Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #16 - Blood Noir (20 page)

“Actually addicted to sex?” I asked.

“Therapy-speak again?” he said.

I had to smile. “You know, Nathaniel is in therapy.”

“I know that he is diagnosed as a sex addict, or was, if that’s what you mean?”

“Then you know how bad it got for him?”

“I know,” Jason said, “and no, if you’re really going to make me give a definition, then no, I’m not a sex addict. I was close in high school, and really close in college. But Raina nearly killing me during sex sort of cured me of the risky behavior, better than any therapy could have.”

Through a metaphysical accident I’d shared that memory with him once. It had been horrible, because I’d been in Raina’s head, and I knew for a fact that the ex-lupa of our werewolf pack hadn’t given a damn whether Jason lived or died. He’d agreed to be tied up and have her change on top of him, and have that as his way of being brought over to the pack. What he hadn’t understood was that she would slice him up with no care. It had been about violence more than sex for her, true serial killer mentality. I think the only thing that had kept her from having a higher body count was that the lycanthropy saved her victims’ lives. Though, in honesty, I couldn’t find anyone else she’d brought over as violently as Jason. I pushed the thought away. I was still able to channel her, sometimes, and this was not the time.

“So, because you could stop the behavior through a shock, you weren’t a true addict?”

“Something like that, though it depends on what therapist you’re talking to, I guess.”

We were left looking at each other, both too serious for being in bed naked. Both of us thinking too hard for what we were supposed to be doing. I wondered how to get us past this and into something else, or whether it was time to put the clothes back on.

“I love watching you think,” he said.

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

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“It means that even in the middle of sex, sometimes something will happen and I’ll watch you think. Not about your day, or about something extraneous, but about the sex, about the man you’re with, about what you’re doing.”

“How can you be sure that’s what I was thinking?”

“Fine, what are you thinking?”

I tried not to smile, and failed. “Wondering how to get you from this to sex.”

“See?”

“What are you thinking, right now, Mr. Serious-Face?”

He smiled. “That I want to watch your face while you stare up at me while we make love.”

“So you get to be on top?” I asked, and tried to make a joke of it. The joke fell flat in the face of his serious eyes.

“Eventually.”

“Eventually, huh.”

He leaned in toward me, and that smile crossed his face, the one that if the customers at Guilty Pleasures could see it, they’d empty their bank accounts. “Yes.”

I started to ask what he wanted to do first, but he kissed me, his hands slid over my body, and I didn’t have to ask what he wanted to do first. He showed me.

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25

JASON SHOWED ME
with his hand between my legs, his mouth on mine. He showed me that he was done with his doubts, done with everything but my body and his. I’d never been with him alone when the
ardeur
was not riding me. I’d never been with him when we could pay attention only to each other, without anyone, or anything, else to distract us, to distract him. He was all hands, and mouth, and teeth, and need. He brought me with his fingers between my legs, then slid his fingers inside me and found that sweet spot. He brought me again, and again, with a flick of fingers and flex of hand. Brought me until I shivered, twitched, and writhed, and damn near convulsed on the bed, while he knelt between my legs so he could find just the right angle for his hand.

I managed to gasp, “God, Jason, God!” Then he stole my words with the pleasure of his hand inside me. He left me with my eyes rolled back into my head, so I was blind to everything but the sensations of my body. Only then did I feel him above me. Feel the press of his body, the weight of him settling on top of me, making me cry out again. I struggled to open my eyes, to see his face hovering over me. The look in his face was everything you want to see in that moment. There was no uncertainty, only the knowledge that he had done this, that his body, his touch, his expertise had brought me to this moment, when the innocent lay of his weight above me could make me cry with pleasure.

He whispered, “Now I’m going to fuck you.”

I whispered back the only word I could think of. “Yes.”

He smiled, and I would have tried to decide what kind of pleased smile it was, but he chose that moment to work his hips between my legs and push himself inside me. I was so wet, so ready from everything he’d done that he slid inside me in one strong movement. It rolled my eyes back into my head again and tore a sound from my throat as my neck bowed backward, and my spine bowed underneath us both.

His voice came from beside my ear, against my hair. “So wet, so tight, so ready.” He shoved himself as deep inside me as he could, made me cry out again, and writhe. Then he kissed me, kissed me with our bodies buried as close as they could get. He kissed me, as if the kiss were all, and he weren’t beginning to move himself in and out of my body. He kissed me, explored me, fucked my mouth as he fucked my body. He’d done his foreplay right; it seemed only minutes and I was screaming my orgasm into his mouth, squeezing it around his groin, clawing it into his back and shoulders. My hands slid in the glisten of sweat on his back. I screamed for him, and he fought to keep his mouth on mine, his body’s rhythm inside me. The only thing he changed was that he fucked me harder, pounding himself inside me harder and faster. I screamed and shrieked, and clung to his body with nails and hands and arms, as if the pleasure would tear me apart, or I would tear him apart. file://L:\Azures L_Disc Shared Dowloads\EBooks\Anita Blake Series 1-17\(Book16] - Bl... 10/18/2009

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He finally rose up enough to pin my wrists to the bed. It meant he couldn’t kiss me anymore, but he could still fuck me, and he did. I could watch his body work in and out of mine now, and the sight alone brought me again. Without his mouth to stop me, the screams were long and ragged. His voice came breathy, strained with effort, as his body kept working in and out of mine. “Feed, Anita, feed.”

It took me moments to fight back from the waves of pleasure, to hear the words, to even try to understand them. I managed, “What?”

“Feed the
ardeur
, Anita. Feed before I go.”

