21. Max
MAX
N ikolai spun me, pressed my back against his taut chest. His hands settled on either side of my waist, cool palms resting over the fabric of my shirt. No one had ever held me that way. Not with intent. Not with heat disguised as patience.
Blood rushed to my face. My heartbeat climbed into my throat, and every place his body pressed against mine turned to a live wire. The match had been struck. I was the oil.
I had to stop this before I stepped over the cliff.
“Can you just bite me, sir?” I asked in my low, rough voice.
“Is the foreplay not to your liking?” He crooned the words against the tip of my ear, and I shivered, need humming under my skin.
We were still standing in front of the mirror. My reflection blinked back at me—flushed, wide-eyed, a woman in men’s clothes with a vampire prince molded to her spine .
“This is me donating blood, sir.” I tried for casual. “Why is foreplay necessary? You pierce my skin with your big, sharp teeth, suck in a mouthful, I slap a bandage on it, and we say good night to each other. Right?”
“Max, Max.” His low, rich laughter vibrated through his chest and into my back. “I’m a vampire, not a barbarian. Only mindless feeders take blood that way. I’m the highest of my caste.”
I’d just insulted the vampire prince. But at least I’d taken his mind off his grief.
“And I don’t have big ugly teeth.” He turned me gently until I faced him. Then he grinned, showing off his flawless, even, white teeth. “My fangs only come out when I’m about to feed, fight…” His crimson eyes darkened with seduction. “Or fuck.”
The ache in my core tightened into a knot. My breasts grew heavy and tender beneath the bind, straining against the fabric.
Shit. Why did he have to say that word? It was vulgar, yet the image it conjured made my blood run so hot I could feel my pulse in my fingertips.
I shouldn’t have bargained with the devil. Or maybe I should stop floundering and follow his lead instead of exposing every shade of my ignorance.
“Feeding is an art, Max.” His voice dropped to a rich velvet. “Especially on someone as unique and exquisite as you.”
“I might be unique since I’m built like a siege tower.
” I held up a hand. “But I’m not exquisite.
Don’t delude yourself about who’s standing in front of you, Highness.
Whatever you think you smell in me, I’ve been a miner my whole life.
My blood probably tastes like iron dust and bad decisions.
” I bit my tongue once. Didn’t care for the flavor.
“Just lowering your expectations so you won’t be bitterly disappointed. ”
While I was still delivering this fair warning, he bent his head. His nose brushed the hollow between my shoulder and neck, and that feather-light touch sent fireworks across my skin. My back arched, pressing into him. I bit down on a moan that nearly escaped.
He inhaled slowly, greedily, as if my scent were something he wanted to hold in his lungs and never release.
Shit.
“Too kind.” He murmured the words against my flushed skin. “You don’t want me to be bitterly disappointed.”
His fangs grazed the column of my neck, dragging a line from below my ear to the junction of my shoulder. His lips followed the same path, cool, barely there. I shuddered. My body wound tighter, every muscle tensed like a bowstring, anticipating the inevitable puncture.
It didn’t come. I was sweating through my shirt.
“You’re tense, Max.” His chuckle ghosted across my damp skin. “I suspect you’re a virgin.”
Now he’d irritated me. “You say that word like it’s dirty.” I snapped my head sideways to glare at him. “It’s not my thing to sleep around.”
“I was trying to get you to relax, Eirath .” His smile held no apology. “I don’t want you to worry. The chemical in a vampire’s bite induces pleasure. Men and women both climax from it.”
My heart skipped a beat.
So that was how vampires disarmed their prey. Pleasure as a weapon. I’d have to put up double defenses. I would not become anyone’s victim. I must keep my head sharp, my body alert, my vision clear.
“I wouldn’t leave a bite mark on your neck for others to see,” Nikolai said, his tone shifting—still intimate, but threaded with a new possessiveness. “Not unless I imprint you as mine. And when that day comes, you’ll wear my mark with pride.”
My head spun. Imprint? As his?
