“I was hoping you’d forgotten that part,” Raven admitted, her voice low. “The part where I kinda attacked you with my mouth.”
A strange light penetrated her vampire’s eyes. “Forgotten?” he rasped. “No. Tried to. Tried to shove it out of my mind, far out. Figure that’s a part of why I’m here, to convince myself it meant nothing, that whatever it was meant nothing. But forget? No, I couldn’t forget. You changed me. Fuck, you changed everything. You…”
“I didn’t mean to.”
True, but even standing as she did, Raven knew she wouldn’t take it back. Not for anything.
“But you did. You called me…”
“I won’t call you Nicolai anymore,” she told him again. “I know it now. You’re not Nicolai.”
No, but Nicolai lived in Nicholas. Nicolai loved Raven. Nicolai wouldn’t have given a damn about this Octavia or getting kicked to the curb, as he put it. Nicolai would have taken her in his arms, laughing and peppering her face with kisses as he twirled her under the glow of moonlight. Nicolai lived within Nicholas, and if he ever broke free, he and Nicholas would be one and the same. But Nicholas, for all his looks, did not live inside Nicolai, at least not as Nicolai lived inside him.
The vampire who loved her was gone. The one before her might seem infatuated, even haunted, but he didn’t love her.
“I’m not Nicolai,” Nicholas repeated, and it sounded for all the world as though he were trying to convince himself. “I wasn’t around then. In the eighteenth century, or whatever it was you told your Guardian. I wasn’t alive. And sorry to break it to you, sweetheart, neither were you.”
“I made a deal—”
“—with a demon,” he supplied, nodding, taking a step closer. “That’s what I gathered.”
Raven swallowed hard. “And you don’t think it’s possible?”
“No,” he barked, ostensibly trying to convince himself. The tell lurked again in his eyes—a glimmer he didn’t want her to see.
“I know my life, Raven. I know it too well. There’s no way I went through all that for nothing. To what? Meet up with you so we could have our merry happily ever after?” He offered a derisive snort. “Where were you every night when I needed—”
Raven couldn’t help the sob she choked anymore than she could stop tears from gathering behind her eyes. “I can’t help when I was born.”
“No, you can’t, and that’s what I’m trying to get through that gorgeously thick skull of yours.” Another step. He stood so close now that if she reached out just a few precious inches her hand would be against his chest. “It didn’t happen. None of it. There was no you. There was no me. There was no brilliant fucking. There was nothing. It didn’t happen. And that, my love, is that.”
A frog the size of Texas leapt into her throat. “Brilliant?”
Unprecedented glimmer bled into his eyes. “Raven, with you, it’d have to be.” He paused and frowned, shaking himself to his senses. “Point being that whoever you think I am doesn’t exist.”
“Never say never.”
Something broke behind his eyes, the last snap of his restraint, and all seemed lost without warning. A snarl tore through his lips and his hands leapt upward, capturing her face between his cool, firm palms, his fingers making a prison of any escape. “I’m…not…Nicolai,” he snarled. “This is Nicholas. You hear? This is all Nicholas. Nod for me if you understand.”
Raven nodded. She could do nothing else.
Then everything vanished—the outrage, the anger, everything. Everything poured out of him in a blink, and suddenly his eyes swept over her, searching hers before landing on her lips. A ragged beat stilled between them, and for a long, wondrous second, she saw him fighting for memories he could not reach. She saw him denying his own convention and reaching for something beyond grasp.
In that instant, she saw Nicolai.
“My name,” he murmured hotly. “Say it.”
Raven steadied herself and gave him what he wanted. “Nicholas.”
“Good. Try to remember that.”
Then his lips came crashing upon hers, and reason melted away.
Chapter 14
While his experience with women seemed rather limited, Nicholas stood reasonably certain that tears weren’t the normal reaction to a man’s kiss. Octavia, granted, felt like no basis of comparison. If she cried when he kissed her, there was a reason. The days of her living as a mystery to his lovesick eyes had long faded into the pages of yesterday.
