Viola grace saguinary.., p.5
Viola Grace - Saguinary Seduction, page 5
No man could lose so much shimmering-red blood, no man could lie so motionless and still…especially not a man as dangerous as Arash Farahani…unless he was…
“Dead.” Peter’s voice was almost conversational. “Very.”
His smile grew wider. More brilliant.
More shockingly, stunningly enticing.
“Dear God. I’ve n-n-nev…” Drucilla couldn’t finish. Now that she’d started licking her lips, she could only do it over and over and over again. Repeatedly. Staring. In danger of complete collapse, not just because of what she’d done, but because of the searing currents of new and ecstatic sensation coursing through every awakening part of her. Not to mention because of the error…terrible, terrible error…that had made her bring down Farahani prematurely. Before…before…
“Easy.” Peter stepped between her and the body on the snow. He blocked her view and that should have made it easier. That should have allowed her to return her focus to the here and the now, and the assignment she’d hopelessly bungled by shooting Farahani and ensuring it could never be completed. Never be resolved, with the possibility of dire impact upon the country and the world for years…decades…to come.
“Peter, I’m…I’m…” Her voice thickened, though not with horror. Quivering and quavering, her voice carried every echo of the strangely enlightening tingle that had not stopped 39
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soaring and spiraling inside her.
Blood lust?
Blood hunger?
Was that what made it nearly impossible for her to choke out the words she needed to choke out? Was that why she found it all but impossible to draw in the breath she needed to draw if she ever hoped to choke them out? “F-F-F…he p-pulled his gun. He pointed it at m-me, and when…he s-s-s…when he said…”
“Easy, Dru.” Through a dim, reddening haze that was hard at work obliterating her vision, Drucilla saw Peter take a step toward her. She saw concern wipe away his earlier expression as he reached for her.
Sweet heaven, how she wished she could retreat from the possibility of his touch! How she wished she could step away from it, thereby avoiding the simmering heat of it!
How she needed to tell him things. Explain things…what had made her pull the trigger out of sheer instinct. Out of urgent need awakened by the sudden clang of alarm bells inside her head.
“He said they were on to him,” she whispered hoarsely, struggling to square her shoulders and unable to succeed.
Struggling to stand erect, away from her tree trunk and get control of herself by vanquishing once and for all the danger of those ongoing tingles and sparkles of unadulterated bloodlusting excitement. And unable to do any of those things either.
Somehow, she managed to meet Peter’s gaze head-on.
“He said they demanded he eliminate us. As a show of his dedication. His loyalty. So they wouldn’t el-liminate him. And then he l-laughed. He said he n-never gave us anything of any v-v-value. And now we had to be p-put down.” Her voice had lost nearly all volume. Nearly all strength. “Because w-we were g-g-god…less. And…”
“Breathe, Dru.” Peter was too near. He was much too near.
Reaching for her. Close to her. “Breathe deep and try not to think about it.”
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Not think?
Drucilla shuddered.
How could she do that?
All her training demanded she think. Every bit of it demanded she report every minute detail of what had just happened and begin to plan for what would happen next. And it demanded she remain calm. Detached. Aloof, and distant, and cold.
And then the tingles reached her brain.
Before Peter touched her, she felt alive. Precipitously alive with the taste of fresh-spilled blood tart upon her tongue. The imagined taste of it sizzling upon her tongue.
“His finger t-twitched. Farah-hani’s finger. He pointed his g-g-gun, and then it t-twitched. I saw it, Peter! I…”
“Shhh, Dru.” His hand dropped all but unnoticed to her arm. “I know. You did what you had to do. You…”
She licked her lips. Compulsively now. “His f-finger twitched, and then I was st-standing over him. My gun was vib-brating in my hand, and…”
Blood.
“Sweet God!” Orgasm shook her. Hottest orgasm, sudden and precipitous, intense orgasm ached inside her. Underscoring her shaken terror…the near fatality of her shaken terror.
She’d never expected so much blood…never expected the fascination of fresh-spilt vermilion, or to react this way to it.
Never expected to grow sweetly, shiveringly wet between her legs. More aroused than even her fevered, lusting dreams of Peter Granatum had aroused her to steaming. To streaming.
Shuddering again, she glanced around. Trying to think.
Wilderness surrounded them. Deep emptiness and returned silence of the far-north, remote Minnesota woods surrounded them on every side.
“Farah-hani’s op-peratives,” Her voice halted. Broke. Grew ever more unsteady. “They m-m-might…we need to…” She looked. Searched for someplace to go. Somewhere to hide.
Peter smiled again. A slow and easy, satisfied smile. And more shimmering currents of orgasm slipped from the flesh 41
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between her legs. Flesh she’d left deliberately bared the way she had from the first day she’d met Peter and begun to hunger for him. Because it was titillating to know she was ready…titillating to feel the sinuous stroking of cold air across her heated ridges and aroused swellings, titillating to know the nakedness, the sexual preparedness, was her own secret.
Titillating, too, to feel the inflammatory scoring of her own flesh against itself and the resulting moisture that stroked searing paths down the insides of her thighs.
