A Very Alpha Christmas Read online

  “Over?” I echoed.

  “And I stop. Right then.”

  I looked at him. “No matter what?” I challenged.

  “No matter what.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “And who wins?”

  “Maybe we both do. Or maybe we both lose. It’s up to you.”

  I looked down at the wine glasses. The champagne lapped at the rims. I felt my body heat as his gaze slid over me hungrily.

  I met his eyes. “It’s on.”

  He chuckled and lowered his head again, this time to my throat, and I held as still as possible, my toes curling against the carpet as his lips sent little tendrils of lust shivering across my skin.

  His hands went to my right shoulder, taking one thin strap of the camisole between his fingers. I knew what he was going to do even before he broke it, but he smothered my automatic protest under another kiss. He dropped the ends of the strap, and the cami slid down to bare my breast.

  I could have cursed him because he seemed to delight in destroying my clothes—if only his lips didn’t taste so good, and if only pulling away wouldn’t have meant spilling the wine. He had immobilized my hands as effectively as if he had tied me up, I realized. No, even more so, because I could at least have fought against the bonds if he’d tied me to something. Now I had to will myself to hold still.

  He kissed his way down my throat to the top of the swell of my bare breast, and my nipple tightened in anticipation as he neared it. I braced myself—but he broke away suddenly, straightening to catch my mouth with his as he cupped both my breasts in his hands, one bare flesh against his palm, the other through the silk of the camisole.

  I rocked at the shock of it, catching myself just in time as the champagne flutes wobbled dangerously in my hands. His thumbs worked against my nipples in time to the strokes of his tongue, and somehow the imbalance of his touch on my breasts, the one naked, the other under the slippery fabric, made it all the more maddening.

  “What are you planning?” I somehow managed when he finally broke away.

  He smiled down at me, a slow, hungry, wicked smile. “The best time to ask that was before you agreed, don’t you think?”

  And then he did drop his head—to the nipple still under the silk, which he took into his mouth, cloth and all, as he trapped the other between two fingers, stroking the tip over and over torturously with his thumb.

  The slick fabric turned rough as it was wet by his mouth, dragging against my skin. I wanted to take his head, to hold it there, but I could do nothing but stand on suddenly shivery legs as my fingers tightened futilely on the stems of the wine glasses.

  He stopped—but only to take the other camisole strap and rip it, too.

  “You and tearing clothes!” I protested.

  “If I took it off over your head, the champagne would spill,” he said mildly. “And you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  I didn’t answer, and he smirked again as he dropped the broken ends of the camisole strap. The silk clung to my body where it was wet, and his smile broadened as he peeled it slowly off my skin. A tug, and the cami was over my hips, then it slithered down my legs to land on top of my slightly spread feet.

  He kissed my lips one more time, and I started to rise onto my toes as be began to pull back.

  “Do you want to risk it?” he whispered against my mouth.

  Dammit. No, no, I didn’t. I settled down onto the flats of my feet—carefully, not even spilling a drop. He waited until I was still, standing with his body just brushing mine, his arms around me—but not supporting me. No, he wasn’t going to make it easy.

  Then he bent to kiss my throat again, moving down between my breasts and then to my belly, kneeling in front of me as he held my hips to him.

  I looked down at him, his black head and powerful shoulders, kneeling before me, and a heady sense of power swept through me. Only to me would he kneel like this, and I was the only one to be worshipped by his kisses. Forever.

  His tongue and teeth danced across my skin, following the curve of my hip then rising to my navel. It should have tickled, but the sensations were very, very far from that. The champagne shivered in my hand.

  Letting go of me, he stood up again, towering over me, a wicked smile on those lips that had just been torturing my skin.

  “What do I win?” I asked, slightly breathless.

  He put his finger against my lips and chuckled again, that brandy-rich sound that was full of wicked intention. “Oh, I didn’t say the challenge was over yet.”

  I kissed it, the first time since he had pressed the champagne flutes into my hands that I was able to touch him at my own initiative. I shifted my mouth to take his finger into it, deep, and he drew in his breath, his eyes going half-lidded as I worked across it with my tongue. He pressed another after it into my mouth, and I played with that one, too, exploring the sensitive webbing between his fingers. Finally he pulled back, but two faint spots of color now stained his pale cheeks.

  With more than a little smugness, I looked pointedly at the bulge that strained the front of his pants. “Is the challenge over or not? I could spill the champagne now, and then who would lose?”

  “You won’t spill it,” he shot back.

  I narrowed my gaze at him. Typical arrogance. “How can you be so sure?”

  His self-satisfied smirk was back. “You want to find out what happens next.”

  “And what would that—” And a gasp cut through my words because he slipped his hand into my shorts, pushing aside my underwear, and thrust the two wet fingers into me up to their limit. The flutes stuttered in my hands, on the very of brink spilling as I clenched hard at the invasion.

  He touched me nowhere else, only holding those fingers still deep inside me. I couldn’t swat at him or back away—or lunge forward to kiss him. I couldn’t move at all, couldn’t even pull my thoughts together enough to speak. Slowly, he began to move, curling his fingers to almost entirely withdraw them, only to push them back in again, even deeper.

