He said, “A little, I suppose. But she was no great love for me any more than I was for her. Looking back, it was more about the fight than the woman, which makes the whole thing even more stupid.” A flash of humor glinted in his eyes. “I thought I was immortal. And now I am.”
He laid down the glass. “He brought friends, my treacherous rival, and I was soundly beaten and left to die in the gutter. Saloman found me and took me home. I remember a physician and a woman who dressed my wounds. But I was dying and we all knew it. Saloman came often and sat by my bed. We talked a lot, or at least he did; and then he began to tell me who he really was. I didn’t believe him. Even when he showed me things. He jumped from my window to the roof across the street and back. He bit the maid who dressed my wounds and drank from her. And I thought it was all part of my fevered dreams. Until he offered to change me, to make me like him.”
Mihaela had never heard him talk so much. She thought she could listen to his voice forever, despite the thread of inevitable tragedy running through his half-comic, self-deprecating tale.
“You said yes.”
His smile was twisted. “I was young. I didn’t want to die. Of course I said yes. He told me the downsides too, about the constant hunger and reliance on human blood, about the aggressions and temptations that come with the undead state. I listened and I looked at him, the most fascinating and the most dazzling being I’d ever known, and to me there was no choice. He turned me.”
One day, she would ask him what that was like. But not now. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell her.
“And then?” she prompted. “Did you just go back to your old life?”
“For a time. I did my best sculptures in the next few years, after nightfall and before feeding, when I was hungry. Even Saloman found that weird: I loved the hunger. Until it overwhelmed me.”
“Is that how you survived on the island?”
The strange, exciting glitter in his eyes died, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing. “I didn’t enjoy the hunger on the island. I didn’t enjoy anything.”
If he’d been human, she’d have diagnosed severe depression. Then his eyes lit again with a different glow. “Until you came,” he said softly, and the blood surged into her face, spread heat throughout her body.
Until I came and came and came…
She had to drag her gaze free of his or melt. Or jump him. Oh no, not again.
And yet this was all leading somewhere, this closeness, this fascination. She couldn’t wait to discover where.
****
It must have been midnight or later by the time they returned to the room. He didn’t touch her as they walked upstairs or when she passed him into the room. Her heart thundered, making her tremble because she didn’t know what to do. Did she just walk straight into her own room, to her own chaste, single bed, and do this all again tomorrow?
There were worse ways to spend tomorrow. And yet there was more to this. There was honesty. And more than anything, there was feeling, although she couldn’t name it or even understand it.
The door clicked shut behind her. She hesitated, glanced back over her shoulder to where he stood leaning his back against the door, watching her. Sexy, beautiful, predatory. And lethal.
Oh yes, she was afraid. She’d always been afraid of him and rightly so.
“Good night,” she said, more huskily than she’d intended. But she couldn’t help that either. She hurried toward the inner door.
“Mihaela.” His voice stayed her, and she froze, her hand on the door, her eyes closing as she prayed for whatever strength she needed here.
“Yes?”
She hadn’t heard him move, but suddenly his voice was in her ear, his lips so close she could feel them stirring the tiny hairs on her lobe. “Don’t sleep in there. Stay here with me.”
She half turned, to demand explanation, clarity, anything to help her, but it was too late. She ran into his mouth and was devoured. And God help her, it was the best kiss of all, combining the urgency of the island with the slow, deep tenderness of earlier this evening.
As if stricken, she opened her palms wide and then, slowly, reached up and closed them around his neck. She stepped closer and fitted against his body, her breasts pressing into his chest. It went on a long time, until she was panting and eager and very clearly won. Only then did he raise his head and say, “You know how much I want you. What is it you want from me?”
Uncomprehending of anything except sheer lust, she stared into his glinting, silver eyes. “What have you got?” She wanted to laugh because it was a line from a movie she couldn’t even remember watching. She wanted to cry because the truth was he had everything. He was everything.
“Is that permission?” he asked.
