Beauty's Beasts (16 page)

“You don’t want to die?” she asked, astonished.

“What do you want, Riley? Why are you bothering me?”

“You haven’t moved for three days.”

“So?” He sat up on his heels, releasing her.

Relieved, Riley struggled up into a sitting position, too. “I was worried!”

“Why?” His fangs, she was glad to note, had retracted.

“Well…because…” She bit her lip. “For god’s sake, Nick. Your lover, your best friend, just died. You go into a funk for three days, and I’m not supposed to worry?”

“I don’t want you to do anything for me,” he said, his words precise. “You’ve done enough already.”

She caught her breath as pure hurt ripped through her. It had never occurred to her that Nick might in any way hold her responsible for what had happened to Damian.

The hurt had to be vented. Five days ago she might have stamped her foot. Or slapped him. Five days ago, she had taken her knife out and jammed it into Damian’s stomach. But that was five days and a lifetime of learning ago.

Now, she clenched her fist and sucker-punched Nick on the jaw with an upper cut that she didn’t telegraph. Of course, it barely made him stagger, but he dipped a finger into his mouth and it came out bloody. She’d made him bite his own tongue.

Good.

She picked up her coat. The black one. The cherry-colored one was covered in Damian’s blood. Silently, she headed for the door.

Nick’s fingers dug into her shoulder, halting her. “You can’t leave,” he told her.

“Watch me.”

“Azazel will be monitoring the apartment.”

“I don’t give a shit about Azazel. I’m not staying here with you any more, Nick.” She didn’t turn to look at him despite the pressure of his hand on her shoulder.

“Riley…”

“No!” She shrugged off his hand. “If I’m so despicable to you, I’ll remove myself.”

“You’re going to leave wearing just my robe?”

“I don’t care!” she railed. “I just want to get out of here.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“And you’re being an asshole.” She spun to face him. Nick was propped against the back of the sofa, his long legs crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed, too. “Damian would hate you for this,” she told him.

A shadow crossed his face. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” His voice was low.

“You think just because you slept with him for a few centuries longer than I did, you’re the expert?” Riley realized her cheeks were wet, and mentally shrugged. This was overdue, she knew. She put her back to the apartment door. “There were things about Damian you didn’t know at all. Things you couldn’t possibly know. That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

Again, the shadow seemed to ripple across his face.

“He left you,” she said deliberately.

Nick licked his lips.

“You couldn’t protect Tally. Damian loved her and you let him down.”

Nick’s arms dropped from their protective cross. “Stop this, Riley.”

Riley dropped her coat and put her hands on her hips. “Damian chose me, Nick.
Me
.”

He moved fast. Vampire speed. Suddenly she was pressed against the door, lifted up so that her eyes were level with Nick’s and held there with his body pinning hers, his hips against hers, his hands around her waist. There was such power holding her there, she knew he could keep her like that all day if necessary. His gaze locked with hers.

“If he chose you,” Nick murmured, his voice resonating through her head and her chest, down to her toes. It made her body quiver in response. “Then why are you wearing
my
robe, hmmm? And why did he not mark you in all the time he was with you?”

His tongue swiped over her cheeks, gathering her spent tears. It was strangely erotic. By the time his lips pressed against hers, her body was tense with anticipation and the touch of his lips made her gasp and shudder. It left her weak and almost totally defenseless.

“I hate you,” she told him.

“No, you don’t,” Nick replied with complete certainty. “Kiss me.”

She shook her head. That would leave her without any shield at all. It would ruin the last of her crumbling senses and she needed what she had left to deal with Nick. He was too canny. Too old.

He was watching her. Probably reading all her thoughts from the expressions on her face, the arousal of her body and her pheromones. It wasn’t fair.

Life wasn’t fair, she reminded herself. She had wanted to wake Nick from his three day stupor.
Be careful what you wish for,
she thought ironically.

