Kraving Dravka (The Krave of Everton Book 3) Page 10

“Gardenia,” she whispered, recognizing the flower from pictures and research she’d done over the years. Its scent was said to be unparalleled.

  “It’s my favorite,” came a voice, a voice she recognized.

  When Valerie turned, there was Celine Larchmont, watching her from a bench nestled underneath a massive tree. A willow tree, she realized, though not as big as the ones she’d seen in pictures.

  Celine stood from the bench, swaying a little, perhaps from the wine that night.

  “You know them?” Celine asked, stepping up next to Valerie, her eyes going to the gardenias.

  “I—I’ve read about them,” Valerie said softly, a little embarrassed to be caught there. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Larchmont, I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Celine waved away her words, though her usual smile wasn’t present.

  “Go ahead,” Celine encouraged, nodding towards the flowers. “It took me a long time to get them to bloom.”

  This was Celine’s conservatory?

  “You planted all these?” Valerie asked, wide-eyed, seeming to see the woman for the first time.

  “Yes,” she whispered, looking around her endless little garden, silvered in the moonlight. “I did.”

  Valerie stepped forward and leaned down to inhale the soft blooms. Her lips parted at their beautiful scent and the first genuine smile of the night crossed her features when she turned back to Celine.

  “They’re lovely.”

  Celine nodded, brushing her fingers over the delicate white petals. She stared at them in silence for a long time.

  “They are,” Celine agreed. “Though I imagine their scent is only a fraction of what it was on Old Earth. I’ve often dreamed of what they smelled like there. These are hybrids, crossed with other flowers to survive within our colony. Pieces of what they once were.”

  There was a sadness in her voice.

  “Celine,” Valerie said softly, lowering her voice when she glanced at the open door, into the darkened hallway beyond. “I—”

  Celine stepped towards her until Valerie could smell the wine on her breath. With a steady gaze, the older woman said, “I don’t want you to marry my son.”

  Valerie’s lips pressed together.

  She’d pieced that together herself.

  “I don’t want you…or your family,” Celine continued, sneering out that last word, “anywhere near mine.”

  Of course, she meant her aunt.

  “You think I want to?” Valerie asked, keeping her voice quiet. “You think I asked for this?”

  Surprise went through Celine’s eyes.

  After what she’d witnessed tonight, Valerie wanted nothing to do with Gabriel Larchmont or his family. But she didn’t have a choice.

  Celine went quiet and looked back at her night garden.

  “Our marriage was arranged,” she said softly. “Derek’s and mine.”

  Valerie figured as much.

  “It works,” Celine said. “But only with a lot of understanding and forgiveness. And lies.”

  Valerie’s lips pressed together. She understood what she was saying.

  “So he doesn’t know?”

  About Celine going to the Krave brothel.

  “He’d kill me if he found out,” Celine whispered, not even bothering to hide her response. She said it so easily, as if mentioning the weather. “And she knows that.”

  Madame Allegria.

  “I do love him,” Celine said, “in my own way.”

  Valerie nodded hesitantly.

  “But this whole ordeal has spooked me,” she confessed and Valerie wondered if her tongue would be so loose without all the wine. “I want my son to marry. But not like this. I don’t want him to live this life.”

  Valerie thought that ‘this life’ suited Gabriel Larchmont just fine, but she kept her lips closed.

  “And I don’t want to be married to someone I barely know,” she told Celine. “But that’s the hand we’ve both been dealt.”

  Celine’s eyes cut back to her. “Why are you doing this? For the money? For our family name?”

  Valerie didn’t answer.

  Instead, she asked a question she’d long wondered. “Do you care about him? About Ravu? You visit him almost twice a month. Every month.”

  The color from Celine’s face drained, her eyes going stark.

  “There you are!” came Gabriel’s voice from the doorway of the conservatory.

  And all at once, their reality came rushing back around them.

