My Love Paramour

by Thyme In Her Eyes

Author's Note: After fixing and updating Affinity, I found that I couldn't stay away. Vlad/Mina is so lovely to write and I am planning to come back to Twilight Is Not Good For Maidens eventually. So here's another Bram Stoker's Dracula one-shot, focusing on Dracula's seduction of Mina. Just to disclaim, I own nothing. Also, the title belongs to the Cocteau Twins, not me. Now enjoy, and remember all feedback is appreciated.

-- MY LOVE PARAMOUR --

You are beautiful, my king, and gentle. Wherever we lie our bed is green.

– The Song of Songs (trans. Ariel & Chana Bloch).

x-x-x

He meant her no harm, but she was not safe with him. He was a cryptic puzzle to her, forever defeating and defying her every assumption and expectation, from her most haughty and arrogant to her most experimental and thoughtful. If he had been something more ordinary, something her keen intelligence could analyze and reduce, then she could have easily resisted him. But there was something so otherworldly about this intense, irresistible foreign prince – this stranger who seemed anything but a stranger, this stranger whom she felt she had known all her life – and her bond with him, which reduced resistance to a very pale hope. His eyes never left her, his focus never wavered. All that wavered was her resolve as he smoothly drew her into yet another dance, another taste of the most perfect freedom.

He was no longer pursuing her because she had long stopped running from him. Now he was only circling her, his words forming tighter and tighter rings around her heart. Mina faced this; lost, waiting and anticipating. They journeyed through diverse and splendidly-coloured worlds together in their conversations and savoured the calm silences that sometimes settled over them and drew them close. They danced by candlelight and deep inside her dreams. When they touched, she was changed. Carefully, he drew her into a red and sensual world outside of the one she knew so well, and tentatively, she let him be her guide. She found herself lingering with him under moonlight, reluctant for their encounters to end. And against her better judgement, Mina allowed him many intimacies.

When he first touched her without invitation, she should have been outraged. Instead, she had craved more. Her sighs had pleaded for it, and Mina trembled at the recollection. She had been paralyzed with shock, then frantic with frightened confusion, but what had astonished her most was how, behind those things, she could have been so powerfully drawn to him and unable to summon up the will to flee. She had been as bewitched as she was distressed. With his fingers grazing her face, his voice almost a whisper, she had tasted unknown, beautiful and inexplicably familiar lands of desire, longing and loss. The force of her emotions had been overwhelming, and the strange forests and stone walls of her oldest dreams closed around her. But for the first time, she felt no fear.

Now, he touched her often; gliding soft caresses over her face and throat, winding hands over her dark hair and long fingers through her locks. She let him. It felt right, familiar and reassuring to be under his touch, and yet it awakened, heated and sensitized every part of her. Once, she had shrunk away from his gaze and caresses, but now she blossomed under them. She had grown calm and confident. She did not feel threatened now, but safe as she could ever be. Her fear of so many things evaporated under his influence. With him, she was so sure of herself and her feelings, and courage rose in her as she understood how eager she was to follow him and their mysterious connection. His voice compelled, and she let her eyes drift shut languidly, savouring everything. As his fingers traced her face, she felt lost and found. His eyes spoke to her soul and his touch drenched her in sensations more dizzying than the absinthe she allowed him to ply her with. Part of her wished she could drink as deeply of this.

The contact between them no longer communicated danger, and his caresses had nothing of impatience in them. When he reached for her, Mina instead was given the impression of an aching longing and tremendous restraint. He was so different from the unchallenged world she knew, and there seemed to be realms of whispers, truths and desires lying underneath every soft and stirring gesture. He put his hand on hers, fingers brushing her pulse. He stroked her hair and ran his hands through it as he drew her close. He tortured her with his fingertips grazing her throat, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He kissed her hands, her forehead, her tears. He wound his arms around her, locking her in his embrace. He bestowed beautiful caresses on her, tracing the curve from her brow to her smiling lips. He caressed her smile too, and her soft mouth shook under the feel of it, and from the breathless, profound sense of rediscovery, of finding home at last. It took all her strength to keep her lips from parting for him.