Raven, however, struck him as an enigma. The second her lips opened to him, the second her hot, silken tongue drifted over his and explored the cool cavern of his mouth, her body trembled and she began to cry.
There were no sobs, no hysterics, no beating against his chest in demand of justice. There were only tears. She rumbled small whimpers against his lips but didn’t allow them to seize her completely, and she wept. She wept so silently, so perfectly, as though she wanted to protect him from the thing that could inspire sorrow from something as simple as a kiss.
Then again, nothing simple existed about this kiss. Raven had every inch of him burning to a crisp. If fire had a taste, she certainly embodied it. There had been nothing like her before. He’d never touched anything like the life sparking through her skin, never experienced a kiss like hers, never felt a woman’s mouth whisper words against his without making a sound. She consumed him without trying, drawing him further into her mystery and the abyss surrounding the world she’d constructed around herself.
The place where they knew each other.
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, though he didn’t buy into her crackpot idea either. There seemed definitely something to her story, something beneath the surface of their complicated relationship something that designed her into his night angel and wheedled her into his every thought until nothing existed beyond the image of her when he awoke and her arms surrounding him as he fell asleep. He’d rolled over the words he’d overheard again and again, contemplating the chance of truth behind the girl’s outrageous claim and vetoing its possibility for the sake of logic alone. There was no explaining the way he felt now.
Octavia had kicked him out of her bed. For the first time in all their years, she’d kicked him out, allegedly because he no longer belonged to her. He’d come home smelling of a different woman, and because of the hint of infidelity, he was no longer welcome between her legs, no matter that half the world’s demon population had taken residence there during their years together.
“You’re not mine. You never were. I’ve but borrowed you.”
Not a lick of sense in her words.
The bitch of it was, he didn’t care. Sure, it smarted like hell but his mind was too preoccupied with the taste of the goddess whimpering into his mouth to give an honest damn. He felt sure that once the numbing melted into something tangible, his feigned outrage at what Raven had cost him would turn into something concrete.
For the moment, though, he let himself get lost in her heavenly taste, in the way her lips moved against his, the way her tongue stroked his and explored his mouth.
“Mmm,” he murmured, sucking hard on her bottom lip, walking her backward until he had her pressed against a tree. “Fuck, but you taste sweet.”
Raven gasped and trembled in his arms, her hips thrusting against his denim-clad cock with wanton abandon that he felt near certain she didn’t mean. This girl had not known a man’s touch, and the world could see it. He’d known it the instant he set his eyes on her gorgeous body. She personified every man’s temptation, but she’d never known a sexual touch.
Not before him, anyway. Not before her birthday.
“You’re playing with fire,” he warned.
Raven met his eyes without bothering to blink her tears away and kissed his lips before she could stop himself. “I’ve played before,” she replied, her voice low and certain. “Our first time together was against a tree.”
A rush of irritation seized his insides, but he honestly di
dn’t know if he was upset with her insistence on sticking to her delusion or the maddening knowledge that he couldn’t see whatever glorious memory played in her mind. And with as nutty as the claim seemed, Nicholas couldn’t shake the haunted notion that at least part of it rang true. There appeared too many things in the air, too much to own entirely up to coincidence. The way Raven had whispered his name. The way she fought him as though she knew him, blocking his every attack without so much as blinking. The decisive lack of fear in her eyes. He didn’t believe her story but he didn’t not believe it, either. He didn’t know what to believe anymore.
Of one thing he felt certain: Raven knew him. The knowledge terrified him, but it didn’t make it any less true.
“Yeah?” he heard himself murmuring.
Raven nodded through her tears, a small, indulgent smile crossing her lips. “You came to kill me.”
Nicholas snorted. Even in their warped fairytale, he remained a ruthless bastard. Perhaps there was more truth to her version than he wanted to allow. “Yeah,” he agreed, his left hand abandoning her cheek to trail down her front until he had her breast cradled against his palm. “That sounds like something I’d do.”
