“Not good enough.”
“No one else for the duration, Honor.” An unambiguous promise . . . followed by a warning. “For either of us.”
Her chest hurt and only then did she realize she’d been holding her breath. Releasing it, she said, “I know it’s unfair, when I might not be able to allow you to feed from me.” A vampire had once told her blood from the vein was as different from stored blood as the most decadent chocolate cake was from a rice cracker.
But Dmitri shrugged those shoulders she wanted to see na**d again. “Blood is easy enough to come by.” Clearing the tunnel, he took them out into the suburbs. “It’s the sex I might die without.”
She dug her nails into his thigh, choking on her laugh. When his lips curved in a slow smile that made her think dangerous thoughts, she decided to play him at his own game. Moving her hand, she danced her fingers up the zipper of his sedate black pants. He cursed, but managed not to swerve.
It did something to her that he’d hardened immediately under her touch, made her even bolder. “Try not to drive beside a semi or a pickup,” she said, closing her hand over him and squeezing just enough that his jaw turned to granite, “or they’ll get an eyeful.”
“Fuck that.” He punched something on the dash and the car’s roof unfolded over them with a smooth electronic hum, locking into place in under half a minute. A second press and the windows were up and opaqued.
Good God. “How much is this car worth?”
Putting his own hand on hers, he urged her to pick up the pace. “You can’t have it. Not for a hand job. Maybe if you use your mouth.”
Her toes curled, desire igniting liquid and hot in her abdomen. “You can’t come,” she warned, pumping him with her hand. “Or you’ll have to drive all the way back to change.”
Clenching his fingers on the steering wheel, he hissed out a breath. “I won’t forget this, Honor.” It was a threat.
One that made her ni**les go tight, rubbing against the lace of the sexy bra she’d slipped on under the top. However, she didn’t even consider stopping this—she wanted to do it, to seize an experience the broken woman she’d been at the start of this hunt would have never contemplated. “There,” she said, “it’s the entrance to some kind of park.” Green grass, a few picnic tables.
Wrenching the wheel, Dmitri pulled into the small parking lot. This time of day, it was too late for the dog walkers and joggers and too early for anyone else. Unsnapping her safety belt without removing her hand from his lap, she snapped his open and leaned over to nibble at his ear. When he shivered, she knew she’d hit another one of those hot spots on his body. “Don’t suppose the windshield turns opaque?”
Without a word, he reached out to touch something on the dash. The windscreen was a smoky black a second later. “Is that even legal?” Licking at his earlobe, she insinuated her free hand through the open collar of his shirt to play her fingers over the hollow at the base of his throat, felt his muscles lock.
“The offenses are mounting up.” Dark, dangerous words.
They made her thighs clench, images of the most erotic of punishments running through her head. Dmitri would be no easy lover—like the faceless man she’d seen in her dreams, he would demand and control and possess. “You,” she murmured, using both hands to undo his belt, “are the sexiest man I have ever met.” He made her think bad thoughts simply by breathing.
Undoing the button on his pants after successfully releasing his belt, she pulled down the zipper. And slid her hand inside to close around hot, rigid flesh covered with velvet-soft skin. He threw his head back against the headrest, one hand still on the steering wheel, the other curving around her body to fist in the back of her top. The taut line of his throat was an irresistible temptation. Continuing to caress him with firm strokes that had the tendons in his neck turning white against the warm seduction of his skin, she kissed her way up one of those tendons . . . and then she bit him.
His hand flattened on her back in a single, sudden move before fisting in her top again. An instant later, they were kissing. It was no light brush this time, no exploring touch. This was all tongues and teeth and wicked wetness as he kissed her like a man who had rough, sweaty, dirty sex on his mind and didn’t care if she knew it.
Gasping in a breath when they parted, she fisted him, stroked hard and fast. Once. Twice. His eyes glittered. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d say you’d been taking lessons in how best to please me.”
“I should stop this right now for that comment, but you’re in my blood, Dmitri.” Not giving the fear a chance to rise, she dipped her head and took him into her mouth.
“Fuck!” His hand fisted tighter in her top but he made no move to shove or otherwise direct her head, as if he knew how thin a line she was walking.
Dmitri had tasted every sexual pleasure there was to taste. He’d slid into empresses and queens, rolled out of beds with more than one other body in them, been pleasured by the most experienced of courtesans and the most dissolute of immortals. For a short, sharp instant of time, the depravity had made him forget.
Then it had become a game, to see how far he could go, how much excess he could indulge in without destroying himself. However, for the past hundred years, even the erotic had failed to satisfy—he’d played the game, but with cold calculation, little heat. Yet at this moment, he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been consumed with such ennui. It was all he could do not to fist his hand in Honor’s hair, teach her exactly what he liked.
Keeping his hands where they were was an exercise in the harshest self-restraint. He didn’t dare look down, see that gorgeous mouth working him with lush confidence. Then Honor hummed in the back of her throat and his body arched, his spine curving as pleasure arced from his c**k to crash through him in a brutal cascade.
She didn’t take her mouth off him as he came apart, lapping up his seed with a sensual openness that made him wonder who she would be when she was fully whole, no more fractures in her psyche. No longer breaks, he thought, chest heaving as she stroked her mouth off him with a final lingering suck, but fine hairline scars.
Bracing herself with her hands on his thigh, she faced him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a deep, passionate green, her lips plump and red. Releasing his hold on her top to set himself to rights, he watched her watch him. The instant he finished doing up his belt, she twisted over the console between the seats to curl up in his lap, her head on one shoulder, her hand tracing designs on the other through the fine fabric of his shirt.