Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 73
They sat in silence a long while and in all that time Milli wondered why he hadn’t yet kissed her. Tonight, of all nights, was the perfect night for illicit romance. Why, even her prudish sister had been thoroughly kissed since they’d been here. Milli studied what she could of his face and wondered if it was shyness that kept him aloof. He didn’t seem shy to her, but perhaps he hid it beneath that veneer of silent brooding.
Well, if he wouldn’t kiss her then perhaps she ought to take matters into her own hands. To that end, Milli leaned in and shut her eyes before she could think better of her next move. He tensed instantly beneath her touch, his lips hard and unresponsive beneath hers. When nothing happened, her lids sprang apart, her eyes wide with growing dread. With stinging coolness, he was watching her make a fool of herself. She retreated, mortified. How had she mistaken his detachment for shyness?
Milli was just preparing to leap from the bench and flee to her room, when she felt a firm grasp upon her wrist. She turned, bemused, to find that his eyes were now anything but cool. They were piercing and lambent beneath the moonlight. They were in fact so arresting, so uncanny, that she stilled. Without warning, he pulled her to his side and covered her mouth with his. She was so shocked by the unexpectedness of the kiss that it instantly overshadowed all thoughts of the preternatural glow she thought she’d glimpsed in his eyes.
When the shock passed, she closed her eyes and sank against him. Her lips parted on a sigh. He lost no time deepening the kiss and released her injured wrist, his hand gliding up her gloved elbow. As his fingers slid behind her head, angling it for better access, her flesh erupted into ripples of pleasure. Lips against lips and hands against bare flesh—it was glorious and heady. Every spark of contact, every caress of his lips and tongue, bestirred another deeper sensation—an ache that coiled in her belly and flooded her loins.
His breathing intensified and her heart rate spiked as he gave vent to the fervor that had been kept leashed until this night. Would that she’d known such passion had been simmering beneath his chivalrous smiles and amiable manners. Literature had not prepared her for this!
She followed suit and dragged her teeth over his lower lip. For her boldness she received a gratifying groan deep in his throat like a growl. It resonated in her very bones and she was only a little disturbed by it, inhuman as it was. But nothing short of his suddenly sprouting fangs and biting her would induce her to shatter this rhapsodic moment. Her answering moan of pleasure, however, had quite the opposite effect on him. He stilled and drew her hands gently away from his chest where they had found purchase.
Milli watched him, chest heaving, as he turned away and made short work of placing his mask back over his face. She had wanted to look into his eyes again. She had wanted to see there what she herself was feeling, but the moment was now lost and she was left to imagine what she would.
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, still moist from the kiss. Wet with passion; wet with something else too. There was a slight coppery tang in her mouth which, she supposed, accounted for the faint throb in her underlip where he’d employed his teeth and loosed his ardor. She smiled, delighted by his loss of control.
“Come,” he said, rising from the bench. The inscrutable mask was once more back in place. “You ought to be dancing with more than just the satyrs and beasts of this garden.”
“Yes,” she replied, “I did hear tell of a ball somewhere hereabout.”
“I believe I know the way.” And with that he pulled her up and with a light squeeze of her hand, a secret reassurance, he lead her from the conservatory.
Oh, what a pair they made, subsumed into the wicked hall of mirrors. He a beast and she his most willing prey.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Sick Rose
My Dear Mary,—I have searched the looking glass and found myself aghast at the misshapen darkness therein. Aghast because I am by no means as repulsed by what I see as I used to be. Perhaps that is because I am without my spectacles again and can no longer trust what I see; how then can I trust what I feel is real? Ever your purblind cousin,
Emma.
The vampyre moved with fluid grace beside Emma in the quiet of the lamplit corridor. From beneath her lashes she caught the golden glint of a pin secured at his neckcloth. Emma made to pull her hand from the crook of his elbow, but he held her fast, denying even the smallest distance between them.
“We’re going the wrong way,” she said. The ballroom lay in the opposite direction to the one he was taking.
His lips twitched. “There is only one way tonight.”
They passed the dining hall and turned down another corridor, one that took them past the tapestry room and the billiards room. At length, they entered the old armory where those peculiar Blades of Heaven resided, as well as the mysterious double doors that guarded the castle’s underbelly. The doors stood as before, reposed in their pitted iron brackets, but tonight two silent sentinels were stationed either side of them. These guards were attired not in their habitual livery but in dun, wax-covered robes, black gloves, and wide-brimmed hats, beneath which protruded long, stork-like leathern beaks. Plague doctors! Their glass eyes and awful bills gave her dreadful pause. To her mind there was little