Hunt the Moon cp-5 Page 17

  And sure enough, the size of the mark began to fade as I watched, the edges dissipating like a cloud in a windstorm, the color thinning and then breaking apart and then disappearing altogether, letting the clear, pale skin show through. I suddenly noticed that a lot of my other scrapes and scratches had vanished as well, soothed away by the healing ability that was one of Mircea’s gifts as a master.

  “Doesn’t that take a lot of power?” I asked, amazed.

  He smiled, licking the last of the bruise away. “I have it to burn tonight.”

  “Because of those creatures.”

  He nodded. “It pleases me that their blood should heal you, since they were the reason you require it in the first place.”

  And, okay, yes. Healing had its place and it was nice of him to make the effort and I was suitably grateful not to be hobbling around like a ninety-year-old for the next week. But at the moment, I’d have been a lot more grateful if he would just move that talented mouth a few more inches south....

  He must have read my mind. Because the next moment, rough hands slid up my inner thighs, silky hair cascaded over my stomach, and a warm, wet tongue went to work. Along with lips and teeth and God knew what else, but whatever was happening definitely wasn’t normal. Because it suddenly felt like there were maybe a few extra tongues down there, which my brain kept telling my body was clearly impossible, and my body told it to get bent, because it was busy arching and writhing and thrashing and screaming. And then it didn’t matter anyway, because the next instant my brain stuttered and short-circuited and all but blew out the top of my head.

  Maybe I passed out or maybe I just lost a few minutes there. Either way, I came around to find him just barely stroking, too light to give any friction at all, too light to do more than tease. And I writhed anyway, every tiny movement sweet torture, shuddering down nerves still raw with pleasure.

  He looked up at me teasingly. “How about now?”

  “What?”

  “The date.”

  It took me a moment to even realize what the hell he was talking about. “Oh . . . it’s fair . . . I guess,” I said, trying for joking, but mostly sounding breathless.

  “Fair.” Dark eyes narrowed. “I’ll have to try a little harder, then, won’t I?”

  I stared at him. I thought a little harder might just kill me.

  And then I was sure it would, when the bastard moved on—to my thigh.

  “What—what are you doing?” I gasped. I wanted him in me. I wanted him in me now.

  “Healing you,” he said innocently, mouthing a completely inconsequential bruise.

  “It can wait!”

  “No, no. I like to be thorough.”

  I noticed, I thought grimly, as he licked away a tiny, almost-not-there scratch on my knee. I started to reach for him, hot and aching and desperate. But then rough fingers slipped over the skin of my outer thighs, smoothed up to my buttocks, and then back down to tease the softness behind my knees.

  And, God, he knew how I loved that.

  He did it again and I sighed and gave up, because clearly Mircea was going to take his time whether I liked it or not. Although I couldn’t imagine what he thought he was doing—

  Nibbling on my foot? It would have been more surprising, except that Mircea liked feet the way I liked long, beautiful hair. In a quasi-fetishy sort of way that we didn’t talk about, but that I indulged by doing a lot more pedicuretype things than I ever had before dating him.

  Of course, he usually preferred the objects of his affection encased in silk stockings, the old-fashioned kind with the seam up the back, which he kept sending me in alarming quantities. Or useless wisps of leather, preferably beaded and be-crystalled to within an inch of their life. Or those weird satin mules with the marabou feathers that I drew the line at because I kept tripping over them.

  Not cracked and bruised and torn and battered.

  Not that that seemed to be slowing him down any.

  He licked the underside of the big toe, curling his tongue all the way around it, and I made a small sound. Teasing, dark eyes regarded me from over pink skin and chipped polish. “How did you manage to get barbecue sauce on your toes?”

  “I didn’t,” I said indignantly.

  He just laughed. “You taste good.”

  I would have answered, but he’d started mouthing the mound below the toes and I forgot how. I laid my head back instead and stared at the ceiling, trying not to go completely out of my mind as he took his sweet time. Halfway through, I decided that if I survived this, I was going to kill him. It wouldn’t be easy, him being a master vamp and all, but I would find a way.

