The Dark's Mistress (The Saint-Pierres) (13 page)

He took his lips away from her breast, dashing his tongue over the bite marks to seal the wound.  An unnecessary courtesy when he bit his own breed, but still an ingrained habit.

Kam’s fingers encircled the head of his cock.  “Inside me,” she pleaded.

As he slid into her pussy a little deeper than he had before he suddenly felt a curiously misplaced dread creep up his spine.  Yet it was an expectant feeling like when one wanted to step into the darkness to explore and they weren’t sure they might fall down a chasm, but the risk was what made it worth the thrill.

“Kam,” he whispered, “you’re so tight. 
Mon Dieu
.  Are you—are you a virgin?”

She nodded, and he didn’t immediately interpret that as a positive.  It had been a strange question for him.  He’d never had a virgin.  Hell, nowadays, they were rare.  And a vampiress of Kam’s age?  She must be close to his mid-twenties.  She’d seduced him from on-stage with her lush, yet darkly innocent sexuality.  And she claimed the dark prince as her lover.

“You’re joking with me, right?”

“Johnny.”  She bracketed his face.  Her lips were crimson with his blood.  He wanted to devour them in a kiss, but his rigid cock demanded satisfaction.  “I want you to be my first.”

“But...”  Impossible.  “Kam?  You said…  What about…?”

She shook her head adamantly.  “Never.  I would never allow him.  I know you think—”


“No.  I mean, well…” He couldn’t imagine the Old Lad Himself would have a girlfriend and
not
have sex with her.  “Really?  You and the big guy haven’t...?”

She shook her head again.

“Okay.  That’s a huge relief.  But why me, Kam?”

Now he stopped trying to thrust into her and settled onto his elbows above her.  Desire softened but didn’t go away.  The imminent orgasm had abated.  The head of his cock remained snugged inside her folds.  He couldn’t move further without being sure of her intentions. 

“Your first time should be with someone you love,” he said, though he didn’t believe it for a minute.  Love was so rare.  Did anyone truly ever love nowadays?

“I care about you, Johnny.  I thought…”  She glanced aside.  Was that a tear glistening at the corner of her eye?

Oh, hell, he was an asshole.

“I do care about you, Kam.
  I just… This is a surprise.”


“Are you disappointed?  I know things.  I knew how to pleasure you with my bite.  And how to touch you.”

“Yes, you do.  That’s why you just surprised me with your confession.”

“It’s not as if I’m inexperienced.  I’ve just never let a man go so far as to come inside me like I want you to do now.  I needed to have this done with so He—oh.”

She’d almost said it.  And Johnny could guess the confession she daren’t finish.  If she gave her virginity to someone else, then Himself could not have it.

She was using him as a means to escape?
  I needed to have this done with…

He bowed his head to her chest, kissed her between the gorgeous full breasts that were smeared with her own blood.

“It is all he has ever asked of me,” she said in a tiny, fearful voice.  Her heartbeats fluttered against his fingertips.

He embraced her, hugging her to his chest.  He didn’t want her to ever feel fear with him. 

“He requests I make love with him.  I refuse.  Always,” she insisted.  “It is the one thing I yet have that is mine.  So if I give it to you, then he can never have it.  Maybe then he’ll set me free.”

Johnny nodded, his head still bowed against her chest.  Her heartbeats thundered, as did his.  He touched the bite wound on her breast, catching a bubble of blood.  The crimson bead trickled down his finger, but he wasn’t compelled to lick it.

This was wrong.  The two of them lying here, seeking satisfaction for a means to an end that was vastly different from what the other expected.  And yet, to Kam, this was not wrong at all.  In fact, it may be the only right she could imagine.  A right born of desperation. 

If she thought it would win her the freedom she craved then he couldn’t deny her the chance to grab that escape.

“If that’s what you want,” he said, lifting his head to spy her tear-filled gaze.  “I’ll do this for you.  With you.”  He kissed her nipple and teased his tongue over the bite marks.  She sighed with renewed pleasure.

