Bending down, she pressed her lips to his and circled her hips, spreading her own moisture along his overheated skin. His eyes glinted, then narrowed, but she read the warning in them too slowly. Before she could move, his hands slid down to clamp on her hips like twin vises. With a grunt, he thrust his hips up while at the same time tugging her down hard against him, filling her with one fierce thrust.
She shrieked breathlessly in surprise, the sound quickly going soft and broken as she registered the feeling of his body inside hers, thick and long and incredibly hard.
“Now,” he rumbled, a slow smile lifting the corners of his chiseled mouth, “so do I.”
Laughing, breathless, Ava pressed a fierce kiss to his mouth and then sat back to enjoy her ride.
Through narrowed eyes, Dima gazed up into Ava’s beautiful, laughing face and gave thanks to whatever gods were listening that lust had not yet rendered him completely blind. It might have been a near thing, but it would have killed him to miss seeing her poised above him while her body clamped around his in a hot, snug caress.
He felt her shiver around him, felt the rippling contractions of her sheath milking him, and he gritted his teeth against the need to drive blindly and feverishly into her. If he gave in to the impulse, he knew he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes, and he wanted to draw this out as long as possible. He’d never felt anything more perfect than this.
She tried to shift her hips above him and lead him into a rhythm, but he gripped her hips tighter and held her still.
“Move,” she ordered, her smile slipping a little, turning darker as the need drove her.
“Not yet.”
He wasn’t quite ready. First, he had a few final details to see to.
With a warning squeeze, he released her hips and reached up and around to the bun at the back of her head. A few quick tugs and a handful of pins went flying, leaving her hair to tumble down her back in a thick, heavy curtain the color of rich espresso. Even having spent so long in its confining twist had barely left a wave in the straight strands. They swung past her shoulders, the ends falling to her shoulder blades in back and swinging forward to frame the sides of her breasts.
Which were next on his list.
He felt her watching him, felt those dark, chocolate eyes intent on his while he ran his hands over her loosened hair, fascinated by the soft silken texture and the way the color stood out in stark contrast against the pale, dusky tone of her skin. He met her gaze, held it, slid his fingers from her hair to trace the design of the fine black lace cupping her breasts. Beneath the fabric, her nipples were already pebbled tight. He could feel the hard little nubs pressing against their confinement, but he could not see them, and Dima really wanted to see them. And taste them.
Carefully, he gathered her hair in two large handfuls and pulled it back over her shoulders to drape across her back. His hands stroked one last time over the soft strands, then burrowed under them and flicked open the clasp at the back of her bra. Ava didn’t wait for him to pull it away from her. She shrugged out of it herself, an act of which Dima thoroughly approved, because it let him focus all his attention on the sight of those two pretty mounds meeting his gaze for the first time.
Her breasts drew his hands like magnets. The lace of her bra had barely dropped away before he reached up and cupped the soft curves in his palms, weighing and cuddling them, savoring the way they gave against the slightest pressure of his fingers, then sprang back into shape as if eager to greet him again. She was neither large nor small, but sweetly swelled and perfectly proportioned to her long, slim torso, with delicate nipples in a deep, dusky mauve. He couldn’t have imagined anything more beautiful, and he rewarded her perfection with two carefully placed flicks of his tongue.
Simultaneously, her arms curved around his elevated shoulders, cradling his head to her body, and her sheath clenched tight around him. It felt as if she feared he might slip away from her, and she wanted to be sure she gripped him too tightly to lose him. He could have spoken and reassured her that he had no intention of leaving, but he had much more satisfying plans for his mouth, like closing it over the tip of one soft breast and drawing the hard nipple and tightly crinkled areola inside with a deep, heavy suction.
She tasted like candy, not insubstantially airy like spun sugar, but heavily, richly sweet, like butter toffee or thick, dark caramel. He scraped his teeth over her skin and felt her body jolt, every shift a heady massage to his deeply buried shaft. With that in mind, he repeated the caress again, and again, until she tugged insistently at his hair, forcing his mouth away from her.
