A Very Alpha Christmas Read online

  “Oh, my,” I said when I could talk again. Impishly, I took his finger, which still hovered in front of my face, into my mouth to suck the last few particles off. His eyes went sharper as I did, as if he could bore right though me with them.

  “You like it, then,” he said when I released him again.

  “Oh, you could certainly say that,” I agreed.

  He took another dollop of cream on the same finger, carelessly gouging into the side of the artful mound, and put it in his own mouth, holding me with his eyes. His brows went up.

  “Kudos to the chef,” he agreed after he had swallowed. “Subtle. Unexpectedly so.”

  He took a slice of peach and dragged it through the cream, but his eyes never left me.

  “If I had known what the chef had planned, I would have planned dinner someplace else,” he said. “But I thought you might want to see your first ocean sunset.”

  “The sunset. Yes,” I said, looking out across the gray ocean waves to the horizon for the first time since I had slipped into the tub.

  Land was now out of sight, and even though I knew we were still in the relatively populated shipping lanes not far from one of the busiest bays in the world, it was easy to imagine, when the only other boat on the water was a tiny dot in the distance, that we were in the middle of nowhere.

  The last few dull red glimmers still stained the sky far to the west, where the sun had slipped away unnoticed some time before. In truth, I had hardly noticed any surroundings that were not quite immediate. Not with Dorian just a few feet from me.

  He held out the peach slice, topped with cream, without another word. It was perfectly, deliciously ripe, almost over-ripe, and I bit the top off quickly even as the nectar rolled down Dorian’s fingers. The tart and sweet tastes combined deliciously in my mouth, and I sighed with pleasure. I ate it slowly, careless of the sticky state of Dorian’s fingers, and he loaded up the bitten half with whipped cream again and popped it into his own mouth.

  “That’s double-dipping,” I said, obscurely amused.

  “Double what?” he asked, his expression puzzled.

  “When you dip, bite, and dip again. You’re always so super-polite. I thought you’d be against that.”

  Dorian’s confusion was replaced by amusement. “A time for everything. It’s not polite to do any number of things we’ve done tonight at, say, a cocktail party.”

  He was offering me a blackberry now, and as I took it, I closed my lips briefly on his fingers, working my tongue against them.

  “I know,” I said after I’d swallowed. “It just tickled me.”

  “You have an odd sense of humor at times,” he said.

  I chuckled. “If only that were my worst flaw.”

  The next fruit was the strawberry—the clichéd strawberry, brought far above the status of any cliché by its utter succulence.

  “Okay,” I declared. “Whatever that strawberry is, I want more later.”

  “Fraises des bois,” he said.

  I blinked at him. “Bless you?”

  “Wild strawberries, some people call them. Or alpine strawberries,” he said. “They aren’t really wild. But they do not bear as heavily the common species, and they are rare and precious as a result.”

  “Expensive, you mean,” I said. “Everything you do is expensive.”

  It was his turn to chuckle. “Don’t you think you’re worth it?” He dangled another strawberry temptingly under my nose.

  “Yes,” I said decisively. If I was going to marry a vampire, by God, I would have expensive strawberries when I did. “Yes, I am.”

  Between the two of us, we demolished the fruit quickly, even with my little nibbles off Dorian’s fingers. Despite the work of my tongue, his hand was quite sticky when he finished, and after he had returned the dish to the tray, he started to roll up his sleeve.

  But made bold by the wine, I decided to issue a challenge.

  4

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  His eyebrows shot up. “I was going to rinse my hand in the water.”

  “You can’t,” I said. “You haven’t lost your shirt yet.”

  “Is that how this works?” Dorian asked.

  “You seem to be making up the rules as we go along,” I said. “I don’t see why I can’t, too.”

  “Maybe because it’s my game,” he challenged.

  “Do you really want that?” I shot back.

  He seemed to think for a moment. “Okay,” he said then. “So, what must I do to roll up my sleeves?”

  “You must pay a fine,” I declared. “Your socks. Both of them. Now.”

  “That seems reasonable enough,” he granted. “But it pushes the game faster toward its end.”

  “I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” I said.

  “Don’t you, yet?” he murmured, a light of challenge in his eyes that stirred a place deep inside of me. “Then I must not be playing it right.”

  Before I could say anything else or change my mind, he pulled off his socks and flung them aside. Then he rolled up his right sleeve above his elbow and dragged his hand in the water, pulling it out after a moment and shaking it before giving it a final dry on the napkin. His right hand clean, he used it to roll up his left sleeve in turn.

  “I didn’t say you could do both,” I protested.

  “Two socks,” he said. “Unearned. That means I can roll whatever cuffs I like.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. I’d forgotten that he could manipulate the rules as well as I could. And it always did end up to his benefit rather than mine.

  I began to regret my rash demands.

  As if to flaunt the freedom he’d given himself, he rolled up the cuffs on his pants, as well, until they were just below his knees.

  “The water’s deeper than that,” I said, pretending to be unconcerned even though I was certain that his actions already reflected a definite plan. “If you step in here, you’ll get soaked. And I can’t see you wanting to wear wet clothes for however much longer you want to draw this game out.”

