Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 (29 page)

Definitely not a time for him to play teasing games in the back of his Bentley.

But also, I realized, definitely not a time that he could resist...even if I wanted him to.

Dorian’s hand found my thigh, and a small spike of desire went through me, edged with the intensity that buzzed from him to me. He held my gaze as he slowly inched the hem of my skirt upward until his hand rested on the lace edge of the thigh-high. I shook my head again more vigorously, but my hand over his didn’t try to push him away. Even my stockings itched now, setting my teeth on edge. He slid a finger under the top edge of the stocking, tracing a line across my bare flesh and leaving an irritated, tingling awareness in its wake.

I bit my lip and I cast a look at the chauffeur, but he didn’t seem to notice what was going on in the backseat—or was at least well-trained enough to feign ignorance.

Dorian did nothing more for a long time, his tracing fingers working back and forth across my thigh until I thought I would scream. My legs were slick with my need, the hot smell of sex filling the small cabin. But I could neither urge him on nor make him stop. I seemed trapped in the moment, the frustration of it, as it wound tighter and tighter inside me.

I could watch him, though, watch his beautiful, predatory face. The face of a killer. Of my angel. I could watch the smile curve those sensuous lips, those icy blue eyes locking with mine under the black wings of his brows as he watched what he was doing to me and drank it up.

My hand tightened over his as he slid it higher until it met the elastic edge of my panties. He hooked one finger under it, traced up and down the crease of my inner thigh, chafing against the damp skin. My heart was beating wildly now, skittering out of control, and I felt the heat build between my legs, weeping with my need for him. My center, my legs, my clit—they all ached for him. I hated and loved it at the same time, forcing myself to hold still, to not tilt into his hand in invitation. I couldn’t wait for the torture to end—but I wouldn’t take one step to end it.

His fingers slid farther under the damp fabric, and I caught my breath as he teased along my folds, my hand tightening around his wrist until my knuckles went white.
Oh, please,
I thought.
Please, please, now, please, don’t—

I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask for. I didn’t have words for it. The energy crackled off me, from my body to his and back, until it almost hurt.

And then without warning, he slid one finger deep inside as his thumb found my clitoris.

I bucked forward against the seatbelt and I cut off a gasp, closing my eyes against the wall of sensation that surged out from his touch. I felt my entire body clench around him, concentrated around his touch inside me, warring with the irritating gusts of heated air and the scraping of my clothes’ seams and the against my skin. Everything but him was unbearable. And the only relief was him.

He slid in a second finger beside the first and began to move them. I looked down to see my skirt, tumbled up into my lap, and his wrist emerging from under its edge. From between my thighs. My brain almost could not take it in, the sight of him under my skirt and the feel of him inside me. I felt his darkness then, the seething power of it, sliding out from him to touch my raw brain—oh, God, not to change me but to do something so that, for a moment, I was a part of the darkness, too.

I wanted to come. I wanted to come so hard that I would scream my throat hoarse. I reached for the climax, clawed for it. I didn’t care about the driver in the car anymore. At that moment, I wouldn’t have cared if I were in front of an audience of thousands. But Dorian matched me perfectly, and every time I got close, he tore my satisfaction away, stilling or speeding or shifting his hands until my fingernails dug deep, angry marks into his skin.

The car stopped, and all at once, Dorian pulled away, and I was left, gasping, desperate, and bereft.

“We’re here,” he said softly.

The words hardly registered. My gaze rose to his face, trying to wring some sense from them, and then I looked beyond him, out his window to see a forest of masts against the sky. A marina. We were in the heart of the District, just steps away from the edge of the Potomac, and we were also at a marina.

Dorian opened his door, and the sudden blast of daylight shook some semblance of reason back into my head. Flustered, I slid on my sunglasses and fumbled with my buckle and coat. The chauffeur was at my door by the time I got my coat buttoned, and I stepped on wobbling legs out into the brilliant afternoon light.

“This way,” Dorian said, offering me his arm as if nothing had passed between us—except for the tension in his body, striking a harmonic that made mine hum in sympathy.

