Chapter Twenty-Five Amelia

TWENTY-FIVE

Excerpt from What to Expect When You Become a Vampire , Fifteenth Edition

Page 163: Human Relationships—Love and Intimacy

For some considering leaving mortality behind to become a vampire, a major concern can be whether they will be able to maintain intimate relationships with humans once they have turned.

It is a question with no easy answer. Recent data from Johnson I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of running my hands through it.

“What is it?” he barked at the door.

“Are you canoodling in there?”

Despite the awkwardness of the situation, I nearly burst out laughing. “Canoodling?” I mouthed in Reggie’s ear. “Seriously?”

“He’s old-fashioned,” Reggie grumbled by way of explanation. And then to Frederick, he yelled, “Go away!”

“I will not go away ,” he retorted. “This is my home. You are obviously free to do whatever it is you like with whomever you like, but for reasons I assume you can guess, I prefer it not happen in the presence of my antiques.”

Reggie glared daggers at the door. “You’re seriously bringing that up now? That was nearly two hundred years ago!”

“Furniture never forgets.”

Reggie looked like he was about to say something scathing in reply, but before he could do it, I put a finger to his lips. I had his full attention again immediately.

“Let’s get out of here,” I suggested, quietly enough that we wouldn’t be overheard by the vampire standing outside the door. “I only came by in the first place to take you back home with me. And I don’t really want to do this here. Do you?”

He grinned, then kissed my finger. That simple act of affection was enough to send a bolt of pure heat down my spine. Oh, I was hopeless.

“No. I don’t,” he confirmed. “I would love to go to your apartment.” He shot a dirty look at the closed bedroom door. “Though I have to say, given some of the lovey-dovey scenarios I’ve overheard since staying here these past few days, Frederick is being a filthy hypocrite right now.”

My cheeks flamed. I had no interest in hearing about Frederick and Cassie’s sexual escapades. “Let’s go to my place, then. There’s privacy, and while there are no protective wards, I do have a very judgmental cat who’ll keep you safe.”

He pulled me into his arms and held me for a very long moment. “I need to gather up some things first. Send me your address. I’ll be there soon.”

On my way out of the apartment, I saw someone had left a thick manila folder on the end table by the front door. There was a Post-it note on the cover that had my name on it, underlined twice.

I flipped open the folder and saw that these were pages from The Annals related to The Collective. Inside, there was a note written on crisp off-white stationery, covered in neat, flowing handwriting:

Amelia—I erred on the side of over-inclusivity when making copies of The Annals . In addition to entries pertaining to The Collective, enclosed you will also find entries pertaining to Reginald. (Don’t tell him—he’ll kill me [figure of speech].)

I do caution you to temper your enthusiasm. While I expect these passages will give you context for The Collective’s behavior and motives, vampire historians are not as concerned about nonprofit tax policy as one might hope. A lost opportunity, perhaps. But as Cassie might say, “it is what it is.”

Yours in good health—FJF

I had no idea what I’d find when I read these pages. But I put them in my bag all the same, hoping there’d be something of value there.

·······

My apartment was a disaster, by my standards. There were dirty clothes strewn across my bed from when I’d dumped my suitcase out earlier that day. There was a plate in my kitchen sink from my afternoon snack. And the mail that had arrived while I was away was still stacked, unopened, in a pile by my front door where Sophie left it.

Reggie hadn’t told me how long it would be before he came over. And we didn’t specifically say what we’d be doing when he arrived. Either way, I didn’t want him seeing underwear on my bedroom floor or dirty dishes in my sink. I started shoving random things into closets and drawers for the first time in my life. Gracie glared judgmentally when I wiped the crumbs off my plate and put the dish away without washing it, but honestly, she would just have to deal.

If all went as I thought it would, her mommy would be getting laid soon.

By the time I’d finished vacuuming the living room and dusting the handful of knickknacks on my shelves, he was there, knocking on my front door.

I opened the door to see him standing in my hallway, looking as nervous as I’d ever seen him.

He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Can I come in?”

“Of course.” I stepped aside and gestured with my hand for him to enter.