Riley kissed him, giving it everything she had. She wound her arms around his neck and thrust her fingers into his hair. She let herself go deliberately, sinking into the joy of kissing Nicholas Sherwood. She thrust her tongue into his mouth and gave her soul, her heart, her entire attention to the pleasure of the moment. She soaked up every tiny detail of the experience. Her breasts pressing against him, her nipples pushed against the perfect silk of his robe, sandwiched between her and him. The warmth generated between their bodies. The slick moisture building between her legs, the pulse of her clit, which surely Nick must be able to feel with his hypersenses, the quiver of the muscles in her abdomen as they clenched.

Riley brought her legs up and wrapped them around Nick’s hips and pressed herself even tighter against him. The core of her was melting with the heat of her arousal. Pushed up against his pelvis as she was, even he could not fail to notice, especially as the silk robe had fallen away from her thighs and her naked pussy was pressing up against his stomach. The only thing between their flesh was his clothing.

When at last she lifted her lips away from Nick’s, she was gasping.

So was Nick. He curled his arm around her back to support her, freeing a hand, which he used to cup her face. He pulled her away from the door, carried her across the apartment and laid her down on the bed with surprising gentleness.

“Your body speaks where your words do not, Riley,” he told her, stripping himself of his clothing.

“Not every lustful whim has to be indulged.” Her voice was heavy with arousal.

Nick smiled. “How little you know yourself.”

It didn’t help that he was undressing. Nick was taller than Damian, lean and while Damian had been broader across the shoulder, Nick had sinews and strength to wield a broadsword all day, if it was needed. His thighs were thick with muscle from controlling a horse, and his ass…

She swallowed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

His smile broadened. “What you want me to do. I’m going to make love to you. I’m going to leave you limp and mindless on that bed.”

Her heart leapt and her body with it. She focused on the key words.
Make love.

“Why are you being so…nice?”

Nick leaned on the bed with one knee. His cock was already erect and Riley couldn’t help but look at it. And she couldn’t help compare it to Damian’s. Nick’s was longer, but not as thick, she thought. The head was wider, though. It was flaring almost purple at the edges. It looked wickedly enticing.

She looked up. Nick was watching her and she felt her cheeks start to burn.

“You want me to be not nice?” he asked. “Because I can be whatever you want, Riley.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want you to be anything at all,” she said quickly. “If I get to have you at all, Nick, I just want you to be you. Do you even know what that is, anymore?”

He hesitated and she saw that he was genuinely startled. “As in…when I was human?” He laughed. “You would not even understand the language.” He spoke a few words as he moved onto the bed next to her.

She shook her head sadly. “No, I don’t understand,” she said softly, laying her hand on his chest. “But I wish I could.”

He picked up her hand and kissed her fingers. “It’s an ugly language, anyway. Old English isn’t any better than modern English. Norman French was much prettier.” And he spoke another sentence and kissed her forehead.

“Yes, that does sound much nicer,” she agreed. “More musical.”

“You’d be amazed at the barbaric deeds that were done in that musical language,” he told her, tugging at the tie around her waist. It unraveled and the robe fell open and he sighed. His fingers began to stroke up and down the length of her body. “Is that the spell you cast over Damian? You let him be himself? His true self? You accepted him that way?”

“That he was a Spartan? Yes, I understood that. But I didn’t think what I was doing was casting a spell.” She caught her breath as Nick’s hand closed around her breast and the fingers slid up to the peak to tug at the nipple. It was a casual tweak. His hand moved on, downward, to her hip, making her abdomen ripple and her hips jerk. Her pussy clamped and squeezed as he stroked between her thighs. Her breath grew faster.

“You know who I am, too,” Nick said. It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know the details, Nick. But I understand the differences between you and me. I know you’re not human. I know you were alive when Richard the Lionhearted was on the throne. I know that in my bones. It’s not something I will ever forget. I will never treat you as human when there is a need to differentiate.”

“Yet knowing that, you can still lie here and let me touch you,” he said softly.

She looked him in the eye. “Yes.”

He smiled. “There’s no need to challenge me. I already know the truth of it.” He caught her face in his hands. “I’m beginning to understand why Damian could not leave you be.” His face shadowed for a moment. Rippled with grief. Then it was gone. “Come here.”

