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Authors: Tracy Cooper-Posey

Tags: #A Vampire Menage Gargoyle Urban Fantasy Romance

Beauty's Beasts (9 page)

BOOK: Beauty's Beasts
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He held out his hand to her. “I need a shower,” he said simply, “and you need better food and sleep. The sculptor will have to wait for tomorrow, Nick.”

Riley stifled the need to protest.

“Of course,” Nicholas said, instantly letting her go. He picked up her hand and kissed the back of it. It was an old-fashioned move, but it didn’t feel silly or quaint. His lips touched her skin and she shivered. He was staring into her eyes again—or at least, it felt like he was. Riley try to draw a breath, but breathing abruptly became almost impossible. She became aware in an instant of her ass and thighs resting against his legs, pressing against his hips, creating heat. Her shoulder was pushed against his chest, her hip against his abs. Although vampires seemed to run cooler than humans, where she touched Nick there was heat and pulsing. She could feel his cock next to her hip.

As he turned to look at her properly, she could feel the muscles in his torso flex against her.

She finally was able to draw a breath into her lungs and sucked it in sharply. It shuddered down.

Nicholas’ eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he watched her over the back of her hand. Then he lifted her hand up to Damian.

“We’ve all made choices, it seems,” he said softly.

I didn’t!
she wanted to cry.

Damian lifted her to her feet.

Chapter Six

The studio apartment only had one bed, a prop used to maintain the illusion of Nick’s human status. But when Damian emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a silk robe, his hair wet and tangled about his shoulders, he glanced at it. “I would not use it without his leave, nor would I have you in it beside me.” He grimaced. “These things do not leave me as easily as other human customs did.”

“Nick…won’t be back?” Riley packed away the last of her meal.

“Not tonight.”

She wiped her hands on a towel. “You made me choose anyway, Damian. Now Nick is kept out of his own home by us, and we hurt him tonight. I saw it. I don’t know if it was because of you or me. But it hardly matters.”

He crossed his arms. “It does not bother you that I was Nick’s lover for many, many years before I became yours?”

Riley shook her head. “Should it?”

“You want him. Badly.”

She could feel the need to yank the conversation back to where
she
had wanted it to go, where she needed it to be, but tamped down the desire. This was, she suspected, part of the idea of total trust that Damian had spoken of. Letting go of the need to control everything. Trusting the other.

Instead, she answered Damian’s question as truthfully as she could. “Yes, I want Nicholas. Badly. But you know that. You can sense it every time he arouses me. He did it deliberately tonight.”

Damian’s smile was warm and made his eyes glow. “Well done,” he said, and she knew that he had recognized her struggle to give up trying to control the conversation. “In fact, he did it twice,” he added. “Not the actions of someone who truly believes you have made your choice, hmmm?” He moved slowly toward her.

“Are you revealing your strategies to me, Damian? That’s not a good idea, is it? I might blow the game for you.”

“Perhaps I’m placing my trust in you.” He picked up her hand and drew her back into the lounge area, where the big black leather sofas sat at right angles to each other, bracketing a beautiful Bokhara rug about eight feet square, that featured reds, greens, and other beautiful jewel colors. From a closet, he pulled out some thick quilts, which he laid over the rug, and threw down pillows and cushions from the sofas.

Riley settled herself on the quilts, her heart pattering. She had showered earlier, before she ate, and now wore her robe, just like Damian. She had spent a little time doing her make-up and primping in the bathroom, feeling absurdly like she was preparing for date, even though she slipped into her bathrobe to step out of the bathroom, and wore no shoes.

He settled cross-legged in front of her and picked up her hand. “Nicholas is conflicted about you,” he said simply. “He wants you, but he wants me to be happy. He will not have an easy night tonight.”

She tilted her head. “Why does he not simply seduce you himself? It’s plain he still cares about you. There’s all this history between the two of you. For that matter, why do you not seduce him?”

Damian reached for the tie on her robe and tugged. “Then I could not have you.”

Her heart jumped. “Greedy.”

