Reluctant Partnerships (9 page)

Raymond’s hands burrowed into Jean’s shoulder-length hair, stroking his scalp as he sucked on the patch of skin right above Raymond’s navel. “Feels so good,” Raymond whispered. They did not need the words, but Raymond gave them to his vampire anyway.

Jean lifted his head, blood coating his fangs. “What would feel best?”

Everything felt best as far as Raymond was concerned, but he enjoyed teasing his lover on occasion. Lifting his hips, he bumped his cock against Jean’s chin, knowing it was the one place Jean would never bite him.

“Vieux con,” Jean muttered, feeling his fangs retract without conscious thought. The Aveu de Sang that bound them made it impossible for him to hurt his lover. Raymond wanted Jean’s mouth on his cock, so his fangs pulled back to make that possible, Jean’s desire to feed irrelevant in the face of his wizard’s request. He lowered his head, taking the rigid shaft in his mouth, licking and teasing the head until Raymond’s fabled self-mastery cracked and he squirmed on the bed. Deciding he liked driving his controlled lover wild, Jean stroked the tip of one long finger over Raymond’s drawn-up sac and then lower to tap against his entrance.

“Putain.” Raymond’s hips bucked up into the tantalizing touch, the motion driving his cock deeper into Jean’s mouth. He had set out to tease his lover, but that had backfired spectacularly. With Jean between his legs, he was completely at the vampire’s mercy.

Not that he minded.

Grabbing the bottle of lube they kept by the bed, he dropped it on the sheet next to Jean’s hand. “Fuck me already.”

“You mean you didn’t get enough of that this weekend?” Jean teased, lifting his head. The moment Raymond’s cock left his mouth, Jean’s fangs reappeared, his need for blood held at bay only by his inability to hurt his lover.

“I’ll never get enough of you,” Raymond swore. He ran his hand up his own chest, lingering over the bite mark on his chest.

Immediately Jean pushed his hand aside, covering the mark with his lips and then deepening it with his fangs. Raymond gasped as Jean sucked at his chest, the movement of his lips drawing blood and stimulating Raymond’s nipple at the same time. Desperate now for the final connection between them, he covered Jean’s cock with lube and guided the shaft to his entrance. He could feel Jean’s hesitation through their bond, but Raymond ignored it. They had made love often enough last night and earlier today that his body would stretch easily.

Jean sensed his reassurance, working his way slowly into Raymond’s body. It seemed to take forever, but neither of them cared for the passing of time. They cared only for the joining of mind, body, and spirit that only existed when they made love this way.

When Jean was fully seated, Raymond’s hands settled on his hips. “Don’t move yet,” he said. “Stay right there, so deep inside me I can feel you all the way up to my heart.”

Jean froze at the husky request. Outside this room, he and Raymond were mostly equals, with Jean occasionally the ascendant one before the Cour of Paris, but in their bedroom, Jean was a slave to Raymond’s desires. If Raymond wanted to draw out their lovemaking so that he came from Jean’s fangs against his heart, Jean would make it so.

Raymond’s eyes closed as Jean stilled within him, only his mouth still working as he drew more and more blood into his mouth. Raymond did not worry about how much Jean took—the Aveu de Sang protected him from overfeeding. Instead he concentrated on the incredibly erotic feeling of Jean’s fangs in his flesh and Jean’s cock in his arse. He swore he could feel it pulse inside him in time to the pounding of his own heart. Jean had explained once that a vampire’s heart beat in time with the heart of the person he had fed from most recently until the next time he fed. Given that Jean would feed from no other while Raymond lived, the beating of their hearts was as entwined as the rest of their lives.

Passion built in Raymond’s gut as he focused on the regular pull of Jean’s fangs. Each time Jean sucked blood into his mouth, Raymond swore he could feel him penetrate deeper until he was sure Jean would touch his heart with the razor-sharp canines. His head spun as his hands dug into the muscles of Jean’s shoulders. He tried to hold back a little longer, but his body had learned too well to associate Jean feeding with the explosive lust between them. Desire built and built, spiraling through him and out across his bond with Jean, only to rush back, augmented by Jean’s need, until nothing existed but that moment in time and space, their bodies as linked as their minds and hearts.