A gorgeous smile graced her perfect lips, and he felt something within him collapse with wondrous awe. No matter what the girl thought, the fact remained that she was with him.
“You were…oh…Nico…Nicholas…”
He heard the way her voice caught and decided to ignore it. The warmth of her breast in his hand felt too rich to forfeit for the sake of semantics. His thumb grazed over her nipple, his right hand sliding downward, fingers intent on undoing the clasp of her jeans before sensibility caught up with either of them. He’d felt her pulse around him not too long ago. Her sopping, blissful warmth humming richly around his fingers as liquid desire leaked from her body, as she gave him paradise no man before him had ever touched. He wanted to feel that again. He wanted her naked pussy against his hand, her wetness spilling onto his skin, her craving there for him and him alone to claim.
“Tell me about our first time,” he whispered, feeling cruel for pushing on a lie. He didn’t ask out of malice. He felt genuinely curious how, in this fantasy world of hers, two unlikely beings such as themselves had tumbled into each other’s arms. Perhaps he searched for some connection, for a trigger that would unleash a memory the world had kept him from touching. He didn’t know. Everything felt so confused. He wanted a reason to believe her, no matter how crazy it seemed. He wanted to prove himself wrong. He wanted her to show him reason.
He wanted to believe.
Raven blinked, her head flying back so hard she nearly knocked herself out on the tree behind her. “You want…”
His other hand abandoned her breast to drag her jeans down her legs completely, and he fell on his knees before he could keep up with himself, anxiously working the cuff of her pants over one of her shoes. It didn’t occur to him until her leg was free to just remove the damn thing, and by that time, he didn’t care. He just wanted her open to him. “I came to kill you,” he started for her. “Why’d I come to kill you?”
Nicholas glanced up to focus on the simple white cotton of her panties, and the damp line of her honey pooling in the crotch. She was wet for him. Christ, she was wet. He hadn’t known it was possible for girls to get this wet. His bed had been occupied by a woman who took her pleasures and enjoyed them, sure, but never responded to him as an object of desire beyond what he could do to her body.
Raven drenched him because of what he meant to her, not just because he touched her or because she knew what would happen between them. No, she desired him and him alone.
A thrill raced down his spine.
Nothing in the world felt like this.
“I’m One of the Few,” she responded, her voice trembling, her hips thrusting forward, waving her rich scent into the air and teasing his taste buds like the embodiment of forbidden fruit she symbolized. “You came to kill me.”
“Seems reasonable enough,” he agreed, raising his hand to the tantalizing fabric guarding her pussy. “You’re the enemy, after all.” He pressed his index finger against the wet center, trembling when she threw her head back and moaned. In all his years, he’d never seen anything so sexy. Octavia had dolled herself up in black lace and decorated her pale legs with fishnet stockings a time or two, but Raven, in her plain panties and her worn t-shirt defeated every conventional stereotype of desire. She was purity and radiance, wet and warm and wiggling beneath his gentle touch.
Mine…
She belonged to him.
The roar of the demon could not be denied.
“You were angry.”
“With you? Somehow I don’t figure that’s much of a stretch either.” Nicholas grinned and licked his lips, hooking his fingers around the crotch of her panties to brush the annoying fabric aside and baring her juicy flesh to his hungry eyes. Her mound looked and felt almost as he remembered from their magic-induced tryst on her birthday. She felt smooth, plump, slick and…shaven? This was new, something she’d changed since he’d last touched her. Had she done it for him?
Christ, he hoped she’d done it for him. Especially for the way he couldn’t hold back his whimper or the famished lick his tongue gave his lips.
“Did I do this to you?” he murmured, his thumb finding her clit and rubbing it softly. “Did I get on my knees and taste this juicy cunt of yours?”
Raven choked a sob and nodded. “Oh…”
Nicholas’s brows perked. He honestly hadn’t expected her to confirm anything. Virgins were never too imaginative, at least that seemed to be what the years had taught him to believe. Not that he’d spent too much time deflowering virgins. Octavia lived as the only woman he’d ever bedded, and she’d been far from chaste the first time she’d welcomed him inside her body.
