Fallen Ever After (2 page)

If I could stay in bed with him all day, I would, but we’d done exactly that for the past week. Arie’s phone never stopped ringing. I wasn’t even sure how my godmother had tracked down Arie’s number, but with her anything was possible. First Tessa, then Victoria, and then Luna had called, but it felt good to have friends worrying about me. They were more like family, and considering that I’d never really had one, I loved feeling like I belonged—even if the family that I belonged to was a dysfunctional, supernatural hodgepodge of vampires and faeries and witchcraft.

“How can I say no to you?” His sexy look melted me.

“Then don’t,” I said with a smile. “Don’t say no to me. Just be with me…always and forever.”

Arie sighed. “I’m yours for eternity, but I don’t think you realize what forever means—at least not yet. But someday you will, and I wonder how you’ll feel about it then.”

“What? Do you think I’ll get sick of you or something after a few hundred years?”

I couldn’t help teasing him. It felt good to be lighthearted and free. Things had been so tense between us, but now we could put Katarina behind us and just focus on our relationship. God, I never realized how looking like his ex would make me feel. Like I was somehow less than the psycho-vamp-tramp, and I knew it didn’t make any sense but that didn’t change the way I felt about it.

He pushed a stray chestnut strand away from my face. “No, I think you’re young, you’re beautiful, and you have no idea about the implications of this life.”

His suggestion insinuated that I didn’t yet understand what it meant to be a vampire. And maybe I didn’t, but part of him still worried about how I’d deal with the Sight now that I’d turned. Katarina had the Sight too, and it had driven her to madness once she’d been turned. Now that she was out of the picture, it might be a good idea to let us get used to the idea of our relationship. Our lives had completely changed over the past few months. I loved him with everything I had, I just didn’t want to screw it up by moving too fast. Nagging, useless insecurity and guilt dug into my conscience.

“Arie. Let me…” I brushed my lips over his mouth. “Let me love you.”

“Please,” he whispered, his fingers linking with mine. “Don’t ever stop.”

“Never. I can’t.”

And no words were ever truer.

His love drove me like an addiction, and I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. Not now. He closed his eyes and pulled me close. Unbidden tears ran down my cheeks. Why was I crying? Was it my heightened senses and emotions from being turned? Lifting my head, I took his mouth, our kiss flavored with the salt of my tears. Arie wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me so tight I almost couldn’t breathe. Not that I depended on it anymore. It was a good thing, too, because it felt like dying, the way air was being sucked from my lungs by my hot vampire boyfriend kissing me senseless.

As much as I loved our week together, it would be fun to hang out at the Goth club downstairs at HFC. Tonight a Euro-Goth band called
Defiance
promised to bring out the vampires—both the wannabes, or fang-fakers as Victoria liked to call them, and the actual undead. Tessa had surprised me by not making demands of me this week. Still, a change of scenery would be nice, since we hadn’t left the loft.

Not that I could complain about the scenery. Arie’s tongue explored my mouth with a hunger that seemed insatiable, and the air filled with a charge of awareness. In an almost dreamlike state, I pulled him closer. It could be the apocalypse and I wouldn’t care—probably wouldn’t even notice—because whenever Arie kissed me the whole world fell to pieces. All I could focus on was his tongue brushing against my teeth, and I realized now that I’d never noticed the details of his mouth before. At least not like this. The swirl of his tongue, the sensuous textures, contrasts, and each finite detail that made my finely tuned senses nearly explode. Anticipation made my skin tingle. My breasts pressed against the hard wall of his chest, his hand fisted in my curls as he pulled me deeper into his mouth. God, kissing Arie now that I was a vampire, with every sensation amplified by about a billion, was so fucking hot.

Seriously, I could get used to waking up like this. We’d never be the normal couple that went to picnics, movies, and hikes in the woods, growing old as we held hands and kissed. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We’ll never have children, either. Or grandchildren that I can spoil rotten. I only started living with him when my life was at stake. It’s all too fast.

I pushed the thoughts aside as I met his tongue with mine. The possessive yet gentle meeting of our lips left me breathless and reeling. He thrust his muscular thigh between my legs. His hands dropped to my lower back and he pulled me toward his knee, rocking his leg against me. The pressure felt incredible, and I knew without a doubt that if he kept it up I could come like this. Easy. Or tear his clothes off and forget all about meeting up with Victoria and Luna at the club. I groaned.

Maybe I should. The pleasure streaking through my core overwhelmed me, and I arched into him without him pulling me forward. I took what I wanted, rocking against…

Arie pulled his knee away.

He broke off the kiss and threw me a smile, that cocky curve that lifted his mouth in a way that made me want to either kiss him again or smack him. Or maybe both.

“Shouldn’t you start getting ready, if we’re going to the club?”

Unquenched desire and irritation at both his cockiness and my own weakness tangled into a conflicted knot at my core.

“Arie! I know what you’re trying to do, and it won’t work.”

I threw off the sheet and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. “No matter how sexy you think you are, you can’t seduce me into staying in bed with you. I swear. We’re going to the club—I really mean it.”

But it didn’t sound very convincing—even to me.

Arie sighed and reached for my underwear. He managed to grasp the string side of my bikini, pulling me back into bed and into his arms. I tumbled into them less reluctantly than I let on.

“You don’t mean that,” he said, taking my hand and bringing it to his lips, where he nipped the pad of my finger. “But I want to give you something to think about…for later.”

He knew me so well, and of course he was right, which was irritating, especially when he looked completely amused.

I jerked my hand away playfully. “Fiend!”

