Page 46 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
“That would be great, thank you.” Shane retrieved his own cell from between them, stopping the recording. “Please explain tothem what we’re trying to do, and that we’d just like to ask them some questions—off the books, if they prefer that. And give them my number.” He pulled it up, letting her add it into her contacts.
“Right,” she said. “I… hope what you’re doing works.”
“So do we all,” Shane replied. He smiled, wishing he could give her something more substantial—even just a hug. But he had the feeling she needed to receive that from someone closer to her, Valentine or Maddox or another from her tight-knit Starlight community. He and his vampire would just have to repay her with Vitalis-Barron’s blood. “Thank you for everything, Tara. We’ll let you get back to work.”
She gave a little bow that looked perfectly in place with her butler’s outfit, and departed through the main door, leaving it half-open behind her. Sounds of joy and pleasure refilled the room like it was lighting the place up, driving out the ghosts and lifting Shane’s heart. They had found what they’d come for with minimal fuss, and they had the whole night ahead of them.
At least, if Shane’s vampire wanted that.
He was still behind Shane, fiddling gently with Shane’s neck like he was thinking of his fangs sliding between the space in Shane’s collar. Or perhaps that was just Shane’s imagination, his mind running away with him in a happy shudder and an intake of breath. He could almost feel the way his vampire might hold him for it, a gentle cage, secure and protective, pressing first his lips, then his teeth…
His breath rustled Shane’s hair when he finally spoke. “You were rather good at that.”
“Rather?”
“Very,” he amended, his voice dark and teasing. “You were magnificent, my little swan.”
“I’d hope so. It’s all I want to do with my life, to learn how the world affects people, and then use that to affect the worldmyself.” Thathadbeen all he’d wanted, but now he found he wanted this just as much: this thrill of being kept at his vampire’s mercy, pushed to his limits, to be ordered to his knees and picked back up again, his obedience rewarded with the tenderest of care.
He was certainly being pushed now, his vampire tracing his way across Shane’s shoulder to fiddle with the fabric that bunched there. His voice was darker still, lips brushing Shane’s ear as he spoke. “That was more information than you needed for just the Vitalis-Barron article.”
“You didn’t stop me,” Shane breathed, the warmth in his chest settling lower with each heartbeat.
“Would you have listened if I had?”
Even if the article was an entirely different matter from the slow relinquishing of his body to his vampire’s hands and fangs, with how gently his vampire was pressing his fingers under the fabric on Shane’s shoulder, he couldn’t help but answer, “Have I not obeyed you thus far?”
“Repetition makes a habit, not a rule.” He pressed Shane’s strap aside, slipping it off his shoulder entirely. As it fell, so did the rest of his outfit, crookedly slipping lower.
It was such a little thing, a tiny unmaking of himself, but it burned through Shane like a wildfire, drawing a delicate sound from between his lips. It turned to a groan as his vampire kissed his shoulder, one soft, purposeful press of mouth to skin. He put the fabric back like it had been nothing, taken nothing out of him despite the longing it sent cascading through Shane.
With a little tug on the chain at Shane’s collar, he murmured, “Come, pet. You have been taunting me too long.”
Shane couldn’t have suppressed the exhilarated shudder that ran through him even if he’d wanted to. He let himself be drawn up, guided by a hand between his shoulder blades and another playing with his chain. The atmosphere of the main room hadshifted; the front half had brightened to a pleasant social level as groups split off to chat and drink—both from glassed beverages and the veins of their humans. Shane spotted a few card games in session, and something that might have been charades.
His vampire paused for barely a moment before leading them deeper into the space, where half the electric candles had been turned off, leaving softly flickering glows between dim chairs and dark corners. Conversation was muted here, sweet words spoken in ears and growled through fangs and released like moans. As Shane’s eyes adjusted, he made out the couples’ bodies beyond their outlines and his heart skipped. He wasn’t sure what burned more, the flush in his cheeks or the space between his legs.
At least everyone here wasmostlyclothed.
Shane’s vampire seemed to notice a moment later than he did, slowing uncertainly. “We can go back?” he asked, his mouth to Shane’s ear.
“No, this is fine.” A third of the couples were only engaged in feeding, their fondling kept to publicly acceptable places. “You can just bite me.”
He wanted to offer more, to offer all of himself to whoever lay behind that mask, but despite his fantasies and how thoroughly this place’s existence had seemed to slip into his bones, turning guilt and fear into hope and faith, he still needed something more from his vampire before he felt fully comfortable being taken like that. And there was the fact that having sex with him was not the same as most men, and even if his vampire had reveled in the scars that had slowly shaped him into who he was meant to be, that didn’t mean he’d know what to do with the rest of Shane without some guidance.
His vampire certainly knew what to do with the parts of Shane hehadbeen granted, though, maneuvering him right past the couches and lounge chairs to a low, cushioned bench up againstthe corner. Instead of sitting Shane down, he leaned him back, pressing him to the cold, hard surface of the wall, one hand clutching his hair and keeping his head from knocking while he caged Shane in with the other. It sent a chill through him, his heart thrumming with the feeling of being cornered.
“I can hear your pulse rising,” his vampire purred. He slipped a knee onto the bench, fitting Shane between his legs, not touching him—not quite—just there, all consuming, all demanding.
There was nowhere else that Shane would have rather been.
“Give me your neck, pet.”
He obeyed without protest or hesitation, a thrill trembling through him as he tipped his head to the side, lifting his chin. His vampire’s fingers slid along his collar, and the cold of the gems that covered Shane’s pulse fell away. It didn’t matter that he’d spent his life walking the world with his neck on display or that his vampire had bitten him there a dozen times already; the release was like being exposed, laid bare in a new and beautiful way.
“My little swan, aren’t you magnificent…”
“I’m yours,” Shane whispered, low enough that he wasn’t sure his vampire would hear—wasn’t sure he wanted him to, not when Shane himself didn’t know what that meant yet; couldn’t know, until he finally met the stranger behind the mask.