“I think it’s more of a command,” she said honestly. And his lips smiled as they returned to hers. If it hadn’t been for those strange, silver-glinting eyes, he would have looked human then. But Mihaela didn’t care about that. It was his “differentness” she’d first wanted of him, and now she yearned for the whole being.
He undressed her slowly, with care and tenderness. His own garments seemed so much less than hers. Jeans, T-shirt, shoes. He didn’t seem to bother with trivia like underwear or socks. Which did make it easier to get to his smooth, velvet skin. Only when they were both naked did he lift her in his arms and lay her on the bed with exquisite care.
Tension pounded between her legs. Joy filled her because relief was so close, because she’d know again the mind-blowing ecstasy of sex with Maximilian. And yet it couldn’t have been more different from last time. Instead of the fierce, almost savage urgency of their coupling on the island, he kept it slow, even when she couldn’t stand it anymore and fought him for release.
“Where’s the hurry?” he whispered, sliding his hand between her thighs to feel the hot wetness gathered there for him.
“I’m only human,” she gasped out. “I don’t have forever.”
“Winter nights are long. Even here.” He arched his back, dipping his head to her breast, and she held him to her in ecstasy. The pull of his kiss was strong and unbearably sensual, and she pushed up into him, gripping his hips and buttocks in unmistakable invitation. He lifted his head and, staring into her eyes, entered her slowly. “In my day, we called it possession.”
The idea both frightened and aroused her. “You don’t possess me,” she panted. He felt weirdly cool inside her, like a shaft of ice in her own fire, and she’d no idea why it should feel so good, so agonizingly sexy.
He smiled and began to move inside her, long, sensual strokes that touched all her most sensitive parts. “Yes, I do,” he whispered. “For tonight I do. And it’s sweet, so very, very sweet.”
“Then I possess you too,” she managed, like a defiant child.
“Yes, you do,” he agreed, rather to her surprise. He drew her leg up, bending it at the knee, before he twisted his body and thrust. “So take this. And this. And a little of this…”
“Oh God, yes, more of that,” she pleaded.
He obliged, driving her so wild that she bit his shoulder and pushed until he rolled onto his back and she could sit astride him, rocking him, squeezing him. Excitement soared because, even if just for this moment, it really did feel that she possessed and controlled this powerful creature. And she loved it. She loved the darkened, clouded look in his eyes as the storm of his passion rose. The small, growling sounds that came from his throat vibrated through her, arousing her to fever pitch as she rode him. His hands covered her breasts, and she held them to her, pressing her nipples convulsively into his palms as he stroked and gently pulled.
Then, he drew his hands downward and grasped her hips, holding her steady while he slowed the pace once more, and when she complained, he flipped her on her back, holding both hands in one of his above her head while he lay between her legs and kissed her mouth and breasts, making slow, gentle thrusts inside her.
“You’re k
illing me,” she whispered, half laughing because it felt so wonderful and yet, if she didn’t come now, she thought she’d die.
“I’m making you live.” His voice sounded strange, almost strangled, and it came to her at last, with awe, that this was costing him a lot of self-control. More than she’d ever imagined vampires possessed. More than she’d ever seen in her limited experience of human males.
And so it built again, with slow, deep intensity, to fever pitch, before he brought it back down a notch, enough to leave her hovering on the verge of orgasm while he exacted other pleasures from her body with his hands and mouth, caresses that thrilled her and encouraged her to explore.
She discovered the sensitivity of his nape, and his sharp canine teeth. She rejoiced in the pleasure she could induce in him by licking his teeth, by rubbing and nibbling at his neck. And with triumph, she rediscovered the sensuality of his wonderfully long, muscled back as it moved and rippled to every caress of her hands.
Slowly, things began to change again. His undulations grew wilder and faster, drawing her with him. The fire in her belly, in her womb galloped out of control, and she cried out as the climax crashed around her. She writhed under him in helpless bliss, and at last felt him fall with her.