Many times, he would move closer to her, annihilating the distance between them, and her heart pounded and breath quickened. Their eyes met and lingered for far too long and his aches and yearnings were very much her own. The forbidden contact was too prolonged, keenly inviting something closer and deeper, and Mina knew with instinctual insight how her own fingers would rejoice should she finally reach out and touch his infinitely-remembered face.

The unread seductions in these gestures both thrilled and terrified her, and Mina knew without question that she could not indulge in this. On the first day of their meeting, the stern lines of propriety and intimacy had been been crossed, and Mina had still failed to turn away from her Prince, and deny him her company. When alone, she longed for his hand to caress her face once more.

The tender reverence of his touch had the power to bring tears to her eyes – for Vlad, for herself – but there was undeniable fire in him too, and its heat ignited her, then left her smouldering and blistered with need. In spite of his gentleness, his touch was always firm, shaping her flesh under his as though he knew it well. He seemed to instinctively know her body and its sensitivity better than she could imagine possible, and he exploited this to stir her, offering tantalizing tastes of pleasure and joy. He knew what he was doing, was fully aware of the effect his touch had on her. His fingers were so light on her flesh, but underneath her skin, her blood blazed. For him, it thundered like the wild storm that seemed to have brought him to her.

There was greed and frantic desire in him too, there was no denying this. His eyes often looked at her with hunger and raw, urgent need. Mina was no fool, and had seen from the beginning that his overtures were nothing if not seductive. A part of her had resisted that vehemently, and even now, when he meant more to her than she had words for, she could not fully understand what emotion had encouraged the first thaw from her. Mina sensed heartrending loneliness and desperation in him, as well as fierce resolve and purpose, and could not avoid noting how deeply both qualities were connected. He was as fatal to her now as he was then. There was ancient darkness as well as pain. It was his other side, and his embraces were always ardent and passionate even in their tenderness and simplicity, demanding a response from her. His touch ruled and commanded her, even in its most gentle insistence. There was a possessiveness in how each lingering caress seemed to be an act of reclaiming. He had been wooing her from the moment they crossed paths, and his every word and action was a courtship of her body and heart, his deep yearning both palpable and beckoning.

He was no mere companion or strange acquaintance, but a dark paramour. Mina rarely admitted this to herself, so desperate she was to justify the relationship to her conscience, to make it into something acceptable. To make it good, so that she remained a good woman in spite of permitting it. To render it free of disgrace and the forbidden, so that she could continue it, and continue walking down that unlit path at Vlad's side. She longed to be in his company as soon as parted from him, and felt happier and more awake with him than in all her previous years, but was distantly aware that she allowed too much, and that her conduct was appallingly improper, especially for a woman who had given her heart elsewhere. Always, Mina turned away at the last moment, guiltily denying the first kiss her Prince never stopped trying to claim. Her eyes avoided his, desperate to ignore the sight of hope and warmth becoming bleak, denied dismay as he mastered the heavy hurt her rejection inflicted. Guilt and shame tore through her when she was alone, and conflict raged on the pages of her diary.

In spite of all her remorseful anxieties, Mina could not pretend that their relationship was something common, not even to help her turn away from it. She knew her Prince was far more than some decadent dandy looking for amorous adventures. He was passionate and charged with intensity, but never rash, and he had never tried to blatantly seduce her. He had never forced any touch upon her, never imposed his will on her own. In her most impassioned and confused moments, he had not taken advantage of her vulnerability. There were kisses she knew he had tried to take, and that she had barely avoided, but there was a mysterious harmony between them, and his actions only deepened, rather than damaged, it. There was sincerity in him, something that moved and roused her soul and made her place great trust in him; a trust greater than all her hesitance and self-reproach. Despite his most forward actions, he had never pushed her or forced a choice upon her. It was almost as though he already knew what her choice would be, and was gently and patiently waiting for her.

Though she was on the brink of surrendering her heart to him, Vlad was in no hurry to undo what remained of her resistance. Sensing this, Mina wondered what dark anticipations and hesitations licked at his own soul, and yearned to see the world through his eyes.

His touches were so intimate that it was not as though they were designed to seduce her, but as if they were already lovers. Mina shivered at the thought.

-- FIN --