Vampires' Consort: Magical Menages, Book 2 (7 page)

His erect cock nudged at her entrance.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Come into me.” She slipped her hands down to his buttocks, pulling him toward her. A slight tilt of her pelvis lined them up and, with a thrust, he entered her. As he slid inside her, she sighed in satisfaction at the wonderful sense of completion. This was exactly what she’d been craving since he’d met her at the airport. Since before that. On some level, this moment had been in her mind since she’d first seen a handsome stranger in her corner grocery store. There was a sense of inevitability about the act that she didn’t want to examine too closely. Instead, she surrendered to the blissful sensation of holding Jacob in her arms, their bodies thrusting against one another.

His weight pinned her down, his chest rubbing against her breasts and his hairy belly tickling hers. Akila groaned and drew her knees up high, locking her heels around the small of his back, welcoming him even deeper. She arched her back, her head digging into the pillow, baring her throat to him.

As Jacob dipped his face and latched onto her neck, sucking hard enough to leave a mark, she couldn’t help but think of Valarian and imagine fangs sinking into her throat and a mouth greedily sucking her life’s blood. What had that felt like to Jacob when the bond had been forged between the two men?

She smoothed her palms from his sweat-slicked back to his shoulders, which heaved beneath her hands as he rocked against her. Jacob was a nearly silent lover. Soft groans and grunts were the only sounds he made. The hum of the pump in the aquarium was louder than he was.

Akila tended to be vocal during sex. She filled the void with encouragement. “Come on, baby. That’s it. Harder. Fuck me.”

Her exuberance spurred Jacob’s excitement. He moved faster. Their bodies slapped together as he drove into her harder. She loved that loss of control and clenched her inner muscles around his cock, her legs and arms around his back.

“More,” she wailed, as he hit her sweet spot. Akila began to spiral upward once more, straining toward another climax. “Keep going. Right there.

“Oh, God, yes!” she cried as starbursts exploded through her once more.

With a quiet groan, Jacob pushed deep and froze, trembling against her. His cock pulsed as he released. Akila continued to rock against him while the last waves of her own climax receded.

Afterward she lay still, breathing hard and clinging to his sweaty body. He lay heavily on top of her and she welcomed his weight and heat. Sweet, sticky summertime loving. Next time they should do it on the beach with the surf crashing around them. She’d always wanted to try that.

Jacob sighed softly and rolled off her to stretch out beside her, one arm flung above his head, the other hand resting on his rising and falling chest.

Akila drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That was fantastic. I’m glad you stopped by.”

She didn’t like the way the words sounded light and dismissive, as if she was thanking a guy after a casual quickie. This had been more than that. She could feel it. Yet how could her emotions be involved when she didn’t even know Jacob? He was, after all, a stranger. But she felt strangely connected to him, and a voice inside her warned,
Something has begun.

She glanced at his profile as he lay beside her, the bold nose and sculpted chin and jaw line. His eyes, hooded by half-closed lids, were full of secrets to unravel. Now that he was relaxed and drowsy, she would ply him with a few questions and learn a little more about the man who would supposedly sire her child.

“Tell me more about how you hooked up with Kaspan.” She kept her voice soft, cajoling a confidence from him.

Jacob paused for so long she feared he’d tell her it was none of her business. But at last he replied. “What do you want to know?”

“I’d really like to understand what it means to live in thrall to a vampire. You said he freed you and nursed you back to health. Start with that.”

Could he tell her? Yes. The story was not complicated. But speaking the words was as painful as having his fingers broken one by one, and he could testify to exactly how that felt.

He closed his eyes and released a long breath, separating himself from emotion and looking at his life through the detached eyes of a man staring down a long telescope. What had happened to him sometimes seemed light years away now, but other times it was as vivid as yesterday.

“My father dared to speak against the Reich. He was arrested. We never found out what happened to him, but later my entire family was taken away—my mother, my two sisters and brother—and put in a prison camp.”

“Are you Jewish?”

He opened his eyes and turned his head on the pillow to look at her. She was so young World War II was nothing but a documentary on the History channel to her. She probably knew about Hitler and the Holocaust and the Americans storming the beach at Normandy, but little else of what had taken place back then.

