The Bloodline War (34 page)

Abruptly, she stopped and pressed the bar of soap into his hand. “Your turn.”

He flipped his lids open.

Steam was drifting in hot clouds around her, coiling loose strands of her hair against the moisture on her throat. She looked like an enchanted mermaid.

He curled his lips back from his teeth in a wolfish smile. “I can wash you anywhere, right?”

She sloshed backward from the sight of his fangs, although the glittering heat in her eyes contradicted her retreat.

“Oh, payback’s a bitch, sweetie pie.” He rose to his knees, water cascading off his body, and came at her.

A husky laugh tripped past her lips, her gaze dropping to watch him work the soap into a lather between his hands.

“I wonder where I’ll start. Hmm, maybe your—”

It hit him like a Monster Truck. With an
umph
, he lurched forward and fell against her, his forehead clunking against her chest. The soap tumbled from his lax fingers as a raw, primitive sound tore out of him.

“Jaċken?” Her arms came around him. “Dear God, what’s wrong?”

His mouth fell open and hung there.

“Jaċken?”

“Your…scent.” Turning his face into the upper swell of her breasts, he rubbed his open lips over her skin. “It’s changing.” He drew deep, gulping breaths of her newly emerging aroma into the back of his throat, the shifting power of it swirling through every cell in his body, holding him in thrall. He could do no more than stay as he was, his arms wrapped around her body and his lungs voraciously taking in every aromatic morsel of her. “I’m…bonding to you…Toni. Oh, Christ….” A hard shudder shook him, then another rocked him to the core of his being as the biological process worked at transforming him into what he’d be for the rest of his married life: a fully bonded male.

After several mind-blowing minutes, he drew a last, fractured breath, Toni’s scent making its final descent into all the small fissures of his brain. He’d never smelled anything so good
in his life
as Toni smelled to him now. Damn, he’d heard other bonded males rave about The Change, but he’d just never believed it could be this powerful. Toni was his now, he felt it completely. The territorial Vârcolac in him stretched and roared. He straightened off her, the Phoenix rising from the ashes, and stared down on her with ruthless possession. “
Mine
,” he snarled at her.

Her eyes sprang wide. “Uh, oh.”

Eye-blink quick, he hefted her out of the water and tossed her onto the surrounding ledge of tiles. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we do that tasting-thing I also missed out on?” Grabbing her ass with two hands, he tipped her hips up, the maneuver forcing her to fling her arms behind her to brace herself.

“Jaċken!” she gasped as he went down on his knees before her.

He shoved his face between her thighs, needing her new taste down his throat right fucking now. Thing was…he didn’t exactly know what he was doing. He was only able to poke his tongue and nose around the area a bit at first, too stupefied by the intoxicating mixture of her newly mated aroma and the scent of her arousal to do much more than grunt like a Neanderthal. Then he caught on to
licking
as the best way to experience her, and here he was in his element; the folds of her sex were the softest skin he’d ever felt.

He would’ve been happy enough just to spend the next week lazily running his tongue all over their slick contours. But he was paying attention to Toni, the noises she was making and the ebb and flow of tension in her body, and although she definitely liked her folds tended to, stroking her clitoris was what really spun her top. The thing must’ve been packed full of more nerve endings than he’d realized, based on what he was able to do to her. Giving it a little suckle had earned such a noise out of her, her pelvis straining up so hard into his face, that he’d nearly laughed for joy. Still…. He couldn’t seem to spend all of his time there.

Because whenever he really got going on that knot of nerve endings, the entrance to her body would squish full of more of her juice, and, damn, the stuff was frigging amazing. Like honey in consistency, and just as sweet, it tasted as good as her blood, and
that
was saying something. He just had to get down there and lap it up.

