And sighed.
“This isn’t going to get you anywhere, either,” I was informed tightly.
“That’s okay.” I ran a single digit over the smooth head, watching it blush like a girl in pleasure. “I’m pretty comfortable where I am.”
Mircea shuddered at the implicit threat, that I could keep this up all night. But I honestly thought I could. It was fascinating, what something so simple did to him, reversing who was in charge with amazing speed. I experimented, putting a foot on his chest and giving a little push. He fell back with almost no resistance at all, allowing me to crawl up his body.
Okay, then.
“That wasn’t fair,” he said hoarsely.
“Like you didn’t use power on me earlier? And stay still.”
“Give me a reason,” he challenged, smoothing a hand over my curls.
I didn’t need to be asked twice. My lips covered the sensitive tip of him, and he suddenly looked like maybe he was having trouble focusing. Been there, I thought cynically, only it was usually me losing my train of thought around him, instead of vice versa. I decided I liked vice versa, and twirled my tongue around the head.
Mircea groaned and his eyes slid to half-mast. Which was all very well, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Hm.
I swirled my fingers over the tip of him, getting them wet, and then trailed them lightly up my own flesh. Stomach, breasts, pausing to paint the nipples, feeling his fingers tighten on my skin, up to my neck, lingering over those two little marks, his brand of ownership—we’d see who was owned—and up to my lips. I traced my bottom one with the salty taste of him, and his own tongue flicked out, unconsciously mimicking my movement.
Then I sucked the whole finger into my mouth and his eyes closed.
“You taste good, too,” I told him, smiling, and felt his body shudder against me.
And then the next thing I knew, I was on my back, one of my legs crooked over Mircea’s shoulder, and even with the preparation, he was too big for there not to be a burn. But that was okay, that was perfect, because tonight I wanted to
feel
it. I wanted to know I was alive.
And it looked like Mircea felt the same, because he was driving into me hard enough that my breath caught and my body writhed and my fingers dug into his shoulders, and then he found just the right angle and
stayed
there. Sparks of intense sensation flashed up my spine and coiled in my belly, regular as clockwork, and then arrhythmic, treacherous, as Mircea modified his stroke to torment me all over again.
“Bastard,” I hissed, even as my spine was arching helplessly, trying to meet his thrusts and continue that extreme high. I would have come in seconds, but he wouldn’t let me, the man’s ungodly stamina keeping me hungry.
“You’ll live.”
“Make me
want
to,” I moaned, and Mircea was laughing as he gave in to my hunger, taking me deep and fast. Just the way we needed.
“Is this better?” he teased, but I didn’t have breath to laugh because I was coming, even as the hard thrusts inside me turned erratic. I was still riding the aftershocks as Mircea shuddered above me, sagging against the tight hold of my legs as he came, both of us grinning like fools.
After a moment, he pulled me up and poured us more wine, and we settled down in front of the fire. He nestled up against me, cradling my body against his and sliding his hands up and down my legs, while the logs hissed and the snow fell and I wished I did know how to freeze time. Because I’d have liked to stop it right here.
It was times like these that I thought he was right, that I made things too hard, too complicated. Tony had elevated paranoia to an art form, and I’d absorbed a healthy dose of it growing up. And occasionally it had been really useful. It had kept me alive more than once, causing me to doubleand triple-check things for no reason, or to abruptly leave somewhere just because of the ants running up and down my spine.
But sometimes it could be pretty stupid, too. More than once it had caused me to be too careful, to automatically say no when maybe I should have said yes, to guard myself and my heart so closely, I never let anyone in. I didn’t know everything about Mircea; I would probably never know everything about Mircea. But I knew the important thing.
I knew I loved him.
I had always loved him. Loving him was as natural as breathing, as essential as water. It had defined my life in a real way ever since I was a child.
Before I met him, I had lived in constant fear, even without realizing what it was. When you’ve never known anything else, fear just seems . . . normal. Jumping at shadows because of what might be in them; staying carefully out of sight, because attracting attention was never A Good Thing; monitoring every word, in case it caused offense that would have to be made up for somehow. Of course, there were those I didn’t have to act that way around—Rafe and Eugenie and a few others who came and went through the years.
But as much as I’d loved them, I’d always known the truth. They couldn’t protect me. They couldn’t, as it turned out, even protect themselves. Because they weren’t the master there.
The most powerful vampire I knew was Tony, and even without realizing that he had been responsible for my parents’ deaths, there’d been plenty to fear, including the rooms downstairs that none of the vamps talked about but that the ghosts in the house informed me were essentially torture chambers. People Tony didn’t like went down there, and most of the time, they didn’t come back up.
But I never saw those rooms, other than in a flash of vision I’d experienced years later. And after Mircea’s visit, I had known instinctively that I never would. Because Tony, as mercurial, deadly and downright crazy as he could be at times, wasn’t the most powerful vamp I knew anymore. Mircea was. And Mircea liked me.
And during his visit, it was impossible not to notice that Tony’s attitude changed. He wasn’t exactly jolly—despite his shape, Tony was never jolly—but he was . . . careful. He didn’t raise his voice to me anymore, didn’t threaten, didn’t menace. In fact, it had been a real revelation, seeing him, the always-feared head of house, practically groveling on his master’s perfectly shined Tanino Criscis.
And even after Mircea left, Tony didn’t treat me as he had before. If I didn’t get a useful vision for a week or two, there was a definite chill in the air, or he might confine me to my room or cancel one of my rare forays outside the house. But I wasn’t going downstairs. I was never going downstairs.