“No,” he answered. “It wasn’t only Jews who were imprisoned. Anyone who was undesirable or spoke against the government was rooted out like weeds and thrown on the rubbish heap.” He thought of Gerta and Mother quite literally tossed in a pile with other dead bodies.

“And Valarian found you there?”

“Yes, just before Dachau was liberated in ’45.”

“What about the rest of your family? I’m sorry. It’s not my business.”

He’d rather not talk about it, but now he’d started, he might as well tell her the rest—although not the details. Those he would never share.

“My younger brother Hans was sent to a different camp for some reason. It was impossible to understand the bureaucracy. I never learned what became of him or my father. My mother and one of my sisters died at Dachau. My other sister…died later.” That was enough. She didn’t need to know Mary had become an officer’s whore and later killed herself from the shame of it.

“I’m so very sorry.”

He nodded, accepting her condolence, and moved on. “The formal surrender of the camp took place on April twenty-nine, but another division arrived the day before. Valarian was with them as a war correspondent. He’d immigrated to America many decades earlier, forging new identities and relocating whenever his lack of aging became obvious.”

“If he can’t be out in the daylight, how did he manage to hold down a job like that?”

“He couldn’t join the armed forces. But as an independent journalist, he traveled as he wished, producing the appropriate papers and attaching himself to various battalions. He was resourceful and fought the war in his own way.”

How could he tell her what it had been like just before the Americans took over the camp? That night had been a blur. Jacob had been listless from hunger and closer to dying than he’d realized. When the guards had started shooting and burning bodies to destroy the evidence of their crime, he’d tried to protect some prisoners who were even weaker than himself.

The Americans had broken through the gates, bullets flying. In the midst of it, Jacob had one single-minded purpose—to protect a boy he held in his arms. Having that focus gave him the willpower he needed to stay alive as he shielded the boy’s body with his own. And then he’d felt a presence by his side. He’d looked into eyes so powerful they felt like searchlights. In the midst of the chaos, he heard the stranger’s voice as if it were inside his mind.
The boy is dead. You can let go now.

Jacob looked down and saw it was true. The child’s emaciated chest was no longer moving. He laid the boy on the ground and returned his gaze to the man beside him.
Now what?

“I can save your life, if you will devote it to me,” the dark-eyed man said aloud. He showed his teeth, and where the canines should be was a pair of curving fangs. Jacob was past being shocked by anything at that point. He simply nodded, accepting the face the man showed him.

“I need a good man like you to be my agent. In return I’ll give you a new existence.”

Jacob barely paused to consider. “Will you give me revenge? That is what I want.”

“Revenge is usually not as sweet as we anticipate,” the vampire warned.

“Those are my terms. You help me and I will serve you for the rest of my life.” At the time he hadn’t really understood how long that life would be.

Valarian had slit his wrist and offered Jacob his blood. While Jacob sucked that energizing nectar, Valarian had leaned close as if to kiss his cheek. A sharp pain pierced his neck as the vampire claimed him. Their bond had been sealed in blood.

“Jacob, Are you all right?” Akila’s quiet voice brought him abruptly back to the present, the soft bed beneath him and the warm woman by his side. “I’m sorry I stirred up these painful memories.”

“No. You should know everything about us, about what you’re getting into if you decide to accept Valarian’s proposal. He is no longer an evil being, but he’s no angel, either. The night he freed me, we forged a pact. He helped me fulfill my vow to my family. For years after the war we tracked Nazi criminals even more diligently than the Mossad did.”

“What did you do to them?”

He looked at her. “We didn’t take them into custody.”

She didn’t look particularly appalled by the fact. Perhaps, compared to Valarian’s violent history, Jacob’s one-man justice didn’t seem so bad. Or all of this seemed more like a story than reality to her.

“Do you ever regret making that pact? There must be times when you wish you could go your own way, live your own life. Or maybe I just don’t understand your relationship. Are you lovers?”

Jacob smiled. The girl kept taking him by surprise with her candor. “Sometimes.”

