Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 91
“How should I know?” she whispered. “You won’t resurrect a candle for me to see by.”
“But I see you best in the dark.” His voice was thick with shadows and hunger, the intonation of a sensual epicurean. Lower still went his thrilling hand, roving at the vale of her hip before he paused and lowered his canines to press gently, insistently, at her inner thigh. “Here in the darkness, the shameless in you cannot hide from the devil in me.”
“Yes,” she admitted breathily. She had ever been an open book to him, but she could not claim the same of him; she required light to see. “Light a candle, won’t you? I dislike knowing that I am being watched in my blindness.”
“As you wish,” said he, leaning away to do as she asked. “You are to understand, however, that most ladies prefer to make love in the darkness.”
Her lips were parched with desire. “And is that what we’re doing? Making love?”
“As much as can be expected between wolf and lamb.” Shadows shifted across her skin as he brought the candle towards her and placed it atop the nightstand. He made no secret of his thirst for blood and hunger for flesh—it was there in the gaze that traced her contours. The mattress dipped as he brought his knee down beside her hip and leaned over her. His shirt and trousers were long since removed.
“I craved your flesh that night. I crave it still. And your blood most of all.” The memory of those words still resonated in her marrow. “Do you still…” She swallowed audibly. “Do you still want to eat me, Markus?”
“Always,” he growled, and then swiftly captured her mouth in a branding kiss. The time for talk was at an end.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Vampyre Kiss
Emma’s lashes drifted to her cheeks. Her arms were torpid with passion as she lifted them around Markus’s neck. He availed himself of every inch of skin she offered, his lips like hot silk against her throat. Her breath hitched to feel the teasing pressure of long fangs over her collar bone. But he allowed only the smooth, pearly length of them to skim along her skin, never the lethal edge. When at last he pulled them away, her flesh unscathed, she was both relieved and disappointed.
A disappointment short-lived, for he transferred his attentions instead to her heaving chest. Her heart fetched a languorous sigh that stumbled huskily from her lips. Strong hands delved lower, pleasure bound, whilst his mouth possessed itself of a fleshy peak, rigid and pink with anticipation. Eyes glazed with pleasure, she dug her nails into his midnight hair, her fingers stiffening gloriously each time his canines brushed her pebbled flesh. When he had kissed and venerated every inch of her breasts, he pulled her fists out of his hair and secured them above her head with her torn and discarded shift. He then bound them to the gargoyle crouched over his bedpost so that when she lifted her head back it was to see her fettered wrists clasped in the claws of a leering dragon, and she the cruciate prey beneath him. She ought to have been frightened both by her bondage and the sneering dragon, but she was all the more aroused.
When she shifted her gaze from that fearsome dragon, it was to see Markus watching her from where he knelt between her parted thighs, bold and proud as the Greek warriors of old.
Emma forced her gaze up to his face, blood quickening at her cheeks, and met his knowing eyes. He released her gaze to follow his finger as it circled the crescent moon below her navel. His touch excited ripples along her flesh.
So it was her birthmark that had interested him earlier when he’d doused the flames. She herself hardly ever gave it a thought. Yet he appeared fascinated by the mark, and transfixed by her hips and thighs. His eyes continued following his hand over her flesh, taut across veins and bone and sinew.
Where his fingers moved his lips soon followed. And then his teeth. He bit her gently where the skin over her hip was most sensitive, albeit not hard enough to draw blood. Again, she was torn between relief and keen frustration.
Wherever his kisses roved, she felt worshipped. He was reverent, teasing, and fearsome in his lovemaking. Without warning, he dipped lower and was suddenly kissing her where she ached the most! A sinful kiss at the very gates of Heaven. Her whimper of surprise transmuted instantly to a groan of agonizing rapture. She wanted desperately to push his head away—and that only for a brief moment—but her hands were not hers to control. Feverishly, she writhed, desperate for that elusive freedom in the undulating shadows of that fearsome tabernacle. But the release she craved was always out of reach no matter how she strained to follow. Each time she closed in, she thought she might shatter like a porcelain cup against the flags. But Markus would pause his sweet assault again and again, and that divine frustration mounted ever higher and higher. She was sure she might weep or rage or claw the feathers clean from his pillows (perhaps even his wings) if he continued these torturous caresses.
He seemed to revel in her mindless abandon. Just when she was sure she could take no more of his rapturous brand of torture, she was delivered of her meed at long last. At that most euphoric crest of her ruinous cries, one of his wings shot out like a blade and severed her binding from the watchful black dragon, and she collapsed like a splintered ship as wave after wave rushed through her. Had her gaze not been so befogged by her climactic undoing, she might have witnessed the action as more than just a