Blood of Life: Cora's Choice 1-3 Bundle

by V M Black

  But do I? I wondered. Do I really?

  He stepped back, grasping me by the shoulders at arm’s length. “Go finish getting dressed. I’ll come for you when it is time to descend. I won’t be able to stand beside you all evening, but you fled from the djinn and survived. You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. You can do this.”

  I laughed in my bitterness, the sound tearing at my throat. “I must. You’ve made me.”

  He nodded, accepting the accusation with sadness in his eyes that changed nothing.

  I closed my eyes as he planted a chaste kiss on my cheek. Then I left the study. Obediently.

  I had no alternative.

  “There you are, Cora!” said Jane when I entered the bedroom. She glanced at the watch on her wrist. “Still plenty of time.”

  She sent me to the bathroom, then herded me into the dressing room again, and I stood, dazed, as she dressed me, made repairs to my makeup and hair, and fussed over my perfume. I put on the heels that she gave me and stood for the necklace, earrings, and bracelet to be added.

  Why shouldn’t I be draped in Dorian’s clothes, Dorian’s jewels? After all, I was his possession as well.

  “Take a look, madam,” Worth said, pulling me over to a three-angled, floor length mirror.

  I stared at the creature, and it stared back at me. I knew it was me, and yet I couldn’t make a connection to the image in the mirror. She looked gorgeous, waiflike, and far too fragile to be real. She looked like she could belong to Dorian Thorne. She certainly didn’t belong to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, and the lips of the figure moved, too. I looked away, unable to meet her eyes anymore.

  Worth led me back into the bedroom and pushed a chair out for me. I sat, and she pulled her phone from her pocket. She typed something rapidly and then smiled at me, sympathy in her eyes. “I ordered water for you, madam. You seem somewhat out of sorts.”

  Perhaps she would understand. If anyone could. “I want what he wants, Worth,” I said hopelessly. “Even when I don’t.”

  “He is a good master, Cora,” she said earnestly. “You’re lucky to have him. All cognates are wanted, as much as they want their agnates. They must be. But his caring goes deeper than that.”

  I shook my head, unsure if I believed it, unsure if it made any difference if it were true.

  There was a knock on the door then, and Jane went to answer it, returning with a sweat-beaded carafe and a crystal glass. She poured me a glass, and I drank it. The cold water did a little to clear my head.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I remembered suddenly and grabbed the chartreuse purse from the day before. I pulled out the pack of birth control pills.

  Did I believe? Dared I believe?

  The faint headache I’d had since yesterday had faded. I turned my wrist to reveal the teardrop-shaped bond mark. My fingers curled into a fist, almost of their own volition, and I put the pills back.

  The next knock was Dorian. He had changed since I had seen him last and was now dressed in a white tie and tail suit. Not a hair was out of place. It made me hurt to look at him.

  His gaze raked over my body, a light of desire burning deep in his eyes.

  “Exquisite,” he said succinctly. “Are you ready?”

  I nodded and stood, passing him carefully without touching as I went through the doorway onto the mezzanine. I could hear the chatter of the guests below and the quiet playing of a small orchestra. He offered me his arm. I shrank away, but the force of his personality overwhelmed me and I took it despite myself. He guided me to the top of the stairs.

  “Remember, Cora,” he said, capturing me in his gaze. “We are not all the same.”

  We descended to the salon, side-by-side, to meet the room full of vampires.

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  Sneak a Peek Now:

  I could feel in my body the desire to please him, a yearning for his approval. And right and wrong always seemed so slippery when I was with him, everything I thought I knew shifting under my feet. How long would it be until even that final step seemed like a small concession?

  And would it be him who caused the change, then? Or the bond? Or me? Could I ever even know?

  “How can I want you?” I didn’t realize I had said the words aloud until they reached my own ears. “God, this bond—it’s crazy.”

  “You may look upon what we have in horror, but how do you think we regard your human relationships? Your affections wax and wane.” Contempt dripped from every word even as he trailed his hand down my neck and across my shoulder and arm, his touch sending shards of desire through me as he seemed to drink me with his eyes. “You marry for love but also for convenience, from tradition, for stability and companionship, for money, for children, or simply because people expect it of you.”

  I swayed in the force of his regard, but I couldn’t deny what he said.