But Johnny couldn’t reach the same high of want, and even though his cock was hard and ready to serve her the freedom she thought she could earn, regret cut a black line through his heart.

Kam reached down and stroked him.  He sucked in a breath.  She intended to make his step into moral depravity easy.  She held him firmly; no reluctant, unsure touches there.  No man could fight the intense need such a touch promised.  His hips tilted forward, seeking to move his cock into her. 

Not here on the floor.

Sitting up, he lifted her as he stood and set her at the end of the bed.  The hellcat slinked off the white comforter.  Kam laid back, her breasts exposed and pinked with blood.  The dress was shoved up to flaunt her pretty
pussy.  An accidental vixen, she.  Crowned in demon horns and blessed with the voice of a siren, she had lured him into her boudoir like a goddess who would bite him, fuck him, and then toss him into the sacrificial flames.

The things he did to please a woman.

Bowing to her, Johnny kissed her jaw, and then her mouth.  They danced tongues, she sucking on his while he dragged his lips across her fangs to spill his blood into her mouth.  He wanted to feed her until she was sated and then not stop until the universe swallowed them up.

Shaking down his pants to his ankles, he knelt on the bed between her legs.  He nudged the head of his cock into her hot, enveloping folds. 

“For you,” he whispered.

Forgive me, he thought to himself.  Because this wrong could never become their right.

Chapter
Eleven

It was going to happen.  She would achieve freedom from Himself.  Right here, right now, with the man she trusted most to help her claim that freedom.  It felt amazing. Johnny was willing to do what it took to make her happy...

Willing to do it, but not as happy as she’d thought he should be.  And she knew why. 

Kam tried to convince herself this was right, that having sex with Johnny was the only solution to her problem.  Her body was in for the ride—and oh, she’d let him bite her all over—but her soul remained distant, as if standing off to the side, shivering with a regret she knew would settle in the moment her lover claimed her.

Johnny thrust his hips forward and his hot erection pressed into her.  Anticipation shivered over her skin.

Not like this
.

Kam slapped a palm to his chest.  “No.”

“I think it’s supposed to hurt a little,” he said.

“No.”  She shifted her hips, and his erection sprang free from between her legs, slipping along her thigh.  “You’re right.  This is wrong.  I want the first time to be better than this.  I need it to happen with someone I love.”

“I could love you, Kam.  But we haven’t known each other that long, and I still haven’t proven my worth to you.  And you’re all tangled up in the dark prince’s business.”

“I want to get away from him.  I’m so desperate I’d—  Well, you know what I’d do.  Oh, Johnny, I can’t go through with
this.  Please don’t hate me?”


“Never.  I adore you, Kambriel.”  He nuzzled up to her, pulling her against his chest and wrapping his arm across her stomach, their bodies melded together easily.  The heat of him was too perfect to ever move away from.  “We don’t have to have sex tonight.  Because honestly?  I don’t deserve you yet.”

Tears slipped from Kam’s eyes.  She didn’t deserve him.

“This will feel right to you some day.”  He kissed her at the base of her earlobe.  “And I hope it’s me you trust when you’re ready to make love for the first time.”

“It will be,” she promised.  “It already is.”

“We’ll figure this out,” he said.  “I’ll help you get away from him.”

* * *

A while later, something fluttered against Johnny’s skin.  The sensation woke him from the sleep he was always surprised to wake from.  He rarely slept, but vampires could, and did, need restorative rest, so he nodded off on occasion.  The satisfaction in knowing he had stolen sleep never got old.

A moth fluttered above Kam’s head.  He blinked.  Ready to reach out and snatch it, crushing it, he paused.  Another wing fluttered on Kam’s shoulder.  In the darkness he initially thought the moth had landed on her skin.  But then he saw what it really was.

The tattoo detached from her skin, becoming real.  The moth, or butterfly—whatever it was—floated up, following the other winged creature toward the open window, where they drifted out into the bright luminescence of moonlight.

