Pleasure. Jacquelyn Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ Vampire did. According to her information it was true that, as in the myths, they slept in a nearly comatose state while the sun was out. It made them very vulnerable and very little could wake them until darkness fell. But she didn’t just know this because of her books. She had seen necromancers kill a Vampire, leaving it staked out for the sun to destroy, the daylight keeping it asleep until the rays of the sun had begun to burn it. It had been horrifying, but she had excused the cruelty of it by convincing herself Vampires must be the essence of evil as she had been taught and told over and over again.

      Learning she was wrong about the nature of Demons had led her to understand she might be wrong about Vampires as well. There was certainly nothing overtly evil in this clever and intelligent man beneath her touch. She turned her thoughts back to the marvel that was his body, curiosity eating her up as she longed to know what he did to create such a physique. She knew now it wasn’t merely a matter of “working out,” but it was some kind of task of his work as a priest that required him to be battle-ready and packed with this much power. She trailed her fingers up over a tight buttock, her tongue slipping between her lips to moisten them as she ghosted her palm over him.

      Val slid down into the curve of his lower back, her nails drifting into the valley of his spine, the central shaft that anchored so many of those intense muscles. She watched herself find his shoulders, and this time she noticed one was distinctly more developed than the other. Valera suddenly remembered the sheath and its missing sword. She realized that the hand she glided over his right shoulder was touching his sword arm. Swords! They used swords for weaponry. Valera delighted in her deductive reasoning, forgetting herself as she placed her opposite hand on the mattress beside his left arm to balance herself as she reached to stroke his biceps in fascination.

      “Shall I turn over?”

      The amused voice startled the hell out of her and she jerked away with a guilty little cry. He turned quickly, though, and caught her molesting hand even before she could clear the bed. With a powerful pull he dropped her down onto his chest and then rolled her off her feet and into the bed beside him.

      “Come now,” he scolded her in a hot whisper against her temple, “fair is fair.” He chased the remark with the touch of his fingers against her shin, drawing it up over her knee to her thigh and forcing her to realize just how long he’d been aware of her exploration of his body. “Val,” he said with amusement in his eyes, “you’re a bad, bad girl.”

      She blushed furiously and slapped him in that huge shoulder.

      “You rat! You were awake the whole time!”

      “From the instant you first touched me,” he agreed in a tone low with intimacy. “How could I possibly stay asleep when your touch causes earthquakes within me?”

      Damn, but he was poetic for a warrior. Then again, he was also a priest. It was the most inconceivable mesh of two personalities she’d ever seen. And…

      “Earthquakes?” she echoed, the concept fascinating her right out of her thoughts. That and the fact that his touch was running on to her inner thigh. “It was just a touch.”

      “Just a touch? Is this just a touch?” His deft fingers turned into the juncture of her legs, running with slow intimacy along the seam of her jeans and making her entire body shimmer with liquid heat. She gasped for her breath, her face flushing as she reached to seize his wrist.

      “I didn’t…you were on your stomach,” she reminded him lamely, her chest laboring as her heart revved up in cadence. However, she no longer needed a clarification for his terminology of “earthquakes.” She was quaking, all right. She couldn’t stop.

      “Oh yes,” he agreed as if he hadn’t known that all along. “That’s right. Shall I turn you over, Valera? I have to confess, your backside thrills me just as much as your front side does. It will be no hardship for me either way.”

      Not unless he counted the sweet ache in the lee of his hips and the incredibly aroused fullness of his cock. Gods, it had been so long since a woman had done this to him. Even so, he didn’t remember it being so sharp and so clawing a need as it was with Valera.

      “Sagan,” she panted in a soft panic, her eyes wild with her confusion. Torn between her mind and her body, it was obvious what she was feeling as he touched her. He dipped his head and nuzzled at her breast and the outthrust nipple at its tip. “You said…you said you couldn’t…oh God, that feels…”

      She couldn’t seem to finish a thought and it made him smile against her. Baring his teeth, he nipped at her through far too much material. Sagan was very aware of how small his window of opportunity was with her. She was a woman of spectacular conscience. Very much like himself. She also seemed to remember the tenets that restricted him from her arms better than he did. But he couldn’t ignore how easy and natural it felt to disregard all that had guided him in these matters for a hundred and sixty years of priesthood. When he had entered Sanctuary it had been a resonant calling he couldn’t resist, and now he was being called again and it was just as potent a need.

      He reached for the hem of her sweater, shucking it from her body as quick as lightning. She was limp and distracted, making it so very easy for him to do. Now he had her in a much thinner shirt, a white creation he could see her bra through. White; an astounding color his kind never wore. Everything they wore was black or dark, making the ability to blend and dwell in the shadows seamless.

      “There is a realm,” he murmured, “where it is always night, and there is never any light. We call this place Shadowscape. When I look at you, I think of what you would look like in that ’scape, with your brilliant eyes and your ever-so-fair skin.” He slowly pushed her shirt upward, baring the pale plane of her belly and the tempting oval of her navel. He lowered his head to that place, tracing his lips in light, damp streaks across her until he felt her shiver with her growing need for him.

      She was silent and did not outright protest his explorations of her body, but he could easily hear the internal dialogue she was having about her tummy being “flabby” and that her ass was “the size of a small planet.”

      Sagan disagreed with all of it and he made very certain she would know that. Shifting himself to a position between her legs, his chest resting on her pubic bone, he framed her waist between his hands and nuzzled her belly with his face and released a long, male sound of appreciation. After all, she smelled so good. So purely good. He flicked his tongue against her warm skin and he delighted in the way she jumped beneath him in response. She lay perfectly passive, submitting to him but not touching him as he continued to explore her and stimulate her.

      He ignored below her navel for the time being, knowing that if he crossed that line, the dynamic between them would change quite dramatically. Instead he headed north, plowing away at her shirt until he found the snug and serviceable white bra she wore. Skimming away the blouse completely, he rose over her to view her nearly topless state.

      Valera choked on her own breath as the incomprehensible reality of having so much potent nude male on top of her, where she could just feel so much, completely stunned her. Sagan moved against her intimately and without any reserve or shame, showing not a single sign that he was anything but confident and proud of the aggressive arousal of his body. In fact, it almost seemed incidental to him as he focused on the slow caresses of his fingers down her breastbone and across the tops of her breasts.

      “Look at you,” he rasped in low heat, peeling away the cover of her bra until he could see both of her nipples. “I can see in these pretty pink buds, so tight and so upthrust, how much excitement you are feeling. You may try to hide in your passivity, Valera, but your body tattles on you like a town gossip.” Sagan followed the keen observation by catching her suddenly СКАЧАТЬ