by BETH KERY
Aubrey was suddenly in front of her, blocking her path. She’d expected it, but a chill went through her, nonetheless. She’d never seen him move. It was as if he’d just coalesced in the air in front of her.
He took a step toward her and looked down at her with a heavy lidded stare. She swallowed with effort and forced herself to stand her ground.
He looked hungry.
“Do you plan on biting me?” she asked, her fear barely covered by her paper-thin act of bravado.
“I wish,” he replied quietly. His light eyes roved over her face. “Or perhaps you do.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
He laughed again, his amusement striking her as too rich to be feigned.
“Let me pass. I will speak to Lord Delraven.”
Aubrey’s smile faded as he studied her. “Unfortunately, Blaise has left specific instructions that you are the last person he wants to see.”
“And you follow his every command, is that it? Hail Lord Delraven, the King of the Vampires. I suppose when he orders you to clean his toilet, you ask him if he’d like it done with a sponge or your tongue,” she said irritably.
“I’m not his servant. I happen to be his closest friend.”
“Then he’ll understand when you tell him what happened.”
He smiled wolfishly and stepped even nearer to her.
“And what did happen, Isabel? Please tell me, because I’m spinning from your nearness and don’t know up from down at the moment.”
She rolled her eyes, even though she had to admit, he truly did look a little like he’d been hit over the head. She felt her power over him in that moment as clearly as she saw his face and the shadowed corridor.
“It was all a misunderstanding, a miscommunication between you and Jessie,” she said smoothly. “Both of you thought I was being escorted by the other, and I slipped away in order to escape.”
“Let me touch you, and I will let you pass,” he whispered.
She blinked, sure for a moment she’d misunderstood his request, he’d made it with such restrained intensity.
“Touch me?” she asked, bewildered. “Why? Where?”
He didn’t seem capable of speech. His nostrils flared as though he was breathing her…absorbing her, even though they weren’t touching anywhere. Yet. He lifted his hand and held it an inch over her shoulder.
“If you promise to let me go?” she clarified suspiciously. She could not shake the feeling she was dreaming—Alice dropped down the rabbit hole. These men were so strange, yet so compelling.
“I will let you pass, but you will never escape Sanctuary,” he said.
“Just let me go,” she said through clenched teeth.
He nodded, his gaze fixed on his hand above her shoulder.
“Give me permission,” he said roughly.
“Yes. All right.”
She felt the pressure of his hand. Suddenly he was hissing and stepping back, a snarl marring his handsome features.
“What the—?”
“I grant you your wish,” he grated out, his white teeth clenched. “Go.”
“But what happened to your hand?” she asked, bewildered.
He glanced down at his reddened palm. “It is nothing. It is pain. I will overcome it.”
Isabel glanced back warily over her shoulder as she passed him in the opposite direction of Delraven’s suite. A wild desire to escape had overcome her in those tense moments, a frantic need. She had no idea what had just happened, had no idea why touching her had made him recoil. Aubrey looked up from his palm. She felt his stare on her as she began to run. It frightened her to consider it too closely, but there was a certainty inside her that what he’d said was true.
She’d never just walk out of this fortress on her own.
She raced down gloomy hallways and up stairs, opening doors that led to luxurious salons and bedrooms, and once, a large laboratory, all of them empty. An hour and a half later, she’d still found no exit and encountered no one to either help or hinder her. It was almost as if the residents of Sanctuary followed her movements and took care not to be seen. She felt like a rat being observed in a maze. Fear and desperation built in her until it reached a crescendo.
She did her best to retrace her steps, feeling a grim sense of satisfaction course through her when she once again saw the corridor with the Delraven crest. Aubrey was long gone, probably paying that woman—Margarite—in equal parts money and pleasure.
She must be becoming as mad as this waking dream to be running toward an enigma like Blaise Sevliss, Lord Delraven. She reminded herself that like Aubrey, Titurino, Jessie and the group of men called the Literati, Delraven was a paranormal creature…something not human. But Delraven was different somehow, more than that…
He wasn’t just inhuman, he was beyond human.
