A Vampire's Claim (21 page)

When he returned to the kitchen with the woman, she put the blood into a teacup and poured Earl Grey over it. She prepared a tray with sugar, cream and a couple biscuits. Handing it to him with a short curtsy, she returned without another word to her duties, preparing dinner. He found the biscuits odd, but then he remembered what she’d said about vampires enjoying food without consumption. Well, the biscuits did look good. Maybe Danny would balance them on his nose and, if he performed the trick well enough, let him have them. He was getting hungry himself.

He shouldered his swag, the sum of their belongings, and headed for the stairs to the second level. As he did, he glanced in at the rooms he passed. The décor was the dark furniture and overly formal look of an English estate, down to an ostentatious painting of hunting hounds over one of the fireplaces. The dogs stood against a lush hill-side that looked nothing like this part of Australia, or any part of the country he knew. These had to be Ian’s choices, for Danny had implied her mother had a bond to the land that she herself possessed. Thank God.

When he reached her room, he knocked.

Come in.

It reassured him, the voice in his head, which probably proved he’d turned the corner. As he stepped in, he found he was right about who’d chosen the interior for the rest of the house. The first thing he saw when he stepped in was a series of Outback watercolors, small, quaint landscapes. The room had rustic furniture, a large quilt on the bed. Because this was the part of the house buried in the hill, it was blessedly cool, and a group of candles gave it a light that made him think again of the solitude of their cave, with more creature comforts.

When he set down the tray and turned, she was emerging from the washroom. He could see the bathtub behind her, water ready.

She’d stripped out of the T-shirt she’d borrowed from him. Wearing brassiere, trousers and bare feet, she came to him, took the cup and downed the contents in several swallows, a look of ferocious satisfaction crossing her face before she tossed the delicate porcelain aside, letting it shatter on the floor. Seizing the back of his head, she drew him down to taste the blood on her lips, the taste of her beneath it. Struggling to catch up, he gripped her hips, as much for anchor as to return the pleasure, and she growled, moving into him. Her breasts pushed against his chest, her flat abdomen sliding along his cock as her leg insinuated between his.

If he touches you again, I’ ll kill him, I swear it.

The sheer raw possession in her thought took him by surprise. He sure as hell didn’t like Ian touching her, or thinking about how many blokes Danny might have chosen to touch. But this twisted something unexpected in him, all the way down to his balls. It was beyond jealousy. She viewed him as belonging to
her
, and had taken great offense at Ian manhandling him, not just with the suggestion of violence, but sexual violence.

“He’s not my type, love, no worries,” he managed against her mouth, trying to lighten things. Though his voice was hoarse, and the look she flicked up at him didn’t even register as human.

“I need this now. To do the rest.” Before he could guess what she meant, she made it rather obvious, shoving him to his back on the bed even as she was tearing her trousers off her legs, along with her knickers, leaving her gloriously naked.

“Open them. Now.” She gave a short nod to his strides, staring at what was already straining beneath, as if she could command it to arousal with one demanding look, and she probably could. The air around here was rife with the idea that vampires could control and direct anything they damn well pleased. While he couldn’t very well argue that, not after Ian had knocked him into the dirt and held him there with as much effort as it would have taken to hold down an infant, Dev’s hackles rose.

“You going to make me if I don’t, like your friend down there?”

He fought her, but it made little difference. She was too damn fast. She didn’t take them off. He cursed her as she shredded one of the two pairs of pants he owned, tore the seams of the boxers beneath and ripped open his shirt, leaving it in strips on his broad shoulders. She didn’t touch the knife harnesses he wore beneath his clothes. A message that they were useless against her. She left all that on, but took everything else. As she straddled him, she held him down with one hand pressed hard against his throat. She was dripping and hot already, so he couldn’t help but groan as she sank down on him and began to ride. Even as his mind was spinning, his body was ready for her, hard and thick, making those cunt muscles of hers strain to take him, where she outmatched him physically everywhere else.

“You did this, Dev.” There was anger in her voice, warring with lust. “You stood up to him, you foolish,
stupid
man. You killed those two men because they tried to hurt me. You didn’t care about the consequences.”