“Thank you,” he said. He sounded breathless. I wondered if he’d run all the way there. Or flown.

When I turned to face him, his eyes were everywhere, roaming over everything in my home. But he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

Something was wrong.

“What is it?” I asked. “Do you think you were followed?”

He shook his head. “No. I flew. None of that lot know how to fly. I wasn’t spotted.”

It was surreal, listening to him talking about flying in such a matter-of-fact way. Though if I’d been able to fly for hundreds of years, maybe I’d also find it just as mundane as going for a walk.

“If you weren’t followed, why are you so nervous?” I asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” His eyes widened, and for a moment I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing.

Before I knew what was happening, he had me crowded up against the wall that separated my living room from my bedroom. He nipped a gentle line down the column of my throat, letting his teeth lightly scrape against me as he moved.

His real teeth; not the ones he showed the world.

“I’ve wanted to touch you for so long.” His mouth was everywhere. On my neck, my collarbone, then moving back up to kiss along my jaw. He gave my ass a firm, possessive squeeze. Mine , it said. It felt so good I nearly moaned out loud. “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about it?”

“Tell me,” I gasped. I didn’t know where that bravery was coming from, but I needed to know. “Please.”

He answered with an excruciatingly slow swipe of his tongue along the sweet, sensitive spot where my neck met my shoulder. His touch was like wildfire, and I keened, my body alight with anticipation as he mouthed at me. My knees felt seconds away from buckling. I threw my arms around his neck so that I wouldn’t fall to the floor.

As though sensing my instability, he thrust his hips forward, pinning me in place between his body and the wall.

“At the coffee shop,” he mumbled against my neck. His words were gentle vibrations against my heated flesh that I could feel down to my toes. “At your family’s party. Every time you touched my hand, smiled, leaned over in that tiny fucking black dress.” He shuddered against me. “By the end of the night, it was all I could do not to grab you and take you right there in front of the buffet table, your family be damned.”

I huffed a breathy laugh. “Don’t talk about my family right now.” As hot as the idea was of Reggie losing control like that, thinking about it happening in front of my family was the last thing I wanted.

He chuckled against my shoulder. “You don’t want me to talk about your dad and how I’m still upset we haven’t had a chance to bond over the History Channel?”

I swatted his shoulder. He grabbed my hand and pulled it away from him, kissing its palm, the heat building between us shifting to something playful and sweet.

He leaned in, resting his forehead against mine. I didn’t know much about vampire physiology, but I would have assumed that since he had no pulse, and wasn’t technically alive, he wouldn’t need oxygen to survive. But Reggie was breathing as heavily as I was, his chest rising and falling in time with my own.

I placed my hand flat on his chest, over the place where his heart would beat if he were human. I felt nothing beneath my palm but the fine musculature of his pectorals, the even cadence of his breathing, and the soft fabric of the plaid shirt he was wearing.

What had his human life been like, I wondered? I was coming to know the man in my arms. To care for him. But he’d had an entirely different life, once. Had he been so very different as a child? Had he had a lover, a wife—children—before his sires turned him and he became what he was today?

I flexed my hand, gathering the fabric of his shirt into my grip. Pulled him closer. I realized that I wanted to know every part of who the human Reginald Cleaves used to be, too. Not just the Reggie who was currently gazing at me like I’d hung the moon.

Hopefully, we would have time to explore his past together, later.

In the here and now, Reggie moved his hand from where it rested against the wall beside my head and covered mine with it. He squeezed gently, his bright blue eyes full of unspoken question.

Are you sure?

I’d spent my entire life avoiding risks, not putting so much as a single toe out of line. But as I looked into his eyes, and thought about what taking this leap might mean…

For the first time in recent memory, there was nothing I wanted more than to jump.

I didn’t have to know what this meant for next week, or next month, or two years from now. I wanted this for now . That was enough.

I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered, barely trusting my voice.

