CHAPTER SEVEN
GISELLA
I lay on my stomach in the cool air, Sebastian’s body warm where our flesh touched, as though by being near the living, it gave him life. He tangled his hands in my hair, alternating gentle strokes and tugs, a sweet mirror of the way he played with my breasts, of his hips pummeling relentlessly into me.
A gentle ache between my legs reminded me of the way his body owned mine, a dampness there that belonged to both of us.
I raised myself on my elbows over his chest, looking down at him. “Is this what you had in mind, tonight?” Though my awkwardness had dropped away, I was unsure what to say and sought to fill the silence, anyway.
“Well, I did have something in mind,” he murmured, capturing my face in both hands and pressing a kiss to my mouth with blood-stained lips. “For now, be still, you little hellion, and let me worship you.” His eyes laughed at me while my mind stumbled over my acceptance of who and what I had married.
But accepted him, I had.
I shook my head in mock horror. “Defiling virgins in their new home…”
“Did I hurt you?” he asked seriously, drawing me down to him. His mouth found mine, gentle, undemanding, this time.
If I hurt you, I beg forgiveness with pleasure.
My body heated at the memory of his prowess in the sexual arts. Could a woman want less in an arranged proposal? I shook my head, bemused. The brief pain where he’d bitten me revisited me in a sharp pang. But that wasn’t what he’d meant, and anyway, I wasn’t prepared to have that conversation quite yet.
As though he were present in my head, his hand came down on the soft flesh of my rump, the memory of pain and pleasure reviving my desire. I yelped, and he did it again, smiling as I writhed on his lap. Each smack built pressure inside my body, and as promised, he paired the pleasure of a sweet stroke along my soaked folds between blows.
I trembled, clinging to him as he worked out whatever he needed as he probed my deeper places with a single finger. Each stroke of pain or pleasure brought another moan from my lips. He studied me as I writhed on his prostrate body as though cataloging my cries and storing them away for later, when he might make me scream for him again.
After an interminable time, he offered quarter, working his fingers in quick, hard strokes deep inside me. My cries grew as I stared down into his face, letting him command my body until I broke, shattering over him and slumped onto his chest. My pants softened as he cupped the back of my head and held me to him, my legs slipped either side of his wide body.
I didn’t know how long we lay together, tangled in each other's arms. As my awareness came back, so did my prior thoughts. I leaned up to lick his chest, earning a soft groan.
“Gella, if you do things like that—” His warning sent a frisson of heat through my exhausted body.
Not to be deterred, I asked the question that was most on my mind.
“It was you, with the maid. Wasn’t it?” She hadn’t hurt herself after all. He had. I didn’t need to ask, but saying the words aloud made the surreal circumstances seem so much more ...real, somehow. “I should be scared of you,” I mused, burying my head against his chest.
I’d searched for a heartbeat before, and found none.
At least the legend didn’t disappoint.
“Not everyone is so… accepting of my kind.” The lamp flickered, throwing his face into sharp relief, enhancing the angle of his jaw, the high cheekbones and shadows around his eyes.
“That’s understandable,” I murmured, burrowing closer, despite the implied horror of his words. “People fear what they don’t know.”
“And you know me now, do you?” His voice took on a hint of amusement, fast swallowed by a harsh laugh. “I was created by a creature who dined on magic and slept on a bed of souls. She—” His face shuttered, the demonic look leaving him until he appeared human again, except for the tinge of blood that stained his lips. “I don’t know if there are more like me. Who, or what she might have made. I was purely an experiment. If I have kin, she forgot to mention it as she terrorized life from a broken body.”
Light fingertips trailed my cheek. He wound my hair around his fingers, tugging insistently. I raised my head, sucking in a long breath.
Why aren’t I afraid of you?
Fathomless eyes fixed on mine, amusement roiling in their shadowy depths. Hurt and something deeper lay beneath the facade, the cover he must use with everyone else.
There are no others, Gella. It is just us, and my staff.
I blinked, listening to his voice within my mind. His presence rested there, amongst the unseen places in my head. Not at all intrusive, more company I hadn’t known I was lacking.
Have you always been there?
But there was no answer, so I asked him again, the usual way. So fast my perceptions had changed. I frowned, knowing I should have more questions, be less accepting of his…situation. As though something was wrong inside me.