I blinked up at him, and it must have shown on my face, because he laughed, a wonderful masculine laugh, so happy, so Jason, but more. “You forgot, you forgot about the
ardeur
.”

I managed to nod.

“I do good work,” he gasped, “but feed now, I’m almost…” His body convulsed above mine, eyes closing, his body beginning to lose its rhythm.

“Feed, now!”

I almost didn’t have enough concentration left to find that metaphysical piece inside me and let it go. But at the last moment, with his body almost gone above mine, and the effort showing on his face, in his shoulders, his arms, his chest, I found the
ardeur
, and let go. It rose from me like a nearly visible force. Jason’s body reacted to it, like a blow. He cried out above me, his body shoved inside me one last time, and I felt him let go, too. Let go of his control, let go of his effort, and give himself over to the
ardeur
, give himself over to that piece of me that fed on pleasure. It fed on the feel of his body buried deep inside mine, it fed on the strength of his hands holding me down, it fed on the salt taste of his skin as my mouth rose and licked at his chest. I fed, as his body convulsed inside mine, not once, but twice, three times. I brought him with my body squeezed around him, pulsing for every last drop. I brought him with my mouth on his skin, his chest, licking the last salty bit off the hardness of his nipple.

He paused above me, head hanging down, the edges of his hair plastered to his face with his efforts. His shoulders began to collapse, so that he finally lay down on top of me. He kept his hands loosely on my wrists as his face lay beside mine on the pillow. He was still inside me, but we were both done. We lay there, not for more sex, but to catch our breaths, and let our bodies be able to move again.

He kissed my cheek, and I turned, with effort, so he could kiss my lips. It was a gentle, breathless kiss, and I swear I could taste his pulse in his mouth.

“I like you,” he said, and managed a smile as he said it.

It made me laugh, and that made him wince, rather than writhe. “No more, God, please.”

He’d reached that point where he was too sensitive to do more. Cool. I kissed him back and said,

“I like you, too.”

When
love
isn’t on the menu,
like
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26

THE SEX HAD
been good enough that it wasn’t a matter of deciding how long to cuddle afterward, it was simply we both fell asleep. We fell into that deep, exhausted, damn near unconscious rest that comes after the sex has been long, and hard, and sweaty, and amazing, and the day has been too long, too hard, and you can finally let it all go. You can finally rest, against the skin and touch and weight of your lover.

I woke with Jason and I wrapped around each other; legs and arms intertwined, bodies almost melded together with sweat, and fluids, and sleep.

He made a small, soft sound that was almost a laugh, but not. The sound was one of those utterly contented noises that have no spelling, no place in a dictionary, but they are often the sounds that say more than any full word just how happy we are.

He turned his head enough to see me, and gave me the smile and the look that went with that soft almost-laugh. I moved my head toward him, still on the pillow, and he moved, too, so that our lips met in the middle of the pillow, our bodies still intertwined. Jason drew back just enough to look at my face, our faces still pressed to the same pillow.

“That—was—amazing.”

I smiled. “Yes, it was.” I focused a little past his face and saw marks on his shoulders. I lifted my head enough to see better, and found nail marks on his back. “Jesus, Jason, I’m sorry.”

“It’s a compliment,” he said, giving that lazy smile.

I laid my head back down on the pillow, because it still seemed too much effort to move much.

“That’s why you pinned my wrists.”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning, “I love that you lose control with me like that, but I wasn’t really in the mood to bleed too much tonight.”

I rose up again, to see the marks more clearly, bending from the shoulders this time and not just the neck. There weren’t many marks, but what there were had dried blood in them. I made a face.

“Sorry.”

He shook his head and cuddled closer to me on the pillow, so that our faces touched when my shoulders relaxed. “Never apologize for enjoying being with me, Anita. I love that you enjoy me.”

I kissed his forehead because it was closest. “I know a lot of women enjoy you.”

“They have,” he admitted, “but not lately.”

I stroked my hand down his shoulder. “She really screwed with your head, didn’t she?”

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“You mean, Perdy?” he asked. He’d gone very still beside me.

“Yeah.”

“She said she loved me, but she told me what I wanted to do with her was wrong, perverted.”

“Did she actually say
perverted
?” I asked, and put another kiss on his forehead.

“No,” he said.

“See, you’re projecting.”

“She said
evil
.”

That made me go still beside him, with my lips against his face. “Evil?” I made it a question.

“Yep.”

“What the hell could you have asked for that she would have called
evil
?”

He tensed beside me and looked toward the door. “There are people at our door. One of them has been drinking, a lot.”

“You can smell it,” I said.

He nodded, still looking at the door. I didn’t immediately go for my gun on the bedside table. I mean, they could just be a bunch of partiers going to their own room. Then someone pounded on our door, and a woman’s voice said, “Keith, I know you’re in there, you bastard! Open this door, you cheating bastard!”

Jason looked at me. “Don’t look at me,” I said, “this is so not my kind of problem.”

“So you don’t know what to do either?”

“Not a clue,” I said.

“Great,” he said, “me either.”

She hit the door so hard it shook. Where she was hitting the door said she wasn’t that tall, but she was giving it all she had, and drunk she was using more strength than she would have used sober. She’d be bruised in the morning, and probably not remember why. Jason went for one of the thick robes that were always in the nicer hotel rooms. He tossed me the second robe.

“We’re not going to open the door, are we?” I asked, and let my voice sound suitably horrified.

“She’s not going away.”

“She’s also drunk enough that one look at us in this room like this is going to convince her she’s right.”

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“I can’t help that I look that much like him.”

“Keith, you son of a bitch, open this door!”

“Mr. Summerland, do you really want the eleven o’clock news to show you leaving your fiancée outside your door while you have sex with another woman?”