*Warning: Adult Content ahead*
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Maximus slowly regained consciousness to the feeling of sure, purposeful hands sliding and kneading across his naked body.
His eyes rolled restlessly beneath sealed lids that didn’t want to open.
He was so tired. He felt heavy and weak, his flesh and bones surrendering to the pull of gravity to stay horizontal and immobile on the soft surface of whatever it was he was lying upon. Perhaps a bed.
The fingers of his right hand twitched and curled, and he felt the smooth texture of cotton. He could also feel the weight of his body denting the mattress, carving out a shallow, cozy notch he didn’t want to leave.
Tired and sore. He was sore all over, especially in his shoulder, chest and thigh.
Mostly his chest. Everything inside was burning with a stabbing, fiery pain. As if someone had drawn and quartered him, left his insides to rot under an unforgiving sun before stuffing them back into his chest cavity and sewing him up.
But that wasn’t all. His heart hurt more than he could ever imagine. It wasn’t just the searing pain that pulsed blackly with every belabored beat, it was a coldness at the core of him. As if the muscle that determinedly pumped blood throughout his body was long dead, rotted and hollowed out.
He’d lost a vital part of himself.
He just didn’t know what. He didn’t want to know. It would be infinitely worse if he remembered. He barely breathed it hurt so much.
But the purposeful hands distracted him from the gnawing, unrelenting pain, cool and soothing as they traveled leisurely over his flesh. They smoothed over his collar bones, gentled as they approached his pectorals and down his ribs, barely glancing his skin.
Something dipped into his shallow navel, warm and wet, making him suck in a breath reflexively.
He more felt than heard the rumbling purr against his thigh, as the hands firmly pushed his legs farther apart. And the owner of those hands came to lie between them.
More lapping and licking on the insides of his thighs, along the crease where his legs met his groin. The fingers of both those purposeful hands dug into his hips on either side—
As a velvety, wet tongue licked from his heavy balls to his thick root, up the long, vein-wrapped column of his sex to the engorged head of him that throbbed with exquisite pain.
On a broken gasp, Maximus opened his eyes and struggled upright enough on trembling arms to look down.
An elfin face looked steadily back at him through eerily familiar greenish golden eyes. Short black hair framed a ghostly pale visage. The large, thickly lashed, tilted feline eyes and the full red mouth made bold splashes of color amidst all that icy paleness.
“Wait,” he rasped out, his throat contracting roughly, his voice distorted from lack of use and a pervasive fog of exhaustion, when the elf opened her pillowy lips above the head of his cock.
The female tilted her head slightly to regard him, a questioning look in her eyes that communicated: Really? Do you really want me to stop what I’m doing? I’m about to give you the best head you’ve ever had.
Strange, that he seemed to read her mind so easily.
At least, that’s what he thought she was communicating. Perhaps he was mistaken. But he didn’t think so. Not when he heard her voice inside his own mind.
An eerily familiar voice.
Maximus braced himself unsteadily on his elbows and held her glittering green stare.
Her pink tongue darted out from between the full, wet lips and swiped slowly across the upper lip, then around the corner to the lower lip.
The motion reminded him strangely of a lioness licking her chops before digging into a wildebeest.
Or a panther wetting her muzzle.
“May I?” the woman, who was a complete and utter stranger to Maximus, said in a low, sultry voice, tinged with a growl, as if she didn’t appreciate his untimely interruption of a long-awaited feast.
Perhaps he was dreaming, Maximus thought, his mind hazy at best, delusional at worst. Perhaps this was a hallucination. After all, it had been many months since he’d had release with a female instead of his own hand. Too many to count.
Finding himself in bed with a stranger wasn’t anything novel. He was a vampire warrior male. He was a solitary, bloodthirsty predator. One who controlled his base needs remarkably well, but nevertheless indulged them, long and hard and rough, on occasion.
He didn’t do relationships, beyond his comrades in arms and his…
Maximus’ mind shied away from that thought, as one might jerk a careless hand away from a hot stove.
