Blood on Silk (25 page)

S
aloman left her mouth at last, more to let her breathe than because he was finished with it. Blood still pounded through her, hot and sweet and alluring. Her heart and lungs pumped like pistons. But apart from her arms, which still clung around his neck, the rest of her body sagged, lethargic, almost limp under his weight. He let her bear it a little longer, because she could; because he liked it. After those days and nights of pursuit and teasing, of verbal struggles and all her determined efforts to kill him, it felt good to have her helpless and sated under him.

And in truth it felt good to gaze down at her soft, satisfied face, her eyes still closed, her swollen lips parted and glistening. Her delicate cheeks were rosy in the candlelight, flushed still with passion and exertion, her hair tumbling and tangled across the pillow.

Beauty moved Saloman. Watching Elizabeth slip from ecstasy to sleep made him ache. Perhaps it was release, after three centuries of enforced celibacy followed by nine agonizing days of self-imposed abstinence. And of course, anticipation always intensified the pleasure. Whatever the cause, this was one of those rare couplings that touched his soul.

Physical beauty, sexual skill, erotic surroundings—none of them counted beside this rarity. He was glad to have found it with her.

He eased his weight off her onto his elbows, and her eyes opened wide, dark hazel flecked with bewitching green, staring up at him. A dawning wonder began to cover the wild light of passion that had driven him on. He’d given her something new, and she liked it. He’d been right about that. There were unplumbed depths of sensuality in this woman, and he planned to release a few more of them before sunrise.

Without warning she smiled at him, dazzling him with her open happiness. And he smiled back, because against all the odds, he saw that she was his, that he had won.

He rolled over onto his back, to avoid crushing her to death, carrying her with him, still impaled. She lay on his chest and kissed his mouth before trailing her lips down his chest and fastening them to his nipple. He cupped her soft, pliant buttocks in his hands and squeezed before giving an experimental thrust that made her gasp.

“Isn’t that meant to shrink?” she asked without noticeable dissatisfaction.

“No. Not when it’s inside you.” Smiling, he swept his hands up over the curve of her buttocks and her back and stroked her face. “I think it pleased you,” he teased; yet he felt ridiculously like an inexperienced boy awaiting words of approval. It had been too long, much too long.

“
You
pleased me.” The words seemed to spill from her without permission. As soon as they were spoken, her teeth closed over her lip, as if embarrassed, and to cover it, she kissed his mouth.

Saloman had no objection to that. He began to make love to her again, but very slowly, forcing himself to far greater passivity than was in his nature. Fascinated, he wanted to see what she would do—whether she would falter or wait in shyness for him to resume control, or take her pleasure with quick, wicked secrecy. She didn’t.

She moved on him like a cat, slow and sensual, taking time for her hands and lips to learn his body, with a shy but obvious delight that aroused him all the more. But this woman he’d released no longer drew back in embarrassment from the sexual heat. She embraced it, craved his pleasure with her own, and set about achieving it with a wild determination that enchanted him.

In the end, Saloman reached up with his arms and held on to the bedpost, riding the whirlwind as she rode him, to a profound, devastating climax.

Smiling, he watched her come down once more. Since she sat astride him, and he felt far too comfortable as he was to move and kiss her, he contented himself with tracing the shape of her trembling lips with one finger. She caught his finger in her mouth and kissed it. She looked both decadent and angelic, almost like a Botticelli painting, as her pert, rosy-tipped breasts rose and fell among her tumbling, pale amber hair.

At last, she gave a breath of almost awed laughter. “You really don’t get any smaller, do you?”

“I’m still inside you,” he pointed out.

“What if I . . . ?” Teasing, she began to slide off, but he grabbed her hips to keep her in place.

“No,” he said. “You’re too desirable. And it’s been a long time.”

Her half smile paused with uncertainty. “A day or so?”

“Three hundred and twelve years, give or take a month or so. And nine days, of course.”

Her eyes searched his. “You never struck me as a celibate being.”

“I was never known for it,” he confessed. “On the other hand, the three hundred and twelve years were not my choice.”

“And the nine days?”

He moved at last, rolling her over and under him. “Not so much abstinence, as the desire to have you.”

Her mouth opened, as if to say, “
Me?
” But she closed it again, clearly not sure whether to laugh in disbelief or accept it as a compliment.

He said, “Are you hungry?”

Bafflement flashed across her face. “Hungry? No. That is, maybe a little; I haven’t been thinking of food.”

“We can have sex with the leftovers.”

Her body shook with laughter but also excitement. She clenched involuntarily around his cock, and he withdrew it slowly, to make her gasp—and to savor the sensation.

“You really have food?” she asked as he slid off the bed.

“Humans are always hungry.”

She began to say something, then broke off, apparently distracted by watching him walk naked across the room. He liked that too, but he had no intention of inuring her to the sight. He picked up the black silk robe from the chair in the corner and went out.

The kitchen on the ground floor was not a place in which he spent a great deal of time. It had been cleaned with the rest of the house and never used. But the refrigerator—a useful invention for humans, he allowed—contained some excellent cheese and cold meats, salad, and fruit he’d ordered especially for his night with her. He began setting it out on a plate.

When he heard her soft footsteps on the stairs, it crossed his mind that she was escaping, running for the front door. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t reach the street before he caught her again; yet when she didn’t even pause there, but crossed the hall toward the kitchen, he smiled without meaning to.

Her shadow, and then her presence, filled the doorway. He glanced up to see her standing with her back to the wall. She wore his torn, discarded shirt, and the sight of it on her, of its parting across her beautiful breasts and of her shapely legs emerging from its hem, sent the blood racing through his veins once more.

