by Multiple
He became aware of the woman screaming as she thrashed on top of him. More powerful than her ineffectual attempts at breaking his hold, while she screamed shrilly into his ear, were the scents of her fresh blood, choking him. It was a quality of blood scent he’d never inhaled before.
His savage and barely-controlled inner hunter snarled to life. Fangs punched past his lips as twin weapons, gluttonous for the smell of pure virgin’s blood pumping from cuts on the woman’s struggling body. Ravenous hunger clogged his throat as he’d not felt since he was a young and uncontrolled vampire. Then, before he had any hope of exerting his willpower over the sudden monstrous cravings, his body turned, flipping the woman onto her back. He landed, pouncing over her. His fangs ready to strike, while the veins in his body throbbed for the blood he could smell.
Why was her blood so fucking potent?
The animalistic snarl that lunged from his throat clashed with the woman’s frightened sobs, and her wide eyes gazed up at him with horror polished in their depths. Her small hands pounded against his upper chest as her bare hips and legs thrashed, trying to push his body off. His hard erection beneath his britches pounded for her submission, ordering his hips forward to press the rigid length down into her soft center, crushing her lower body’s struggle to a halt.
The woman whimpered in fear. Then she cried, “Oh no! No!”
The strangled animalistic sound he made choked the woman’s cried words into panting silence, as if she believed halting any motion would make the vicious animal set to strike her miss.
Beth couldn’t stand the predator’s gaze of yellow eyes with red glints slashed in the centers. She whimpered with sheer terror, jerking her gaze to the side, clenching her eyelids. She’d seen the long white fangs and she’d heard the animalistic snarls that came from the beast surely set to kill her. First, a monster hunted her and now another apparition held her captive. Yet the powerful menace against her felt like a man with hands, arms, legs, and a heavy chest. She felt men’s trousers along her bare legs, and she felt a jacket fallen open over her breasts. Was it a man?
Why didn’t it strike? her mind wailed, as her breath heaved. Was this the beast that chased her? She thought not. But her questions and abject terror paled in comparison when she felt a hardened length pressing into her core … and what that foretold, nearly caused her to fall into hysteria.
“Don’t move!” The commanding voice was a tense baritone with the aftereffects of a growl.
The appearance of human words so surprised her panicked state, she jerked her gaze toward the sound as her body quaked in reaction. Had someone come to save her?
“Don’t,” the beast above her commanded, “Move.”
To hear the semblance of a human’s voice in the world gone so mad made her hopes flare unrealistically. Yet they did all the same. She wanted to live.
“Trinity!” a man’s voice shouted from the forest surrounding them.
The beast’s head jerked upward to look over her head and away from stalking her with its blazing and vulturous, yellow eyes.
“Stop, brother! Don’t bite her, Trinity!” the voice rang out from the distance.
Beth felt the air she held suspended leave her lungs as her hands flattened on the chest above her. Bite her? She cringed.
“Virgin’s blood,” the beast-man above her snarled viciously. “So potent you can smell it. Never felt this hunger before!” His voice growled, making her whimper and squirm against him with the intense need to run.
“Trinity! Brother!”
“I will fight it, Church,” her beast-man vowed, half snarled, half shouted as his chest heaved into her chest. “Move away!” he yelled.
“For our mother!” the voice, called Church, returned.
Beth didn’t understand anything that had happened that night. How could she end up nearly naked beneath a primal man-beast? So many things were beyond the comprehension of her innocent life. However, she did understand — or perhaps she wanted it so badly to be true — that the man called Trinity, imprisoning her, was trying to fight the urge to strike her. He couldn’t be the one that had chased her through the night forest because that presence held a livid and evil malevolence toward her.
“I will rise upward and give you my jacket,” the creature called Trinity said. His voice held strange inflections through the large fangs extending from his mouth. It also seemed he promised the action as though to convince himself.
Beth tensed more, trying to slow her panting breath, halfway certain he wouldn’t win the battle as he began to rise upward. Then, with his arms locked on either side of her, he stopped moving, but his other worldly eyes didn’t stop traveling. He looked over her face, and then he looked downward toward her bare chest. She gasped a squeal of embarrassment chasing her fear, as caution be damned, she jerked her arms between them to cover her breasts.
“You are very beautiful,” his tense voice emitted lowly. His hand rose and she would have flinched away, but his gaze held her immobile. His fingers touched her cheek and they felt cold as he curled them and he stroked over the curve of her cheek with the back of his knuckles.
“Please,” she begged for her life, and the red glints in his eyes seemed to dull within the yellow. His hand lifted to her temple and he did the most extraordinary thing. He wrote a cross upon her temple with his fingers.
“For my mother,” he growled lowly.
Beth could feel the incredible tautness in his body above her. He nearly quivered with tenseness, and then he continued to rise off her lower body, until the cold night air flashed across her nakedness.
It was the most unheard of position she’d ever been in. She’d never so much as shown her ankle to a gentleman. To be nude was horrifying as she laid there shaking with mortification. Then a warm jacket fell on top of her and she snatched it against her body … overwhelmed.
“Put it on,” the man’s hoarse voice ordered from the darkness above her.