Jean tasted the moment when Raymond’s control shattered, when anything else ceased to exist, even before he felt the hot splash of the wizard’s release between their bodies. The taste of Raymond’s climax in his blood followed by the sweet rush of satiation set fire to Jean as well, his orgasm spooling through him and out of him to fill his lover’s body with proof of his adoration. He gentled his suckling, his fangs resting in Raymond’s chest as his softening cock rested in Raymond’s passage, letting the moment of communion stretch.

Finally, though, he had to lift his head, licking quickly at the bite marks to close them.

“Not that I’m complaining, because you know I’m not, but what brought that on tonight?” Raymond asked. “After last night and this afternoon, I expected it to be a couple of days before you were hungry again.”

“I’m always hungry for you,” Jean said. “I just usually control it better than I did tonight.”

“You know I’m perfectly happy with you not controlling it,” Raymond reminded him with a smile. “This has you worried, doesn’t it?”

Jean nodded. “It could undo all our hard work over the past two years to convince people of vampires’ right to be treated fairly and our ability to live within the confines of the law.”

“That’s what you have to make people understand,” Raymond said. “That he isn’t living within the confines of the law, human or vampire, and that vampires are as upset about his behavior as mortals will be when they learn about it. It will be an uphill battle, no doubt about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s one we have to lose. I need to sleep a little and then we’ll go see Anne-Marie again and get the legal people at l’ANS started on legislation we can propose. We’ll deal with this the same way we’ve dealt with everything else since the alliance began.”

Jean smiled, the simple reminder reassuring him. “Together.”

A
DÈLE
let herself into her house in Château-Chinon, resetting the wards and locking the door behind her. She tossed her keys and wand in the basket she kept by the door so she wouldn’t have to search for them in the morning and stretched, her back arching as she reached toward the ceiling. Her whole body hurt from the tension of being in the same room with Pascale and not letting anyone see the turmoil. The stretches helped, but they would not relax her enough for her to sleep.

Pulling the pins from the chignon that kept her long hair confined during the day, she shook it out, feeling that bit of tension leave her as well. She walked slowly through the small house to the bathroom, turning the hot water on full and closing the door to keep the heat inside. She would soak until she was wrinkled and then go to bed.

And forget about the woman in Paris who could be her partner if Adèle would let her.

Stripping down, she climbed in the tub, hissing as the hot water hit her chilled skin. It would be time to turn the heat on soon, and then another long, cold winter. Every winter she swore she would move to Provence, but she never did. No matter how much she cursed the cold weather, this was home in a way no other place had ever been.

Settling into the water, she closed her eyes and wondered how she had managed to be the one driving along the road from Dommartin to Château-Chinon at exactly the right—or wrong—moment to find Pascale. Any of the wizards associated with the now-defunct Milice de Sorcellerie would have done the same thing she had done, but none of them would have had to worry about the consequences, because they all had partners. They would have calmed Pascale down, taken her back to l’Institut or on to Paris to see Angelique, and gone home to their partners. Instead, Adèle had to be the one to find her. Adèle, who did not have a partner to go home to. Adèle, who had hated having a partner the first time around.

 “I don’t want another partner, damn it,” she muttered, dunking her head beneath the water so she could wash her hair. “The one I had the first time was bad enough.”

Jude had been gone for six months, mostly out of her life for a year before that, and yet she still tensed when she saw a shadow across a doorway, expecting to hear his voice drawling, “Hello, pussy” in greeting before he grabbed her.

She shuddered in disgust at herself as she felt her body react to the mere thought of him touching her. If only her body had reacted with the same disgust as her mind, she might have been able to deal with him, but even as he had spewed filth at her, he had aroused her as none of her previous lovers had ever done.

