Текст книги "Desire in His Blood"

Автор книги: Zoey Draven

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Chapter 34

Gemma

Azur was sleeping when I woke.

Judging from the cerulean cast across the floor, it was midnight or a little after, the moon bright overhead outside the stretch of his wide windows. They were pulled open, a cool breeze sweeping over my overheated, sensitive skin.

In the quiet, the events of the day returned to me, slow and thick like golden honey. I didn’t dare move my body. It was well used. Bruised and bitten and licked and kissed. There wasn’t an inch of it that Azur hadn’t explored with a determined, erotic gleam in those red eyes.

My belly fluttered as I watched those eyes dart behind closed lids now. His black hair was tangled in his horns. He was scowling even in his sleep, his brows drawn down. The sharp slices of his cheekbones were more prominent in the moonlight, casting shadows in the hollows of his face.

Lying side by side, I realized we were still joined. I must’ve passed out after my last orgasm. Maybe he had too. I winced when I shifted, feeling muscles tug and pull deep inside me, muscles I’d never even been aware of before now. Slowly, I backed my hips away, and his cock slid from me, though it burned as it dragged against my sensitive flesh.

Azur’s eyes opened, a flicker of red in the darkness, his body tensing, all his relaxation from sleep gone. Then I felt him soften. A deep huff left his lips. His arms tightened around me.

“Hurting?” he asked, his voice quiet.

There was a time when, perhaps, he’d wanted to hurt me.

Now I heard the muted worry in his tone, in the way he studied me, his face turned toward me on his pillow.

“A little worse for wear,” I whispered back, not trusting my hoarse voice. Half the keep had probably heard my moans and screams. But I didn’t regret it. I didn’t regret a single moment.

Except if Kalia heard, I thought, cringing. I prayed to all the deities in the universe that she’d stayed at the village.

When I felt something twitch beneath me, I exclaimed a surprised, “Oh!”

I was lying on one of his wings.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, suddenly feeling shy, which was ridiculous considering everything we’d done to one another throughout the course of the day.

But this was new, wasn’t it?

This kind of intimacy.

The quiet between sleep. The study of my slumbering husband’s darkly handsome features. The unspoken choreography of wings and horns and limbs as we lay beside one another in his bed.

This made me shy. I almost preferred that he was seated deep inside my body because then I could lose myself in that pleasure and not feel uncertain about it.

Now that his rage seemed to have passed—his body returning to its normal state and the urgency of his feedings receding—I worried that he’d turn me away from his bed. I worried that he’d turn cold again.

After today, I didn’t know if I could withstand that. Now I knew how hot he ran. How passionate he could be, determined and driven. I knew the dark curl of his smile when I challenged him. I knew the blissed-out expression on his face when I squeezed his pulsing knot—which he called his seal—in my palm. Now I knew that he liked to hold my hand when we were recovering in between sex, running his calloused fingertips over my knuckles as if trying to soothe me.

I couldn’t bear it if he took that male away from me. I wanted more of him. I didn’t know if I’d ever get enough.

In the end, I didn’t need to worry at all. Azur leaned up on one elbow when I released his pinned wing, his eyes scanning over my bared flesh. I was covered in his bites, twin fang marks lining my neck, my breasts, my arms, between my thighs. Even with the baanye, I was still feeling sleepy and weakened.

But he was healed at the very least. The large gash down his chest was gone, revealing smooth skin once we’d finally bathed. Gone like magic. A faint, lightened mark—raw, healing flesh was the only evidence it had ever been.

I’d done that. My blood.

“I was too rough with you,” he grunted, his voice tinged in regret and apology.

I smiled, and Azur stilled when he saw it. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

Some of the tension in his shoulders released. His fingers brushed my swollen lips, and I felt some of his silver come leak out from between my thighs. He’d filled me up over and over again. I wondered how long it would be before nothing of him remained inside me.

Even though I felt like my body had just been through a battle, I felt infinitely relaxed. Like I’d been massaged a thousand times over or I’d just had a jug of Drovos wine. I felt like I was floating.

Then he was skimming his finger over one of his fangs—which hadn’t yet retracted fully. A pinprick of his blood mingled with the clear fluid I now knew he called his venom. Painstakingly, he dabbed his fingers across the bite marks, gentle and light. Ludayn had done that but only with her venom. With blood, however, I felt a tingling warmth.