No teasing seduction. She rode him, ruthlessly using the lust of one body for another, something that couldn’t be denied. He didn’t know if this was punishment or desperation, but he gripped her hips, hung on as she bent, lithe and flexible, and sank her fangs into his throat, drinking deep, letting him feel the unnerving rush of blood from that major artery flow into her mouth. She swallowed against him, close enough the quiver of her breasts brushed his chest as she kept moving rhythmically, demanding his surrender.

She was still drinking when he came, crying out hoarsely, his hands digging into her arse as she made a noise of approval against his skin. Her body shuddered, an intense but short climax of her own that seemed to paralyze her for a moment, her forehead pressed hard against his jaw. Then, still impatient, she was sealing the wound with strokes and pressure of her tongue, her fingers burying into his hair, squeezing past the point of pain, her mouth still on the side of his neck.

But when she slowly rose, her lovely abdominal muscles contracting as she straightened without the use of her arms, he saw she wasn’t done with him yet.

She stepped away from the bed, their mingled fluids trickling down her thighs, the dark pink of her flushed and swollen sex visible to him. “Clean me, Dev.” She said it softly, but it was still a command. “With your mouth.”

To do it, he had to leave the bed, go down on his knees before her. Technically, it wasn’t difficult, because he didn’t think his legs were quite ready to hold him and it made sense to give her that cosseting as a continuation of the passion between them. However, when he slid out of the bed, she moved back two steps, waited for him, brilliant eyes resting on his face. A taunt, making it clear she expected him to walk those two steps on his knees.

To hell with that,
was his first thought. Then he looked at her. Her hair poured across her pale shoulders, her breasts high and proud. But beneath that, a tempest, so many things obviously swirling in her mind as she stood before him.

She was a garden behind a stone wall, protected by a dragon in a moat. When she let him into that garden, when he was deep inside her—God help him, he might be insane—he’d discovered rare and fragile blooms. He saw them in her eyes, in the tremble of her body, her response that couldn’t be feigned. And it wasn’t just a response to his body or what he was doing to hers. She was responding to
him
.

She was the dragon, the wall
and
the garden. So though her challenge brought forth an instinctive rebellion in him, he thought the dragon
expected
to be fought, maybe even relished it. But somehow, ultimately, it was surrender that would bring him over the wall, into that garden, her innermost self. Would bring both of them into it. Taming the dragon, at least temporarily. When he was in that garden, he never wanted to leave.

It was a strange mélange of thoughts, but he was at a loss to explain most of his reactions to her. He didn’t know why even this demand made his cock give an unexpected contraction, another small expulsion of semen that caused a gasp, a little bit of a forward pitch. Her hand was on his shoulder then, steadying him. She guided him as she put one foot on the bed, widening her stance.

“Every drop, Dev. Let me feel that clever tongue.”

Placing his mouth against her cunt, he closed his eyes, immersed in the scent of her. When he placed hands on her hips, her own landed on top of them, closing over his wrists, a light manacle. He began to lick, circling his tongue over the damp, still-aroused clit, goaded by the guttural sound that emitted from her lips. He kept going, kept his focus on actually cleaning her, which he understood was what she wanted. He was performing a task for her.

In return, she rewarded him. Or tormented him further. With her, the line between pleasure and torture was slim.

Opening a window in her mind, she showed him other times, when she’d bedded men to add spice to the blood she took from them. Afterward, she sent them away and let her maid do the cleaning honors with a soft washcloth. The maid she’d used in Brisbane had been young, her fair skin flushed a pretty pink as Danny taught her best how to pleasure her Mistress, to bring her to climax again. Then one night Danny had laid the young woman down on the bed and removed the knickers beneath the short black skirt. Fingering her moist, virginal lips, she had the girl writhing until Danny removed her own knowledgeable hand and made the girl finish herself, enjoying the maid’s discovery of her own sensuality.

He gave her labia a light nip.
Could have done without the first part, love, about you and those other blokes. But the rest . . .

