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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.
“I’ve wanted you for so long. And I’ve watched you give your love to other men. I tried to tell myself it was okay, it was for the best because I loved you enough to let you have your mortal entanglements. I watched you with that stupid human boy who broke your heart, and it took everything in me not to rip him limb from limb when he left you. ” It was a poor choice of words on his part, considering what had ultimately become of my ex, Gabriel, but I pushed the thought from my mind, focusing on Holden’s voice and the deliberate, commanding way he filled my body.
“I watched those dogs circle, watched how they treated you like a toy they could share. No one has ever been good enough for you. No one has loved you the way I’ve loved you. ” He growled into my ear as if his love were a threat, and the way he spoke it almost was, but I wanted this, I wanted to hear it all.
He released my neck so suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do at first. “I will have you, Secret. If it takes me the rest of my life to show you I’m the one you should be with, so be it. But I will prove it to you. ”
He bit me, burrowing his fangs into the tender, bruised tissue of my throat. I yelped, but not from pain. The perfect agony of his bite punctuated his escalating thrusts. When I bit him back, we both came hard, the orgasm spilling over us before the first drop of his blood ever touched my tongue.
I drank from him, and he from me, until all my darkness had been chased away and I let myself come apart, experiencing the aftershock like an explosion. It felt as if our bodies might be melting together, fused for all time. With his blood in me and mine in him, I could feel my own pulse as he must, heard my breath the way he could. I wondered if he was experiencing himself through me, learning how his closeness brought me peace as much as it did passion.
I wrapped my arms around his back, licking the wound at his neck to speed the healing.
