Time After Time (Cora's Bond) Read online

  The ones who died? she wrote back instantly.

  Yeah, them. And there’s more stuff. It’s all stupid. I don’t want to talk about that, though. What else did you do this weekend?

  I sat back against the cold porcelain tank, focusing on the tiny screen in my hand and willing myself out of this dangerous, complicated world and back into Lisette’s simpler one, if only for a moment.

  Hannah had gotten into loud 1980s sweaters and was establishing an eye-blinding collection from the local thrift store, throwing Sarah into despair about ever setting her up with a guy, which was Sarah’s stated goal in life for every one of her friends.

  Meanwhile, Lisette had extracted promises from all our friends not to walk alone on campus at night after yet another student had gone missing, and she’d gotten into a tiff with Sabrina about it after Sabrina had pointed out that the police had said that three of the five missing students had left clear signs of having run away after the first disappearance.

  And Geoff had eased back into the group after the last party, showing a keen and growing interest in Clarissa.

  Wouldn’t it be awesome if they got together? Lisette wrote.

  It would be something, I wrote back as my brain cringed away from the image.

  Aw, don’t be jelly! You have Dorian!

  Yeah, jealous wasn’t the word I was thinking of.

  I wished I could type, Keep him away! She eats people! But that would require far more explaining than I was willing to do, and even if Lisette believed me, next time she met Clarissa, she wouldn’t care.

  I guessed that I’d just have to trust Clarissa, as uncomfortable and potentially disastrous as that sounded.

  So, where’s your billionaire douchebag? Lisette typed, adding a series of stickers to let me know that she was joking.

  Ahahaha, I wrote. You’re so funny. But I felt a twinge of guilt because she’d surmised—correctly—that I wouldn’t be talking to her if he were there.

  As if summoned by that thought, there was a knock on the bathroom door. I leaned out past the half-wall that blocked the view of the door from the toilet seat as the handle twisted and Dorian stepped in. He was wearing his pants and a dress shirt from dinner, but the collar was open, his cuffs rolled up, and his feet were bare.

  He’s right here, I typed quickly. TTYL! I clicked out of the Messenger app.

  “I could have been on the pot, you know,” I said.

  The deep shadows under his eyes lightened fractionally as he crossed to stand in front of me. “It looks to me like you are.”

  “I meant...doing my business.” I frowned at him.

  “I know what you meant, but you lock the door when you do that,” he said.

  I reviewed my routine and realized that he was right. I always did. “Okay, but how do you know that? And how come you never rattle the doorknob when I’ve got it locked?”

  He held up one finger. “I have very good hearing.” He raised a second finger beside the first. “I use the house app. It tells me which doors are locked, and that way, I know I’m never interrupting you.”

  I made a face at him and leaned against the toilet tank again. “The stalker app. I should have known.”

  He didn’t retort, merely raising his eyebrows. “You haven’t showered yet.”

  I stood up and waved my phone. “I didn’t know how long you’d be. I expected you to take longer, to be honest. So I was chatting with my friend. You know, you can do that with a phone and not just use it to spy on people.”

  It came out a little defensively. I hadn’t meant it to, but talking to Lisette seemed suddenly pretty childish in the grand scheme of things, and I was all too aware of how little help I’d been—and could be—in this situation.

  Dorian stood aside to let me out of the toilet alcove. I set the phone on the counter next to the sink and turned to face him again.

  “You should talk to your friends,” he said simply.

  I snorted, leaning back against the edge of the counter. “Let’s see. You’re trying to fight against the Kyrioi for the future of the world, but it’s important that I chat with my friends. That makes sense.”

  “We’ll still be fighting against the Kyrioi in five hundred years. You won’t be chatting with these friends then,” he said. “You feel guilty because you are conflicted. But you’re conflicted because you’re young.”

  I frowned at him. “So you’re not conflicted, then? Do you become that damned certain of yourself once you’ve lived a century or two?”

  The shadows came back into his eyes. “I am conflicted for entirely different reasons. Ones that won’t change no matter how many centuries pass.”

  I gave a helpless half-shrug, not wanting to talk about that now. Not even wanting to think about it. Abruptly, I changed the subject—to something that had been gnawing at the back of my mind but that I hadn’t even dared to think through completely until that moment.

  “I didn’t cry downstairs. I wanted to, but not like before. A man had just died in front of me, and...God, I was sick and shocked and disgusted and upset, sure. But my hands—they’re not even shaking.” I held them up to demonstrate, and they remained rock-steady in between us.

  Dorian caught them both in his and raised them to his lips, kissing the backs of the knuckles and sending a shivering reaction through me.

  “I know,” he said, and there was a shadow of regret in his voice—but also an echo of pride.

  “Why not?” I demanded. “If this had happened three months ago, I probably would have started screaming and I wouldn’t have stopped for hours. Today, I worried most about how it will impact your cause, and then I messaged my friends for half an hour.” I laughed hollowly. “And I didn’t even tell her that I saw a man die.”

  “Your circumstances have changed,” Dorian said. “And you’ve changed. I won’t say that you’ve grown stronger, but your strength is being revealed. In a better world, you’d never have to find out how brave you really are.”