“You’re bisexual, then.”

He paused to consider. Despite his years with Valarian, and those years had included a lot of sex, Jacob still thought of himself as a heterosexual male. He was attracted to women. His relationship with Valarian was something else entirely, an unbreakable, unshakeable connection.

“I suppose you could say that.”

Akila surprised him even more by adding, “Do the two of you ever share a partner, like a ménage situation?” She said it in an offhand manner, but the glitter in her eyes made it clear she was intrigued by the idea.

“Rarely, but sometimes. One doesn’t live as long as we have without experimenting with many things.”

Akila flopped back on the pillow. “You must think I’m an incredibly shallow bitch for asking sex questions after the serious things you’ve told me about your life. I’m sorry. I blurt out whatever crosses my mind. I really need to learn to keep my big mouth shut.”

“No. Your honesty is refreshing. I like it.” He smiled at her. “Especially since so much of my life is carried on in the shadows of half truths and lies. It’s the nature of being Valarian’s agent. I conduct his business when he can’t—although with the advent of the Internet it’s much easier for him to do whatever he needs to from home—that entails being very careful about everything I say.”

“I can imagine. Like keeping Superman’s identity a secret. It would be tiresome.” She cut a sideways glance at him. “Do you ever wish you could just be normal?”

Every day.
“My life stopped being normal the day my family was arrested in nineteen forty-three. This is my life.”

And it just got a lot more interesting since you burst into it.

Valarian watched the lights in the windows of Akila’s room shine in the darkness. He stood in the garden below, the one planted with night-blooming flowers that shone ghostly white in the moonlight. He loved to sit for hours in the peaceful place. He hadn’t chosen to go there tonight simply because it was below Akila’s window and he could hear the sounds of their lovemaking floating out into the night. Not at all.

His nose twitched as it caught the faint scent of sex, and his cock twitched as he envisioned heaving, naked flesh. His fangs descended from the desire to sink them into Akila’s lovely breast or Jacob’s solid shoulder. It was difficult to separate the need for sexual release from the need for blood, both so powerful and elemental a part of him.

He could go upstairs, throw open the bedroom door and join them on that wide bed. The desire to do so was strong, and he’d never been a man to deny himself what he wanted. During his life, his mode had been to seize and possess. His newfound benevolence toward humanity had only taken place over the past ninety years and had been a slow learning process, for at heart he was a selfish being.

Right now he must leave Jacob and Akila alone to become acquainted with one another. Slaking his lust was not important. The world was at risk and trying to save it was the least he could do to make up for his years of rampaging across the globe destroying fragile humanity in order to satisfy his craving for violence and blood. Maybe there could be redemption for him after all from this one grand gesture.

But it was hardly his grand gesture, was it? Jacob would be the causative agent and Akila the one who would carry the savior. Other than bringing the two together, what part did he really play in the event? He’d contributed a little DNA, staged a little show of dominance to spur Jacob to make a move. That was all. It wasn’t as if their progeny would truly be his child.

He stared at the pale blossoms in the garden, then at the lozenge moon that frosted the ocean waves. The primal sounds coming from the bedroom window accelerated as Jacob and Akila’s union neared completion. Valarian rested his hand on the bulge in his trousers, cupping but not rubbing his erection.

Akila’s wail of release signaled the end of their coupling. It was followed by the murmur of two voices sharing confidences. That was as it should be. It was a vampire’s nature to spend a long, solitary existence. Partners, thralls, friends, sexual attachments came and went as the years rolled by. No matter how close those attachments might seem at the time, they inevitably faded and drifted away to be replaced by new emotional entanglements.

He sighed. Now he’d truly depressed the hell out of himself and that was unacceptable. Moody contemplation was Jacob’s special gift, not his.

Valarian turned away from the garden and the sounds of Akila and Jacob’s connection and trotted down to the beach to enjoy a late-night swim. There was always something to do, some pleasure to be had in solitude. By the time he’d stripped off his clothes and dove into the water, he was laughing at the absurdity of life once more. A vampire begetting a child by proxy—what foolishness would the universe think up next?