Holy God.
The visual of her and the maid had his drained cock struggling to rise again. The brainless appendage didn’t realize it would take a miracle for a normal man to get it up after such a fucking, and Dev was a heavyweight.

But when you’re standing behind my chair tonight, you’ll think of it. If you don’t, I’ll send other thoughts your way. I want
them to see that erect cock straining and know that it belongs to me. I want them to envy me until it borders on the edge
of hatred.

The venom in her mind was alarming. He paused briefly.
Love?

Her fingers dug into his scalp again, though her voice gentled. “All the way down the leg to my ankle, Dev. You missed a drop.”

He followed the track, suckling with his mouth, and then he realized the appearance of it, as he went lower, lower, his hips necessarily sliding back toward his heels and then having to lift his arse in the air as he bent all the way to the ground, to the foot she had braced on the carpet. Her tiny foot, the precise arch, the fragile bones of the ankle.

Don’t think, Dev. Just do it. Leave your mind out of it and decide what you want to do.

He found her arch with his mouth and dwelled there, feeling her fingers trail down the bridge of his back, the bullet scars and other signposts of his life. She adjusted her stance so the foot shifted under his mouth. Then she lifted her foot off the bed to prop it on the small of his back, right above the curve of his buttocks. It was where Ian had placed his boot, only this was her delicate foot, her toes gripping his skin, teasing the cleft, her cunt positioned over his head, so that he could have turned on his back and stared up at it, the petals of slick flesh. But for now he paid homage to her foot, teasing it with his tongue, his teeth, the suckling of his lips.

Then he heard a soft moan. Remarkably, a drop of moisture fell on his back, anointing him where his hair had slid forward, baring skin at his nape. Lifting his head then, he worked back up the leg, holding on to it to steady her. She shifted the other leg back to the bed so he could work back to her cunt, then across and down to tease that foot as well.

Oh, God, Dev, you are too good at this
. A tug of his hair, and she moved away, her foot easing out from beneath his mouth as he sat on his heels again. She moved back another step, studying him. “I intended to teach you a lesson.”

“Consider it taught, my lady.”

She closed her eyes, and he had the fleeting, amused thought she was counting to ten, something his mother had done . . . well, countless times. Then her eyes opened and his amusement shriveled up like a man’s testicles before an icy wind. “You’re in a den of lions here, Dev. If you challenge Lord Charles the way you challenged Ian, he won’t hesitate to rip your throat out.”

“If you wanted a submissive puppy who wets himself if someone scolds him, you brought the wrong escort to this party.” He stayed on his heels as he retorted, because it didn’t matter if he was laid out flat on the floor. He wouldn’t be anyone’s doormat.

Her shoulders lifted in a sigh. “Yes, I did. I’m sorry for that. I’ve brought you into hell, Dev.” She shook her head, turned away.

“You can go now. I’ll tell them I dispatched you on station business, but you can simply go . . . wherever it was you were intending to go before we met.”

He blinked. “Is that a command, my lady?”

Danny stopped, spun around and leveled a glare on him. “Don’t be thickheaded. You don’t belong here, Dev. Which means you’ll die here, and I’ve no desire to see that happen. You’ve played your part in this little drama.”

“You didn’t answer the question.” He watched the irritation flicker through her gaze, a muscle flex in her slim jaw.

“And if it is?”

He rose then, aware she might be stronger and faster than he was, but he’d always be taller. Her eyes narrowed at his matter-of-fact mental taunt as he moved closer.

As far as hell goes, I’ve been there, a long time now.

Putting his hands on her shoulders then, he slid them up under her hair, and forward, to her jaw. She’d gone tense as a snake about to strike. While he expected her to do just that, he simply bent, brushed his lips over her mouth.
I’ll try not to let the arrogant
bastard—either one of them—get under my skin. A man’s will can’t be taken, and my will, for the time being, is to be here
with you.

What about when I no longer give you the choice? When I refuse to let you go, no matter
what
your will is?

Letting his hands glide back under her hair, he caressed her nape, twining the strands, his thumb teasing the artery in her throat as her gaze went opaque.
It might be a moot point. Maybe there’s already nothing I’ll deny you.