“Mircea. It’s freezing.” “I will keep you warm,” he told me, those lips sliding down to my cleavage.
And, okay, it was getting warmer out here. “We can’t stay on a street corner all night,” I protested.
“Of course we can’t.” And before I fully realized what was happening, we were at the end of the street, my arm tucked in his as he looked this way and that, curious and bright-eyed and obviously delighted. With what I didn’t know, but a second later he laughed. “Oh yes. Yes, that will do splendidly.”
And then snowflakes falling around us were caught in headlights. They froze like crystals hanging in the darkness, a thousand tiny flashes of gold, as a limo pulled up at the corner. I looked at Mircea. “How . . . ?”
“I borrowed it from a friend,” he told me, bundling me inside. And then immediately covered my body with his own.
He kissed me slower this time, a tender movement of his lips and then his tongue against mine, deliberate, caring, and carnal. And for a few moments, I forgot everything, except the silky hair falling around me, the smoothness of the lips on mine, and the feel of his hands on my body. Their calluses came from handling a sword regularly, hundreds of years ago, but vampires stayed as they were when they died, so they had never softened. They were the only remnant of the half-barbarian prince he’d once been, except for the hair he refused to cut.
I took the opportunity to bury my hands in it now, a spill of deep, silky mahogany, the color of oak leaves in autumn. And, okay, that was corny, bu
t Mircea made a girl poetic. Only this so wasn’t the place.
“Mircea. We can’t,” I gasped, glancing at the driver, who was watching us unashamedly in the mirror.
Mircea didn’t even look up. “Drive,” he said, and smashed a hand down on the button for the partition.
By the time it was up, my top was down and things were progressing at a rather frightening rate. “People can see us through the windows,” I protested, as the soaked silk was unzipped and my bra unhooked, all in one smooth motion.
“Tinted.”
“But . . . I’m hungry.”
“So am I,” he growled, and pulled off my dress.
Somebody had left a fur coat on the seat, something black as midnight and soft as a cloud, and the sensation against my bare skin was a hell of a distraction. Although not as much as the warm hands smoothing over me, the hard-muscled thighs pressing against me, or the tongue sliding over mine, liquid and warm and increasingly demanding.
I came up for air, minutes later, to find that Mircea’s coat was off, his shirt was open and his tie was barely clinging to one shoulder. That was a little disturbing, because I couldn’t remember how he got that way, or how my panties had ended up flung against the opposite seat. All I knew was that I was naked except for that sinfully soft fur coat, most of which was trapped beneath me.
I tried to tug it around, to give me some possibility of coverage should any of the passing cars get too close, but Mircea had other ideas. “Leave it,” he said hoarsely. “I like the contrast with your skin.”
And then he proceeded to show me exactly how much.
“What’s . . . what’s gotten into you?” I gasped, as that dark head worked its way down from lips to neck to body. Not that Mircea wasn’t usually . . . affectionate . . . but he didn’t normally care for public displays—or even semipublic ones.
It didn’t seem to be bothering him right now, though.
The lips on my skin were warm and soft and pliable, unlike the prick of fangs behind them. But he didn’t bite down, he just scraped them lightly over sensitive flesh, until I was hard and peaked and desperate. “It has been a while, so I cannot be certain,” he murmured. “But I believe I may be drunk.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“The blood of those creatures. It was . . . intoxicating.”
“You mean the mages?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He rolled a nipple between tongue and teeth, making my hands fist in his shirt.
“But . . . but they were human.”
“Mmm, no,” he said thoughtfully. And then he bit down.
I gasped and clutched his head between my hands, holding him as he drank from me. The sensation of warm lips, sharp, sharp teeth and deep, intimate pulls had my body tightening, my skin flushing and my pulse pounding in my ears. I felt my grip on the moment slipping away.
“Then what were they?” I asked breathlessly, before I forgot what the hell we were talking about.
“They were human, but stronger,” he told me, sitting back on his heels. “Like you.”