“Tell me what to do,” she insisted.
Anxiety grew in her when she saw him strain to speak, but his lips didn’t even part. His eyes flickered over to a credenza next to the door where a pitcher and glasses rested. Isabel hurried over to the table where she poured a tall glass of cool water.
“Let me hold up your head,” she said quietly when she approached him again and saw that even more sweat had beaded on his brow. He obviously was trying to raise himself and was weakened even by that effort.
She sat on the corner of the bed, her knee bent close to his shoulder, and lifted his head. He drained the water more rapidly than she would have expected, given his nearly paralyzed state. When he was done, he looked up at her. The message in his eyes was like a complicated, coded language. It bewildered and scared her, but she didn’t move away from him. She glanced down at her gloved hand. His wavy, thick hair gleamed next to the black
velvet, more lustrous by far than the inexpensive fabric of the glove.
She wanted to feel it twining through her fingers. It shocked her, this sudden desire. She’d recoiled at the thought of touching another being for so long now.
She tried not to recall the vision of his beautifully shaped, erect phallus highlighted by snug straps of leather. How could he be so ill and debilitated when his cock was so hard?
For a stretched moment, they just stared at one another. She felt strange—torpid and warm, and yet energized and prickly as well, as though the nerves were singing out a plea to be touched. After a moment, she forced herself to inhale. The desperation she’d seen in his rigid face was fading, slowly being replaced by a stony, fierce expression.
“Are you better now?” she asked as she turned to set the glass on a bedside table. When he didn’t speak, she tried to gather herself. What was it that she was doing here? Why had she come? It was so difficult to think, when her vision was so full of him, when he crowded her senses and flooded her brain. It felt a like a sensual assault.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
“I-I had to. I needed to speak with you. You must let me go.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” he repeated. Her forehead crinkled in confusion when she heard the bleakness of his tone.
Suddenly, without her knowing how it had happened, she lay on the bed, her head on the pillow where his had just been. He leaned down over her, his large hands holding her shoulders. She saw that his incisors had lengthened. For some reason, she wanted to weep when she saw the wild desperation on his rigid features.
Such a living portrait of pain.
He leaned down and sank his teeth into her neck.
Chapter Five
She wanted to scream, whether in fear or shock or ecstasy, she didn’t know. There was pain, but a distilled, voluptuous bliss twined through it, leaving her immobilized. Her eyes opened wide, as though she were being shown the secrets of the universe and couldn’t quite comprehend the miracle of the vision.
A tension swelled in her sex. It hurt where his teeth pierced her neck, but his lips moved around the puncture wounds, the movement striking her as decadently erotic. She felt the heat of his mouth penetrate her. Somehow, the sharp pain he wrought mingled with nerve and flesh until it transformed into a potent, sharp need for release.
She struggled weakly against him, not because she wanted this bizarre, electrical experience to stop—no, she would have begged him to continue—but distantly, she was mortified that she was about to climax explosively beneath a stranger…
…her captor.
That the act shouldn’t feel like the height of intimacy, but did, confused and panicked her.
The movements he made while he fed—the subtle suckling actions of his jaw and the convulsions of his throat as he swallowed her blood—came to a halt when he felt her weak struggle. His hold on her shoulders became more firm.
She cried out shakily when he withdrew his teeth from her flesh.
“Shhhh,” he quieted. “Do not fight me.”
She came at the sensation of his teeth sliding back into her flesh. Orgasm ripped through her, pain edging vast waves of pleasure.
It was as if those crashing surges of sharp climax whisked away the familiar landmarks of her known world.
The next conscious thought she had was of movement and stability at once. She cracked open her eyes and saw she was in a torch-lit, domed corridor. Through a hazed consciousness, she saw angels and gods cavorting above her, some leered down at her mockingly, others reached to touch her, to comfort.
But they may retract their healing, beneficent fingertips. She required no comfort. She felt numb. No, that wasn’t right. She didn’t feel numb, but alive. She buzzed with life; she was drunk on it.
She rolled her head on a hard object and looked up. This angel was real—a dark, fierce one. The cavorting angels overhead were faded caricatures compared to him. His gaze remained fixed ahead, like a cold, straight blade lodged in stone. She realized the hardness behind her head was his biceps, and that he carried her down a long corridor.
“Hey,” she said.