Free Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 by V. M. Black

realized were tight began to loosen under the warm, steady wash. The styling products that had kept my hair in place began to flow down into my face, and I screwed my eyes shut and scraped my hair back.
    I opened my eyes to catch Dorian looking keenly down at me, water running off the flawless planes of his face.
    “Your clothes,” I said reaching out to the waistband of his soaked pants.
    He just reached between us and unfastened his pants, peeling off the clinging fabric and flinging it into a corner of the shower.
    “Better?” he asked, catching an arm around my waist and pulling me against him. We were front-to-front, and his hardness pressed between our bellies. The strangeness of it, of everything, hit me again.
    “I can’t believe I’m here,” I blurted. “Doing this.” I’d wanted to do this. I’d chosen to do this, asked to do it. What was wrong with me? “My friends—they would freak out. They’d kill me. They’d kill you, some rich old pervert taking advantage of an undergrad.”
    He caught the nape of my neck and bent his head down to mine, nuzzling against my cheek before brushing his lips to mine.
    I shivered and shut my eyes, leaning into him.
    “And what would you tell them?” he asked softly.
    “I don’t know. I still don’t know what this is,” I admitted. “It’s not like anything I ever expected.” I opened my eyes and pulled back to look at him squarely. “Or wanted.”
    His hands slipped over my water-slick body, one on my back, the other cupping my rear and pulling me more firmly against him. My skin flamed with awareness where he touched me.
    “But you want it now.” It was not a question.
    “Yes,” I breathed. Oh, yes. For as long as he was with me, I would want this—and when we were apart, I would ache for it. It was the bond, had to be the bond.
    “This isn’t something your friends can understand.” He kissed my neck, and I shivered as my knees weakened slightly.
    “But I don’t understand it, either,” I protested. Who could? I’d known this man—this half-devil, half-angel—for scarcely more than a month. If I didn’t count the time I spent unconscious, I had spent time with him only over seven days. At the third, he’d transported me out of my body, taken my blood because I had given it to him and in return had presented me with a new life. I’d let him do it, wanted him to do it more than I had ever wanted anything. At our forth meeting, I’d tumbled into bed with him, and now, at our seventh, he’d proceeded to frighten me beyond my imagining with the terrible society of his people. Yet I was here again, in his arms.
    And I couldn’t want to be anywhere else.
    His voice was low in my ear. “You will understand, Cora. We have all the time you need.”
    His head dipped to my shoulder, and I leaned back against the cool shower wall as his mouth and the water moved over me, letting the sensations carry me away. The heat was back, the thrumming need that started deep in my womb and lanced along my nerves, into my clit, my nipples, my lips, following his mouth and making me hurt with desire.
    Dorian cupped a hand with the lower edge against my breast, holding it away so that the shower ran to fill it up, the trickling edge of water teasing at my nipple. He caressed the hard nub with his thumb through the warmth of the water, and I shivered.
    He kissed a line between my breasts, kneeling to lavish my hips and navel with attention. The image of him, on his knees before me, burned into my brain and shook me as much as the feel of his mouth on my body did.
    Dorian rose up again to take my other nipple into his mouth, stroking and pulling it into a peak so hard that the juncture of my thighs ached. I grabbed his hair, unable to stop myself, my breath hissing through my teeth.
    His hand slipped between us, and he cupped my mound and entrance in one hand, unmoving for a long moment as his mouth tortured first one breast and then the other, the water sheeting