Cora made a soft mewing sound, and I gathered her against me. Her body, still wasted with sickness, trembled against my own, her coat and our clothes the thinnest of barriers between us. The small of her back seemed made for my hand, and she tilted her head back into my hold as I slid the fingers of my other hand through her hair.
“You should have gone the first time,” I told her, though nothing in the world could now make me let her go. “I shouldn’t have come up here with you.”
As if it made a difference anymore what I should have done. As if it would change what I was doing now.
“I know,” she breathed.
I kissed her then, kissed her more deeply than I had since her conversion, and she gasped against my mouth, the sound of it sending the blood roaring in my ears and throbbing through my veins. Her mouth begged me to enter it, and I did, stroking her with my tongue as she shook in my arms with the force of her own need.
Images of all that I wanted to do to her flashed through my mind—things that I already knew were in our future as well as things that never would be. I could hear her voice in my imagination, crying out, screaming, the smell of her flesh and her desire and her blood all mingling together until I had to break off for fear that I would no longer know what was real.
She clung to my jacket, protesting my retreat, however slight, and I felt myself poised upon the edge of a razor, and on either side lay our destruction.
“Too long,” I whispered into her hair.
What a hard and brutal path we had before us, though she knew none of that yet. I had thought, foolishly, that once I had a bond, I would be saved—that as long as I was far away while the bond was firming, the last of the dangers would be over.
But the truth was that I should have been dead. I was too old, had been too far gone, and now, with a cognate, I wanted too badly the things that I could not possibly ever have. The dark things. The wrong things.
“Dorian—” Cora cut herself off as if she didn’t even know what she’d intended to say, my name a plea on her lips.
As she would beg me for everything, until the final end.
I could not choke back the bark of black laughter before I kissed her again, reining in the beast inside me so that my touch was the softest of caresses. She kissed me back, her body tuning to mine, her mouth hot and hungry, pushing me on.
I pulled back again long enough to peel out of my jacket and waistcoat in the same motion, discarding them on the floor. Her coat had already fallen from her fingers between us. I pulled her out of the doorway and pushed her against the wall of the bedroom, my arms a prison on either side of her head as she leaned back against its support.
“You want this,” I said flatly. It wasn’t a question, but it was crucially important that I hear from her own lips that it was true. “You want me.”
“Because you want me to,” she said faintly.
How little I had touched her yet—body or mind. How much I had wanted to. “Because of the bond.”
She licked her bottom lip, the merest edge of her tongue flicking out slightly, unconsciously, I was sure. “I wanted you before that.”
“I know,” I said. “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have passed the blood test.”
Her face contorted, frustration, desire, and confusion all battling in her expression. She seemed on the verge of saying something several times before she finally snapped, “Shut up,” and I couldn’t tell whether she was talking more to herself or to me. “Just shut up and kiss me again.”
I did, willingly, for she had given me what I needed—an acknowledgment of her role in what was happing between us. What was going to happen. I would be careful, excruciatingly gentle this first time, even if it killed me. That she was a virgin in the human sense scarcely mattered. That she had never been with an agnate, her agnate before—that did.
I took her mouth harder this time, shoving her back against the unforgiving wall. She pressed up against me, her hips grinding into my body, and I pushed my knee between her legs, separating them and pressing my thigh against the heat there. My cock ached with the need to bury itself in her.
She moaned and ground harder, the motion of her hips a captive to my caresses. I wanted to take her there, to tear off her clothes and have her scream my name against the wall.
And I would. One day, but not now. Not yet.
I kissed her lips, her jaw, the sweet curve of her neck where I had drunk before as she arched it into my mouth. Then I pulled back, dropping my hands to her hips to tug her turtleneck out of her pants, and she made a strangled noise of protest.
“Your shirt,” I said in explanation.
She reached down instantly and pulled it over her head and off, flinging it aside in the same rough motion. Then she met my gaze, and her entire body stiffened, a bright blush creeping up her cheeks as she stood there in her white knit bra and gray pants.
Did she not understand how beautiful she was to me? As painful as it was to see her ribs telegraphed so clearly through her skin, she was still perfect. Every mole, every freckle, every unruly hair that stood up from the static of the shirt being dragged over her head—I loved them all.
Or perhaps that was exactly why she was self-conscious. Her hand strayed up, drifting from her belly across her breasts to her neck, where her fingers stopped, half-fearfully, half-expectantly touching her skin.
“No blood, Cora,” I told her, catching that hand and pulling it down again. “Not today.”
