion to leap on her then and there and hold her fast. He wanted her to trust him. He didn’t want to have to overpower her, even though he knew he might be being a fool. He’d missed her so much. There was no way to describe how much in words. It was all about feeling, and he was nearly choked with it now.
Mason had been surprised the serpentine mark on his back had not disappeared, for in the past the third mark had disappeared on the small handful of servants who had been illegally turned. Jacob’s had simply turned more silver. It hadn’t surprised him in the least.
“Are you hungry?”
Squatting carefully, he removed three of the strips of meat from his pack and laid them on the ground. When he looked up at her, she was studying them. As she raised her gaze to him, he felt her reaction. Contempt.
Not a scavenger.
His lady was definitely in there. While he bit back a smile, it drew tears to his eyes.
“I’ve dreamed of you, my lady. Have you dreamed of me? Do you dream of your servant, or have you forgotten me? Tried to forget me?”
Her eyes shifted back and forth. She was blinking, shaking her head, and she put a talon to her forehead, scraped. “Buzzing,” she rasped. “Music. Sweet.”
Her voice was so rusty from disuse, it made his own throat close up in pain.
“My lady.” She stayed in her tree though she tensed as Jacob rose, came to the trunk and put his hand on the bark, splaying his fingers. Her eyes rested on his hand, moved up his arm to his face. Lingered on his lips.
Not…serve me. No longer. Not call…my lady.
“
I couldn’t imagine anyone who has seen you daring to call you anything else, my lady. And I am your servant.” His voice took on an edge of possessive command. “As you are my lady.”
His eyes marked the shudder that ran through her as she responded to it. Oh, she was definitely in there. It made him remember the night she’d allowed him to master her. Wanted him to master her.
Jacob had thought waiting for four months would drive him to insanity. Suddenly four more minutes seemed more than he could bear.
As if she sensed his mood, she shifted, got her haunches under her. Was he mistaken, or was that the light of challenge in her eyes?
“Come down here.” His eyes glinted. “Or I’ll show off and come up.”
She launched herself from the tree, taking flight, moving to the next clearing on the other side of the stream. And found him waiting for her there, crouched just below the branch she was on. He sprang and she took off again, but he anticipated her, caught her ankle.
She turned on him, hissing, and they spun through the air. While she was able to dislodge herself and soar free again, he managed to right himself and land on his feet half-crouched, as sinuous as a cat.
It was an impressive move, and Lyssa’s heart stuttered in her chest confusingly. She leaped away again.
But with each jump, things that had been nonspecific swirls of images were becoming clearer. Words and thoughts exploded in her mind, hurting her head because she’d denied herself thought. She hadn’t wanted to think anymore, didn’t want to be anything more than a creature of the forest, living by reaction and defense from day to day.
The first day she’d allowed herself to get close enough to see him, not just feel him, she’d sat in the trees and yearned.
A handsome man as a mortal, that handsomeness was now enhanced by his otherworldly quality, the comfortable power of a man who’d fully embraced all the things he was, all the energy that was his to command. When he spoke out loud as he often had these past few days, sensing her near, his voice had been smooth, melodious. Words caressed her body as if they were kisses from his mouth, intimate touches of his tongue.
It perhaps had been a sin beyond measure to turn him into a vampire. He’d already been devastating to female senses as a mortal.
In the end, she didn’t know if she was really trying to escape him, or make him prove himself to her. She led him on the chase for several miles, and he wasn’t even winded. From tree to tree, path to path. Over water, up steep grades.
As she evaded and he followed, the more he stayed with her, the more the wordless desire burning in her heart expanded through her body, kindling hot and steady in her loins until it almost became too difficult to maneuver, the rubbing of her thighs too much of a distraction because of the way they compressed swollen tissue.
When she came face-to-face with him on the next embankment, she perched precariously on the edge. He studied her from the other side of a dry gully.
He could close the distance at any time. He’d proven it. He was letting her run, letting her know he was chasing only as an indulgence, knowing he would have her in the end. He somehow knew letting that thought sink in slowly and sinuously, like a lover’s tongue teasing her folds, would affect her this way.
But he apparently realized she was ready for a change in the game. Or perhaps he was intending to change it regardless. Opening the shirt without care for the buttons, he yanked off the hiking shoes and stripped off his jeans to face her gloriously naked, one of the most potent weapons he could use against her. She couldn’t take her eyes from him. All the rippling muscle, the hard and long cock stretching up toward his belly, the firm sac of his testicles. While she missed the thatch of hair that had been on his chest, the ability to touch the hard, smooth curves of him was tempting her fingertips. As her thighs trembled, his eyes registered it. He knew everything that was going through her mind, every reaction of her body.
He sprang, making it across the wide gully without a running leap. Just as his foot landed on the opposite side, she took flight again.
When she landed in the crotch of a live oak, she shrieked to find he’d used the mind link to anticipate where she would land. He was right above her. He dropped and seized her from behind, pinioning her wings against her, holding his wrist with a closed fist across her breasts, an effective lock. She could struggle but not gain a purchase with her taloned elbows.
