Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 (5 page)

“
Don’t you dare,” he ground out, standing over me. “You, of all people, know better than that, know the lines I have drawn that I will not cross.”

My heart raced.
I gripped the arms of the chair so hard that I thought my fingers must break. I didn’t know whether I wanted to flee or to fling myself into his arms. So I just sat, frozen, like a small animal in a hunter’s bright light.

He put a hand on my shoulder, and I could feel the unnatural
strength of him through his arm even though his touch on me was light. It stirred up an answering wildness in me that was frightening, a recklessness that countered his anger with blatant need. I swayed, powerless against him.

His voice was relentless.
“I could have taken you in my office the first time we met.”

Against my will
, I thought of his hand on my wrist, the needle in my arm, the madness that had possessed me.

“
Yes.
” The word was pulled from me in a whisper.

“
I could have taken you on the street, outside the restaurant, against the brick wall.”

His hand on my back, though the thin fabric of my shirt.
His body so close to mine, almost touching, and his burning eyes...

“
Yes,” I repeated weakly.

“
And Friday night—I could have taken so much more,” he said.

Why?
part of me asked, the hungry part, the part that wanted him to take me here and now.
Why didn’t you?
I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying it aloud.

I knew he had taken advantage of my susceptibility.
I should have condemned him for doing as much as he did to me, but I couldn’t.

And did I think that his staff blamed him any more than I could?
Hypocrite,
I thought.
Fool.

His words were fast, low, and harsh.
“I want you to understand, clearly understand, how deeply I regret the loss of control that I had that night. But however much you wanted me—you must believe me that I needed you far more.”

I swayed slightly under the force of his gaze, the force of his desire that I could feel sweeping through me even now, leaving my nerves raw and jangling.
Involuntarily, I leaned toward him, to close the distance between us. But he let go of me abruptly and turned his back, leaving me sitting alone, aching and bereft.

“Don’t tell
me
that I have no shame, Cora,” he said.

D
eliberately, Dorian stepped away from me and circled back to where he’d left his plate. I took a deep breath to steady myself, but it was impossible with only the table’s width between us. My head was hot and light, my pulse humming in my ears.

I could still feel his nee
d crackling off his body. But he had managed to turn away. I knew I wouldn’t have had the strength for that—not the way I felt, and not the way I sensed that he felt. It was only his self-control that allowed me to sit across from him and eat my breakfast as if my body didn’t answer to his every desire.

If he let me go home, as he promised, it would
be because he decided to allow it. With him so close to me, it wasn’t a choice I was even capable of making.

My chest felt crowded and tight
. I was as powerless against him as I’d been against my cancer.

Dorian
gave no sign of noticing my reaction, though I was sure that he did. His face was creased in a frown, and he kept his eyes averted carefully from my face. He picked up a silver fork that had somehow in his sudden charge at me been bent into a sharp curve. Effortlessly, fastidiously, he straightened it in his fingers. The fingers that had just touched me so gently. When he finished, he held the utensil balanced perfectly in his hand for a moment, then began to eat from the plate in front of him.

“The breakfast was prepared especially for you,” he said a
fter a moment when I made no move to join him.

“Heaven forbid I insult you by not eating it,” I
muttered, then instantly regretted it. I sounded like a brat.

“Not me,” he said coolly.
“My staff. The chef was in raptures at the thought of preparing a meal for you for the first time. He truly outdid himself.”

“The
first
time,” I echoed.

“
Indeed.”

I didn’t bother to argue with him.
Instead, I looked at my plate and regarded the food there—crepes with fresh fruit, omelets, small gourmet sausages and delicate miniature crab cakes. They should have filled me with delight, but I could feel nothing right now—nothing except the overwhelming presence of the man, the creature who sat across the table.

I began to eat mechanically, tasting nothing.
What was wrong with me? I was terrified and still half-dazed with all that had happened to me. I should be clamoring to go home. But I couldn’t force myself to ask.

Shameless, indeed.

He seemed to be able to read my every expression, but I could tell nothing of his thoughts or motivations. Lust and hunger—those were clear enough. But the other flashes beneath his icy demeanor were so fleeting that I could get no handle on them. What did he see me as, other than a way to sate himself?

What did I want him to?

After several minutes, Dorian broke the silence. “You did not like Worth’s clothing selection?”

“
I didn’t look at it,” I said stiffly. “Thanks for the gesture, but you’ve done more than enough already. I don’t want to owe you more.”

“
There can be no debt between us,” he said.

I took a swallow from one of the goblets in front of me
—a bright concoction of seltzer and juices. “I don’t see it like that.”

“
You should. You will.” The last word was a promise.

I finished the last bite of crab cake.
Intellectually, I could appreciate the delicacy of the flavoring, the extravagance of lump crabmeat with just enough luscious breading to hold it together. But now it lay like lead in my stomach.

Dorian’s staff.
I turned the idea over in my mind. There had been the butler, then woman in the gray dress when I woke up, this Worth person, and before that, the people—doctors?—who had attended to me when I was reacting to his bite, and now there was the chef and his helpers. There must be dozens of people working in the depths of the great mansion. I wondered if they all knew about me. I wondered if they were curious about what I was like.

