Saint
Istorm into Aurora’s room, my eyesight flashing from thermal to normal and back again.
“You asked Dagon to feed you?” The accusation rips out of me, adrenaline racing through my veins like I’m on a hunt.
Aurora looks up from the book she’s reading in bed. Her shocked eyes and pouty mouth are enough to snap my sight back to normal, but it does nothing against the fire searing my skin.
“Answer me.” I’m no longer yelling. I’m lethally calm. The news came to me like every scrap of gossip did in this place—passed around the family until it eventually landed on the wrong person.
Ajax told me. He’d heard it from Zachariah, who’d heard it from Dagon.
And fuck me if I hadn’t exploded at the mere idea of my hunter brother feeding Aurora.
His blood pouring into her mouth, his body sustaining hers.
Even if it was purely survival with no intimacy involved, I didn’t fucking like it.
“First off,” she says, shutting her book.
“I didn’t ask Dagon. Annika offered him as a volunteer after we talked about how much healthier I felt after drinking from you.
How much better I could access and control my power.
How much clearer my mind felt.” She gives me a little shrug.
“We were theorizing if those effects had to do with drinking powerful hunter blood.”
“And if he said yes? You would’ve fed from him?” The question snaps out of me in a way I can’t control. Fuck, I need to get a grip, but it’s impossible. There’s a territorial, primal creature scratching its way out of my chest and I can’t stop it no matter how hard I try.
“I don’t know!” she fires back. “You said I couldn’t feed from you again. And you’re also the one who told me feeding isn’t always…” She motions toward me. “Intimate. Annika certainly had no issues with the idea, and she’s his mate.”
The idea of her fangs in Dagon’s flesh has my own fangs punching out. If anyone is going to take care of her, it’s me.
She arches an eyebrow at me. “I don’t know why you think you have the right to be angry at me for entertaining the idea when you’re the one refusing me, Saint.
” She sighs, getting off the bed and heading to the bookshelf across the room.
“It’s your right to say no to me. It’s always your choice.
But you have no right to kick in my door and start lecturing me for a choice you made.
” She shakes her head. “I have to do something to stay alive.”
“You do have to do something. Feed from a human. A willing, volunteer human. I can smell you across the palace, Aurora. You’re toeing the line of starvation again.”
“I told you I won’t feed from a human.” She reaches to put the book back on the shelf and stumbles, her legs buckling.
I’m there in an instant, catching her against me before she touches the ground. She looks up at me, concern fluttering in her eyes.
Shit. She’s so damn weak.
And it’s my fault because I’m too afraid of losing control with her. I’ve damned her progress before she’s even truly begun. A low growl rumbles from me as I sweep her into my arms and take her back to the bed. I sit her on my lap, holding her head against my neck.
“I’ll feed you,” I say, doing my best to hold on to some semblance of control. It’s fucking hard to do, especially when she feels so pliant against me, the soft cotton of her pajama bottoms doing nothing to hide the delicate skin of her thighs.
“Saint,” she argues. “I don’t want you to be guilted into this. I’m not your responsibility. You have to be okay with me trying with other vampires—”
“No,” I cut her off. “Just…no. This isn’t about responsibility or guilt. This isn’t about me not wanting to feed you, Aurora. It’s about what you deserve, and if I lose control with you…”
“You won’t.”
I look down at her, at the way she has such unflinching trust in me.
“I won’t pretend the trust we’ve built is unbreakable,” I admit.
“You know me better than some of my own brothers, but that doesn’t mean you know every part of me.
There are pieces of me that are chaotic.
Sometimes those pieces take over.” I cringe.
“I don’t want my chaos to bleed all over you. ”
Aurora smiles up at me. “My chaos and your chaos are the same.”
Something inside me stretches awake, a longing I can’t describe or begin to understand. It has nothing to do with the desire coursing through me, begging me to set my mouth on Aurora’s body and make her moan. It’s something deeper, something endless.
I shift her against me, repositioning her at my neck.
“Not from the wrist?” she asks.
“Take it or leave it,” I offer.
I don’t have to help her get her fangs out this time. All she has to do is take a deep breath, and out they punch. Fuck, she’s so damn beautiful. She drags her lips over the skin of my neck first, a slow exploration that has every muscle in my body tensing with need.
Claim. Bite. Fuck.