When he dabbed at a mark on my arm, I watched as the bite healed itself entirely. When I smeared away his blood, I saw nothing remained. It wasn’t tender to the touch either. It was simply gone.

It wasn’t that the bites had hurt. But I realized he was trying to ease my pain, my soreness, however he could, no matter how small.

Azur worked methodically. Slowly. Deliberately. His touch turned into something else entirely when he finished between my thighs. His fingers traced up the sticky mess between my labia, and my breath hitched, a familiar curl of desire making me reach for his hand.

Azur grunted but pulled away.

“Let me draw you a bath,” he murmured.

“You don’t have to do that,” I told him. “It’s after midnight.”

“I’m not tired,” he responded. He was already rising. Azur’s bed was large and incredibly comfortable. It had a dark canopy over the top, held up by four, large columns, on all corners of the bed. “I’ll have a keeper bring some binding root in tea too. For the pain.”

“Let them sleep. I don’t want to disturb them at this hour,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”

“Do you have an aversion to letting others take care of you?” Azur asked me softly, eyeing me as he rounded to my side of the bed. Still incredibly, incredibly naked. My eyes strayed to his thick, curved cock. Still hard.

I blinked, my brow furrowing. “What?”

His claws tilted my chin up so that I was looking at him and not distracted by the tantalizing length of him.

“Do you have an aversion to letting others take care of you?” he repeated. Firmly. Intentionally.

I swallowed.

“The keepers are only too happy to do their Kylaira’s bidding. There is a reason we have a few who stay on during the night. And if my wife is in pain, I will see her well. I don’t give a damn about anything else or if I’m disturbing any of my keepers’ sleeping patterns.”

His words made my heart skip.

“You’re incorrigible,” I said with zero malice. “Very well. Wake the entire keep, then. I’d like food, too, while you’re at it. I’m starving.”

Hearing Azur’s soft laugh was a reward in itself.

“Yes, Kylaira,” he rasped. “I will make sure you are well fed.”

“And if you intend to feed anymore, you better make sure some baanye is brought up too,” I added quietly.

Want flared in his eyes, but then I watched him rein it back in.

“I’ve taken too much from you,” Azur told me. “No more feedings until your strength is returned.”

A flicker of disappointment sank in my belly.

We’ll see, I thought silently.

“I mean it,” Azur said firmly, eyeing me like he could hear my thoughts.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He mumbled something under his breath and then swept me into his arms, making me exclaim my surprise and grapple for his shoulders. He walked us over to his washroom. Kylorr bathing rooms, I’d discovered, were nearly identical to human ones. Though much, much larger to account for wings.

Azur’s washroom, however, had a large sunken in bathing pool. Deep enough to stand in. One he unveiled with a swipe over an invisible sensor, and I watched the floor slide silently away. One of the higher-tech items I’d seen in this entire keep.

“Do I have one?” I asked, gaping at it. I’d never considered that one might be hiding under my floor.

“No,” he grunted. “Not in that room.”

When we’d bathed off Azur’s blood earlier, we’d done it in the shower pod. But I was all too happy to soak my tenderness away.

“Though, these rooms are where you’re likely to stay,” came that husky voice. I didn’t dare breathe when I glanced up at him, though he was focused on filling the bathing pool, the water coming out steaming from the silver tap. “Don’t you think?”

I hadn’t given much thought to our sleeping arrangements. I couldn’t deny that his words filled me with pleasure. Now that I knew what sex was like with him, I wanted to take full advantage whenever I could.

“Yes,” I said softly. “I believe so.”

There were stairs that led into the pool. Azur stepped down them as the water lapped higher and higher. He placed me on a ledge seat lining the wall.

“I’ll be back,” he told me once he made sure I was situated. “My Kylaira demanded food, I believe.”

My lips twitched as I watched him leave, the heavy bulk of his black wings disappearing into the moonlit bedroom. He wasn’t gone long. He returned with food for me and a steaming kettle of tea, displayed on an intricate tray, a mere moment later. As if the keepers had been waiting with one at the ready outside the door.

Azur lowered the tray so it was perched on the edge of the pool. He made sure to turn off the taps when the water came to the tops of my shoulders, though the water level wasn’t nearly enough for him, and then he waded in.

My husband took the seat directly across from me. His wings spread wide, as did his arms, lazily draped over the stone edge, presenting the bulk of his finely muscled chest. On full display.

“You’re so far away,” I teased softly, eyeing him. I nearly sighed in contentment as the heat of the water loosened tight muscles and soothed small aches.