She wanted to shout for joy; and yet tears caught in her throat and in her eyes and she could do nothing about it. The pleasure was too much. Everything was too much. And she never wanted to let him go.
She seized his face between her hands, kissing his mouth with trembling lips. He kissed back fiercely, and she tasted blood, hers or his, she didn’t know. But it pushed her over another precipice. Dragging her mouth free, she twisted her head to one side and pulled his mouth to her throat.
“I don’t need to,” he ground out, and that seemed more beautiful than anything.
“I do,” she whispered. A groan escaped him, of ecstasy and hunger. His lips closed on her neck, and he sucked the skin into his mouth until he found the vein, and then he bit, and she moaned out her unbearable pleasure. He began to thrust inside her once more, and as her blood flowed into his mouth, she came yet again.
****
Her blood streaming into his mouth and body was a mind-blowing bonus for Maximilian. He’d set out to take her without the blood, because he believed it was the only way she’d let him back in her bed after this night was done. If he was to win more than her guilty lust, then he had to control his natural hunger at least for this night.
And it had come back to him, that strange pleasure in postponing the slaking of his thirst which other vampires found so perverse. For Mihaela’s sweet, passionate body was more than enough; her scent, her smooth, soft skin and her wild, hunter strength all added to the joy of making love to her.
He’d watched it happen with interest as the last couple of days unfolded. Not just to her but to him. Something was changing their vital, instinctive attraction into something much more, already turning their next inevitable fuck into a loving. It had been a long time for Maximilian, and yet since he was embracing existence once more, it seemed curiously right to embrace this new feeling too, for the fascinating hunter who’d wriggled under his skin.
And so, when she offered her throat, he’d taken after all, and that was so much better too because of his abstinence. He became so lost in the joys of his long, long orgasm of sex and blood that he was afraid he would kill her.
It was an option that tempted him. He was no fledgling. He could stop. But the intensity of his pleasure urged him to go on and on and finish it. It was the instinct of his kind, and the little mewls of helpless ecstasy that spilled from her drove him on. There was no pleasure quite like absorbing life force…
With one last mighty, aching thrust and suck, he drew his teeth free and kissed her wound, licking it and licking it until it closed before his eyes. It came to him in a curiously human thought that he never wanted her to be hurt or to suffer in the slightest, least of all by him.
Not that she appeared to be suffering now. The expression of utter, blind rapture on her face, in the trembling of her lips and eyelashes, was enough to stoke the sexual pride of any creature. But there were stains on her skin that he recognized, and when he caressed the soft, raven hair framing her face, it was damp.
The bright new world opening around him froze and crumbled into darkness.
“I made you weep,” he whispered as pain and shame seeped through his entire body. “I wanted to make you smile, and you wept.”
Her eyes fluttered open, clouded still with sated passion. Perhaps there was hope for him…?
Her lips formed into a shaky smile that broke his cold heart. Incredibly, her arms slid up his body and wound around his neck. “You can make me weep—like that—any time you like,” she said huskily. “You make me—feel so much that I can’t bear it, and yet I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop.”
Her words sank in, deep and soothing, and gladness burned through him, reviving. “Then I can stay here while you sleep?”
“It’s your bed,” she observed with a sleepy smile.
“I meant here,” he said, twitching inside her. “Right here.”
Her laugh was throaty, excited in a way that made him want to take her again immediately. “I couldn’t sleep with you inside me.”
He eased his weight off her on to his side, turning her with him so that they didn’t separate. “Yes, you can,” he said and kissed her mouth. It smiled under his. Her eyelids fluttered closed, and he watched her drift into sleep.
Maximilian lay beside her, her silky cheek against his chest, and listened to her heart and her blood. He held her and watched her sleep, and with slow, aching wonder, pondered how in the world he had let this happen.
His existence was complicated enough.