  “But have I changed for the better? Am I really braver than I was? Or have I actually changed for the worse because I’ve stopped caring like I once would have?”

  “The fact that you can even ask that question means that you do care, Cora.” He positioned himself squarely in front of me. “Your eyes have been opened to the world, and your heart, seeing a greater view, had three choices: to break instantly and forever, to become resilient and strong, or to become callous and indifferent.” His gaze swept over me, leaving prickles of heat in its wake. “You are anything but callous.”

  “I don’t feel very strong,” I said in a small voice.

  Again, the quirk of those sinfully full lips. “The strongest never do because they are too wise about their own weaknesses.”

  I giggled and pushed him away gently. “Yeah, that’s too deep for me. All you need now is a long beard and a pointy hat, and you’re all set to be my wizard guide, talking like that.”

  I stepped past him, and he caught my arm so fast that he jerked me up short, pulling me hard against his body. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. His mouth came down over mine as he twisted the hooks on my bra loose and slid it from my body. All that we’d been through that evening was in his touch—the darkness and the frustration and the despair. And I needed it every bit as much as he needed me.

  “What am I to you?” he demanded when he finally pulled back. “Tell me, Cora.”

  The answer was pulled from the depths of my soul. “Everything.”

  “And that’s what I will do to you,” he vowed.

  Then he bent and took my nipple before it had the chance to fully harden, and the shock of it tightening in the heat of his mouth sent a jolt through me that made me rock against the hard grip he had on my hips.

  He lavished my breast, suckled it, stroked it with his tongue until I whimpered under the onslaught. And then he pulled back, leaving it suddenly exposed to the cool air of the bathroom as he took the other in turn.

  My hands threaded in his h
air, skimmed under the collar of his shirt as a desperate ache began between my legs. As if he could sense it, he moved one of his hands to the small of my back to hold me against him, and the other one he raised to my mouth, pushing two fingers inside. I sucked the saltiness from them to the same rhythm of his mouth on my body, as if he controlled my lips and tongue with his own.

  Dorian pulled his fingers free and dragged the wet tips down my belly to my entrance, where he slid them deep inside. I clenched hard around him, biting down against my moan as he moved them inside me, matching strokes with his tongue. My legs were shaking, but he kept going, pushing me over into a spiraling climax until my whole body tingled and I gasped for air, hardly able to keep my balance.

  As I began to slide down the other side of it, he pulled away and tipped his head back to look at me. “You will stand, Cora,” he said. “You will stand and not touch me, or I will stop.”

  His fingers were still stroking inside me, keeping me barely on the edge, and I jerked my hands off his body, curling my fists at my sides.

  He laughed then, a dark laugh, and I knew what the game would be. I’d try to stay upright, on my own balance, and he’d try to make me come so hard that I had to grab on.

  “No,” I managed. “You won’t stop.” I wasn’t going to play that game on his terms. But there was another set of rules, perhaps more dangerous, that I craved. “Or you’ll hurt me.”

  “Not tonight, Cora,” he said. “I can’t go so near the darkness tonight. But I can find another punishment for you. Without stopping. Will you accept it?”

  His thumb was stroking my clit as his fingers moved inside me, and I swallowed and nodded, wanting more, needing more, no matter what the catch might be. So long as he didn’t stop doing those things to me.

  He kissed me softly on the breastbone. “So be it,” he said, and then his mouth trailed kisses down my belly to my nest of curls and lower still, to my clit.

  He kissed it, and I rocked forward onto my toes, barely catching myself from grabbing his shoulders. Then he worked against me in earnest, and there was nothing teasing, nothing gentle about him now, every movement calculated not to titillate but to send me smashing into the next orgasm even as his steadying hand dropped from the small of my back.

  I panted and shook, struggling to stay on my balance, fighting to keep my body with his. But he was merciless, and I ran out of air and out of my mind so that I couldn’t tell what which way was up or down.

  I sagged, stumbled, and would have fallen. But Dorian’s free hand shot out to steady me. He pulled back instantly and straightened to tower over me.

  “I win,” he said simply, setting to work on the buttons of his shirt.

  “I didn’t touch you,” I protested.

  “You didn’t stand, either.” He unrolled his cuffs.

  “You said you wouldn’t stop,” I said, my whole body still reverberating with the lingering effects of the broken climax.

  “Do I look like I’m stopping? Turn on the shower. Get in. And wait for me.” He dropped his shirt to the bathroom floor and started on his belt.

  I obeyed. The warm water from the overhead rain panels washed over me, drenching my hair, and I couldn’t help but think that I might have just made and lost the most dangerous gamble of my life.

  He stripped off his pants and underwear together and stepped in after.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I asked—yes, definitely asked, because I would refuse to beg.

  “Anything I want to,” he said, and his eyes consumed my world.

  “But not hurt me.” Oh, God, how I wished at that moment that I could say that wasn’t what I was hoping he’d do, whatever the consequences.

  “But not hurt you,” he echoed instead, the corner of his mouth lifting.

  He stalked forward, and I backed up reflexively, my heart hammering hard. But there was nowhere to go, and my back came up against the cold marble wall in the corner of the shower just as he braced his hands on either side of my body and kissed me.

