You're So Vein

by Christine Warren

  “What are you doing?”

  She gave him the kind of look people usually reserved for slow children and senile old men. “I’m putting on my stockings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I hate wearing boots over bare feet.” She wrinkled her nose. “It feels somehow unhygienic.”

  He scowled. “You don’t need boots. You are not ready to leave.”

  “Oh, trust me. I’m so ready.”

  Ava slid off the mattress, knelt, and located her boots where they had landed under the bed. She pulled them out and resumed her seat.

  Confusion was not an emotion with which Dima had much experience—none, actually, that he could remember over the last five hundred years. He disliked the feeling it gave him. “Normally, a fledgling will stay with his sire for at least the first month or two following his turning—”

  “First, and I’m not quite sure how you missed this before, I’m not a ‘he.’ ” She zipped up the first boot, slid her foot into the other. “And second, there is absolutely nothing about the current situation that counts as normal, not in my book, and I’m guessing not in yours. I don’t know what the rule book you carry around in your head says about being a vampire”—she held up a hand when he would have interrupted—“and I don’t care. No matter what anyone else says about it, this is my life, and I intend to go on living it exactly as I please.”

  When she stood, he stepped in front of her to block her path to the door. “There is no rule book, as you so disdainfully put it, but there are certain things about being a vampire that you need to know, for your own safety, as well as for the safety of our entire race.”

  She pursed her lips. “You know what? You can shoot me an e-mail.”

  He grasped her arm when she tried to step around him. “You act as if this were a kind of joke and if you play along for a little while, you can go back to normal as soon as the laughter dies down.”

  “Do you see me laughing?”

  “No, I see you behaving as a spoiled little girl who has been told she must finish her chores before she can go and play with her friends.”

  She jerked her arm from his grip. “I was never a spoiled little girl, as you so gallantly put it,” she informed him, all but spitting fire, “and I finished my chores a long time ago. In fact, I did a few other people’s chores while I was at it, and I made up my mind years ago that I wouldn’t waste any more of my time worrying about other people’s rules. I make my own, and I play by them. And if anyone you know has a problem with that, you can tell them to confront me themselves.”

  He watched her stalk toward the door and fought the urge to grab her and shake her. How could anyone who counted a vampire as a best friend be so ignorant about what it meant to live in their world? Had she learned nothing from that Regina woman? He needed to make Ava understand that, as of the previous day, she was now a very small, very weak fish swimming in an ocean full of sharks.

  “If someone comes after you, Ava, a confrontation will not be what you get from them,” he said to her retreating back, and something in his tone must have penetrated that stubborn hide, because she paused in the doorway to the living room. “You’re living in a whole new world now, damochka. Things are not so neat and tidy as they were before. You are no longer safe.”

  She turned around and laughed in his face. “I’m no longer safe? Like I was safe when I walked by that alley and got attacked by something that wanted to suck out all my blood and leave me there like an empty candy bar wrapper? Spare me the dire warnings, Dima. At least now if someone attacks me, I have some strength to fight back.”

  “It’s true you are stronger. Faster, too. At least compared to the average human. But what about the average vampire?”

  He saw the small furrow between her brows and knew she had not thought about her situation from that perspective. She had considered herself powerful for so long that she could not fathom herself in any other light.

  “Our population grows slowly, kukla.” He pressed on. “That means that it will be rare for you to encounter a vampire who is not much, much older than yourself, and an older vampire is a more powerful vampire.”

  “Now you’re trying to scare me?”

  He shook his head. “Merely warn you.”

  “About the boogeyman under my bed?”

  “About the price for infringing on another vampire’s territory, or feeding from his servant. Or interfering in a dispute between two vampires. Or disrespecting a vampire’s line. Or underestimating his age. Or—”

  “Kissing the wrong cheek of his ass?” she asked sweetly. “So far, the dangers you’re telling me about sound a lot like the ones I faced when I started my own modeling agency. Just substitute the word ‘agent’ for ‘vampire’ and ‘model’ for ‘servant’ and I’ve already been through all of that.” She paused. “Come to think of it, modeling agents and vampires are starting to look eerily similar to me.”

  Dima bit back a growl. “This is not a laughing matter!”

  “That’s too bad, because if I stop laughing at it, you’re not going to like my backup response. At the moment, that one begins with me screaming at the top of my lungs and then possibly burying my boot heel in your left eyeball. So which one would you rather I go with?”

  “Lapushka,” he gritted out, “your fangs are not yet sharp enough to be snapping them at me.”

  She smiled as sharp as broken glass. “Why don’t you put your dick back in my mouth and we’ll see about that?”

  So this was what could drive a man to strike a woman, mused a small voice in the back of Dima’s mind, perhaps even to strangle her. With those choices in mind—kiss or kill—he took the only path left to him. Eating the distance between them with two long strides, he reached out, cupped the back of her head in his hand, and sealed her smart, sarcastic, suicidal mouth with his own. Judging by the way he currently felt, by the time he worked off his mingled fury and arousal in her body, either she would be too weak to speak, let alone cause more trouble, or he would be dead and Ava Markham would have become someone else’s problem.