  Gabriel sauntered into the conservatory, as if he hadn’t been fucking Madame Allegria on a desk upstairs just moments before. He grinned at Valerie, like they shared a little secret now, and it made her flesh feel like it was crawling.

  Celine turned to her son and reached up to brush a dark lock away from his forehead. Her touch was gentle, loving.

  “Father sent me to find you two,” he told them both. “Dessert is waiting in the sitting room.”

  Then he wrapped his arm around Valerie’s waist, his other going around his mother, as he steered them from the conservatory.

  His grip on her was possessive. Valerie stiffened under his touch, especially when she caught a whiff of her aunt’s perfume.

  “Shy?” Gabriel murmured to her when he felt her stiffen, whispering in her ear so his mother wouldn’t hear. His hand squeezed her hip, his palm hot through the thin layer of her dress. “You’ll get over it, bride.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Five years ago…

  Dravka was tired. So fucking tired.

  He was coming out of a Rut, a particularly intense one at that. All Keriv’i males in their prime were plagued by them, like clockwork.

  Khiva was standing at the window in the sitting room of the Cluster, staring out across the space colony of Everton. Whatever he was looking for, Dravka didn’t know but Khiva often stared out that window.

  Unlike them, Khiva still had hope. To find his lost brother and mother, somewhere among the stars. Dravka wondered what that felt like. Hope. He couldn’t remember feeling it for a long while.

  Ravu was lounging across the space in a wide armchair while his brother read from the single Nu tablet they all shared.

  By all accounts, it was another normal day. In a few hours, they would go to their respective mating rooms, where they were visited by their clients every night. They would fuck them until they were satisfied and then they would return to the Cluster, where they’d bathe and perhaps sleep. But mostly, they waited.

  For what?

  Dravka didn’t really know anymore.

  But on that particular late afternoon, they heard the light tread of footsteps in the hallway outside of the Cluster. There wasn’t a knock, not that Madame Allegria ever knocked, before the door pushed open.

  And there stood a human female. Lithe and beautiful with light hair and piercing green eyes.

  Sad eyes.

  She wore a simple dress, a dark green in color that matched those eyes. The lines of it were stark, though they ran over the slight curves of her body perfectly. He swallowed and though his Rut was over, he swore he felt something awakening within him again.

  Khiva was the first to react, approaching the door. In a calm, even tone, he said, “I think you are lost, little one. We are not seeing clients until the evening—”

  “I’m not a client,” the female said and Dravka almost felt disappointment at the words. “I’ve come to introduce myself as Madame Allegria just hired me to run this establishment for the foreseeable future.”

  His hearts began to pump harder, blood circulating through his veins.

  “She did?” Khiva asked, frowning, his eyes running over her, regarding her with new eyes. Dravka felt a flare of something that felt like envy.

  “My name is Valerie Browen,” the girl said. She couldn’t be older than 21 or 22. Young…and yet her eyes were old. So fucking old. “I’ve just come from Genesis. I—I’ll be running the front desk downstairs and seeing to all your needs on a daily basis.
I’ll be living on the property as well. What is your name?”

  “Khiva,” was his response, though his name sounded like a question itself. Valerie nodded once.

  From across the Cluster, Dravka caught Ravu’s bewildered look and Tavak’s shrewd one.

  “Why did she hire you, Miss Valerie Browen?” Tavak asked, his tone a little mocking as he said her name.

  But Valerie wasn’t rattled by the male’s question. She simply regarded him.

  “I suspect because I’m her niece,” came her dry response. The ripple of tension in the Cluster was palpable. Even Khiva’s face seemed to darken ever so slightly. “And what is your name?”

  “Tavak,” he finally said, after a long moment of strained silence. He jerked his head over to his brother, who was still sprawled across the armchair. “This is my brother, Ravu.”

  Finally, Valerie’s eyes caught on the last Keriv’i male in the room.

  Him.

