A Vampire's Claim (6 page)

“Give me your soul, Dev,” she murmured. “Sometimes it’s much easier to let someone else carry the weight of it for a while.”

Her lips curled back then, so he could see the sharp canines elongate, become tiny, needlelike points. There was a weight on him, something that made it not matter that he was seeing something he’d never seen before, except in horror films. She was right. He had known the danger of her the moment he’d walked in tonight. And the feelings that rose in him now were acquiescence, the fierce desire to accept, to give her whatever it was she wanted. They raged through him, full of his lust and pain. It was nothing she was compelling or forcing from him. In the fight-or-flight scale of reaction to fear or great emotion, he’d always been a fighter. His lack of choice at this moment had to do with what his own soul was demanding, not hers. He had to have her. Take her. He’d accept whatever price she demanded. No matter what she was.

Her hand slid behind him, and the whip dropped to the floor with a heavy thud. “Do as you like, bushman. I promise you can’t break me.”

Obeying mindless, primal need, he tore the swatch of panties from her, found her wet opening with his broad head and shoved her down on it, a sword determined to fit into a small scabbard, even if he tore her open the way she was tearing him.

She sank her fangs into his throat, filling her mouth with his blood. Her cry at his penetration allowed some of it to escape and trickle down to his collarbone, leaving a drop on her breast right over the red mark he’d made with the whip. His blood slid down and stained the edge of the bra. Yanking it off her with the noise of ripping fabric, he filled his hands with her curves.

Blood. Pain. Release. Flesh and pleasure. Woman. He seized her buttocks then, gripping as he thrust against her against the wall, beating a tempo. She was so tight and perfect, all the way to her womb. She didn’t tell him to stop, didn’t make him back off, as he would if he’d had a mind to be the considerate lover he knew he could be. But at the moment he had no control.

It didn’t seem to matter. Her body rippled with desire against his as she undulated with lithe grace, keeping right up with him in ferocious urgency. Her hair caressed his face, the curve of his shoulder as she nourished herself at his throat. He felt her strength again in the unshakable grip of her arms, the resilience of her bones as he shoved her against the shabby wall. She didn’t seem to notice or care.

He maneuvered his hand in between them, lubricated his fingers in the slick fluids dripping around her opening, stretched impossibly by his cock. Teasing her clit until he won a gasp, he moved around to slide those fingers into her tight arse before she could deny him. He wouldn’t see her after tonight, but by the Devil, she was going to remember him for days afterward.

She bucked up against him. While she didn’t loose her clamp on his throat, he heard her whimper, felt her pussy muscles contract on him, her clit harden, ready to go. He loved a sheila who liked having her arse played with, almost as much as he enjoyed the wet heat between her legs. He wanted to fuck her, lick her clean, get her creaming again and start all over, until she was hoarse from screaming and unable to walk.

Until he was hoarse and unable to walk.

She was having a hard time keeping her mouth on him now. More blood was trickling down his chest and she was flexing her body into a crescent, lapping up the stream like an eager kitten, reaching his nipple, her nails raking over his shoulders, drawing blood there as well. Bending his head, he put his lips over the red mark he’d left on her plump right breast, as he’d first desired, and that stilled him for a moment, so he could almost stand outside his mind and feel the rushing urgency of their bodies. Their temples brushed, and he thought they might look like two strained curves of a heart, quivering with near explosion.

“Come for me, love,” he demanded roughly. “Let me hear you.”

She stiffened, resisting, but he withdrew and then slammed back in, letting her feel the length of him stroking against the outer lips, finding the dense spot within her and rubbing against it on the way back to her womb. That was the good thing about being cursed with an organ the length of a horse’s cock. He could make that feeling last a good . . . long . . . time. He withdrew, slid back in again. Moved his mouth to a nipple, scoring her with his teeth, sucking on her relentlessly.

“Give over,” he snarled against her flesh.

His wrists were burning where she’d bound him and he’d fought the restraints. Her skin was abraded by his whip. Small sacrifices of flesh to one another. They were both caught up in this, on sacred ground indeed. He’d never look at the dingy second level of this boardinghouse the same way again.

