In three days, Nicholas barely moved from the sofa.
He wasn’t just mourning. He wasn’t moving at all. Stone statues showed more life. He needed neither food nor sleep, and was able to stay completely and utterly still. So he remained exactly where he sat for hours at a time, focused inward, not speaking.
Riley moved around the apartment, at times almost forgetting he was there, so motionless was he.
After three days of this, she became worried, though. She knew that Damian had forced Nick to agree not to do something stupid like end his own existence—did vampires even call it suicide? But this motionlessness was not living, either. Was she even being fair, though? Was three days enough to recover from the loss of a relationship that had lasted for centuries? How could she know?
Finally, she went with her gut. She just knew that she had seen the raw human emotions on Nick’s face when Damian lay dying, and now she did not. He was locking them away and that was not a good thing. Not even for a centuries old vampire who should know better.
But how could she possibly crack open his tough old shell, when he knew every strategy she could employ and would recognize it before she even began?
Finally, Riley stumbled over the answer when she sat at the table eating her lonely breakfast, as she watched Nicholas sitting motionless on the sofa, the blue eyes staring into nowhere.
The eyes.
Her heart jumped as she realized she had been staring at the solution all along. Moving casually, as she had been for the last three days, she made her preparations. She showered, dressed in Nick’s green silk robe and nothing else, put on her make-up and a light touch of scent.
Then she settled on the sofa next to him. Her heart, her entire body, was strumming with tension. With need.
She placed her hands on either side of his face and turned his head to look at her. He didn’t resist her touch, but his eyes looked right through her. She shivered at the touch of his gaze.
“Look at me, Nick,” she commanded.
The expression in his eyes didn’t change. Did he even hear her?
“I miss Damian, too, you know. Look at me, goddamn you.”
His eyes focused on her. She could almost feel the surprise and indignation there. But he remained silent. She kept her hands on his face in case he tried to look away and break the direct contact of her gaze, once he realized what she was doing. It was a futile gesture, really. He was so much stronger than her. But over the last three days he had proved that in some ways, she was the strong one.
His eyes stayed locked on hers and she realized with a start that she didn’t know when Nicholas had last fed, or when he needed to feed again. Did stress make him hungry? Was she baiting a thirsty vampire? Too late, far too late to reconsider the wisdom of what she was doing.
His eyes were so blue, she realized with a dazed mind. Mid-winter cloudless day blue. With a start, she realized it had begun. She was caught in his gaze. Drawn into him. Her heart was trying to climb through her chest.
“I can hear your blood pumping through your arteries,” Nick said. His voice was thin, croaky from not being used for three days.
Riley moaned. His fangs were descending. The direct gaze was a primary challenge that a vampire would first tackle by feeding upon the victim. They only subsumed it sexually to avoid the complications of being caught with a dead, drained body. Nick wouldn’t care about that in his current mood.
She licked her lips, trying to tamp down the beginning curlicues of fear. Nick wouldn’t hurt her, she tried to tell herself. “Nick, I need you,” she whispered helplessly. Truthfully. It was an appeal to his better nature. His human nature. And it was a gamble. He could choose to be offended by her need and her essential weakness.
Or he could respond to it, his male ego reaching out to her as she desperately wanted him to. She kept her gaze locked on his eyes. “Feed on me if you have to, Nick. I don’t care anymore. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
His eyes shifted. Focused on her face. His gaze moved down, to the base of her throat and the pulse there. His hand caught in her hair and her head was slowly, inexorably, pulled backward to expose her throat. The strength in his grip told her he could have easily snapped her head back and broken her neck, instead of bending her head back. She blinked up at the ceiling and felt his lips touch her throat. They slid around to rest over her carotid artery and she felt the brush of fangs.
Her heart was roaring inside its cage, banging against her ribs. She thought it might explode if it beat any harder. She could feel its throb in her temples.
“You don’t lie as well as I do,” Nick murmured, his lips brushing against her throat. “Your body gives you away.” He licked her throat. “You no more want to die than I do.” He dropped her onto the sofa on her back and kneeled over her. His fangs were fully extended. Fury made his expression thundery.
“You don’t want to die?” she asked, astonished.
“What do you want, Riley? Why are you bothering me?”