  Dravka stood from his seat and watched carefully as her eyes seemed to widen on him. Her pink lips parted, though they were still downturned. She blinked once, twice.

  His hearts were still beating quickly. Her voice was stirring something within him and when he stepped close, he caught a whiff of her scent. Clean and smelling of lemon soap. Underneath that, he smelled her warmth and his jaw tightened with want. He needed to consume that warmth.

  His pupils dilated on her until the light in the room seemed to glow.

  In the back of his mind, he had a suspicion of what was happening.

  The nuvur’u drava.

  The linking.

  His kind formed strong bonds and attachments. Then again, the Keriv’i had always believed that the demavs, their deities, led them to these bonds, to their mates.

  He’d never responded to a female like this.

  And when he caught her gaze with his own, the corner of his lips lifted. His hearts were thundering. He felt…excitement. Something other than numbness and the endless feeling of waiting.

  Because maybe this was what he’d been waiting for.

  She was what he’d been waiting for.

  “You look sad, Valerie Browen,” Dravka murmured, approaching her until she had to crane her neck to regard him.

  He saw her throat bob with her swallow.

  “I’m sad,” she whispered, her brow furrowing, “because my mother just died. And now I’m here. And I don’t know what comes next.”

  Ache bit at his chest.

  Grief was highlighted in her gaze. Grief he was very, very familiar with.

  Even still, there was a strength in her eyes too. Shining and bright, just hidden. She was an honest being, unapologetic for her feelings, unapologetic about her grief or why she was here.

  “I know that sadness well,” he told her, dropping his head in a gesture of respect.

  “You do?” she asked quietly.

  Dravka remembered the others in the room. He sensed their presence though he never lifted his gaze from her.

  “We all do,” he told her, his voice gruff, “in one way or another.”

  Valerie blinked.

  Every last being in that room was a lost soul. But maybe they’d all found one another for a reason.

  “What is your name?” Valerie asked, her eyes large and wide and beautiful.

  Dravka had the strangest thought, as he rubbed at his aching chest, that he wanted to make those sad eyes happy. That he would do anything to see her happy. And he’d only just met her.

  “Dravka,” he rasped, his name floating between them. “My name is Dravka.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Valerie returned to the brothel later that night, she was alone and found she didn’t want to be.

  Madame Allegria had gone straight to her penthouse in the Downtown District, preferring to live among the bustling nightlife rather than the quietness of the Garden District. Which gave Valerie leave to do whatever she pleased that night.

  Once inside, she went straight up to the Cluster, her feet retracing the steps she’d taken thousands of times during her five years there. A cold ache had lodged itself in her chest, one she hadn’t been able to shake, one she hadn’t felt since she’d found her mother dead in her bed, her eyes open and unseeing, gone to a place that Valerie could not follow.

  She thought of her mother that night as she walked to the Cluster, as she walked towards Dravka.

  The sitting room was empty when she pushed it open, though slivers of light were peeking out from Tavak and Ravu’s doors. And Dravka’s.

  She walked to that door and knocked once before pushing it open.

  His scent hit her hard, as it always did. Greedily dragging it into her lungs, Valerie stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

  Dravka had been standing at the window, the one that faced the front of the brothel. Had he watched her come inside? He turned to regard her. He’d left her room earlier, after their kiss, tense and angry. He carried an amount of that tension now, in his shoulders, in the lines of his face.

  But when he saw her, he approached her without question and hesitation. It was dark in the room, only the flickering sconce on the wall was lit, casting long shadows across them. She walked into his arms, which came around her, and she pressed her face into the strong wall of his bare chest. His skin felt velvety soft underneath her lips.

  “I was waiting for you to get home,” he told her, his voice husky and deep in her ears.

  Always watching out for me, she thought, longing going through her at his words. For a moment, she got lost in a daydream of him saying those words to her, in a life that was their own and no one else’s.

