Ward of the Vampire (6 page)

I’d lie if I said I didn’t want him just as much.

It took a bit of maneuvering to get my dress out of the way, but he quickly caught on to what I was up to and he helped, leaning back a little, holding his cock up, then guiding me when I lifted my hips and lowered myself onto him.

He’d made me so wet that my body welcomed him in one, slow downward movement. His eyes remained locked with mine the entire time, but halfway down he started blinking, his nostrils flared, and his mouth fell open on a sigh. When he was fully inside me, a shudder ran through me, immediately echoed through him. For a few seconds, I was still, and so was he.

I had a handful of lovers before him. Some of them were very nicely endowed. It’s even possible there might have been a measuring tape and games with it in my past. I knew, just from taking him inside of me, that none of them had been as gifted as he was. Still, that wasn’t why this felt so new, so raw, so good.

Too late, I realized I hadn’t even thought about a condom. I hadn’t thought about anything more than my need for him. I’d never done this before. I’d never lost my mind to lust. I’d never slept with anyone without protection, never felt smooth, slippery skin against my folds. It felt odd. New. Naughty and delicious.

More than that, it felt right.

I started moving, shifting my hips, lifting myself up and pushing down again in small thrusts, and right away he helped me. His hands were tight on my waist, anchoring me, guiding me again, sometimes caressing me over fabric I wished hadn’t been in his way.

We found a slow rhythm together, and it didn’t matter anymore that we were on this balcony, that the city was around us, that a party was just behind the window and its drapes. The only thing that existed for me was him, his body, and how well it fit mine.

Maybe I should have been worried at how my brain seemed to have short-circuited. But as I kept looking into his eyes, all I felt was this sense of rightness. This was what was supposed to happen. This was why I’d come here.

The thought made me falter and lose my pace. At once, he reached up to caress my cheek.

“What’s wrong?” he murmured.

I covered his hand with mine. “Is that why your sister brought me here? So that we’d—”

He drew me down and kissed me gently until the question had all but disappeared from my mind.

“Did she tell you to sleep with me?” he asked then.

“No, of course not.”

He nodded. “All right. Do you want this? For yourself?”

I didn’t hesitate for a second. “I do, yes.”

He kissed me again, no more than a brush of his lips against mine, then clutched my waist with both hands and rolled our bodies over, laying me down on the cold tiles as gently as he possibly could. He was still inside me, as he lay prone above me. He captured my gaze again and slowly started moving, making love to me with such intensity it felt like he was trying to engrave each second in his memory—and mine.

Suffice to say he was doing a very good job of it.

Little by little, he increased his pace, and his cock caressed, stroked and reawakened every part of me. At first I let my hands play over his chest and shoulders, and tried to accompany his movements, but soon he was moving too fast, too hard, and all I could do was cling to him, my short nails digging into his shoulders.

“Next time…” My words came out as moans, each one pushed by another thrust from his hips. “Can we… do this… in a bed?”

Surprise lit his eyes and he laughed breathlessly. “Already thinking about next time?” His rhythm never faltered; instead, it shifted ever so slightly and sparks lit up my vision like fireworks. “Is this time so boring that you’re thinking of something else?”

I had to struggle to answer coherently. “No. It’s so good I… I want it to happen again.”

Now, he faltered. Now, he stilled mid-thrust, blinked down at me, then smiled. I smiled back, and curled a hand at the back of his neck, where tiny hair were so soft, to pull his mouth down to mine.

The kiss started as sweet, as slow as sugar syrup trickling down. It ignited in a blink with a twist of my hips and his answering thrust. We were both too close to last much longer. Falling into him, with him, was almost too easy. It was—again, stupid, ridiculous, pathetic and yet true—like my whole life had led me to that very moment.

His body completed mine, and we trembled as one, not from the cool air but from the heat we’d created together.

When he ended the kiss, he looked at me for a long time and I couldn’t help but wonder why there was so much surprise in his eyes. He rolled away from me, lying down at my side, and I had to close my eyes for a second not to protest at the deep feeling of loss I felt. Silly, really, when I could feel him pressed alongside my body.

*

But then…

I opened my eyes. The world sort of shifted around me, I don’t know how else to explain it. I was still on the floor of the balcony, but in a different place, and Mr. Ward wasn’t lying next to me anymore, he was crouching at my side, his face so close to mine that I thought he would kiss me. He was wearing his shirt again, and me, my panties. I was clutching his arm, as I’d been doing when I stopped being able to breathe.

Except…

I remembered that. I remembered being sure I would die. I remembered the cold words we’d exchanged before that.

But I also remembered a different version of events, one in which we’d chatted, flirted, then succumbed to lust.

Down in the street, a police car was just passing us. Somehow, I realized that it was the same car I’d heard when I’d been so sure I was dying. Only a second or two had passed, even though my body and mind were telling me something entirely different.

“What…”

Air. Sweet, cool, delicious air. I gulped it down almost greedily. Next to me, Mr. Ward slowly stood.

“What’s going on?” I managed to finish.

After a beat, he held both hands out to me and helped me to my feet. His shirtsleeves were still fastened with those beautiful cufflinks, and yet I still couldn’t help feeling guilty at the way I’d lost one of them. Both versions of events were warring in my mind and confusing the hell out of me.

“Can you breathe now?” he asked, and there was a waver in his voice that hadn’t been there when we’d argued.

“What happened?” I asked again.

He passed a hand through his hair and sighed. “Lilah happened, that’s what. You said she told you to be nice to me?”

I nodded, unsure what he was getting at.

“You were rude.”

My eyebrows shot up, and he amended that at once.