  “So then you’ll win?” he asked. He was teasing me again.

  I made a face at him. “I think the longer this game goes on, the less I understand it.”

  “I think you’ll understand this just fine.”

  The dark glint was back in his eyes again, and he slid across the deck until he was directly behind me. I started to crane around to see what he was up to.

  “Hush,” he ordered. “Sit back.”

  My heart sped up again as I settled back against the pillow, the anticipatory buzz in my senses returning. The truth was that the dinner had left me feeling pleasantly light and a little reckless. The four full glasses of wine I’d drunk probably had something to do with that.

  His feet slipped into my peripheral vision on either side of my head, and I stifled a slightly boozy giggle as I realized that he was sitting above and behind me, essentially straddling my head from where he was sitting on the deck.

  His ankles and calves followed, easing down into the water so that his upper calves lay across my shoulders, pressing me gently against the jets on the backrest of the molded seat with my arms floating out to the sides.

  “I could tickle your feet,” some impish part of me made me suggest.

  “Try it,” he suggested coolly.

  Fine. I would. I flexed my fingers once, preparing them for the best tickling position, and then, waggling them wildly, I touched them to the soles of his feet.

  Nothing. He didn’t even twitch.

  “Don’t tell me that vampires aren’t ticklish,” I said. Yes, I was most definitely tipsy because I had no reason to be so disappointed by that discovery.

  “I don’t think any adult agnates are,” he said. “At least not in that way. If you mean an itch such as you might get in your nose, though….”

  “I can’t use an itching nose against you.” I squirmed tentatively against his legs, and though their pressure on my shoulders had been de
ceptively light, they now kept me quite effectively pinned.

  “Why would you want to use anything against me?” he asked. His voice was still light, casual.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe because you use pretty much everything against me.”

  He chuckled then, and in that dark sound, I realized how many different ways my last statement could be taken.

  “Not yet, I haven’t,” he said.

  I shivered despite the warmth of the tub.

  His left hand found the curve of my jaw then, his fingers chilly in the winter wind as they wandered down my throat. I wondered what he could possibly intend with me almost entirely submerged in the water and him still mostly clothed.

  Then his other hand came around, and on his fingers were the last remnants of the cream.

  “Taste it, Cora,” he ordered. “Take it.”

  I opened my mouth to let his fingers slide inside, accompanied by the sweet-tart confection that covered them. I closed my eyes as I worked my tongue over them slowly, and he slid them back and forth in frank suggestion.

  Finally, long after I’d sucked the last morsel of sweetness from them, he slid them out and dipped them in the water again before using the wetness to trace soft lines across my face. The freezing air and the churning, heated water created a strange kind of counterpoint, not exactly erotic on their own but unbalancing, setting my nerves on edge.

  He slid one of his hands down again, following the line of my throat into the water and farther down to cup my breast as I caught my breath. I realized that there could be no completion here, not by his hands, not as long as I stayed in the pool, and I couldn’t possibly expose any part of my soaked body to the cold air for more than a moment. The bite of the breeze on the few lines of water on my cheeks and neck were enough to tell me that. So there would be only teasing. Only torture and frustration.

  I was ashamed at how much I was looking forward to it.

  His fingers were working across my breast as if he were drawing lines on it as he had on my face and neck. The pattern was abstract, almost purposeless…except that it came closer and closer to my nipple at every pass.

  I was determined to wait it out, to wait him out without giving him the satisfaction of a reaction, and so I closed my eyes and tried to force my face into perfect relaxation. But if anything, that made the anticipation worse. I could still feel his eyes on me, and I knew that he felt the tension through my body, and I was just as certain that he was enjoying it.

  Finally, his wandering fingers made contact with my nipple—but only to graze it. I made only the tiniest noise of disappointment, and he laughed and instantly closed his fingers around it.

  “Was that what you were looking for?” he asked.

  “I think you know,” I barely managed because now that he’d taken it, he was moving his fingers on it gently, rhythmically, tugging and rolling it in a way that shot straight down between my legs and connected to a throbbing heat in the deepest part of me. He didn’t hurt me now. He merely coaxed, oh, so gently did he coax, and my body sang obediently in response.

  His other hand slid from my neck, where he’d been feeling my pulse beneath his fingers as he sent it beating faster, down to the other breast so that his hands could work together until the heat of the spa seemed to pound in my face and I was wriggling and gasping against the seat.

  Then I found it, the one jet that shot upwards, and with a cry of victory, I rocked my hips forward over it. I held myself there as it battered me and Dorian’s hands kept moving, beat after interminable beat, and finally I shattered and came, panting against his hands and legs that held me.

  When it was over, I slid back against the headrest with a groan, and silently, Dorian pulled his limbs from the water. I lay with my eyes closed as I heard his footsteps retreat into the stateroom. It wasn’t like I could go anywhere, anyway. It wasn’t until his return that I opened them again, half against my will.

  Dorian was standing beside the hot tub, a huge, fluffy bathrobe outstretched in his hands.

  “Stand up,” he ordered.

