Chapter 11

Felice became aware of his erection by the sensation of pure heat that part of his body exuded. Then she felt the weight of it prodding at her stomach.

She sighed.

“Can’t you think of anything else?” she asked with a roll of her eyes.

He chuckled, knowing immediately what she was talking about. “I can’t help it. You’re so naked and warm and attractive. It’s like asking a compass not to point north.”

“You’re incorrigible,” she accused him.

“Every last inch of me,” he agreed. “Some inches more than others.”

“Halo!”

“What?” he asked, his grin unrepentant.

“Oh…never mind. You’re a lost cause.”

“I am where you’re concerned,” he said, bending his head to nuzzle her neck where it joined her shoulder beneath her hair. “God, you’re warm. And sweet. How am I supposed to resist the irresistible?”

She felt his open mouth close over her pulse, his tongue licking, his teeth nipping, his lips brushing. It made a blossom of heat swirl outward from that point and all the way through her body. Her hands curled into fists where they were resting on his chest. Of its own accord her leg, which was draped over his, slid up so her thigh was caressing his. It was a wanton reaction but one she couldn’t seem to stop. Her head tilted to give him better access to her neck and he took advantage with a pleased growl. His arms tightened around her, nearly crushing the breath out of her. His hand, which had been cupping the back of her head, slid down out of her hair and caressed the entire length of her spine. When he reached the inward curve of the small of her back, he opened his palm wide and pressed into her, drawing her lower body as close as he held her upper. His hunger to hold her close made her dizzy with arousal. Made her feel incredibly desired and treasured. She supposed that was how he made all of his women feel. Those faceless many who were so eager to do as he wanted.

“I’m not like your other women,” she whispered into his ear.

“I know that,” he said, surprising her. Did he? Did he really know that? And did he truly comprehend what that difference meant?

“I can’t be used and discarded.”

He stilled. “Is that what you think? That I use them?”

“Don’t you?”

He pulled his head back so he could look into her eyes. His dark blue eyes bored into hers. His coloring, she realized, was so much like her own. They could probably make beautiful babies together.

Whoa. Nope. Not a jump her mind should be making right then, she warned herself. Half-human half-vampire babies? Definitely not on the menu.

“If I use them then they are using me,” he said, his frown intensifying. “We are both using each other for a night of sexual gratification. Sometimes I feed from them, making the experience all that much more intense for the woman. I give her a gift of pleasure. She gives the same to me. While I am with her I give her my devoted attention, unlike the other men in her life. Then, when it’s over, we amicably part ways.”

“Ha! I find that hard to believe. You give a woman that much and you think it’s easy for her to just get up, walk away, and not look back? A woman would have to be crazy to turn off her craving for what you give her on a dime like that. It has to be difficult for them…to be treated so well and then dropped so succinctly.”

“Hey, they know from the start I’m only a temporary fix. I’m like a drug they can get high off of, but when the drug runs out it runs out. It’s over and so is the high. That’s just the nature of any drug.”

“And as we have noted many times these past hours, drugs can be so easily addicting. It’s a wonder these women don’t try to hound you into giving them more of that high.”

He shrugged. “Maybe some of them do. Or would if I made it possible. However, I don’t give out my number, I don’t bring them home, and I don’t go back to the same bar for months afterward. Sometimes we cross paths again no matter how careful I try to be, but I make it clear it was what it was and now it’s over.”

“It’s so cold. I could never do that.”

“Sure you could. I can see you crave some decent male attention. You probably haven’t been with anyone since Michael. I can feel how starved you are for affection and sexual gratification. It’s part of why you find yourself attracted to me even in these circumstances.”

She wanted to shout a denial in his face. She wanted to smack him hard and tell him how wrong he was but she couldn’t. He was speaking the truth. It had been almost a year since she and Michael had split and she simply could not find it in herself to trust anyone again—not enough to expose herself to them and become that vulnerable again.