No. No. No.
I shove the thoughts away even as I lean into her touch. Her lips feel so damn soft against my skin, their warmth a teasing caress that has me drunk.
A hot burst of pain melts into pure, undiluted pleasure, her bite the most sensual thing I’ve ever experienced.
My blood spills into her mouth, and she moans as she swallows.
She shifts over me, caging my hips with her thighs without breaking her bite.
She’s drinking me down like I’m her last hope, and fuck me, I love it.
I slide my arms around her, allowing myself this small freedom to hold her while she drinks. She smells like a dream, feels warm and soft atop me, and those needy little whimpers are giving me life.
“Saint.”
Scratch that, her saying my name like that is what makes life worth living.
She takes another mouthful, her hips rocking over me. She gasps as my hard cock scrapes against the too-thin barrier of her pajama shorts. Then she does it again. Drinking and rocking over me, chasing the two pleasures with abandon.
Fuck, she’s perfect. I love watching her let go, watching her submit to the demands of her body, her instincts.
It’s beautiful and intoxicating at the same time.
My fingers slip under the tiny tank top she’s wearing, brushing the bare skin of her back.
I’d give anything to peel these thin layers from her body and slowly make her sigh my name for an entirely different reason.
“Yes, please,” she says, drawing back to look at me.
I blink, my head spinning both from her bite and the blood loss. “Shit. I didn’t mean to send that fantasy to you.” I slipped up. Again. I’ve spent too much time in her mind, connected to her in ways I’ve never been connected to another being. It’s too easy to share things with her like this.
“I’m happy you did.” Her eyes are lust-hazed and needy, her lips stained red with my blood. “I want you to do those things you were thinking about.”
My body locks up like a statue.
“Please,” she begs. “I need you.”
“You need someone gentle,” I argue, despite knowing I’ll be whatever she needs me to be.
“I need you, Saint. Just you. Please. I ache. Your blood, your scent, your kiss. It’s all I can think about.”
Fuck me. She has me at her absolute mercy.
“You need to lick me.” I tilt my head to the side, exposing the still-open bite.
The most adorable blush brushes her cheeks at my demand.
I smirk. “You’re asking me to peel your clothes off and make you come, but me telling you to lick me makes you blush?”
She parts her lips, flustered.
“Lick me, Aurora.” I demand. “You need to seal the wounds closed if you want me to take this one step further.”
She immediately licks the bite holes, her tongue lapping over me in one long tease that sends lightning down my spine.
I move faster than she can follow, pressing her back onto the soft mattress, me on my knees above her.
Not an ounce of fear comes off her as I run my hands over her skin, relishing every single place we connect.
Instead, she arches into my slow exploration, gasping as I graze my hand over her breasts, back and forth until her nipples are peaked beneath the fabric.
“You like that?” I ask, needing her words of consent and confirmation before I continue.
“I like you touching me,” she says. “In any way. All ways.”
I’m harder than granite, my cock begging me to sink inside her heat and forget every rule I’ve put in place when it comes to her. I can’t give in. For her, I have to keep my control.
But she’s aching not only for my blood, but for a release. I can give her that. I can take the edge off for her so she’s not in pain. That’s all it has to be.
Slowly, I hike up her tank top, and she takes over halfway, lifting it over her head and tossing it to the floor.
Her breasts are bare, and I groan at the sight before I bend down and take one of her nipples into my mouth.
I suck on it until it’s rosy and pert for me, situating my thigh between her legs to give her something to grind against while I move to her other breast.
She arches against me, gasping as I take my time kissing her breasts, down her ribs, over her hips, until I hook my fingers in the band of her shorts. I look up her body, gauging her reaction.
Aurora lifts her perfect ass off the bed, nodding at me.
I smirk up at her, dragging those shorts down her legs and letting them drop to join her top.
“Fuck, Aurora,” I groan, my eyes drinking in every glorious inch of her. She’s completely bare beneath me, looking up at me like I alone hold the ability to make her dreams come true.
And if this is all the time I’m granted with her, I’m certainly going to fucking try.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” I say, bending down to glide my hands along her creamy thighs. I turn my head, dragging my lips over the inside of her thigh, then do the same with the other. “You haunt my dreams. My every thought.”
“Saint,” she whimpers. When I drag my fangs so lightly over her skin, she shivers. “Please.”