You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  Ava felt herself pale, but no way would she let him see that he’d scored a hit. “I wouldn’t have done either of those things.”

  “You have no idea of how powerful the hunger can be, Ava. You have no idea what it can make you do.” He leaned forward as he spoke, making her sharply aware of his heat, his size. She knew he was tall and powerful—he’d carried her like a feather pillow, for pity’s sake—but she tended to dismiss those qualities in men. After all, very few men in the world could literally tower over her, at five feet, ten inches. Dima, in fact, only bested her by five inches—less than half a foot. But when he stood this close, when she could feel his breath on her skin, smell his musky, spicy scent, see the pulse beating in the side of his throat, she began to realize that it wasn’t his height that made this man so overwhelming; it was his presence.

  He had alluded to his age, eight centuries, which would put his birth somewhere in the Middle Ages. Judging by his appearance, he would have been around thirty when he crossed over, and unless she needed her vision checked, his physique suggested a career as a warrior, hours spent training with heavy weapons and utilizing that training on the brutal battlefields of the past. Unlike men of today who honed their muscles with weight reps and built their endurance with active cardio, Dima’s physicality was part of who he was. He was fit because fitness had meant survival, strong because strength had meant success. He’d been forged at a time when Darwin would have ruptured a blood vessel from the excitement of seeing his principles at work.

  Ava frowned. This “him Tarzan, me Jane” thinking was really not like her. Most men who tried that attitude with her ended up swinging through the jungle without a vine. So why was she standing there staring at him, practically drooling, when thirty seconds ago she’d been imagining pulling a Salome on him and demanding his head on a silver platter?

  His eyes locked on hers and held, the connection between them vibrating like the strings on a cello, while he raised his hand to his throat. Ava saw the movement in her peripheral vision, but she couldn’t seem to break away from the icy grip of those cool predator’s eyes. Then, he touched the skin just above the collar of his dark shirt, and she couldn’t look at anything else. She saw his finger press hard, digging into flesh, piercing skin with a nail that couldn’t possibly be so sharp, could it? But it sliced like a razor, a small bead of claret blood welling up at one end of the short slash, and like a camera effect gone horribly wrong, Ava watched her vision narrow and fill with red until all she could see was the contrast between the taut, golden skin and the dark, rich, shimmering, beckoning blood.

  Everything else ceased to exist. Her brain shut off. Her breathing quickened, each inhalation bringing with it an intoxicating scent colored with musk and spice and earth and sweetness. Her mouth went suddenly dry, and she swallowed reflexively, only to find, in the space of an instant, a flood of saliva rushing forth. She swallowed again, breathed again, and her stomach cramped with hunger for the first time since she’d put her modeling career behind her.

  A cacophony of drumbeats sounded in her ears, a deep, steady, bass rhythm overlaid with an erratic, ragged tempo that clawed at her already-frayed nerves. Something rasped in low counterpoint, dull and uneven, like scratches heard through cotton wool, punctuated by a sound like the whimper of an animal in pain.

  Around Ava the room receded, the world receded, everything receded but the blood. The blood was everything.

  The blood was life.

  Chapter Ten

  Dima saw her eyes glaze over, pupils dilating until the black void all but swallowed the surrounding dark brown of the iris. The hunger had her.

  He knew it, had counted on it, and stubbornly pushed away the faint twinge of guilt that tried to creep into his consciousness. He knew she was too young to control it, too young to even understand what the hunger meant, what it could do to her, how it could take her over until nothing of Ava remained—just the need, intense and gnawing and all-consuming. That had been the problem. As long as she denied the hunger, she could never learn to control it, and as long as she couldn’t control it, she couldn’t be allowed out of his sight. He’d taken on the role of her sire, and that meant it was his responsibility to teach her the rules of her new life. The first rule was respect the hunger.

  The second rule was know how to feed.

