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

although his height be taken.’”
    Worth unknown. Again the words meant almost too much. What was the meaning of what I felt? I would have labeled it lust, if I had been forced to give it any name at all, but that didn’t begin to cover it. What I wanted wasn’t just his body on mine. I wanted to erase those flashes of sadness, to melt his coldness, to fill the ancient emptiness within him with myself.
    And a part of me wanted him not to admit that he didn’t love me—but to prove that he did.
    That discovery froze me in place, struck with a bone-deep terror. I couldn’t want him, no matter what, because what he offered me was nothing but a beautiful prison. What he felt about me couldn’t possibly matter.
    Could it? If I really thought that, why did I keep pushing him, asking him?
    I don’t care, I told myself fiercely. I don’t. I won’t.
    Then Dorian kissed me again, and the shock it sent rippling through me seemed to mock all my resolutions. I could taste him as he dipped shallowly between my lips, and I felt a sudden, half-panicked desperation for more, for everything, and I opened my mouth, begging him in.
    But he pulled away, and I gave a tiny, involuntary whimper.
    “Well, then,” he murmured, and again that chuckle, as dark and rich as his brandy-flavored mouth. This time, when his mouth met mine, it was everything I had been yearning for. He possessed me utterly, stroking my tongue, my mouth, moving with a slow rhythm that rocked my body, tying my brain and my hips and my lips and my center to him. And the strange desperation twisted into a kind of exulting fulfillment. Yes, this, this and more....
    The ache between my thighs deepened to a throb, and he caught me up against him as my legs gave way. Scooping me up, he carried me to the sofa.
    His eyes were haunted as he set me down softly upon the leather. “‘Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks, but bears it out—even to the edge of doom.’”
    Whose doom? His, or mine?
    Could it even matter?
    He started to pull away, but I clung to his shirt.
    “Don’t,” I said. Don’t leave.
    He treated me to a lopsided smile that hurt my heart. “Have no fear, Cora. I’m not going anywhere.”
    He loosened my hands from his shirt and slid his away to unclip the white suspenders that held up his highwaisted pants. I sat up and pulled the tail of his shirt out of the waistband of his pants and loosened the bottom stud. I kept my head down as I worked upwards, not wanting to see the shadow of myself reflected in his eyes.
    His hands, working down, met mine halfway. He caught my hands in his, and I stilled, my body thrilling at even that small contact.
    “Cora,” he said, and my eyes were dragged upward. I saw the shadow there, but over it was a hunger that sent my pulse skittering out of control.
    “I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” I said weakly.
    “It’s good, Cora,” he said, bending to bring my hand to his lips, just as he had the first time we had been together. I closed my eyes at the silken caress, soft and hard at once. I could feel his breath against the back of my knuckles. “It is the purest thing in my black life.”
    And the blackest one in mine?
    Dorian let go of my hand and knelt next to the sofa. He captured one of my ankles in his hands and slid the shoe from my foot. His thumbs moved against my instep slowly, methodically, releasing tension that I didn’t even know I had, working into my heel and the across the ball of my foot. I sank back against the sofa’s arm as liquid warmth filled me, all my muscles gone limp.
    And something within me let go and surrendered to the moment, whatever it might bring.
    I watched with half-lidded eyes as he lifted my foot and bent his head. But it wasn’t until I felt his damp mouth against the arch that I realized what he was doing.
    Embarrassment flooded me. How could he put his mouth there, on my foot, of all places? I had the urge to snatch my foot away, but then