She should be scared out of her mind to confront him and demand her freedom. Instead, it confused her to realize it was excitement unlike she’d ever before experienced that twined with fear in her veins. Why did she feel so drawn to him?
At the end of the hall she encountered a pair of closed mahogany doors. She opened them and cautiously entered a study featuring bookcase-lined walls and deep leather couches and chairs. Several maps lined the walls. Some appeared to be detailed maps of London, while others showed overlapping straight, thick lines intersecting squiggly, broken ones. The fire in the hearth had dwindled to glowing embers and was the only source of light besides a dim lamp on a desk. She moved into the room, her footsteps muted by a dense carpet, highly aware of her heartbeat throbbing in her ears contrasting with the thick silence.
“Lord Delraven?” she called in a threadbare whisper. Her attempt was half-hearted. She could perfectly sense he wasn’t in the room.
Just as she knew precisely where he was. From where had this unusual prescience in regard to Delraven come? Was this a new ability she’d acquired when she’d been rendered unconscious by her kidnapper? Margaret had mentioned Delraven touching her. She’d said Delraven had held her. Had his essence somehow transferred to her in some inexplicable fashion?
Her hand shook slightly when she extended it toward the handle on an adjoining door. The door swung open with a low-pitched whine.
He lay on the bed, naked save for a leather harness of sorts that looped around his hips and thighs. It left his genitals fully exposed.
For a full ten seconds, both of them remained unmoving.
He made a sound—a small noise like a choking, hoarse gasp. She glanced rapidly from his erect cock to his face. His unusual dark green eyes seemed to smolder more than the burning embers in the study fire. When she saw the sweat that glazed his long, muscled body and the strange, desperate expression on his bold features, she raced into the room. It suddenly struck her that every fiber of his flesh was straining to move, but couldn’t.
“You’re ill,” she said, her gaze flickering around the room. Do creatures such as he become ill? The question came automatically into her brain, but she quickly dismissed it in the face of the obvious. Blaise Sevliss was sick, in pain, or both.
“Tell me what to do,” she insisted.
Anxiety grew in her when she saw him strain to speak, but his lips didn’t even part. His eyes flickered over to a credenza next to the door where a pitcher and glasses rested. Isabel hurried over to the table where she poured a tall glass of cool water.
“Let me hold up your head,” she said quietly when she approached him again and saw that even more sweat had beaded on his brow. He obviously was trying to raise himself and was weakened even by that effort.
She sat on the corner of the bed, her knee bent close to his shoulder, and lifted his head. He drained the water more rapidly than she would have expected, given his nearly paralyzed state. When he was done, he looked up at her. The message in his eyes was like a complicated, coded language. It bewildered and scared her, but she didn’t move away from him. She glanced down at her gloved hand. His wavy, thick hair gleamed next to the black
velvet, more lustrous by far than the inexpensive fabric of the glove.
She wanted to feel it twining through her fingers. It shocked her, this sudden desire. She’d recoiled at the thought of touching another being for so long now.
She tried not to recall the vision of his beautifully shaped, erect phallus highlighted by snug straps of leather. How could he be so ill and debilitated when his cock was so hard?
For a stretched moment, they just stared at one another. She felt strange—torpid and warm, and yet energized and prickly as well, as though the nerves were singing out a plea to be touched. After a moment, she forced herself to inhale. The desperation she’d seen in his rigid face was fading, slowly being replaced by a stony, fierce expression.
“Are you better now?” she asked as she turned to set the glass on a bedside table. When he didn’t speak, she tried to gather herself. What was it that she was doing here? Why had she come? It was so difficult to think, when her vision was so full of him, when he crowded her senses and flooded her brain. It felt a like a sensual assault.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
“I-I had to. I needed to speak with you. You must let me go.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” he repeated. Her forehead crinkled in confusion when she heard the bleakness of his tone.