Not until she had been thrown into this wild situation. With this wild and predictably unpredictable man. What he was, the way he treated women, should offend her sensibilities, but she found it far too compelling, the idea of a brief, wild interlude that fed her tons of affection and sexual gratification without all the mess that came with a relationship. She could be confident he wouldn’t hang around to make her life miserable. That he wouldn’t become yet another demanding control freak stalking her every minute of her life.

“See? I can see you thinking about it. I can see the appeal it has for you. It’s more enticing than you might have considered before. Exposing yourself, giving everything you’ve got for a short while, no holds barred, and then casting yourself adrift from me and rowing away into a new direction, with the eddies and residual waves of the encounter to sustain you while you take the time to search for that more permanent connection you crave.”

“What do you get out of it?” she asked softly. “I mean besides the obvious,” she added dryly when he gave her a wolfish grin.

“Just that. Nothing more. I don’t need more. I’m a pretty simple guy when it comes to all of that. I don’t dig complex relationships. Too much work.”

“So you’re lazy,” she said sharply. “You want all of the fun and none of the work.”

“That about sums it up.”

“Except…you’re missing out on all the best parts,” she insisted softly, her hand caressing his chest in slow circles. “It’s like watching a great movie without the sound. The pictures are exciting and fun to see, it’s true, but you lose the depth of the story. You lose all the meaning and intent, all the plot revelations…all the true beauty as it was meant to be seen and experienced. That’s so sad.”

“I don’t need you feeling sorry for me,” he said with a frown. “I’m happy just the way I am. I have a good life.”

“But not a great one. The only thing you seem to get satisfaction and joy from is your hunting. That isn’t enough,” she insisted.

“It’s enough for me. Now shut up and let me kiss you.” He grinned at her a moment before he swooped in and caught her mouth with his. She knew instantly that he was trying to use feigned lightheartedness and sex to cover his own discomfort. She was hitting too close to home for him. He was trying to bury it under sexual attraction and action. She let him…for now. She had made her point clear and now it was up to him to decide if he wanted to continue his life as it was—or if he wanted to examine it and see its deficits and correct them. In the meantime, she was happy to indulge in his no-strings attempt at seduction. He wasn’t about to change on a dime, not enough to affect her, so she had to decide whether to accept his terms of a relationship or not. As he kissed her, his hand coasting down her flank and curving around the cheek of her bottom, she knew she was going to indulge in him. And with the cameras off, she felt free to do so. Hell, even with the cameras on she had not been shy about her responses to him. But just to be sure she broke from his mouth, panting softly, and glanced up at the cameras. The little red lights were still off.

“They aren’t watching,” he said as he noted where her gaze had gone.

“I know. I just feel…exposed nonetheless.”

“Let me take your mind off it,” he invited with a seductive growl. He began to kiss her neck in that gently savage way again, and she immediately melted. She grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head back. She then attacked his mouth with hers, drowning in the intensity of the heat between them. She felt his hands roaming all over her skin as he pulled her on top of his body.

She slid over him, skin to skin, breast to chest, belly to belly, sex to sex. She drew her knees up, in effect straddling him, and it brought her damp folds directly over his erection. He growled again, grabbing for her hips as he surged against her, rubbing himself along the length of her pussy. She gasped at the raw eroticism. Felice pressed her hands against his chest and rose up so she was sitting back on her heels…on him. She undulated her hips, stroking herself over him, and he cursed.

“Ah damn, you feel amazing,” he hissed.

“Wait. It gets better,” she promised him seductively.

He ran his hands from her hips up her sides and around to her breasts. He cupped them strongly, his powerful, rough fingers making her feel delicate and small. Her nipples tightened as arousal spun through her. The sensitive tips of her breasts were rubbed by his calluses and she moaned softly. He pinched at her nipples, pulled at them, caressing her in between tugs. Then suddenly he wrapped a hand around her back and pulled her up, allowing her breasts to hover by his mouth for only a second before he was closing voracious lips around her.

She gasped, her head arcing back as frissons of fire bloomed down her body. The raw animalism of him, the pure sexuality…it was overwhelming. His hands were everywhere, his hips surged against her, his mouth devoured her delicate flesh. He sucked and gently bit at her nipple, cupping her breast and holding her where he wanted her. She supported her half-upraised body on a single arm, her other hand blindly caressing his chest and abdomen. She felt the powerful muscles beneath his skin. It was hard and unyielding. He was forged as if from granite. That was to say nothing of the other hard places on his body.

