Beloved Vampire (22 page)

Then she was gone, slipping out from behind the tapestry, leaving an impression of silken hair and liquid eyes, myriad things to stroke the senses of touch, scent, sight and taste. Had Jess wanted to defy him as well? Take his servant and overwhelm her, because she was feeling overwhelmed? Amara would let her keep the control, and help her find satisfaction in a safe place. That sounded reasonable, not insane at all. Except Jess knew she was using it as a substitute for what her body truly craved, who it truly craved. And that
was
insane.

Fortunately, she had time to collect herself. She ate the dinner, studied the empty ballroom and obsessed over what she was going to see below. Whenever her breath started to shorten, a warning of anxiety, she reminded herself that very little of her experience with Lord Mason had matched the unpredictable cruel menace of Raithe.

That didn’t stop her throat from closing up, her mouth drying and stomach lurching, when the staff finally began to set up the dining area. She drew the curtains as Amara suggested, watching through the crack as the ballroom lights were dimmed, leaving illumination to the window candles and sconces placed upon short pillars set up in a circle in the center of the large room. A divan was carried in, cushions were scattered about and several statues placed at different points of the circle. Erotic, elegant sculptures, life-sized artwork. As the stage was set, she was reminded how much vampires enjoyed presentation. Her heart accelerated.

Fifteen minutes, once it started. She’d said she’d stay fifteen minutes. She could do this for fifteen minutes. She’d done far worse, for far longer. And she was way up here, and they’d said she didn’t have to participate. She didn’t even have to wait fifteen minutes. She could go now.

No. She
would
do this. Because it wasn’t about complying with her agreement with Amara. It was about her facing her fears, not letting them run her life.

Incense was lit and a staff member used a fan to disseminate the aroma in the room. Jessica inhaled vanilla and sandalwood.

Several screens were brought in, draped with transparent fabric, and arranged on three quarters of the circle, so it was as if Jessica were gazing into a sheikh’s tent.

Was he purposely creating a scene from her imaginings, and if so, was it to help ease some of her fears or draw her deeper into a dangerous fantasy? He’d seemed opposed to her immersion in Farida’s memoirs, but had he changed his mind, decided it could work to his advantage?

Leaving that disturbing thought, made more disturbing because she wasn’t repelled by either idea, she studied the people who came and went. Human servants were intriguing, of course, for their willingness to bind themselves to monsters, but neutral staff held a mystery of their own. Most, like Mason’s, carried one or two marks for security purposes, but typically they were not called to serve a vampire’s more intimate demands for nourishment. They simply worked for a supernatural being as they would a human employer, collecting their paychecks. She knew some of Mason’s staff had families, children.

The ideas vanished, swallowed in a black hole of uncertainty in her mind as Amara entered the ballroom. She opened a panel in the far wall, revealing the sound system, and made an adjustment to the track, slowing it down, making the exotic selection even more seductive. When she came to the center of the room, she sent an absent smile up toward Jess’s corner, despite the curtain being pulled. Sliding off the wrap at last, Amara tucked it discreetly under the pillows, then began her stretches, rolling her head and shoulders.

The tingle in Jess’s fingertips returned as she remembered touching Amara’s perfumed, silken skin. The brief bra top she wore was the coin style, lifting and displaying her breasts prominently. A matching coin belt, low on her hips, overlaid the slitted transparent skirt that showed the cleft between her buttocks and the hint of her sex. The anklets she wore were also laden with delicate coin chips and an interesting accessory, a slender chain that ran between the two, a subtle manacle that allowed her only a certain range of stride, almost like what was put on Jessica for her own protection.

Jessica shifted her glance at a movement at the French doors, and Enrique slid in, joining his wife. Her eyes widened as she realized he was also in a form of dance costume. The harem pants and arm braces made of metal showed to good advantage the rippling, muscular physique, the tanned, smooth skin. While Amara didn’t look toward him, Jessica sensed her awareness as she stretched, practicing spins, shimmies, loosening up. When he came up behind her and slid his palms over her hips, she undulated against him in a graceful move, creating a musical sound of silver coins as she looped an arm around his neck and they turned together.