“So I’ll give you a choice,” he continued before I could process. “I can drink from your wrist. Some will still see the mark. Or I can drink from your thigh, and this thing between us stays a secret for as long as you want.”
I was already being called a warlock. If the cadets saw a vampire’s mark on my visible skin, they’d brand me a blood whore before the day was out.
“Thigh,” I sighed.
Nikolai moved before I could second-guess myself.
His arms swept beneath me and lifted me off the floor. I was a tall woman built with dense bone and growing muscle, and he carried me like I was made of air. The ease of it did something reckless to my insides.
He laid me on a high leather chaise near the fireplace. The leather was cool against my back, the fire’s warmth pressing against my left side. He stood over me for a beat, crimson eyes tracing my body from face to feet with undisguised hunger .
My heart hammered against my ribs. I gripped the edge of the chaise with both hands.
“The pants need to come off, Max.”
“The boxers stay on.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “That’s non-negotiable.”
“As you wish.”
He hooked his fingers into the waistband of my pants and drew them down my legs. Slowly. His knuckles trailed along my outer thighs, dragging fire in their wake. I lifted my hips to help—a small, involuntary cooperation that my brain registered a second too late.
The cool draft hit my bare legs. I lay before the vampire prince in a men’s shirt, a chest-bind, and a pair of boy’s boxers, and I’d never felt more exposed in my life.
His hand settled on my knee, cool and burning at once. He pressed gently, guiding my legs apart, and lowered himself between them, one knee on the floor like a man kneeling at an altar.
When his lips touched my inner thigh, every coherent thought I’d ever had left the building.
Shit, this wasn’t what I had in mind.
His mouth traced a slow line along my soft, sensitive skin.
No one had ever touched me there before, and the nerve endings were so raw that each press of his lips sent a shock wave rolling up through my center.
His breath fanned hot against my thigh, and his tongue followed.
The sensual strokes tore a gasp out of me.
My leg kicked in pure reflex. He caught my calf in one hand and pressed it flat against the chaise without breaking rhythm, his grip firm, his mouth never leaving my skin.
“I won’t sleep with you.” The words came out threadbare. My last defense, flimsy as wet paper.
He raised his head just enough to speak against my thigh, his lips still brushing the damp skin.
“I don’t plan to.” His crimson eyes found mine, and the heat in them made my stomach free-fall.
“I’ll service you. Pleasure you. But when the day comes, when you’re ready, you’ll beg me to fuck you.
” His thumb drew a slow circle on the inside of my knee. “And you’ll say please.”
Was he always this obnoxious?
But fuck, he was hot. Too hot for his own good. And mine.
“Will you allow me to undress you and lay you bare, Max?” His voice was low, careful—the voice of a man who wouldn’t take what wasn’t offered, even with his mouth an inch from where he wanted to be.
“I…I don’t know.”
“I won’t fuck you even if you plead today because you aren’t ready,” he said. “I just want to see you. Let me worship you.”
“Fine.” The word left me before my brain cleared it.
Shit, I was so inexperienced that it was agonizing.
He undressed my top before peeling the boxers down my legs, his fingers skimming the backs of my thighs, the curve of my calves, the arches of my feet. Then all my clothes were gone, and cool air met the heat between my legs.
I was bare in front of the vampire prince.
He went still .
His gaze roamed over me before dropping to the valley between my thighs.
I watched his expression shift—hunger reshaping into reverence.
I was utterly bare down there, all smooth, flushed pink and hairless.
Born that way. I’d never thought about it, never had a reason to.
But the way he stared made the blood surge to the surface of my skin.
Self-consciousness hit me like a wave. I tried to close my legs. His hands caught my knees, gentle but unyielding.
“Perfection,” he whispered. “So beautiful, Max.”
He lowered his head.
The first stroke of his tongue parted my slit, and every sensation I’d ever known—pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion, fear—was annihilated in a single instant.
Pleasure doesn’t cover it. This was a fucking wildfire.