Even with a partner she had hated, the partnership had turned sexual. Adèle had no illusions a new partnership would be any less so. She had nothing against sex, but she liked men, and her potential new partner was most definitely not a man. She might have said that would make it easier to keep her partnership on a functional level only, but she had seen what happened with Sebastien and Thierry. She was not in Thierry’s confidence, so perhaps he had been bisexual before meeting Sebastien and she had simply been unaware of it, but one way or another, he had gone from being married to being partnered with Sebastien. She had seen them together during the war and since then. They showed all the same hallmarks of a deeper relationship that she had remarked in Alain and Orlando or Jean and Raymond. She had never been invited into their quarters at l’Institut, where they lived full-time now, but she doubted she would find more than one bed if she were.

She could not care less about what they did in the privacy of their own rooms. Their relationship was their business, but she had no interest in copying it. She had never looked at women in any kind of sexual manner. Sure, she could see why men would find certain women more attractive than others or say whether an outfit was flattering on another woman, but that was hardly the same as wanting to take one to her bed.

She liked men.

“This is getting me nowhere,” she muttered with a sigh. Scrubbing quickly, she got out of the bath and dried off, wrapping her hair in a thick towel to blot some of the water out before blowing it dry. As she dressed, she tried to imagine sharing her house with another woman. Two sets of toiletries on the edge of the tub, two brushes, two hairdryers, two nightgowns instead of one. She could list the changes, but she could not fathom making them. She had never shared her house with anyone. She had never met anyone she wanted to share her life with that way, certainly not her former partner, yet if she accepted that she had a new partner, she had to be open to those changes.

As set in her ways as she was, she could make those changes if she had the right incentive, if she met the right man. And therein lay the rub. On the rare occasions she imagined a relationship, it had always been with a man.

Adèle had little patience with her own sex most of the time, finding far too many of them melodramatic, weepy, or weak. She could think of a few exceptions. Magali Ducassé, the wizard who had always stayed behind at the end of a battle to mop up, was possibly the deadliest wizard Adèle knew, and given some of the things Adèle had seen during l’émeutte des Sorciers, that was saying something. Angelique Bouaddi at Sang Froid had always struck Adèle as being a shrewd entrepreneur who ran her business with an iron fist despite her ultra-feminine appearance. If Angelique had been her partner rather than David’s, Adèle might not have hesitated as much. She could picture a functioning partnership with a woman like Angelique, intelligent, savvy, wily, even, and not afraid to go after what she wanted.

Magali was not a vampire, so a partnership with her was out of the question, but Adèle had worked with her during the war and had found that collaboration to be nearly seamless. If Magali were a vampire, Adèle thought perhaps they could make something of a partnership as well.

Adèle could not claim to know Pascale well, but nothing in what she had seen of the newly turned vampire gave her any reason to respect the other woman. Being turned was a life-changing experience. Adèle understood that, but she did not understand the impulse to self-destruction. She had never been one to bemoan what could not be changed, choosing to work through the challenges in her life and to come out stronger on the other side. Pascale’s histrionics were exactly the kind of display that made Adèle roll her eyes and dismiss a person from her esteem. She would never be able to make a partnership work with someone like that, male or female. She would lose patience and shout, as she was wont to do, and Pascale would wail and storm out, and that would be the end of it.

Better never to begin.

R
AYMOND
went to the réfectoire for breakfast the next morning, leaving Jean in their rooms busily contacting other chefs de la Cour. Halfway through the night, Jean had left their bed to pace the sitting room. Raymond had given up luring him back to bed when even walking into the room naked had not gotten his lover’s attention. It drove home the gravity of the situation with the nonconsensual turning far more than anything else could have done. Jean had never passed up a chance to ravish him before, even when they were still pretending their relationship was only functional.

After breakfast, Raymond would call Anne-Marie Valour, his replacement as president of l’ANS, and set up a meeting with her to discuss the situation and the legislation, but no one would be at the office this early.

To his surprise, Martin Delacroix sat at one of the tables nursing a cup of coffee. “Good morning,” Raymond said, bringing his own coffee and croissants to the table. “I didn’t expect to see you awake this morning.”

“I haven’t been to sleep,” Martin admitted. “My mind is racing too fast to relax.”