“We were rude to each other. When you realized who I was, Lilah’s compulsion kicked in but it was too late. You’d already broken it. That’s why you couldn’t breathe.”

It made absolutely no sense, and I wanted to say as much, wanted to demand an actual explanation. Instead, what came out was a plaintive, “Did we… did we just have sex?”

My panties were soaked. My entire body still shivered from pleasure. My skin remembered the touch of his hands, his lips, his cock. I knew exactly what his mouth would taste like, a hint of smoke and the headiness of champagne.

But at the same time… it hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have. That simply wasn’t how things had gone after I stepped onto the balcony.

Mr. Ward’s expression remained guarded.

“I did not lay a finger on you,” he said. “I gave you a second chance to be nice. It was all a fantasy. Your fantasy, I might add. I was just along for the ride.”

Did I say I was confused? Never mind confused. I was two seconds away from having myself committed for psychiatric evaluation.

Words were escaping me. I needed him to actually explain everything and start making sense, but I could hardly even think. Only when my teeth started chattering did I realize I was trembling. Every inch of my exposed arms and back was covered in goose bumps. Mr. Ward lifted his gaze to the sky, sighed heavily, then picked his jacket from the banister and thrust it toward me.

In my memory, he’d wrapped it over my shoulders ever so gently. The dissonance made my head hurt, but I did take the jacket and slipped my arms in the sleeves. It was too big, but that hardly mattered. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to warm up. The fabric was too light to help much for that, but the scent clinging to it, his scent, the barest hint of cologne mixed with cigarette smoke… Heat zinged through me.

“Come on.” He sighed again, picked up my purse and handed it to me. “Let’s get you inside before you die of hypothermia.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer and opened the window; I followed him inside, my mind still churning over images and sensations—a fantasy, he’d called it. My fantasy.

What on Earth had just happened?

Without thinking, I followed him through two guests-filled rooms, and a tiny part of me noticed that he’d been right. No one stopped him to congratulate him on his birthday. No one knew who he was. No one, or almost.

In the back of the second room, a man was standing against the wall between double doors and a tapestry that had already been ancient by the time this country was founded. He wore an expensive-looking suit, but his white tie and gloves marked him as one of the staff, as did the way he inclined his head toward Mr. Ward.

“Stephen, would you be so kind as to find my dear sister and invite her to join me and my… guest upstairs?”

The man inclined his head again. His eyes flicked toward me and something gleamed in them. I almost want to say recognition, but I was pretty sure I’d never met him before. I‘m good with faces, and he had distinctive features that looked finely chiseled from a dark wood. A neatly trimmed goatee was barely more than a shadow around his mouth and down to his chin, a few gray hairs betraying he wasn’t as young as the rest of the servers offering drinks and canapés to the guests.

“When you say ‘invite,’ sir,” he said in a deep but quiet voice, “how forceful do you wish me to be?”

Mr. Ward had started to reach for the door handle. He paused and looked at Stephen, his eyebrows furrowed as he considered the question.

“Don’t get yourself hurt,” he finally said. “If Lilah is reluctant, please tell her she already insulted me once tonight. That should be enough to convince her.”

Stephen inclined his head again then pushed away from the wall. He was gone without another word. And I was more confused than ever. A ‘forceful’ invitation? Not getting hurt? An insult?

“Come,” Mr. Ward said, and my body was moving before I even knew it.

He’d opened the door, revealing a narrow staircase. Well, when I say narrow… The other staircases in the house were on a ‘Gone With the Wind’ scale. This one? Three people could have climbed side by side. He closed the door behind me, and at once the sounds of the party faded. They weren’t just muffled. They just ceased. Talk about insulation. Someone could have screamed, right where I stood, and no one would have heard even if they’d been standing right outside the door.

It did not make for a pleasant realization.

Mr. Ward started walking up the steps. When I didn’t immediately follow, he glanced back at me. I jumped into motion and went after him, my hands clenched on the sides of my dress, lifting it up so I wouldn’t trip over it.

We soon reached the third floor. Like the first two, it was decorated with pieces of furniture and art as beautiful as they seemed old. We stepped through a small salon and into a sitting room, and while I paused to take in my surroundings Mr. Ward went to the fireplace on the far wall. If he’d extended his arms on each side of him, he still couldn’t have touched both ends of the carved stone mantle. He crouched next to the hearth, fiddled with something on the side, and fire came to life, the faux logs instantly glowing like embers.

“Well?” he said as he glanced back at me. “Don’t just stand there. Come warm yourself.”

I shuddered at his impatient tone, remembering the gentleness of his words in my ‘fantasy.’ Dropping my gaze to the floor like a scolded child, I crossed the room to approach the fireplace. Even as I did, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with me.

Why was I jumping at each of his commands? He was bordering on rude—no, forget that. He
was
rude, snapping orders at me and glaring without reason. And instead of telling him what I thought of his manners, I just obeyed.

“What’s happening to me?” I mumbled when I was standing two feet away from him, close enough to the fireplace that already the flames were warming me. “This isn’t me. I don’t let people talk to me like that. Order me around like… like…”

I didn’t even know how to finish. I looked at him, and was surprised to see a flash of guilt cross his features.

“I’ll try to get a grip on myself,” he said as he walked away from me.

I watched him go to an ornate cabinet against the wall. The whole front was carved, colorful glass panels set into branches and leaves so realistic I almost expected to see them move against his hands.

He opened the topmost door and drew two glasses out, setting them on the flat surface below. After a beat, he pulled out a third glass and closed the door. He then reached for the larger doors beneath. They opened to reveal a collection of bottles. I don’t know much about alcohol, but when he poured a deep amber liquid in each glass, I assumed it was some kind of scotch or whiskey.