Mircea had meant security, protection, sanctuary. He had many other attractive attributes, ones that other women would probably value much more highly. But nothing came close to that sense of security for me. It had been the greatest gift anyone had ever given me.
It still was.
“I’m thinking you just hit good,” I told him, when I could talk again.
He thought about that for a moment. “Let’s try for excellent,” he said, and rolled me over.
Oh, boy.
Chapter Sixteen
“I knew it!”
I jumped, because the angry voice spoke at almost the same moment that I rematerialized back in my bedroom in Vegas. I spun around, sending my aching head sloshing unpleasantly against my skull, and saw Billy lounging on the bed. A pack of playing cards hung in the air in front of him, laid out in a vertical game of solitaire. But they were ghostly cards, no more substantial than their owner, and I could clearly see his scowl glaring through.
For someone who regularly was up to as much crap as Billy Joe, he did disapproval really well.
“What?” I said defensively, clutching the mink and my dignity. Since I was barefoot, mostly naked and completely hungover, I was pretty sure I grasped only one of them.
“You slept with the goddamned vampire!”
“I—How did you know?”
Billy rolled his eyes.
“Well . . . even if I did, it’s none of your business,” I informed him haughtily. And then I ruined the effect by limping to the bathroom.
I flicked on the lights, but they hurt my eyes so I flicked them off again. But then I couldn’t see. Until Billy’s softly glowing head poked through the wall, like a pissed-off night-light.
“I thought you were gonna give it some time,” he said accusingly. “I thought you were gonna get to know him first. I thought—”
“Does anybody ever really know anybody?” I asked. And, okay, it was lame, but my head hurt like a bitch.
“Oh, man.” Billy looked disgusted. “He must really be something. One night and he’s got you wrapped.”
“He does not!”
“Like hell.” He crossed his arms. “What did you tell me right before you left?”
I sighed, wondering why I never had any damn aspirin. “I know. But—”
“But what? You told me you’re absofuckinglutely, posifuckingtively, not getting horizontal. ’Cause vamps aren’t like regular people, and you’re in the middle of negotiating the relationship and he’d take it as a sign of surrender, and—”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said, running some cold water onto a washcloth. And then slapping it over my aching eyes. Dear God, I was never drinking again.
“Oh, okay. So what was it like?”
“A . . . time-out,” I mumbled incoherently.
But apparently not incoherently enough.
“A time-out.” Billy did sarcasm pretty well, too.
“Yeah.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means it didn’t count,” I snapped, and then wished I hadn’t, because it hurt. I stifled a groan and put my elbows on the counter, supporting my throbbing head.
“And who decided this?”
“We did.”
“And which part of ‘we’ came up with the get-out-ofjail-free card?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” Billy said. “That’s what I thought.”
I took the washcloth off so I could glare at him. “I don’t recall appointing you my conscience!”
“You don’t need a conscience. You need some goddamn common sense! You used to have some, remember? You’re the one who told me what those things are like—”
“Mircea isn’t a thing.”
“Oh, so he’s not a monster all of a sudden? He got upgraded? I guess I must have missed the memo!”
I turned and walked out of the bathroom. Billy’s faintly glowing backside was sticking out of the wall above the dresser, framed in the mirror like a bizarre trophy. But all things considered, I liked it better than the other half right now. Get him wound up and he could go for hours, and I was so not up for it tonight. Or this morning. Or whenever the hell it was. The room was dark, but there were blackout shades under all the drapes in the suite, so that didn’t mean much.
“Okay, ‘monster’ is out,” Billy said, getting himself sorted. “So what are we calling him now? Sugar Tits? Baby Cakes? Angel Boy?”
I got a sudden image of a very naked Mircea, fire-warm skin backlit by flames, the same ones that had formed a vague halo around his head. He wasn’t an angel, I knew that. But regardless of what Billy thought, he wasn’t the devil, either. And it had been only one night, and he’d sworn it wouldn’t make a difference—
“Why are you here, anyway?” I demanded, going on the offensive, because my defense kind of sucked right now. “I fed you before I left.”
“Yeah, and that’s all I care about! You were supposed to be back hours ago!”
“Well, I would have been, but . . . there was a delay.”
“A delay that left hickeys all over your neck and made you walk funny?”
“I’m not in jail, you know,” I snapped. “I can come and go whenever I—” I stopped. “What hickeys?”
He pointed silently at my neck. I pushed the old-fashioned collar of the coat aside and leaned closer to the mirror. And saw—
“Son of a bitch!”
“You didn’t
notice?”
Billy demanded.
I winced. “No. And keep your voice down.”
“Why? No one can hear me but you.”
I rested my forehead on the cool top of the dresser. “That’s kind of the point.”
He snorted. “And to top it off, you’re hungover!”
“It was the wine. It always does this to me.”
“Then why’d you drink it?”
“Because after the night I’d had, I thought I deserved it,” I muttered.
Billy sighed, and a moment later I felt a ghostly chill on the back of my neck. It felt good. “What went wrong this time?”
“Short version: everything.”
“And the long version?”
“I’m too hungover for the long version.”
“Gimme the CliffsNotes, then.”
I pried myself off the dresser and started sorting through a drawer. “Let’s just say, it looks like my luck runs in the family.”
“Ouch.”
I went back into the bathroom to change, and this time, Billy left me alone. I pulled on an old pair of khaki shorts and tried a couple of different shirts, finally settling on one with orange and white stripes. It was soft, thin cotton with a mock turtleneck and no sleeves. It had been part of my work wardrobe, worn under a jacket to keep me from dying of heatstroke in the Atlanta summers, and it looked a little dressy for the shorts. But it was better than announcing my evening’s activities to everybody I met.