Defiant Mate: Lethal Legacy Vampire Series, page 6
God, he tasted good.
Another sense kicked in!
Just that tiny taste had me pulsing more fiercely. And then he dove in, curling his tongue around mine, and deepened the kiss into an erotic caress that immediately heated my core.
To my everlasting delight, he seemed to want me as much as I wanted him. He kissed me endlessly, angling his head, varying the pressure of his lips and the swirl of his tongue. I was helplessly ensnared and drowning with need. The taste of him was an intoxication I didn’t expect. And once tasted, I couldn’t get enough. I was kissing him back just as deeply, just as fiercely. So much so that, when he released my lips, I couldn’t keep in my whine of protest, reaching up to try to recapture his lips, wanting more of him. I gripped his silky long hair with determined fingers and entrapped his long legs with mine to pull him closer to me.
He didn’t even flinch at the pain in his scalp or deviate from his purpose.
I could feel his smile on my skin as he trailed his lips along my cheek to the soft shell of my ear and then the sensitive skin of my neck.
God, I wanted it all. His kisses. His touch. My body craved it.
The sudden cool air on my breast was my first clue that he had uncovered my swollen breasts. I looked down and was riveted at the sight of his dark head bent to capture a taut nipple into his mouth. I watched my nipple disappear into his mouth and almost dislodged him at the feel of the strong suction that seemed to have a direct trigger to my clit. He bit down suddenly, and the pleasure of the pull and sting sent electric jolts of sensations to my core, causing an immediate gush of wetness between my legs as searing ecstasy fissioned deep in my belly and pelvis.
My erratic pants of pleasure filled the air around me as sensations I never thought possible ricocheted through me. He couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t hear him, but he must have felt the rapid expansion of my chest as I continued to pant, because he kissed me again, his lips fused with mine. I helplessly tried to meld my body into his.
I woke then, trembling and throbbing in sexual frustration. The tips of my breasts still tingled and throbbed from his possession, and my panties were drenched.
Fuck! Frustrated tears filled my vision, but I refused to let them fall.
Two days later, my in-laws left, and I was alone with a large contingent of staff to cater to my every whim in my husband’s New York mansion. By the third day of waiting for my absent husband to arrive, I finally got the message, as pictures of my husband surfaced in the local society pages of the newspaper.
He wasn’t coming home to me and seemed to have no intention of giving up his bachelor status. It was my first sighting of him, and he was attending a movie premier in London with his mistresses, not one but three women. Beautiful women.
I had always dreamed of attaining a husband who was a protector, a provider, and who gave me lots of passion. You know, all the good p’s. Instead, it looked as though I had attained one who was promiscuous, a prick, and who seemed like a damn peacock! Yeah, he was pretty enough. Already, this man was making me crazy. Who the hell was I kidding? The man is drop-dead gorgeous. With his blue-black hair, wavy and falling to his broad shoulders, sea-green eyes, dark flawless olive skin, square-chiseled jawline, and over six feet of pure virile male, he was masculine perfection.
None of that mattered because I had my man. I had the man of my dreams, literally.
I had long since ignored the why, where, or how we came together and instead focused on what it felt like to be held by him. When we were together, nothing else mattered. We had each other. No words were needed to express what we felt for each other, because it was all in the way we touched and kissed each other. His touch was reverential and adoring and felt as though he was sharing his mind with me. When he kissed me, it felt as though he wasn’t just savoring my taste and essence; it seemed as though he was sharing his soul.
Despite the disaster of my marriage, I thought that all was well in my life until I fell asleep that night and my dream man came to me.
My in-laws had seemed familiar to me, but until I saw him, I hadn’t made the connection. And even then, I had to see his face on my dream man to do that. It was devastating to realize that the dreams that I had been having since I was twelve years old and, more alarming, the intimate recent ones were of him.
I had been dreaming of him! My husband. Drako Petrov, son of Alexi Petrov, was my husband and my dream man.
I should have known, should have guessed it. I didn’t know what this all meant, but it made his desertion that much harder to stomach. I learned the hard way that even his betrayal and rejection didn’t stop the dreams. No, the dreams became my torment. The place where I learned that I was weak where he was concerned. And now that I had made the connection between my dream man and my husband, in my dream I could finally see his face clearly.
As soon as he tried to hug me, I ducked my head and moved to the other side of the room.
He frowned and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”
I glared and belatedly remembered that he probably couldn’t see my facial expression. I settled for folding my arms and stiffened my spine in a defiant stance.
He started toward me again, and again I sidestepped his advances, determined to avoid any further intimate contact with him.
He stared at me, more confused than angry. It seemed he, too, remembered that we weren’t able to see facial expressions and instead opened his palms in a universal gesture of “what?”
I had never denied him before. Ever since the dream when I approached him and allowed his hugs, he had never stopped touching me. It had become our thing that, no matter what, we spent the night hugging, kissing, and caressing each other. We didn’t need words or facial expressions. Our bodies, our touch, and the way we made each other feel had its own language. The intimacy between us hadn’t progressed much further than kisses and caresses. Unfortunately, up until then, any attempt at further intimacy dissipated the dream or we would wake up.
