Time After Time (Cora's Bond) Page 8

  “I am.” The words came out as a groan. “Oh, I am.”

  But I needed him so much more....

  He stroked my breast softly with his thumb, rubbing across the hardened nipple. The fabric rasped it softly, and I whimpered. His lips found my neck as his thigh pressed between my legs. I arched into him, my hips and neck both seeking his touch. His mouth on my neck got harder, and I pulled against his hand around my wrists not because I wanted to escape but because I needed to know that I couldn’t.

  Any then it came, the teeth against my skin, and I cried out. This time, it wasn’t a swift parting of my flesh. No, instead, it was slow, deliberate, calculated to prolong the moment of cutting. The sharp agony of it burst into my brain as his fingers on my nipple twisted cruelly, and for a moment, the edges of my vision went dark as my mind fled the assault on it, the wave of ecstasy mounting up to surge over the pain.

  He released my wrists, and all I could do was seize his head, my fingers in his hair, clutching his mouth to my neck, pleading with my strangled cries for either more or for respite, not even I knew which.

  His free hand caught my underwear at my hip and tore it there, and then he freed his cock from his fly. Shudders went through my body at every movement of his mouth against my neck, the madness of his poisoned kiss a glory to me now, setting my blood on fire until I thought I could feel each vein and artery’s path sketched individually in my body. And the heat of them pooled below, where the throbbing emptiness lay that only he could fill.

  Shamelessly, I begged for him. There was no fight in me now, no game being played between us. Whatever reserves I’d thought I had after the brutal week were gone, and I would grovel for him.

  He boosted me up so that I was balanced between his body and the handrail, and my begging was cut off by my gasp as he thrust inside me all the way up to the base of his cock. My body was reduced to the three points of glory and pain—his mouth on my neck, sucking and cutting, his hand pincering my tender nipple, and the white-hot ring of heat where he slammed into me, again and again.

  I didn’t have breath for pleading anymore. I didn’t have breath for anything at all. My body moved with his as I hissed through my clenched teeth, pushing back against him every bit as hard as he drove into me. I was so high, wound so tight, that I was afraid that when I came, I’d never return....

  And then I did come, the surges of need turning to the rush of fulfillment, a peak that pushed me up higher even as it tore me apart.

  Chapter Eight

  I don’t know how long I stayed in that place. It was beyond time, beyond my mind itself, but I came back down again slowly with a reluctance that almost hurt to find Dorian’s mouth on mine, the rusty taste of my blood still on his lips. He broke off, and I closed my eyes and clung to him, my arms around his shoulders, my unnaturally sensitive skin memorizing the feel of his body against mine, in mine, riding with him as he came.

  And then we just held each other as our panting breaths slowed until he stepped back and I slid off the hard edge of the handrail. My knees tried to give way as my feet met the tiled floor, my heels wobbling dangerously. But Dorian snaked out a hand and caught me, steadying me as he straightened his pants with his other hand.

  “Thanks,” I managed, my voice raw. He handed me a handkerchief wordlessly, and I used it. With sudden self-consciousness, I noticed the honeycomb ceiling.

  “I hope there’s not a hidden camera up there,” I said, handing back the handkerchief.

  He slipped it into a pocket of his coat. “Oh, but there is,” he assured me.

  My expression must have been pure horror because he laughed.

  “My staff are manning them currently, as I’m among the agnates handling security for the vigil,” he explained.

  “And that means they turned it off when we entered?” I asked. Out of respect for me, Dorian required that his guards turn off the visuals to any room we were in alone together.

  “Yes. Why do you think that no one’s come to rescue us yet?” he asked.

  I blushed slightly, realizing that his staff must have assumed that we were doing...exactly what we were doing.

  Dorian plucked my torn underwear from the leg it was still wrapped around, put it in the center of my discarded dress, and folded them up together into an anonymous package.

  “And what do you expect me to wear?” I asked.

  He held up my coat, which came down lower on my legs than the dress had. With a shake of my head, I put it on and did the buttons down the front, the lining silky against my naked skin while the outer edges of the neck and hem chafed my skin almost unbearably.

  “As I said, peeping toms are taken care of,” Dorian said, pushing back the emergency stop knob so that the elevator began to move again. “But the crowd of people in the lobby wanting the only elevator that goes all the way to the penthouse...that’s another issue entirely.”

  With that, he hit the button for the third floor, and almost instantly, the doors opened. Dorian stepped out, and bemused, I followed into a small, empty elevator lobby. He watched the elevator doors close and waited until the lights indicated that it had reached the ground floor and started on the way up again before he hit the main down button again. Seconds later, a different elevator opened, and he stepped on.

  I smiled as his plan became clear. “You got rid of the audience for our walk of shame.”

  “Shame?” he asked. “There’s nothing in the world to be ashamed of.”

  The doors to the main lobby opened then, and I could see our limo waiting through the glass doors. I took Dorian’s offered arm, and he handed me into the back of the Mercedes. The cold winter breeze slipped under the edge of the coat to tease the dampness between my legs. The thought of losing Dorian seemed to make me even more desperate for him, and the chilly air only intensified my awareness of my need.