Yes. Since you came to New Orleans.
I started, pulling away, but his long arms coiled around me, trapping in his embrace against his chest. I let him press me against his skin, what I’d wanted from the outset of our encounter. Before he taught me so many things about both my body and his.
Before he withdrew from my body, rubbed his fingers in the mixed fluids coating his cock and licked my virgin blood from his fingers.
My concept of what comprised a villain reset every time I learned something new about him.
“You should be afraid of me.” His chest rumbled beneath my cheek while he resumed threading through my hair. “Why aren’t you afraid? Of me,” he added as an afterthought.
I smiled, listening to the nothingness where his heart should beat. “I had... a moment,” I confessed, mimicking the patterns he made in my hair on his chest with my fingertips. A shudder ran over him, small bumps rising on his skin. Something of life remains within him . A different sort of life, perhaps. I smiled at the thought that I could get a reaction from him. “When I saw the blood—my blood…” I trailed off, the image of his lips glistening red.
But no force of repulsion followed that thought, no fear.
“A moment ?” Amusement laced his tone—true amusement, this time.
I propped myself back on my elbows, looking down at him.
Ebony arched eyebrows curved against marble, smooth, and perfectly angled. Soft, over the hardness within.
“Gella,” he murmured. His fingers tangled deeper into my hair, and I thought he would pull me down to him. “Why aren't you afraid?”
“I—” I waited for my head to come up with some logical reason. But the organ I relied on in my lifetime failed me. Thank you for the warning. I whispered the note to myself. “I have no idea.”
“You should be.” His brow furrowed, eyes narrowing as he studied me.
I shrugged, uncomfortable beneath his assessing gaze. “Well, I’m not. So…”
“So.” His eyes cleared. “It appears I have a wife.”
Some emotion swelled in me at his words. I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat, which warred with the nest of worms roiling in my belly. Why I should care so much for an ideal I hadn’t put stock in from the moment my father sold me and left me in a nunnery? Certainly not with a man I’d met but had been promised to at some previous, unknown date, I couldn't say.
Sebastian crushed me against his chest, cradling me tight to his body as though he never wanted to let me go.
Domineering, controlling…monster. I knew what he was; what the girls on the ship and I had contrived to have the other passengers believe, who shied away from us, fear and repulsion in their eyes. Now, I was in the arms of one such creature, and all I felt was…relief. Trust. A long breath left me. I relaxed into his hold and closed my eyes.
A sharp knock on the library door roused me; I glanced down to find Sebastian sleeping deeply. With no breath escaping his lips, he looked...different. I frowned, ignoring the repeated knocking, pressing my hand to his cheek. His flesh was cold as it had been before, but harder, somehow. As though life had left him.
The door creaked open behind me. I shrieked, rolling off Sebastian’s still form, scrambling at my sides in a frantic effort for cover, huddling in the remnants of my dress.
“Charleton!”
“Oh, my— Madame, I am so sorry?—”
The butler, I really did need to learn his title, hovered at the door frame, his sharp gaze taking in his disrobed master, me by his side, my throat covered in flaking blood. Despite his flustered apology, some part of my mind noted that he hadn’t retreated from the room, either.
What a sight—though I doubted it was the first time he had come across such a scene. Somewhere in my chest, a tiny monster roared with jealousy at the image of another woman in my husband’s arms. At least he’s not the single monster here, I thought wryly.
I managed to gather the tatters of my dress around me, but my husband had efficiently ripped the whole thing down the middle—no wonder it had come off so easily. Keeping it around my shoulders was nigh impossible, and as Charleton had probably seen more of my naked hide than he’d ever expected, it was a moot point. The Lord above knew what my hair looked like.
Settling for gripping the material to my side and leaving my shoulders bare, I straightened, attempting the pretense of some sort of lady-like posture. Charleton’s face went bright red as he surveyed me, half draped over his employer. His face reflected my suspicions of my hair, but I decided to keep up the pretense anyway.
“What did you need, Charleton?”
The valet’s lips twitched as his color began to return to some semblance of normal— what was considered normal, in this place? —and opened his mouth.
I had no idea what he expected to come out, but the tall, thin man snorted a laugh.