Chapter Sixteen
It seemed both disrespectful and wasteful to be sheltering inside this delectable woman’s sleeping body and yet be thinking of another lover who’d been dead for six centuries.
And yet, however indirectly, Caterina had made him what he was, and talking about her to Mihaela this evening had brought back surprisingly fresh memories. A vital, sensual girl, married to an old man for the sake of her family’s wealth and position. Of course, that was how marriages were done in those days, and Caterina had never complained. She’d just taken lovers.
Young as he was and intoxicated by several nights—and one particularly naughty afternoon—in her arms, Maximilian had never made the mistake of imagining he was the only one. He was grateful for her favors and eager for them to continue, but she was a married countess and he a penniless sculptor. She made use of that, commissioning a bust of herself as a gift for her husband, and so commanding Maximilian’s frequent presence in her palace. It didn’t go unnoticed, and when, that particular afternoon, the doors burst open upon Caterina and Maximilian rolling naked in a tangle of dustsheets on the elegantly tiled floor, Maximilian had just been grateful the other man was not her husband.
“So, Madonna, this is how you betray me!” the young nobleman had exclaimed. Caterina had giggled in a nervous sort of way. Maximilian merely rose, allowing Caterina to cover herself with the sheets, and reached for his clothes.
“So you are the sculptor,” the nobleman sneered. “Unworthy to kiss her feet!”
Maximilian laughed. “What I kiss is none of your business, sir. I think the lady wishes us both to go.”
He’d felt no pity, only triumph at the fury in the young nobleman’s eyes. To Maximilian, neither of them had any rights over Caterina. But the other man, not even her husband, didn’t see it that way. He came close up to Maximilian as he fastened his tunic and hissed, “Tonight. Outside your workshop, I’ll teach you who’s worthy of a noble lady’s body.”
That was what riled him. Perhaps he’d spent too much time around Saloman, had grown too full of himself because of Caterina’s favor, but he saw no reason for anyone to consider him inferior to the jealous, strutting nobleman.
“I’ll be there,” Maximilian prom
ised, and abruptly, Caterina, wrapped still in her dustsheet, pushed the nobleman out of the way to seize Maximilian’s hand.
“Don’t be,” she said urgently. “He’s mad with jealousy because I don’t want him anymore. I only want you. He’ll hurt you, Maximilian…”
Maximilian, startled to have been given such preference, merely kissed her fingers, cast the nobleman a wicked glance of triumph, and left. He had no doubts that he could deal physically with the nobleman without even killing the fool. The refinements of dueling with swords and daggers might have passed him by until recently, but Saloman had fenced with him in play, and he was besides quite used to standing up for himself in fights; he was taller, stronger, and had disarmed more than one drunken bravo in tavern brawls.
Stupidly, he’d been imagining a one-on-one fight. Not a deliberate, murderous ambush that had flattened him as soon he stepped onto the street…
The most important misjudgment of his life. For three nights later, as he lay in his narrow bed in Giacomo’s house, clinging to that life by a thread, Saloman had said, “I’ll make you like me. I’ll make you immortal.”
And Maximilian, weak with fever and pain, confused by impossible realities and hallucinations, had known only that he wanted it not to be over, that he wanted to live. “Do it,” he’d whispered.
And Saloman’s beloved head blocked out the light of the moon. Saloman’s arms enfolded him, and Saloman’s lips kissed his throat. Weird, unnatural, and yet strangely, beautifully right, even when he felt the fangs sink into his flesh and what was left of his blood flowed out into Saloman’s mouth.
It was a soothing, pleasurable way to die. He no longer felt the pain of his injuries, only the powerful draw of his blood from his body as his heart slowed and fluttered toward death. He could hear only Saloman’s heart, impossibly slow and strong. Dying at last, he imagined he could hear his own blood pumping through the vampire’s veins to the rhythmic beat of the vampire’s heart.
In a curiously distant way, he didn’t mind now if he lived or died. It was sweet to die in the arms of a friend like this… Perhaps he was already dead…
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