She slid her hand down between their bodies, wrapping her fingers around his erection. He was wet from the juiciness of her body, and it allowed her fist to glide along the length of him. He was an impressive specimen of manhood in all ways. They said size didn’t matter, but clearly he had never had to worry about it. He was large and inviolable. She stroked him and she heard his breath catch right before it rushed out in a groan of pleasure. She smiled as she flexed her hips, stroking him that way as well, opening her hand so he felt it, so she was pressing him against her sex. Then she rose up again and fisted him once more. She stroked him from root to tip and he bit down on her nipple in response, clearly a sign of him losing control. He had been so careful up until that point. She welcomed the pain. Welcomed the sign that she was affecting him as much as he was affecting her.

His hands were constantly moving along her body, stroking her, arousing her. She curved into his touch, allowing the sensation of his caresses to eddy deep into the aroused places in her body. She began to pant for breath, just as he left her breasts and dragged her mouth back onto his. He suddenly rolled, pinning her, freeing up her other hand so she could run it down his back and up over the curve of his buttock. His ass was hard as a rock, the muscle flexing as he surged into her hand, taking his pleasure from her stroke.

He broke from her mouth only long enough to press his lips to her ear and whisper, “Let go of me. I want to be inside you.”

She hesitated. This was the point of no return. She was about to have sex with him in full. Wild, abandoned, no-attachments sex.

And she was all right with that. She lived in the moment, not knowing what would happen to her in the next hours. She had to live her life in captivity as if tomorrow wasn’t going to come. She had to grab on to it all for all she was worth.

She let go of him.

He exhaled a breath into her ear before coming back to her mouth. If she were forced to describe his kisses to an outsider, Felice would come up woefully short. She didn’t know how to convey the depth of them, the pure heat and arousal caused by them. The need they inspired. To say nothing of his touch and the feel of his erection sliding through her wetness. And just when she thought she couldn’t be stimulated any more, his fingers raked down through her curls and searched for her clit. She gasped into his mouth when he found it. She had been using his erection to stimulate herself, but this was just as good. He touched her with skill and knowledge. He knew how to stimulate her even though they were virtual strangers. She saw immediately the appeal of having his skill at her beck and call…even if only for a short while.

His touch swirled against her, his fingers alternately stroking and fluttering in tempting, arousing ways. Waves of pleasure swept over her. She cried out into his mouth as the sensations became nearly unbearable. Her head was spinning. But there was something she should be remembering…something…

She gasped and pulled her head back, her hand pressing against his chest to put a minuscule amount of distance between them.

“Do vampires get diseases?” she asked shakily.

“No. And anyway, isn’t it too late to be worrying about it?”

He had a point.

“Can you get pregnant?” he asked then, a frown curling across his forehead.

“No. Funny we did not think about it until now.”

“Hysterical,” he said dryly. “Now, if there’s nothing else…?”

“No. Nothing else,” she assured him.

“Good. Because I am very ready to fuck you. And you are primed for the fucking.”

“So crude,” she said with a frown. He kissed her hotly, leaving her gasping before he pulled back and said, “Does it matter?”

“No,” she confessed. “It doesn’t matter…except that it makes me burn all the hotter for you.”

“Good.” He kissed her again until she was breathless and her head was spinning. All the while his fingers stroked against her clit. It became unbearable, unstoppable. She felt her orgasm building, felt him playing her like a fine instrument. She burst apart, like a symphony of music he was creating. She cried out into his mouth, her head tipping back as pleasure shuddered through her. He followed her, giving her no relief from his kisses.

When she at last came down from the high it was to the feel of his hand leaving her body and his cock taking its place. He rubbed himself against her sensitized clit. She moaned in a cross between pleasure and raw pain. She didn’t think she could bear any more in that moment. Then he was notching himself into her opening, thrusting shallowly, putting just the very head of himself inside of her, stimulating her vaginal rim. She became hungry for him, more so with each teasing stroke. She gripped at his shoulders, her nails gouging into him.