“I-I,” she mewled, her body quaking.
“Don’t make me touch your skin again,” his voice demanded.
Then it seemed to Beth as if her body was held by strings he pulled. She sat upright even though she thought she couldn’t. Next, her arms jerkily lifted to turn the coat behind her and put her hands through the sleeves.
Her hair was a rampant mess around her and half was caught beneath the jacket, but she didn’t care. She hurriedly buttoned it, to cover herself, buttoning from the bottom to the top, but the last two buttons wouldn’t close over her bosom. It seemed extremely important to her that they should close and tears burned her eyes again that she couldn’t get them shut.
Trinity held himself rigid against striking and taking the virgin’s blood, even as it pounded in his veins with the demand to do so. Never had the demand for a human’s blood been so strong. He’d never experienced a test as severe and he knew it was about to get worse as he sensed the rapidly beating heart in the tender, nude virgin at his feet.
He wanted to howl as he lifted his face, flipping back heavy wedges of his long hair. He breathed in the cold night air as his mind went through a mantra he used when he trained his body to fight. A minute later, some of the tenseness left him as he silently intoned the mantra. He was stronger than his urges. He willed his fangs back and his fingernails to recede. He knew the yellow predator in his eyes cooled.
“I will not be a foul beast that hunts without morality,” he rumbled from deep inside.
He had to get the woman out of the woods to safety. There were many problems with all that had happened within the hollow hours of morning and the consequences of it all touched his thoughts. Nevertheless, he focused on the immediate need, and he wondered once he picked the woman up into his arms and he started to carry her from the woods, where the hell was he going to take her?
Something about it angered him and when he bent down there was fiercer growling in his voice than he intended. “Grasp my shoulders. I will take you out of these woods.”
The woma
n made a feminine yelp of fright and she scooted away from him with pale, shapely legs showing and his hunting jacket losing the battle to cover her large, plump breasts. At that moment, it seemed as though scattered moonlight through the lifting fog chose her naked breasts to gleam upon. He could feel the hot blood pumping through her veins, the virgin cove between her thighs, and his erection’s interested lust for her ripe, curving body. It posed a three-way attack against his willpower. Why this virgin? This had never happened before.
“I do not have the prudent time to hold out and calm your sensibilities, maiden,” Trinity snarled as he strode to the girl, and then he grasped her arms with his superior strength.
“Just let me go!” she cried, and then she squealed as he swung her upward and planted her struggling body over his shoulder.
“And just where would you go in these dark woods with that foul monster trying to kill you, maiden?” Trinity mocked her ridiculous pleas as his wide hand clamped over the creamy-textured flesh of her outer thigh.
His eyeteeth pricked as the cloud of her temptations worked to overpower his resolve again, and she responded with crying accusations. “You are the monster!”
Incensed with more than fury, he growled like the beast he could be as he started forward swiftly through the woods. “I’ve not hurt you, have I?”
The girl was frantically trying to hold down his jacket over her bare ass upended over his shoulder, while her other hand was clutched like a claw of nails through his shirt and into his back.
Pain was good, he thought. It could make the un-dead feel alive. But as he rushed through the forest carrying his bleeding, nubile virgin, a thought relentlessly scratched at him. Why was the woman not affected by his bloodlust and his carnally aroused allure? Normally, when a male vampire’s lust became fixated with a woman in close proximity, he exuded an appeal that enslaved and mesmerized the woman he lusted for. It couldn’t be stopped. If a vampire’s shaft was hard, the unwilling became willing.
He despised it.
Beth couldn’t believe the strength of the man that carried her. She wanted him to be a man. He spoke like a man, so she made him a man. Not a beast. It felt better when she decided he was a man named Trinity, and he was trying to help her. Not eat her.
Besides, all the blood in her body had pooled into her head from the position she was being carried in. It made her feel lightheaded as her long hair trailed down to the back of Trinity’s calves. His pants were lighter colored than her hair and on different bounces of her body, she could see the black ends whipping against the material as he strode forward.
It came to her in snatches that she’d read a romantic tale once about a great warrior saving a damsel and carrying her away over his shoulder. It had sounded so enthralling at the time. However, in reality it was horrid and jarring and completely breath-snatching as she moaned and felt a black curtain of unconsciousness fall over her.
Chapter Six
“Maiden?” Trinity questioned. He’d felt her body fall limp over his shoulder. Sweat strafed his temple with the effort he used to refrain from jerking to a standstill, to lick the blood he could smell like a lover’s scent, husky and cloying in a cloud around them. Yet he realized she was too delicate to carry as he was. He stopped his near-running pace and lifted his senses to the immediate surroundings and then the woods beyond.
The foul creature that hunted human women, and strangely not for their blood, he thought, was gone from the woods. The monster’s last bloody corpse was to the east of where he stood and his own horse was straight ahead. Trinity felt his younger brothers’ attentions were elsewhere and that was good, because this newest dilemma of one virgin’s blood scent might be hard for any of the Blacknall brothers to resist.
Resist they would … of course. Nevertheless, why put all of them through the agony that one of them could endure. And he was enduring. Church, he was certain, was not far away. Perhaps his brother had conjured an idea of what they were going to do with a young society miss. A very naked society miss, completely out of her gown.