Definitely the wrong thing to say—the erotic light in his eyes became hotter and more intense. He looked like he might pull my underwear down and plunge into me with one stroke. The sheer fabric of my bikini happened to be the only layer of clothing between us; I’d discovered that Arie preferred to sleep naked most of the time. But his preference kept us from doing a whole lot of sleeping. His lust-filled look could have burned a hole through the material, and there wasn’t much to my underwear to begin with. He stared at me the way a lion might look at an antelope right before the chase. And my first thought was that, like the antelope, I should run for my life. My second thought was that I
really
wanted to get caught.

“Only when it comes to you—you’re mine, Holly,” he said, his husky voice a penetrating caress.

“Yes, yours.” It was a promise I intended to keep.

His chest was smooth, the thick pads of muscle rolling beneath pale skin. And his abs, dear Lord, those ripped eight-pack abs could be cut from steel.
Oh god.
Arie’s gaze trailed to my naked breasts. Warmth spread to my chest as my nipples tingled and hardened under his gaze. I tried to cover up, but Arie grasped my wrists, raising them above my head.

“Never hide your body. I want to look at you.” He brushed his lips across mine, kissing a trail down my neck. “You’re so beautiful, Holly.”

I trembled under the assault to my senses. Bare and open to his hungry gaze, a mixture of vulnerability and desire shot straight to my thighs. Wetness pooled in the folds that lay between them. Everything was intensified. Arie had always turned me into a puddle of sensation, wrung me out with his expert touch that he’d undoubtedly honed over the centuries. But I’d never experienced anything quite like this. Each sensation felt drawn out, overwhelming, and excruciating in a way that verged on painful. His mouth left a trail of fire that burned into my ultra-sensitive nerve endings—one of the perks of being a vampire. At the moment it left me squirming as I tried but failed to adjust to the thrum humming down my neck, to my thighs, and through my entire body.

“I’m going to suck on those,” he whispered as he looked at the hardened pebbles of my nipples, which betrayed my need to feel him inside of me. “Touch, taste, nibble, and bite…”

“Yes. Please, yes.” I writhed beneath him, needing him to do what he described.

His mouth moved further down my throat, and I shuddered at the scrape of his teeth over my skin. Slowly, his mouth descended, nipping and licking as it trailed lower. The desire that flamed in my breasts and between my legs only eased when he finally took one nipple between his teeth. But my relief was only temporary. His tongue flicked over the hard nub while his hand massaged my other breast and pinched my taut nipple. I gasped for air, wriggling beneath him, needing to feel him touch my pussy.

God, I want this man.

I clutched his shoulders, digging my nails into his skin as I let out an animalistic growl that I almost didn’t recognize. His mouth trailed lower, between the valley of my breasts, over my ribcage, across my navel…

He stopped just above the mound of curls between my legs.

“Are you sure you want to go to the club? We could stay here, have some fun, order some delivery.” When he spoke, his breath tickled the coarse hair at the apex of my thighs.

I laughed and groaned almost at the same time. “No more pizza. No more Chinese.”

“We could order Indian.”

“You’re impossible.”

He grinned. “And you’re wet.”

Heat spread across my cheeks from his erotic but not inaccurate taunting. Arie was skilled. Devious. And I wanted it all and then some. I tried not to squirm, because then he’d know for sure that what he said was true.

“Maybe,” I said, licking my lips. “You might care to find out for yourself, and then we can get ready to go to the club.”

Arie groaned before rolling onto his back. “Not a chance. You want to go out, then you get me later.”

The power struggle rippled between us, sexy and hot as hell.

A little payback was in order. My lips parted as I straddled his waist. His intake of breath, an audible hiss, made me feel triumphant as I lowered my breasts until they pressed against his chest. Tracing the shell of his ear with the tip of my tongue, I stopped at the lobe, tugging on it with my teeth. He hardened against the crotch of my underwear. Kissing his neck, his collarbone, his chest—I dropped to his nipple and flicked my tongue across it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to spare ten or twenty minutes before a shower?” I asked in the sexiest voice I could manage and looked up at him through my lashes.

“Holly, if you don’t stop now I’m going to pound you into the bed from now until closing and you can forget about going to the club.”

I leaned up and planted a kiss on his forehead, then used my newfound supernatural speed, or time-bending as Arie called it, to spring off of him before he could grab me.

“Suit yourself. If you change your mind you can join me in the shower.” I had a feeling he was going to need a cold one.

He kicked the rumpled sheets to the foot of the bed. -
You’re going to regret that later.
-

I smiled at his telepathic threat, which was more of a teasing endearment, even if it was a sexually frustrated one. I laughed. -
Do you promise?
-

Vaguely, I heard him mutter a curse. Before I could make it to the shower, he had wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me toward him and backward until we were both on top of the bed. When I landed on him, he rolled me onto my back and pinned me to the bed.

“You know, I really wish Tessa would have taught you a little bit more discipline.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I never knew until I’d met Arie that a little bit of bondage and the smack of discipline could do wonders for my soul. It kept my visions at bay during sex and allowed me to orgasm. Well, either that or the supernatural bond we shared even back when I was human made it possible to block out everything except for the skillful swirl of his tongue.

Arie believed that like attracted like, and supernatural beings shared a bond. And I didn’t mind the idea of being bonded to Arie one bit. In truth, I didn’t mind the semi-dozing post-coital state with the taste of come in my mouth and his body wrapped around me like a blanket, either. From the look in his eyes I had a feeling that was exactly where we were headed.

“Well why don’t you show me some discipline?”

“That wasn’t on the menu. I was planning to go easy on you since your ass took quite a pounding last night.”

I blushed. I couldn’t help it.

-
But I want you to spank me.
-

I gasped.

It wasn’t my intention to blurt out what I wanted telepathically, and it was frustrating not to be able to control my new supernatural powers. Arie didn’t laugh at me when I looked away. Instead, he leapt from the bed and began rooting around underneath it.