His tongue and fingers stilled for a moment as if he wasn’t sure whether I’d bitten him out of passion or as a warning for him to stop. “Don’t stop,” I said. “Don’t ever stop.”
He chuckled, his laughter rumbling against my breast. “So you want to play rough, do you?”
I hadn’t bitten him hard. He’d need to wash his hair to get the blood out later, but it was barely a scratch. He’d heal in less than a minute.
“It was an accident,” I protested.
He pushed me down firmly into the soft nest of blankets and pillows. “I thought you said you didn’t want me to stop.”
“I don’t.”
“Good. Tell me what you want.”
He kept me pinned with one hand, his fingers loosely circling my neck while his other hand remained cupped over my sex, stroking in lazy, cruel, teasing gestures.
“That,” I gasped. “More.” I could barely remember how to speak, let alone form commands, and he hadn’t yet begun to really touch me.
He picked up the pace, alternating quick flicks with long strokes, never setting a rhythm I could follow and occasionally stealing my breath by inserting his finger inside me before resuming his campaign of driving me mad.
“Tell me what you want.”
I wanted him. I wanted the weight of him on top of me while he filled me inside, but I no longer knew how to form those desires into words.
“You,” I said at last, able to come up with something resembling a response to his request.
“You want me?”
I nodded furiously while he continued to toy with me, the intensity of his touch creating a ball of heat in my belly that fanned out through my whole body, making me feel light and hazy.
“But what do you want me to do?” Now I knew he was tormenting me on purpose, the evil prick. I clawed at his arms, and his fingers tightened around my throat, choking me, but in a purposeful, nonviolent way. If he wanted to hurt me, he could have crushed my windpipe with the same ease as another man could snap his fingers. This was a game, a twisted, wonderful game. “Tell me,” he insisted.
“I want you inside me,” I said, my words barely a whisper, using what air he allowed me to have.
He moved to withdraw his hand, but I wrapped my fingers around his wrist, holding him in place. “Oh you do want to play dirty with me, don’t you, my naughty girl?” I’d never heard him sound so…British before. His UK accent had long since slipped away once he’d adjusted to life in America, but his old life was there, sneaking into his vowels and coy consonants. He didn’t sound posh, not the way his American persona would lead people to believe. The accent sneaking through was all Northern, gritty and mean. I got a little wetter just to hear it.
“Keep talking,” I muttered, digging my nails into his wrist so he wouldn’t dream of releasing my throat. His grip didn’t clench farther—any more would border on risky—but he didn’t let up either. A pulse of his fingertips was warning enough he could clamp down harder at any moment, and my heart throbbed, with matching pulses hammering in my ears and groin.
“You like it when I talk this way?” he growled. I didn’t know how to reconcile this version of Holden with the one I knew. My Holden was sleek and manicured, everything in its right place, the pinnacle of handsome respectability.
This Holden was as much an animal as the beast living inside me. He was undone, and I loved him all the more for it. His usually slicked-back hair had fallen forward, sweeping over his forehead and half-hiding his wild eyes from me. When he grinned, the flash of fang was as much a sign of his arousal as it was a gesture from a predator used to mock its prey. He was telling me—in no uncertain terms—he meant to keep me, and I wouldn’t get away.
I arched my hips up to meet him, craving contact with something more than his fingers. His hand crept higher on my neck until he cradled my chin. Needing to taste some part of him but unable to rise up and go after what I wanted, I licked his thumb. He slipped the digit into my mouth, and I sucked hard, my fang nicking the skin, his blood pooling to the surface.
It wasn’t a real bite, just a scratch of teeth, but the taste of his blood in my mouth was like getting a hit off the most addictive drug possible. I didn’t want to believe I was as much a vampire as I was, but the way his blood drove me wild left little room to pretend. I sucked harder, trying to get as much from him as I could, but he pulled his hand back, locking it around my throat again.
“Bad girl.”
“Stop teasing and do something about it, then.”
His brow arched. “Was that a challenge, darling? I do love a challenge.”
God, his voice. When he went back to speaking normally after this was all through, I would miss this new voice. How had I known him so long and only heard it now? It hardly seemed fair he’d been denying me that part of himself.
“I’ll let you bite when I’m good and ready. Understood?” He gave my head a little shake. “Understood?”
“Yes,” I rasped. But I wanted to bite him again and again and again.
“Now tell me what you want me to do to you.”
He eased up on my throat enough I could speak, and I said, “I want you inside me, and I want you to talk to me the entire time. Then I want you to let me bite you.”
He stopped stroking me and pushed his pajama bottoms down with one hand, unleashing the eager erection I’d been feeling pressed between my legs. “As you wish.”
As he thrust into me with a smooth arch of his hips, I was barely able to cry out. He used his free hand and the muscular strength of his thighs to part my legs wide for him, but once he was inside me, I wrapped myself around his waist, ankles locking behind his back. If he was going to keep me held prisoner, I would do the same to him.
Continuing to hold me by the neck, he lowered himself onto me so his chest was pressed flush with mine. He found my ear with his mouth, nipping at the lobe, and started to whisper.
“I remember when I first met you, irritating girl you were, all skinny limbs and hair. I thought to myself, this girl is going to die before she sees her eighteenth birthday. And then I saw you kill. I saw a fire in you unlike anything I’d ever witnessed, and I knew I’d been wrong. I knew you were a fighter, and that was the first time I understood what kind of a woman you could be.” With him close and his voice so different, it was like a stranger saying those words. Holden’s words in another man’s voice. Something about that was both off-putting and incredibly sexy.
“More,” I commanded.
His thrusts were gentle, one hand on my throat, the other on my waist, pulling me to meet each pump, then pushing me down as he withdrew, so each time he came into me I felt the full length of him.
“You grew up, and you became beautiful. So goddamn beautiful. Every day I had to look at you it hurt because I was never supposed to have you. I was afraid of you because of your pulse and your stupid heartbeat. Whenever you breathed it reminded me I could lose you, and the longer I knew you, I understood I couldn’t lose you. I can’t.”
He licked the shell of my ear, and his thrusts became more vigorous. I gasped each time he filled me, the pleasure bordering on pain. His neck was close, but the angle he held me at made it impossible for me to reach him. Like a sexual Tantalus, I was inches from what I most desired but forbidden from drinking my fill.
Holden continued to speak, ignoring the way I scratched at his back and shoulders, burying himself into me with such force we both trembled.