Jessica noted then that their third marks were the same, the tattoo-scar outline of a wolf. Enrique’s was on his upper abdomen, to the left over the rib cage, and Amara’s was on her back, so that as their bodies came together the marks were pressed to each other. A mated pair. A quiver ran through Jess as she thought of the tiger mark on the inside of her own thigh, and the one high on Mason’s shoulder.

When Enrique at last let Amara go, it was with obvious reluctance. He sat then, taking an unobtrusive place on the cushions next to one of the screens.

Jess was glad for her curtains. As she gazed out the narrow opening, the music and incense drifting over her, the tightness in her belly waffled between desire and fear, taking her on a merry-go-round of anxiety. He’d set this up perfectly. The right amount of privacy and titillation to tempt her to her own destruction. But she couldn’t look away, couldn’t think of leaving now.

Particularly when Mason arrived.

A desert tiger he still was. From her time in the desert, Jess knew men of wealth often wore the belted tunic over a robe. He’d chosen the belted tunic, the wide sash emphasizing the lean power of his upper body, but wore no robe beneath it. Even his feet were bare, as he stretched out on a hip and one elbow on the divan, opposite from Enrique. His attention centered on his female servant.

He reclined so easily, like a cat in truth, all lazy power and grace. Propping up one knee, he lifted his plate off the adjacent table and set it before him, a small selection of meat and fruit. Vampires didn’t eat food, but they enjoyed the taste and smell. She knew all of this, because she’d been to the ritual of a vampire dinner hundreds of times. It reminded her, even though she was holding her breath, taking in his every feature, that she was supposed to be fearful of what she was about to see, despite the aesthetic props.

But that uneasy stirring couldn’t break her motionless anticipation.

At his nod, Amara began dancing to the music’s haunting strains. Jess watched his eyes follow her. Had he commanded her to wear this particular outfit? Was that why his eyes had scanned over her functionally at first, ensuring she’d followed his direction, and then taken his time on the return trip, lingering on the bounty of pleasures the view offered? Jess’s thighs tensed in an unexpected way at the thought. Lifting the first piece of meat, he inhaled it before he took a sparse taste, though his gaze never left his servant.

As riveting as he was, she made herself go back to Amara. She didn’t know much about belly dancing, but Amara had offered to teach her some of the moves. Though she’d refused—for now—she couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to dance like this for Lord Mason, as Amara was doing.

If you do not understand that I consider my relationship with Lord Mason and my husband sacred
. . .

Amara’s attention was wholly on her vampire Master as she executed the effortless spins and shimmies that drew the gaze to the movement of hips, the arch of the body, the undulations that made the breasts quiver and the coins sing. She did it all without jerking the short chain between her ankles, keeping it barely slack, working with joyous grace and beauty within the limits of her bondage.

She approached Mason in a series of lithe, erotic movements. When he crooked a finger at her, she spun to her knees and fell back so her skull was caught in the cup of one large hand. Leaning down, he gave her the food he had in his mouth, transferring it with a long, sweeping kiss that stole Jessica’s breath away again. Then he released her and she was up again.

She maneuvered around him, moving with fluid grace to one of the alabaster statues. It was a male nude and Amara presented her back to it, working her hips in a rotation that had her brushing the top of the inanimate male’s thighs. Turning, she trailed her fingers, the points of her nails, across the anatomically correct genitalia. Another dip, sway and turn brought her to a female statue. Her lips passed over the tip of the breast.

A leap and unexpected fluid flip brought her back to the divan. Her stomach arched up to him, hands and feet on the floor, head dropped back so her hair brushed the floor. She held there, quivering, as Mason poured wine on her bare belly and licked it off, teasing her navel piercing, catching it in his teeth as she moaned. She held the position, however, as Mason balanced two small empty cups there, nodded to Enrique.

Now the other servant rose, came to Mason and dropped to one knee between his wife’s straining thighs. Pouring what appeared to be coffee in the small cups, he offered one to Lord Mason. The two men drank for a bated length of time while Amara served as their table, then Mason brushed the front fold of her skirt away. Revealing her sex, bare except for the silver ring of a clit piercing, he tipped the cup. A few drops of hot liquid landed on the small bud of flesh, making her shudder, a soft cry coming from her lips.

