Maybe I passed out or maybe I just lost a few minutes there. Either way, I came around to find him just barely stroking, too light to give any friction at all, too light to do more than tease. And I writhed anyway, every tiny movement sweet torture, shuddering down nerves still raw with pleasure.

He looked up at me teasingly. “How about now?”

“What?”

“The date.”

It took me a moment to even realize what the hell he was talking about. “Oh . . . it’s fair . . . I guess,” I said, trying for joking, but mostly sounding breathless.

“Fair.” Dark eyes narrowed. “I’ll have to try a little harder, then, won’t I?”

I stared at him. I thought a little harder might just kill me.

And then I was sure it would, when the bastard moved on—to my thigh.

“What—what are you doing?” I gasped. I wanted him in me. I wanted him in me now.

“Healing you,” he said innocently, mouthing a completely inconsequential bruise.

“It can wait!”

“No, no. I like to be thorough.”

I noticed, I thought grimly, as he licked away a tiny, almost-not-there scratch on my knee. I started to reach for him, hot and aching and desperate. But then rough fingers slipped over the skin of my outer thighs, smoothed up to my buttocks, and then back down to tease the softness behind my knees.

And, God, he knew how I loved that.

He did it again and I sighed and gave up, because clearly Mircea was going to take his time whether I liked it or not. Although I couldn’t imagine what he thought he was doing—

Nibbling on my foot? It would have been more surprising, except that Mircea liked feet the way I liked long, beautiful hair. In a quasi-fetishy sort of way that we didn’t talk about, but that I indulged by doing a lot more pedicuretype things than I ever had before dating him.

Of course, he usually preferred the objects of his affection encased in silk stockings, the old-fashioned kind with the seam up the back, which he kept sending me in alarming quantities. Or useless wisps of leather, preferably beaded and be-crystalled to within an inch of their life. Or those weird satin mules with the marabou feathers that I drew the line at because I kept tripping over them.

Not cracked and bruised and torn and battered.

Not that that seemed to be slowing him down any.

He licked the underside of the big toe, curling his tongue all the way around it, and I made a small sound. Teasing, dark eyes regarded me from over pink skin and chipped polish. “How did you manage to get barbecue sauce on your toes?”

“I didn’t,” I said indignantly.

He just laughed. “You taste good.”

I would have answered, but he’d started mouthing the mound below the toes and I forgot how. I laid my head back instead and stared at the ceiling, trying not to go completely out of my mind as he took his sweet time. Halfway through, I decided that if I survived this, I was going to kill him. It wouldn’t be easy, him being a master vamp and all, but I would find a way.

He licked a long swath up my instep and I shivered helplessly. “Are you cold?” he asked innocently.

“Mircea, seriously—”

I broke off because he’d started sucking on my heel. Which should have been no big deal, but which, for some reason, felt positively sinful. Who the hell knew that a heel could be an erogenous zone?

“Anything can be, if you never get a chance to see it,” he murmured.

“People see feet all the time.”

“Today. But they even swathed the piano legs in Victoria’s London.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

“Humans rarely do,” he told me, and bit down.

I made a sound that was absolutely not a whimper, but might have been edging that way. Because the sensation had shot straight to an area that definitely was an erogenous zone. And that had already been pretty damn stimulated.

“Mircea, I swear to God—”

“All done,” he told me, releasing my foot. I sagged in relief.

And then he grabbed the other one.

And that was it.

I let the pink, silky-skinned foot he’d left me with come to rest on that taut chest. Mircea paused what he was doing to look at me narrowly, which I took as a good sign. Getting his attention hadn’t been so hard, after all. Let’s see if I could keep it.

I let my foot caress a flat little nipple, rubbing it to a peak between my toes, and then sliding down a ridged stomach to a hard thigh. Mircea hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even moved. I smiled.

My toes slid lower, across satiny skin and crisp hair to a velvety hardness that jumped eagerly under my touch. I felt a little clumsy—I wasn’t nearly as dexterous as with my hands—but my foot was surprisingly sensitive. I hadn’t expected to feel . . . quite so much. My own breath picked up a little as I went exploring, sliding my toes slowly up and down that rigid column. And I guess I must have gotten something right, because it swelled impossibly bigger under my touch.

“That isn’t . . .” He stopped and licked his lips. “That isn’t going to work.”

I laughed. “Yeah. That was convincing.”

