The teasing hand changed direction, tracing the lines of my body back upward with deliberate slowness. When it reached my breast, I held my breath. The suede over his thumb rubbed my nipple, circling, and I moaned a little.

“Please,” I begged.

“Surrender,” he said.

The thumb circled lightly, lazy and maddening. I thought I might explode.

I turned my head and nipped his earlobe, whispering, “Haven’t I already?”

The hand left my breast to catch my face there, and his mouth sealed over mine, another promise, his tongue seeking and ravenous. I had never kissed anyone like that, reckless and messy and gasping. He released my wrists and spun me back to face him, and then I felt both of his hands on my ass, pressing me against him. I was straining toward his body, trying to rub every inch of my skin against whatever I could reach.

My mouth was in a frenzy against him, but his tongue was slow, deliberate. I was getting desperate. He was holding back, teasing me, enjoying himself. Playing with me, drawing out the torture now that he’d gotten the surrender he wanted. He was treating me like a kitten again.

I’d show him a kitten.

My hands moved to his back as the kiss grew more ferocious, and I lightly trailed my nails up and down his skin. They were still blood red from Mrs. Cleavers’s paint, still filed to points to impress the Pinkies at the caravan. He murmured approvingly into the kiss, and I murmured back while softly and sensually drawing one single nail ever so gently up his spine.

And then I made my hand into a claw and ripped my talons down his back.

He drew back from the kiss and hissed at me, teeth bared. I smiled smugly.

“Meow,” I whispered.

“Indeed,” he growled, his voice dripping with ferocity.

For just a second, I registered that I could smell the blood on his back, and I was filled with a wild desire to run my tongue up the wounds I had made. And then the full force of his body drove me to the bed and pinned me there, pressing me down into the cool sheets.

The studied tension of his kiss was gone, all veils of playfulness dissolved in the blood on my hands. When he kissed me this time, he meant it.

I meant it, too. I wanted him, more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life. My hands held his face right there, daring him to stop kissing me for even a second. Somewhere at the other end of the bed, he was ripping off his boots and stockings with one hand, but his tongue kept lapping at me, pulling me in. I heard things hit the ground, and then he pressed back over me, and I sighed against his lips, arching my back and finding the heavy fabric of his breeches still there, between us. Between me and what I needed.

I didn’t want to wait another second to feel the full, hot length of his skin along my body, to find him poised at the brink of me. I wrapped my legs around him and ground my body against the hardness there, whimpering, all pride and modesty forgotten.

He pulled away to whisper raggedly in my ear, “It takes two hands to do this, love,” and I understood.

My hands fumbled for the ties on his breeches as he licked down my throat and between my breasts, and I mumbled, “Don’t they have kilts in your world?”

Finally, the laces were loose, and I tried to push down the cloth with clumsy fingers. Just then, he started circling a breast with his tongue, and I dropped the laces to clutch the sheet underneath me, gasping as he took my nipple into his mouth and sucked. I threw my head back and moaned, twining my fingers in his hair.

He kissed me as he shucked his breeches, and the kiss built in intensity until the full weight of him finally covered me, skin meeting skin until there was nothing left between us. I could hear myself whimpering again, feel myself wiggling, but still he held back.

“Are you mine?” he whispered in my ear, and his knee nudged my legs apart. His gloved hand teased me, stroking, dipping and caressing. I was so close. So close.

His finger worked faster, and he licked the hollow behind my ear. I threw back my head and looked up at the mirror then, at the dark fall of his hair and the pale, powerful ripples of his back. I saw the four straight red lines where I had clawed him, already healing. It was only a second that my attention wandered, but then the finger was gone, and he was pushing against me, poised at my last barrier, waiting for my word.

“Are you?”

I was panting, wanting, groaning, a beast of emotion and yearning that couldn’t be denied. And he wanted words from me, wanted me to think. Wanted me to make a choice.

“Sometimes,” I whispered back in his ear.

Then, so quietly, “Now.”