  Without question, I did, stepping up onto the seat as the hot water sheeted from my body. The cold air hit me like a hammer, but already, my arms were sliding into the robe, and it dropped all the way to my ankles as I stepped onto the frigid deck.

  A second later, I had been swooped up into Dorian’s arms. With a startled sound, I grabbed him around the neck, but he didn’t even pause as he bore me back toward the stateroom. As he stepped inside, he slipped his hand into his pocket and tapped a few times on his phone, and the great glass door slid closed again.

  The room, though, had been thoroughly chilled by its exposure to the winter night, and the closed doors only stopped the wind from whipping through it. But with another tap on his phone, a gas fire flared up in a fireplace against one of the side walls, in front of a small sitting area below the bed on its dais overlooking the sea.

  Dorian set me down on a curved chaise there, and I looked up at him with a smirk of my own. “Such a shame for you that you still have your pants.”

  In fact, he still had his tie, his waistcoat, and his belt, as well. And, I supposed, his underwear. He never had been one for wearing undershirts, though, a lack that I’d rather enjoyed on more than one occasion.

  “A shame for you, as well,” he said, straightening. “But now it’s time for you to earn this.”

  He tugged at the knot of the tie around his neck, and in two long pulls, it came off. He wound the length around his hands, and my breath caught as I thought of far too many things he might do with it.

  “And what do I have to do for that?” I asked, pretending innocence—probably not very well, at this point.

  “We will see, won’t we?” he replied.

  I tried to give him a bold smile even as my heart accelerated. There was another feeling in the back of my mind, one that was neither fear nor anticipation nor lust, and it had been growing for some time.

  A quiet, seething guilt—for things I had not said. For a confession I needed to make.

  Not now, though. Not yet. I would tell him eventually, but I wouldn’t ruin this. For either of us.

  So I reinforced my wavering smile as he bent over me with his tie in hand. I held out my wrists with my eyebrows arched in a way I hoped was flirtatious, but he just chuckled.

  “And how would I get the dressing gown off you then?” he asked.

  Dressing gown. I blinked before I realized he meant the robe.

  “You’d tear it off, like you like to tear everything off,” I said with only a touch of resentment.

  But he just shook his head, and he smiled, which was the last thing that I saw before he lowered the band of silk to my eyes.

  The tie wasn’t very wide, but Dorian was skillful, as always, and he wrapped it around my head so that the second pass overlapped the first and shut out any crack of light, even when I tilted my head back.

  “That is what I’m planning on doing with it,” he said softly, so close to my ear that I jumped.

  “I see,” I said through my suddenly dry mouth. Which was, in retrospect, probably the single stupidest thing that I could have said at that moment, but perhaps he would think I’d meant it as a joke.

  “Do you?” he asked, wicked laughter in his voice.

  I felt his hands on the lapels of the robe, sliding downward toward its waist. Neither of us had tied the belt closed, and now, at his tug, it fell open to expose my body. I could feel the heat from the gas fireplace on one side of my body, but the air of the room was still frigid, and goosebumps rose up instantly across my skin.

  “Cold, Cora?” Dorian asked, his tone coolly solicitous. But the tweak on my hard nipples that came in the next moment was anything but that.

  “If I am, it’s your fault,” I managed to shoot back.

  “Ah, a challenge. I like a challenge.”

  My mind swam with what he might do next. By the rules that he’d apparently established, he couldn’t
use any part of himself that was still in clothing. But that eliminated very few options with him, as I well knew. He had his hands, his mouth…and anything else he cared to bring into the mix.

  As if he could read my mind, he said, “While I need no…accessories, I do like to see you in them…and with them…sometimes. But there is, in fact, very, very little action at all necessary on my part—if I so choose. Do you remember when we first met?”

  I nodded, swallowing. When he had taken my blood to test it to see if I was a candidate for a procedure to cure my cancer—without me having any idea what this “procedure” entailed, of course—I had all but come at his touch, and I had been almost as disturbed and baffled as I had been aroused by it.

  Now I still stirred at every brush of his fingers, but my reaction had become so much a part of me and of my relationship with him that its absence would have been shocking.

  “That was before we’d formed a bond, of course,” he continued. “Our connection was…faint. Only somewhat more than that between me and any other human. Now it is very much deeper. I want you to know that I play a kind of game with you every time we are together, Cora.” His fingers brushed my ankle at those words, and I shivered at the stirring that the touch sent through me. “It’s a game in which I am careful not to allow too much through the bond.”

  The trickle of awareness that was coming from his fingers already seemed a little stronger.

  “Why not?” I asked. I’d meant to speak the word boldly, but it came out thin. Weak.

  “It is more challenging that way,” he said quietly. “And, more importantly, less dangerous. But just for a moment, I want to show you…what it could be.”

  “Now?” I asked. Why now? was what I really meant. Why not before?, too—and also, Why not always?

  “I have to touch your mind,” he said simply. “I try not to do that. It’s too easy to…change things. Our bond is a connection of the minds, and so some level of contact, of exchange, is inevitable, but too much….” He trailed off.