“Please!” she gasped against his lips.

He pulled back, his blue eyes boring into hers.

“Please what? I want to hear you say it.”

She resisted at first, not sure if she could be as crude as he was. In the end her wild body left her no choice. She had to have him…whatever the cost.

“Please fuck me,” she whispered.

“Gladly,” he said with a wild grin.

Just like that, he thrust into her. It was a hard thrust, a confident one. He was sure he could make it inside of her with just that one thrust. But he was thwarted by her tight body. She was still tense from the aftermath of her orgasm and it had been a while since she had been sexually active. He exhaled with pleasure, his eyes boring into hers.

“So tight,” he growled. “So perfectly tight.”

He drew back and thrust into her again. This time the wetness of her body and the determination of his had him seating himself fully inside of her. As a matter of instinct her legs wrapped around his hips, her calves clutching at his iron-hard thighs and flexing buttocks. He withdrew again, teasing her a moment with shallow thrusts once more until she huffed in frustration.

“Easy,” he said to her. “We have all the time in the world.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “They could come through that door any minute.”

“Doesn’t that make it more exciting?”

“It makes it dangerous. We’re vulnerable,” she fretted.

“Don’t worry. Let me do the worrying.”

He returned deep inside of her, overwhelming her with a wave of pleasure. Immediately she forgot about worrying, she forgot about where they were and the situation they were in. The feel of him inside of her left no room for her to pay attention to anything else.

He began a rhythm. It was slow and undulating at first, a stroking from the inside out. He split his attention between her mouth and her chest…always nipping down the length of her neck in his travels between the two. It was amazing. She felt as though she had her thighs wrapped around an unstoppable force, like she was riding a tornado. He was like a wild, untamable mustang—something she couldn’t control…and wouldn’t want to. It was part of the beauty of him. The unadulterated savagery. He picked up his speed, a little faster, but not too fast. Still slow enough that she felt every inch of him at every moment. His breath began to come harder, and she cupped his face in her hand so she could draw it away from her and meet his eyes. They connected like that for several minutes, him thrusting and staring into her, reaching down into her body and her soul at the same time.

“Jesus, you’re incredible,” he ejected on a hard breath. “I don’t know why…it feels so different. So much more.” He shook his head in his frustration and looked away from her, as if he couldn’t bear seeing inside of her a moment longer. She was having none of it. She once more cupped his face and forced his eyes to hers.

“It’s because I’m different. I touch you. I make you think. Think about things you’ve never thought of before or never wanted to think of. No. It’s okay,” she assured him quickly when he tensed all around her and inside of her. “Don’t stop. Don’t be afraid. I know what I’m getting myself into.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said harshly. “I’m never afraid.”

To punctuate his point, he slammed himself hard inside of her. It made Felice gasp, her eyes rolling back for a moment. When she came to herself again she realized he was staring hard into her eyes, defying her and himself. Making himself connect with her without fear. She felt him penetrate deep into her soul, burrowing there just as he burrowed into her body. The ghost of a worried thought drifted through the back of her mind. How was she going to let him go and never look back? How could she leave something that felt so right?

She had to. She had to take what she could in the moment. He wouldn’t allow any more than that. Her resolve renewed, she focused on the moment, on getting from it all that she could. She was building memories. Opening her senses to everything so she could recall it all with clarity when it was over.

She met his gaze head-on, their wills merging just as their bodies merged. She lifted her hips to meet his every thrust. The feel of his fingers returning to her clit made her near wild with desire. She was drawing deep for every breath, unable to catch it and hold it for more than an instant. The smell of sex permeated the area between them. It was raw and unbelievably arousing. It was as though they were two animals mating in the wild, rather than two people mating in captivity. He sent her soaring from that closed-in place, made her fly as an orgasm ripped through her from out of nowhere.