No blood. Only her body and mine, entwined as they were meant to be. My hands memorized the texture of her skin, the too-sharp nip of her waist. I skimmed up to the slight swell of her breast, and I felt her nipple harden under the touch of my palm with her desire for me as her body yielded to mine.
I breathed into her hair, and she gave a tiny sigh. Nuzzling her neck, I whispered, “Tell me you want this. Tell me it is your own free will.” Tell me that I am still on the path to redemption and not to hell….
“I do. It is.” Those four words, those tiny words, let out so softly that they were the merest whisper, burned like a brand to my brain.
Yet they were meaningless on their own. I knew they were, because I could make her want to say them if I chose. I could make her want anything. I hoped, I prayed, that I wasn’t deceiving myself.
Consent had been important. So was this. And the stakes were even higher now.
I laughed—laughed with the circles in which I was spinning, the unknowability of the truth. But there was no more that could be done, and so I pushed back her hair and kissed her softly just below the ear, then harder, working my way down to the too-fragile line of her collarbone.
I could make her come with only a touch of my fingers on her wrist and a stroke of my mind on hers. But I wasn’t going to do that. I would not tear the bond open that wide. That way lay madness. I would hold back even if it killed me. She might burn for me, but I would not quench her desire with annihilation.
She made a tiny noise, and I slid my other hand up behind her to the fastening of her bra, which I loosened with a quick twist. Even as she sucked in a quick breath of surprise, my hand on her breast pushed away the fabric of the bra to cup her hot, bare flesh.
Mine. The fierceness of the thought pushed all else away. Mine, now and forever.
I slid my other hand down her back to take the curve of her buttocks, urging her hips to rock harder against my leg as I caught the tight nub of her nipple between my fingers.
What I wanted to do…. I could not stop myself from tightening my hand, feeling the pain twist inside her into a sweetly edged pleasure that flowed through her body back into mine. I pushed her higher up the wall with my leg until her feet dangled and her breasts were high enough that my descending kisses could reach them. I worked my mouth across her skin with slow deliberation, loving the taste of it, loving the swelling curve of her flesh and the paleness of her areola around the darker pink of her nipple. I kissed a circle around it as her hands threaded through my hair, urging me on. But it wasn’t until the end of each hissing breath had the slightest whimper in it that I took the hard peak of it into my mouth.
She arched hard against me then, the rocking of her hips almost frantic. I felt her come, the undertow of her climax rippling through her body and into mine, and I felt a wash of victory at what I had called from her.
So long. It had been so very, very long. I was playing with fire, but I had gone much too far to let go now.
As her small, rippling orgasm receded, I swept her up into my arms and carried her to the bed. She was as light as a whisper, a wisp of a woman, pared down to far too little.
In that moment, as I set her on the edge of the bed, I knew that her slight frame was the only thing standing between me and oblivion.
I pulled my tie loose and began working the buttons down my shirt, and as I did, she leaned forward and tugged the tail of my shirt out of my waistband and unfastened it from the bottom, her hands trembling as she worked. My hands met hers halfway down, and I caught them, kissing them each in turn as she looked at me, her face twisted with yearning.
Two twists to free the cuff buttons, and the shirt was off. I gathered her body to meet my mouth as I came down to claim hers, to claim it forever with my touch.
I pushed her back onto the bed with the weight of my body, and she went willingly, her hands dragging at me as her hips arched towards me. I popped open the button of her pants and tugged open the fly, and then my hands skimmed over to catch the waistband of her pants and underwear together and drag them off as she wriggled her hips to help.
I straightened look at her, to feast my eyes as I would soon take her flesh. Her skin was pink—not with self-consciousness this time but the heat of her desire. She was everything I could have wanted, from the waving mass of her brown hair, inelegantly cut, to her brown eyes, now dark with yearning, to the scant swelling of her breasts and the neat, tightly curled nest of hair below. She shivered, and I caught the back of her neck in one hand and slid the other hand down, across her belly and lower.
Her thighs were wet with her need, and she sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes going wide and her thighs clenching around my leg between her knees. But even as her legs tightened, her hands on my arms tightened, too, as if to pull me against her.
I watched her face’s delicious contortions as I slid a finger along her slick opening, wetting it before I found her clit. Her brow knitted as my finger touched it, then twisted more as I began to roll it against her soft mound. Her hands around my biceps grew tighter and tighter until her nails bit hard into my skin.