  He licked a long swath up my instep and I shivered helplessly. “Are you cold?” he asked innocently.

  “Mircea, seriously—”

  I broke off because he’d started sucking on my heel. Which should have been no big deal, but which, for some reason, felt positively sinful. Who the hell knew that a heel could be an erogenous zone?

  “Anything can be, if you never get a chance to see it,” he murmured.

  “People see feet all the time.”

  “Today. But they even swathed the piano legs in Victoria’s London.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  “Humans rarely do,” he told me, and bit down.

  I made a sound that was absolutely not a whimper, but might have been edging that way. Because the sensation had shot straight to an area that definitely was an erogenous zone. And that had already been pretty damn stimulated.

  “Mircea, I swear to God—”

  “All done,” he told me, releasing my foot. I sagged in relief.

  And then he grabbed the other one.

  And that was it.

  I let the pink, silky-skinned foot he’d left me with come to rest on that taut chest. Mircea paused what he was doing to look at me narrowly, which I took as a good sign. Getting his attention hadn’t been so hard, after all. Let’s see if I could keep it.

  I let my foot caress a flat little nipple, rubbing it to a peak between my toes, and then sliding down a ridged stomach to a hard thigh. Mircea hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even moved. I smiled.

  My toes slid lower, across satiny skin and crisp hair to a velvety hardness that jumped eagerly under my touch. I felt a little clumsy—I wasn’t nearly as dexterous as with my hands—but my foot was surprisingly sensitive. I hadn’t expected to feel . . . quite so much. My own breath picked up a little as I went exploring, sliding my toes slowly up and down that rigid column. And I guess I must have gotten something right, because it swelled impossibly bigger under my touch.

  “That isn’t . . .” He stopped and licked his lips. “That isn’t going to work.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. That was convincing.”

  Particularly since Mircea could put a halt to this at any time. Unlike a human male, a vampire has perfect blood control. He could have willed all that lovely hardness away, could have refused to play. But that would have been admitting defeat, something that his stiff-necked pride, the kind he liked to pretend wasn’t there, would never permit. So I gently fondled the superb length of him, so thick, so silky soft, so good against my skin.

  And sighed.

  “This isn’t going to get you anywhere, either,” I was informed tightly.

  “That’s okay.” I ran a single digit over the smooth head, watching it blush like a girl in pleasure. “I’m pretty comfortable where I am.”

  Mircea shuddered at the implicit threat, that I could keep this up all night. But I honestly thought I could. It was fascinating, what something so simple did to him, reversing who was in charge with amazing speed. I experimented, putting a foot on his chest and giving a little push. He fell back with almost no resistance at all, allowing me to crawl up his body.

  Okay, then.

  “That wasn’t fair,” he said hoarsely.

  “Like you didn’t use power on me earlier? And stay still.”

  “Give me a reason,” he challenged, smo
othing a hand over my curls.

  I didn’t need to be asked twice. My lips covered the sensitive tip of him, and he suddenly looked like maybe he was having trouble focusing. Been there, I thought cynically, only it was usually me losing my train of thought around him, instead of vice versa. I decided I liked vice versa, and twirled my tongue around the head.

  Mircea groaned and his eyes slid to half-mast. Which was all very well, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Hm.

  I swirled my fingers over the tip of him, getting them wet, and then trailed them lightly up my own flesh. Stomach, breasts, pausing to paint the nipples, feeling his fingers tighten on my skin, up to my neck, lingering over those two little marks, his brand of ownership—we’d see who was owned—and up to my lips. I traced my bottom one with the salty taste of him, and his own tongue flicked out, unconsciously mimicking my movement.

  Then I sucked the whole finger into my mouth and his eyes closed.

  “You taste good, too,” I told him, smiling, and felt his body shudder against me.