Lowering her forehead to his, she adjusted her balance and spread her legs wider, pressing herself more firmly down upon him, taking him another fraction of an inch deep until he swore he could feel her heart beating against the head of his cock.
“Dima,” she breathed, and he could smell her sweetness on her breath, feel it drifting over his skin in another teasing caress. “I love having you inside me, all huge and hard and thick. You make my toes curl and my brain melt …”
Ava paused, shifted, moaned as he probed deeper and hit a spot that made her breath freeze in her chest.
“You make me crazy,” she whimpered after a moment, when she could finally open her eyes again and lock that chocolatey gaze onto his. “But if you don’t stop teasing me and start fucking me in the next fifteen seconds, I don’t care how long it takes me; I will find a way to kill … you … ugly. Do you understand me?”
Dima laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed during sex. Had he ever? Had it ever, ever felt this good before?
“Hold on, lyubushka,” he ordered, and grinned.
Gripping her around her rib cage, he levered himself into a semi-sitting position and twisted, flipping both of them over bodily and reversing their positions so that Ava lay on her back beneath him, his hips still wedged between her thighs, his body still clasped tightly in hers.
She gasped in surprise, blinked, then scowled. “I liked it better when I was on top.”
“I imagine you did. But I have something else in mind.”
He ignored her muttered insult and spread his legs, drawing his knees up until he knelt on the cold hardwood floor with Ava’s thighs parted obscenely wide and draped over his. Before she could open her mouth to issue another complaint, he straightened his torso and lifted her hips until only her shoulders remained on the floor, with the rest of her body elevated and his grip supporting her weight.
The position drove him even deeper inside her, bringing a moan to her lips.
“Christ, would you hurry up already?”
She reached out to him, her hands finding his thighs and gripping hard until he could feel her fingernails biting into his skin through the heavy cotton fabric of his trousers. Then her stocking-clad legs curled around his waist, gripping him like a vise. She attempted to use the little leverage her hold gave her to thrust her hips against his and initiate a steady rhythm of mating, but Dima wasn’t quite ready for that.
“Ah-ah,” he scolded. “Not yet, lapushka.”
Fighting for just a few more minutes of control, he took one of her legs and unwrapped it from around his hip. He grasped it behind the knee and straightened it, lifting it until the back of her calf pressed against his shoulder and her delicate, high-arched foot pointed straight up at the ceiling. Then he stripped the stocking off that leg, returned his hand to her waist, and leaned forward, forcing her leg to bend at the hip and her channel to accept another breathtaking fraction of an inch of his arousal. The high, breathless cry that shuddered from her made him feel as powerful as a god.
“Now,” he growled, bending to brush his lips over hers. “Now I’m ready.” He turned his head, pressed another achingly gentle kiss to the back of her knee, and met her desperate gaze with a smile. “Are you?”
Before she could even think to answer, his lips parted, erect fangs glistening above her for a moment before he sank them deep into the tender white fle
sh at the back of her knee.
Ava screamed.
The sound echoed in his head, driving him faster, deeper, making him crave to get closer and closer to her. If he could have melted against her, merged them into one, he would have. He could imagine no future so glorious as remaining inside of this woman for eternity. Her blood flowed into his mouth, hot and thick and sweet, and he could feel himself getting drunk on her taste.
Ava, however, appeared to care less about eternity. She used every muscle she could, every new strength she could find, to throw herself against him. She arched her body like a drawn bow, body curving toward his like an offering. But she was no meek virgin giving herself in sacrifice; she was the mature goddess-queen of her people, using her fully realized sexual power to subdue the beastly threat, ensure the bountiful harvest, and ensure the safety of all the future generations of her people. Dima might be physically stronger, might have her pinned to the floor beneath him, but he had lived a long life. In that time, he had grown wise enough to realize that for all the apparent male dominance of his position, he had been conquered the moment he first felt the tug of her lips on the head of his cock.
