Yes, because he was straddling me, holding my thigh in his hands, now mere inches from my hip, while he praised me for something as basic as breathing. Still, I fought to relax, because I didn’t want to explainany of that.
After centuries, he moved to the other side, and the torture started anew. In, out, I breathed. And damn him if he wasn’t good at this. By the time he finished, I felt leagues better than when we’d started. His hands lifted off, the familiar pressure gone. Finished? Gods, this had nearly ended me—
“Turn over.”
My head flew up. “You have to be joking.”
It was a mistake to look at Raphael. He was still straddling me, knees pinning me in place while he stared down at me. It was like the times he’d pinned me on my back in the sparring ring… only then, I usually had the wind knocked out of me. Now, I was breathless because he’d just spent almost an hour working his hands over my aching legs.
“Want to bet?”
It was a bet I would lose, his eyes said. He saw the surrender in my eyes and gave me room. I turned over, unconsciously running a hand over my throat as I did so. It was so scratchy. Was the room dry?
I didn’t have time to ponder. Raphael went right back to work, hands by my ankles, rubbing around the tendons. The muscles were already loosened from the first round, some of the ache gone.
This time, when he ordered me to breathe in and out, it wasn’t just relief that swept through me when the tension eased from my muscle. Pleasure mounted with every press of his palms, every squeeze into the back of my calves. He hit one spot that just was begging for his touch, and I cried out in a sharp gasp before I could stop myself.
Raphael’s fingers paused. I stopped breathing, wanting to die all over again by smothering myself with the blankets. But after a moment—one second, two, or a century, I couldn’t tell—he began to touch again.
There were no wooden planks to count now. I shut my eyes, but that just made it worse. There was only Raphael’s touch, and the ache of my body that alternated between sharp pain and release.
“There you are,” he murmured as I pressed back against his touch. With the way my body felt under his control, the words slammed into me.
Distraction. I needed to grasp at something. What could I use as a wedge between this feeling and me, between us?
“Why did you say not to tell another vampire I took your blood?” was what I finally landed on. I’d been too focused on fighting against this boon to notice the words before.
Not that I was sure what a boon it was for Raphael. I was the one getting her sore legs massaged.
Raphael was silent, shifting to my upper thighs now.
“Is it because you’re king? A status thing?” I guessed. Perhaps it was a signal of weakness. With how brutal the vampire world was, it made sense.
Of course, anyone who thought Raphael was weak was a complete moron, but this was a society that adopted human children to turn them. Things weren’t always logical.
Gods.There. He stroked the back of my thigh with a slight caress upon releasing. Not expecting the extra touch, I gasped.
I shoved my face into the blankets. There was no way he’d missed the sound. But he didn’t miss a beat in his movements, and finally put me out of my misery by answering.
“It is about status, in a sense. But it doesn’t matter.”
I clenched the blanket under my fingers. “Why not?”
“You won’t ask someone else for their blood.” He said it confidently, like it was a simple fact.
He wasn’t wrong. But there was something about how he said it, while I couldn’t look at him because my legs were turned over in his lap. “What if someone offered their blood to me?”
“Who.” The word came out as a hiss, his movement stopped. But his grip didn’t loosen, just stayed stone-still, fingers digging into my thighs. “Whose blood do you want, Samara?”
While I stayed silent, Raphael stayed still, digging into my tender thigh.
“Raphael, let go,” I wheezed. “It hurts.”
At once, the warm press of his hands disappeared. “I apologize.”
“It’s fine.” The bit of pain had done the job to cull the heady feelings working through my body.
Whose blood did I want?