  And then the next thing I knew, I was on my back, one of my legs crooked over Mircea’s shoulder, and even with the preparation, he was too big for there not to be a burn. But that was okay, that was perfect, because tonight I wanted to feel it. I wanted to know I was alive.

  And it looked like Mircea felt the same, because he was driving into me hard enough that my breath caught and my body writhed and my fingers dug into his shoulders, and then he found just the right angle and stayed there. Sparks of intense sensation flashed up my spine and coiled in my belly, regular as clockwork, and then arrhythmic, treacherous, as Mircea modified his stroke to torment me all over again.

  “Bastard,” I hissed, even as my spine was arching helplessly, trying to meet his thrusts and continue that extreme high. I would have come in seconds, but he wouldn’t let me, the man’s ungodly stamina keeping me hungry.

  “You’ll live.”

  “Make me want to,” I moaned, and Mircea was laughing as he gave in to my hunger, taking me deep and fast. Just the way we needed.

  “Is this better?” he teased, but I didn’t have breath to laugh because I was coming, even as the hard thrusts inside me turned erratic. I was still riding the aftershocks as Mircea shuddered above me, sagging against the tight hold of my legs as he came, both of us grinning like fools.

  After a moment, he pulled me up and poured us more wine, and we settled down in front of the fire. He nestled up against me, cradling my body against his and sliding his hands up and down my legs, while the logs hissed and the snow fell and I wished I did know how to freeze time. Because I’d have liked to stop it right here.

  It was times like these that I thought he was right, that I made things too hard, too complicated. Tony had elevated paranoia to an art form, and I’d absorbed a healthy dose of it growing up. And occasionally it had been really useful. It had kept me alive more than once, causing me to doubleand triple-check things for no reason, or to abruptly leave somewhere just because of the ants running up and down my spine.

  But sometimes it could be pretty stupid, too. More than once it had caused me to be too careful, to automatically say no when maybe I should have said yes, to guard myself and my heart so closely, I never let anyone in. I didn’t know everything about Mircea; I would probably never know everything about Mircea. But I knew the important thing.

  I knew I loved him.

  I had always loved him. Loving him was as natural as breathing, as essential as water. It had defined my life in a real way ever since I was a child.

  Before I met him, I had lived in constant fear, even without realizing what it was. When you’ve never known anything else, fear just seems . . . normal. Jumping at shadows because of what might be in them; staying carefully out of sight, because attracting attention was never A Good Thing; monitoring every word, in case it caused offense that would have to be made up for somehow. Of course, there were those I didn’t have to act that way around—Rafe and Eugenie and a few others who came and went through the years.

  But as much as I’d loved them, I’d always known the truth. They couldn’t protect me. They couldn’t, as it turned out, even protect themselves. Because they weren’t the master there.

  The most powerful vampire I knew was Tony, and even without realizing that he had been responsible for my parents’ deaths, there’d been plenty to fear, including the rooms downstairs that none of the vamps talked about but that the ghosts in the house informed me were essentially torture chambers. People Tony didn’t like went down there, and most of the time, they didn’t come back up.

  But I never saw those rooms, other than in a flash of vision I’d experienced years later. And after Mircea’s visit, I had known instinctively that I never would. Because Tony, as mercurial, deadly and downright crazy as he could be at times, wasn’t the most powerful vamp I knew anymore. Mircea was. And Mircea liked me.

  And during his visit, it was impossible not to notice that Tony’s attitude changed. He wasn’t exactly jolly—despite his shape, Tony was never jolly—but he was . . . careful. He didn’t raise his voice to me anymore, didn’t threaten, didn’t menace. In fact, it had been a real revelation, seeing him, the always-feared head of house, practically groveling on his master’s perfectly shined Tanino Criscis.

  And even after Mircea left, Tony didn’t treat me as he had before. If I didn’t get a useful vision for a week or two, there was a definite chill in the air, or he might confine me to my room or cancel one of my rare forays outside the house. But I wasn’t going downstairs. I was never going downstairs.