He sat up, careful not to wake her, and stroked her skin where the tattoo had been.  No wound or any scars.  It was as if a temporary tattoo had simply been peeled away.  How weird was that?

Did she know that’s what they did? 

She’d mentioned Himself had given them to her.  Anything that had come from the devil could not be good.  That thought crept under his skin and something akin to fear skittered up his spine.  This entire apartment had been a gift to Kam from Himself.

Anxiety shuddered through Johnny’s veins.  He exhaled to calm his sudden rushing pulse.  Looking about the darkness, he expected to see red eyes glowing from the depths.

Sleeping with the devil’s girlfriend?

He wagered the percentage of men who survived such a feat was less than zero.

* * *

The nightwings landed on Himself’s eyes.  Their antennae burrowed into his pupils.  Ancient pupils set in eyes that had seen millennia and would see many millennia more.  Visions of Kambriel in black latex sashayed before him, pleasing him.  He could not feel love but he could manifest pleasure, satisfaction, and sometimes even joy.  Love was intangible, and he wasn’t sure mortals felt it, either.  They had been put on this earth to experience love, yet so few understood that and worked toward embracing the emotion.  Presumably because it required utter selflessness. 

Such a cruel trick their God had played upon them all.

But he could not pity them their lack of love.  The world would be less easy to inoculate with his malice and darkness were it peopled by higher-evolved beings. 

When Kambriel was on stage she connected to the pitiful mortals in ways that amused him.  So like the mortals to worship false gods and goddesses.  They would never know true worship demanded flesh and blood and the being’s very soul.  They were simply pleasing themselves, pressing salve to their stupid emotional wounds.

Kambriel was a salve to his need to possess the finest, the most exquisite, to feed upon and ultimately corrupt innocence.  She was the closest he would ever come to touching the elusive love.

Himself sat up stiffly upon his throne.  His talons cut into the obsidian throne arm.  The nightwings showed him the insufferable Johnny Santiago kissing his Kambriel.  And touching her skin.  Fangs grazed over her breasts—he bit her!

Ripping the nightwings from his eyes, Himself growled and fisted the air.  His fist collided with the column to the left of the throne, crushing the meteoric stone to dust that glittered in the air as it settled about his hooves.  Hadn’t his meddling with that idiot longtooth’s family been enough?

“I will crush that vampire!”

* * *

Johnny woke with a gorgeous woman wrapped in his arms.  Her hair spilled over his face and he smiled through the silken strands, not brushing them away.  The closeness of her warm, chocolate and cherries curvy body against his bare chest made him shiver.  He had an erection, and realized he lay with his leather pants partly down around his hips.  He tugged them up because it felt weird to lie so exposed next to a woman he hadn’t completed the deal with.  It shouldn’t, but—  Hell, this not-fucking was new to him. 

He kind of liked the intimacy that hadn’t demanded they go all the way.  To think about it, he actually felt…  Yeah.  He felt.

Because usually after having sex he was ready to hop up and leave, maybe to see the chick again, maybe not.  He’d not had a serious relationship because it had always been so easy.  To find quick satisfaction.  To walk away.  To just have a good time and not tangle with the intricacies of relationships.  His tribe didn’t call him the charmer for nothing.  So the women tended to follow him around like lovesick teenagers. Singers always got the girls.

Kam he wanted to linger in, to really get to know.  He wanted to wait until she was ready to commit to a sexual relationship.  Weird feeling, that.  And the coolest.

He had been willing to take her virginity because she had thought that would free her from Himself.  Much as he’d not wanted to do it in such a ‘clinical’ manner, he would do anything for Kam.  He’d been relieved when she’d decided she wanted to wait until they were truly in love.

That kind of thinking was so far out of his realm, and yet, again, it felt right to him. Kam was divine.  She was artwork.  She was like a flower that shouldn’t be touched because to do so would mar the perfection, and yet, he wanted to rub away some of her beauty to reveal the insides.  It was not ugly inside Kam.  She was darkness and bright and beauty and danger and all those other poetic things that sallied back in forth in his brain right now.