  Dima tried to tell himself that his enthusiasm for teaching that particular lesson had nothing to do with the way his body tightened at the image of her lips against his skin, her tongue cleaning the blood from his flesh, her teeth biting deep and drawing strength and life from within him.

  His self just laughed.

  Ava swayed toward him, her gaze locked on his throat, her slim figure trembling with need. Ignoring his own, different, need for the moment, Dima curled one hand around the back of her neck and slowly drew her to him.

  She latched on to him with a desperate whimper, shaking like an addict. He expected to feel the burn of fangs ripping through flesh without regard for finesse or restraint. Few fledglings managed anything else the first feeding after their change. In the beginning, the hunger ruled, and the hunger had no time for niceties. But it didn’t happen that way.

  Instead, he stiffened in surprise at the gentle pressure of her lips and nose and chin nudging his skin, like a kitten preparing to nurse. His breath froze in his chest as, for a long, painful moment, she seemed content to breathe him in, to absorb his essence through her skin instead of through the nourishing warmth of his blood.

  Dima gritted his teeth. He had known Turkish sultans and Romanian princes who had never thought of torture so devious. He tried to pretend that it was circumstance that set him afire, that the connection of the blood they shared forged an unwitting bond between them and intensified the normal sexual attraction between two healthy adults.

  The trouble was that he’d been an adult since the middle of the thirteenth century and he had never, in all his existence, felt the way he felt when this arrogant, stubborn, manipulative woman before him reached out her soft, pink tongue and dragged it over the surface of his throat. He had been inside women and felt less arousal than he felt now, with both of them fully clothed and fed up with each other and no contact between them but for his hand at her nape and her face buried against his neck.

  This was a very bad sign.

  Quickly he debated pulling her away from him and forcing her to drink from a bag of preserved blood, but his body seemed to have a mind of its own and it reacted with violent denial at the very idea. His fingers tightened reflexively, drawing her closer, and he felt a vibration very like a purr just before she sank her fangs into his flesh and began to feed.

  His eyes nearly crossed in his head.

  Last night, her feeding from his wrist had been all about survival, a primal instinct based entirely on the nerve signals firing deep in the reptilian core of her brain stem. It had been about as erotic as donating to the Red Cross, and still he’d become aroused. This time he was lucky he didn’t come in his pants. The jolt of lust that hit him nearly knocked him on his ass, but frankly, he didn’t care if he kept his feet or not, just so long as he got Ava off of hers. Once he got her off her feet, he could turn his attention to her legs, to spreading them and lifting them and sliding between them and—

  “Dermo,” he swore.

  While he had been distracted by the idea of how it would feel to get his hands on that lean, lush body, the source of his consternation had been making herself busy.

  Her mouth never moved, too busy drawing in his essence for anything else, but her body was another thing entirely. It shimmied closer, pressing full length against Dima’s larger frame, her arms snaking up around his neck to hold him in place. Then she began to shift, twisting and rubbing against him, not kittenish anymore, but as wild and wanton as a she-cat in heat. Urgent little moans hummed against his skin, driving him crazy, but nothing could compare to the eye-crossing torment inspired when she arched her hips, fitting the soft vee between her legs di
rectly against the bulge in his trousers, and then rolled forward like a tidal wave. If they had been naked, the motion would have sunk him inside her to the hilt.

  “Zayebis’!”

  Dima groaned. He couldn’t do it. He might want her like hell burning, but at the moment Ava had no idea what she was doing. She was operating on pure instinct, unaware of anything but the first enthralling waves of hunger, and that was a big problem. In a couple of months, a few weeks even, she would learn to control herself, and the hunger would no longer be able to drive her into the kind of feeding frenzy that bled over from the need for food to the need for sex. It was something all vampires had to learn to untangle, but until she got the hang of it he couldn’t touch her like this. It would be like taking advantage of her when she was drunk.

  Maybe even in a few days she would at least understand how intertwined the two needs could be and would be able to make a decision about whether she cared which one was currently driving her. Not now, though. For now, she was entirely under the control of her most primitive instincts.