  Mircea had meant security, protection, sanctuary. He had many other attractive attributes, ones that other women would probably value much more highly. But nothing came close to that sense of security for me. It had been the greatest gift anyone had ever given me.

  It still was.

  “I’m thinking you just hit good,” I told him, when I could talk again.

  He thought about that for a moment. “Let’s try for excellent,” he said, and rolled me over.

  Oh, boy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I knew it!”

  I jumped, because the angry voice spoke at almost the same moment that I rematerialized back in my bedroom in Vegas. I spun around, sending my aching head sloshing unpleasantly against my skull, and saw Billy lounging on the bed. A pack of playing cards hung in the air in front of him, laid out in a vertical game of solitaire. But they were ghostly cards, no more substantial than their owner, and I could clearly see his scowl glaring through.

  For someone who regularly was up to as much crap as Billy Joe, he did disapproval really well.

  “What?” I said defensively, clutching the mink and my dignity. Since I was barefoot, mostly naked and completely hungover, I was pretty sure I grasped only one of them.

  “You slept with the goddamned vampire!”

  “I—How did you know?”

  Billy rolled his eyes.

  “Well . . . even if I did, it’s none of your business,” I informed him haughtily. And then I ruined the effect by limping to the bathroom.

  I flicked on the lights, but they hurt my eyes so I flicked them off again. But then I couldn’t see. Until Billy’s softly glowing head poked through the wall, like a pissed-off night-light.

  “I thought you were gonna give it some time,” he said accusingly. “I thought you were gonna get to know him first. I thought—”

  “Does anybody ever really know anybody?” I asked. And, okay, it was lame, but my head hurt like a bitch.

  “Oh, man.” Billy looked disgusted. “He must really be something. One night and he’s got you wrapped.”

  “He does not!”

  “Like hell.” He crossed his arms. “What did you tell me right before you left?”

  I sighed, wondering why I never had any damn aspirin. “I know. But—”

  “But what? You told me you’re absofuckinglutely, posifuckingtively, not getting horizontal. ’Cause vamps aren’t li
ke regular people, and you’re in the middle of negotiating the relationship and he’d take it as a sign of surrender, and—”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said, running some cold water onto a washcloth. And then slapping it over my aching eyes. Dear God, I was never drinking again.

  “Oh, okay. So what was it like?”

  “A . . . time-out,” I mumbled incoherently.

  But apparently not incoherently enough.

  “A time-out.” Billy did sarcasm pretty well, too.

  “Yeah.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Which means it didn’t count,” I snapped, and then wished I hadn’t, because it hurt. I stifled a groan and put my elbows on the counter, supporting my throbbing head.

  “And who decided this?”

  “We did.”

  “And which part of ‘we’ came up with the get-out-ofjail-free card?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah,” Billy said. “That’s what I thought.”

  I took the washcloth off so I could glare at him. “I don’t recall appointing you my conscience!”

  “You don’t need a conscience. You need some goddamn common sense! You used to have some, remember? You’re the one who told me what those things are like—”

  “Mircea isn’t a thing.”

  “Oh, so he’s not a monster all of a sudden? He got upgraded? I guess I must have missed the memo!”

  I turned and walked out of the bathroom. Billy’s faintly glowing backside was sticking out of the wall above the dresser, framed in the mirror like a bizarre trophy. But all things considered, I liked it better than the other half right now. Get him wound up and he could go for hours, and I was so not up for it tonight. Or this morning. Or whenever the hell it was. The room was dark, but there were blackout shades under all the drapes in the suite, so that didn’t mean much.

  “Okay, ‘monster’ is out,” Billy said, getting himself sorted. “So what are we calling him now? Sugar Tits? Baby Cakes? Angel Boy?”

  I got a sudden image of a very naked Mircea, fire-warm skin backlit by flames, the same ones that had formed a vague halo around his head. He wasn’t an angel, I knew that. But regardless of what Billy thought, he wasn’t the devil, either. And it had been only one night, and he’d sworn it wouldn’t make a difference—