“You haven’t moved for three days.”
“So?” He sat up on his heels, releasing her.
Relieved, Riley struggled up into a sitting position, too. “I was worried!”
“Why?” His fangs, she was glad to note, had retracted.
“Well…because…” She bit her lip. “For god’s sake, Nick. Your lover, your best friend, just died. You go into a funk for three days, and I’m not supposed to worry?”
“I don’t want you to do anything for me,” he said, his words precise. “You’ve done enough already.”
She caught her breath as pure hurt ripped through her. It had never occurred to her that Nick might in any way hold her responsible for what had happened to Damian.
The hurt had to be vented. Five days ago she might have stamped her foot. Or slapped him. Five days ago, she had taken her knife out and jammed it into Damian’s stomach. But that was five days and a lifetime of learning ago.
Now, she clenched her fist and sucker-punched Nick on the jaw with an upper cut that she didn’t telegraph. Of course, it barely made him stagger, but he dipped a finger into his mouth and it came out bloody. She’d made him bite his own tongue.
Good.
She picked up her coat. The black one. The cherry-colored one was covered in Damian’s blood. Silently, she headed for the door.
Nick’s fingers dug into her shoulder, halting her. “You can’t leave,” he told her.
“Watch me.”
“Azazel will be monitoring the apartment.”
“I don’t give a shit about Azazel. I’m not staying here with you any more, Nick.” She didn’t turn to look at him despite the pressure of his hand on her shoulder.
“Riley…”
“No!” She shrugged off his hand. “If I’m so despicable to you, I’ll remove myself.”
“You’re going to leave wearing just my robe?”
“I don’t care!” she railed. “I just want to get out of here.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“And you’re being an asshole.” She spun to face him. Nick was propped against the back of the sofa, his long legs crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed, too. “Damian would hate you for this,” she told him.
A shadow crossed his face. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” His voice was low.
“You think just because you slept with him for a few centuries longer than I did, you’re the expert?” Riley realized her cheeks were wet, and mentally shrugged. This was overdue, she knew. She put her back to the apartment door. “There were things about Damian you didn’t know at all. Things you couldn’t possibly know. That bothers you, doesn’t it?”
Again, the shadow seemed to ripple across his face.
“He left you,” she said deliberately.
Nick licked his lips.
“You couldn’t protect Tally. Damian loved her and you let him down.”
Nick’s arms dropped from their protective cross. “Stop this, Riley.”
Riley dropped her coat and put her hands on her hips. “Damian chose me, Nick. Me.”
He moved fast. Vampire speed. Suddenly she was pressed against the door, lifted up so that her eyes were level with Nick’s and held there with his body pinning hers, his hips against hers, his hands around her waist. There was such power holding her there, she knew he could keep her like that all day if necessary. His gaze locked with hers.
“If he chose you,” Nick murmured, his voice resonating through her head and her chest, down to her toes. It made her body quiver in response. “Then why are you wearing my robe, hmmm? And why did he not mark you in all the time he was with you?”
His tongue swiped over her cheeks, gathering her spent tears. It was strangely erotic. By the time his lips pressed against hers, her body was tense with anticipation and the touch of his lips made her gasp and shudder. It left her weak and almost totally defenseless.
“I hate you,” she told him.
“No, you don’t,” Nick replied with complete certainty. “Kiss me.”
She shook her head. That would leave her without any shield at all. It would ruin the last of her crumbling senses and she needed what she had left to deal with Nick. He was too canny. Too old.
He was watching her. Probably reading all her thoughts from the expressions on her face, the arousal of her body and her pheromones. It wasn’t fair.
Life wasn’t fair, she reminded herself. She had wanted to wake Nick from his three day stupor. Be careful what you wish for, she thought ironically.
Riley kissed him, giving it everything she had. She wound her arms around his neck and thrust her fingers into his hair. She let herself go deliberately, sinking into the joy of kissing Nicholas Sherwood. She thrust her tongue into his mouth and gave her soul, her heart, her entire attention to the pleasure of the moment. She soaked up every tiny detail of the experience. Her breasts pressing against him, her nipples pushed against the perfect silk of his robe, sandwiched between her and him. The warmth generated between their bodies. The slick moisture building between her legs, the pulse of her clit, which surely Nick must be able to feel with his hypersenses, the quiver of the muscles in her abdomen as they clenched.