He steeled himself. It was becoming easier, or perhaps he was becoming stronger. The tempest of desires that attacked him was not the violent cyclone it had been. He would choose, and he chose not to bite and feed upon the warm and delectable woman in his arms. It was as if maturing from puberty into manhood. Youngsters found it hard to control their lustful intentions; a man did not.
He’d lusted after and he’d bedded women in his long years. Always retaining a minute control to do nothing more than that. When he engaged, if he did at all, he picked older women. Widows whom he could ply with drink, so they might not really remember the rougher sides of their sexual encounters. If they happened to question a more animalistic tone, he simply wiped those thoughts away from them.
In essence it had become tedious to control and a bothersome event, to the point he’d not even tried to form a liaison in well over …
“A year,” he snapped, with dawning incredulousness. By god, it had been that long.
Trinity drew an irritated breath at himself as he lifted the lady off his shoulder. He bent one knee to kneel as he lowered the woman to the ground, but he supported her with his bent leg. Her head lulled forward, then to the side, and finally caught arched backward. Dark tendrils of her thick black hair fell away from her flushed face.
He saw several scratches on the cleavage of her lily-white breasts. The maiden was ethereal, her skin was so ivory, and he saw a cut on her pale slender neck. He forced himself to glance quickly over to another on her delicate cheek. All those abrasions had stopped oozing blood. However, the one that raised his hackles and made him suck in a controlled breath was seeping with sluggish determination over the hand and fingers he used to support her back.
It was where the monster had slashed her as she ran. He’d heard her pain at the moment of the attack. Somehow, as he’d lifted her off his shoulder, his hand had reached beneath his jacket against her bare skin. His hand settled just above the lace on some style of short-corset she still had on, and his hand was pressed against the gash, which was oozing blood.
He dared not move his hand, as desire like the molten center of a wildfire swept through his empty soul. It told him if he touched his unique saliva to the laceration on her human flesh the bloodletting of the wound could slow. It reasoned with him that if he bit her luscious neck, he could stop himself after only a few draws and she wouldn’t be harmed.
“Don’t kill me, I beg you, my lord.”
Trinity’s stalking gaze left the tender and dark cove between the virgin’s legs to lift to her pleading gaze. The retort of denial was upon his lips, but it stuttered to a halt when he saw his free hand, not supporting her back, was clasped over her delicate throat. He was shocked that he’d not realized he’d arched her throat and started to turn it to the side. He was riveted … realizing tragically she might be too much of a temptation for him.
“Please,” she pleaded with enlarged pupils of fear as her small hands touched his chest. They pushed ineffectually.
“Do not plead with those pretty lips,” he said in a low, almost tender tenor, as he looked deeply into her eyes and his breath blew across her face. Her body trembled, but her eyes remained sharp, and once again, confusion furrowed his brow.
“I cannot mesmerize this temptation,” he muttered, loosening his fingers over the warm and fragile column of her neck.
“You look like a man,” she whispered, and her small hands uncurled from their fists upon his chest. They flattened against his tensed muscles.
His own hand lifted from her throat and lowered downward to graze over the curve of her exposed breast with his curled fingers.
“Don’t, please!” she cried, clenching her eyes shut, while digging her nails into his chest.
It came to him that dressed, or rather undressed as she was, didn’t make her any less the innocent. He rarely moved in the circles with young society girls … and he reminded himself that they were the purest form
of untried.
Beth couldn’t believe the frothing of emotions claiming her. She had never once in her life thought about a man touching her … her bosom. She might die. She couldn’t believe it had actually happened. The resulting ache that shivered through her chest was agonizing in its pleasure, instantly wanting to make her feel its throe again. Then it suddenly sent pangs lower into her core, completely surprising her into a small moan. She desperately wanted to clasp her hands between her thighs as her eyelids lifted.
“Maiden,” the man who saved her, named Trinity, rumbled in a deep tenor voice.
He knew things about that moan she did not, and for the first time since she’d been attacked in the dark woods, she shivered with cold.
“Trinity!” a man’s voice shouted.
Beth gasped, clutching her hands over her breasts, while trying to scrunch her lower body beneath the bottom of the jacket, where it wouldn’t go.
“Church!” Trinity shouted above her, lifting his intense gaze above her head, even as he pulled her closer to his strong chest.
“Is she alive?” Church asked, and Beth could tell he wasn’t coming closer to them.
“You cannot sense her heartbeat?” Trinity asked, with his deep voice sounding amazed.
“Nay, just smell the bewitching blood,” Church called back. “But I’ve a cloak here I’m throwing to you, brother.”
Beth felt Trinity lower his gaze to her, but she pressed her face into his neck. For the first time she wondered who these men were.
“You are more and more a mystery, maiden,” Trinity said, and as he spoke, Beth could feel the rumble of his voice through her hands pressed to his chest.
The shiver she felt was beginning to turn into quaking of her limbs. After all the terror, her mind was returning to the horrible predicament she was left in — nearly naked, freezing, and with two men she didn’t know. However unreasonable it might be, this made her burrow even more into the embrace Trinity offered.