Anita Blake 20 - Hit List (21 page)

“But you might be in love with me, do you understand that?”

His face was solemn again. “I do.”

“And you still want to feed me?”

He raised my hand up and laid a gentle kiss on my palm. “You’ve already given me more physical contact than I’ve had from a woman in two years.”

I couldn’t keep the surprise and the near horror off my face. “Dear God, Ethan, not even sleeping in big naked kitty piles?”

“I am an outcast, Anita, barely tolerated. I will be their muscle until the day something faster and stronger than I am kills me. It is my only use to the red clan. You don’t cuddle at night with someone you’re sure is basically a meat shield.”

“That’s harsh,” I said.

“It’s my life.”

In my head I thought,It’s not much of a life . “If you come to St. Louis there will be plenty of people to cuddle with, as long as you don’t insist on it all being weretigers.”

He entwined his fingers with mine. “You have such small hands.”

“They match the rest of me,” I said.

He smiled. “Not all of you is small. Your breasts are amazing.”

“Yeah, yeah, my chest is all breasts.”

“No, breasts, and muscle. You’re in amazing shape. You hit the gym like a guard.”

“I work out with our guards as often as I can.”

He gave me wide eyes. “I’ve never heard of a royal that works out with the guards.”

“I’m not big on the whole royalty thing,” I said.

“Our queen thinks you show a lack of respect.”

“She’s right,” I said.

“It’s been wonderful sleeping next to a woman again. I hadn’t realized how much I missed just holding someone in my arms.”

I realized that Ethan wasn’t dominant enough to push the sex forward. I was going to have to be bolder, or we’d be talking for another hour. Talking was good, I liked that I could talk to him, but I needed to feed theardeur and find Edward. He needed me at his back.

“Kiss me,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Kiss me.”

He looked uncertain then, nervous.

“Has it been two years since you kissed a girl?”

He nodded, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I reached up with the hand he wasn’t holding and touched his face, made him look at me. “Has it been two years since you’ve done anything with a girl?”

“Yes.” He whispered it.

I smiled at him, trying to make it gentle. “You’re going to be good at it.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re a wereanimal, so that makes you a sensualist, and I’ve seen you fight. You know how to use your body; that translates to the bedroom.”

“I’ve known fighters who weren’t good in the bedroom.”

“They had issues,” I said.

“How do you know that I don’t have issues?”

“Everyone has issues,” I said, “but if the issues are too much I’ll let theardeur free and it takes away all the doubts.”

“I didn’t think I’d be this nervous,” he said, and he let go of my hand and just looked at me.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” I said.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

I smiled at him. “I was, but I’m not now.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because you’re more nervous than I am.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why shouldn’t that make you more nervous? Why don’t you think I’m a pussy for being nervous?”

“You called me sweet earlier; I’ll return the compliment.”

“Sweet isn’t what a woman wants from a man.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find that a lot of women rate sweetness in a man pretty damn high.”

“Do you?”

I smiled up at him. “Kiss me, Ethan, just kiss me, and we’ll go from there.”

“Why not feed theardeur and take all the doubts?”

“Because I’d like some of what we do to just be us, and not the metaphysics.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I’d rather ease you into your first sex in two years than pounce on you like a starving wolf.”

“Pounce on me?” He gave me a look as if he didn’t think I could pounce on him.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “I could totally pounce on you.”

He smiled, flashing those dimples. “Bet you couldn’t.”

“If you mean arm-wrestle you and win, you’re right. I’d lose, but pouncing isn’t about strength.”

“What is it about?” he asked.

“Sex,” I said.

He frowned at me. “I do not think pouncing means the same thing to you that it means to me, then.”

I grinned at him. “Probably not, but you want me to have sex with you, right?”

“Very much.”

“Then I’ll win, because you want to me to pounce on you.”

He flashed those dimples again. “You’re saying that I’ll let you win.”

I reached up, sliding my hands over his shoulders, drawing him down toward me. “I’m saying that it’s a win-win.” My hands slid down his back as he came closer.

His face was so close I couldn’t focus on it, as he said, “I like to win.”