Mindlessly, they strained together, instinct and need in motion. He felt his orgasm building in the base of his spine, heard the rhythm of her breathing change, grow sharper, shallower. He threw himself desperately against her, caught her when she followed suit, let his body flow into hers as her blood flowed into his mouth.
Let the two of them flow together, joined, mingled, bound to each other, two bodies clinging together as the world exploded around them, leaving them weak and breathless and changed. Forever.
Chapter Twelve
Morning-after regrets had nothing on the ones that hit a girl after dark, Ava discovered when she opened her eyes to stare up at the loft ceiling.
The apartment around her was silent and tangibly empty, as was the bed next to her. Turning her head on the pillow that had materialized beneath it sometime between when she passed out from sexual overload and now, she confirmed what her instincts had already told her—Dima had already risen and made himself scarce. Thank God.
A slip of color on the white pillowcase caught her attention. Frowning, she reached up and found a small sticky note propped up and waiting for her. The sum total of its contents consisted of two words scrawled in a barely legible masculine hand—Stay put.
My, such a charmer.
Ava tossed the note back where she’d found it and sat up with a scowl. If he honestly thought that he’d get a positive response from her with that kind of tactic, the man not only had no idea who he was dealing with; he was out of his little Eastern European mind. Nearly as dangerously unstable as she had been when she’d thrown aside every single one of her beliefs and values in the wee hours of the morning and let lust, rather than logic, make her decisions for her.
Lips firming, Ava threw back the blankets and climbed out of the bed. She had only the vaguest memories of how she’d gotten into it—dim recollections of her limp body being scraped off the floor and placed gently between the sheets before the man responsible for her condition climbed in after her and proceeded to worsen it—but the how didn’t matter right now. She was too busy mentally smacking herself upside the head for the why.
She should have known better. In fact, she did know better, and that was what really had Ava steamed. Steamed and scared in ways she didn’t even want to contemplate.
She wasn’t the type of woman who let her libido make the decisions. She had always believed herself too smart and too savvy to take that kind of chance, with her health or her heart. Sex, she had decided early on, was a very pleasant activity that worked best when she approached it from a point of cool, careful consideration, but she’d known none of that wisdom last night. Hell, she’d barely shown any sanity. She had leapt on Dima like a sailor on shore leave, not a thought in her head other than doing something to assuage the empty ache between her legs. Just the memory of her behavior made her lip curl in distaste.
Finding her dress draped carelessly over the back of the single chair in the room, Ava grabbed it and tugged it on, not bothering to search for her lingerie first. Strapping herself into a bra wasn’t nearly as important as getting her armor back on, and she had a vague recollection of her panties fluttering away in half a dozen pieces anyway. And God help her, she didn’t think she would ever wear stockings with a garter belt again as long as she lived. As nasty as they might be, she would become a panty-hose girl from now on. Even if it killed her.
Searching for the rest of her belongings gave her a good enough excuse not to think about the other reason she regretted last night so strongly, but she had no intention of lingering on those particular thoughts. Those led to even darker thoughts, ones that pointed out how she hadn’t been herself last night.
Those were the insidious thoughts, because they started out all soft and sympathetic, telling her it was all right, that she shouldn’t blame herself. None of it had been her fault, those thoughts pointed out. After all, it had been the hunger making her decisions, not Ava herself. Ava hadn’t been in control. The hunger had controlled her.
Shit, shit, shit.
She shoved that thought ruthlessly away, not just refusing to deal with it but completely denying its existence. At least for now.