“In this case, yes.” The bow unraveled and he pulled the tie aside. “I think that is what is stopping Nicholas, too. For the first time in centuries, he honestly cannot choose.” His fingers stroked her flesh where the robe rested against her upper breast, the edges not quite closed.

“The…breech between you two, over my mother. You stayed apart for nearly thirty years. That’s a lifetime for some people, Damian.”

“There have been times even when we were still together when we were a continent apart for much longer than that. Time is different for us, Riley.” His hands separated the edges of her robe, but she caught at his wrists and looked him in the eyes.

“Have you ever been apart this long because of an argument?” she asked.

His chest lifted and rose. “No.”

She cupped his cheek. “It damaged your relationship,” she said softly. “Whether you want to admit that or not. You can’t just walk back in without repairing that damage.”

“I came back. I’m trusting Nicholas to protect you,” Damian said, his voice harsh. “Is that not extending the olive branch?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Now Nicholas must take the branch back.”

His fingers curled into fists around the front of her robe, and she could feel the tendons and muscles in his wrists under her own hands stretch and flex. “You’re making me feel very…young. How do you propose that Nick take back the branch, Riley?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have all the answers,” she admitted. “It’s a pity you can’t bamboozle him the way you did me, tonight. If you could make Nick feel the way I did, looking down at your body with my knife in your gut, he’d know exactly how he felt about you.” Tears pricked in her eyes as she remembered. “I don’t ever want to go through that again, Damian. Not for real.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her. “You realize that most of what you were feeling was guilt and remorse, my lover?”

His lips stole her breath and her response. She wound her arms around his neck, her fingers tangling in his damp hair. Her body pressed up against his and she realized that he had separated the front of her robe after all, for she felt her flesh press against silk.

His hands, the long fingers, circled under her robe, across the skin over the back of her hip, making her hip jut forward and her back arch. Smoothly, his palm slid down to cup her bottom, and he found the lace of her thong.

Gently, he pushed her back so that he could see what the robe had hidden. He pulled the garment from her shoulders and tossed it aside. “Ah…women, I do love their ways.” He let his fingers slide along the edge of her demi-bra, teasing the lace and her flesh at the same time. “That purple looks good on you. It makes your eyes look very green.” His arm curled around her waist, drawing her back against his lean length. “I could inhale you in one breath.” He nuzzled her throat. His tongue swiped her flesh, making her nerves sizzle.

He made her feel so small and delicate with his arm around her that way. She wasn’t petite, but she may as well have been, pulled up against him like that. Damian was a big man. Tall, with shoulders and chest in proportion to his height. She was quite powerless with her breasts crushed against his chest, and the maelstrom of sensations his mouth was setting off made sure she wasn’t about to try anything else. She melted against him. Her pussy was on fire, pressed against him as it was, and the pressure on her clit was making it ache with need.

His lips lifted to her ear. “Do you trust me, Riley? Will you try, tonight?”

She swallowed. “I’ll try,” she agreed, the best she could truthfully give him.

He turned her in his arm so that her back was pressed against him, and his fingers spread out over her abdomen, like they were tasting her flesh. She drew in a shaky breath. He had moved her like she was a doll and weighed nothing. “You could snap my neck any time you wanted, couldn’t you?” she breathed.

“I would prefer you forget that,” Damian murmured. “I don’t want you afraid of me.” He stroked, sending ripples across her abs as her nerves responded.

Riley let her eyes close. “I don’t fear you, Damian. I wouldn’t be here if I did.”

His fingers brushed across her cheekbone. “Then there’s trust there, after all.”

She opened her eyes again and turned her head to look at him. He was smiling.

Riley shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Nick was wrong tonight. One hundred and eighty degrees wrong about you.” He put her back on the quilt, on her knees, and caught her face in his hands and kissed her. It was no simple smack on the lips. It was a deeply emotional, heartfelt wordless expression that still left her confused.

He rested his hands on her shoulders, his thumbs stroking her jaw. “Apart from hunters and humans who have lived and walked in the underworld for years, there are two sorts of humans, Riley. One type, when they learn of vampires, when they meet us, blank out the knowledge and treat us as just another type of human. So we stay human as much as we can around them and don’t call attention to our vampiric qualities, because to do so tends to make that type of person jittery, or just plain afraid of us. The other type of person, the very rare person, can truly accept us for what we are. That sort of human actually sees us as different when they look at us. But not as freaks, or something to fear, but they never forget that we are not really human, either.”

