Chapter Fifteen #3
Yet instead I find myself moving to Viktoria’s side. I sit stiffly on the couch, hands in my lap, and watch as Claude leans down over the chaise that Jonah’s resting on. His fingers trail down the other man’s neck, down his chest.
Viktoria is watching intently, and so am I, even though I keep willing myself to look away. It’s obvious Claude welcomes the attention. Maybe the display should irritate me, but instead there’s a strange and sinuous heat in my stomach.
When Claude throws a leg over Jonah’s hips and sinks onto the chaise to straddle him, that heat sinks lower still. I press my knees together, heart pounding in my ears. Look away, I tell myself, but I can’t.
Claude pins Jonah’s wrist beside his head and leans down, his lips brushing the delicate skin over his pulse point. For a moment I swear I feel his eyes on me, though it’s impossible to tell for sure with curls falling over his brow. Then he bites.
Jonah sucks in a sharp breath, his eyes rolling as his head lolls back on the couch.
I have to glance away after a few moments, my face hot and my chest burning with the oddest mix of jealousy and arousal. When I turn, I find Viktoria watching me, her eyes heavily lidded, her smile small but showing a hint of fang.
“They make a pretty picture, don’t they?” she murmurs, shifting closer to me.
I squeak out something that might be an agreement, overwhelmed by her sudden nearness. My pulse pounds as she leans in, brushing a lock of hair behind my ear with one painted nail.
“Claude and I tend to have similar tastes,” she says, her eyes following the curve of my neck with a gaze so heavy, I feel it on my skin. “I can only imagine how sweet you must be.”
“Oh,” I say faintly. I’m sure she can see the movement of my throat as I swallow.
“May I…” Her tongue flicks out to wet her lips. “Try you?”
That burning in my chest slowly spreads through my limbs and belly, making me feel almost dizzy with the rush. I have an urge to glance at Claude for approval, but I can see out of the corner of my eye that he’s still thoroughly entangled with Jonah on the couch.
It’s just a bite, I tell myself, though it’s obvious that Viktoria is offering more than that. Yet if Claude didn’t feel the need to ask my permission for a bite, then why should I?
I don’t trust my voice right now, so I simply hold out my wrist and nod.
Her lips are soft against my skin. If Claude’s bite is a kiss, then hers is barely a breath, a brush of a butterfly’s wings. As she drains my vein, that usual rush of pleasure comes in to replace the blood I’ve lost. It isn’t quite as intense as when Claude does it, but it still feels good.
I bite my lip, swooning slightly. Very good. Especially when she puts her other arm around me to hold me against her. If I shut my eyes and pretend, it would almost be like being in Claude’s arms. Almost.
When she pulls away, and my eyes slide open, they go straight to him.
Claude is staring at me, his lips tinged red and an intensity in his gaze that I haven’t seen before, sharpening his soft blue eyes into hard chips of sapphire.
The emotion on his face is far more complicated than anger or jealousy, and it gives me an odd thrill to see him so obviously affected by me.
Victoria touches a bloodied fingertip to my wrist to heal the wound. Her other arm is still around me, keeping me pressed against her side. Not an unpleasant place to be, especially if it makes Claude keep looking at me with that smoldering intensity.
“I have a lovely vintage up in our room that I’ve been saving for a special occasion,” Viktoria says, her gaze sliding over to Claude. “The four of us could share it, if you’re so inclined.”
I bite my lip as I look over at Claude. His expression has shifted at the question, his long eyelashes obscuring his eyes as he looks down, and it’s impossible to read him in the low lighting.
Is this something he wants? Is it something I want?
Surely it’s insane to be considering it.
I’ve never done anything like that before.
I’ve never done anything with Claude, even.
But it wouldn’t technically break our contract if we weren’t touching one another, would it?
For a moment I imagine it, all four of us in their bedroom.
Someone else’s hands on me, someone else’s mouth on Claude, and our gazes meeting, locking, across the room.
The ache that image sparks in my chest is equal parts pain and pleasure.
As Claude finally raises his gaze to meet mine, that ache deepens. Then his mouth firms, and he stands up, holding out a hand.
“No, thank you,” he says. “Not tonight. We should head home.”
I stare at his hand, and then up at his face. A glance at Viktoria tells me she’s almost as taken aback as I feel, though Jonah’s smirk tells me he anticipated this and is somehow amused.
Claude gestures at me, impatient. “Nora.”
Is he calling me to him like a dog? My annoyance breaks through the strange haze I had fallen into, at least, and I shake myself before getting to my feet. “Very well.” I curtsy to Viktoria. “It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having us.”
“Of course.” She takes my hand and kisses the back of it. “I hope to have you in the future, as well.”
I flush at her wording, and mumble a goodbye to a still-smirking Jonah before heading for the door, brushing right past Claude and the hand he’s holding out to me. He trails after me silently, out the door and to our waiting car.