“So do I,” I said. I whispered it against his lips.

Then he kissed me, tentative at first, as if he weren’t quite sure what to do, and then a sound escaped his throat. A sound full of longing, eagerness, and he remembered how to kiss. He remembered how to kiss, and how to have eager hands run down my body while he did it. We kissed until we had to break just to catch our breath, and broke apart laughing.

We laughed until he moved his hips just a little and I could feel that he was hard and eager now.

It made me look down at him and there was nothing soft now. He was very hard, long and smooth, and wide. “You’re beautiful,” I said.

“I’ve never had a woman say that to my penis before.”

I looked at his face. “Then they were fools, and I like men. I like everything about them.”

“Most women seem a little afraid of us.”

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid.”

“No,” he said, and his voice was growing deeper, “you’re not.” He drew out of my arms and slid lower on my body. “I want to taste you. I want to look up your body and watch your eyes roll back into your head, and then I want inside you.”

Just staring down at him, watching that eager darkness fill his eyes, tightened things low in my body. I tried to get in my way; tried to keep myself from enjoying the moment, but theardeur was just there behind my eyes, inside my head, my heart, my gut, and it wanted him. The beasts inside me seemed strangely sluggish. The weretigers in all their colors that had been so eager for him earlier flicked a tail tip at me, opened lazy eyes the color of fire, and three different shades of blue: pale sky blue, the gray-blue of a cloudy day, and blue with that golden edge of dawn to it. All three of the tigresses concerned with the man who was kissing his way down my hip seemed almost sleepy, content, as if they’d already fed, or just woken from a nap. Apparently, the drugs they’d given me for pain really had worked. I’d remember to get the name of the drug so I could share it with the other wereanimals. Any painkiller that actually worked for lycanthropes would be a real godsend.

The tigers were content to let theardeur feed, while they watched like some huge version of sleepy housecats. Or maybe it had just been so long since I’d fed theardeur that even the beasts inside me knew it had to come first. Maybe they hadn’t liked the physical cage of my body being so badly injured either. How do you know what a tiger thinks?

Ethan snuggled down between my legs, kissing slowly on the very inner edge of my thigh, each kiss getting him closer and closer to things that were so intimate. Again, I tried to get in my own way; what was I doing letting a stranger go down on me? But his mouth moved from my thigh to other things, and that one caress of lips and tongue bowed my spine, threw my head back against the pillow, made my hands grab onto the sheets.

His mouth was so warm, his tongue licking around and over me, tracing the edges of every fold, exploring every part of me, so that it wasn’t just about hunting for that magic button and the orgasm, but truly about exploring and tasting me. He’d told me exactly what he wanted, and now he was doing it. It wasn’t just that it felt amazing, but the sheer joy he took in it. Some men, like some women, do oral sex like a duty, but some truly enjoy it. Take pleasure in every part of the act, enjoying, relishing every lick, every suck, every bit of writhing they can get from their partner. Ethan was one of those lovers. But then he’d had years to fantasize, and now that the fantasy was true, he was going to suck every bit of enjoyment out of it he could.

He sucked on that one sweet spot, and drew me over the edge, spilling that heavy, delicious, weight between my legs up and over me. It bowed my spine so that my upper body half rose from the bed like someone was pulling me upward on a string like a puppet lost to pleasure. My body fell back against the bed, writhing and jerking like the strings had been cut and I could only dance brokenly, joyously on the bed. I was boneless, helpless with pleasure, eyes fluttered closed so that I was blind.

The bed moved around me and I knew, vaguely, that he was crawling upward across my body, but it wasn’t until I felt him long and hard, brushing against the delicate bits that he’d just finished sucking that I cried out again, my body writhing, eyes opening wide, staring up at him.

He brushed the tip of him across that spot again; it made me writhe again and stare down between our bodies to find his hand around himself, using his own body as a toy to brush against me, and begin to roll the tip of him over and over on that spot.

There were already little jerks of preorgasm coming as he rubbed himself against me. The question was, would I go before he did? I wanted him inside me before that happened. I wanted to feel him put what was brushing against the smallest bit of me deep inside me.