It was like a switch flipped inside him. Whereas moments ago his kisses had been gentle and restrained, now he was a man unleashed. His hands slid down my body and gripped my ass, hauling me closer to him, the chill of his touch seeping through the fabric of my clothes and down to my skin. My arms wrapped instinctively around his neck, and he held me tight, tighter, as he ravished my mouth, his tongue tracing the seam of my lips before delving inside. He smelled incredible—like the laundry detergent he must have used on his shirt, cool male skin, and his own uniquely Reggie scent. It was indescribably erotic, what we were doing. I moaned against the pleasure already rising inside me.

“I’m going to make you feel so good tonight,” he promised against my lips. “Can I tell you what I plan to do?”

There was a hint of wickedness in his voice. I melted against him. “Yes.” My hands slid into his hair, tugging hard on the strands of messy gold. He groaned—he liked that, I thought through my haze of lust; I’d have to file that away for later—and gripped my ass hard. “Tell me.”

It took him a moment to regain composure enough to respond. “I’m going to bend you over every flat surface in this apartment like we are in one of those filthy Regency novels Frederick pretends he doesn’t read,” he murmured against my cheek.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Even now, he was doing his utmost to disarm me. To put me at ease. But my heart was threatening to beat right out of my chest, and the way he’d begun moving against me showed me he wanted this as much as I did.

The time for jokes was over.

Risking everything, I slid my hand down his torso, not stopping until I reached the bulge at the front of his jeans.

The noise he made was so guttural it was barely human. The sound went straight between my legs, making me crave the feel of him above me, pressing me down into the mattress. I wanted to see him, to feel him go feral with me.

His mouth was back on my neck, kissing and licking and sucking with so much enthusiasm I would definitely have a massive bruise tomorrow. He was whimpering as he mouthed at me, his hips speeding up as I gripped him. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he wanted to bite my neck and taste my blood.

A groan went through me at the thought of him sinking his teeth into me. His tongue, lapping at the puncture wounds he’d made. The pleasure of my taste driving him into an even greater frenzy.

“I better stop,” he said. If he had been breathing heavily earlier, he was gasping now. “We haven’t discussed…” He trailed off and buried his face in my neck again. “I want you— all of you—so badly. I just know you would taste so sweet. Like something out of my filthiest, most reprehensible wet dreams. But I…You…”

He shook himself a little, and pulled back so that he could gauge my reaction to his half confession. His eyes were wild, black pupils blown huge inside brilliant blue irises. He looked desperate. Broken.

I reached up, cupping his cheek in my free hand. He leaned into my touch, his blue eyes never leaving my face. How could I tell him what I was thinking? Slowly—so slowly—I unbuttoned his jeans.

“How connected are blood and sex for you?” I asked.

He whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut tight. His cock throbbed once, hard , against my palm.

“They don’t have to be connected at all if you don’t want them to be,” he breathed. “I promise. But…but in order to finish, I—”

“Have you ever touched yourself, imagining drinking my blood?” The Amelia of three weeks ago could never have imagined I’d be having this conversation today. That I would be saying these things. That I would even be in this situation in the first place.

But here I was, dirty talking a vampire, trying to make him lose control. Just a little. And getting more turned on by it than anything I’d ever experienced in my life.

“Yes,” he confessed. “I don’t feed directly from humans anymore, but— fuck , yes.” His face was still buried in the crook of my neck. His hips were now moving relentlessly against my hand. “So many times. Nearly every night since— fuck —since I met you.”

We were skating dangerously close to an edge from which there would be no return. I knew that. Before we went any further, I had to know there was a safety net to catch me when I fell. “If I take you to my bedroom right now, will you want to…” I licked my lips without thinking about it. His eyes tracked the movement of my tongue. Ravenous. “Will you want to bite me?”

His answer was immediate. “Yes.” He stopped his movements, his hands coming up to cup my face. Cool palms against flushed skin. “I will. If I get you in your bed, if I get you naked —I’ll want to bite you just as badly as I’ll want to fuck you.”

The unadulterated lust I saw in his eyes threatened to liquefy me where I stood. “Reggie—”

“I would be so gentle with you,” he murmured, fingertips caressing my chin. “You wouldn’t feel a thing—and you would be in no danger. I promise. But if that’s not something you want, I’ll just…” He trailed off. Shook his head. “We can make this about you, instead. I want you however I can get you. In any way you will let me touch you.”

