“I heard you,” she panted, “but I’m not done with you.”
“I need you,” he insisted, wrenching his sleeves fully off his arms. This new stretch of naked skin invited exploration, especially the bulging firmness of his biceps. “You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting.”
Though his young man’s impatience was flattering, it was hard to take seriously. “If you want me to hurry, you shouldn’t be so touchable.”
She moved her hands to his back to caress him there, her fingertips gently tracing the edge of his shoulder blades. He cursed as she made a tremor run down his spine. His mouth opened on her neck and then—with seeming reluctance—retreated.
“You’re lucky it’s daytime,” he grumbled even as he found the zipper behind her dress. “I wouldn’t have the patience to put up with this after dark.”
Grace was wondering what he meant when a sudden breeze on her upper body startled her. He’d had time to lower her bodice, but her longline bra was no small item to remove. It had straps and hooks and an elasticized lower portion that shaped her waist snugly, a recommended undergarment for the fitted dress she had worn today. Nonetheless, Christian had it off her too quickly to resist, almost too quickly to be embarrassed.
He looked at the natural shape of what he’d uncovered for all of two seconds.
“Jesus,” he groaned and latched his mouth onto her nipple.
The effect of his suckling was as powerful as an electric shock, but far more pleasurable. His lips were wet and clinging, his tongue laving hungrily over and around her peak. He seemed to know when he’d teased her nipple as tight as it would go. With a sigh that moved her almost beyond bearing, he pulled her breast hard into his mouth. The pressure he exerted created an aching line of feeling, one that stretched from her throbbing nipple to deep between her legs. Her clit pulsed like he was squeezing it. Grace’s spine arched as her hand knotted in his hair.
“Wait,” she moaned as he shifted breasts.
In answer, his hands curved back around her bottom. She could hardly think for what he was doing—his mouth working magic on her other nipple, his fingernails scratching lightly over her soaked panties. Groaning, he pushed the damp cloth deeper into her folds, so close to the nexus of her sensation that she longed to groan back at him.
“Wait,” she said again, more weakly.
“Grace,” he growled warningly.
“We aren’t thinking. What if someone from the crew comes in?”
“I locked the door, Grace. No one’s interrupting us.”
She hadn’t heard him lock it, but he seemed so certain with his gold-sparked gaze blazing into hers. In truth, looking at him, it was hard to remember her objection. The faint flush on his harshly handsome face, the way it darkened his lips and brightened his eyes, was incredibly arousing.
“I want you, Grace,” he said. “God help me, but I do. All you have to do is decide if you want me, too. All of me. Deep inside you. Hot and hard and making you feel more alive than you’ve ever been. That’s why you kissed me. That’s why you touched me. To remind yourself
you’re
in charge of your life.”
Though he was more experienced than she was, she hadn’t expected this depth of understanding from a man his age. The words he’d spoken were so true tears sprang into her eyes.
Seeing them, his hand lifted to her face. His fingertips feathered the edge of her hair. “Be who you want to be,” he said softly.
In that moment, Grace knew exactly who that was.
She wanted to be the woman who’d say yes to him.
H
e didn’t have to read her. He could see the answer in her expression.
“Good,” he said and tore her panties right off her.
She gasped, the smallest edge of nervousness in it. Pleased, Christian smoothed his hands over the rounded muscles of her now-bare bottom.
“I like that,” he murmured next to her ear, “when you’re a little afraid of me.”
She shivered, and he loved that, too. Then, as he moved one hand to cup the folds of her mound, her body creamed over him. With a growl of appreciation for her responsiveness, he curved two fingers slowly—one knuckle deep—into her wet, soft heat. A well-aimed pressure on the cushioned wall of her sex made her gasp again.
“I guess we know how
you
feel about being scared,” he said.
“I feel too good to care that you’re being snide.”
He laughed at her tartness, and because she writhed as he worked his fingers to the edge of her barrier. He stopped laughing when her head flung back on a sensual groan. Her lovely neck was completely exposed to him, her pulse so strong he could count it. Daytime or not, his fangs surged completely down, his tongue running across them in stark hunger. He craved this woman for more reasons than sustenance.
He’d barely pressed his lips together before her head tipped back toward him. Her green eyes smoldered as brightly as an
upyr
’s.
“Chris,” she whispered, the little nickname that drove him so inexplicably insane. “Show me how to do this with you.”
“I’ll get you started,” he said, too hoarse to hide the change in his voice. “Once you get going, it comes pretty naturally.”
“Show me.”
She took his cock again in her gentle hands, surrounding it in the human heat that was so attractive to all his kind. His responses were slower than usual, but they were building. His eyes drifted shut with pleasure as she glided her fingers over the shape of him. Nearly overwhelmed with hunger, he clenched his molars hard enough to nick himself with his fangs. The brief taste of blood was another hammer strike to his lust.
“You like when I touch you.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “and I’ll like it even more when we fuck.”
He opened his eyes to watch the word make her jerk. She drew her hands back, clutching them at her waist where her bodice had fallen. He’d watched his ghostly Grace make that gesture, knew it like the back of his hand. He couldn’t wait any longer. If he didn’t sate at least one of his desires, he was liable to lose control in ways that would not serve him. Excitement swamped him with the decision. He slid forward in the soft chintz armchair and put his hands on her narrow hips. Her breath came quick and shallow as his grip lowered her.
“Brace on my shoulders. I want your hands on me.”
She blushed and did as he asked. His skin blazed hot where her fingers restlessly kneaded him.
“God, you make me crazy,” he growled. “You always made me crazy when you touched me.”
“Christian, I never—”
The tip of his erection found her, silencing her denial. Her cheeks turned the most beautiful scarlet.