But she looked serious, almost anxious. He wondered if, as the joy of sex faded, she’d come to plead for her life—or to ask for a cooked meal.

He placed some cherries on the plate and opened the cupboard door to find a glass.

She said, “The three hundred and twelve years. Were you conscious?”

He paused, his hand on the stem of the glass, then brought it down and filled it with the fruit juice from the fridge. “Mostly. I slept a lot too.”

“I can’t even . . .” She walked toward him with quick, agitated steps. “How did you survive the boredom?”

He glanced at her in surprise, because she’d unerringly found the hardest part. “Determination to survive. I thought a lot.”

“About what, for God’s sake? For three hundred years?”

“Everything. You understand I was already more than two thousand years old. I’m used to—er—passing the time.”

“But you can’t exactly have had many distractions!”

“Revenge is a good one. Ruling the world another. And, of course, there was the pain.”

“Pain?” She sounded uncertain, as though imagining emo - tional turmoil.

He let the smile tug at his lips while he made a fist and thumped it against his heart.

Her eyes widened with shock. Her mouth fell open, and she grabbed the table as if to steady herself. “You felt that? For three hundred years?”

He shrugged. “The first few were the worst. One’s body learns to cope and adapt. Sometimes, when I was just waking up, it seemed like my best friend. Almost a solid entity.”

He said it to lighten her horror, to make her laugh. But she didn’t, continuing instead to stare at him with a compassion that seemed to hurt more than his remembered agony.

He let his hands fall from the plate. “Elizabeth, I can take pain. I can take boredom and hunger. I can even take blinding, meaningless lust that I can’t move to assuage. I can bear betrayal and the kind of fury that should make one’s body explode. But not pity. Not from a woman I’ve just fucked.”

He meant to shock her with his coarseness, but she didn’t even blink, so he pulled her against him and kissed her, hard. And then, with her almost-naked body in his hold, he no longer knew which of them he was distracting. Although she responded with blind instinct, as if she could do nothing else, she began to ask more questions, unable to leave the subject until he thrust his hand under the shirt, between her thighs, and she gasped, staring into his face with a different kind of shock. She seemed to smolder. And so, predatory and triumphant, he laid her across the kitchen table and brought her to orgasm with his fingers while he rubbed cream cheese into her breasts and drizzled wine over her nipples; then, while she convulsed under him in helpless bliss, he licked it all off with slow, deliberate sensuality.

After which, he took her and the remaining food back to bed, to let her feast off him instead.

It was a lifetime of experience crammed into one endless night. The excitement and tension of the Angel seduction, the astonishing flight across Budapest, the roller-coaster emotions that assaulted her throughout the night, swept her up, and threw her onward, learning about him and about herself.

To say nothing of the wild, intense, gloriously constant sex.

Elizabeth felt like a stranger in a strange world, yet she welcomed it with open arms. It seemed that this night, which had begun with the near certainty of death, was bringing her to life.

They talked a lot. He even talked during sex—not crude words designed only for self-arousal, but hot, moving ones that told her how beautiful she was and how much he wanted her, how much he adored what she was doing to him. Beside that, the novelty of their other conversations seemed far less, even snippets of events that had occurred hundreds of years ago. She found herself telling him bits and pieces of her own much duller life, the friends who were important to her, the few men she’d gone out with and trusted and lost. And she found she no longer thought of those men with the mixture of humiliation, self-pity, and self-deprecation that she was used to—it was why she avoided thinking about them as much as she could—but with dispassionate if rueful humor. They were experiences of life; that was all. And none of them came near this one, not even Richard, whom she also mentioned in passing. Richard, who’d never even kissed her, and now she was glad.

Once, as she sprawled on the floor, examining the horde of books she’d found in his bedroom, wearing only his silk shirt against the predawn chill, she said, “Is this how you caught up with the twenty-first century? How many of these have you read?”

He shrugged and sank naked into the chair beside her. He didn’t feel the cold. “Bits of all of them. I read quickly. And television is wonderful. I have a laptop too—endless information at the touch of a few keys.”

She smiled as he drew her back against his legs and glanced up at him. “You seem to take it all in your stride.”

“Three hundred years seems longer to you than to me.”

“You’ve been around since the world began. . . .”

“Not quite,” he said wryly. “I don’t remember the dinosaurs. In fact, until this week I’d never even
heard
of dinosaurs.”

“Are we really the same race?” It felt good to surprise him, to feel his stroking hand pause on her hair before carrying on.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I read it.” She caught his questing hand sliding inside the shirt, not to prevent it, but to hold it against her breast. “You wrote it.”

“I probably did, though with little idea of preaching to posterity. Where did you come across it?”

“In the hunters’ library. It’s extraordinary, the stuff they have there.”

“I must take a look sometime.”

She glanced at him with sudden unease, but all his attention appeared to be on his hand, which was now caressing her naked breast. His concentration, especially after all the sex they’d already enjoyed, was very gratifying as well as arousing. And God, he was beautiful, with the tangle of black locks falling across his pale cheek, his full, sensual lips parted, his large black eyes more warm now than opaque. She had learned to read some of the expressions there, the signs of lust as well as laughter, teasing, odd instances of sadness and anger.

He was thousands of years old. It would have been stranger if he
wasn’t
a complex man. She’d always been prepared for that, and for her own curiosity about the history he’d touched. What she hadn’t expected was the force of her desire to know
him
. And yet in a lifetime—her lifetime—even if she spent every waking moment with him, she’d never know it all.