His raw honesty cut through me like a knife.

“Okay,” I said, pressing a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth.

Wordlessly, I took his hand, and led him into my bedroom.

·······

It had been a long time since I’d had a man in my bed. Under normal circumstances I’d probably have been nervous about my body, worrying about whether Reggie would like what he saw when the clothes were gone.

It was hard to be nervous about anything at all, though—it was hard to even think—with the way his mouth moved hungrily against mine. It was like he was determined to worry away at all my insecurities with the tip of his tongue, until there was no room left for anything but him.

He walked me backwards through my bedroom, steering me with one hand on my hip and the other at my waist, until the backs of my knees hit my mattress.

“Lie down,” he murmured. It was dark in my room, but there was enough light from the hallway, enough moonlight streaming in from my bedroom window, that I could see him clearly, broad shoulders silhouetted against the darkness. “I want to touch you.”

I complied, eager for the same thing, then closed my eyes, expecting to feel the mattress dip when he got in bed with me.

Instead, I heard him kneel beside the bed. Felt his hands wrap around each of my ankles.

“What—?” I began. Then yelped as he tugged me towards the edge of the mattress.

“I want to see you let go,” he explained, hands snaking beneath my skirt to tug at the edge of my underwear. “And I want it to be because of me . I want you to fall apart on my tongue, feel your legs quivering beside my ears as you shout my name.” He drew my underwear down my legs and threw them over his shoulder. Then he shoved my skirt up to my waist. “I want to taste you. Everywhere. So badly.”

“Reggie,” I whimpered. I shivered as he pulled my legs over his shoulders, tilted my hips up with his hands. I was splayed open for him, naked and vulnerable, heart thundering so loudly that surely he must be able to hear it.

His mouth was just a hairsbreadth away from where I ached for him. I could feel each shaky exhalation of breath against my core. His beautiful, expressive eyes met mine. “You want this. Don’t you.” He closed his eyes, rubbing his cheek against the inside of my thigh. The delicious scratch of his stubble pulled a groan from me before I realized it had happened. “I can smell how much you want me.”

I whined, wriggling in his grip. “Reggie, please .” I could tell he needed verbal confirmation from me that I wanted to be with him like this. But if I didn’t have his mouth on me immediately, I was going to lose my mind. “I want this. I want you. Please .”

His mouth quirked up into a half smile. His eyes darkened. “As my lady commands.”

Then his mouth was right there , electric, flooding me with sensations I could scarcely remember feeling before and couldn’t name. He was relentless as he devoured me, sucking my clit into his mouth a moment before laving it with the achingly soft flat of his tongue. I tried to cry out but couldn’t, made mindless by pleasure and pure desperate need as I lay helpless on the bed before him, held together only by the determined way he worked me and the vise grip he had on my hips. My breathing was way too fast and growing shallow, my chest heaving, my blood pounding in my veins as he teased and drew out my pleasure.

“Please,” I begged again, my voice raw. I didn’t even know what I was begging for. For him to stop. For him to never stop. I wanted to come. I wanted to make him come so hard he would never forget it. With what was left of my sanity, I wondered: Was this something we could actually have? Despite our differences, despite what he was, could we actually be together like this, not just tonight but tomorrow night, and the night after—and have it be real? “Reggie, please .”

My pleas seemed to spur him on, his grip on me tightening as he hauled me up even closer to his mouth. I tried to buck against his face, his clever tongue, desperate for more friction, for release. But his hold on me was too strong. He pinned me in place, keeping me right where he wanted me, preventing me from moving at all as he drove the tight coil of pleasure inside me higher, and higher.

And then—

He pushed one rough finger inside me, and then another, so tight , the delicious intrusion forcing every sentient thought from my head. I needed this—him—all of it. I needed it now .

“ Hades ,” he growled against my cunt. “I cannot wait to fuck you.”

His filthy words, muttered right there , were all I needed to hurtle headlong into orgasm. I scrabbled at the sheets, at Reggie’s hair, clinging to anything I could to anchor me as the waves of bliss came again, and again, and again. Reggie coaxed me through it with his lips and tongue, holding me as he urged my body to keep going. I moaned his name, mindless, back arched like a bow above the bed, locked in pleasure that seemed to stretch on forever.