  And as he did it, he just watched my face, standing slightly away from me with a faint smile on his lips.

  The floor seemed to sway under my feet, and the champagne flutes trembled. I knew what he was going to do, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hang on. I realized that this had been the entire point. I was done with this game now, but my muscles seemed to lock up, and when I tried to make myself slosh the champagne, I only managed to move one of the flutes half an inch, and the champagne only lapped at the rim.

  “Very funny,” I managed. “You, um, win. Game over.”

  “It’s over when I say it is,” he said as his fingers worked against me, in and out. “Or aren’t you enjoying yourself?”

  Dammit, I was. I wanted this and hated it at the same time. I reveled in the dark shivers that came from my deepest places, running up my spine to the top of my head, delighted in the aching of my arms as they struggled to hold the wine glasses level, even found a twisted kind of anticipation in the knowledge of how this would end: with his triumph and my defeat. Yet I couldn’t bear how he lorded his power over me even though I couldn’t stop myself from subjecting myself to the blatant enjoyment of his arrogant gaze, and the smug glint in his eyes told me that this was how he had imagined it playing out all along. I reached for my climax, even knowing that I couldn’t hang on to the glasses then—and knowing that the second that I failed, he would stop.

  I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back, I thought to the rhythm of his hand. But I was beyond speech now because his thumb had come up against my clit, skimming it ever so softly with every stroke of his hand. And I felt his presence wrapping ever more tightly around me as my pulse pounded in my head.

  “I can make you come just like this,” he said, a quiet monotone that seemed to drum in my ears to the beating of my heat. “I can break you with three fingers.” His lips curved in that delicious, infuriating smile. “I could break you with one.”

  I bi
t my lip against my whimper, not wanting to give him the satisfaction, even as I tried to tilt my hips into his hand. My sex was burning now, a ring of fire around his hand. I felt suffused and empty at once, so much that I was at the edge of pain even though he was being utterly, absurdly gentle. And still his thumb just skimmed my clit, teasing but offering no relief.

  I wanted to shoot him a reply, something clever and barbed, but the champagne glasses were shaking dangerously in my hands and my head felt stuffed, and all I could do was bite back the tiny sounds that tried to come at the end of each breath as I closed my eyes tight against the avidity of his gaze.

  There would be no release for me like this. It could go on forever, pulling me thinner and thinner. The only escape was for me to spill the wine on purpose, and I couldn’t force myself to do that, even though I already knew how it was going to end.

  And then the pressure of his thumb deepened, finally, for three strokes, and I came apart, rocking forward hard—

  The champagne sloshed, and in the same instant, his hand was gone. My eyes flew open with a ragged gasp as I stood, staggered, still battered by the first hard spasms of an orgasm that died away instantly.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, no, you don’t. Don’t you dare.”

  I was still on fire, still aching, even the air chafing my body intolerably. The echoes of the interrupted orgasm were like a thin blade across my raw nerves.

  “Challenge over,” Dorian said.

  2

  I looked at my hands where drops of champagne had spilled onto them. In a sudden fit of pique, I dropped the flutes onto the carpet. One broke, and the other rolled a few inches before coming to a stop.

  “No,” I said, kicking my feet free of my torn cami as I backed away from him. “Game over. I’m done playing.”

  He smiled at me. “Twenty-four hours. You don’t have to play, but if you don’t—well, then, you’ll just have to wait.”

  I glared at him. I knew what he was threatening. Twenty-four hours without sex. As if I couldn’t go twenty-four hours without sex.

  I’d gone twenty-one years without sex with no problems at all, I thought, in my anger ignoring the fact that only the last few counted for anything…and that I’d met Dorian himself only a few months before.

  Still, what kind of desperate nympho did he think I was?

  A desperate nympho stuck out at sea with an incredibly handsome, incredibly skillful vampire who would do his level best to make her pay for refusing to play along, I answered myself promptly.

  Dammit.

  “Easy for you to ask,” I said, raising my chin. “I think I’ll lose either way.” All my nerves were still on fire, jangling with unfulfillment.

  “Most likely, yes,” he agreed easily. “But the question remains: how much will you enjoy losing?”

  “I didn’t enjoy this at all,” I snapped back, my face flushing from the transparent lie since I couldn’t even manage to sound convincing to my own ears.

  “Didn’t you?” Dorian replied. “Your next challenge, then. Convince me that you don’t like this at all.”

  He walked up to me and put a finger to my lips again. I glared at him, refusing to give a reaction this time—at least not one that he could see—but he slid it slowly down my throat before stopping between my breasts.

  “You haven’t done anything yet,” I said, my voice trembling only slightly. “What are you going to do?”

  He stepped even closer, so that the fabric of his clothes brushed against my naked body, and his hands skated down to the band of my shorts around my hips.

  “I’ll make it easy on you,” he whispered into my ear as he slowly tugged them down.

  I could make him stop. I’d already said I was done with the game, hadn’t I? I wasn’t desperate. If he insisted on holding me to my ridiculous commitment of twenty-four hours, then all the better. We probably needed time to regroup, to establish some part of our relationship on a less physical level.