Seemingly impatient with our standoff, he closed the distance between us in a blink.
His speed initially stunned me, and I had no defenses when he pulled me into his arms and captured my lips in a devastating kiss.
I’d had every intention of denying his advances. However, as soon as he touched me, all angry emotion seemed to dissipate like mist after a hard rain. I was soon in his arms seeking his warmth and companionship as I always did. And despite what I knew of him, in this place, in our sweetest oblivion, his kisses and arms were all I needed, and I shamelessly engaged in some seductive moves of my own long into the night.
I hated to admit it, but his kisses seemed sweeter, more intense than before. God, the taste and feel of him elicited new levels of pleasure. New levels of want. I should have been repulsed by him or at least had enough self-respect to not allow my “player” husband any kind of intimacy with me.
My only consolation was that this was just a dream, right? This wasn’t real. Too bad that, when I woke the next morning, my lips were puffy and slightly sore and my breasts were tender from his amorous attention.
Dream my ass.
I excused my weak-ass resistance as another inexplicable phenomenon in my life. For sure those pop-up adjectives had to be a freak of nature. And yeah, I was going to categorize my dreaming of my future husband years before actually meeting him as another. Both phenomena are weird as fuck.
I wasn’t even remotely tempted to tell another living soul for fear that they would either put me in the nuthouse or have me under some damn scientist’s microscope. Regardless, I wasn’t going to risk revealing any of my psychic abilities to anyone. Not my ability to dream of my future husband for years before it happened and certainly not my ability to know the character of a person on sight. Facial sight.
Yeah, that was another tidbit I hadn’t dwelled on during my dream. However, now that I was awake, some of the pop-up adjectives that came at me at the sight of my “husband” wouldn’t leave my mind. Trustworthy. Brilliant. Strong. I didn’t need to recall more. I had already made up my mind to have hope for my husband, even before I knew he was my dream man.
It was mainly because of the readings I had gotten off my in-laws. They had all been pure positivity. Benevolent, honest, principled, intelligent, brave, strong, and integrity were adjectives that jumped out at me on meeting them. In a word, they were good people.
I was done with feeling sorry for myself, for waiting on a husband who cared nothing for me and letting others dictate my life. Yes, I was still the daughter and sister of powerful mobsters and now the wife of a wealthy man, but it didn’t mean I had to hide away. And despite the allowance I now received from my husband, together with what I still received from Tristan, I needed to work. The money was essential to aiding my responsibilities.
So, days after becoming the wife of Drako Petrov, I took my usual security team of my three monks, Burak, who Tristan gifted to me on my wedding day, and two huge men my in-laws insisted on adding to my security detail and left my cage to work.
I was surprised that Tristan would give Burak to me. Burak had been Tristan’s personal bodyguard since we were both kids.
I was grateful for the protection, though, because I was a women determined to chart my own course and take charge of my own destiny.
I went to work and submerged myself in the love of dance that had saved my sanity all my life. Fortunately, marriage wasn’t turning out to be the shackles that I had feared. In fact, I seemed to have more freedom than I had ever had in my life.
Using my years of training in classical ballet, I tried other dance styles that my mother and Tristan would have vehemently banned. I fell in love with hip hop. And with time and freedom to do as I pleased, I became remarkably good at it. My new dance style gave me a career I would have never contemplated. While I continued with my ballet dance troupe, I also moonlighted in hip-hop in between my ballet shows.
And yes, I dreamed of my husband or more like dreamed with him. Our interaction started the same, with me trying to deny him, but I was incapable of denying him anything, despite how he continued to betray me. The chemistry between us kept getting stronger, more erotic, and while I hated to admit it, I couldn’t wait for the day when we would finally meet. I was at a point where I went through the motions of the day when I wasn’t dancing just to get to those precious dream-state moments.
Inexplicably, my subconscious mind refused to comply with my determination to ignore my absent spouse. Ever since I realized that I was married to the man in my dreams, the dreams changed from being mobile, abstract, disjointed scenes to vivid technicolor of not just the sight of his body but the sight of his expressions. Now my dreams seemed more like actual encounters than something that happened in a dream state.
No matter how pissed and disappointed in him I was, when I closed my eyes, I couldn’t resist him. My body didn’t want to resist him. It should have only been a dream, but my dream state felt more real to me than my awake state. I certainly found more joy in my dream state than anywhere else.
I should have been the shy virgin or at least uncertain of how to handle a man as virile as he. However, there wasn’t an inch of his body that I didn’t explore as he explored mine. He would caress me to the point of what felt like near sexual madness. Determined to bring him to the same level of obsession, I became frighteningly bold in my exploration of him.
Even his sandalwood scent, all masculine and sexy as sin, aroused me to the edge of pain. When I thought for sure I was ready to expire and explode, I would then wake up with the physical evidence of my unsated desire. My heart would still be pounding erratically, my skin damp with sexual heat, my breasts taut and sensitive. There would be an empty throbbing low in my pelvis with my inner thighs drenched with my essence, and my entire body would be trembling from his sensual exploration.
