Chapter 8 #2
“Not tonight.” And he means it. I can hear that he means it, which is exactly the problem with men like this.
They commit so hard to the lie they start believing it, and then you can’t tell them apart from the truth.
“I’d tell you. Out of all of them, I’m the one who’d tell you. That’s sort of my whole job.”
“Your job is HR?”
“Something like that.”
I lift a hand to my neck. Two small punctures, slick. I look back at Enzo over my shoulder. Fangs rest against his own lip now, a bead of red clinging to one.
My blood.
“Oh.”
“There’s a reason you’re not afraid,” Leif says.
“Yeah. It’s called good drugs I didn’t take and a great orgasm I did.” Maybe I should have gotten that antidepressant refilled.
“No.” He crosses to me, cups my jaw, tilts my face like he’s reading the back of it. “There’s a reason. You’ll find it on your own. I can’t hand it to you, you wouldn’t take it from my hand anyway. Some things a person has to walk up to herself.”
“That’s very fortune-cookie of you, Leif.”
“It’s the truest thing anyone’s said to you in thirty-two years.”
How could he possibly know that?
For half a second my chest constricts at his words. Most people never give me the truth, they give me a lie they believe will make me feel better. It never does.
Leif brushes his thumb across my pulse, and I file his words and his fangs away, because a man this beautiful is allowed one creepy line a night.
Enzo hasn’t said much, this whole time. He watches me the way the others talk, with his whole attention, and right now he’s looking at my throat like it’s saying something my mouth isn’t.
“What,” I say.
He meets my eyes. Holds them.
“You’re not running,” he says with this odd observational tone that almost disconnects from the moment. “Everyone runs.”
I do run. Yet, he’s right. I’m not running. I should be running. I have spent a career reading a room and knowing the exact moment to leave it, and every instinct I own is screaming door, door, where is the door. And I am not moving toward the door. I don’t even clock where it is.
Is that me?
Or is it the thing they keep almost saying, the thing Davi swallowed, the thing Leif won’t hand me?
I file it under after. The way I’d table a donor’s grabby hands until the check clears. Tonight I would rather have this than know the answer, and that, not the fangs, not the blood, is the most dangerous thing about me.
I turn in Enzo’s arms and kiss him, because the compulsion is louder than the logic and I need to taste myself on his mouth more than I need my next breath.
He crashes into me like he’s been waiting all night to stop being polite.
Enzo is all leashed control, all bodyguard stillness, right up until his mouth is on mine and then there’s nothing controlled about him at all.
Copper and pepper and me, all of it on his tongue, and every thought I had goes out the window after it.
He lifts me like I weigh nothing and carries me to the showers, sitting on the tiled bench with me astride his lap, my knees framing his hips. The pepper of him is everywhere now, in my mouth, my lungs.
But he’s still in his pants, and the need to drop onto him is the only coherent thought I’ve got left.
The vampire problem can wait until I’ve come again. I have priorities, and they are stacked in a very clear order.
A zipper rasps somewhere close. Hands land on my hips, urging me down, and I pull back, because Enzo’s hands are already on me and these are not Enzo’s hands.
Davi.
He winks. Lemon and salt, close enough to taste, the heat of him is a different temperature than the two at my flanks.
Then Enzo thrusts up and every thread about fangs and blood and impossible men snaps clean.
There’s only Enzo, filling me deeper than I’ve ever been filled, so good my whole body sighs around him, and I decide their delusion can be true if this is what comes with it.
Davi’s hands stay on my hips. Guiding. Setting the rhythm Enzo’s body answers. Like he knows exactly how Enzo likes it.
He probably does.
His hands clench on my hips almost too tight as I gasp into Enzo’s mouth. Every hard ridge of him scrapes against my walls. Dragging along over-sensitive nerve endings.
“That’s it.” Davi’s mouth brushes against my ear, his chest hot against my spine where Enzo’s hands have climbed back to my breasts. “Ride him. He won’t move till you do. He’s polite like that.”
Enzo growls. The sound rolls up through his chest into mine.
“Polite is not the word I’d use for a man with fangs.”
Davi laughs against my neck. Enzo’s hips snap up and the laugh dies in my throat on a gasp.
I ride him. Gods help me, I ride him, because the alternative is sitting still on the most perfect cock I’ve ever taken, and I’m not strong enough for that. Not tonight.
So I work him. Slow at first, finding the angle, then deeper, dragging up the length of him until just the head holds me open and I drop back down to the root on a sound I don’t recognize as mine.
His hands hold my hips, but they don’t push, don’t take over, just spread wide and let me feel how much restraint costs him. His thumbs press bruises into my skin he’ll likely deny in the morning.
Davi’s chest stays at my back, his hands guiding me up and down on Enzo’s thick cock. I let my head fall back and just enjoy the ride.
My eyes flutter open. The burn of another orgasm climbs. Rippling up through my toes. Enzo’s pupils are all I see. The black so complete that for a moment he looks like a demon.
I’m not sure why that turns me on. But it does.
Maybe it’s the fact that with each flip of my hips his mouth parts and his eyes roll a little further back in his head. And I’m doing that to him.
It’s intoxicating.
Leif settles on the bench across from us, shirt hanging open off those lean swimmer’s shoulders, blood still wet on his lip. Mine, Davi’s, I’ve stopped being able to tell. Those crystalline eyes track every roll of my hips like he’s memorizing them.
“Leif.” His name falls out of me as my nipples scrape across Enzo’s chest. My whole body shudders with pleasure.
“He’s not done with you.” Davi’s teeth graze my shoulder as he whispers against my neck. My hips roll and thrust but slowly lose the pace as my orgasm builds. “None of us are.”
I’m going to need Advil.
“Held himself back all night,” Davi continues, his thumb finds my clit over the flex of Enzo’s stomach, pressing in time with every thrust. “You have no idea what it cost him. Not biting you the second you walked through that door tonight.”
Enzo makes a sound that isn’t a word.
I come.
I don’t decide to. It’s wrung out of me the same way the first one was, my body answering a command nobody gave, and I clench down on him so hard the polite control Davi bragged about finally tears loose.
His hands lock on my hips, and he fucks up into me, fast, brutal, the bench legs shrieking against the tile, and when he comes, he drops his face to the bite he already made and just breathes me in.
Not drinking. Just breathing. Like I’m the thing keeping him on this side of falling apart.
The room goes quiet but for four sets of lungs working too hard.
“Okay,” I say it to the steam-damp ceiling because someone has to. “Okay. So. Vampires.”
“She’s processing,” Davi tells the others.
“I am not processing. Processing would imply I’ve accepted the premise.” I am still, I should note, fully seated on Enzo’s cock and in no hurry to relocate. “I’m humoring the premise. There’s a difference and it’s load-bearing.”
“Cataloging it earlier. Humoring it now,” Davi says. “She’s negotiating with herself.”
“And I’m winning.”
Leif rises from the bench and crosses to me before he tips my chin up with one finger and looks at me like there’s something written on the inside of my skull and he’s most of the way through reading it.
“Ask them upstairs,” he says. “After.”
“After what?” And who? Who am I asking what?
He just smiles, fangs and all. Up this close and not chasing an orgasm they look almost real. Which is of course impossible.
Vampires aren’t real and I need to not feed into their delusions.