He growled against my thigh and pressed harder.
The second orgasm erupted from somewhere so deep I didn’t know it existed. It didn’t build. It just detonated through the aftershocks of the first. My body jackknifed off the chaise. My scream lodged in my throat and cameout as a strangled sound that was half his name and half a prayer. The pleasure was violent, consuming, tearing through me, until I was nothing but sensation—no name, no past, no armor, no disguise. Just a woman shaking apart in the hands of a man who drank her blood and rang her body like a bell.
When it finally released me, I lay boneless on the leather, gasping, trembling, my skin sheened with sweat. Nikolai’s mouth left my thigh. I felt his tongue trace the puncture wounds once—a slow, sealing lick—and the sting vanished.
His forehead rested against my hip. His breathing was ragged. His hands still cradled my thighs, and they shook—barely, but I felt it.
Neither of us spoke.
The fire crackled in the hearth. My heartbeat slowed by fractions. The world reassembled itself around me—the leather beneath my back, the ceiling above, the vampire by my side.
I’d just had my first orgasm. My first two. At the hands of a vampire prince who’d taken my blood and given me something I didn’t have a framework to process.
And I was already terrified of wanting it again.
22
MAX
The vampire stared at me the way a man stares at something impossible, as if he’d spent his entire life searching for something and had just found it in the last place he’d thought to look.
“Nectar and flame,” Nikolai murmured. He’d stopped drinking, but the craving in his crimson eyes hadn’t dimmed. If anything, it burned brighter. “I’ve fed for twenty-six years. Your blood is the purest honey, dark flame, and sunlight. Nothing could compare.”
Not exactly flattery to a blood donor. I needed to warn him not to get addicted to my blood, which would do neither of us any good.
“Who are you?” he asked in awe. “Where have you been all these years?”
“I told you. I was in the mine of Crimson Ridge.”
“I live for the day when you’re ready to let me fuck you,” he said. “I’ll fuck you while I drink from you, and I’ll finally be complete.”
In the mine, men traded lewd jokes all thetime. But those were blunt instruments, crude, impersonal, thrown around to pass the hours in the dark. This was different. This hit my center like an arrow that wasn’t intended to harm but to claim. It was so dirty and delicious at once that my blood ran hot and my skin burned. I fought not to writhe. If I encouraged him, we’d end up fucking, and a moment of weakness would cause a mountain of headaches. No amount of regret would fix that, so it was best not to kick up a hornet’s nest.
And I was afraid that I could no longer trust myself.
Nikolai climbed onto the chaise behind me, his hand drifting over my curves I hadn’t realized had been starving for this kind of touch.
“That day won’t be today, Nikolai.” I pumped conviction into my low, husky voice.
“I’m a patient man,” he purred.
“Every man says that,” I murmured.
“I won’t ask who.” His voice cooled to something lethally soft. “Because I can’t promise not to strangle any man who said that to you with my bare hands.”
My pulse tripped. Even his threats turned me on. Hormones. That was all this was. A biological malfunction I couldn’t control.
“You seem to have plenty of experience,” I said, pulling my boxers back on and adding socks in front of my groin. I was still a man to the outside world. “Do you bring women up here? Drink from them, pleasure them like you did me, then fuck them?”
“Do I hear jealousy?”
“Why would I be jealous?” I snapped. The images hit me anyway—other women on this chaise, his mouth ontheir skin—and an unfamiliar fury spiked through my skull, irrational and scalding. Acid pooled in my stomach. I shut it down before it could fester. “I barely know you. I’m just gathering facts. I want to know where I stand.”
“You’ll know me more and more, Eirath,” he drawled, savoring my fury. “You stand on solid ground with me.” He smiled at me. “I’ve never brought other women to this penthouse. I have a private feeding room on the floors below. The lift you take leads directly here. Only Aelindor and I have access.” His gaze pinned me. “And now you. You’re the only one. Aelindor has never come here.”
My breath caught as I realized the scent of my blood had wrecked his judgment so thoroughly that he’d handed me this kind of access. Maybe I should be more generous and offer two mouthfuls instead of one and stop watching him drink like a hawk enforcing the bargain.
No.The cold, practical part of me stepped in. This was the era of the Rupture, not the age of generosity. Almost everyone took advantage of kindness.