  He continued, “And what you feel on your wedding night and what you feel five years later, ten, twenty, forty—even true love may not last, or it may blossom and fade several times over. We are as constant as the sun. Our hearts are not our own to give, but once they are taken, they do not—they cannot—waver.” He reached my hand and took it, clasping it in his own.

  Another jolt went straight through my body even as my mind rebelled at his words. He was equating a bond—our bond—with love, but there was nothing that I had seen that night that was anything like the kind of love I believed in. Not even Jean and Hattie, with him acting as if she were a child to be indulged and talked around.

  “How can you talk about it like that? A heart—what can you even know about a heart, other than its blood? That’s not love,” I protested.

  He might believe it was, but being a vampire, how could he even know what love should be?

  “You know better than that, Cora. There’s more than blood between us. Humans pretend to value unconditional love, but that’s not something full humans could ever understand. There are always conditions—lines that cannot be crossed, words that cannot be unsaid.” He raised the back of my hand to his lips, and my skin came alive under his touch.

  “But with you, no line is too far,” I said faintly, through the sensations that he stirred in me. “It never can be. Nothing is too much, even if it destroys me. ”

  “I would sooner destroy myself,” he said, and his next kiss fell on my lips.

  I clung to him, my body pressed against his, my parted lips inviting him to take me. But the kiss was too soft, over too soon as he moved lower, along my jaw and down my neck.

  Need flared up in the core of my being, pushing up my spine and into my brain. I knew what was going to happen next—I knew it, and I wanted nothing else but him. Even though I refused the names he wanted to put to what we had.

  Flames of desire licked across my skin, following his mouth as it traced the neckline of my dress and swirling into my mind. I struggled against its influence, trying to keep a clear head. Maybe my surrender was inevitable, but I wouldn’t give up easily.

  “This—this is just lust,” I said. “Chemicals. Like an animal in heat.”

  He straightened, standing over me, and my hands tightened slightly, involuntarily on the fabric of his shirt.

  “Your greatest poets would disagree,” he said. “Those who are supposed to be able to put words to the human condition with more skill than any.”

  I shook my head even as one of his hands found the zipper of my dress and pulled it down, sending a shock of anticipation through me. “I don’t believe you.”

  “‘Let not the marriage of true minds admit impediments,’” he recited as the stiff fabric of the dress’s bodice came away from my body. “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

  He tugged at the gown, and it slid over my hips to puddle at my feet. His hands came to rest lightly on my waist, still encased in the heavy foundation garment.

  “That’s n
ot what those words mean,” I protested even as my body inclined toward his involuntarily. He was changing things around, just like he always did.

  “Isn’t it?” Dorian stepped around, behind me. I stood with the dress billowing around my ankles, caught in the force of his darkness. My body felt stretched, tense, waiting for his next touch.

  And then it came, and I gasped as his lips touched the nape of my neck, moving down across the prominence of my spine, smooth and cool against my skin. The heat in my center pooled low, where my legs joined. I leaned into him, closing my eyes, losing the edges of myself in the electric reaction.

  He pulled away just far enough to speak, and I felt his breath against my skin.

  “‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,’” he repeated softly, “‘or bends with the remover to remove.’”

  I shivered at those words. No, nothing I could do seemed to be able to erase the way I reacted to Dorian, no matter how strongly I willed it. I knew I had to escape the terrible bond that held me—but I was afraid that if someone offered me the chance right then, when I was in his arms, I could do nothing but refuse.

  And I was also afraid that I wanted more from him than what the words sex or even pleasure could encompass. When he touched me like that, I had a mad urge to immolate myself in him until I was utterly lost, so that I didn’t even know who or what I was anymore. And I was afraid that if I did—when I did—he might not put me back together again.

  I felt his hands move to the laces of the corset, and I caught my breath as he untied them, anticipating the cool air. But instead, he put a hand between my shoulder blades and pulled.

  The pressure against my ribs and waist increased so abruptly that the air was pushed from my lungs. He moved his hand to my hips and pulled again. I felt the open inch at the back of the foundation garment come closed, pressing on me so that I had to take shallow breaths from my chest.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he tied the laces off again.

  He chuckled, a dark, rich sound that made my hair rise on the back of my neck. He pulled me back against his body, his mouth exploring the curve of my neck. “You will see,” he murmured as his lips skimmed my ear.