His vampire strength was fully developed, and she might as well have been a child struggling against a parent. Or a human against a vampire…The sly whisper inserted itself in her mind.
You must have hated me, the way I reminded you of this, all the time.
“No, my lady. Sssh…calm down. Hush.”
Her breath was sobbing in her throat, or perhaps she was just sobbing, weeping at the way it felt to have his arms around her. His warm bare body pressed behind her, his erection against her buttocks, fitting aggressively into the channel, making her want to rub herself up and down his length.
Brushing his knuckles along the firm gray skin of her cheek, he traced the outline of her prominent brow, the bone of the eye socket and curve of the pointed ear. She twisted her head. “I know how much you love my touch, my lady. Need it. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure I can give you.”
“You’re not my servant anymore.”
“I am always your servant. Your lover. Your mate. I want no other.”
Trust me, my lady. Please don’t run. I’ve wanted to touch you for so long as well. God, you don’t know how much…I hated you for leaving me, but I would forgive you anything. Don’t you know that?
She wanted to clutch at his wrists, but she would hurt him.
Do it. I’ve missed the way you like to draw my blood. The way you like to watch me react to the pain you inflict. Feel how hard I am, just from remembering it.
She gasped as he pressed against her back, lowering his hand to her abdomen, holding her there to feel his erection. She got wetter, her body slippery, begging for him. She couldn’t hide her thoughts, any more than he’d been able to do when she’d given him the second mark. Every desire was his to tease and pluck, like the petals of a flower. His fingers descended, finding her. She arched up against him, crying out, the soft birdsong she made when aroused or distressed in this form.
“How I’ve dreamed of your cunt. I’ve had dreams that are all about it. Me fucking it, tasting it, putting my fingers deep into it, watching you do this …”
His voice was rich music in her ears as her body bucked. He held her so easily. Almost violently, he yanked her around, easily balancing them both on the oak’s thick limb. Pulling her legs around him, latching his hands on her hips and staring into her eyes, he thrust into her, hard and deep, no foreplay, nothing but a rough, pleasurable claiming. A reconnection that had a cry wrenching from her throat. His eyes were priceless gems, mesmerizing, capturing her.
Her pussy spasmed on him as she wrapped her tail around one of his legs, the barbed tip digging into his thigh. She had her arms around him, spearing him with her hooked talons. She felt the raised abrasion of his third mark beneath her palms.
It didn’t go away.
“No, my lady,” he said hoarsely. “The powers that put it there know I am always yours, no matter what I am. I told you the only safe thing to tattoo on the outside of a body is what’s branded on the soul. This is branded on my soul and will never change. I am marked as yours forever. “Mark me some more.”
She hadn’t talked in over six months, and so thinking was easier than speaking, but she wanted something from his lips.
“Please…call me …”
“Lyssa. My lady. Mine.”
When he tightened his arms around her, held her close, she clung this time, just absorbing his scent, his strength. Her warrior, her knight. Her lover. Her servant. The man she loved.
In her Fey form, a climax could take minutes to be over, a pleasurable torment beyond description that took all control beyond the reach of the senses. As it swept over
her with just the first few strokes of his cock inside her, she arched back, screaming, her talons ripping upward, tearing his flesh, muscle. She’d feared taking him in this form for just that reason. But she wasn’t taking him. He was taking her.
He held on, his cock getting even harder inside her, thrusting, his arms pounding her down on him, over and over, making the climax even more intense. His head dipped, his mouth capturing her nipple. He bit, drawing her blood from that excruciatingly sensitive area as she’d once bitten him to give him the second mark. The thought as well as the sensation pushed her even higher. No matter how she fought him in the throes of ecstasy, he held her easily, his face fierce with his own desire, his cock spurting inside her, claiming her again.
I’m here, my lady. You’re mine, as I’m yours. I don’t want you ever to forget it. My Mistress. My slave. My lover. My mate. My lady. Mine.
With a sudden fierceness, he lifted her off him and turned her again, only this time he thrust his cock hard into her ass, collaring her, bringing her back against him and holding her still, making her suffer the ecstatic torment of shooting up the roller coaster again, taking as long as it needed, his hand coming forward to sink three fingers into her pussy as her heels hooked the outside of his knees, keeping herself open, wanting to take him deep.
And when we’re done with this, I will come in your mouth, my lady. You will take me in every orifice, so I feel I’ve come home to you…marked you in every possible way. And I will eat your cunt until you come, and fuck you all over again, until you know you can never leave me, not for any reason…
He was still her knight, her samurai warrior, her vagabond. But now he was also vampire. The natural dominance, combined with the alpha nature he’d always carried, had blended in a way that made her feel helpless to resist him…and she didn’t want to resist. She wanted to trust, to not worry, to believe she could love him and not have to give him up…that he could be hers, and she could be his…
Everything she’d wanted from Rex, but he’d been unable to give her. Jacob could now give her all of it.
VQ 02 - The Mark of the Vampire Queen Page 39