Page 72 of The Vampire Castle in the Sky

I must have said it aloud. “The rest will have to wait,” he hummed in my ear.

“I’ll be quiet,” I whispered, my fingers tracing the chiseled line of his hip.

Before I could close my fingers around him, he seized both of my wrists in one hand and pinned them on the wall above my head. “If I take you now, you won’t be able to keep quiet.” As if to prove it, he let a single finger inside me, wringing an outcry of pleasure from my lips. “I won’t be able to keep quiet either,” he admitted, the pressure of his hand increasing, following my quickening gasps. “When we do this, we’ll be alone and have hours, days, nights ahead of us.”

I lost my mind after that. His thrusts grew harder, turning me into a mess of inarticulate murmurs. I almost begged him to take me then, for tomorrow had never been very kind to us.

“Promise me nothing will ruin this,” I sighed, so close to release that the words were more sound than letters strung together. “Promise me, and I’ll believe you.”

“I promise,” he chanted between kisses. “I promise.”

The ache between my thighs expanded up to my abdomen, tightening and coiling and gathering. His other hand came around my jaw, keeping my head straight and my eyes on him as this lightning-striking-the-ground sense stole over my body once more. I pulsed around his fingers, my release quiet and unhurried, blissful as my empty head.

I was left boneless, light as air.

Hector’s face softened too, despite his hardness, which was pressing up against my bare stomach, heavy with unspent need. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, his fingers still tracing circles between my thighs. “Sometimes it hurts looking at you. Like my heart will burst if I don’t look away.”

“Don’t look away,” was all I said.

He obeyed. His eyes never left mine as he sank to his knees before me, gripped my left leg, and threw it over his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” I gasped. “I just had—”

“I need to taste it.”

Blood rushed to my face. “Is that something vampires do?”

“It’s something you and I do.”

Then he buried his face between my thighs and showed me what it was to be hungry.

Waves of inexpressible pleasure flooded me at every lick, every trace, every swirl of his tongue along the center of me. Gazing down at his flushed cheekbones, I took the silky strands of his hair between my fingers and kept him on the exact spot I needed him.

He had never looked more beautiful. The gods, I thought, had made his face for this exact purpose. To be used like this by me. To yield to the ocean of my pleasure. To be pulled under. To drown. Until his only conscious thought was of my taste on his tongue. His only lifeline. I knew he would agree if I told him this, for he did not come up for air. He did not pause to ask me how I liked it. He just had me.

One ripple of release rolled into another, and I soared once more, chanting his name with my fingers still tangled in his soft hair.

Before I was able to fully return to myself, leaning slack and dreamy against the wall, Hector pulled away, his intoxicated expression shifting to a frustrated scowl. “Someone’s at the door,” he bristled and then vanished, moving so fast around the room that I could only see the blurry outline of his figure darting from one corner to another.

I felt a tug around my waist and found myself standing in my nightdress while Hector lingered by the door, fully clad, his hand on the doorknob.

Sorry, he mouthed.

I smiled like a drunken idiot. I was too happy. Too stupidly, ineffably happy to even wonder who could be awake at this sun-dazed hour.

29

Hector

Roan was leaning against the wall opposite the bedroom, somber, weary, and glaring at me.

The moment I shut the door behind me, he wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Glad to see you’re entertaining yourselves while the rest of us are busy burying my aunt.”

I hated that he could smell her on me, smell the exact depth and complexity of her pleasure mingling with my own unspent desire. This was why I’d promised myself I’d wait, so we could have this precious moment undisturbed and to ourselves alone. But as always, I’d been unable to resist her.

She touched me, and the world fell away. There was just her and my heart that kept missing beats and my hands that could not bring her close enough. And then I tasted her, and I found myself starving. I’d been starving for her for so long, languishing in snowstorms of fascination, that I still had trouble believing this had happened at all. That what I felt on my fingertips was the satin softness of her skin, that the honeyed taste on my tongue was of her pleasure, that the sweet reverberations in my ears were the sounds of her wanting me.

I didn’t think people could belong to other people, but no part of me felt like mine anymore.

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