The stumble in my step tells me I either drank more than I thought, or was drunk from more than I thought, or both. I clamber into the limo and rip my heels off, tossing them to the floor.
After the door shuts behind Claude, we sit in silence. I rub my aching feet and refuse to look at him.
Claude slides closer, reaches out to close slim fingers around my ankle. “Let me…”
I swat his hand. “No.”
I catch his wounded look out of my peripheral vision. “You’re angry with me.”
The snort that leaves me is far from dignified. “Perpetually observant, Lord Claude.”
“Why?” He leans forward in his seat, elbows resting on his thighs as he stares at me. “You wanted to sleep with her?”
“I… wanted…” I’m not even sure what I wanted, except— “I wanted to have some choice in the matter.”
A beat passes. When Claude speaks again, his voice is lower, with a sharpened edge. “Then you shouldn’t have signed a contract to be my valentine.”
I ignore the way it makes my heart beat faster to hear him call me his. “The contract didn’t stop you from having your mouth all over someone else’s valentine.”
“All over…?” He huffs a laugh. “I bit his wrist. And Nora, you said—” He shakes his head, looking stupefied. “You said you didn’t want intimacy with me. If it bothered you, you should’ve said something.”
He’s right. I didn’t—don’t—want that with him, and I’ve been very clear about it. But I’m too drunk to suppress my feelings right now, especially the clawing monstrosity that is my jealousy. “When should I have stepped in, precisely? Before or after he started writhing like an animal in heat?”
Claude throws up his hands, exasperated. “You’re acting like I fucked him.”
“Well, you looked barely a step away from it,” I snap back.
“I was within sight of you the whole time, you know I didn’t do anything indecent.”
I let out a harsh laugh. I can’t stop remembering the way Claude threw a leg over Jonah’s hips, the sounds the other valentine made. There is a bubbling heat within me, and I am both annoyed and annoyingly turned on. “Oh, so you call that decent?”
“Yes! In fact, I know it is, because our contract is clear that biting someone does not count as intimacy!”
There’s a pause after he speaks. A shift in the air between us as we both realize what he said. What it means.
I’m not sure which of us moves first, but all of a sudden I’m on his lap.
My fingers tangling in his hair, his lips against my neck.
Both of us clutching at each other with the same desperate need.
This is dangerous—we’re both drunk and sexually frustrated—but I need him, and this is the only way I can have him.
“Yes,” I whisper, before he can even voice the question.
His teeth sink into my neck. I arch against him, crying out, as pleasure floods every nerve in my body.
It’s bliss, pure bliss, my body trembling against him as the ache between my legs becomes a pulsing throb.
Claude moans into my neck, drinking from me like a man dying of thirst even though he’s been thoroughly glutted tonight.
Each pull from my veins sends a new wave of need through me.
I feel feverishly hot, panting on his lap, so close to the orgasm my body has been craving all night.
Claude shifts his weight, and one of his knees slips between my thighs. The gentlest pressure where I so desperately need it. And I come apart instantly, crying out his name and grinding against his leg.
As the blinding pleasure recedes, I realize Claude has stopped drinking from my neck—has already sealed the punctures with his blood-tinged kiss—and is frozen beneath me. I pull back, pushing hair out of my face, to look down at him. His eyes are shut, his expression a pained grimace.
“Please,” he whispers. “Move.”
I jump off his lap as quickly as I can, scrambling into a seat opposite him on still-wobbly legs. “I’m so sorry,” I blurt out. “I didn’t realize— If you didn’t want—”
“I did want,” he says, his eyes remaining closed. His hands are braced on the seat on either side of him. “I do want. Very much. Thus the problem.”
My eyes drop to his trousers, and I blush. I felt it beneath me on his lap, but seeing the size of his bulge is another story altogether. “Oh,” I say faintly. I pause, swallow. Then, “Claude…”
“Please don’t say it,” he says.
“I want it too.”
He winces. “I told you not to.”
“But I… what I’m saying is, we could make an exception tonight…”
He’s shaking his head already. “We have a contract.”
“A contract between us.” My brow furrows. Claude suggested the clause, and I agreed, but… “If you want it, and I want it, then—”
“A valentine contract is a matter of court law. We cannot amend it without approval.”
I bite my lip. It does sound a lot more serious when he puts it that way, but still. “Nobody would know if something were to happen.”
“I would know,” Claude says. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “Nora, please, drop it. We can talk about it later. Not now.”
I study him across the car. His eyes are still shut tightly, his usually perfect face creased as if in concentration or pain, his hands in fists at his sides.
If my arousal is an uncomfortable distraction even after my release, then his must be worse.
Much worse. So I relent. “Okay.” I turn my head away stiffly.
“It was a mistake anyway. We’re drunk. Let’s just forget it ever happened. ”
It is a very, very long car ride home.