  Anyway, surely by now it was only twenty-three and a half hours, and I’d be asleep for part of that, so how hard could it be?

  But instead of saying any of that, my hips moved in closer against his as he slipped the bands of my shorts and underwear down together, and I heard my voice murmur back, “What do you mean by easy? I have to convince you I don’t like…what?”

  His voice dropped even lower. “To be hurt.”

  My throat suddenly seemed to close up as the hair rose on the back of my neck. I knew I could tell him no, that I really didn’t want him to do it. I knew that if I really wanted him to stop, if I insisted, I could end this right now and wait out my twenty-four hours in whatever part of the ship I wanted.

  But there had always been that edge when we came together, the danger, the taste of pain. From the beginning, it had been what had scared me about Dorian the most. And what had drawn me the most irresistibly to him.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said, the words barely forced through the tightness in my throat. Panic, I decided to label it. Panic, because the other things I might have called it were far too frightening.

  “You can trust me,” he said as my shorts cleared my thighs and dropped the rest of the way to the floor. I was leaning against him now, my naked body against his fully clothed one, still dressed in that damnable three-piece suit. One of his hands skimmed back up my body until he was resting his fingertips ever so lightly against the side of my face, pulling back so that he could pierce me with his impossibly blue eyes.

  “Tonight,” he finished.

  I could trust him tonight…but not all nights. I had seen looks in his eyes that had sent my mind wheeling in circles, terrible circles of terrible thoughts.

  But tonight I could trust him. Tonight, he would stop at a place that was as safe as I ever could be with one such as him. I could trust him—even though I could never trust myself.

  “Tonight,” I found myself breathing in return. An agreement.

  “Good girl,” he murmured. The hand touching my cheek slid to the back of my head. Gently, almost caressingly, he plucked out the hair clip and dropped it to the floor so that my hair tumbled down my back. Then, as he met my gaze, he twisted his hand in it slowly, increasing his pressure until my neck arched and the roots of my hair ached in protest.

  “Remember, Cora, what this game is,” he said, his words soft, level. “Prove to me that you don’t like this. If you fail, I will stop.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and gave a tiny nod, the movement sending a sharper pain into my head. A battle of wills with a vampire. How on earth did I ever think that this wasn’t a losing proposition?

  And why was it that the idea of losing so foolishly sent my pulse racing hard?

  He dropped his head to my arched neck, and I clamped down against the shiver of anticipation. But there was no pain there, no sharpness of teeth parting flesh, no hammer to my brain as the anguishing intoxicants in his saliva hit my nervous system.

  No, that would be too easy. And Dorian never, ever made it easy.

  His hand that was still on my hip slid upward to one of my breasts. Even as he kissed me with almost delicate tenderness, his fingers tightened slowly, inexorably, digging into the sensitive flesh. My nipple ached against his palm—not from the pain of his hold but because it lacked it.

  I tightened my jaw against my urge to shift, to guide his hand as his mouth moved across my throat lightly, too lightly, butterfly kisses compared to the vise on my breast.

  Then, as if he had read my mind, he did move, splaying his fingers so that my nipple was bared to the air again between them. I swallowed as his fingers began to tighten on either side. But almost instantly, Dorian paused.

  “What’s that?” he murmured in my ear. “You want it?”

  I screwed my eyes shut, reminding myself of the roundabout rules. If I said I did, it was over. And that was the last thing that I wanted right now.

  “No,” I said, and to my own astonishment, my voice was perfectly level
. “No, I don’t like it at all.”

  Liar, liar, liar, my body sang, but it was enough for Dorian for the purposes of his game, and his fingers began to tighten again.

  I bit back my hiss of pleasure as the hard nub of flesh was trapped, the pincering pressure growing with every second. It hurt, oh, how it hurt, the pain of it as sweet as the burn of wine going down my throat.

  His mouth was gentle, a delicate counterpoint to the pain his hands were causing me. I swallowed back my whimper, afraid that it would reveal too much pleasure. Afraid that it would make him stop.

  He kissed his way down my throat, my collarbone, then pulled away for a moment. With my eyes closed, I couldn’t tell what he was doing—but I didn’t dare to open them. I hardly dared to breathe.

  An instant later, my answer came in the form of the soft rasp of his tongue on my compressed nipple. He pulled back, and the cool air of the room made its throbbing peak almost unbearably sensitive.

  I must have betrayed something, made a noise, however faint, because he said, “Was that enjoyment?”

  I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. My other nipple was throbbing now, needing equal attention—equal punishment.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  Damn him.

  “No,” I said, my voice only trembling slightly.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because if you were, I couldn’t do this.”

  His hand released my breast, and I almost cried out in disappointment, but then Dorian’s mouth was there, closing over it. I wanted to protest, to tell him that it was the other breast that ached for his touch, but I clamped my jaw down as his tongue pushed my nipple against the hardness of his teeth, not enough to cut, oh, no, but enough to send shivers of reaction through my body. My clit throbbed to the rhythm of his mouth, my naked thighs chafing at the dampness there.

  And then, finally—his hand was on my other breast, tightening, hurting until my head was so full of pain and the place between my legs felt so swollen that I thought I would burst.