It blazed up from the point of contact, spread through my pelvis, licked along my spine, and detonated behind my eyes in a burst of white heat.
Shit.
I gasped. My hips bucked off the chaise. My hands flew to the leather and dug in hard enough to leave nail marks.
He didn’t stop.
His tongue worked in slow, deliberate strokes—flat and wide, tracing my shivering, plump folds to circle the swollen bud. My thighs trembled against his shoulders. My breath came in ragged pulls.
“Nikolai, please—” His name tore from my throat before I could cage it .
He groaned against me, and the vibration shot through my core.
His hands slid beneath my thighs, tilting my hips, opening me wider, angling me so his mouth could reach deeper.
His tongue pushed inside me—once, twice—slick and impossibly skilled, then withdrew to lap at my clit with a pressure that had my spine bowing off the leather.
“You taste like a dream, Eirath ,” he murmured against my aching flesh, his breath ragged. “Nothing even comes close.”
He was calling me his angel of twilight and little ruin again, and I had no idea how I even understood the old tongue.
My fingers threaded into his silky ash-blond hair and gripped. He made a guttural sound against me and doubled his effort.
The pressure built like a rising tide behind a dam. Every stroke compounded the previous ones. Every flick of his tongue wound the coil in my belly tighter, tighter, until the tension became unbearable. I couldn’t tell if I was drowning or flying. My body arched into a bow and held?—
And broke.
The orgasm crashed through me, starting from my core, radiating outward, ripping a cry from me that didn’t sound like a human.
My vision whited out. My fingers locked in his hair.
Every muscle in my body seized and released in rolling waves that kept coming, cresting, shattering against the shore of my consciousness until I thought I’d shatter with them.
I’d never known .
I’d never known a body could do this. Could feel this pleasure and survive.
Before the last wave had fully crested, his fangs pierced the soft skin of my inner thigh.
I cried out—startled. The sting lasted half a heartbeat before euphoria flooded in to replace it.
This wasn’t the euphoria of the orgasm. This was chemical—a warm, golden tide coursing through my bloodstream.
It sank into my bones and turned them to honey.
It reached into my mind and told every alarm, every defense, every survival instinct to stand down.
I’d sworn I’d keep my head clear. Keep my guard up.
I was wrong.
I was more vulnerable than I’d ever been. If the vampire drained me dry in this moment, I wouldn’t fight. I’d open my mouth and say, Please.
And then even that thought vanished, because his thumb found my clit again, starting with a gentle circle first, then building with the rhythm of his feeding.
He drank from me in measured pulls, his lips hot against my thigh, his thumb working me in time with each draw.
Pleasure braided with pleasure—the chemical bliss of his bite and his touch weaving together into a crescendo.
“Oh god—” My voice cracked. My hips rocked against his hand, chasing the pressure, unable to stop. “Nikolai, I can’t—I’m going to?—”
He growled against my thigh and pressed harder.
The second orgasm erupted from somewhere so deep I didn’t know it existed.
It didn’t build. It just detonated through the aftershocks of the first. My body jackknifed off the chaise.
My scream lodged in my throat and came out as a strangled sound that was half his name and half a prayer.
The pleasure was violent, consuming, tearing through me, until I was nothing but sensation—no name, no past, no armor, no disguise.
Just a woman shaking apart in the hands of a man who drank her blood and rang her body like a bell.
When it finally released me, I lay boneless on the leather, gasping, trembling, my skin sheened with sweat. Nikolai’s mouth left my thigh. I felt his tongue trace the puncture wounds once—a slow, sealing lick—and the sting vanished.
His forehead rested against my hip. His breathing was ragged. His hands still cradled my thighs, and they shook—barely, but I felt it.
Neither of us spoke.
The fire crackled in the hearth. My heartbeat slowed by fractions. The world reassembled itself around me—the leather beneath my back, the ceiling above, the vampire by my side.
I’d just had my first orgasm. My first two. At the hands of a vampire prince who’d taken my blood and given me something I didn’t have a framework to process.
And I was already terrified of wanting it again.