“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Leah.”
We didn’t?
Boy, that was a first.
I stared at the undulating bodies on the dance floor, trying and failing to imagine Lucien’s powerful frame among them and gulped before asking, “Um, do, you, er, dance?”
“Not publicly, no. However, privately, yes.”
I twisted my neck to look at him. “Privately?”
He grinned. “Drink up, pet, and I’ll show you The Feast.”
I felt my brows knit. “I thought we were at The Feast.”
His fingers wrapped around my wrist and lifted my glass to my lips. “Drink,” he ordered.
I drank and he took my glass, put it next to his on the bar and then captured my hand.
Again, he moved us through the crowd, his hand secure in mine, anchoring me to him as he pushed through. The bodies seemed to close in this time, the eyes no longer averted, the curiosity now explicit.
Lucien either ignored it or didn’t notice it (likely the first). He led me to a back wall where there was an open doorway that led to a shadowed hall. What looked like an overdeveloped bouncer was standing just outside the doorway.
Without hesitation or even glancing at the bouncer, Lucien guided me in.
The hall was long and snaking, turning this way and that, not with corners but with curves. There were no doors which I thought was way weird. It was shadowed, creepy and strangely threatening and if I wasn’t with Lucien there was no way I’d have been there. The music and the hum slowly died as we moved forward and followed the snake.
Finally, with the club just a soft, nearly indistinct buzz behind us, we turned an actual corner.
And I was confronted with A Feast.
My first instinct was to look away.
But it was like a car crash and I couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted to.
It was different here, like night and day. The walls weren’t cement but painted a deep, rich red. The floor was covered in thick pile carpets and pillows. Some of pillows huge, the size of double beds. Some of them smaller. All of them covered in velvet in different rich shades, plum, scarlet, sapphire, ruby, forest green, wine and blood red. There were enormous mirrors on the wall framed in heavily carved, dark wood reflecting the activity on the pillows, against the walls, on the floor.
Feeding and lots of it.
On a double-bed-sized pillow was a woman so stunning she looked like a model, her alabaster skin exposed in a low-cut black dress. Three vampires were attached to her. One at her neck, one at her ankle and one whose mouth was at her cleavage suckling at the side of her breast.
My gaze floated, horrified at the raw, brutal sensuality of it. It was everywhere. I couldn’t escape it.
I tore my eyes free, trying to find a safe place but caught an image in a mirror, a vampire nearly as big as Lucien had a tiny woman pinned to the wall. Her head was lolling on her shoulder, her arms limp. He was holding her to his mouth with his hands under her armpits, her feet clean off the floor, legs dangling. Her face was a picture of ecstasy as blood dribbled down her neck, escaping his mouth.
With nowhere to put my eyes, I turned into Lucien and shoved my face in his massive chest. My hands lifting, fingers curling into his lapels, I pulled the fabric to my cheeks so no vision could penetrate even accidentally.
His arms came around me, a hand drifting up my naked spine, under my hair to rest warm on my neck. I felt his body bow so his mouth could be at the top of my head and my face and torso arched into his to keep the contact.
His voice was low when he asked quietly, “You don’t think it’s beautiful?”
Oh my God.
He thought this was beautiful?
A thought occurred to me and, panicked, my head snapped back and his jerked up to avoid a collision.
“Don’t feed from me here,” I blurted out my plea.
I felt his body jolt then saw his eyes narrow before he asked, “Pardon?”
“Please. I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t feed from me here.”
“Leah –”
I shook his lapels roughly and pressed closer, going up on my toes, so much in a state I didn’t measure my words. “Promise me, Lucien. What happened last night is something special, something that should be between us, not reflected in a fucking mirror for anyone to see.”
At my words, his face gentled, his fingers came to my hairline at the side of my head and slid in, stopping, curling and holding me there before he whispered, “Sweetheart –”
I was too rocked by what I just witnessed, knowing how it felt, seeing what was likely my ecstasy of last night on that woman’s face, I didn’t let his actions register. Or his tone. Or the endearment he’d used last night and this morning which I thought, regardless of the outcome of both events, was achingly sweet.
It was too humiliating by half. Or it would be if he did it to me.
“Please,” I begged on a frantic whisper.
“I won’t feed from you here,” he murmured and with his agreement my relief was so great, my body collapsed into his. My arms went tight around him and I pressed the side of my face to his chest.
He bent again, his words stirring the hair on top of my head. “Do you want me to take you away?”
I nodded, my cheek sliding against his chest and his hand, still in my hair at the other side of my head, tensed reassuringly then slid away.
He took my hand and we were away, leaving the scene behind us, quickly snaking back through the hall.
I found my heart was beating wildly. Without my panic overcoming my being I felt it. In fact it was beating so hard I fancied I heard it.
Then I realized what I’d done and a new panic surged through me.
The panic was so strong I yanked at his hand, planted my feet and stopped.
Lucien stopped with me and looked back at me. “Leah –”
I cut him off yet again, saying, “I don’t want you to think I’m a miss priss.”
He didn’t respond. He just stared at me.
I continued, taking a step closer, tipping my head back to look at him. “It was beautiful. Those things always are. But they’re also raw. That, particularly, was raw. And revealing. And I don’t want anyone to see me that way.”
“Leah –” he started but I kept on talking.
“It’s private and it’s okay if they,” I looked behind me, throwing my arm toward the hallway we’d walked through for emphasis before I turned back to him, “want to give and share and… whatever… but, if you do it in front of others, you give it away and it’s not just yours anymore. And I’m yours, you said so yourself, and I don’t want anyone to have me, not even a little piece of me, not anyone, just you.”
I was so panicked, desperate to give him my explanation, not wanting him to think I was a prude, or worse, to offend him by casting aspersions on his culture, I didn’t even realize what I was saying.
And furthermore, I didn’t mean for it to come out the way it did.
But it did.
And Lucien took it a certain way.
I knew this because one second I was standing with my hand in his.
The next second I was against the wall, his body was pressed to mine, his hand in my hair yanking my head back in an arc that was painful not only at my neck but in my hair, and his mouth was on mine.
This wasn’t like the kisses we’d shared before. This one was demanding, bruising, possessive, branding and undeniably savage.
And, it might make me a freak, but I loved every, fucking second of it.
His mouth tore from mine and before I could even take a breath, he asked, “You’re mine?”
I tried to salvage something, anything, “I didn’t mean –”
He cut me off with a growl. “You’re mine.”