When I collapsed to the bed, boneless, he was on me in an instant.

“You are so fucking beautiful.” His growl was visceral, animalistic. “The way you looked when you came—fuck. I nearly came too, just from that. I just—” He was tearing at my clothes in his haste to get them off me, quickly losing patience with the buttons of my blouse. They skittered to the floor as he tugged my arms out of the sleeves, and fumbled with my bra for two seconds before he had that off, too. I was too wrung out, too limp from the aftermath of what he’d given me, to help him. He didn’t seem to care. Nothing was going to get in the way of what he wanted.

Which, apparently, was me—naked.

Suddenly, it was vitally important to me that I not be the only naked person in this situation. I sat up and groped for the hem of his shirt.

“Off,” I mumbled. He didn’t seem to notice. He gently pushed me back down onto the bed, unbuttoned my skirt, tugged it down over my hips. Taking my own clothes off was good, very good—but it wasn’t enough. “It’s not fair that I haven’t gotten to see you yet. Take your shirt off , Reginald Cleaves.”

At my use of his full name he stared at me, a smirk on his lips. “Impatient, are we?” But he did as I asked, lifting his shirt over his head and tossing it over his shoulder in one fluid movement.

He never broke eye contact with me, keeping his gaze trained on my face even as I let my eyes roam over his body.

“Do you like what you see?” He asked it playfully, but the intensity of his expression made clear just how much he wanted his body to please me.

And oh, it did.

Now that the barriers of clothing were gone, lying in a heap beside the bed, it was like a dam of want had broken inside of me. I moved to touch him, not even bothering to fight the impulse to do it. He was solidly built, if not overly muscular, his broad chest covered with a smattering of light brown hair I couldn’t resist trailing my fingers through. His breath hitched as I experimented, tracing the defined lines of his pectoral muscles with my fingertips, stroking down along his abdomen, and then further down still, until his stomach muscles tensed in anticipation.

Was his body much different now than it had been before he changed? I cast the thought aside as soon as it occurred to me. It didn’t matter what he was like before. Because it was this Reggie who was gently pulling my hands away from his body and laying me down on the mattress. It was this Reggie who was kissing me so urgently and with such tenderness it felt like my heart was breaking.

And it was this Reggie who was kicking off his pants, then levering himself over me until we were pressed together, flesh to flesh. Hard to soft. Cool to warm.

This man was so outlandishly funny I never knew whether I wanted to hit him or to laugh. He was disarmingly kind, and so thoughtful it made my head spin. And I realized? with a sudden, all-encompassing jolt of awareness—he was mine.

If I wanted him to be.

“Amelia.” He hovered over me, arms shaking with his effort to hold as still as possible. Then he shifted a little, until his tip nudged at my entrance.

His blue eyes met mine, boring into me. Needing to be sure I wanted this as badly as he did.

I nodded, and wrapped my arms around him, pulling him down into another blinding kiss.

He entered me with a single hard thrust of his hips and a loud, incoherent exhalation of pleasure. My breath stuttered, body struggling against the delicious intrusion of his body into mine. He was so big, and it had been so long since I’d done this, but the stretch of it, the completeness with which he filled me, pushed the breath from my lungs and threatened to pull me under again before we’d even begun. My hands scrabbled down his back, nails lightly scoring his flesh as I sought to anchor myself against the pleasure that was already starting to mount again. He seemed to like that, a lot, a very lot, hissing at the pinpricks of pleasure-pain? and then growling when I dragged my nails down his back a second time, except harder, and more forcefully.

“Amelia,” he said again, voice hoarse with his fraying restraint. He still wasn’t moving, was still letting my body adjust to his. But his arms were shaking badly now, and I could see in the rigid set of his jaw and the ragged way he was breathing how badly he wanted to let go.

“You don’t need to hold back,” I assured him. I craned my neck a little, lifted my chin so I could press my lips to his. “I want this.”