Riley brought her legs up and wrapped them around Nick’s hips and pressed herself even tighter against him. The core of her was melting with the heat of her arousal. Pushed up against his pelvis as she was, even he could not fail to notice, especially as the silk robe had fallen away from her thighs and her naked pussy was pressing up against his stomach. The only thing between their flesh was his clothing.
When at last she lifted her lips away from Nick’s, she was gasping.
So was Nick. He curled his arm around her back to support her, freeing a hand, which he used to cup her face. He pulled her away from the door, carried her across the apartment and laid her down on the bed with surprising gentleness.
“Your body speaks where your words do not, Riley,” he told her, stripping himself of his clothing.
“Not every lustful whim has to be indulged.” Her voice was heavy with arousal.
Nick smiled. “How little you know yourself.”
It didn’t help that he was undressing. Nick was taller than Damian, lean and while Damian had been broader across the shoulder, Nick had sinews and strength to wield a broadsword all day, if it was needed. His thighs were thick with muscle from controlling a horse, and his ass…
She swallowed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
His smile broadened. “What you want me to do. I’m going to make love to you. I’m going to leave you limp and mindless on that bed.”
Her heart leapt and her body with it. She focused on the key words. Make love.
“Why are you being so…nice?”
Nick leaned on the bed with one knee. His cock was already erect and Riley couldn’t help but look at it. And she couldn’t help compare it to Damian’s. Nick’s was longer, but not as thick, she thought. The head was wider, though. It was flaring almost purple at the edges. It looked wickedly enticing.
She looked up. Nick was watching her and she felt her cheeks start to burn.
“You want me to be not nice?” he asked. “Because I can be whatever you want, Riley.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want you to be anything at all,” she said quickly. “If I get to have you at all, Nick, I just want you to be you. Do you even know what that is, anymore?”
He hesitated and she saw that he was genuinely startled. “As in…when I was human?” He laughed. “You would not even understand the language.” He spoke a few words as he moved onto the bed next to her.
She shook her head sadly. “No, I don’t understand,” she said softly, laying her hand on his chest. “But I wish I could.”
He picked up her hand and kissed her fingers. “It’s an ugly language, anyway. Old English isn’t any better than modern English. Norman French was much prettier.” And he spoke another sentence and kissed her forehead.
“Yes, that does sound much nicer,” she agreed. “More musical.”
“You’d be amazed at the barbaric deeds that were done in that musical language,” he told her, tugging at the tie around her waist. It unraveled and the robe fell open and he sighed. His fingers began to stroke up and down the length of her body. “Is that the spell you cast over Damian? You let him be himself? His true self? You accepted him that way?”
“That he was a Spartan? Yes, I understood that. But I didn’t think what I was doing was casting a spell.” She caught her breath as Nick’s hand closed around her breast and the fingers slid up to the peak to tug at the nipple. It was a casual tweak. His hand moved on, downward, to her hip, making her abdomen ripple and her hips jerk. Her pussy clamped and squeezed as he stroked between her thighs. Her breath grew faster.
“You know who I am, too,” Nick said. It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know the details, Nick. But I understand the differences between you and me. I know you’re not human. I know you were alive when Richard the Lionhearted was on the throne. I know that in my bones. It’s not something I will ever forget. I will never treat you as human when there is a need to differentiate.”
“Yet knowing that, you can still lie here and let me touch you,” he said softly.
She looked him in the eye. “Yes.”
He smiled. “There’s no need to challenge me. I already know the truth of it.” He caught her face in his hands. “I’m beginning to understand why Damian could not leave you be.” His face shadowed for a moment. Rippled with grief. Then it was gone. “Come here.”
He tucked his arm under her waist and pulled her underneath him and looked her in the eye. His hand smoothed its way along the side of her hip, down her leg. “Just this once, Riley Carson Connors, I want to be very old-fashioned and traditional. Human, if you will. Do you mind?”
She shook her head. She was afraid to speak. She thought she might cry if she spoke. His request was profoundly moving.
