The Bleeding Dusk (The Gardella Vampire Chronicles 3)

Victoria had levered up the knife and was sawing delicately, and awkwardly, against the ropes. “And whatever is wrong with the way Lady Petronilla looks?” She couldn’t keep the little grunt from her voice as she felt soreness and pain radiating up her wrists from the tense, awkward motions. Her injured left leg screamed under the weight of her body as she knelt there, working as fast yet as carefully as she could.

“She is as flat as a board. Flatter, even.”

“Flat as a—Oh.” Victoria bit her lip and rolled her eyes in the dark.

“Ah, at last! I can feel my fingers again,” Sebastian said, and he wiggled said fingers against hers.

“Take care,” she warned, “else you’ll get them cut and then you won’t feel them at all. This blade is wickedly sharp.”

“It is indeed, for I’m free already.”

She felt a jolt as he pulled his wrists apart, brushing against her as the ropes fell away. He gave a relieved exhale as he took the blade from her aching fingers. Victoria heard the unmistakable sound of friction, as if he were rubbing his wrists and arms to get the blood flowing again. Which was something she longed to do herself, as soon as she was untied.

“Now what are you doing?” she asked, impatient to be free.

“Cutting apart my ankles. You do realize,” he said with a sudden, low chuckle, “that I am free and you are still bound, my lovely Venator. And that I have the rare advantage over you?”

A little squirm started in her middle, making her feel ill. Or…perhaps it was something altogether different from nausea. “Sebastian,” she said in warning, then remembered. “I have to ask you something about my aunt.”

“…and that you are at my mercy?” His voice had taken on a low purr, and suddenly he was next to her, moving with such freedom that she knew his legs were also unbound.

“Sebastian, when you took her vis bulla—”

His hands found her face easily—how, in the dark, she didn’t know—but when his elegant yet sticky fingers curled under her chin and around the back of her neck, the only thing she could do was try to pull back as she lost her train of thought.

She had no leverage, nothing but her aching wrists and chilled fingers to hold her steady, propped behind her. When Sebastian moved closer, bringing that familiar scent of clove that always clung to him and setting her heart to pounding, Victoria had nowhere to go except down to the floor…and that was one place she didn’t want to go.

He missed her mouth that first time, his lips brushing just above his fingers, in the middle of her cheek. But he soon rectified the error and drew her forward, up on her knees and toward him, chest to bosom, as he covered her mouth with his.

Eleven

In Which Michalas’s Wish Is Granted

As so often occurred when kissing Sebastian, Victoria found herself more helpless than not, with her hands still tied and her balance precarious. Yet she closed her eyes there in the dark and opened her mouth when he opened his, accepting his slick tongue and offering her own. The aches in her hand and leg eased, fading away in the wake of the deep kiss that reminded her how much she had missed this—intimate touching, passionate kissing, Sebastian himself.

She couldn’t see him, just barely the dark shape of a shadow close to her, blocking her vision. But she pictured his handsome face and the sensual curling of his tawny, lion’s-mane hair, surely tousled from battle with the vampires. His eyes were a darker shade of the same hue, a chestnut, and his skin—so unlike his grandfather’s pale visage—was golden. He looked like a bronze angel, she’d often thought. An ironic description.His lips were soft and smooth, fitting to hers and then drawing closed to lick and then nibble at the corner of her mouth, his teeth gnawing gently at her bottom lip, right where his grandfather had bitten her the night before. Victoria started when she realized this, when she felt his teeth on the tender part of her lip, and tried to turn away. But he was cradling her face in his hands and only kissed her more deeply than ever.

“I thought…you preferred…carriages,” came a raspy, annoyed voice from across the room, “Vioget.”

Victoria started and twisted her face violently from Sebastian, who seemed to have no inclination to release her. “Max? Oh, thank God, you’re alive!”

“Your…concern…overwhelms me.” There was a soft shuffling sound, a sharp intake of breath. “Perhaps…you could be…so kind as to…bring that knife…here. When”—his voice trailed off, then picked up more strongly—“you’ve finished…of course. I cannot…imagine…it should take…very long…at all.”

“Carriages, parlors, dungeons,” Sebastian said carelessly, “wherever the opportunity presents itself. Which it does rather more often than I would expect you’d imagine—or be familiar with.”

But as he spoke Sebastian had released her, mainly, Victoria thought, because she’d mutinously kept her face away from his seeking fingers and mouth, twisting back when he tried to renew the kiss. Now he moved behind her, his hands on her hips as he found his position.

Too late, she realized she was at an even greater disadvantage with him kneeling behind her, knife in hands. “Don’t move now, Victoria,” he said, his voice curling in her ear like soft smoke, his breath warm on her skin. “This knife is very sharp, and I cannot see what I’m doing. I’d hate to slice into your beautiful flesh…the fresh blood would draw the hungry vampires here in a moment.”

One of his hands moved aside the great mass of hair that had fallen down from her coiffure, when her stake had been removed, and now his lips pressed gently to the sensitive skin there on the top of her shoulder, at the juncture of her neck. Featherlight at first, then heavier, then with a sleek brush of tongue, he kissed her flesh while he sawed away, one-handed, at her ropes.

She couldn’t help the smallest of gasps when he mauled and sucked at the tendon there, where he knew she was most sensitive. And Max couldn’t help but hear her reaction, the faint sound of breaking suction, the quiet lapping of Sebastian’s mouth.

He did it purposely—whether it was to titillate and arouse her or to annoy Max, she wasn’t certain, but the only thing she could try to do was ignore the swipe of his lips, the warm slide over the top of her shoulder, up along her neck. But when one of his hands—the one not holding the knife, fortunately, slid around to cover one of her br**sts, Victoria couldn’t hold back a sudden intake of breath.