  Dorian wrapped his arms around my waist, but I could hardly feel them through the pressure of the corset. Then his mouth found my collarbone, followed it, and my body trembled against his as he found its hollow. He kissed his way up the side of my neck to the sensitive place just behind my ear. My skin felt hot and flushed, his lips and tongue sending shivering reactions through me that left my legs loose and shaky.

  He turned me in his arms, and my body melded to his, fitting so well that it frightened me. He caught my mouth, a light, brief kiss that left my lips tingling for more. My breath came fast against the stricture of the corset, and I let out a little sound as his mouth came down over mine again. The kiss was firmer but still too brief, a mere press of his lips to mine before it was gone. I ached between my thighs, and the satin lining of the corset rasped against my skin. My arms had wrapped around his body, holding him to me. I wanted him closer, closer still....

  He gave a sad, distant half-smile as he looked down at me, and at the sight of it, my heart squeezed in my chest.

  “‘Love is an ever-fixed mark that looks upon tempests and is never shaken,’” he said, almost to himself. “‘It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.’”

  Worth unknown. Again the words meant almost too much. What was the meaning of what I felt? I would have labeled it lust, if I had been forced to give it any name at all, but that didn’t begin to cover it. What I wanted wasn’t just his body on mine. I wanted to erase those flashes of sadness, to melt his coldness, to fill the ancient emptiness within him with myself.

  And a part of me wanted him not to admit that he didn’t love me—but to prove that he did.

  That discovery froze me in place, struck with a bone-deep terror. I couldn’t want him, no matter what, because what he offered me was nothing but a beautiful prison. What he felt about me couldn’t possibly matter.

  Could it? If I really thought that, why did I keep pushing him, asking him?

  I don’t care, I told myself fiercely. I don’t. I won’t.

  Then Dorian kissed me again, and the shock it sent rippling through me seemed to mock all my resolutions. I could taste him as he dipped shallowly between my lips, and I felt a sudden, half-panicked desperation for more, for everything, and I opened my mouth, begging him in.

  But he pulled away, and I gave a tiny, involuntary whimper.

  “Well, then,” he murmured, and again that chuckle, as dark and rich as his brandy-flavored mouth. This time, when his mouth met mine, it was everything I had been yearning for. He possessed me utterly, stroking my tongue, my mouth, moving with a slow rhythm that rocked my body, tying my brain and my hips and my lips and my center to him. And the strange desperation twisted into a kind of exulting fulfillment. Yes, this, this and more....

  The ache between my thighs deepened to a throb, and he caught me up against him as my legs gave way. Scooping me up, he carried me to the sofa.

  His eyes were haunted as he set me down softly upon the leather. “‘Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks, but bears it out—even to the edge of doom.’”

  Whose doom? His, or mine?

  Could it even matter?

  He started to pull away, but I clung to his shirt.

  “Don’t,” I said. Don’t leave.

  He treated me to a lopsided smile that hurt my heart. “Have no fear, Cora. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He loosened my hands from his shirt and slid his away to unclip the white suspenders that held up his high-waisted pants. I sat up and pulled the tail of his shirt out of the waistband of his pants and loosened the bottom stud. I kept my head down as I worked upwards, not wanting to see the shadow of myself reflected in his eyes.

  His hands, working down, met mine halfway. He caught my hands in his, and I stilled, my body thrilling at even that small contact.

  “Cora,” he said, and my eyes were dragged upward. I saw the shadow there, but over it was a hunger that sent my pulse skittering out of control.

  “I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” I said weakly.

  “It’s good, Cora,” he said, bending to bring my hand to his lips, just as he had the first time we had been together. I closed my eyes at the silken caress, soft and hard at once. I could feel his breath against the back of my knuckles. “It is the purest thing in my black life.”

  And the blackest one in mine?

  Finish the arc with Rites of Blood, Cora’s Choice 4-6 Bundle

  The story continues in...

  Blood Rites

  Cora’s Bond – Book 4

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  Blood-bonded to the billionaire vampire Dorian Thorne, Cora Shaw enters a world of unimagined sensuality—and unimagined danger. With the hold he has over her, he can exert absolute control over her body and mind, even to the point of erasing her completely.

  And Dorian has already shown a willingness to use his power to force her to do his will.

  Cora is determined to find a way out of her bond, no matter what the price. But even as she seeks an escape, she wonders if she can really let him go....

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