A giggle escaped my lips. I clapped a hand over my mouth, clutching the material tight beneath my armpit, but I couldn’t stop. Both of us doubled with laughter, Charleton clinging to the doorway, me over my husband’s prone body.
Inappropriate, Gella.
I gasped as Sebastian berated me in my head. Charleton stopped laughing, peering around fearfully, his shoulders raised to his ears.
“Did—do you hear him, too?” I whispered, the breath of Sebastian’s apparent powers astounding me.
Charleton nodded, his lips pressed in a thin line, unspeaking.
I took a deep breath.
“Wake up.” I leaned over Sebastian’s still form, but he remained unresponsive. I tapped his face. Not so much as a flicker of his eyelids. Contemplating slapping him harder to see if I could get a reaction, I expected him to open his eyes, scare me as a child does, pretending a hurt.
Hands settled on my—very bare—shoulders, and I jumped a mile.
“ Jesu Christus , Charleton,” I swore, looking over my shoulder, crossing myself by habit.
The corners of his mouth turned down. “He won’t wake,” he said softly.
Something inside my head agreed, but I pushed on, my logical brain aware and rearing, finally. “What do you mean, he won’t wake ? He was fine and, um, active an hour ago.”
It was my turn to flush, heat rising from the line of material to above my eyebrows. I wouldn’t have been surprised had steam issues from the top of my head.
“But, madame. The sun is rising. He does not...exist...in the moment of light as it breaks on God’s day.”
Well put.
“It’s morning?” I glanced at the hall behind him, then realized the fruitlessness of the action. “You don’t need to be scared of him, Charleton,” I said, searching for a way to lift the body beneath me.
Sebastian exhibited no sign of life bar the frustrating commentary running through my head. I glanced at Charleton, still checking the room around us.
Actually, he does.
Charleton jumped and scurried from the room.
“Would you stop doing that?” I asked in exasperation, addressing Sebastian’s corpse in front of me. Nothing odd about that, talking to a lifeless body bearing my husband’s likeness beneath me. “You’ve scared the man half to death.”
Why aren’t you afraid, Gella?
“He works for you,” I reminded him, wondering how on earth we were going to move him. Sebastian seemed to have gained hundreds of pounds in his sleep. Death? Charleton’s words came back to me, and doubt began to grow deep inside me.
“Can you blame me?” I snapped, continuing my soliloquy and attempting to tug his shirt over his chest. His broad, well-defined chest. My hands passed over ridges of muscle. I swallowed, tracing outlines of his physique.
Are you quite done?
Desisting in groping the man, I returned to tugging the material over him, and moved to his pants, struggling to get them around his round, firm buttocks.
You’ve never dressed a man, have you?
“I’m so glad you find this amusing.” My irritation growing, I sat back. Defeated by men’s breeches. “How do you dress with all this?” Flustered, I gestured to his half-covered form as though he could see me.
You should talk. That dress took far too long to remove.
“Mhmm.” I didn’t dignify that with a proper reply. “Is Charleton likely to be back?”
Perhaps. He’s seen me in worse states.
“This happens often, does it?” I imagined a string of women scooting from his bedroom, terrified and under threat of silence. “Wait, what do you mean, worse states ?”
That’s a discussion for when I can speak to you properly.
“What, this isn’t properly ?” I grumbled, expecting a snarky reply, but there was none. “Sebastian?”
The room grew cold, as though his presence had left, though his body remained. Tugging my clothes around me, I surveyed his still form as I rose.
Where do you go?
Silence met my thoughts.
No matter how many times I called out to him, Sebastian either didn’t hear me or refused to respond. Giving it up as a bad job and assuming someone with greater strength than me or the man himself would do something about his exposed body, I towed my worn, exhausted body to the door. I peeked around the hallway, but Charleton and his flock of staff who scampered everywhere together had disappeared.
I crossed the corridor to my own room, closing the door behind me. A shiver took over my body, most likely from a combination of blood loss, exhaustion and the trauma of being a nail bed for my husband's teeth. With that bitter thought in mind, I dropped the tattered material of my ruined dress to the floor.
Not bothering to dress or bathe, I collapsed into the comfort of the bed and fell asleep.