Each encounter drove me closer and closer to an obsession with my absent husband. An obsession that made me almost desperate to assuage my tormenting need. Thoughts of going after him began to plague me.
And then I had to come down from whatever madness had invaded my senses to accept the reality that this man was my husband. He had made it more than clear that he didn’t want a wife. He didn’t want me.
I was in a constant state of yearning that only got worse each day, despite the constant hurt of jealousy and the ache of possessiveness the sight of him with his mistresses evoked. Every fiber of my being told me that he was mine. Everything in me said so. I even had a damn piece of paper telling the world that he was mine.
My dream man and dance may have become my life. Drako became my obsession.
I had to know more about him to help me deal. It started with Google searches and quickly morphed into a frenzied poking on social media that yielded nothing. And when those didn’t give me even a clue of who my man was— yes, he was mine, despite the mistresses and the lack of acknowledgment— I had to know more. The ability to find out information about a person who didn’t even have a social media account was beyond me. So, I asked Burak for help.
At first, he provided me with the same basic crap I had uncovered on the internet. I didn’t care that he was one of the wealthiest Russian oligarchs, or one of the wealthiest men in the world, or that he had hundreds of business interests. After I insisted that he dig deeper, Burak found out more and provided photos.
Clear, vivid, beautiful pictures. I loved that he was an anonymous donor to several children’s charities around the world, specifically focusing on education, health, and promoting young athletes. Most weekends Drako was on a basketball court in some of the worst neighborhoods in Third World countries and some in major cities, scouting to pluck out that one bright spark to give him or her a helping hand. He also wasn’t daunted by going into several war-torn regions to bring children out.
I loved that he and his brothers low-key sponsored several activist groups and even provided security for their protest events. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
After two months of his assignment, Burak thought it was important that I knew that this man I was so fascinated with loved to take part in extreme sports, collected rare artifacts and beautiful women.
I scowled at him and told him that I knew those facts. I still wanted to know more about my husband. Months into being married to Drako and two months of Burak keeping constant surveillance and reports, I still had an insatiable need to know more about Drako. “Go back for more,” I demanded.
“You’ve become a damn stalker!” Burak hissed.
“Stalker is such a demeaning word. Do you even know what that word means? It’s not as if English is your first language,” I reminded Burak sweetly, because clearly Burak wasn’t getting the point. He couldn’t shame me into giving up this new window into my husband. I wanted to know where he was every hour of the day. I wanted to know who he spoke to. I wanted to know what he did.
“I have to think that you don’t realize how limiting that word is. Webster says that a ‘stalker is a person who stalks: a person who pursues someone obsessively and aggressively to the point of harassment.’ That is not what I do to Drako. He doesn’t even know about me. I don’t interfere with his life.”
“Move on.” Burak got in my face. “You are better than this. Better without that man who doesn’t care that you exist. Move on.”
“That man?” I used my fingers to make air quote signs, letting him know that I didn’t appreciate him referring to Drako as such. “That man is mine, whether he knows it or not. He may not know me now but mark my words. Drako will know me. He will love me, and I will have him.” Yup, I had long since parted ways with sanity.
“Listen to me, Danika. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that ‘that man’ will ever be ready to settle down,” Burak bit out impatiently as he used air quotes. “Do you think he doesn’t know that I was tailing him? His bodyguards were on to me within two minutes of me ‘stalking’ him for you.”
Those air quotes were starting to annoy the hell out of me.
“He knows that I follow him around for you, and he doesn’t give a damn that you know what he does. Other than the one time he lifted me by the neck and pushed me against a wall to find out who I was, he has left me alone. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” He gripped my shoulders. “I am over two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle, and he lifted me with one hand. One hand, Danika. I have known men like this all my life. He is dangerous, and he’s a predator.”
“Okay, so I think it is only fair that I warn you that what you’re saying is not a deterrent. You’re only increasing my interest.” I didn’t bother hiding my smile. “He’s fascinating as hell, isn’t he?”
“This man cares nothing for his wife!” Burak gritted out.
“Oh, I understand that,” I told him sweetly and stepped out of his firm but gentle hold. “I understand that I’m not technically ‘stalking’ my husband because he is aware of your presence and hasn’t complained to authorities. So, please find out more. And get a recording of him please? I can’t believe that I have never heard his voice!”
Burak sighed long and loud.
I smiled.
While Burak ignored my request of a recording, I continued to get the daily updates and loved everything about my man except his delay in coming for me.
I might just forgive Tristan someday.
Over the next two years, I became a top choreographer despite my aversion to publicity and my selective clientele. The seemingly insatiable demand for my talent was staggering, and my astronomical fees didn’t deter music artists who seemed to get a kick out of my exclusivity. And thanks to my six months of comfort eating, after my last ballet performance in Australia, my hips and bustline had gotten a roundness and generosity that were assets for my more provocative and sensual dance moves. They were assets that would have been impossible if I had to perform in a ballet.
I couldn’t help but hope my man loved my new curves as much as I loved them when he finally came for me. At least, in our dreams, he hadn’t commented or seemed repulsed by them.