  Now I understood why Dorian had chosen a car with a privacy screen instead of his usual stock Bentley. He’d realized that I would likely find out some part of what he’d been doing that week at the wake—and either he wanted to discuss it away from the ears of his employees, or he knew that I would.

  “I still don’t forgive you,” I said as soon as both doors were closed.

  Dorian angled his body against the door on his side of the car. His hair was still rumpled, his clothing wrinkled and in disarray, throwing the perfection of his features into further relief.

  “I don’t ask you to. I only ask that you understand,” he said.

  The car started forward, but he made no attempt to buckle up, and so neither did I.

  I snorted. “I understand just fine, but that doesn’t make me like it one bit better. You say the scars will go away. But the memories won’t. The suffering won’t. Just because you won’t have scars doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “But other things matter more. The Kyrioi have been directly linked to three deaths, those of an agnate, his cognate, and a human thrall, and though they publicly distanced themselves from the attempted rape on you, the fact remains that Cosimo was deeply connected to them at the highest levels. We have taken our retribution. The balance is restored, at least for now.”

  “How can retribution lead to balance?” I demanded.

  “In a world with no courts, no judges, and no sentences, there is only war,” Dorian said. “They have provoked battle, we have responded. If they continue to press, their cause will be seen as unjust because ours has already been declared just. They must accept the strike as a form of righteous vengeance, or they can defy the resolution made by a proper quorum and flout the traditions of centuries. Then they will have no protections within our customs, and they will all be made outcasts.”

  “Your people sure do seem to make a lot of judgments for a group of people who don’t have any judges.”

  He smiled faintly, reaching across to graze my leg with his fingertips. “You are not the first to point this out. I’m safe now. And you’re safer than you’
ve ever been. That’s what really matters.”

  “No, it also matters that you almost died,” I said. His fingers were skimming higher now, dipping under the hem of my coat. “And don’t think you can...can orgasm your way into winning this argument.”

  “I have no expectation that I’ll win it,” he said, catching the lowest button of the coat and undoing it with a twist. “But realistically, neither can you. Fight with me later, Cora. You have no idea how much I need you right now.”

  And I wanted him, too.

  He slid his hand up my thigh. This time, a tinted window blocked Jenkins’ view of the back of the car, and I knew that the dark tints on the side windows made it impossible to see us from the road. But what about noise?

  “Is it soundproof?” I asked, nodding to the privacy divider that separated the front seat of the limousine from the back.

  “For ordinary conversation,” Dorian said, turning his hand to catch the second button and twist it free.

  “I don’t think this is ordinary conversation.” Already, I could hear the strain in my voice, the anticipation. The thought that I’d come so close to losing him, to losing this...it almost slayed me.

  “Isn’t it?” Dorian’s hand was on my thigh again, his fingertips grazing the crease of my leg.

  “Dorian,” I said warningly. But my hips were already tilting into his hand as he ran his fingers over my still-slick folds, and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

  He looked at me keenly. “I can make it so that he can’t hear you, even if you scream.”

  “No mind control stuff,” I said. The words were getting harder to say as his fingers dipped deeper. “You promised.”

  “And I’ll keep that promise,” he said. Then he pushed two fingers together into my heat all the way up to their knuckles, pulling a gasp from me. His thumb circled my clit lightly, teasingly. “If you want me to.”

  “Then do it,” I ground out.

  In the next moment, I was pulled onto the edge of the seat in front of him, his strong thighs on either side of my hips as his hard cock pressed into the small of my back. My coat was hitched up around my waist, exposing me, and his hand, that hand that had just been inside me, was clamped around my mouth and jaw. I could smell myself on him, and I could smell him, too, the saltier scent of what he had left inside me.

  “Scream all you like, then,” he said, his voice close to my ear. “No one will hear you now.”

  And I knew that he wouldn’t be satisfied until I did.

  His free hand moved slowly, leisurely, trailing first down the outside of one of my thighs before wrapping around my knee and moving up the inner side, stopping a full hand span short of its juncture.

  The tenderness of that hand was a sharp contrast to the unyielding one that was covering my mouth. That one kept my head pinned to his shoulder, my neck twisted so that I couldn’t even see what he was doing to me. It made a mockery of his tender touch and was a blatant promise of what was to come.

  What I wanted to come.

  “Or maybe,” he said softly into my ear, skimming his fingers lightly along both creases at once, “I won’t let you come at all.”

  I shook my head—or tried to, because nothing could move the hand clamped over my mouth. He chuckled, sending prickles across my skin, and he nuzzled my neck with his lips as his fingers played along my folds and drifted over my aching clit. I tried to tilt my hips into his hand, but he hooked his legs around mine, pushing me back up against him even as he forced my knees farther apart.

  “But that’s not what you want, is it?” His voice dropped to the barest murmur. “What you want is for me to take you so completely that this moment with be branded into your mind for the rest of your life.”

  His fingers spread my folds, exposing their inner layer to the coolness of the car’s air.

  “The way I held you.”

  He pushed one inside, and my body shuddered at its invasion.

  “The way I took you.”