  Reluctantly, he slid his hand from her nape and grasped her by her upper arms. “Kralya,” he rumbled, his voice sounding even rougher than normal. “Kralya, that’s enough. You’re finished.”

  Not even a flicker of an eyelash suggested she had heard him. Her tongue continued to rub against his skin in time with her drawing suction, and her body slid over his in an enormous, sensual caress.

  “Stop.”

  She whimpered and pressed closer. One dainty hand released its grip in the hair at his nape and slid over his shoulder and down his chest, fingers curving to allow her nails to drag across his nipples. His breath shot out in a hiss.

  “Ava, enough!”

  Her hand moved, quicker than he would have thought she could this soon, and before his brain, sluggish with arousal, could catch up, he heard a rasp and felt a tickle of chill air. His pants were open and her hand around him when he finally processed the input from his overwhelmed senses. Then all he could do was groan at the feel of her slim fingers curled around his cock, cool and firm against his overheated flesh. She slid her hand down to the base, then back up to the tip, milking him with sure, feminine strength. When she reached the end of the shaft, she slid her thumb over the tip and flicked the edge of her nail lightly against the sensitive bundle of nerves under the glans.

  Dima’s whole body rocked with a shudder. In another fifteen seconds, the decision would be entirely out of his control and—ironically, given their track record with each other so far—he thought she deserved better than that. When he finally got inside her, he didn’t want her to regret a second of it.

  “Enough,” he managed again, forcing the word through gritted teeth. He grasped her hand in both of his and carefully pried her fingers from his cock before pressing her forcefully away from him. When her mouth left him, he felt oddly bereft and had to bite back a sigh. “That’s enough. You don’t want to do this now.”

  Ava licked her lips. Her tongue caught a few stray trickles of blood, and her eyelids drooped as she savored the taste. Her cheeks were stained red, flushed with blood and excitement, and she looked like nothing so much as a woman well and recently fucked. One who would like nothing so much as to repeat the experience.

  “I want more.” She swayed closer, her gaze fixing on the scratch at his throat, now dotted with two slightly uneven puncture wounds. “Tastes so good.”

  She looked and sounded like a drunk, drunk on blood and desire, but she also looked soft and warm and infinitely inviting. And if Dima ever wanted to get his dick back inside his pants, he needed to stop looking at her for a minute so things would have a chance to calm down.

  “You’ve had enough.” He sounded harsh, harsher than he’d intended, but Ava didn’t flinch at his words. Instead, she ignored his bark and stepped forward.

  “Want more.”

  Dima turned his back and fisted his hands at his sides. “No.”

  He fixed his gaze on the windows and wondered if it would help if he pressed his dick against the cold glass for a few minutes. Better yet, maybe he could just shove it in the freezer. Though the way he felt right now, he could encase the bloody thing in six inches of clear glacial ice and it wouldn’t make any difference. He burned for her.

  He could see her reflection in the window. She stood behind him, heavy-eyed and frowning, flushed with desire. The elegant bun at the back of her head had started to come loose—hardly surprising after all she’d been through—giving her a disheveled look that only made him wonder how long her hair would be when she let it down. When he spread it across his pillow, would it frame her face like a halo? Or would he be able to wrap it around them both, blanketing them in silky darkness as he rode heavily in and out of her slick, tight—

  God help him, but even Russian might not have sufficient curses to get him through the next few minutes!

  Dima closed his eyes against the image of her hovering behind him and fought hard for control. His muscles pulled tight around him, making his body feel two sizes too small. In fact, the only thing about him that didn’t feel too small at the moment was his damned dick, and that was the thing he most needed to have taken in.

  Taken in. He groaned. Holy hell, but he had to stop thinking in metaphors.

  Breathe deeply, he instructed himself, and shifted his shoulders as he fought to blank his mind and bring himself back under the control he hadn’t lost in a literal age. He could do this. He’d faced Vikings and Huns, Cossacks and Saracens, and defeated them all. He wouldn’t allow himself to be brought low by a recently human woman with the bearing of a queen and the temper of a rabid badger.