Swinging her abruptly from the wall, he crossed the short distance from the parlor to the small bedroom. He wanted to take her on her back. He needed to feel her legs high on his spine, her body open to his, pressed beneath him. It gave him the angle he needed, a friction against her clit she couldn’t resist any longer, though he sensed her scrabbling attempt, just as he sensed her aversion to the position he chose, as if she was used to or preferred to be on top. But when their eyes locked once more, it didn’t matter. Two puzzle pieces were two puzzle pieces, no matter what way you turned them. And when all was said and done, it didn’t change the fact they were still a puzzle.

He was a lost soul. She was a vampire. Everything was bloody perfect.

Her screams resounded through the building as he began to come with her, both of them finding their temporary release. He from the wasteland of his memories. She . . . Well, Dev didn’t claim to know any woman’s mind, let alone that of a supernatural one, but from the bite of her fingernails, the beautiful artwork of her pleasure-suffused face, he thought he’d served her well despite it all.

As his blood and seed were drained from him, as the orgasm ripped through him like bushfire, only one fleeting question remained to worry his mind. And that made only a negligible dent in his already battered shields as he drifted into a hazy aftermath.

What happened to a man after he handed a vampire his soul?

3

F
ROM the start, he’d warned her. He might not control himself. Might use her too hard, take her too rough. A halfhearted attempt to protect her from
him
.

What a fucking joke.

How much time had passed? Sometime during the early morning hours, she whispered something about how he’d persuaded her to take an extra day here.
I’ ll punish you for that, bushman.

That threat, delivered in a soft breath of air against his ear, had left him wrung out and drained. Again and again. She had the stamina of a male beast in rutting season, and she didn’t take no for an answer. She didn’t even ask the question. He found himself servicing her mindlessly, again and again, however she demanded it. And when he flagged, her mouth, hands and body would drive his cock to obey her once more.

Since Tina, he’d probably spent less than forty-five minutes alone with a woman. Most he pushed away after about twenty minutes.

He wasn’t a bastard. He left them satisfied, but he had nothing to offer but a good fuck and picking up the beer tab before he took off. Like most men, he wasn’t into the cuddling aftermath, but unlike them, it wasn’t because he feared intimacy. It was because he remembered what true intimacy was like. The mockery of it flogged self-loathing to life. If he was in range of alcohol, he’d be forced to get off his face to bury it again. Otherwise it drove him mad enough to do violence.

She didn’t care about that, the dogs he was afraid to loose. She herself had broken the chain holding them back. She reveled in his savagery, his attempts to fight her for control. She took him on like a she-wolf. At one point, he remembered staring at her through the darkness, for by that time Elle had cut the generator, leaving them only the option of candlelight. He’d seen a hint of his blood smeared on Lady D’s full bottom lip, the stain of it gleaming on a fang.

While he remembered nothing about the passage of time after that first coupling, everything else had the sharp edge and accuracy of a carved spear. She’d reversed their positions, shoving him to his back on the bed. His eyes had widened when she produced iron manacles from her belongings. Like those clapped on the wrists and ankles of his convict ancestor. He’d seen a pair under glass at a museum, and had imagined them, hard and unforgiving on a man’s legs or arms, limiting his choices.

With movements faster than he could follow, even if his chest hadn’t been working like a bellows, his dizzy brain still reeling, she had him bound again. There was the disturbing click on each wrist and ankle, four separate suspensions of time. She used her belt to bind the leg chain to the foot rail, his belt to make fast the wrist manacles above his head. Frissons of shock jittered through him, a strange, unsettling venom that compelled him to fight. However, the way her blue eyes intensified beneath the fringe of gold lashes as she studied the flex of his muscles, the bowing of his body, a thin line of perspiration along his neck, made him grow still again, shallow breath held.

She’d recovered his whip and held it in her hands, the braided length passing through her fingers, while she stood at the foot of the bed.

Despite the fact she’d just milked him, his flagging cock wanted to strain like a dying man, ready to pull itself over sharp rocks toward her.