  He just couldn’t decide which outcome to hope for.

  Chapter Eleven

  She should protest, Ava knew. She should beat her fists against his chest, or dig her thumbs into his eyes, or slam her elbow into his solar plexus, or do something else to let him know that this was no way for him to win an argument. He’d done it once already, using his strength to force her to drink from him, and as far as she was concerned, she still owed him for that one. She wasn’t about to start running him a tab.

  The problem was that her body refused to obey the commands issued by her mind. It was too wrapped up in the feel of him: hot, hard muscle, strong, callused hands, focused, predatory intent; the scent of him: musk and spice and rich, dark earth; the taste of him: coffee and vodka and decadence. Her body didn’t care about the arguments between them or the ones they would undoubtedly have once they returned to their senses. It just cared about getting as close to him as possible and staying there.

  Of course, it did care a little that they’d wasted the time between when she’d been on her knees in front of him earlier and now. That was a lot of time wasted when they could have been doing much more interesting things than fighting. And it was a lot of steps for them to retrace. If only there were a shortcut.

  He seemed to read her mind, or perhaps the way she met each heavy stroke of his tongue with one of her own and then strained closer, eager for more. Rather than wasting time wooing her, he touched her as one sure of her welcome, his hands stroking over her sides, cupping and kneading her breasts, following the plane of her stomach and the curve of her hip, sliding down to grasp the hem of her dress and tug insistently upward. Bless his enterprising heart.

  Realizing her hands were gripping his biceps in a veritable death grip—enjoyable but hardly helpful—Ava unclenched her fists and reached down to help him strip off her clothes. It was important to her to get rid of them yet equally important that he not
damage the expensive designer dress. She might be blinded by lust, but she hadn’t completely lost her mind.

  Brushing his hands away was easy once he realized she only meant to redirect them from fabric to skin. He gripped her thighs, groaning into her mouth when his thumbs found the straps of her garters and began to stroke. He seemed to appreciate her choice in lingerie. Leaving him momentarily content, she crossed her arms, grasped the bottom of her dress, and with a long tug and a well-timed shimmy, had it up over her head and tossed into the corner before he’d traced the length of the first garter strap up to the belt and slipped underneath.

  She felt him stiffen—in more ways than one—as their lips parted to allow her to pull the dress over her head. His pale blue eyes burned, looking more like blue flame than glacial ice as he ran his gaze over her nearly nude form. He lingered on all the usual places—the swell of her breasts beneath the black lace of her bra, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips and the satin-and-lace-covered mound between her thighs—but in no way did he make her feel like an anonymous sex partner. Not when his gaze then slid up to her throat, her lips, and he reached a hand out to cup her face reverently in his palm.

  “Nenaglyadnaya,” he murmured, leaning down to brush her lips with his. “Kak ya tebya hochu.”

  She didn’t need a translation to recognize his appreciation of her body, nor his desire, not when she could match it breath for breath. She had never wanted a man so much, certainly never wanted a man like him—a man too strong to control, too powerful to dismiss. Her first career had taught Ava that sex was a commodity, something that could be parted with more pleasurably than money and that conferred as much benefit on the giver as on the recipient. Provided, of course, that the giver remained in control.

  With Dima, Ava did not feel in control, at least not completely, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. For the first time in her life, intimacy didn’t feel like a transaction or a battle. It felt like a partnership, each of them giving and taking in equal measure, each leading and following in easy rhythm. Maybe it was because lust had left her completely mindless, but she couldn’t care less about control with Dima. All she cared about was touching him and being touched in return.

  He seemed to have no problem with that. Sliding the hand on her face around to her neck to urge her closer, his other made itself useful by stroking across her body, leaving trails of gooseflesh in its wake. Everywhere he touched her felt electric, as if some kind of power traveled from his body to hers through skin-to-skin contact. When his callused fingers skimmed her belly, she felt the surge of energy all the way to her toes, but when they skimmed beneath the soft fabric of her panties and garter belt and dipped into the secret space between her thighs, her toes curled up and died, along with approximately half of her brain cells.

  His touch made her want to shout, but that would mean taking her lips from his, and he tasted too good for her to try anything so foolish. Instead, she moaned and shuddered and flexed her hips toward him, urging him to touch her. His large, clever fingers rifled through her neat curls and pressed lower, parting the soft lips of her sex to find the hidden treasures within. Rough fingertips traced the length of her slit, teasing the wet silk of her most intimate skin, making her tremble. They circled the tight ring of her entrance, probed, teased, then drifted up to scissor around her clitoris, making the little nub pulse and ache.

  Ava moaned into his mouth. If he had felt anything like this arousal while she’d had her mouth around him earlier, how had he found the strength to pull her away from him? Why the hell had he wanted to? Never in her life had she felt this fire. He had been so insistent on impressing upon her the power of a vampire’s hunger for blood, but this was the urge she felt could more easily become an addiction. If drug addicts felt like this when they pumped chemicals into their bodies, it was a wonder any of them ever came down off a high. To feel like this forever, Ava would be willing to do many, many things she had never before considered. Including lower her guard even a tiny bit.