  After a moment, Dima’s breathing finally began to slow, and he allowed himself the luxury of a small smile. He had known he could do it. Vladimir of Novgorod was too highly trained a warrior to be defeated by—

  A mouth, hot and wet and silken, gliding over the head of his cock. Tongue flicking, rubbing, cajoling. Lips gliding, teeth and fangs carefully pulled back, as she drew him deep, deep, deep inside her and held him there like a taste of rare ambrosia.

  “Bozhe moy [My God]!”

  His eyes flew open, his gaze slid down, and he blinked, disbelieving, at the sight of this woman kneeling before him, her dark head bent, her red lips stretched around the shaft of his penis, a look of intense excitement on her beautiful face.

  Inside him, demons roared, demanding that he welcome her attentions. He had forced nothing on her, had tried to stop her, they argued. She was doing this of her own free will, and his conscience could just sit down and shut up and no one would have to get hurt!

  But in spite of his urges, Dima was not a stupid man. He knew what would happen if he didn’t stop her. Oh, he would enjoy it in the meantime, but afterward, she would hate him. She would tell him that he had taken advantage of her while she was weak, while the hunger controlled her, and he wouldn’t be able to deny it. He might have the satisfaction of one amazing night, but if he took this one, he doubted there would be any others.

  He very decidedly wanted for there to be others. God help him.

  Scraping up the last of his strength, Dima savored the feeling of her mouth on him for one more minute, then grasped her head in his palms and growled her name. Slowly, her lashes parted, and she looked up at him, her eyes dark and dazed and hungry.

  “Ava,” he growled hoarsely, watching her to be sure she understood him. “This is not you. This is not what you want. You have to stop.”

  She blinked, pulled back slowly, her lips sliding off of him and into a frown. “Stop?” she repeated, and he saw a glint of something like herself in her eyes. Her gaze slid from his face to his dick, lingered as if confirming it was indeed attached to him, and back again. The glint brightened. “You can’t want me to stop.”

  He choked out a sound that might—just—have passed as a laugh. “Want has nothing to do with this. You need to stop. You are not thinking clearly. The hunger is in control now. You are still too youn
g to be able to control it.”

  Ava pushed slowly to her feet. Her frown tightened and her eyes—noticeably clearer now—narrowed. “You’re going to want to get out of that habit you have.”

  “What habit?”

  “The one where you’re always telling me what I want and what I can do.”

  “I am your sire. It is my responsibility to make sure you come to no harm and to teach you how to adjust to your new life.”

  Ava peeled back her lips and used the tip of a perfectly manicured finger to test the sharpness of one of her new fangs. Then she wiped a tiny trace of blood from the corner of her mouth and raised her eyebrows at him. “As far as I can tell, I seem to be adjusting just fine on my own.”

  This time, Dima was the one frowning, because he could see that. No trace of the haze of hunger remained in her eyes or her expression. She looked utterly calm and utterly confident and utterly in control of her own actions. And damn it, he’d just pulled her mouth off his dick. Was he out of his mind?

  No, he reminded himself. Forcefully. He’d had to stop her. No vampire her age—barely over a day—could possibly have that much control over her own hunger. It took most vamps days’ worth of feedings, all carefully supervised by their sires, before they could keep from killing every human they fed on. And once they learned to control the bloodlust, it was usually another week at least before they got a handle on the regular lust. The hunger for blood and the hunger for sex were intimately entwined, and there was no way Ava could have gained control over both of them in the space of one supervised feeding. Things like that just didn’t happen.

  Things like fledglings and women turning their backs on him and walking calmly away before he was finished with them didn’t happen, either. But Ava did it anyway. He moved to follow her, swore, paused, and refastened his pants. By the time he entered the bedroom, she was sitting on the edge of the mattress pulling on her stockings.