Suppressing a shudder, Ava damned all stockings to the black pits of hell and pulled her boots on over her bare feet and legs. The feeling of leather directly against her bare feet made her nose curl, but she gritted her teeth and pulled the zippers high. No way would she let disgust with her footwear keep her a prisoner here. When she got back to her apartment, she would call a cobbler or somebody and send the damned things out for a thorough cleaning. The important thing right now was getting home and never coming back to …
Ava frowned. Where the hell was she, exactly? Considering that she’d been unconscious when Dima carried her back to the loft, she hadn’t gotten a chance to make note of the address. Moving to the window, she pushed back the heavy, light-blocking drapes and peered outside. She had known it would be dark—duh, being a vampire now, she couldn’t have woken up before dusk if she’d tried—but she hadn’t expected it to be quite as pitch-black outside as it appeared. It looked like she’d completely bypassed dusk and headed straight into full-on night. A glance at her watch confirmed it. It was nearly ten o’clock, which wasn’t late for Manhattan—heck, it was practically still lunchtime—but the sidewalks below the loft were surprisingly bare. And surprisingly bright.
Ava blinked and craned her head until she could see the end of the block just a few yards away. The street lamp on the corner was nearly burnt out, but even in the dim brownish light she could read the street signs posted there as easily as if it had been high noon.
She could see everything outside quite clearly despite the dark, which kind of weirded her out. It didn’t look like it did during the day, precisely, and maybe that was what made her so uneasy about it. It made sense that vampires would be able to see well in the dark, and if she’d thought about it, she would have realized that meant that now she could see well in the dark, but she’d never before stopped to wonder what the nighttime looked like to a vampire. Now she knew.
It wasn’t like looking through night-vision goggles so that everything looked eerily green, nor was it like looking at a photo negative of the world, with lights and darks reversed on the spectrum. And it wasn’t like seeing in black and white, either. Things looked essentially normal if she didn’t linger on them too long. It was just that she could see the darkness.
She shuddered just thinking about it. She didn’t mean that she could see where the shadows lingered in the streets and doorways; she meant she could see the darkness as if it were a thing, as if it were a veil of transparent black fabric that draped over certain spots in the environment, shading but not hiding their contents. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. If this was what Regina had been looking at since Dmitri had transformed her, it was no
wonder she hadn’t told her friends about it. Ava would have freaked.
A thought occurred to her, and Ava glanced around the bedroom, taking in the sparse decor and complete lack of personal effects lying around. It had vaguely occurred to her last night that she hadn’t seen her purse since she’d woken up after her attack, but at the time, she’d been preoccupied with other things, like learning she’d been turned into a bloodsucking fiend. A missing purse hadn’t seemed like a priority in her life. Now, a day later, it had taken on an entirely new level of importance.
Her purse was where she normally carried her cell phone. The cell phone in which she kept programmed the number of the livery company she used to hire cars for herself and her models whenever they were required.
Cursing aloud, she stalked through the living room, double-checking to be sure she hadn’t missed seeing it. But no, her purse was definitely missing. And Dima apparently used a cell exclusively for his own calls. Or maybe he relied on smoke signals and mind control. Whatever was in vogue for vampires these days, it didn’t matter, because there was no landline phone in the apartment.
Her cell phone rang again. After a quick glance at the caller ID, Ava shoved it back into her pocket unanswered. This time, Missy was calling, of course.
Ava was sprinting back into the bedroom before the memory could slide back into her subconscious.
Dima had tossed her coat on the floor on the far side of the bed where you couldn’t see it unless you actually went all the way around to the other side of the mattress. She scooped it up and quickly patted the pockets.
Yes!
Digging the sleek silver toy from the coat’s left-hand pocket, she flipped it open and scrolled through her contact list. A push of a button—and a verbal slap to a young new booking agent who had never dealt with Ava before—had a car on its way and gave Ava just fifteen more minutes to freak out before she’d be on her way home and officially one step closer to forgetting her current nightmare. Although she didn’t know the exact address of the building, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like that prevent her from making good her escape. She gave the dispatcher the names of the cross streets that she’d been able to read off the signs outside and figured she would just walk down there to meet the car.
You're So Vein Page 10