  And with that kiss, I was gone. His. I sagged against the wall, grateful for something to take my weight under his onslaught as one of my hands found his cock and circled it, stroking him to the rhythm of his tongue in my mouth. The water poured over us, running down our bodies and making my hand slide slickly over his skin.

  The shower bench was next to us, and he caught my leg nearest it under the knee and put my foot up on it. Then his hand skimmed up my thigh again and deep between my folds until I was shaking on the edge of another climax.

  Then he pulled out completely, and I made a noise of protest as his mouth worked against my neck.

  “You stopped!” I accused, releasing his cock, so close to coming that I could hardly hear the words over the thundering of my heart.

  He stopped kissing me. “No, my love. I’m just beginning.”

  And then his fingers skimmed backward, between my entrance and my tailbone, and I clenched reflexively against him.

  “Your punishment, Cora,” he said. “Take it.”

  I stood there with the water streaming across me, my heart beating so hard that I thought it would burst as his fingers pressed intimately against me. And, I realized, I had put myself in a position where I had to do as he said. He’d promised not to hurt me, but unless I accepted him, fully and without reservation, I would break the vow that he’d made. I found, at that moment, that I could not.

  And I surrendered.

  As his first finger breached the barrier I shuddered against the wall, against him, against the last, darkest intimacy of it. The second was there, next to it, and I panted with the effort of my surrender as he pulled against me to let it in, pushing them both inside to the limit.

  “No more,” I said, overwhelmed by the intensity of it and the tightness of my body around him.

  “No, Cora,” he said. “This is the start, not the end. When you come like this, then it will be over.”

  I nodded, unable to do more, wanting it too desperately even as it frightened me. He kissed me then as his fingers began to move slowly, rhythmically, matching his mouth and hand, and then he moved down my body again to tease my breasts with his tongue until I thought I couldn’t bear it any longer. He moved lower still, until his tongue flicked my clit before his mouth closed against it, sucking, as his fingers moved and stretched against me.

  And I came hard, clenching around his fingers but also the emptiness deep inside. It was an ugly orgasm, a brutal one, drilling into my brain the place in my body where the pleasure centered in such a way that I couldn’t escape it.

  Only then did Dorian pull back, and only then did he fill my empty place with the hardness of his cock, driving into me until we came together one last time.

  And after, he poured the body wash into his hands and washed me as he had the first time we’d been in this shower together. But this time, I knew through experience what he’d meant when he’d promised that he would take every inch of my body.

  Because he had.

  Chapter Four

  Dorian was gone much of Sunday morning and afternoon. He had to make arrangements in response to the theft of his research, and that was on top of the work needed to get the new tests into a production-ready state. As he said, “Right now, the Kyrioi might be able to screen people, but it will take them days, maybe even weeks, to get results without our processes. And since even we haven’t perfected them yet, you can be certain that they haven’t either.”

  I spent the day messaging my friends and picking through the library. Dorian’s night, though, belonged to me alone, and it made me unable to regret the time I’d spent by myself.

  On Monday morning, Dorian lingered for breakfast before driving me to my first class, this time in a shiny new BMW.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror as he pulled away from the curb in front of his house. “The guards are still there.”

  “Of course they are,” Dorian said, one eyebrow rising questioningly.

  I said, “I
mean, we know why Hattie was killed now. So why keep up with the guards?”

  Dorian turned onto a larger road, moving out of the residential areas of Georgetown and towards College Park. “The guards are still a good idea—perhaps not much use against a well-planned attack but certainly against something either uncoordinated or impulsive.”

  “I guess,” I said, wishing it wasn’t necessary. He’d had guards on me constantly since Cosimo’s foiled rape plan. Realistically, why would he stop now, just because the reason for the most recent attacks had been uncovered?

  And of course, there was still the poison pen.... Since Dorian had increased security, there hadn’t been another note left on my bed. But unless they were some kind of distraction, I still didn’t know why those hateful messages had been left for me. Or why we’d been chased at the ice skating rink. Neither of those was necessary or even particularly helpful in a quest to steal Dorian’s research. If anything, they had pointlessly raised his guard.

  But I didn’t worry about any of those things. Dorian seemed convinced that the letters were nothing but a prank, and I had no evidence yet otherwise.

  We rode in silence for some time. Dorian’s brow was lowered, unlike his normal perfectly impassive expression, and I knew he was brooding.

  I finally asked, “So why are you driving me to class? I know you have other things to do. More important things.”

  He blinked at my voice and looked over. “Because once you are there, you will be gone.” There was a second, unspoken corollary to that statement—And I will be alone.

  I heard it as clearly as if he’d said the words, but I just nodded. There were moments when I could feel in him all the swirling darkness of his existence, his hunger for light. And I could feel what I was to him—a still, bright point in the middle of a maelstrom.

  I shouldn’t be that. Not for anyone. I wasn’t tough enough—and I certainly was nowhere good enough to be any kind of a counterweight to the blackness he felt in himself. But what I could be was hope enough that he could use his own strength to turn away from the dark. Even though at times he had to be strong enough for the both of us.