Pure Ecstasy Read online

  “Are you saying we have one of those loving relationships?” she asked almost disdainfully.

  “What kind of relationship would you like to have?” he returned.

  “Today is your day, after all. I will follow your lead.”

  She smirked.

  “We would have an extremely sexual relationship, in which we lose ourselves in each other’s body twenty hours a day and only rest because we’ve collapsed from the intense ecstasy and orgasmic exhaustion. And even then, you would be sheathed tightly within me while we sleep because I cannot bear to part with the pleasure of your body for even a breath.”

  Seth breathed out through his nose, his eyes cast down, as he struggled to maintain composure.

  Goddess above! How easily she ignited him!

  The images she evoked in his head with her words were so vivid, all he could see was their naked bodies entwined, undulating together in waves of passion, instead of the slice of cheesecake on the plate before him.

  When he’d calmed his pulse to a more sedate rate, harnessing every bit of control in his formidable store, he looked back into her eyes.

  “Is that all you want from a husband? A Mate? Is that all you want from me?” he asked quietly.

  Instead of answering, she picked up her fork and cut into her multi-layered ice-cream cake.

  After eating for some minutes in silence, she licked her lips, met his gaze, and addressed his original question, “I didn’t die as a Pure One because of unrequited love.”

  He gave her his full attention.

  “I didn’t die because I suffered the Decline.”

  “But you died and was given the choice to become a vampire?” Seth asked.

  “Not a vampire,” she answered.

  “A Dark One. I was not given a choice. I was simply reawakened as a Dark One. Same soul, same body. Just more powerful than ever because I was finally free to fully harness my Gift.”

  “Sex,” he stated.

  “Yes,” she confirmed with relish, drawing out the S.

  “My Gift is the ability to harness sexual energy, one of the most powerful energies that connects all living things. I can manipulate it to intensify my power. I can take it from others to feed my own life force.”

  “You can also use the same energy to bring pleasure instead of pain, to heal wounds.”

  “True,” she acknowledged. “I can even restore life when someone is close to death. Isn’t there a human saying that runs along the lines of ‘if you can’t have sex you might as well be dead’?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Seth demurred.

  She shrugged.

  “Well if there isn’t, there should be. Sex makes the world go round, darling.”

  “How did you die?” Seth got back on topic and asked before she could ply her seduction with words.

  “I was hunted down as an evil fox spirit who killed men through sexual intercourse. Then, as part of my punishment, I was bound in iron chains with a boulder tied to my feet and tossed into the deepest part of the village lake.”

  The breath whooshed out of Seth’s chest at her emotionless recitation.

  “Given my Pure healing abilities, it took hours before I finally suffocated to death.”

  Chapter Seven

  And then she was silent.

  After dropping that conversational bomb at Seth’s feet, she focused on eating her dessert, occasionally looking up at him through her lashes, as if she had no emotions attached to what she’d just revealed about her death as a Pure One, but was merely curious what his reaction might be.

  He tried valiantly to keep his reaction to himself, but the visceral pain of hearing her story, knowing how frightened and alone she must have felt, made the skin tighten on Seth’s face, as if the thin epidermis was just barely able to contain and mask the force of his emotions exploding within.

  He felt deeply for this female.

  He wanted to protect and shelter her.

  He wanted to tear apart with his bare hands those who tried to hurt her.

  “Were you responsible for those men’s deaths? Did the villagers ever find the evil fox spirit? Or was that just a made up scapegoat?” he asked with remarkable calm.

  She gave a graceful shrug.

  “I used my Gift to heal men and women from the village. I was tangentially part of the Jade Lotus Society that Rain presided over when she used to be the Pure Ones’ Healer.”

  For millennia, Rain held the position as Healer of the race. But after finding her Eternal Mate in Valerius, she lost her Gift, and was now content to be a regular practitioner of modern medicine.

  Though “regular” was a relative term, given that Rain was millennia old and still retained the use of her living zhen—her hair.

  “She tried to induct me formally into the Society, and she invited me to stay at the Sanctuary with the rest of the members, but I prefer my independence,” Jade continued.

  “I’d visit her sometimes to learn and to share in the healing arts. We weren’t close, though I suppose I do esteem her abilities and her dedication.”

  “She esteems you as well,” Seth murmured.

  In fact, when the Dozen had debated whom to send to Jade Cicada’s Hive to negotiate an alliance with the vampire queen, it had come down to Seth, given his role, and Rain, given her acquaintance.

  But because it was during the time of her Phoenix Cycle, when she was at her weakest and needed to spend thirty days with the Consort of her choosing recharging her powers, Seth was the natural choice.

  Seth wondered briefly whether his path would have been different had Rain taken this assignment instead of him.

  Would he ever have been in the position he was in now? Bound to the vampire queen by his blood to quench her thirst as she wreaked havoc on his body and brought his emotions to broil?

  Somehow he knew that Jade was in his destiny.

