Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 81
The library appeared uninhabited when she entered. “Lord Winterly?” she whispered, loath even to disturb the dust with her breath. But no answer was forthcoming. “No doubt you mean to materialize like some dread djinn again.” She felt foolish for talking to an empty room.
His library smelled like it always did, like the perfume of antiquity. But the ancient mustiness, the olden ink glue, and the sweet vanilla was comforting to her, and the fire’s languid chattering beckoned her from the door. She obeyed its warm invitation after only a brief pause, stepping deeper into the vast book-laden chamber.
Just how did the master of Winterthurse fill his long days and nights? His eternity, as it were. Presuming, of course, that he did not sleep as mortals did. Intrigued by the lonely book she spied atop his high-backed armchair by the fire, she betook herself thence to investigate.
The binding was rather less antiquated-looking than the books she descried on his lofty shelves. She turned it over to peruse the front panel and the title thereon. It was that blasted novel he’d slipped her. She had long since determined that he lived only to shock her and she’d been only too happy to sneak the book back into the library with no one the wiser to her having possessed, even briefly, this so-called literature. Well there were no eyes watching her now. With a determined purse of her lips, she turned the front board. The first few pages seemed innocuous enough, but she was soon to find how utterly explicit it all truly was!
“But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her.”
Emma looked up from the page suddenly with a rueful blush staining her cheeks. Remarking that she was still alone, she ignored the heat of guilt in her cheeks and continued her study of this lurid little novel. Her eyes widened by gradations of mounting horror—or was it fascination?—as she read on.
“‘Oh!’” said Winterly suddenly, “‘what a charming creature thou art!’”
She gave a startled shriek, dropped the book, and thrust her hands up to guard her palpitating heart.
Laughing, he continued to quote the very sentence she’d been reading when he’d spoken over her shoulder. “‘What a happy man will he be that first makes a woman of you. Oh, that I were a man for your sake…’” And then flashing long teeth, added, “Well, mortal at any rate.”
“You startled me!”
His gaze filled with mischief. “Your race tends to startle easily.”
“Is it any wonder? Your race feeds off mine.” She lifted her chin. “I forbid you to sneak up on me. It is bad manners in a vampyre to lurk about.”
He made her a bow. “You have my word, no more ambushing my guests—wouldn’t want to frighten you to death.”
“As to that, how long will you suffer me to live now that I know what you are?”
“My dear, Emmaline, why on earth should I kill you?” He quirked an indolent brow and seated himself in the armchair. He was only a little less threatening in repose.
“You’re a vampyre.” Death personified.
“Indeed?” He looked down at himself. “However can you stand my presence?”
“With mistrustful forbearance.”
He chuckled, running his tongue along one long canine. “Do you know, I perceived the exact moment you knew what I was.” No longer satisfied with looking up at her, he rose to his full, intimidating height. “It was at the abbey.”
“Yes,” she said, remembering every detail of that encounter—how he’d smelled, how she’d felt, the coolness of the rain against her fevered flesh.
“I might have drained you dry and thrown you from the cliffs that day, fed your empty corpse to the gulls and the sharks. Instead it was a mortal kiss I sought from you. It was a far different sort of hunger I sought to slake.”
“Yes,” she said. “Why did you spare me the vampyre’s kiss?”
“Perhaps I fancy a little warm-blooded sport just now.”
“Sport you might enjoy with any number of women.”
“Ah, yes, but there are none like you, Emma.”
“I do wish you would not use my name so freely, Vampyre.”
“You wish that then, and see where wishing gets you.”
Her mouth flattened. “I am nobody. You could sport with more exotic beauties—empresses and actresses, if you wished.”
“I find you infinitely exotic, my prim little rose. Besides, you are hardly a nobody. If you were that, you’d be moldering away in your uncle’s attic.”
Or in a grave, she thought.
“Instead, you waltzed in the underworld and kissed a vampyre beneath a full moon.” There was something of redoubtable hunger in his countenance; and it excited her abominably. “And you have only whetted his appetite, I’m afraid.” When he closed the distance between them, she did not balk. When he lowered his lips to hers, she held her ground. When he molded her frame to his, he pressed an exquisite kiss upon her lips. The furnace flared in her belly and the flames weltered in her blood. He made a leonine noise deep in his throat as her arms tightened around his neck.
She made no protest as he ran his hands into her coiffure, releasing the mass to tumble down her back. He was always letting her hair down. She dropped her head back obediently as he tugged her hair like a bell rope so that her neck was more exposed and vulnerable to his grazing teeth.
More kisses ensued. Prurient fingers descended over her hips and began to draw the hems of her skirts up slowly from where they’d rested at her ankles. “Who shall delve with you all the mysteries of Venus?” he whispered. “Who shall be your preceptor and lover?”
In a heady moment, she was supine atop the Aubusson rug before the fire. He had her skirts bunched around her waist and a hand was gliding up her stockinged thigh. But she swiftly caught that hand before it ever reached…Venus.