  Her lips were pressed into his chest, his warmth heating them. Her core squeezed with aching want. Unconsciously, she remembered the sad desperation in Celine’s voice—spoken in her beautiful night conservatory, in her beautiful house surrounded by beautiful things—when she told Valerie that she loved her husband, in her own way, whatever that meant.

  Was that her own future? Desperately trying to convince herself that she loved someone she didn’t?

  Her lips moved of their own accord.

  When her tongue flicked out, Dravka froze, a rough sound escaping his throat. His hand grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her away until he could meet her gaze. In the darkness, those eyes were watchful and careful. She held them, her lips parted, her heart beginning to throb in her throat.

  His nostrils flared and then she was leaning forward again, holding his eyes as she kissed his chest again.

  A sharp exhale escaped him, his swallow echoing in the quiet room. Her hands stroked over him, gliding down his muscled back, feeling the sharp slabs and ridges of strength there. When her fingers reached the waistband of his pants, he sucked in a breath, snagging her grip away.

  But she wouldn’t be deterred. Determination thrummed through her, determination he no doubt read in her eyes. She went onto the tips of her toes, dragging her mouth up until she was kissing his neck. Then she nibbled at the column with her teeth before soothing the bites with her tongue.

  “Val,” he growled, his hands coming to grip her hips. She wanted to forget that Gabriel’s hands had ever been on her. “What are you doing?”

  She felt his cock rising against her, more quickly than she’d thought possible. Thickening and heating against her belly. She could feel it through the thin material of her teal-colored dress, the one with the neckline that plunged to her navel, revealing the valley of her breasts. She wanted his fingers to stroke her there. She wanted his mouth to kiss her there.

  Valerie didn’t answer his question. She stepped into him until he stepped back…and then the backs of his knees were hitting the edge of his bed. She pushed him down onto it until he was sprawled.

  Dravka looked up at her with an unreadable expression. One of lust and darkness and bewilderment and need. His eyes ran over her, maybe assessing her in the way he assessed his clients every night. What did he see? He saw her in a tight, low dress. He saw
her hands trembling. He saw her wet lips. He saw the determination and desire in her gaze.

  He saw her fingers come to the single tie at the back of her neck. Valerie pulled and the straps that wrapped around her shoulders fell away. The material encasing her breasts dropped—and a ragged, harsh groan tore from Dravka’s throat when Valerie peeled the dress off to pool at her feet. Until she was almost naked, clad only in a thin scrap of material between her thighs.

  “Mellkia,” Dravka murmured, swallowing, already trying to push up from the bed—a dangerous place to be with him, no doubt. “We shouldn’t—”

  Valerie crawled over him, placing her hands on his chest, throwing her legs over his thighs to keep him in place.

  “Vauk,” Dravka hissed, stilling. A muscle in his jaw was jumping and she placed her lips there, feeling it twitch against her. Her bare nipples dragged over his chest and he moaned, holding himself very, very still. “Valerie.”

  She frowned, hearing the ragged hesitation in his voice.

  “Don’t you want me?” Valerie whispered in his ear, catching his gaze. She caught his hands, brought them to her breasts, and she gasped when his palms squeezed around them almost unconsciously. His hands. Roughened and warm and perfect against her. “Don’t you want this?”

  She could actually hear his hearts thundering in his chest, could feel them against her.

  “How can you ask me that?” he growled, his hands gripping her breasts, his thumb just nudging against one of her nipples, making a flood of wetness rush between her legs. He took his hands away, grabbed the back of her neck again, and angled her head down until she could see…

  Her lips parted.

  The tip of his cock was peeking up from the waistband of his pants.

  “You see that, mellkia?” he rasped in her ear, his sinful, rich voice making her shiver. The head of his cock was flooded with pre-cum, dripping down the tip, wetting the front of his pants. He was a mess. A perfect mess. “Only you ever do this to me. Vauk, I could come just petting your breasts, Val. So don’t ask me if I want you. Because I’ve never wanted anyone more than I want you.”