Why?
I wanted to ask. What was this new thing between us; what was he trying to do to me, and why? Was he punishing me? If he’d wanted that, surely he would have done it the night before. Was he punishing himself? Or was he nothing more than a vessel for the buzzing, saw-edged energy?

Not knowing what else to do, I took his arm, aching and frustrated as he led me down a sidewalk toward the boat slips, every step chafing the swollen sensation between my legs.

Even in my befuddled state, I knew immediately which boat must be his. It was at the end of a dock and was easily twice the size of any of the others—a huge white yacht that towered over the gray marina.

“You really don’t do many things by halves, do you?” I said as we began walking between the neat white lines of sailboats and day cruisers toward the monstrosity at the end.

I spoke more acerbically than I’d meant to. But he’d teased me into a pitch of arousal that I couldn’t even articulate.

“That’s not something we agnates are known for,” Dorian returned, an edge in his voice that matched what I felt.

To go all the way, to the heights that only he could propel me from where I was now...I could hardly imagine it even as I wanted nothing more.

The gangway was already down, and we were greeted at the top by a young man—well, I corrected, thinking of my conversation with Jane earlier that day, a young-
looking
man—in a white uniform who offered us flutes of champagne. Dorian plucked one up, but I passed. I would rather face a group of strange agnates stone-cold sober, I decided.

“Your guests are in the salon, Mr. Thorne, Ms. Shaw,” the man said.

“Thank you,” Dorian said.

“Are we late?” I whispered as we walked along the deck. I looked back to see the gangway being pulled up behind us.

“Not at all,” Dorian said. “They knew when we would be arriving. We’ll meet them in a moment. But first—”

He opened a door and pulled me in with him, hitting the light as the door shut behind us. It was a small utility closet, a mop and bucket leaning against the wall.

“What—?” I started.

But he had already turned me to face him, plucking off my sunglasses and setting them on a shelf with his and the champagne flute before pinning me against the door and lifting my skirt to yank my panties down, his hand sliding between my legs again as his mouth came down over mine. My purse dropped nervelessly from my fingers.

I knew what was coming, I craved it, but the feeling of his fingers plunging deep inside me was still shocking. It ripped a whimper from my throat, and I gave it to him, gladly, gave my surrender to his mouth that covered mine. It had to end, this torture that rasped across my nerves. I was so swollen with need that when he slid a third finger in, next to the other two, I felt like I would break from the fullness. Still he pushed me to the edge, to the edge and not over. And I didn’t know whether I was going to die or kill him.

Knocking off his hat, I grabbed his hair and pulled his mouth down harder against mine, giving myself to him utterly even as I demanded every bit of him in return. And he obliged, his lips against mine, his tongue deep in my mouth, his fingers inside me, moving, stroking.

And then he let me come, and the force of it almost took me away, my mind bobbing in its riptide. My brain went, my knees went, my body seemed to fly apart even inside its skin. And he pulled back even as I was still shattered, and I cried out again as his fingers slid out of me, leaving a swollen emptiness, a hollow fullness in their wake. He caught my wrists together in his hand that was wet from me, pinning them above my head against the door as I struggled to make my legs and feet and knees work together as they should to support me.

“As you said, I’m not much for half measures,” he said, laughter in his voice as he loosened his belt and fly. It was a sharp, ragged laughter, a cutting one, and it made me shudder again.

He jerked my panties off, tearing them, and I couldn’t even think a protest as I finally managed to make my legs support me again. But only for the moment, because he lifted me up against the door, his hands boosting me up under my thighs so my legs wrapped around his waist, opening me to him completely.

But I was the one who reached down, who guided his cock to my most vulnerable parts, who welcomed the thick length of him into me until our pelvises met.

“Kiss me,” I begged. “Kiss me again.”

Dorian did as I throbbed around him, wild with the feel of him inside me, needing his mouth, his lips, his tongue, which stroked me until I wished I would die from it.