He didn’t do relationships. Only females who Consented to his taking of their blood for a night of nonstop rutting, whose faces he never recalled after he was done with them. And since he always fucked from behind, he never had to take a good look in the first place.
All that was to say—looking directly into the face of the female who was about to eat his cock was a situation Maximus couldn’t recall ever finding himself in. His dreams were never this vivid. His encounters were never this…
Identifying and personal.
He blinked slowly, involuntarily signaling his consent, and pulled his body up slightly so that he could lean against the headboard to watch.
She licked her red lips again, her eyes glinting with something fierce.
Slowly, keeping her eerily familiar eyes locked on his, she closed her luscious lips around his pulsing glans and sucked strongly without preliminaries, making his hips jerk and his cock leap.
The vibrating purr increased in volume, and he felt it rumbling through her throat to wrap around his monstrous erection.
Dark Goddess! He couldn’t recall the last time something felt this good.
Her hands were strong on his hips, holding him where she wanted him as she slowly moved her mouth upon him, taking him harder and harder with each draw, squeezing him with exquisite pressure in the hot, wet recesses of her mouth, continuing to hold his slitted gaze.
Deeper and deeper she took him into her throat, the long, pale column of her neck working convulsively to accommodate his thickness and length.
But it was not nearly enough. As much as she opened herself, it was anatomically impossible for her to take him all the way inside. The other half of his penis screamed at being left out, his veins standing in stark relief against the thin, vulnerable layer of skin over his stone-hard shaft.
Perfectly in tune with his body’s needs, her hands left his hips to wrap around the base of him that couldn’t fit into her throat. Her saliva and his pre-cum coated his entire length from root to head, and she worked the wetness all around him until a hot, delicious friction stole his breath.
She continued to work him with her clever mouth and ingenious hands as she maintained eyeball intensity, her golden green eyes piercing into him as if she could see everything he didn’t show.
All the darkness and need and savagery that he’d always held back, carefully leashed beneath a veneer of calm and control.
His hands fisted into the sheets beside him, but he didn’t reach out to tangle his fingers in her short, choppy hair like he wanted to. Didn’t hold her fragile skull within the palm of one large hand and force her to take him deeper beyond deep, harder and faster and rougher until her teeth scraped him raw.
This was her turn, he strangely understood from her piercing gaze. She was taking her pleasure from him because she’d earned it. That she gave him pleasure in the process was a mere added bonus. She was the predator in this scenario, and he, the prey.
Not faceless. Not like any of the purely physical encounters he’d had before.
No, the recognition and possessiveness in her eyes told him she knew exactly who he was, and the way she refused to relinquish his gaze told him that she wanted him to know her too.
She was making sure he’d never forget her face and what she did to him now:
Her claiming of him.
As if she approved of his silent understanding and acceptance of the power play between them, she growled low in her throat and nicked his sensitive, swollen flesh with her teeth, making his buttocks clench and his cock jerk with pained pleasure inside her mouth.
She squeezed him harder now, both with rhythmic twists of her hands and increasing torque from her mouth upon him.
His own upper lip curled involuntarily to reveal the gleaming fangs that had punched through his gums, dripping with saliva, vibrating with need.
He clenched his buttocks again to give her warning and locked his hips. He was too close. He wouldn’t be able to hold back much longer.
She only clamped harder down upon him, squeezing him tightly, still holding his stare.
Come. Her husky voice commanded in his head.
Come for me now.
His body obeyed mindlessly on a shuddering exhale, his balls drawing tight as they filled his shaft full of scalding hot seed that erupted in surging waves into her mouth.
She sucked him hard and fast through his release, swallowing everything he gave her, never breaking the seal of her lips around his sex, wringing him dry of every last drop.
Finally, his head fell back, his eyes slid shut, and the bone-deep exhaustion that weighed him down before took him under again.
But this time, the soreness in his tissues faded to a dull throb, as hot, soothing pleasure flooded his veins.
Vaguely, he heard that familiar female voice in his hazy mind: rest now, my warrior. You need to store up some strength. For I shall have more of you when you awaken.
Much, much more.
Aja James - Paranormal Fantasy Romance Author 