  If it hadn’t been this time, this place, in which his path collided with hers, it would have happened sooner or later.

  “But to your earlier question—I don’t know if there really was an evil fox spirit or not,” Jade said.

  “Humans wove many such stories in those days, especially in the remote villages where I lived, where the mortals were extremely superstitious and suspicious of anything they didn’t understand.”

  “With good reason,” Seth surmised, “if Pure Ones were living amongst them. Vampires too?”

  “Not that I was aware,” she answered. “The way those men died, they weren’t drained of blood, only of soul. And the expression on their shriveled faces even after death was one of ecstasy.”

  “Why did the villagers come after you? Did you…use your Gift in the village?”

  Seth tried to keep his tone neutral, but she still smirked at his question.

  “You mean, did I indiscriminately have sexual congress with the men of the village to feed my powers?”

  He simply looked at her.

  “No. I was educated early on about the power of sex during my human life, and I wield it now because I want to revel in the pleasures of the flesh, and coincidentally, doing so magnifies my powers.”

  “But while I was a Pure One, I was a well-behaved, sexless little nun. Not because I was afraid of falling in love with the wrong male, mind you—I don’t believe in love, so how could I ever fall into it—I was more or less a hermit because I simply didn’t trust people, men and women alike.”

  “So you were wrongly accused and punished,” Seth concluded.

  “If you choose to believe my story,” Jade said, as if she didn’t care whether he did or not. As if she could have woven the tale simply for her own amusement.

  “I do believe you,” he stated solemnly.

  “Why?” She was honestly baffled by his conviction.

  “Because I trust you.”

  She was silent for a few beats.

  And then, “Not very bright of you.”

  She pushed aside her finished plate and bridged her hands together under
her chin, leaning closer to him across the narrow table between them.

  “I’ve told you a secret, Pure One. It’s your turn. Tell me something your loving, beautiful, remarkable, etcetera, etcetera human wife didn’t know about you.”

  She seemed inordinately peeved at his long dead human wife, Seth noted.

  Though he wanted to pursue her past in far more depth and detail, he knew that she’d already revealed more than she intended. One day, he wanted to understand her. He would likely never solve the puzzle of her totally, for that was part of her infinite allure, but he wanted to understand her.

  Why she didn’t believe in love.

  Why she refused to trust.

  But it was indeed his turn to be honest with her. And perhaps, in so doing, be fully honest with himself in a way he’d never really examined before.

  “My wife was loving, generous, a wonderful mother and helpmate, funny, smart—”

  Jade speared him with a fulminating glare at his continued endorsement.

  He smiled.

  “But she wasn’t beautiful, at least not by purely aesthetic standards. She was beautiful to me.”

  “You mean she had a lazy eye, a face full of warts and a bulbous nose?” Jade seemed delighted at the prospect.

  Seth suppressed a smile.

  “She was of average height, average build, just…average in general. Until she smiled and spoke and moved and danced. Then she was dazzling.”

  “Did you fall in love with her instantly?”

  “No,” he replied, “We grew up as friends since we were children. As young adults, we went our separate ways as boys and girls are wont to do. When we came back together as a couple, it was a gradual and natural progression. Over a period of months and years, our fondness grew into attraction and eventually love.”

  “But she’d always wanted to jump your bones, I’m certain,” Jade guessed.

  “The gradual attraction must have been only on your part.”

  His eyes crinkled at the corners in the way that absolutely mesmerized her.

  “I suppose she found me handsome, but more like a close relative she adored rather than a prospective lover.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Pure One,” she said, staring unblinkingly into his eyes.

  “You are not ‘handsome.’”

  She reached across the table and took one of his hands in both of hers.

  “You are desire and lust and sex and passion incarnate. You are pure ecstasy.”

  Her whispered words turned Seth hot and cold, stoking a fire within that he’d always kept banked. Now that fire roared blazing hot.

  He was all of those things she said, all of those things that no one else had ever detected about him.

  But he was only those things with her. She brought them out in him.

  “She never saw that in me,” Seth uttered low.

  “I was none of those things with her.”

  A triumphant smile spread slowly across Jade’s lips.

  She pressed a hot, possessive kiss in the center of his palm.

  “Ah,” she sighed, obviously pleased.

  “Then she never had you at all. Destiny only loaned you to her for a short time. You belong to m—”

  Abruptly, she cut herself off and dropped his hand like it was hot coal.

  She looked away for long moments before determinedly holding his gaze again, her eyes piercing his with an indefinable gleam.

  “I want you.”

  She stated the words as if she were throwing down a gauntlet.

  He looked back at her intently, searching those intense blue eyes for some depth of feeling beyond superficial lust.

  But he couldn’t see inside of her. She was, and always had been, closed off to him.

  One of Seth’s Gifts was the ability to detect the desires of others, the better to negotiate and mediate. All he’d ever felt from Jade was sexual aggression and hunger for pleasure. He could never tell whether these were the only things she wanted, or that these were the only things she allowed herself to want.