“What . . .” He licked dry lips. “Love, what—”

“You may speak as you like,” she said. “Except to question anything I do to you. That’s up to me, and none of your business to decide. I’m a fair hand with a whip myself, Dev.”

And he felt it, enough to make him jump. The tail popped so close above his nipple the faint sting came from the snap of the air.

Despite himself, his cock slid from his thigh back up toward his belly, an animal reawakening.

“You do have some of the way of it, then,” she observed. “Though I’ll bet that’s a bit of a surprise to you. Has no woman ever mastered you? Taught you to respond to her slightest touch upon your mouth, guiding your head? Made you give her everything, letting her ride you past the endurance of your great heart? Like a stallion trained to go on until you’d let it explode in your chest rather than fail her.”

Christ, she was a sight. Talking like that, naked as a savage, her long blond hair loose and flowing along her arms and shoulders like a mane.

“That what you’re fixing to do, love?” he managed hoarsely. “Ride me to the end?”

Her gaze flickered at his deliberate disobedience. This time the pop hit his abdomen with a singing pain that arched him off the bed, sent fire coursing through him and brought a curse to his lips.

“No,” she said softly. “I want to make certain you’ll go that far, if I demand it.”

That powerful first time must have addled his wits, because he never had his feet back under him again. She brought him back to life with her sultry taunts and the painful caress of the whip, the brush of her body, her hair across his chest, and then she rode him to another climax.

Living in the Outback so long, his body had adapted so he didn’t waste water easily. He wasn’t one to sweat profusely, but nothing could dehydrate a man quicker than fucking. She didn’t give him water, or any type of relief for a while. She changed the manacles, spread his body wider on the bed, making his shoulders and hips ache.

The next time, she commanded his erection to life by running the whip under his arse and gripping it in both hands to hold him to her as she teased his girth with her small mouth. Slid his cock through the cleft of her breasts, using her own fluids to lubricate the valley. But what sent him back to groaning stiffness was when she turned, made him watch his cock pump up and down the channel between her cheeks as she straddled him backward. The flex of those lovely buttocks, gripping him, moving up and down, feeling her flesh clench his organ, made him leak out and slick the passage further, increasing the torment.

When he thought he could stand no more of that without the tearing agony of a forced orgasm, she backed over him, filling his vision with the heart-shaped backside as she leaned forward to go down on him and stroked him beyond speech with the hot, sucking pressure of her lips, the grip of her fingers, moist breath on his broad head. Her pussy was over his face, but strain as he might, she kept it out of reach, though the fluids collected over her aroused cunt lips before his glazed eyes. He opened his mouth to take in the slow drops that eventually fell, sweet as hot molasses, on his tongue, his lips.

At one point, he demanded she rub it in his face, that she ride his cock. She did neither until he begged, pleaded.

After the third time, or maybe it was the fourth, she’d had water brought, and food. But she hadn’t let go of the upper hand then, either. Putting the water in her mouth, she cradled his jaw in one hand, her other loosely on his neck, so the pressure of her palm was against his ragged pulse. Coaxing his mouth open, she let the fluid trickle in and hydrated him that way, one painstaking mouthful at a time. By the time the slow, sensual process was over, he was high and proud again. He was going to be fucked to death.

Death by fucking he could take. It might even be welcome, though it would mean he was surely going to hell. He hadn’t lived a good enough life to earn heaven, and only a god with a macabre sense of humor would give him every man’s wish for his last act on the earth before plunging him into the fires that would scorch the memory.

True to her word, he wasn’t allowed any questions about what she was doing or why. Every attempt was met with a punishing strike of that lash, as opposed to a teasing lick from it, and she was liberal with both, for he was hardheaded, when all was said and done.

Occasionally, the restraint, the pain of it, brought forth a surge of emotion so strong he had no control anymore. He raged at her, thrashed against the manacles until they scraped the skin off his wrists, enraging him further, pulled at the unrelenting iron headboard. He called her foul names, demanded she release him, the demon-bitch from hell.