Nick brushed her hair back from her face. “You really are very beautiful,” he said. “I have lived a greater time than all men, so I have seen beauty in every form, and yours outshines them all. I confess, Riley, I have fought harder to deny it and struggled longer against its effects, but even I am not immune. I consider it my staggering good fortune that you choose to be in my bed today.”
He kissed her temple, and Riley reflected that there was not a man on earth who had managed to make her feel like her beauty was a gift and that she had bestowed a favor upon them by sleeping with them. Only Nick, who wasn’t human anymore. For the first time in her life, for one shining moment, her beauty wasn’t a curse. It was actually a positive thing.
She blinked hard. “I thought Englishmen were supposed to be really bad poets?” Her voice was thick with the dammed-back tears.
Nick’s mouth was trailing down her cheekbone to her ear. “And lovers,” he added, and thrust his tongue into her ear. The tip of his tongue circled around the grooves and ridges of her ear as his breath blew softly against it. She began to writhe at the sensations both stimuli were building.
His thigh slipped between hers, pinning her down and pressing against her mons. The pressure against her clit was both pleasurable and a torment. Her hips lifted in reaction.
“Mmm…” Nick murmured in response, his lips closing around the lobe of her ear.
“This is old-fashioned sex?” she said, with a gasp.
“So far,” he agreed. “Lovemaking at its most basic.”
She felt a frisson of surprise touch her again at his use of the word “lovemaking”. Why was she so sensitive about it? He was being old-fashioned, for heaven’s sake. Go with the flow, Riley, she told herself.
“Of course,” he said, his tongue sliding down her neck to swirl over the most sensitive point of her nape, as his hand delicately caressed the underside of her breast, “If I really were human, then this would have to be your wedding night. You would not be in my bed, otherwise.”
“No?” She gasped as his fingers slid over the peak of her breast, tripping over the nipple one finger at a time, tugging on it four times in a row, then back again. Sweet torture.
“A beauty like you would have been carefully marketed out to the highest lords in the land, no matter what the size of her dowry. You would have been brought to my attention, for sure.”
“You…were a lord.” Of course. Of course. The broadsword. His language. She gasped as his teeth pulled at her other nipple. A sharp tug. Then he let it go so he could speak.
“Let us say that the marriage was agreed between us and this is the marriage bed,” he said. “It would, of course, have been a four-poster bed and the curtains would have been drawn all around us.”
“Why?” she asked, and drew in a sharp breath as his leg lifted from between her thighs and was replaced by his hand. His fingers began to stroke the flesh of her thighs, teasing. Her legs fell open, trembling.
“So that the witnesses could remain in the room and hear the taking of your maidenhead.”
Riley lifted her gaze to Nicholas’s eyes. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
He was smiling. “Unfortunately, no. The wedding would have been arranged for the night falling in the middle of your menses cycle, too. Even back then they knew that was when you would have the best chance of getting with child. A child conceived on your wedding night would have been considered a most fortuitous event.”
Riley shivered. There was something in Nick’s face. A shadow. More than grief. An older darkness. But it was gone before she could examine it and his hands were distracting her, teasing her, fluttering against the lips of her pussy.
Her clitoris was screaming for attention. So was her pussy. She needed Nick. Wanted him inside her. This slow, delicate seduction was killing her.
“So you would have to…make love to me in a room full of people?” she breathed.
“It was the way of it then,” he told her. “Just for your wedding night, and just for the first time. Once the bloody sheet had been produced, they would hang it out the window and go away happy.”
She reached up to hold Nicholas’s face, instinct driving her. “Make love to me, my lord. Everyone has gone. It’s just us now.”
Nicholas’s breath caught. Then he kissed her with a passion that was almost blistering in its intensity. It took her breath away. His hand was under her hip, lifting her, holding her against him, and she could feel his cock against her belly, hard and throbbing.
His hand slid under her knee and lifted it. Her leg was draped over his hip. It spread her thighs as she lay on one hip beside him. His fingers curled over her ass. Her pussy squeezed.
And still his kisses continued. Her nipples raked his chest as he plundered her mouth with his.
She felt his cock press against her pussy entrance. The engorged head stretched the entrance and nudged inside.
She gasped into Nick’s mouth as he pushed into her. He thrust his tongue deeper into her mouth, and his fingers gripped her ass as his cock worked its way into her. When he was fully seated inside her, she could feel him pressing against her womb.