Particularly since Mircea could put a halt to this at any time. Unlike a human male, a vampire has perfect blood control. He could have willed all that lovely hardness away, could have refused to play. But that would have been admitting defeat, something that his stiff-necked pride, the kind he liked to pretend wasn’t there, would never permit. So I gently fondled the superb length of him, so thick, so silky soft, so good against my skin.

And sighed.

“This isn’t going to get you anywhere, either,” I was informed tightly.

“That’s okay.” I ran a single digit over the smooth head, watching it blush like a girl in pleasure. “I’m pretty comfortable where I am.”

Mircea shuddered at the implicit threat, that I could keep this up all night. But I honestly thought I could. It was fascinating, what something so simple did to him, reversing who was in charge with amazing speed. I experimented, putting a foot on his chest and giving a little push. He fell back with almost no resistance at all, allowing me to crawl up his body.

Okay, then.

“That wasn’t fair,” he said hoarsely.

“Like you didn’t use power on me earlier? And stay still.”

“Give me a reason,” he challenged, smoothing a hand over my curls.

I didn’t need to be asked twice. My lips covered the sensitive tip of him, and he suddenly looked like maybe he was having trouble focusing. Been there, I thought cynically, only it was usually me losing my train of thought around him, instead of vice versa. I decided I liked vice versa, and twirled my tongue around the head.

Mircea groaned and his eyes slid to half-mast. Which was all very well, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Hm.

I swirled my fingers over the tip of him, getting them wet, and then trailed them lightly up my own flesh. Stomach, breasts, pausing to paint the nipples, feeling his fingers tighten on my skin, up to my neck, lingering over those two little marks, his brand of ownership—we’d see who was owned—and up to my lips. I traced my bottom one with the salty taste of him, and his own tongue flicked out, unconsciously mimicking my movement.

Then I sucked the whole finger into my mouth and his eyes closed.

“You taste good, too,” I told him, smiling, and felt his body shudder against me.

And then the next thing I knew, I was on my back, one of my legs crooked over Mircea’s shoulder, and even with the preparation, he was too big for there not to be a burn. But that was okay, that was perfect, because tonight I wanted to feel it. I wanted to know I was alive.

And it looked like Mircea felt the same, because he was driving into me hard enough that my breath caught and my body writhed and my fingers dug into his shoulders, and then he found just the right angle and stayed there. Sparks of intense sensation flashed up my spine and coiled in my belly, regular as clockwork, and then arrhythmic, treacherous, as Mircea modified his stroke to torment me all over again.

“Bastard,” I hissed, even as my spine was arching helplessly, trying to meet his thrusts and continue that extreme high. I would have come in seconds, but he wouldn’t let me, the man’s ungodly stamina keeping me hungry.

“You’ll live.”

“Make me want to,” I moaned, and Mircea was laughing as he gave in to my hunger, taking me deep and fast. Just the way we needed.

“Is this better?” he teased, but I didn’t have breath to laugh because I was coming, even as the hard thrusts inside me turned erratic. I was still riding the aftershocks as Mircea shuddered above me, sagging against the tight hold of my legs as he came, both of us grinning like fools.

After a moment, he pulled me up and poured us more wine, and we settled down in front of the fire. He nestled up against me, cradling my body against his and sliding his hands up and down my legs, while the logs hissed and the snow fell and I wished I did know how to freeze time. Because I’d have liked to stop it right here.

It was times like these that I thought he was right, that I made things too hard, too complicated. Tony had elevated paranoia to an art form, and I’d absorbed a healthy dose of it growing up. And occasionally it had been really useful. It had kept me alive more than once, causing me to doubleand triple-check things for no reason, or to abruptly leave somewhere just because of the ants running up and down my spine.

But sometimes it could be pretty stupid, too. More than once it had caused me to be too careful, to automatically say no when maybe I should have said yes, to guard myself and my heart so closely, I never let anyone in. I didn’t know everything about Mircea; I would probably never know everything about Mircea. But I knew the important thing.

I knew I loved him.

I had always loved him. Loving him was as natural as breathing, as essential as water. It had defined my life in a real way ever since I was a child.

Before I met him, I had lived in constant fear, even without realizing what it was. When you’ve never known anything else, fear just seems . . . normal. Jumping at shadows because of what might be in them; staying carefully out of sight, because attracting attention was never A Good Thing; monitoring every word, in case it caused offense that would have to be made up for somehow. Of course, there were those I didn’t have to act that way around—Rafe and Eugenie and a few others who came and went through the years.