  Then his fingers shifted again, lower, pausing at the entrance of her body until she thought her heart would stop if he didn’t come inside her; then one finger pressed forward, penetrating her, and it did.

  Their lips parted, her head falling backward as if her neck could no longer support it. Only the warm, heavy hand cupping her there kept the back of her skull from bouncing off her shoulder blades. She let out a whimper, a low, husky breath of sound, and her eyes began to drift shut.

  Simultaneously, the finger inside her was joined by a second, stretching her, and the hand at her neck tightened, pulling her forward until her forehead came to rest against his and his breath filled her mouth with his scent.

  He shook her gently and flexed his wrist, sending his thick fingers sliding deeper within her. “Open your eyes,” he ordered, his voice dark and ragged. “Look at me, kralya. Watch me.”

  She shook her head. She couldn’t. The feelings were too intense. If she could see him watching her while he touched her like this, she would come undone, and more than a climax would be at stake.

  “Look at me.”

  His mouth touched hers, a quick brush, sweet and tender; then she felt something sharp nipping at her lower lip. He took the plump flesh between even, white teeth and bit down until she gasped at the faint sting. A second later, he crooked the fingers buried between her legs and dragged his nails across the front wall of her sheath. Against her will her eyes flew open and her body jackknifed, instinctively seeking to escape the overwhelming bolt of pleasure. He held tight, controlling her with the hand on her neck and the one in her pussy as he pressed pleasure upon her. His gaze captured her, blue flame consuming her, leaving her self-control cindered in little mounds at her feet.

  “No,” she moaned, the incoherent protest garbled not by his unrelenting grip on her lower lip but by the intensity of her arousal. She couldn’t speak, could barely form the words in her mind, let alone on her tongue, but it didn’t matter. She had no idea where the protest had come from. She wasn’t trying to make him stop—God, if he stopped, she would die, right after she killed him—but she had no other language to express how unbearably intense the sensations he pressed upon her had become. She had no way to tell him that watching him watch her as he forced her higher and higher toward climax was going to shatter her, that when the smoke cleared, he would find her lying in little tiny pieces at his feet and, like Humpty Dumpty, the damage to her would be irreparable.

  But she couldn’t say any of that, so she panted and she moaned and she began to chant the word no like a mantra, even as she pressed herself harder against his fingers, trying to coax him closer to her clit, and her hands clawed at his shirt, ready to shred the material like confetti if it would allow her to touch the smooth, hard skin beneath. She thought briefly about demanding that he strip, quickly, but that would mean asking him to take his hands off of her, and there was no way she could bring herself to do something so foolish.

  Taking matters into her own hands, she reached for the hem of his shirt with both hands, intending to yank it over his head with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of speed. To her surprise, the shirt didn’t just lift when she pulled: it split all the way down the middle until she could shove it back over his shoulders, completely out of her way. She paused for barely a millisecond, stunned by the new strength in hands she had thought she knew so well; but if this was what she could do as a vampire that she hadn’t been able to do as a human, maybe her new life wouldn’t be all bad. There was something to be said for being able to strip a man in under thirty seconds.

  She decided right then to go for the record. With his shirt out of the way, she turned her attention back to the pants she had already unfastened once before. This time she wasn’t so careful with his zipper, but then again, this time she wasn’t having to sneak up on him. He grunted his approval when he felt her hands grip his waistband and shifted to grant her better access. Once again, she had his zipper down and his shaft in her hand befor
e he remembered to breathe, and if she fisted the length a little abruptly this time, well, he had only himself to blame. The stroke she had meant to tease him with coincided with a particularly devious flick of his wrist, one that had her melting all over him like hot, sweet syrup.

  Dima didn’t complain. Instead he grunted and pushed his leg forward, spreading her thighs until he could insert his own between them, making a place for himself close to her center. If that was what he wanted, Ava was happy to oblige him. Pressing herself closer to him, she rubbed her lace-covered breasts against his chest and curled one leg around his, locking her ankle on the inside of him and then yanking forward without warning. The unexpected movement threw Dima off balance, and he tipped backward, his bulk conspiring with gravity to land him flat on his back on the floor of the bedroom doorway.

  Grinning maniacally—and definitely relieved that he’d released his grip on her mouth before he went ass over elbows—Ava followed him down, landing on his chest with a breathless thump.

  Dima cursed and blinked up at her. One arm had curled around her back instinctively to cradle her protectively as they fell, but the one between her legs had jerked away to flail vainly for balance. It had taken her panties with it. He tossed them aside and reached for her again, but Ava was already ahead of him. Bracing both palms on his chest, she levered her lower body up until she could straddle his hips like a cowgirl. Staring down at him, grinning, she acknowledged to herself that this was the most fun she’d ever had during sex, and thank God, they were still far from finished.

  “I think I like this position,” she purred, pressing her hips down so that her bare pussy brushed teasingly over his straining erection. She still wore her bra, her garter belt, and her stockings, and while she’d gotten Dima’s shirt mostly off, he still wore his pants. Mostly. The fly was open and the material spread like wrapping paper around a highly anticipated gift. Ava couldn’t wait to play with it.