It was enough. She was talking about their earlier lovemaking. How to answer? I’ll take you any way you come to me-how about now-didn’t seem quite the right response.
“Does it bother you?” Charles asked.
A soft thump, thump, thump, and subtle vibration told him that she was tapping her fingers on the bed. Then the bed bounced as she sat up. He turned his head so he could open one eye and look at her.
She was naked. Some of the movement had been her pulling off the last of her clothes. As he watched, she reached out with her hand, leaned forward, and touched his bare back. She just held her hand there. As she sat there, her pulse rate picked up until he could see it beat in her neck-and it wasn’t passion.
“Bad thoughts?” he asked.
She nodded. “It’s over. Done. Has been for a long time. Why does it still have such power?” The hand on his skin fisted, pulled away, then landed back where it had been, fingers widespread.
Words. He wasn’t good with them. But he’d try. “It’s not over in your head. And that’s all right, Anna. Don’t expect it to be over and done so fast. It’s like… like the silver left in my wound. It needs to fester out-and sometimes it’ll feel worse than the original wound did.”
“If I let the wolf in,” she said a little bitterly, “it’s not a struggle at all.”
“Wolf is emotion: needs and now,” he agreed. “She doesn’t care about the past as long as it doesn’t affect now.”
“She knows you won’t hurt us,” Anna said, sounding frustrated. “I know, too, but it doesn’t help. She can reach out and take what she wants.”
He rolled over, taking his time in the doing of it so he wouldn’t startle her. When he finished he was a foot closer to her and could look at her without getting a crick in his neck.
“And do you want me?”
She’d pulled her hand away when he’d moved, and now sat straight-backed and stiff. Something started to change…
“Not your wolf,” he said. “Do you want me? Or is it only the wolf.”
Was she only doing her best to live with the creature inside her? Giving it what it wanted? That was what his father did with his mate. Wolf to wolf they were tight as any mated pair he’d ever seen-man to woman… they did not match. He didn’t want that for Anna.
He didn’t think Anna disliked him, didn’t think everything between them was her wolf. But even the possibility of it was searingly painful.
“I want you,” she told him with a thumb at her chest. “I do.” Then she gave him a little rueful smile. “So does she.”
He went back to his original question, then. It was very important that he know the answer to this one. “Does it bother you when your wolf initiates our lovemaking?”
She dropped her eyes, not from any desire to submit, but as a human impulse to hide what she felt. “Not the way you mean,” she said finally.
“And how do I mean it?”
She gave him an exasperated look.
“I’m not playing games, Anna,” he told her, holding her gaze when she would have dropped it. “I need to know how to handle this. I need to know more.”
“You are asking if I’m entirely willing to have sex when she starts things.” Her voice was brittle with the embarrassment that colored her cheekbones.
“That’s what I’m asking.”
She swallowed. “Yes.” And then said, in a rapid pace, like a balloon deflating, “I think I give her the idea in the first place.”
Relief washed through him. Anything else he could work with. Anything. “So. Does it bother you when she initiates lovemaking in the way you mean it?”
She gave a snort of laughter. “Sorry. But it sounds stupid when you put it that way.” She dropped her head, then lifted it, tossing her hair back and showing him her face, bright with embarrassment and heat. “It bothers me that she can do it without me. But I can’t touch you-naked skin to naked skin-without a little help from her.”
“Ah,” he said. “So let’s try a little play time and see if, with my cooperation, instead of hers, you can get results.”
She blinked at him. “What? It’s four in the morning. You’re going to have to speak in shorter sentences that make more sense.”
He lay flat on his back, lifting his chin in a submissive pose he’d only ever offered to his father before. “Here I am,” he said. “Stuck tight.” He flopped his hands as if his wrists were tied to the mattress. Wiggled his feet. “What are you going to do with me?”
SHE stared at him. Submissive? Charles? But that bared throat was still there. No threat. He couldn’t have made her believe with words that he wouldn’t hurt her, because she already believed the words. But his body was telling her the same thing-and that she trusted right down to her bones.
Because she trusted, she was able to move closer, until her knees bumped into his body. She put her nose against his throat and he moved to make more room, even when she opened her mouth and let her teeth rest against his skin.
Under her tongue, his pulse began to speed up. Not fear-she smelled his arousal, and the sheer, unadulterated call of that scent loosened something inside her, making her moan in pleasure. She licked the side of his neck, appreciating the taste of salt and man, appreciating the freedom he’d given her to touch and taste at her leisure.
She took her time, her touches tentative at first. It felt… like she was violating his privacy. Intruding.
She remembered something abruptly. “Someone told me you don’t like to be touched,” she told him. She couldn’t remember who it had been. Asil, maybe.
His chest lifted off the bed, following her fingers when she started to lift them. Uncertain, she left her hands where they were, so he had to make an effort to keep them on him.
“Not usually,” he admitted, sounding a little breathless. “But I love your touch. Touch me anytime. Any place. Anywhere.” It was heartfelt and honest: and she had a sudden vision of him talking to his father and her with her hands on inappropriate places.
She was going to share the picture with him, but then she got a good look at his face and realized he meant what he’d said-and the impulse to laugh left as quickly as it had come. Deliberately, he pushed up higher, pressing her hands into him, using the muscles of his back because he kept his hands and feet where they had been.
“Pet me,” he told her. “I like it.”
Her heart beat so hard she could hear it-fear, a little, yes. But also there was something momentous and empowering in having Charles at her mercy. He was as good as his word: no matter what she did, his hands and his feet stayed where they were.
SOMETHING vibrated under her head.
It was such an odd sensation that-still only half-conscious-Anna tried to figure out what it was. Her ears told her there was a car motor somewhere very nearby, and she tried to figure out how she’d made it from the bed to a car without noticing.
And then she smelled the vampires.
“She’s awake, Ivan,” said a woman’s voice.
Anna opened her eyes and saw the vampire who’d attacked Moira. The woman smiled at her.
“Now me,” she said, “I didn’t like Krissy. She was a pushy little bimbo. But Ivan had a thing for her-and he doesn’t like you at all. So you just be a good puppy, and we’ll not have any trouble, right?”
Anna didn’t bother answering. She was naked, chained hand and foot and stuck in what could only be the back section of the blue minivan the vampires had been running around in. They’d removed the backseats and installed huge eyebolts to which they’d chained Anna. They were going to be paying the rental company through the nose when they returned the van. She was pretty sure that even rental insurance wouldn’t cover things like drilling eyebolts through the floor.
The woman vampire was leaning against one of the big sliding doors. Her feet were pressed against Anna’s side. Next to her was a man who looked about forty-five, but he was a vampire. He’d probably been forty-five for years.