He looked into her eyes, inches from his own. “Heavenly,” he murmured.
Her pussy was rippling and clamping around his shaft, milking it. Nicholas’ extended teasing had left her too close to an orgasm. She could feel it building already, gathering and growing.
“Oh, Nick!” she tried to warn him, her hands fluttering at his chest, her eyes widening.
“Shhh…”he said, and pulled his cock from her with inexorable slowness.
Riley writhed and panted, her climax building like a runaway steam train, unstoppable. “Quickly!” she cried.
Nick slid into her again, making her moan at the delicious sensation and the utter desperation she felt. She needed more. More!
He gave another incredibly slow withdrawal and thrust, impaling her with his long cock. Riley was falling to pieces around him, though. She plucked at his chest, clawed at his shoulders and arms, as her climax drew closer, unable to hold it off. Her breathing altered. Disintegrated.
Nick’s fingers nestled up against her clit. Stroked it. “Come for me,” he urged her.
Riley closed her eyes as her orgasm slammed through her. She tried to stay on top of it, to control it by breathing through it.
“Don’t you dare control it,” Nicholas growled in her ear. “Let go while you’re with me.”
She gasped, her eyes opening. Nicholas was watching her as she climaxed, his blue eyes missing nothing.
He kissed her roughly, and his cock slid back into her. “You will scream for me,” he promised her. “You will let go.”
His fingers closed around her clitoris once more as his cock thrust into her. Riley wanted to tell him to give up, that she only ever came once, but his fingers were stroking, milking her clitoris in a way she had never experienced as he pounded into her, thrusting into her and abruptly, she began to tingle with the building waves of a second climax. She gasped, disbelief circling through her.
“Yes, sink into it,” Nick coaxed, his voice low. “Close your eyes. Focus on it.”
Riley caught his gaze. “What are you doing to me?” she moaned.
“What I promised,” he said, his voice rough. He kissed her, as his cock pushed deeper and deeper inside her. “Close your eyes,” he told her.
She closed them, and immediately she could focus on nothing but what his fingers were doing to her clit, and the delicious sensation of his cock sliding in and out of her pussy. The pleasure they created seemed to double just by closing her eyes and she moaned. Her climax built.
Riley gripped the bedcovers, a little frightened by the power of the approaching orgasm. It was building and building, sweeping through her entire body, stealing her breath, locking up her joints, shunting thought aside.
“I’m here,” Nicholas murmured. “Let go. Enjoy it.”
The reassurance was enough. She sank into the approaching climax and truly let herself go. It was for a moment as if the world stopped. Her breathing halted and her body arched. Her pussy clamped hard around Nick’s cock, milking it as he had done to her clitoris, and she heard him grunt softly and felt the spasms of his shaft as he came.
Then the climax peaked in waves of silvery pleasure that shuddered through her and she screamed in a low, hard voice that was utterly unlike her own. She couldn’t draw in a full breath. The climax kept her hovering on peaks of delight as Nicholas toyed with her, until finally, there was simply no more pleasure to be had. She was spent. Replete.
And abruptly sleepy.
She realized she was curled up in Nick’s arms, her head against his chest. His cock was still buried inside her.
His lips pressed against her temple. “Sleep for a while. I’ll go and get some food for you.”
“No, it’s too dangerous,” she protested sleepily as he withdrew from her body.
“For you, maybe. Azazel won’t try for me. It’s you he wants. I’ll be careful.”
A blanket was dropped over her and a pillow placed under her head.
She woke some time later. It was still daylight, so Riley knew that not much time had passed. When she checked the clock over the fireplace, she saw that barely ninety minutes had gone by. It was just after eleven in the morning.
The door to the apartment opened and she realized that the key fitting in the lock was what had woken her. She sat up, bringing the blanket up with her, as Nick stepped in and shut the door, locking it behind him. He was carrying shopping bags of food in one hand.
He was wearing his long black coat, black jeans and Damian’s old teal sweater, which made his eyes look even bluer, if that was possible.
As he turned around from locking the door, he saw her sitting on the bed and paused. “You’re awake. I thought you’d be out for hours yet.” And he smiled.