Then he began to move, thrusting into me, pushing me mercilessly against the door. And all I wanted was more, closer to the place where pleasure edged into pain, until that buzzing irritation was obliterated in the sheer physicality of his body driving into mine.

There was no finesse to it. It was fast and hard and dirty, and my center twisted and tightened until it tore and dropped me into the hot embrace of the climax that rippled down through my aching clitoris into my center and pounded up into my head. He held me then, pushing me deeper into the heat of it, until I thought I would come apart.

Until all I wanted was to come apart.

Just as the last echoes left me, his frame gave a great shudder, and he came, too, deep inside of me as I panted against his shoulder. Slowly, he lowered me to the floor, then took a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and kissed me again, gently, as he used it between my legs to remove what he had left there.

“Cora, if you had any idea—” The words came out in a fast, rasping whisper, almost tumbling over one another until he bit off the last one. They were still rough, hard, despite the tenderness of his touch.

I just sagged against his shoulder, my mind blank, my body still throbbing with his contact. He’d branded me, just like I’d been afraid of all along. Branded my sex. Branded my soul.

What had just happened? How had it happened? I was standing there in the mop closet with a vampire, still Cora Shaw, but somehow not the same. Not ever the same.

Dorian straightened and folded up the handkerchief before making it disappear back into his pocket. He stooped and retrieved my panties and handed them to me. But they were now torn, useless.

“You’re rough on lingerie,” I observed, managing to find my voice. It was still my voice, saying the sorts of things I would say. “Really, on all kinds of clothes.”

He took the panties back and dropped them into the mop bucket. “I can get you more.”

“Yes, but right now, I don’t have any,” I pointed out.

He flashed that smile again, that peculiar, edged one that was almost manic. “A bonus.”

Right. I straightened my clothing as best as I could, exquisitely aware of the fabric of the skirt against my naked rear. I replaced my sunglasses and tried to check the position of my hat by feel, but as Dorian opened the door onto the deck, I had the sinking sensation that the evidence of what we had done would still be written on our faces.

I cast a glance at Dorian, who was sipping his champagne as if nothing had happened.

Well, at least my face, then.

Damn him.

D
orian opened another door, and I discovered that the salon was a large living area decorated in pale sand colors along severe modern lines, the perimeter surrounded by tinted windows that looked out over the Potomac on three sides.

There was a small group gathered there, agnatic power palpable among them, and I froze in the doorway as the men in the room stood up. Smoothly, Dorian took my arm and led me inside, and I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders next to him.

No more cowering. No more quaking. Whatever happened, I was done with that.

A woman in a steward’s white uniform stepped forward to take our outerwear, and I surrendered my coat, hat, sunglasses, and purse.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Dorian said, ushering me forward, “Allow me to present Cora Shaw. You all met at least briefly at her Lesser Introduction, but I doubt that many lasting impressions were made at the time.”

Ten. There were ten guests in the room, five men and five women, and at a swift assessment, I decided that they were divided evenly between agnates and cognates.

Dorian was, I realized, making an effort to introduce me to other couples. His friends, I supposed. The first vampire party I’d attended had been a big society affair, to which every agnate in the region had to be invited or risk a mortal insult. Dorian had warned me then explicitly that not all the agnates would be like him—and how right he had been. I’d seen things that night that still frightened me.

This handpicked group must be the kinds of relationships between agnate and cognate that he wanted me to see. And they seemed, from the carefully open smiles that a few of them wore, to be determined to make a good impression.

I recognized only two of the guests: Jean and his cognate Hattie. Hattie worked for Dorian in his research lab, and she’d been the doctor in attendance when Dorian had bitten me and caused my conversion and bond. I’d met her again at the first party I’d attended, along with Jean, who’d seemed to treat her with indulgent condescension.

Dorian made quick introductions. Will and Elizabeth, Dalton and Marie, Raymond and Francisca, Jean and Hattie, Oleg and Svetlana. I nodded to each and tried very hard to match names to faces, but I was pretty sure I had all but Jean and Hattie mixed up almost immediately.