Not that it mattered, since I wouldn’
t be meeting any more of them, I told myself.

I took a last gulp of juice and pushed back from th
e table, wanting him, wanting home, wanting to be free. I rubbed the small mark on my wrist while Dorian ate on, seeming to be oblivious to my state even though he was the cause.

Finally, I forced myself to speak.
“I’ve imposed on you too long. I really need to get back to my apartment. I haven’t even bought books for next semester, and I was planning on doing a deep clean on my apartment, and I need to catch up with all my friends and let them know I’m okay.”

It was too much—
I was just babbling, inventing excuses where none needed to be made at all. I shut my mouth.

“
All that in the thirty days before the end of Winter Break?” he asked, his voice steeped in irony.

“
It’s my life,” I said staunchly. “I need to get back to it.”

“
And when I need you?” he asked quietly, that pale gaze looking straight through me and sending my heart into a frantic, skittering beat.

I closed my eyes, swayed slightly against the draw of him.
Never
, part of me raged.
Now
, another part begged. I ignored them both, and I spoke the simple truth.

“
You know I’ll come. I’ve got no choice.”

“
You will want to,” he said, a sharp correction.

My eyes snapped open.
“Because you make me?” I demanded. “I don’t see how that’s better.”

He stood from his chair, looking down at me.
I couldn’t move. “I don’t need to make you want me, Cora, any more than you can make me want you. You cannot live without me, nor I without you. Not now.”

My mouth had gone dry, half with fear, half with wanting.
“You can’t live without my blood, you mean.” The words came out almost as a croak.

A strange kind of smile passed over his face then
, haunted but with a glimmer of something like hope. He reached out to trace the line of my cheek and jaw with the back of one finger. “Blood is only the beginning. As long we both live, I will need you in a way that no other can satisfy. All of you.”

“
Body and soul.” I hadn’t meant to speak, but the whisper was mine. “Until death do us part.”

“
Yes. The bond is thrust upon me as it is upon you. I can escape it no more than you can.”

“
You went after it,” I protested. “I didn’t. You wanted it as the end to your all your research.”

“
An end to the death,” he agreed. “That makes me no less subject to it and its demands.”

“
But you give the orders. And I’m the one who has to obey.”

“
That is how it is, Cora. It is our natures, yours and mine.”

I shook my head.
“I can’t live with that. I have to go. I have to clear my head. You may have lived a thousand years, and maybe you have everything figured out and you’re okay with this, but I’m twenty-one, and I don’t even really know who I am yet. Especially not now.”

I met his piercing
eyes, and I knew that he held the power to make me stay. He could lock me up forever, and he wouldn’t even need bars or a key because he could make we want anything that he chose.

As if he could read my mind, he said,
“I’ll not keep you here against your will, Cora.”

“
Then you’ll let me go right now?” I asked, only half believing it.

In answer, he took a phone from his pocket,
tapped it briefly, and said, “Have a car brought around for Cora. She wishes to return to College Park.” He returned it to his pocket.

“
Thank you,” I said numbly. Was it going to be so easy?

He passed me and opened the door, his face inscrutable.
“Do you have all your things?”

“
Not my jacket,” I said. I had run from the room without stopping to retrieve it, leaving it on the bench in the dressing room.

“
Then let us fetch it,” he said.

I nodded weakly.
He was being so reasonable, but I could feel the roiling hunger radiating from his body, and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to change my mind by force, if necessary. I was half afraid that was what I really wanted—that I wanted to be with him but didn’t want to take the responsibility for the decision.

He
opened the breakfast room door and stood aside for me to go out first. He could have called for a servant to see be back to my room, or I could have asked that one take me. But I didn’t. As much as he frightened me, even the idea of being apart from him made my heart twist up into my throat in sudden panic.

So I exited
the room and followed the colonnade out to the stair landing with Dorian as a silent escort at my side. The inches of air between us seemed to hiss with energy as I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, but I ignored it and started down the open-sided hall.

I stopped in front of a door and put my hand on the knob
—only to pause. Was that the right one? The doors all looked the same.

“
One more farther down,” Dorian said.

I risked a look at him.
“Whose room is this?” I nodded to the door I had almost opened by mistake.

“
Mine,” he said simply.

Next to the one he had given me.
Of course. I bit my lip and went on to mine, opening it and stepping inside.

Dorian followed and shut the door.

Only then did it hit me that I was alone in a bedroom with a devastatingly handsome vampire who quit
e definitely wanted me naked. Just as much I wanted him.

Damn, Cora.
Not much for good decision-making today, huh?

I forced myself to tear my attention from him and focused on the room instead.
All I had to do was grab my jacket and get out. I’d get in the car, go home to my apartment, and I’d never have to see him again.

I knew that wasn’t true
even as I thought it, but I didn’t care. I needed a goal. Otherwise, I was very much afraid that I’d never leave.

So.
The closet.