It struck her with the impact of an earthquake.
She loved him. She loved Nicholas Sherwood with soul-destroying intensity. It was that simple. She wanted to be with him. Always. And she had loved Damian the same way.
She pulled her knees up under the blanket and hugged them. “You know, don’t you?” Her voice shook. She could feel her eyes filling with tears.
Nick’s smile faded. He put the bags on the sofa and crossed over to the bed. He didn’t sit on it. He didn’t try to touch her. “I know,” he agreed. “A human’s pheromones change when they fall in love. Yours have changed.”
“That’s what brought you out of your funk. Not sex at all.”
He studied her. “You make it sound like a bad thing. Love is never a bad thing.”
“Damian said love could be perverted.” Her tears fell then.
“Only between perverted souls. You’re not one of those.”
“Are you?”
“Not if someone like you can love me, Riley.” He took a deep breath, his chest lifting. “You are like a fresh breeze after centuries of despair. You’re hope personified.”
“I’m just a person, Nick. I have faults. Foibles. Don’t make me out to be something I’m not.”
“Oh, I know your human flaws all too well,” he said, with a quick smile. “I love them all.”
“Love?”
“Did you think you were the only one who toppled into this?” he asked softly.
Abruptly, the meanings behind the morning’s lovemaking and talk shifted and became clearer. He had known all along that she loved him. He had been hiding his love for her.
“Nick…”
He sank onto the bed beside her. “I was born in 1163 in Oxford, and I was milk brother to John Lackland, Richard’s brother. You know of whom I speak?”
“King John?” Riley breathed. She could feel her eyes widening.
“He became king later, yes,” Nick agreed. “By then, I was cut off from my family affairs.”
With a jolt, she realized that Nick meant he had already been turned a vampire.
“Family affairs?” she repeated.
“A courtesy title. John and I were friends, as milk brothers usually are. Were.” Nick grimaced. “My real family were lost to me as well.” He evened out the bedcover with his long fingers, then lifted his gaze to hers. “I was the eldest son of the Duke of Bradford. We were heading to Oxford for a tournament, at the command of King Henry, and were waylaid by what we thought was a highway thief. My father was elderly, nearly forty by then and unable to defend himself. Israfel was always a strategist. He killed my father first, then my younger brothers. That left me alone. He wanted me, you see. He isolated me, and by killing my family in front of me, made sure that shock partially disabled me, too. It worked. With his natural strength he barely had to work to take me.”
Riley found her mouth was dry. She swallowed. “This…Israfel. He was the one who made you?”
“He was my maker and my first vampire partner, yes.” Nicholas began to smooth out the bedcover again, almost compulsively swiping at the embroidered satin. He watched his fingers. “The tournament had been called to celebrate my betrothal to the King’s cousin, Mary. The feast was to take place that night.”
Riley said cautiously, “You loved her? Mary?”
“I was to meet her that night.” Nick’s eyes lifted to lock onto Riley’s. “I welcomed the marriage, Riley. I wanted it. I wanted the children.” His face spasmed in pain. Abruptly, he got to his feet and moved to the window. He leaned his fist against it. After a moment, he rested his forehead against it, too, as if the cool glass was soothing.
Riley slipped from the bed and threw on his robe and belted it. She came up beside him and wrapped her arms around him. She didn’t speak.
After a moment, Nick pulled her around him and put his arm around her. “You wanted to see the human in me, Riley. That’s all that’s left of him—a pathetic scrap bundled up in pity.”
“Damian knew this, didn’t he?” she asked gently. “That’s why you both became involved in the raising of my mother.”
Nick sighed. “Except you’ve missed the one obvious connection.”
She looked up at him.
“Damian did have children before he was turned,” Nick said softly. “You and your family are indirect descendants of his.”
She could feel her eyes widening again. “You two are so closed-mouthed…” She sighed. “Were,” she amended.
“It’s a defense mechanism, honed from centuries of practice,” Nick said. “We rarely let anyone in.” He straightened up from the window, and pulled her against him even tighter. “I may still slip from time to time. I’m out of practice. Damian knew everything there was to know. I didn’t have to explain anymore.” He shuddered. “God, I miss him.”
Her eyes filled with hot tears. “Me, too.”