Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 by V. M. Black Read Free Book Online

whisper.
    He shook his head. “No, Cora. I won’t. Ten years—that’s half your lifetime now. How can you be so sure what you will want in ten years? Or twenty? Or fifty?”
    I could feel in my body the desire to please him, a yearning for his approval. And right and wrong always seemed so slippery when I was with him, everything I thought I knew shifting under my feet. How long would it be until even that final step seemed like a small concession?
    And would it be him who caused the change, then? Or the bond? Or me? Could I ever even know?
    “How can I want you?” I didn’t realize I had said the words aloud until they reached my own ears. “God, this bond—it’s crazy.”
    “You may look upon what we have in horror, but how do you think we regard your human relationships? Your affections wax and wane.” Contempt dripped from every word even as he trailed his hand down my neck and across my shoulder and arm, his touch sending shards of desire through me as he seemed to drink me with his eyes. “You marry for love but also for convenience, from tradition, for stability and companionship, for money, for children, or simply because people expect it of you.”
    I swayed in the force of his regard, but I couldn’t deny what he said.
    He continued, “And what you feel on your wedding night and what you feel five years later, ten, twenty, forty—even true love may not last, or it may blossom and fade several times over. We are as constant as the sun. Our hearts are not our own to give, but once they are taken, they do not—they cannot—waver.” He reached my hand and took it, clasping it in his own.
    Another jolt went straight through my body even as my mind rebelled at his words. He was equating a bond—our bond—with love, but there was nothing that I had seen that night that was anything like the kind of love I believed in. Not even Jean and Hattie, with him acting as if she were a child to be indulged and talked around.
    “How can you talk about it like that? A heart—what can you even know about a heart, other than its blood? That’s not love,” I protested.
    He might believe it was, but being a vampire, how could he even know what love should be?
    “You know better than that, Cora. There’s more than blood between us. Humans pretend to value unconditional love, but that’s not something full humans could ever understand. There are always conditions—lines that cannot be crossed, words that cannot be unsaid.” He raised the back of my hand to his lips, and my skin came alive under his touch.
    “But with you, no line is too far,” I said faintly, through the sensations that he stirred in me. “It never can be. Nothing is too much, even if it destroys me. ”
    “I would sooner destroy myself,” he said, and his next kiss fell on my lips.
    I clung to him, my body pressed against his, my parted lips inviting him to take me. But the kiss was too soft, over too soon as he moved lower, along my jaw and down my neck.
    Need flared up in the core of my being, pushing up my spine and into my brain. I knew what was going to happen next—I knew it, and I wanted nothing else but him. Even though I refused the names he wanted to put to what we had.

Chapter Six
    F lames of desire licked across my skin, following his mouth as it traced the neckline of my dress and swirling into my mind. I struggled against its influence, trying to keep a clear head. Maybe my surrender was inevitable, but I wouldn’t give up easily.
    “This—this is just lust,” I said. “Chemicals. Like an animal in heat.”
    He straightened, standing over me, and my hands tightened slightly, involuntarily on the fabric of his shirt.
    “Your greatest poets would disagree,” he said. “Those who are supposed to be able to put words to the human condition with more skill than any.”
    I shook my head even as one of his hands found the zipper of my dress and pulled it down, sending a shock of anticipation through me. “I don’t