Read Online Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 by V. M. Black - Free Book Online Page B

less strange to me.
    There was a knock on the bathroom door.
    I turned, my bare feet soundless on the heated marble, and stopped, my hand an inch from the knob.
    Another choice that I didn’t really have. Not because he’d make me but because I couldn’t force myself to stop.
    I opened it.
    Dorian stood there, dressed in nothing but a pair of dark blue pants. I wondered why he hadn’t paused to put on a shirt and shoes. Could he have wanted to see me so badly?
    As badly as I now realized I wanted to see him?
    I felt more naked now than I had before, shockingly naked, and I backed away hurriedly at the thrill that went through me.
    His gaze raked over me, but all he said was, “If you get dressed, I’ll take you home.”
    “Yes,” I said. I’d kept backing up, and now I stood in the center of the room, a dozen feet from the door.
    But I made no move toward the dressing room, where my clothes waited for me.
    After a long moment in which neither of us moved, he shut the door and hit a button near it. A low hum indicated that a fan had come on somewhere.
    “Heat,” he said, catching the question in my expression.
    We were going to go. Go away, go to my apartment, where he would leave me alone. That’s what I wanted. It had to be, because this craziness, the lust and the ache and all the things I didn’t want to name, they were all a lie.
    But I couldn’t look away from his eyes, searching them, as if they held the secrets of my own soul.
    And I said, “Dorian, I can’t. Please don’t make me.”
    At those words, he rocked on his toes, and a muscle in his jaw spasmed. The night he’d found me freezing on the road, I’d hit him with all my strength, and he hadn’t even flinched. But now my words made his entire body sway.
    Oh, God. What had I done. What was I doing....
    “A little while,” he said. “Just an hour longer. And then you have to promise me that you’ll go.”
    “Okay.” I was ready to agree to almost anything.
    “Okay,” he repeated, and he smiled then, but his eyes looked like something was broken inside.
    He crossed to the shower, the transition to which was marked by an arched frameless glass enclosure flush against the basket-weave floor. After tapping on the touch screen on the wall next to the opening, he reached in and manipulated several of the imposing array of chrome knobs and buttons, and water sheeted down like rain from a series of panels in the ceiling as steam rose up to frost the glass.
    He extended his hand wordlessly, and I approached, hesitant in spite of my own plea to stay. My body drew tight with awareness of the nearness of him.
    I put my hand in his.
    He drew me close, his face serious, his eyes shadowed, but all he said was, “Your hair is still up. More or less.”
    Without invitation, Dorian began plucking bobby pins from my tousled chignon, dropping them carelessly to the floor. The look in his eyes turned the impersonal action into a caress, and the glorious mess that Jane had created slipped downward until it fell in a mass of waves to just brush my nipples, which hardened at the touch. Dorian’s wicked smile returned, and my heart sped up. Tiny goose bumps rose on my scalp as his fingers searched through my hair for any fasteners that he had missed, and his fingers felt so good, so right in my hair.
    “Come here,” Dorian said, hooking an arm around me and pulling me against his body. I obeyed, a little breathless, melting against his strength.
    He took my mouth, and I reveled in the insistent demand of his lips and tongue. I felt him harden through the fabric of his pants. An answering ache bloomed between my thighs.
    Dorian broke off the kiss. He stepped backward into the sheeting water and pulled me with him, tugging the shower door closed after us.
    The shower was warm enough to startle a small yelp from me—I’d become more chilled than I realized, standing naked in the bathroom. But after just a moment, my skin adjusted, and muscles I had not