At a nod from Mason, Enrique dipped his head, began to tease her with his mouth as her sounds of pleasure and shaking increased.

Jessica was quivering herself, low in her belly, her hands curled into the pillows as she watched them.

“Stop,” Mason said at last, and though his voice was a seductive growl, Jessica heard him clearly. When Enrique paused, Mason gripped his shoulder, eased him upward until, though still leaned over his wife, Enrique’s mouth was about eight inches above her glistening lips.

“Dance for him this way,” Mason commanded. “Enrique will be still. You must bring yourself to his mouth on every rotation, to earn the barest touch of his lips, his tongue. And you must follow the proscribed form of the dance.” His eyes glinted. “I will know if you deviate.”

Amara began to perform the hip circles. It took her several tries, for Mason obviously had a diabolical knowledge of her range in this position. But at last she reached Enrique, and she cried out softly as she made brief contact with his mouth. Her body arched up, a work of erotic art, every circular motion straining with the effort to bring her labia and clit back to Enrique’s lips for one exquisite, short taste, then down again.

As she performed for him, Mason’s expression was unreadable, but Jess saw him trail a hand down Enrique’s bare back. As Amara’s arousal increased, she nevertheless followed the tempo of the music that had been chosen. Even from here, Jess could feel how much the woman wanted to move faster, faster and faster, until her hips would be a shimmying blur, so flexible in her need that it could not help but be likened to frenetic fucking.

However, despite being forced to the slower tempo, it was obvious when Amara was getting so close to a pinnacle that one more simple contact would detonate her. Mason’s palm drifted down to Amara’s belly, teased her there again and brought her to a halt, trembling. “Both of you, dance for me,” their Master commanded.

When the vampire settled back on the divan, Enrique slid his arm under Amara so they came up together in a supple movement.

Amara began the shimmy and Enrique turned with her, moving in behind her body to adopt a similar movement, synchronizing the masculine and feminine forms, the spins coordinated as if they were inside each other’s minds. Perhaps, with their link to Mason, and their love for each other, they were. Amara twisted between the two men, rubbing up against her husband, then spinning to her knees to Mason for a caress and another mouthful of food. Back to the feet of her husband to press her lips in fervent adoration against his thigh, before coming back to her feet so she danced once more for Mason.

When Jessica could feel perspiration beading on her upper lip, her thighs so slick she had trouble holding them against each other, Mason rose from the divan, moving into the dance.

Amara spun, as if attempting escape, and Mason caught her waist, trapping her in Enrique’s embrace. Her husband took her mouth as Mason unfastened the coin halter and let it fall to the floor like a shower of treasure, his hands replacing it. Jess was awestruck by Amara’s control, for her hips continued to move in a figure eight, rubbing with irresistible seduction between the two men’s arousals.

She’d been shared by Raithe before. But this was different; she couldn’t deny it, no matter how she wanted to do so. Enrique bent, licked Amara’s nipples between the vampire’s fingers, then took Mason’s fingers into his mouth as well. Mason caressed the man’s nape with a free hand and then dropped it along his back. Enrique’s loose pants were slit on the side all the way to the hip, open to the creature to whom they were both bound. Mason’s hand slid into that side opening and tightened on one muscular cheek. As he did, Amara put her hands behind her back, tugged open the tie holding Mason’s tunic closed. Then she raised her arms, slid them around Mason’s neck to lift herself.

Because Jess was so soaked, if she’d been in Amara’s stead, Mason could have done as he did to her now, simply dipped his fingers, already wet with Enrique’s mouth, into the hot pool of her need. Then, as Amara clasped her legs around Enrique’s waist, Mason used the accessible position to lubricate her rear passage with those fingers. Amara closed her eyes, made more of those pleasured sounds in her throat, her breasts thrusting upward in reaction, winning the absorption of the two males.

It was as simple as that. In one smooth movement, Mason drove into her backside as Enrique thrust into her sex. Amara screamed at the dual sensation. When Enrique let out a guttural sound himself, dropping his forehead onto his wife’s shoulder, Mason leaned over him and sank his fangs into Enrique’s neck.