I tried to find words to say that, to be able to articulate around the growing weight and warmth that was already building again between my legs.

His voice came breathy with strain, “I can’t hold out. I’m too close.”

I managed to gasp, “Inside, inside me.”

He looked at me, gray eyes a little too wide, and just nodded. He used his hand to guide himself lower, and I felt him begin to push inside me. “Gods, so tight, so wet, so warm.” I wanted to say that sometimes after oral sex I seemed to tighten, but I had no words outside my head as he pushed the head of himself inside me. It felt too good for words. It felt too good for thinking.

I cried out for him, “God!”

“I’m not in yet,” he said, “try not to move that much, please.” Theplease was strangled, his voice deeper, eager, as if more of his body wanted inside than just the part that was sliding inside me.

I tried to do what he asked. I tried not to move, but parts of me were moving that were even more involuntary than the rest of me. “Gods, you’re spasming around me.”

“Inside, just shove inside me,” I managed to say.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t, I promise.”

He shook his head and tried to stay with his careful push, but I’d had enough, or theardeur had, or both. I unleashed that passion, that tidal wave of want and need. One moment he was being careful, the next his eyes went so wide I could see the whites of his eyes, and then he shoved himself inside me in one long push of his hips. It made me scream his name to the ceiling, and when he started to shove himself in and out of me, finding a nearly desperate rhythm as he fought his body, my body, and theardeur so that it would last, my body writhed so that I screamed his name to the wall behind me.

“Ethan!” My nails dug into the bed, because I needed something to anchor me, to anchor us, as he rode above me, and I felt him fill up every inch of me.

“Gods!” He yelled it, in a voice gone low and growling.

I looked up at him and watched his gray eyes shift above me. They’d been tiger eyes, but now they were tiger eyes the color of amber and morning sky. I knew that color.

His hips thrust one more time so deep that it did dance that line between overwhelming pleasure and almost pain, but it brought me, too, so that we rode the orgasm together, and I fed. I fed on his body between my legs; I fed on him spilling himself inside me; I fed on my nails raking down his arms, as he stayed propped above me, and then his body convulsed again, thrusting deep, tearing screams from both our throats, and with the second release his body gave. The human body above me spilled outward in an rain of thick, hot liquid, and the body between my legs was golden furred with stripes of dark amber framing that face with its hazel-blue eyes.

He growled my name. “Anita, what have you done to me?”

I ran my hands down the light, dry fur of his arms; it was unbelievably soft. “Brought you home,” I said.

He collapsed on top of me, and I had to push at the last minute so this larger, heavier upper body didn’t press me into the bed. He was still deep inside me, bigger there in this form, too. It made me turn my body, so that we were on our sides, one of my legs over his thigh. I couldn’t move well enough to wrap myself around his hips yet.

I think he tried to pull out of me, but he wasn’t used to the new size, and he’d just had sex, and just done a violent shapeshift that had left him exhausted. He blinked at me. “This isn’t me.”

“I smelled gold on you the first time we met,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.

“Impossible.” He managed to put one furred hand on my side so he could see the golden fur against my skin. He was growing softer with the wonder of it all, or the exhaustion, or the shock, and was able to spill out of me. The movement made us both writhe. When we could talk again, he said, “No one has four forms.”

“You do,” I said, and laid my hand against the swell of his pectorals. They’d been nice in human form, but everything got bigger in the beast-man form. He looked like a bodybuilder in this body. It made me wonder what some of the other wereanimals at home who were serious bodybuilders must look like in beast-man form. It was unusual to have sex in half-form, so I didn’t usually get this close.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

I moved my gaze from his chest to his face, that strangely attractive mix of human and cat. I said the only thing that I could say in that moment. “That you are beautiful.”

It made him do that cat grin, drawing back to flash teeth that could have torn me to bits. He drew me into his arms, his fur the driest thing in the bed. I’d never understood why the liquid from the shapeshift gets everything else wet and leaves the fur dry. “I’ll get you all messy,” I said.