  “My blood,” Seth clarified.

  “Yes.”

  “My body.”

  “Yessss.”

  “That is all?”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  What did he want her to say? She didn’t have patience for guessing games.

  “That is plenty,” she said. “I want to renegotiate our deal. What do you want for your blood and body? Unlimited access. Sole ownership. Name your price.”

  A sharp, splintering pain exploded within Seth’s heart.

  “You want me to be your Blood Slave,” he rasped out, his eyes boring into hers.

  Her gaze flickered slightly as if she knew she’d hurt him with her demand, but wasn’t sure why.

  “We don’t have to call it that,” she coaxed. “We don’t need to formalize the ritual. You would simply give me your word that you’re mine. Only mine.”

  “I cannot be owned that way,” he stated quietly.

  “Everyone and everything can be had for a price,” she resolutely refuted. “It is how I built this Hive, the strongest vampire Hive in the world.”

  The look in her eyes gentled slightly as she considered him.

  “I would treat you well, Pure One,” she promised softly. “I would only take my pleasure with you, if that’s what you want. I would forsake all other males, and keep you always by my side.”

  “Like a pet.”

  Jade sat back as the waitress came to take their plates away and put the check on the table.

  She was nonplussed.

  She was offering him carte blanche access to her Hive, her resources, her power and influence, in return for mutual pleasure and gratification. Yet he was obviously extremely put out, if the muscle ticking in his jaw were any indication.

  Perhaps she should have thought through her strategy better.

  But this was their last day together. She wanted more days like this.

  Infinitely more.

  She was desperate to possess him totally, elated to know that no one ever truly had.

  She wanted to mark him, claim him, own him before Destiny decided to loan him to any other female.

  He was hers.

  She needed to make him hers.

  Mine, the primitive beast inside of her growled.

  “We should go,” he said and stood, after paying the bill, his ever calm and polite mask once more encasing his face.

  She took his arm as they walked out of the dessert shop together, the better to lean in and ask, “You’ll consider it?”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  He turned to face her on the sidewalk and clutched her close so that their conversation couldn’t be overheard by humans going about their day.

  “I will not be your whore.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I cannot be bought.”

  “You—”

  He held her shoulders and shook her a little, finally losing some of his cool.

  “Don’t,” he ground out.

  “Don’t,” he repeated when she opened her mouth to speak.

  “I do not fuck on command. I am not built that way. I will never give anyone the power to reduce me into a collection of flesh and bones and blood. I am more than that. And if you wanted to pretend that you are my wife, you would know that. You would respect who I am.”

  In total silence and stillness they stared at each other on the sidewalk, his chest slightly heaving with his vehemence, her chest heaving as well as if she were catching her breath from the onslaught of his words, hurled like javelins at her emotional armor.

  He wouldn’t stay with her.

  She’d risked a great deal to bargain with him. If he’d asked for her throne, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have given it up just to have him inside of her, filling her to the brim with his blood and seed.

  If he’d asked her to wage war on the Pure Ones’ behalf, conquer other vampire Hives around the world to ensur
e his Kind’s protection and safety, she wouldn’t have batted an eye. She would have started marshalling the troops first thing tomorrow. After she’d filled herself with him for the rest of the night.

  But she couldn’t have him.

  He wouldn’t let her have him.

  They had about ten hours before midnight, when he’d return to his life, and she to hers.

  Don’t leave.

  She wanted to beg him, but she never begged.

  Stay with me.

  She wanted to command, but he’d already refused her.

  Be with me.

  She wanted to hold onto him and lose herself in his body, absorb him in turn completely into herself, until nothing and no one could keep them apart.

  Love me.

  But she would never utter that rubbish out loud, even though she wanted it more than she wanted to breathe.

  He’d laugh at her if he knew her ridiculous, fantastical thoughts. Even if love did exist in truth, she knew very well that she couldn’t command it into being.

  She shifted within his grasp, and he automatically loosened his hold on her.

  “You’ll regret not taking my offer, Pure One,” she said as she forced herself to step away from the tantalizing heat of his body.

  “Next time, I won’t be so generous in the negotiation.”

  He straightened as well and looked down at her, his face frozen with a stoic glaze.

  “Then I’d better make sure there will not be a next time,” he said quietly.

  “There will be,” she returned with false confidence.

  “I always get what I want.”

  He didn’t reply, his eyes unreadable in the shade of the afternoon sun.

  “Enough pretense,” she said abruptly.

  “I tire of this game. Just as I tire of your endless refusals. We might as well part ways now. Why wait for midnight? I am eager to return to my harem where pleasure is offered freely and inexhaustibly. You are dismissed, Pure One.”

  She turned her back to him, regal and haughty, without another word.

  A long silence stretched behind her.

  Then, so quietly she almost didn’t hear, he walked away.

  *** *** *** ***

  Present Day.

  She was three rooms down from his.