Page 134 of You Only Love Twice
But for one brief second, she was allowed to touch him....
His tongue darted out, touching the sensitive pads of her fingertips and tasting the blood there. A drop of blood slid down over her collarbone and pooled between the hollow of her breasts.
His lashes fluttered.
Black pupils absorbed all the merciless color from his eyes, and her breath caught when she saw how deep in the darkness he was. He wouldn't even know her in this moment, and it was said that a blue blood in the grip of the craving was at the mercy of his basest, most primal instincts.
Malloryn hated her for what she'd done to him.
What if he tore her apart?
The thin veneer of civility was gone. Obliterated. All that remained was hunger and need and sheer, furious desire. There was no sign of her ice-cold husband in his black eyes when he looked up at her. The craving had him in its thrall.
He lifted his head, the air wheezing through his punctured lung. Adele swallowed hard and helped ease him to her throat.
"You need a little blood, Your Grace," she whispered, for brash, calculating Adele was nowhere to be seen.
Traitor.
All that was left was her stammering pulse and the sudden tension in her lower abdomen, and a small blossoming seed of hope she'd thought she'd extinguished.
Malloryn's breath exhaled across the upper slope of her breasts, his gaze locking on that trail of blood as she drew him higher. Something cool and wet met her skin, and she gasped in surprise as she realized it was His Grace's tongue. He licked the blood from between her breasts, his hand sliding up the slope of her ribs just beneath the curve of her breasts.
Instantly, heat flushed through her. "Your Grace!"
Well within his rights, of course, but she'd never been touched there. The experience was worlds away from the diagrams she'd been shown and the exotic painted pictures of how precisely a man would take a woman.
And a part of her wanted him to move that hand higher, until it lay on her skin, cupping the soft weight of her breast....
Not to be, of course.
For that was when the predator awoke.
Fingers curled around her throat, wrenching her head to the side, and Adele gasped as her husband rose above her with swift demonic hunger, his tongue tracing from her breasts to her throat.
Hunting the source of it.
The shock of his heavy weight slamming her down to the floor drove the breath from her lungs. Then his cool mouth was upon her throat, and he sucked. Hard. Adele cried out as a pulse of aching need lit through her body, ending right between her legs. It was the first time he'd willingly touched her, apart from the moment he slid the ring on her finger during their consort ceremony.
"Malloryn!"
Her legs were spread obscenely, Malloryn's narrow hips pressing insistently between them. This wasn't what she'd expected.
Don't fight him.
It was hard to disobey her instincts, her skirts crushed between them and her hand fisted in his hair.
Adele lay back and surrendered, her heart pounding rashly through her veins and the ring resting innocuously against the back of his neck. A single twist of her hand and he'd be poisoned.
But she needed to get some blood into him first.
It took long moments to realize this was not the same as all the other times she'd been forcibly bled.
Malloryn's cologne was so familiar, she couldn't mistake whom she was with. And she'd chosen to allow this, which made all the difference. His thumb began to stroke her throat as he drank, sliding down to her collarbone, then lower, as if tracing the pattern of her veins. Fingertips brushed the lace covering her breasts, and Adele died a small death as she squirmed beneath him.
Oh, God.
It felt... incredibly good.