“There are no operatives, Dru. You know that. You know Farahani worked alone.”
Of course she did.
No Alizarene professing to function as a double agent would risk having operatives. No Alizarene would ever risk being suspected of double-dealing. Knowing exactly what would happen if he was found out. Knowing he would be killed without compunction.
She knew. But she couldn’t think clearly enough to rationalize. Couldn’t function on any reasonable level. Couldn’t make any sense of things that should make unquestioned sense, inarguable sense.
“We need to get you inside,” Peter said simply. His fingers tightened around her arm and Drucilla glanced down at them.
Stared down at them.
When had he put his hand there?
How had she not noticed it was there?
“We need to get you to someplace warm. Before you go into shock.”
She glanced around again.
Was there such a place?
“P-Peter, I’m not…not…” When she looked up into the smooth gray depth of Peter’s bottomless eyes, she couldn’t finish.
He could see it. Had to be able to see everything that was going on inside her.
“It happens sometimes,” he murmured, smiling again slightly. Scintillatingly. His gaze reflected his faintly mocking 42
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awareness of what was happening to her. Inside her. And then he turned her the smallest bit. To face another stretch of seemingly unbroken woods, seemingly inhospitable wilderness obliterated by a thickening curtain of falling snow. “What you’re feeling is not that unusual. It’s not that uncommon, and you need to…”
Not uncommon?
She doubted that!
Shivering, she lacked the strength of will and the freedom of movement to pull free of his grip. Too long pent, the endless streams of escaping essence would not stop. Would not slow down or ease.
They only debilitated her. Entirely. Leaving her vulnerable and barely able to walk, stumbling over nothing as Peter began to lead her in no direction she could determine.
“Sh-shouldn’t we hide the…Farahani? Just in case…you know…”
Every instinct she possessed, and every bit of training she’d absorbed, told her they should. Immediately. But he was the senior agent, the instructing agent, and when he murmured the snow will do it almost absently, stepping aside, she went along with it.
Silent, silken, deadly, the snow was coming down in increasingly thick waves. The expected mid-winter blizzard was already sweeping in and she felt a momentary panic.
They would be inundated. This remote woodland would be choked and buried, cooling red bloodspill and all. Pure whiteness would take over the world and they would…would…
“Peter?” The cold had intensified. The cold reached the numbing stage, leaving her mouth sluggish, her lips thick and stupid in their inability to form coherent words.
And the rest of her? What about the weakened, insatiable rest?
What about the headlong rush of warmth Peter’s touch sent straight through her…straight to her marrow and all the way to the roiling, awakened center of her?
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Stumbling, she complied when he began to lead her toward nowhere. Quivering beneath the force of whatever had taken her over and now entirely possessed her, she shook violently as she followed without protest, barely able to stand even with his help. Or maybe that was especially with his help.
Peter’s smile had turned dangerous. It had become the smoothly practiced expression of the accomplished seducer she knew him to be. Because even agents talked. Female agents who’d known him and marveled at his prowess. Female agents who’d ignored every rule in the book at his insistent urging and expertise and allowed themselves to grow besotted with him.
Beleaguered by the memories of him that were all he left in his destructive wake.
Female agents who’d reported in urgently rising whispers the desperation they’d felt…still felt…after being seduced by him and left by him. Female agents who’d awakened every bit of Drucilla’s curiosity and her detestably virginal longings with their sighed insistence that they’d do it all again…gladly do every bit of it again, if only he would look at them one more time. Give them the chance again. Because there were things he knew how to do to a woman. Things he would do with very little urging if he chose…tortures he would exact that were in their way far more potent and diabolical than the unendurable tortures he knew how to inflict upon his enemies.
And now he was looking at Drucilla that way. The way the other women had described. The way she’d never imagined he would look at her.
Torture?
Shivering, she stared into his eyes.
She had become the student again. And he was about to become the teacher. He was about to present her with all new lessons that must be endured and must be learned. Followed by all new examinations that she would be expected to repeat and repeat and repeat until she mastered every last concept they questioned. And these lessons, these examinations, would have nothing at all to do with operations as an agent.
“This way, Dru.” His pressure upon her arm increased.
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Significantly increased.
Mesmerized, gazing up into his eyes, she nodded.
Fascinated by the promise in his gaze that what he was about to do to her would be the equal of anything she’d inflicted upon Farahani and its effects would be even more astonishing, she gave her wordless permission. For things she couldn’t imagine, much less understand. With her body shaking in its every fiber, about to be consumed by increasing agues of eagerness mixed with need.
Her mind tore itself in half. And then the halves began to wheel and stutter. Separately as well as in tandem.
“There’s a cabin.” The sound of Peter’s voice, firm and sure with the knowledge of what he’d awakened inside her, sent new heated tingle-thrills through her.
You’ll like me, his gaze said.
And you say that to all the girls, she thought back at him.
You’re a killer now, he responded silently, urging her into quicker motion. And you can never go back. Never be anything else again.
She surged. Spreading her legs wide, increasingly unable to walk with the layers of her exposed and swollen, much too vibrantly sensitized flesh brushing against each other, she surged and shuddered. Knowing the beginning…only the beginning, barely the beginning, of sensual, sexual torture.
