Silken Rapture (Princes of the Underground 2)

“I don’t know either. You’re the genius. Let me know when you figure it out,” Blaise said before he walked toward his private quarters, shutting the door behind him with a click of finality.

After Aubrey left, Blaise once again wandered out of his bedroom. He felt edgy and restless. After five seconds in his study he was all too eag

er to avoid Elysse’s portrait, all too desperate to prevent recalling what Aubrey had said.

You’re pissed at finding yourself a thousand times more attracted to Isabel Lanscourt than you ever were Elysse.

He winced at the memory.

He sought out David Kwan in the gym. An hour and a half workout with David didn’t ease his anguish as it should have. Smashing his fists, knees and feet into David hadn’t calmed him, and having David return the favor hadn’t worked either. The image of Isabel Lanscourt’s luminescent face would not be dislodged from his mind even by David’s brutal blows to his skull.

After he got out of the shower in his private quarters, he felt weak. He should have visited the apex room where they’d housed the crystal. He needed to feed. His flesh was not nourished moment to moment by a soul. He required vitessence to survive, and he had not tasted blood or a woman’s sweet juices for forty-eight hours now…since before they stormed that unused Tube platform and found the crystal and the female.

Isabel Lanscourt.

He felt too fatigued to dress completely. Instead, he fastened the brown leather harness that fit snugly around his hips and below his testicles and buttocks. He sheathed his heartluster next to his outer left thigh. Even if he were at death’s door, he would strap on his heartluster. It was as integral to him as his arms or eyes…as much a part of him as his clone.

Morshiel was a cancer he couldn’t completely cut off his body. They were two parts of the same whole. Aubrey didn’t understand that. No one understood that fact, save for Blaise, Morshiel and Usan, their Magian creator. Blaise fought desperately against his clone just as he battled with his own savage, parasitic nature.

He lay on his bed and stared at the frescoed ceiling, seeing nothing but a pair of large, animated, black eyes. One second, the expression in those eyes was dazed, bewildered…soft. The next moment, they might have belonged to a spitting tomcat backed into a corner.

After she’d fainted and he’d laid her in her bed earlier, he’d allowed himself five full seconds just to stare at her before he’d resolutely turned and walked out of her suite.

Her aura was in constant movement—alive, golden and glorious. Blaise had the ability to tune out vitessence in his visual field in order to focus on the physical body. In Isabel Lanscourt’s case, her body was possibly more distracting than her brilliant life force.

Blaise and the other five Sevliss princes in existence were as sensitive to energy fields as a farmer was to his crops. They required vitessence to live, after all. They were also deeply attracted to the corporal body. It was their acute awareness of humans as energy beings that made them so physically adroit—brilliant fighters, keen observers…knowing lovers.

He shifted restlessly on the bed when the image of Isabel lying naked on the silken pane flashed into his mind’s eye yet again. Her long hair wasn’t as dark as her eyes, but a lustrous chestnut brown shot through with strands of dark gold. It’d looked like waving silk spread on the amber pillowcase. The vision of her smooth belly and the dark pubic hair between slender, shapely thighs had been electrical somehow. He kept having the most brazenly illicit fantasies of filling her with his come, seeing that flawless skin dripping with his essence.

It was strange for him to envision such things. He did not typically have intercourse with women. Because of his wolf-nature, his penis grew painfully swollen following ejaculation, locking him to a female for a short period of time. He pleasured women, and they gave him pleasure, but he found intercourse too difficult…too intimate, especially in those moments when he became fused to a female’s body. There was always the possibility that he might have to watch, with no escape possible, as disgust eventually entered a woman’s eyes at the evidence she had just had sex with something inhuman.

An animal.

He couldn’t banish the image of Isabel from his mind. His cock stiffened next to his thigh. He felt weak, unable to muster the energy to control his rebellious brain.

She’d been so helpless lying there, so vulnerable, so beautiful, like a fertile virgin field waiting to be harrowed.

His cock wasn’t just erect now, it was a heavy, plaguing ache. His upper lip and abdomen had grown damp with sweat. He felt a strange combination of sharp need and listlessness. He needed to feed, yet he didn’t move. It was as if he thought the vivid image of Isabel Lanscourt that had taken root in his brain could nourish his very body.

He barely had the energy to blink his heavy eyelids when his bedroom door opened and a woman with shoulder-length auburn hair entered, shutting the door behind her. She smiled as she approached his inert form. Her grayish-gold vitessence moved sluggishly, reminding Blaise of dawn peaking through a London smog.

“What do you want?” he asked with great effort. His jaw had grown as heavy as his eyelids.

“I would think the question is what you want, my Lord,” the woman said in a husky, knowing voice. She fleetly removed her robe, baring apricot-hued skin and large, firm breasts. “Mr. Cane sent me to you. He said you would be…hungry by now.” Her avid, green-eyed gaze lingered on his swollen erection. She laughed seductively. “I see he was right.”

“What’s your name?” he grated out. He’d never seen her before. He never fed from a woman twice. His need was vast. He would harm a human if he took from her too greatly. Besides, she would become attached to him if he saw her more than once. Worse, he might become attached to her, just as he had Elysse.

Blaise had vowed never again to need a woman beyond nourishment. Why desire what would eventually be ripped away from you by the inevitability of fate? Of death?

“Margarite,” the woman said as she began to make a show of herself, palming her breasts from below and plumping them as she ran her fingertips over the peaking nipples. Aubrey knew Blaise’s tastes and he’d chosen well for him tonight. Aubrey often joked over the fact that playing pimp for Blaise was not the least favorite, even if it was the least respected, of his many professions. His friend had taken on the role centuries ago when he realized that Blaise occasionally fell into a malaise because he resisted the urge to feed.

Anger began to trickle into his awareness at the temptation Aubrey had offered him.

“Margarite,” he muttered as he watched her finesse her nipples. He doubted the name was real, although the breasts definitely were. The women Aubrey brought him might be nothing more than very expensive whores, but they were typically of the highest quality flesh. Aubrey saw to that.

“Yes, Lord Delraven?” she whispered, a hint of a smile on her pouting lips.

“Get out.”