His thumb touched her lips. “That’s you, Riley. Nicholas assumed you were the normal sort, the type that could not grasp my age, who would hate that Nick and I had lived so long and had known your mother as a child. But you understand. You accept it all, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” Riley frowned. “I’m not even sure why you’re surprised about it. Nick said ‘deal with it,’ so I did. I didn’t realize that…” she wrinkled her nose over the bad grammar, “not-dealing-with-it was so common.”

Damian laughed, a carefree sound, and spoke a sentence that was not English.

“What was that?”

“My birth language,” he said. “The Greek that was spoken in Sparta. Historians would have me locked up inside a language laboratory for years if they heard it.” He grinned. “I’ve forgotten more than I’ve retained, now, it has been that long—and there are none now who speak it, other than me.” He touched his forehead to hers. “I said that you are the sort of treasure men, once they have seen you for what you are, go mad and die for need of you.”

“Mortal men,” she corrected. “But that’s not you,” she added as his lips came against hers.

His hand held the back of her head. “Thank the fates for that, or I would not be here now, doing this to you,” he said against her mouth and thrust his tongue inside.

Riley moaned at the rush of hunger and need that pushed through her with the invasion of his tongue. Damian seemed suddenly eager and less controlled than before, as if the revelation that she really did understand his true nature was arousing to him. And perhaps it was. It would be exciting to find someone who accepted you for what you were. God knew she would be thrilled to discover someone wanted to fuck her because of what went on in her mind, rather than how she looked.

Riley gasped and pulled her mouth away from Damian, staring at him. She could feel her whole body trembling as she processed her own thoughts properly, once more. Damian
did
want her for her mind. He wanted her
because
she accepted him for what he was, because she wanted him, because she was a hunter—or would be once Nick trained her, and even because Nick wanted her, too. He wanted her for a lot of complicated reasons, including simply because she was a part of his world. But nowhere in there did he want her because she was a “beauty,” a sex object that he wanted to collect.

Damian stroked her jaw with his thumb. “Everything all right?”

“Everything’s just fine. Better than fine. Almost perfect,” she assured him. “Fuck me, Damian. Like there’s no tomorrow.”

“There’s always a tomorrow, my lover, and you will grow to appreciate that fact by and by.” He picked her up and put her on the quilts, farther away from him. “Don’t move.”

Her heart skittered. “Where are you going?” she asked as he stood up.

“Nowhere. Shhh.” He looked down at her, his black eyes smoldering with the pent-up arousal she had sensed a moment before. She had guessed right. Her total acceptance of his nature
had
unleashed a higher level of pleasure for him.

Damian untied the silk belt on his robe, shrugged the garment from his shoulders and tossed it onto the sofa next to hers. He was gloriously naked beneath the robe and his shoulders and chest gleamed in the low lights. For the first time, she saw all of his body at once. There were scars. Everywhere. Small ones, mostly, but they began on his upper thighs and stretched up to just below his heart. She counted a dozen before she gave up.

He had wanted her to see them and accept them. They were part of him, part of his heritage.

“Did you get those before you became vampire?” she asked.

“I was a warrior before I became a vampire. Now, if I am wounded, I heal cleanly.” He touched the place where her knife had slid into his stomach that evening. “There is no sign of the damage caused by your knife anymore.”

She moved forward and touched a puckered scar on his thigh. “I want the story of each and every one of them, eventually. Will you tell me?” Her fingers were mere inches from his cock, which was throbbing with rushing blood and arousal. She looked up at Damian’s face. His eyes had narrowed with a deceptively sleepy look as he watched what her fingers were doing.

“Yes,” he said after a perceptible pause and she heard him swallow.

Inspired by that purely human sound, she let her fingers drift over to his testicles and stroke and squeeze them. Damian sighed.

BOOK: Beauty's Beasts
5.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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