“I did?” he repeated, not bothering to mask his surprise.
“Yes, you were…” Raven’s teeth scraped her lower lip with such reckless seduction he nearly gasped. “You were teaching me.”
“Teaching?”
“Y-you…I’d never…”
Nicholas’s eyes remained glued on her face before trailing downward, focusing with hungry intent on her soft forbidden flesh. “What did I teach you?” he whispered. The answer seemed already within his grasp. He just wanted to hear her give it voice. “Tell me what I taught you.”
Raven gasped and bucked against his hand. “You came to kill…’cause you hated me.”
“I taught you that?”
“Then you bit me.”
Just the idea of her blood had his cock at full attention. A low growl rumbled in the back of his throat, his thumb’s attention to her clit becoming more conscientious. He loved the way the slippery little pearl felt under his fingertips. “I bit you?” he repeated, his voice suddenly hoarse. “God…”
Raven nodded desperately and arched again into his touch. “Nicolai…”
“Nicholas,” he corrected. It seemed important for them both to make the distinction. Nicolai implied a history that didn’t exist. Or if it did exist—if he believed her insane story—a history he didn’t remember. In that instance, the whisper of his true name became something beyond a different name by which to call him.
Calling him Nicolai impressed upon him the burden of memories he didn’t possess. Calling him Nicolai made him undervalued as the man he was now. He wanted Raven to want him, not some aged memory of something which could very well be an elaborate hallucination, affecting her now like a well-detailed acid trip.
If he had Raven, he needed to know she knew his name. He needed her to know it was him—Nicholas. England’s native son, born as a vampire in the nineteenth century courtesy of Octavia, and slave to her every whim until this amazing woman, One of the Few, danced onto the scene before his very eager eyes.
It stood to reason why he’d stressed the name before, and why he stressed it now.
He wasn’t Raven’s precious Nicolai.
�
�Oh…”
“My name. Say it.”
Raven cooed, thrusting her pussy against him with reckless abandon of which he didn’t think her entirely aware. “Nicholas.”
“That’s right. Nicholas. Say it again.”
“Nicholas.”
“Mmm. That’s lovely, that is.” He rewarded her obedience by taking a quick lap up her drenched slit with his tongue, rolling her divine flavor in his mouth. She tasted so warm and sweet. If purity had a taste, it would be found in Raven Rayne. “So is that it, then?” he asked, smacking his lips.
A long mewl tore through her throat. “Nicolai…”
“Nicholas.”
“Nicholas,” she agreed, but her tone indicated a sort of absence from understanding. She seemed only half with him, only half listening. While he loved knowing he could drive her mad with a few simple touches, there were things too important to gloss over.
“Raven, my name.”
She blinked and glanced down, meeting his eyes. “Nicholas,” she said. “I’m sorry…I’ll—”
“I’m not him. I’m not your white knight.” His lips clamped hard around her clit and favored her with a good hard suck, two eager fingers slipping across her labia and massaging her juicy flesh with a mind solely aimed at driving her as crazy as she’d driven him. Fuck if he’d ever tasted anything like this. He’d never get enough of her, of this, of her rich honey. He wanted to drink this every day. He wanted to sample her and know her wetness was for him and him alone to taste.
He’d never known anyone who wanted him so. The knowledge intoxicated him.
“I’m not him,” he said again. His tongue flicked over her precious little button as his fingers slipped at last between her vaginal lips and teased the tightness of her opening. “I’m not.”
“I wished for you,” she insisted on a sob.
“You got something else. There’s no way I’d ever forget this.” He nipped at her, easing his fingers deeper within her pussy. She clamped down hard around him, sucking him in, dragging any chunk of him that she could into a place no man had ever before explored. It felt momentous, beyond anything he’d ever experienced. It belonged to him. No one could take this away.
Ripples Through Time Page 15