“Feel this,” he said, his eyes holding hers. “Feel me go into you.”
He pulled her onto his aching hard-on, only the illusion of control in her hands. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t in his, either. The clasp of her outer reaches, the meltingly soft tight heat, was close to making a slave of him. The head of his cock squeezed inward, causing her to squirm and him to gasp at the wet friction.
“It’s too big,” she said unsurely.
“It isn’t,” he promised. “You’re very wet, and it’s very smooth. There might be a little pain, but you’ll like my pike staff being all the way inside you.”
He pulled her a fraction farther, his spine threatening to melt with bliss. Grace made a small, doubtful sound—half pleasure, half pain, the latter of which he tried to ease by smoothing one hand up the curve of her vertebrae.
“You’re really stretching me. I don’t remember it being this difficult the first time.”
His eyes came slowly open. “What did you say?”
She blinked at him. “I said, is it supposed to be this difficult the first time?”
Sensual overload notwithstanding, he knew those weren’t the words she’d used. But maybe she thought they were. She was staring at him in seemingly genuine confusion.
“It’s not so bad,” she admitted, her pelvis giving another devastating, experimental wriggle. “You don’t truly have to stop.”
Oh, she brought out the conqueror in him, whether she intended to or not. His eyes were hooded as his gaze slid down her bare torso. Those breasts of hers drove him crazy. His voice came out as soft and dark as smoke.
“Maybe if I touch you where we’re connected, it would be better. Maybe you’d beg me to continue.”
He thrust his hand underneath her skirt, finding her clitoris by the quicker pulse beating inside it.
Grace jumped, her eyes briefly losing focus as his fingers smoothed around and then directly over their target.
“Yes,” she said in a higher, slightly embarrassed voice. “That does seem to be helping.”
He didn’t ask her to talk after that, simply let her focus on the sensations his extremely practiced fingers were pulling out of her. The changes that came into her expression were his reward: from wariness to surprised enjoyment to pleas she didn’t have the nerve to put into words.
Through it all, he rocked his prick into her—steadily, gently, reminding her it was waiting for her to welcome it. Her hold tightened on his shoulders, her fingernails starting to dig in. She was rocking back at him, though not with the full abandon he would have liked.
But maybe she’d have liked more abandon, too. “Oh, God,” she cried finally. “Just do it!”
He didn’t wait. He drove into her in a long plunge of fiery heat, with a grunt a caveman wouldn’t have been ashamed to use. He couldn’t help the desperate gratitude of the sound. In that instant, it meant that much to him to claim her.
Treating the motions as extensions of each other, he finished the thrust by carrying them both to the trailer’s floor.
His inner marauder exulted at being on top of and inside her. Belatedly, he realized he must have moved at greater than human speed. Her reaction to finding herself beneath him was stunned.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his hand cradling her head. “Was that too rough for you?”
Despite his concern, he couldn’t wait for her to answer. He kissed her—crazily, deeply—wanting to thrust the ecstasy he was feeling at full penetration back into her. She didn’t resist him. Her slender arms came around him, and then her legs, and then the heat and wetness in her increased.
He wanted to bite her, to draw her lifeblood into him until they were one again. His body shook with the instinct, his cock stiffening even more as his different urges heightened each other. He thought he’d never been more at the mercy of his vampire nature. If Roy hadn’t bullied him to feed, he wouldn’t have had the slightest hope of not putting his mark on her.
Grace responded to his urgency, whatever she might interpret as the cause. Her body began to work under his, her undulations moving his cock a few inches in and out of her. That she couldn’t restrain herself was obvious. The mewling noises she was making were those of intense desire.
Kissing her in his current state was too big a risk. If he cut her, he’d drink, and if he drank, he’d form a bond he didn’t want with her. Knowing it was for the best but regretting it, Christian tore his mouth from hers.
“Let me,” he said, one hand steadying her hips. “Let me take us both where we want to go.”
The instant he began to thrust in earnest, he was glad it was day. He didn’t crash precipitously into climax the way he would have at night, when his perceptions of friction and heat and pressure were their most sensitized. He was able to give her long, controlled lunges, going as deep as she could take him, as hard as she could stand.
Her rising moans said she liked the force he was using. He could tell his aura had healed any hurt he’d done by taking her maidenhead. She went over fast, with a cry of what he thought was surprise for how potent the climax was.
Her energy backwashed over him like flames from a very erotic fire, almost but not quite as drinkable as blood. Though the influx wound his arousal tighter, he slowed to let her enjoy her glow of relaxation. Only when her lashes began to drift did he pick up the pace again, this time adding a rolling motion to his pelvis that strafed his tip against a different sensitive spot on her inner wall.
To judge by Grace’s gasp, the spot was a top-notch choice.
He liked it pretty well himself. The change in angle had a new set of his own nerves singing, enough that grunts for the sharply pleasurable sensations escaped him. The trailer floor began to vibrate as he kept vigorously at it, hangers
ching
ing all around them on clothing racks. If he felt this good, he knew Grace wasn’t going to hang on long.
He gave the spot she liked a little more pressure.
“Oh,” she said, her big green eyes widening. “Oh, oh,
God
.”
She slapped her hands on his ass, under his trousers, as her body arched up to his. Her orgasm clenched him in a slick hot fist for a good long time.
“More?” he growled, knowing the answer even before she bit her lip and nodded.
He felt like a god as he drove her from peak to peak, watching her body go progressively softer, seeing her eyes fill with the gentlest sort of surrender. He could believe she’d loved him when she looked at him like that—at least once upon a time. Her hair spilled around her in a dark red halo, having escaped the bonds of her ponytail. Her lips were bruised from his hard kisses.