“For good reason,” he grunted, those red eyes pinned on me with the intensity I’d grown accustomed to. “If I were any closer, you’d be bent over the side of the pool already.”

I gasped. Heat pooled in my belly. I’d thought I was tapped out. Apparently I’d been mistaken.

But I knew my body couldn’t take much more and so, perhaps, it was a good thing he kept his distance. For now.

To distract myself, I ate from the tray. I smiled when I saw the small platter of steam cakes, decorated with blue-and-pink blooms, still hot as if Ludayn’s mother had just taken them from the clay oven herself. Another platter of herb-crusted meat, black in color, sat beside it. A compote of purple berries with mushed black seeds were spread over glistening, roasted brown roots. To top it off, there was a creamy custard, savory and warm and bright yellow like lemons from the Collis.

When I poured the tea into the garnet-colored crystal teacup, I saw the liquid was blue.

“Binding root,” Azur explained. “But I also had the keepers blend in marroswood.”

“Marroswood?” I asked, frowning, not recognizing the name.

Azur tilted his chin down. He’d kept the light in the bathing room low. Soothing. Steam curled between us, all around us, like we were in our own little world. The gentle golden glow from a nearby hovering orb light cast deep shadows across the wall.

“Getting you pregnant with my child is not an option,” he informed me.

Shock made me freeze.

Gods…I’d never even thought about that.

It was clear Azur had.

“Not for some time,” he finished softly. He nodded to the tea. “That will keep my seed from taking. If you choose to drink it,” he added quietly.

Because he realized he couldn’t force me to drink it?

“It’s not the right time for me to conceive,” I told him, flushing when I thought about the amount of come he’d spilled in me in the last day. Even still, I took a long sip from the cup, the hot tea soothing on my scratchy throat. “It would be my child too. I’m not ready for one either. Not yet.”

His shoulders noticeably relaxed as I drank, even though I felt a spark of annoyance.

The silence that followed was tense and lengthy. I was unsure why him slipping marroswood into my tea bothered me so much even when I knew it was the logical decision, even when I agreed with it.

“I’m still learning, Gemma,” he said quietly.

“Learning what?” I asked.

“Learning to be a husband,” he said, his voice gruff.

I stilled. The tea was soothing. A little bitter but nothing as unpleasant as baanye. The binding root would help with the soreness at the very least.

“I will misstep. I have already with you. Many, many times,” he told me, softening my ire. “This is new to me. In case you haven’t noticed, you are my only wife. Before, I have only taken lovers. Brief and short-lived affairs because I didn’t have time for anything else.”

The words hung between us like the steam floating in the air. I sighed.

“How many?” I asked, unable to deny my curiosity.

“Lovers?” he asked. When I nodded, he ran a hand over his face, his expression wary. “Enough.”

“Enough?” I repeated, my eyes widening, my spine straightening. “You won’t tell me how many?”

Azur blew out a short huff from his nostrils. “I might still be learning, but I’m no fool, wife. I’ve had enough lovers. Enough to know how to please a female.”

I rolled my eyes, snagging a steam cake off the tray.

“Were you not pleased?” he murmured, that silky voice floating toward me, no doubt trying to distract me. I wasn’t falling for it.

I couldn’t help but glare even as I munched on a huge mouthful of the decadent cake.

“I won’t be angry,” I told him. “It angers me that you won’t tell me. Just like with the marroswood, I know that it’s right. You made the right decision. But we can at least discuss it honestly beforehand. That’s all I want.”

Azur regarded me carefully.

“Two a year since I was fifteen,” he finally told me, his tone quiet, studying me. “Approximately.”

That was…that was likely around forty lovers. He had to be five years older than me, at least.

Forty to my one. If Petyr could have even been called that.

But I’d told him I wouldn’t be mad. Still, I hadn’t expected to feel disappointment sinking in my belly.

It made me feel…inconsequential, I supposed. Because surely, out of those forty females, he’d experienced days like these with them. Forty females who knew the way he groaned, who knew the prick of his fangs and the way he gritted his teeth when the sensitive membranes of his wings were stroked, making his hips buck faster, harder.

“Oh,” I said. Because that was all I could think to say. I’d asked for this.

“Gemma.”

“Hmm?”

I met his eyes, blinking back the sudden glassiness in my gaze and reaching to the tray for anything to shove into my mouth. I’d take a gallon of baanye right now if it meant I didn’t cry in front of him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said softly after I swallowed the herb-crusted meat that tasted like ash on my tongue. “Thank you for telling me. That’s…that’s what I wanted.”