Suddenly, without her knowing how it had happened, she lay on the bed, her head on the pillow where his had just been. He leaned down over her, his large hands holding her shoulders. She saw that his incisors had lengthened. For some reason, she wanted to weep when she saw the wild desperation on his rigid features.
Such a living portrait of pain.
He leaned down and sank his teeth into her neck.
Chapter Five
She wanted to scream, whether in fear or shock or ecstasy, she didn’t know. There was pain, but a distilled, voluptuous bliss twined through it, leaving her immobilized. Her eyes opened wide, as though she were being shown the secrets of the universe and couldn’t quite comprehend the miracle of the vision.
A tension swelled in her sex. It hurt where his teeth pierced her neck, but his lips moved around the puncture wounds, the movement striking her as decadently erotic. She felt the heat of his mouth penetrate her. Somehow, the sharp pain he wrought mingled with nerve and flesh until it transformed into a potent, sharp need for release.
She struggled weakly against him, not because she wanted this bizarre, electrical experience to stop—no, she would have begged him to continue—but distantly, she was mortified that she was about to climax explosively beneath a stranger…
…her captor.
That the act shouldn’t feel like the height of intimacy, but did, confused and panicked her.
The movements he made while he fed—the subtle suckling actions of his jaw and the convulsions of his throat as he swallowed her blood—came to a halt when he felt her weak struggle. His hold on her shoulders became more firm.
She cried out shakily when he withdrew his teeth from her flesh.
“Shhhh,” he quieted. “Do not fight me.”
She came at the sensation of his teeth sliding back into her flesh. Orgasm ripped through her, pain edging vast waves of pleasure.
It was as if those crashing surges of sharp climax whisked away the familiar landmarks of her known world.
The next conscious thought she had was of movement and stability at once. She cracked open her eyes and saw she was in a torch-lit, domed corridor. Through a hazed consciousness, she saw angels and gods cavorting above her, some leered down at her mockingly, others reached to touch her, to comfort.
But they may retract their healing, beneficent fingertips. She required no comfort. She felt numb. No, that wasn’t right. She didn’t feel numb, but alive. She buzzed with life; she was drunk on it.
She rolled her head on a hard object and looked up. This angel was real—a dark, fierce one. The cavorting angels overhead were faded caricatures compared to him. His gaze remained fixed ahead, like a cold, straight blade lodged in stone. She realized the hardness behind her head was his biceps, and that he carried her down a long corridor.
“Hey,” she said.
Her lips felt heavy and odd, as if the already sensitive flesh had sprouted billions of new nerve-endings. Perhaps her voice resounded only in her mind, because his gaze didn’t waver.
“Hey.”
Still, he didn’t acknowledge her.
“I know you can hear me. I know you’re aware of me,” she finished softly.
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. She didn’t know what had made her say it, but it suddenly struck her that she’d spoken the truth. Despite his averted gaze, he might as well have been carrying a ticking bomb, he was so focused on her.
He carried her into a room. He kicked the heavy door shut and shifted his hand beneath her. The furtive snick of the lock sliding home made her shiver with excitement.
A sideways glance informed her they were in the bedroom where she’d breakfasted with Margaret Turrow—had that just been today? It felt as if it might have been weeks ago, months…
He laid her on the bed.
“What are you—”
She broke off when he began to unbutton her blouse. A bedside lamp was the only source of light in the room. It cast his face in shadow and gold. Her heart swelled in her breast. Her eyes dampened.
He removed the blouse and tossed it aside. He slid his open hands along her sides and she shivered in concentrated pleasure. Her skin seemed to take on a life of its own, thrilling at his touch.
The sadness she saw on his rigid features and gleaming eyes, the torment, the wild, desperate longing, confused her…angered her. He removed the lacey confection of a bra Margaret had brought her in the velvet reticule along with dozens of items of expensive lingerie. She trembled uncontrollably at the sensation of palms caressing the tender skin at the sides of her bare breasts.