And then I ducked my head to her neck, and she let out a small moan before I silenced it with my kiss, which she returned with a hot desperation. Her thighs loosened and she rocked her hips into my hand as a tiny shiver went through her.
Cora was panting against my shoulder, and I could feel the tension twisting hard inside her body as my fingers pushed her onward. She was completely mine now, every nerve, every shudder that rocked her body belonging to me. I could feel her teetering at the very edge of another climax, and I slid my slick finger into her heat, catching against the smooth place inside as I continued to stroke her clit with my thumb.
And she came. She came hard, grinding her hips into my hand, making a strangled, gasping noise as I pushed her hard into the depths of the orgasm, reveling in my power over her body.
“Dorian,” she said as she came down again—begged, because that’s what my name was, a plea for me. A plea for more.
I pulled away long enough to loosen my belt with fingers still slick from being inside her and shed the rest of my clothes. God, but I was hard, so hard that the pulse of my blood almost hurt. I lowered myself over her again, and this time, she closed her eyes as my fingers spread her, one sliding deep into her heat as my thumb found her clit again, my cock pressing against the smoothness of her leg.
There would be pain later, but not today. It was too heady a brew to begin with. And so I slid a second finger in beside the first as her muscles adjusted to them both, pressing and stroking to the rhythm of my thumb until she was shivering around them. I pulled down, stretching against her as I stroked her, and she whimpered, on the verge once again.
I withdrew my hand and angled my hips between her knees, resting on my elbows on either side of her head. Her body clenched, and her eyes flew open again.
They were wide and wild with a fearful arousal, a kind of terrified eagerness at least as much at what she was choosing as at what I was going to do to her.
Finally. Though I had only met her a scant few weeks before—though I hardly knew her at all beyond the mere fact of her bond to me—it seemed like my entire life had been traveling toward this moment of claiming her forever. And it took all my will not to wrench her legs apart and drive into her without mercy.
But I said, “Open for me, Cora.”
Her thighs around me loosened. As I slid up her body, she lay completely rigid and frozen except for the tiny, panting gasps, her fingernails raking slow lines along my shoulders. As my cock found the slick entrance amid the nest of curls, I met her eyes, and she swallowed hard, the vulnerability in her face making her more naked than the bare expanse of her flesh.
“Trust me,” I said.
Trust me in this, and I will hope to prove myself worthy of it.
She said nothing, but with a tiny whimpering noise she tilted her hips fractionally toward me, and I slid into her with careful control, stretching the slight barrier at her entrance as she hissed through her teeth. Her heat clasped me as her legs tightened around me again—to invite me inside her now rather than to shut me out. She shuddered as I came to rest belly to belly, shuddered with a thrill that I could hear in the catch in her fast breathing.
My cock throbbed—with the need to take her, to plunge in and out of her body, to claim every last centimeter of her as my own as I spread her to me.
“Open more,” I ordered, urging her knees apart with the hand that was still slick from being inside her.
Letting out a soft breath of air, she obeyed, letting me slide in the last fraction of an inch until our pelvises met. The heat of her filled my head with a swirling rush, and I lowered my head to whisper into her ear as she panted and shivered with reaction.
“Come with me, Cora.”
I began to move with great deliberation, no pounding against her as I wanted to but stroking deeply and slowly. I would be gentle. Careful. To rush in too fast might leave no place to go but the ultimate, the unthinkable.
Her body was electric under mine, moving, rocking, responding as if she were an instrument under my hands, and I gritted my teeth against the effort of keeping my promise to myself—my silent promise to her.
But I could still make her come, hard and deep like she never had before, like she never could except with me. I could mark her body with my touch as surely as if I’d branded her. Even as she grew wetter, she grew tighter, too, clasping my girth with every stroke. I increased my pace, gradually but relentlessly, as her breathing broke apart into little ragged gasps.
I drove her onward and slid a hand down between us, against her soft belly and lower until I could catch her clit between two fingers and stroke it to the rhythm of my thrusts as her fingers dug in and she made small sounds with every ragged breath.
And then she came hard around me, bucking into my body with the waves of her orgasm. Her face was as beautiful as I’d known it would be, flushed and twisted with pleasure, her hair a wild mass and the cords in her neck and the tendons in her arms standing out under her skin as if her body almost could not contain it. She keened out her pleasure, and the sound went straight through my head and down my spine into the base of my cock and I came, too, so hard that it pulsed up into my temples.
Finally, when I was done and she was lying panting, limp and wrung out on the coverlet, I slowed—slowed and finally stopped.