I’d thought we’d had pretty spectacular sex today. But maybe this was simply normal for him. Maybe it was nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t special to him like it had been to me. How could it be when I was so incredibly inexperienced next to him?

I heard the gentle whoosh of his wings and then the trickle of water as he approached me.

“It bothers you,” he murmured, drawing me into his arms. Pinning me in place even when I tried to turn away. “Why?”

I pressed my palm to his chest. Trying to push him away? But when I felt his warmth, his steady strength, my fingernails curled into him instead before I traced the line of his fresh scar between his pectorals.

“I didn’t think it would,” I told him truthfully. “I promise you that.”

“But it does.”

I swallowed. “Yes,” I whispered. “And now I feel so stupid for even pushing the subject.” I laughed. “Gods, how predictable.”

Azur frowned. “You have nothing to be jealous of.”

A muscle in my cheek jumped. “How can I not be? I’m feeling a little insignificant here.”

“Insignificant?” Azur repeated slowly. Now he was getting pissed. I could see it climbing, stiffening his spine, and sparking his eyes. “I didn’t marry any of them, now did I?”

“Our marriage was not a love match and you know it,” I replied, turning my face away, not at all pleased with how I was handling this. But my eyes were beginning to sting again. “Just forget it. Please. I don’t want to argue. Not after today. I’m sorry for pushing.”

Azur was quiet for a long time but he didn’t retreat. I stayed locked in his arms, red faced and tense.

“You’re my kyrana.”

I chanced a peek up at him. He’d called me that before.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked. He wasn’t glaring at me, like I’d expected. Instead, his expression was patient. Like we had all the time in the world.

“No,” I said softly.

“We don’t know why or how it happens,” he said quietly. “Whether it is by Raazos’s or Alaire’s or Gaara’s or Zor’s design. Or maybe none of them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A kyrana is a blood mate,” Azur told me, his voice smooth and rich. “Whether it is by divine selection or science or magic or even fate, whatever you wish to call it, you are my blood mate.”

“All right,” I said softly. Still confused, though Ludayn’s small comments here and there were beginning to piece together in my mind. “And what does that mean, exactly?”

“That there is no other female in this entire universe who is better suited for me than you.”

I stilled, hearing the ragged truth in his words.

“Is that…is that why you married me?” I asked, lips parting. “Because you somehow found out that—”

“No,” he said. “I did not know when I married you. I denied it at the ceremony when you signed in blood, though I could smell it even then. I began to suspect it on the flight back to Krynn.”

My mind flooded back to those lonely, empty days.

“I’d drunk myself into a stupor in my room,” I said. I leveled him a long look and dryly added, “And you pulled my hair and tried to scare me.”

It was difficult to reconcile that Azur with this one. Because I now knew I had nothing to fear from him—even though I’d watched him decapitate a dragon with his gauntlets alone earlier.

His lips rose in a wry smile. “And you smelled fucking divine,” he rasped. “I could smell your blood, just beneath your skin. I’d never smelled anything better. In my entire life. You don’t know how little control I had in that room.”

His voice was ragged.

“And then when I fed from you? That very first time?” he asked, running his hands down my arms. I felt his cock pulse against me.

I gasped.

He growled, rough and raw.

“It was like coming to life.”

Chapter 35

Azur

“It was?” Gemma breathed, staring at me, wide eyed.

I stroked my hand through her hair.

“Did you know that the Kylorr didn’t always feed on blood?” I murmured. “We evolved into what we are now. After thousands of years of endless battles and blood-soaked wars. Our ancestors used to celebrate their victories by drinking the blood of their enemies, of the ones they slayed on the fields of their conquests. It was an honor. A right, however brutal and savage it might have seemed. Over time, our bodies learned to use that life force. To metabolize it. Adapt to it. Making us stronger. Faster. Larger. Making us dependent on it, though the wars became far and few in between.”

“I didn’t know that,” Gemma said quietly.

“We were always berserkers,” I told her. “But the blood became a pathway to unleashing our strength. The berserkers of old were said to have found partners. Blood mates. Whose blood strengthened them unlike anything they’d ever felt before. They attached themselves to their mates and never strayed. Entire battles were won at the hands of a single mated Kylorr.”

Her lips parted. Understanding was entering her gaze.

“Ludayn said… She said earlier that you were in a rage because of me,” she told me.