And with a chuckle of fierce triumph, he plunged into me, again and again and again, and I was already there, somehow. I cried out in release, fireworks blossoming behind my closed eyes as he touched something inside me that I hadn’t known existed. He stroked again, and again, and I kept waiting for him to bite me or draw blood or do something definitively inhuman. But instead, he just kissed me as I came, his tongue tasting every inch of my mouth with the same hotness that burned below.

“Stop, stop. I’m dying,” I said. Inside me, everything felt swollen, loud, overtouched, sensitive beyond belief. “Please.”

But he rolled to his side, taking me with him, and his hand moved down to caress me even as he kept moving. Forehead pressed to mine, he said, “You don’t mean that. You don’t want me to stop.”

“I can’t take any more,” I said. “One’s all I’m good for. This is too much.”

“It’s never too much.” He chuckled, his finger moving faster again.

And then I felt it, deep inside me, blooming like some bright flower in the darkness, something new and strange. And I was riding it, consumed by it, the pleasure sweet and sharp as a violin note, rocking me to my core. And we both cried out in release, quaking together before collapsing in a heap, laughing.

24

Sometime later, I woke up curled against him under the red velvet coverlet, my head on his chest. And quite surprised at myself. His arm was around me, his dove-colored glove absentmindedly stroking my wrist. His gloves were the only things he was still wearing. I, of course, wore nothing.

“Good morning, poppet,” he said with a sleepy grin.

“Poppet?”

“I believe we’re technically pirates now. And you smile in your sleep. I probably did, too.”

Warm and rested and satisfied for what felt like the first time in forever, I stretched, my knuckles and toes grazing the walls. For someone on an impossible quest, in that moment, I felt marvelous.

“You’re going to have to wash that glove,” I observed. “Or throw it away.”

He examined his hand, grinning, and said, “Perhaps I’ll have it framed instead.”

“I didn’t glance, you know,” I said. “When we touched.”

“I know,” he said. “And I’m glad. I don’t want you to see what’s in my head when I’m touching you. That would take away all the fun.”

“Does it only work once?” I asked. “The glancing?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Every gift is different.”

I should have felt shy, and it seemed strange that I didn’t. But I was comfortable there, in a rich deviant’s bed on a submarine, cradled by the blood drinker who inexplicably adored me.

“Why do you love me?” I asked, lured into candor by the strangeness of the situation.

“Hmm?”

“I’m just curious. I show up out of nowhere, and you all but pledge your undying love to me, even though you don’t really know me. Just because of a broken heart and a spell. It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” he said, chuckling. I smiled, to feel his chest rumble with it. “But don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

“I believe that other people believe in it,” I said. “But I’m just too practical for that sort of thing. There are too many variables, too many chemicals and likes and dislikes and shared interests and the timing of it all.”

“Ah, a romantic,” he said wryly. “But you’re wrong.”

“Am I?”

“What if you could take everything you were looking for in a person and whisper it into someone’s ear, and they brought that person to you? And then, when you saw them for the first time, even if you didn’t know they were the one for you, you suddenly knew it anyway?” His finger traced my eyebrows, my cheekbones, as he thought a moment. “What if your heart stopped when you saw that person, and only after that did you realize that they truly were everything you ever wanted?”

“OK, that would be nice,” I had to admit.

“That’s what happened for me,” he said gently.

“What did you ask for?” I needed to know. It was a tall order to live up to the feeling he had described.

“Cleverness, courage, beauty, humor, strength, slyness, curves, magic, talent, understanding. An equal.”

“Didn’t you ask for someone … you know … like you?”

“I did.”

“But I’m not what you are.”

“Oh, that,” he said, considering. “That’s not a problem. If it ever comes down to it, I can make you like me.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I’ve only done it once. Whatever it felt like, to her, it was better than dying. Asking another Bludman anything about the process is considered terribly gauche. But as you’ve seen, there are advantages.”

“Such as?”

“Improved strength and healing, longer life. And with all of those, of course, come courage and humor, because you don’t have to worry so much. When you’re less likely to die and you don’t have to fight for food, the main concern is keeping those you love safe.”

“Oh, that’s all, is it?”

“Well, yes, that can be a tall order.” He chuckled again.

“I have other questions,” I said, trying to seem uninterested.