His eyes drifted closed. “I will never hurt you. I swear. But towards the end, I might—” He bit off the rest of what he was about to say and buried his face in my neck. “I might lose control. Just a little. If you need me to stop—”

I tugged on his hair, lifting his head so that he had to look in my eyes. The vulnerability I saw in them nearly took my breath away. “I won’t need you to stop,” I assured him. “But if I do, I’ll tell you. Right away. I promise.”

He stared into my eyes another long moment, as if trying to find the truth of what I was saying in them. Then he closed his eyes. Nodded.

And he began to move.

“Oh,” I said, the sound all but pushed out of me at the first thrust. And then, suddenly, I began to worry—irrationally, probably; and definitely about thirty minutes too late—that maybe I wouldn’t be any good at sex. Reggie had been alive for hundreds of years, and he’d implied more than once that he’d had more than his fair share of sexual partners during that time. I’d had a few boyfriends, and obviously had had sex before, but compared to a lover with hundreds of years of experience, how could I possibly know what I was doing?

“Fuck,” he whimpered, mouth at my ear. “You feel—so —fucking good. ” His hips were already picking up speed, his body pistoning into mine so insistently, so needfully, it obliterated all self-doubt. He grabbed both of my hands in one of his, pinning them above my head, and stared transfixed at the way my breasts bounced with his movements. The way he was looking at me—and the way it felt, my cunt clenching around him as he thrust into me again, and again, and again—

His hands dropped down to grip my ass, lifting my hips and changing the angle of our connection. Something about the new positioning opened me up to him even further, allowed him to go deeper, harder, to brush up against parts of me no one had touched before.

“Reggie,” I gasped. “Oh, fuck.” Something…something was different. I cried out again, helpless in the face of this delicious mounting pleasure, an ecstatic sort of pressure at the base of my spine that was threatening to pull me under. I felt drunk, wild, and burning hot, my body already racing towards another sharp crescendo as my hips sped up to match his movements.

Without thinking, I flung my head back onto the pillow, the angle leaving my neck completely exposed.

His hips stuttered to a stop, even as he remained fully seated inside me.

He growled .

“Amelia,” he breathed, panting hard. His eyes were glued to my exposed neck. His hips started moving again, even faster this time. “Amelia. Amelia, please.”

Oh, god. He was begging . For me.

For my blood.

“You want to bite me,” I breathed, my movements matching his thrust for thrust. The edge was looming, my orgasm shimmering just out of reach. “Don’t you.”

He groaned, thrusts speeding up until he was fucking me at an absolutely punishing pace. And then his head dropped to my shoulder, hands fisting the sheets on either side of my head so tightly his knuckles were white. “Yes.”

“Where?” I asked. I knew I was testing the limits of his fraying control. But in that moment, I didn’t care. I wanted to see him unleashed, in every way. I knew he would never, ever hurt me. “Where do you want to bite me?”

“Amelia,” he cried out. “Please. If you don’t want me to—if you don’t want it, I can’t—please, don’t—”

His body was taut as a bowstring as he moved above me, all muscle and sinew and bone. “Tell me.” I slid my hands down his backside, then squeezed his ass, trying to pull him deeper inside. “Tell me where.”

The noise he made was desperate. Broken.

“If I bit you,” he breathed, “I would do it—” He abruptly stopped moving. I could feel the tension in his body and every ounce of self-control he was using in this moment to hold himself still. He gently pushed my hair away from the side of my face and gazed at my bare neck as though it held the secret to his happiness. “I would bite you right here.”

He pressed two shaking fingers to my pulse point. I could all but feel the flow of blood through my veins with every beat of my heart. His eyes on me were feral. Hungry.

An image of him biting me, mouth suckling at the wound, flashed unbidden behind my eyelids. I cried out, body clenching around him, hard . I didn’t know why the thought of him biting me turned me on. Maybe it was the idea that letting him do it would be the ultimate act of letting go.

“Would it feel good?” I asked. Even though I knew it would. I could sense it. I tensed up again, on purpose this time. Squeezing him. I watched as his eyes rolled back in his head, as he warred with what little remained of his restraint. “Would it feel good if you bit me?”