No. Not nowhere. She had felt it coming. But it had been so quick she’d barely had time to prepare for it. It became obvious that the same was true for him. As she spasmed around him, he went still. She saw his jaw flexing as his eyes slid closed. He was savoring every minute of the feel of her milking his cock, making hungry demands on it. He, too, was building memories, she realized. For some reason that made her feel infinitely better.

She flexed her muscles around him, clutching at him aggressively. She would give him something to remember, she vowed to herself. Something untamed and beautiful.

She rolled her hips, impaling herself with him as he hovered still and hard, half inside of her body. Taking him into her as she tightened herself around him was apparently more than he could stand. He released a savage growl and began to pump into her hard. He left her gaze only long enough to press his mouth against her ear, kissing it and biting tenderly at the lobe before hissing out, “Give it to me. Give it all to me.”

She didn’t know what it was he wanted. She was already giving all that she could. She was his to do with what he would. She wasn’t resisting him in any way. The only thing she held in reserve was…

She could not give him that. He had made it clear he didn’t want her prolonged affections. She had to hold her hopes and expectations in reserve, hold them above what this was.

She renewed the vigor with which she took his body into hers. She rolled her hips, reached for him, took him deep. She bit the ear that was by her lips…probably a little harder than she should have if the sound he released was anything to go by. It was hard to tell with him because right after she did it he attacked her mouth with renewed vigor. His hand left her lower body and dragged up her side. She felt it wrap around her breast, stimulating her there. It was all the right moves for an incredible sexual experience.

So then why…? Why did it feel like it was missing something?

She put the sentimentality of the thought aside. There was no place for it here. No place for it in the orgasm that was building in her body. She cried out against his mouth, breaking away, unable to focus on anything but the wild feelings coursing through her body.

“That’s it,” he whispered fiercely against her ear. “Come for me. God, you feel amazing. You’re such a wild little thing. I never would have guessed…never. Jesus, you feel good. Ah!”

His head arched back on his neck, his body double-timing into hers. They were going to crash together. It was coming.

Then it was there. Cresting over them both like a wild washing wave that pulls away the sand beneath your feet. On the one hand they were overwhelmed by their mutual orgasms, on the other there was something being taken away from it…something that allowed a part of them to burrow deeper into the sand.

She gasped for breath, as did he. Their bodies were glistening with sweat. He laid down over her, his weight heavy and welcome as they rode out the residual pleasure of their connection. He took the time to kiss her around her ear and down her neck, then coming back to her mouth where they exchanged soulful kisses between harsh breaths. He finally rolled off her and she felt immediately chilled. There were no blankets to pull up over herself so Felice shivered. He was there immediately, drawing her in tight to his side and chest, sharing his incredible warmth.

His hand traveled leisurely up and down her body, keeping the ashes of pleasure stirred to life within her. She knew he was the voracious type. Once was never enough. However, beyond that, he would and could walk away. But how many times? When would he go?

Probably whenever they got out of there. They would go their separate ways and she would never hear from him again. Hell, she probably wouldn’t even remember him. He would probably wipe her mind of all these moments of pleasure and connection.

She wouldn’t let him. She would find a way. She would promise to never ever utter a single word about vampires to anyone. She would do whatever it took to convince this committee of her sincerity. Anything. Anything so long as she could keep these memories alive.

He petted her down the length of her hair, drew fingertips over the rise of her cheek and along her jaw. He trailed his touch down her throat and along her collarbone. She closed her eyes and simply basked in it. Again, storing memories. His tenderness was a beautiful thing. He did not just use her and roll away and disconnect. He stayed with her. Made her feel well loved. Made her feel a connection that wasn’t supposed to be there.

She caught his hand in hers and met his eyes.

“I’m tired. I’m going to nap,” she said.

He frowned at her obvious withdrawal but he didn’t protest. He simply resituated their bodies so she could have as much of his body heat as she needed while resting her head on his chest and remaining curled to his side. She basked in it. She took what she could get. Again his hand began to trace lightly over her skin…as if he couldn’t resist touching her. She decided not to stop him again. She would simply bask in the tenderness…take it for what it was.

Felice slowly let her eyes slide closed and eventually fell asleep.