He was down there now, pushing his tongue into her opening to chase more of it down—a move which ramped up the noises she was making, a bunch of
uh-uh-uh
,
oh-oh-oh
shit in his ears that nearly brought him to his own explosion. She reached between her legs and dug her fingers into his hair, frantically twisting up fists of it. A message that she was done with his messing around? Her folds were plumped up like a biscuit and a series of broken gasps were hissing between her gritted teeth, so yeah, he probably needed to give her a break. Curling his hands around her legs, he spread her thighs wider and really latched on good to that jewel of hers. With his lips and tongue and jaw all working together, he got down to the serious business of sucking on—

He was rewarded almost instantly. She yelped once, then settled into a high keening cry as her thighs clamped tight around his ears, and—the best part—her feminine core pulsed rhythmically against his chin. His New and Improved Balls got off on that big time, pulling up tight against his body and—
Oh, shit
. A droplet of liquid leaked to the tip of him. He reared back from her with an anxious expulsion of air. He was going to come.

He heaved unsteadily to his feet, bringing her with him to the next highest step of tiles. “I have to get inside you.” He probed around her silky wetness and just about ended himself right there.
Damn…damn
. He looked down between her splayed legs to aim better. Another huge mistake. That secret place of hers was a deeper pink than before, the petals glistening and fuller. So ready for him. With a ragged groan, he just drove his hips forward…only to succeed in shoving her backward along the slippery tiles. He growled in frustration.

“Pull me toward you at the same time you push.” Her voice sounded heavy and breathless.

His hands were trembling with the force of his need, his fingers no doubt digging too roughly into her skin as he grabbed her by the hips and hauled her forward and upward into his next thrust. An incoherent noise burst out of him as he plunged deep inside her this time, and—
ah
!—the hot petals of her sheath closed around his shaft like a velvet fist. He jerked forward from the intensity of it,
bonking
his head on the mirror behind her.

A muffled sound of amusement escaped her.

He gulped for air.
Yeah, laugh it up, lady
. See how well you do after thirty-odd years of deprivation.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

“I just can’t seem to get used to…how good you feel.”

Her fingers caressed the length of his spine. “Do you want me to get on top again?”

“No.” He licked his lips and swallowed. He didn’t think there was time for adjustments. “I got this covered.”

Right
. He felt like an oaf as he started to surge between her thighs. He tried to be proficient about it: straight in, straight out, nice and smooth. But she was such a tight glove of torturously squeezing muscles that, time and again, imminent danger would rise up through his testes and tighten the muscles in his lower back, making his strokes go all sloppy and uneven, his frigging knees banging into the side of the tub.

But then…why should he care, if she didn’t seem to? Each deep thrust inside her body, whether unskilled or expert, earned a corresponding groan of pleasure from her, so he must’ve been hitting something good in there. Her legs were wrapped tightly around him, too, her head thrown back, the picture of a woman in the throes of passion.

Saliva filled his mouth as he hungrily eyed the elegant stretch of throat, bloodlust rising up to join the action. Without warning, he lunged for the unblemished side of her neck and sank his fangs in with one clean stroke, her resilient flesh giving way with a satisfying
pop
.

She jumped only slightly this time, then melted beneath him into a pile of groaning jelly.

He gulped her quenching blood down his throat drunkenly, wondering if he’d ever get used to the incredible taste of it. The power and energy it gave him. How it filled him with—

He went rigid as his climax came at him full throttle, as unstoppable as a bullet. Yanking his fangs out of Toni’s throat, he flung his head back and shouted in pure barbaric ecstasy, the blood-Fiinţă combo pouring through his system back-loading his orgasm with staggering force. A bolt of lightning sheared his balls in two and blew the top of his cock off. Shuddering again and again, he pumped hot liquid into his wife’s body in what seemed an endless stream, the convulsions of her sheath around him as she found her second orgasm damn near pushing him into a dead faint.

Gasping for breath, he sagged forward, utterly spent. He planted a hand on the mirror behind Toni to keep from collapsing on top of her, and hovered there for the small infinity it took his climax to finally lose some of its grip on him. Hell…shit, if there was anything better than an orgasm in this whole wide world, somebody needed to write an airplane banner about it.

He gazed down on her, still struggling to get his heart back into his chest and his lungs to a place where they could fully inflate again. “All right,” he panted. “That one might’ve been a little ‘good’.”

She exhaled a laugh. “Boy, howdy,” she agreed, and the hazy, satisfied look in her eyes made him want to spike the ball in male triumph.

With a contented sigh that cranked up his
I-was-a-stud-horse-in-bed
success even more, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a hug.