Intolerable torture.
Walk.
She had to concentrate intently, had to focus every bit of her shivering, shimmering self upon that once simple exercise.
Had to blot out all else, everything else, just to remain on her feet and in motion at his smiling, almost cruel urging.
How much farther? a dazed and dazzled, barely coherent part of her mind thought to question. God in heaven, how much farther?
She wanted to touch the moist-aching ridges and folds between her legs. Needed desperately to touch them the way she did every night and early morning in the long hours between awake and asleep when she thrashed restlessly atop the tangled ruin of her bed. She needed so urgently to stroke 45
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them with shaken hands that tried in vain to calm…needed to know the soft and then less soft pressure of her own fingers delving as deep as they dared into her flesh. Probing at the misting folds in uncertain search of ways to ease the hardened clustering of desire and need that lay too far buried for her to reach it or assuage it. Much less relieve it.
Peter watched with the smallest of completely knowing smiles. Gauging the increasing unsteadiness of her steps.
Monitoring her increased staggering and her legs-spread swagger as she struggled in vain to avoid inciting herself to further swollen wetness. Unbearable wetness.
“Here we are.” Nearly blinded by inner turmoil and the night that encroached from within as well as without, Drucilla barely saw the cabin when he led her right up to it.
It was small. Ramshackle and rough-looking, a dark log structure rendered nearly invisible by busy swirls of flakes dropping from a milky-dark sky and the swaying arms of surrounding pines.
“I’ve used it before,” Peter said, helping her to step across a decrepit porch to the roughhewn door. His mouth shimmered so close to her ear that his lips stroked fiery, fatal strokes along its outer ridges.
She stared up at him.
But isn’t that…dangerous?
Flakes rimmed ebony-dark hair shadowed with the onset of night. And light lit his eyes…cold light, hard light. Blood hungry light.
This was dangerous, all right. In every possible way, this was dangerous…this onrushing liaison in this place he admitted using before. Very probably often before.
Every agent knew that was never to be done. Even the most inexperienced agent…Drucilla …knew any habit was dangerous and potentially fatal. Any moment of predictability could be the last and should never be countenanced, never be allowed.
Peter was being careless about this. He’d been careless several times already on this endless, blood-stained afternoon.
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He’d been careless when he’d left her alone with the Alizarene agent. Careless when he’d minimized the risk Farahani represented, careless when he’d disputed the need to cover their tracks, cover her killing. And now, almost criminally careless in his habitual use of a place Farahani had very likely known about. And maybe others as well.
This was exceedingly dangerous.
He was going to get himself killed one of these days. Maybe her, too. And she should refuse. Should insist they turn around and get away from here. Now. And yet…and yet…
“I don’t th-think…” Physically, she couldn’t hold back.
Peter had caught her in his trap. Had used her own lust and the bloodthirsty metallic taste of blood hot upon her tongue to pull her forward and down, into this.
“You don’t need to think.” Pressing so insistently against her that, for a heart-stopped instant, she thought he meant to kiss her the way he had in every one of her sweat-strangled dreams, Peter bent to insert an ancient key into the lock. To turn it and then draw her into his cabin…his lair. Draw her to him. Always radiating the irresistible attraction of a magnet at work upon steel. A pull stronger than any she’d ever been prepared to resist. A pull that was and always had been hot.
Sensual. Sexual.
“Blood lust,” was all he said, all he had time to say, before his mouth found hers. And then, “It’s going to be hours,” as he reached for the throat of her coat. “Before the blizzard ends.”
His fingers worked quickly. Deftly. Releasing the two large buttons that held her coat closed, he kept up his light, insanely enervating and constantly brushing pressure. He caressed her lips. Endlessly. He stroked lightly, swaying his entire body from side to side with a motion that barely qualified as motion…a motion that resembled the sweet lightness of breeze attempting to soothe the swollen, throbbing mound of her lower lip.
Peter tantalized. He promised in his own inimical, intolerable way so many more things that might or might not 47
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actually be granted.
Drucilla groaned softly.
And Peter laughed.
Now that he’d unfastened her coat, he slid it backward. He slid it away from trembling shoulders with a quick flick of hands that instantly, unerringly returned to her throat. Large, large hands that surrounded its base with shivering warmth.
Her coat dropped, forgotten. Nothing more than a pale blur in danger of being ruined, if it hadn’t been already, by accumulated dust and grit on the unswept floor. Certain to be ruined, had Peter not caught it with another deft move and tossed it across the back of a squat sofa.
Then, a moment of silence. Intense silence, pulsing at the same rate and in the same tone as the heavy pulse that ripped and tore at all the important parts of her body.
Peter ran his tongue across Drucilla’s lips. Searching for something, he seemed not to find it. “Beautiful,” he murmured, catching his breath as he took a single step backward and away from her. Looking down at her, he ran his gaze slowly over her. Surveying her in the darkening gloom…surveying her pale dress that blazed like backlit fire, a perfect match for the discarded coat because it had been made to match.