He tucked his arm under her waist and pulled her underneath him and looked her in the eye. His hand smoothed its way along the side of her hip, down her leg. “Just this once, Riley Carson Connors, I want to be very old-fashioned and traditional. Human, if you will. Do you mind?”

She shook her head. She was afraid to speak. She thought she might cry if she spoke. His request was profoundly moving.

Nick brushed her hair back from her face. “You really are very beautiful,” he said. “I have lived a greater time than all men, so I have seen beauty in every form, and yours outshines them all. I confess, Riley, I have fought harder to deny it and struggled longer against its effects, but even I am not immune. I consider it my staggering good fortune that you choose to be in my bed today.”

He kissed her temple, and Riley reflected that there was not a man on earth who had managed to make her feel like her beauty was a gift and that she had bestowed a favor upon them by sleeping with them. Only Nick, who wasn’t human anymore. For the first time in her life, for one shining moment, her beauty wasn’t a curse. It was actually a positive thing.

She blinked hard. “I thought Englishmen were supposed to be really bad poets?” Her voice was thick with the dammed-back tears.

Nick’s mouth was trailing down her cheekbone to her ear. “And lovers,” he added, and thrust his tongue into her ear. The tip of his tongue circled around the grooves and ridges of her ear as his breath blew softly against it. She began to writhe at the sensations both stimuli were building.

His thigh slipped between hers, pinning her down and pressing against her mons. The pressure against her clit was both pleasurable and a torment. Her hips lifted in reaction.

“Mmm…” Nick murmured in response, his lips closing around the lobe of her ear.

“This is old-fashioned sex?” she said, with a gasp.

“So far,” he agreed. “Lovemaking at its most basic.”

She felt a
frisson
of surprise touch her again at his use of the word “lovemaking”. Why was she so sensitive about it? He was being old-fashioned, for heaven’s sake.
Go with the flow, Riley
, she told herself.

“Of course,” he said, his tongue sliding down her neck to swirl over the most sensitive point of her nape, as his hand delicately caressed the underside of her breast, “If I really were human, then this would have to be your wedding night. You would not be in my bed, otherwise.”

“No?” She gasped as his fingers slid over the peak of her breast, tripping over the nipple one finger at a time, tugging on it four times in a row, then back again. Sweet torture.

“A beauty like you would have been carefully marketed out to the highest lords in the land, no matter what the size of her dowry. You would have been brought to my attention, for sure.”

“You…were a lord.” Of course. Of course. The broadsword. His language. She gasped as his teeth pulled at her other nipple. A sharp tug. Then he let it go so he could speak.

“Let us say that the marriage was agreed between us and this is the marriage bed,” he said. “It would, of course, have been a four-poster bed and the curtains would have been drawn all around us.”

“Why?” she asked, and drew in a sharp breath as his leg lifted from between her thighs and was replaced by his hand. His fingers began to stroke the flesh of her thighs, teasing. Her legs fell open, trembling.

“So that the witnesses could remain in the room and hear the taking of your maidenhead.”

Riley lifted her gaze to Nicholas’s eyes. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

He was smiling. “Unfortunately, no. The wedding would have been arranged for the night falling in the middle of your menses cycle, too. Even back then they knew that was when you would have the best chance of getting with child. A child conceived on your wedding night would have been considered a most fortuitous event.”

Riley shivered. There was something in Nick’s face. A shadow. More than grief. An older darkness. But it was gone before she could examine it and his hands were distracting her, teasing her, fluttering against the lips of her pussy.

Her clitoris was screaming for attention. So was her pussy. She needed Nick. Wanted him inside her. This slow, delicate seduction was killing her.

“So you would have to…make love to me in a room full of people?” she breathed.

“It was the way of it then,” he told her. “Just for your wedding night, and just for the first time. Once the bloody sheet had been produced, they would hang it out the window and go away happy.”

She reached up to hold Nicholas’s face, instinct driving her. “Make love to me, my lord. Everyone has gone. It’s just us now.”