He moved to embrace her, his arms a little unsteady as—

His jaw unhinged in naked shock. When he’d swept his palm through the steam on the mirror just now, he’d opened up a visible patch of reflection behind her, and there on her back was—

“
Holy shit
!”

Chapter Thirty-six

The Rec Room was in an uproar.

Alex was laughing so hard he started hiccupping, and the villainous-looking one called Dev Nichita was really gone, rolling on the floor, his arms clutched around his middle. Male model dude, Thomal Costache, was trying to help Dev up, but was stumbling around so much from his own hysterical laughter, he kept missing Dev’s hand. Kasson Korzha had tears running down his face,
super
male model dude Arc Costache was close to needing CPR, and that one with the bull skull tattoo on his arm, Gábor Pavenic, was shaking so hard across the shoulders, he might as well have been convulsing.

Holy Christ, but it’d been one hilarious afternoon so far—or middle of the night to Alex, but he was having too much fun to feel tired. He’d always wanted brothers to screw off with, and these warriors were proving capable of degenerating into a pack of unruly frat boys with the right provocation. Like when man about town Roth Mihnea had passed out top-shelf bottles of scotch to Dev, Thomal, and Kasson as consolation for their loss of Toni. The three men had shared liberally with the rest of them, and now they were all pretty thrashed…which had naturally inspired Alex to teach everyone how to do blue flamers.

Yeah,
light farts
.

Alex laughed louder, his ribs starting to ache. Shit, man, there wasn’t anything funnier than a mighty blue flamer. The position a dude had to Gumby himself into just to complete the light-off was comical enough: ass scooted to the edge of a chair, knees jacked back to the ears, hand doing a reach-around so that a cigarette lighter could be held near the ol’ bunghole, not too close or else a dude risked catching his pants on fire.

Then,
fwapp
, let one rip and watch the spurt of blue flame.

Seriously
, he’d never seen men—anyone—laugh so hard as when the warriors had started taking turns. Kasson had yelped like a girl for burning his sphincter, Gábor had nearly crapped his pants for pushing so hard to get a fart out, then Nỵko Brun, the most serious body Nazi of all them, had come up to bat. The man had exploded such an Aurora Borealis out of his butt that the current near-seizure-like laughter had promptly taken them all out. Jesus, if they all didn’t quit soon, they’d—

“What the
hell’s
going on in here?”

Jaċken was standing inside the doorway of the Rec Room, staring at them all like they were a bunch of headless zombie chickens.

Alex’s new brother-in-law was dressed only in a pair of hastily-donned black sweat pants, leaving bare what was one Holy Mackerel of a tattoo-embattled upper body.
Daaaamn
. Alex wished Jaċken had been his brother back when he was thirteen and wearing his first pair of eyeglasses. That way, when eighth-grade bully Bobby Knudson had knocked Alex’s new specs askew with a hard slap to the face and a sneering, “Hey, poindexter, nice coke bottles,” Alex could’ve said, “Oh, I’m sorry, haven’t you met my brother, Bad Ass?”

Tonĩ was at Jaċken’s side, her pink T-shirt on inside out, her pajama pants hanging low on her hips, and the bun on her head damp and unruly from whatever she’d just been doing with Jaċken.
Grody
!

Nỵko was the first to recover from his laughing fit. “Well, hey, look, it’s my new sister-in-law.” He smiled broadly at the newlyweds. “What a breath of fresh air you are now, Tonĩ. Jaċken obviously did his job well.”

The room broke into applause and whoops.

Yuuuukkkk
!

“Hell, Jaċken,” Arc gasped out, still trying to control his laughter, “what’re you doing coming up for air so soon? We didn’t expect to see you till—”

A lamp crashed to the floor as Dev staggered drunkenly to his feet.

“Smooth move, bumblefuck.” Gábor snickered.

“Would everyone shut up! I need you to check something out.” Jaċken pulled Tonĩ closer.

“Oh, shit.” Thomal covered his eyes with one hand, peeking out the edge of it at his brother, Arc. “He wants to show us that he knows how to bang a chick now.” He cleared his throat. “Yo, chief, it’s really not necessary to—”