“Don’t do me any favors,” she said with difficulty through a throat that had tightened with emotion.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his cold tone bizarrely at odds with the smoldering heat in his eyes when he plumped her small breasts in his hands. She cried out in sharp arousal when he casually pinched both nipples at once. Desire sluiced through her, making her struggle to recall what she had meant to say.
“You look like you don’t want to do this. Don’t, then. I’m not going to beg you.”
“Beg?” he glanced up from where he’d been watching himself finesse her breasts with adroit fingertips. He looked confused. “You’re saying you want me to stop?”
“Not exactly. No…I’m not staying that,” she whispered.
“Good. Because I’ve tasted you, there’s no going back. I will have you now.”
He stood abruptly and began to lift her skirt. Beneath it, she wore the ivory panties that matched the bra and a pair of thigh-high stockings. She didn’t typically dress in skirts and hose, but she had no choice but to wear the clothing Margaret had brought her, unless she wanted to walk around Sanctuary in her rumpled evening dress. It had disturbed her a little to admit it, considering she was being kept prisoner at Sanctuary, but donning the pretty, delicate lingerie had pleased her for some reason, stroked her feminine pride.
She whimpered in uncontrollable pleasure when he ran his hands along her hips and pulled down her panties. His touch electrified her. She lay there on the bed, a whirlwind of feeling, angry and bewildered by what was happening to her, but primarily drunk with desire.
He spread her legs and pinned her with his stare. His nostrils flared.
She craved his touch like an addict, and he gave her what she needed, stroking her naked thighs and ribs and breasts until she trembled uncontrollably. Her limbs felt heavy and useless. She was paralyzed by desire as she lay there, unable to pull her eyes off his transfixed expression as he learned her body with his hands.
In the end, she did beg. Again and again.
“Please,” she moaned, her head thrashing on the pill
ow, unable to take the torture a moment longer. He paused, her breasts in his hands. He’d been molding them to his palms and lifting up before releasing them abruptly, appearing fascinated by their tendency to pertly spring back into place. His wicked fingertips had turned the nipples into hard, pointed crests. She gritted her teeth when he touched them, they were so sensitive. She begged him to touch them again when he focused his attention elsewhere.
She sighed shakily when he released her, hating the absence of his touch. Her pussy was molten now, liquid and hot, a volatile explosion brewing in its depths. He stood. She watched, her breath caught in her lungs, as he rapidly undressed. The flex and ripple of muscle over bone held her spellbound when he removed his shirt. Every nerve, every cell in her body strained toward him when he liberated the long, thick pillar of his cock from his jeans. He still wore the strange leather harness instead of underwear. Her mouth opened in surprise when he turned as he kicked off his pants and she saw the sheath that rode down his right hip and upper thigh. A supple strap wrapped around his leg, holding it in place. She wanted to ask him about the weapon, but her tongue had grown as heavy as her limbs.
Her heart seemed to have swelled to two times its normal size. It throbbed against her sternum as if it were running out of room. His male beauty was breathtaking, but intimidating, as well. Lord Delraven’s body wasn’t one to be petted and coddled by a woman’s touch. It was the tool of a warrior, hard and grown accustomed to labor and pain.
He paused next to the bed. She ripped her eyes off the potently erotic vision of his cock and heavy balls surrounded by leather and met his gaze.
“Take off your gloves,” he said.
A sliver of panic pierced her. She shook her head on the pillow. He didn’t know the protection the gloves afforded her and her consciousness felt too thick with arousal and need to explain such a complicated thing.
His face hardened at her refusal. He knelt on the bed and peeled back the velvet from a forearm and hand. She grimaced when her hand fell to the bed, foreign images and sensations impinging upon her. She could only partially interpret them, they were so strange and alien—the sweetness of the mulberry leaf, the friction in the gland before it secreted the sticky residue, soft, quick hands touching and spinning and stretching—