  A second one followed, stroking in and out as my breath came faster. The rhythm he set was too slow, torturously so, and I gripped his wrist in both my hands, trying to force him to go faster. But his strength was too great, and all my urging had no effect.

  “Exactly the way I wanted to.”

  And then there was a third finger, invading me, spreading and stretching me as he laid them side by side.

  “Until you begged for mercy with pleas that no one could hear.”

  His fingers hooked up inside me to catch the place that sent ripples of reaction through my body, and his thumb found my clit at the same time, rocking me, stroking me with merciless precision right up and over the edge so fast that I had no time to brace myself.

  He kept going, matching his touch to my body’s responses until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Noises were coming from my throat, but I didn’t know what they were—insensible, garbled sounds, further muffled by his hands across my mouth and my inability to formulate a coherent thought, much less beg for anything at all. And still he went on, pushing me deeper into the grips of the orgasm. The edges of the world went dark, eaten away as my world narrowed to nothing but a thin, hot stream of sensation that burned along all of my nerves.

  Then, when I’d lost all sense of myself, he stopped as swiftly as he’d begun, withdrawing his hand—but it was only to move me, to push me down onto my stomach on the soft leather seats. His hand was still clamped around my mouth and jaw, and my hips hung off the end of the seat. A moment later he was there, between my legs, driving into me and carrying me up again to the peak and over until he came, too.

  Only after, when he’d pulled my limp body into his lap again, with my naked legs sprawled across the seat where he’d just taken me, did he let go of my mouth to kiss it long and tenderly.

  He pulled away and looked down at me. “I didn’t tell you goodbye because I knew I had to come back to you, Cora. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter who or what comes between us. I will always, always come back to you.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Par-TAY!” Lisette squealed, bursting into our apartment with Hannah, Sarah, and Clarissa in tow. And, to my disbelief, Paquita, Marie, and even the agnate Rebecca were there as well, the last standing behind the rest of the girls looking bemused. Of my wedding party, only the improbably named Karen was absent, along with the cognate whom Dorian had requested to fill in at the last moment for the slain Hattie.

  “Are you ready to go?” Lisette demanded of me as Chelsea and Christina came out of their rooms to join us.

  I put the last touches on my makeup and stepped out of the open door of the bathroom. “Thank you, Lisette. Yes, I’m ready, and I’m wearing the shirt, and I look ridiculous.”

  “You should just be grateful that I didn’t get you penis-shaped noisemakers,” Lisette said unsympathetically. “And I think you look as awesome as any bride at her bachelorette party ever has.”

  I looked down at my white rhinestoned shirt with the word Bride emblazoned across it in cursive. Lisette had a pink one that said Maid of Honor, while everyone else wore black shirts with Bridesmaid written on them.

  The week before, Lisette had related some long story about Swarovski crystals being too expensive and their more affordable alternatives, but my eyes had just glazed over. I’d just nodded, smiled, and handed over all the money that I’d owed her for meals from the last several months with a nice premium on top—interest, I insisted, refusing Lisette’s attempt to give it back. And Lisette had turned around and spent most of it on these silly shirts and, of course, a beribboned headband with a short veil that she now plopped onto my head.

  “Now you’re ready,” she said. “Let’s go!”

  She herded all of us out of the room, and I grabbed my wallet and keys and shoved them into my pocket with my phone. I bobbed along obediently in the middle of the pack, finding myself next to Rebecca, who wore her riotous black curls in an elegant French braid that somehow managed to make her
look queenly even in her silly shirt.

  “Do you know what Clarissa got us?” Lisette asked as we all crowded into the elevator.

  “Couldn’t guess,” I said honestly, not really quite daring to.

  Clarissa shot me a toothy smile over Lisette’s head. “A party bus.”

  “Oh, I wanted to tell her,” Lisette pouted.

  I didn’t groan aloud. I thought I should be rewarded for that. “With strippers?”

  But of course it was Clarissa. I shouldn’t have bothered to ask.

  “With special strippers,” she said, winking.

  I had no idea what she meant until we piled onto the bus and I realized I already knew a good half of the so-called strippers. Three of them were shifter guards from Dorian’s house, wearing little more than thongs, bowties, and their smiles.

  They fit their role admirably for having been dragooned into that post, and I could only assume that Clarissa had conducted tryouts for the roles first. If they were embarrassed, they gave no sign—which was more than I could say for myself.

  Another six men I could also identify as shifters, though I didn’t recognize them in particular—from other people’s entourages, I could only assume. And Raymond and Dalton were also there, presumably to protect Paquita and Marie. They looked like the worst strippers ever in their sport coats and casual slacks. But they were vampires, so of course no mere human would challenge the appropriateness of their attire for the role they were supposedly fulfilling. No one would even notice except in the unlikely event that the agnates wished them to.

  “All right, everybody!” Lisette called, clinging to one of the poles at the center of the bus as the colored lights swirled off the recessed disco balls. “Let’s sit down and get this party started!”

  I had to smother a giggle at that statement—so very like Lisette, to whom it wouldn’t occur that dancing around in a moving bus might be an option. But I was happy enough to forego any gyrations and hip-thrusts for the moment and take a seat while my maid of honor passed around champagne flutes and a magnum of Dom Pérignon.