He opened his eyes and stared directly into mine. “It would feel good for both of us. My venom, it’s—” He bit off the rest of what he was about to say. Shook his head. “It would make you feel good. And I’d come. Immediately.” His voice was like sandpaper on stone, eyes boring into mine. “I’d come hard . Coming with the taste of blood in my mouth is—it’s just—you have no idea , Amelia—”

“Then do it,” I said. I reached up and drew lazy circles at the place on my neck he’d just touched. He stared at my fingertips as they moved, unable to look away. And then, because he seemed to need to hear it: “I want you to do it.”

He whimpered. Squeezed his eyes shut tight.

It happened so fast I hardly saw it. One moment Reggie was above me, incoherent with need. The next, I was crying out at the unexpected pleasure of being bitten. I was making love to an animal in that moment, all vestiges of the man Reginald was most of the time lost to the creature kissing and suckling at the shallow puncture wounds he’d made in my neck. Why didn’t it hurt? Why did it feel good , when he bit me? The pleasure from his bite raced down my spine, straight to my cunt, amplifying my need to a nearly unbearable degree. Making me insatiable. When my next orgasm crashed over me, I ran straight into the blissful release, the waves of pleasure wiping my mind of everything but him.

When I returned to myself, Reggie was groaning, fucking me so hard and so desperately I was going to have trouble walking for a week. “So beautiful, so sweet,” he moaned, mouth coated red with me. He was nearing his breaking point; I could feel in the way his thrusts were becoming chaotic, frantic. I could hear it in the fevered pitch of his words. “ I knew it. Knew you’d taste so good, I never want to leave you, want you, I—you are mine.”

I felt, more than heard, the sound he made when he came. His hips stuttered up hard once, and again, and then his body went rigid above me, back bent in an exaggerated arc as he spilled himself. His eyes were unseeing, glassy with pleasure. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

His body felt like two hundred pounds of dead weight when he collapsed on top of me a moment later, heavy and immovable as lead. He sighed, his cool breath tickling the little hairs at the nape of my neck.

“I hope,” he said, after what felt like an eternity, “that that felt even half as good for you as it did for me.” He rolled off me, wincing a little as he withdrew from my body.

“I would hope the two orgasms you gave me would have given you some clue,” I teased. He chuckled, then propped himself up on one elbow so he could look at the wounds he’d made on my neck. I touched them, marveling when I realized the little holes were already closing up.

“Did I hurt you?” He leaned in closer, pressing a chaste kiss to the healing skin.

I shook my head. “No. It felt…” I trailed off, not sure how to put how it felt into words. Then I decided to just come out with it. “It’s like you said. It felt good . Why?”

He sighed, then gathered me into his arms. I went willingly, letting him roll us both over until my head was pillowed on his chest. His flesh was firm and cool beneath my cheek. “If our bite is painful to our victims, then it’s ultimately self-defeating.” He sounded almost embarrassed by the admission. He craned his neck so he could look into my eyes before continuing. “Our venom is sort of an aphrodisiac. So it can feel good for our victims, too.”

When we suck them dry , he didn’t say.

I shuddered at the implication that Reggie may have once used this power to subdue, and seduce, his victims. To get them to offer themselves up to him willingly. Even eagerly. Then again, I’d been the one who asked him to bite me in the first place.

“I’ll never do that without your consent,” he added. “I haven’t been that sort of monster in many years.” He leaned in close and pressed a gentle kiss to the top of my head. “We never have to do it again if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” I said, hurriedly. Before I could talk myself out of it. Because as ridiculous as it sounded, it was the truth. It felt good , having his teeth in my neck. Knowing that my blood made him feel pleasure in return. “Maybe not every day, or anything. But like—”

“Special occasions?” he suggested. “Birthdays, perhaps? Anniversaries, promotions at work?”

I stifled a laugh against his bare chest. Were we really discussing this? Joking about it? A potential future together, where we had regular sex and maybe sometimes added in a little biting to go along with it? It was as delicious a thought as it was impossible to grasp.

“Special occasions,” I agreed. “That sounds good to me.”