“Yes. I took down a kyriv alone because I was fueled on your blood. The blood of my mate. Of my kyrana,” I said, inclining my head. “Normally, that feat would take a dozen Kylorr or more. Never before has the strength come so easy. Never before has the act of feeding been so consuming. Never before have I felt so aware of life, of sound, of scent, of touch. So to say that you feel insignificant…”

Gemma bit her lip, lowering her gaze briefly.

“It is the furthest thing from the truth,” I finished, willing her to understand. I hadn’t expected to explain this to her. Not tonight.

Yet I hadn’t been able to withstand the dejected look on her face.

“Well, when you put it like that, I feel silly,” she murmured, giving me a half smile. One thing I appreciated about my wife was that she could move forward with a shrug of her shoulders. Her smile died. “I suppose I was speaking more about…about sex. Compared to your, um, extensive experience, I can’t exactly measure up.”

Realization bloomed. Affection made me rub at my chest, right next to where her fingertips were tracing.

“Gemma,” I grunted.

“Yes?” she breathed, trying to hide her pink cheeks.

“How many times did you make me come?”

The pink only deepened. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” I growled. “Tell me, is my come still leaking out from your cunt?”

She gasped when I reached below the water to pet her sensitive slit.

“Likely,” I decided, taking my hand away when I saw her eyelids flutter. “Given how many times I filled you up with it.”

“But—”

“Sex with a kyrana…” I trailed off, shaking my head. “Nothing else will ever compare. Ever. Do you understand me?”

Gemma was staring at me, her eyes flickering back and forth between mine. It wasn’t often that she showed vulnerability. I didn’t want her feeling like the sex, for me, had been lacking.

It was the opposite.

It was more than I’d ever expected.

She’d drained me dry. Toward the end, I hadn’t known if I’d had any come left to give her.

“So you liked it?” she asked.

I would’ve laughed in her face had that hesitant question not nearly cracked my chest wide open.

“No,” I said. Before her face fell, however, I growled, “I loved it. I crave it. I need it. Do you know how difficult it is not to wrap your legs around me and sink deep inside you? Right now? To fuck you into oblivion and sink my fangs into your pretty neck and lose ourselves together? Raazos’s blood, I might be addicted to it, wife.”

She was breathing hard, her eyelids going heavy, her fingernails curling into my thick flesh.

“Oh,” she whispered.

“And that pleasure when I feed? You know the one and I know it too. That is only for us. Only for us. Not many will ever experience that. To experience it during sex too? Gods, wife, it is the closest to the Alara realm we will get in this one.”

I nearly hissed in relief when she gave me a confident little grin, one that made me want to bend her over the bathing pool wall like I’d warned her before.

Her voice was husky when she asked, “So what you’re saying is that I’m the best lover you’ve ever had? Over your entire lifetime?”

I barked out a laugh, and her responding chuckle made a lightness spread in my chest, warm and consuming.

“Yes,” I said. Teasing, I said, “You’re the best wife I’ve ever had too.”

After hearing her outraged gasp, I silenced it with a kiss.

It was easy to forget, I realized. When we were like this, it was easy to forget the circumstances that had brought us together. It was easy to forget who her father was. It was easy to forget my vow at the altar of our family shrine, made in blood and bound in vengeance, and the promise I’d made my mother.

I had married Gemma Hara hellbent on destroying her family.

Only I couldn’t anymore.

She was mine. Claimed and protected.

She wasn’t a Hara anymore.

She was of House Kaalium now.

“Enough of this,” I rasped, lifting her from the water, desire riding me high. She gasped when I settled her outside the bath, and I kneeled on the ledge where she’d been sitting. “I’ll be gentle, wife. But I need a taste of you. I need it now.”

Briefly catching sight of her pebbled nipples and her surprised expression, I pushed her thighs wide.

Then, without hesitation, I buried my face between them.

Her shocked moan echoed in the bathing room. Splashing sounded when my wings gave an unconscious pump behind me. The taste of her cunt made my eyes roll back. I sucked and licked and laved until she was squirming underneath me, moaning out my name, her head thrashing and her thighs trembling around my face.

“Just as good as your blood, kyrana,” I growled, ravenous for her, my eyes dilated and completely focused on her. “Your cunt was made for me.”

When Gemma orgasmed, she came with a bright cry, her abdomen clenching, her hips bucking into me. I would never get tired of it, I realized. I would never get tired of watching her fall apart in my arms.