Vampires Like It Hot

by Lynsay Sands

  She was in her head again, Jess realized with irritation, and wondered if Raffaele had tiptoed through her thoughts too at any time. Jeez, he was a vampire too. He probably had wandered through her mind a couple times. Had he controlled her too? Whirling on Ildaria, she asked, “Is there any way for you to know if Raffaele has been controlling me?”

  “What?” Ildaria blinked at her in surprise, and then shook her head and said, “Never mind. I can guarantee he hasn’t been controlling you.”

  “Really?” she asked hopefully. “How can you guarantee it?”

  “Because life mates can neither read, nor control, each other. It’s what makes them so special.”

  “Oh,” Jess breathed, relaxing a little, and thinking that at least she hadn’t been made to do anything she hadn’t wanted. Her mistakes were her own. That was something anyway. Actually, it was more than something. She would have been completely crushed to learn that Raffaele had been controlling her and using her that way. Now she just had to deal with the fact that she’d been a willing participant in sex with a vampire, Jess thought, and sighed.

  “Look, I know the captain seems to have a lot of rough edges, but most of that is just for show. Really, he’s a diamond in the rough,” Ildaria said quietly. When Jess met her gaze, she added, “He’s a good man. A fair man. He’s dragged every person on this ship from one scrape or another and takes care of us. He’s a fine man, worthy of being loved.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Jess asked with bewilderment.

  “Because you need to know it to make an informed choice between the two men.”

  “No, I don’t,” Jess growled, turning away from her.

  “Yes, you do. Look, right now you think you love naked-Raff, but that’s just because you don’t know Vasco. I’m sure that if you’d spent some time with him, you would have seen past his bluster, and coarseness, to the gem beneath and fallen for him. But you didn’t get that chance. You jumped ship, and dropped right into naked-Raff’s arms and fell for him instead. But this is a big decision. I want to help you make the right one, and you need to get to know both men to choose between them.”

  Jess stared at Ildaria silently, her thoughts actually on the woman rather than what she was saying. The first time she’d seen her—Jess shuddered at the memory of Tyler’s horror, and Ildaria with blood dripping down her face. Shaking her head to remove the memory, she asked, “Why do you want to help me?”

  “I don’t. I want to help Vasco,” Ildaria said at once. “He’s old, and before you popped up he was showing signs of tiring of life. He needs a life mate.”

  Jess raised her eyebrows at that. Vasco didn’t look old to her, but she simply said, “Maybe you are trying to help Vasco more than me, but I wouldn’t have even expected that much from you after what you did to Tyler.”

  “Who?” Ildaria asked with confusion, and then her expression cleared and turned grim with recollection. Waving one hand impatiently, she said, “Oh, him. I didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve.”

  Jess eyed her dubiously. “He deserved having his family jewels chewed on?”

  “He deserved to have them chewed off,” Ildaria countered harshly. “As does any man who thinks to use them as a weapon against a woman.”

  “Tyler did that?” Jess asked with disbelief. “But he seems such a nice, quiet type.”

  Ildaria snorted at the words. “What’s that old saying? Still waters run deep?”

  “Yeaahhhh.” She drew the word out, unsure what that had to do with anything.

  “Well, those still deep waters also hide bottom feeders,” Ildaria assured her, and when Jess continued to stare at her blankly, she sighed and explained, “Certain sharks are bottom feeders too.”

  “Really?” she asked with surprise.

  “Oh, yeah, the saw shark, the horn shark, the zebra shark.” Ildaria shrugged. “They’re all bottom feeders.”

  “Oh,” Jess said, and then grimaced. “It’s hard to see Tyler as a shark, though.”

  “Well, he is,” Ildaria said firmly, her expression icing over and eyes going distant as if she were recalling the incident. “He seemed nice when he first got on board. Polite and friendly, but after we were under way, he asked me to show him where the bathroom was. I was a little distracted with my chores at the time. There’s a lot to do when we set sail, and I didn’t think to read his mind, but quickly finished what I was doing and then told him to follow me and headed below to show him where the bathroom was. I was still thinking about what I had to do before we hit international waters when he suddenly grabbed me from behind and pushed me up against the wall, then ground against me. He was gripping me so tight that if I’d been some poor mortal girl, I would have come away with terrible bruises. I also would not have been able to escape his attentions.”

  “But you aren’t mortal,” Jess said solemnly.

  “No, I’m not,” she agreed. “So, I just asked what he thought he was doing. As I recall, he said, ‘Come on, bitch, don’t play hard to get. You know you want it. All you Dominican girls are little sluts, sucking every dick out there. Well, now you can suck mine.’”

  “No way!” Jess cried with dismay. She never would have believed it of Tyler.

  “Yes way,” Ildaria assured her, and then smiled grimly. “I said fine, but we’d have to move out of the hall in case someone came. He immediately grabbed my hand and dragged me down to the galley. I was reading his thoughts by then, and he was imagining what he’d do if I tried to run. He’s a pretty sadistic little prick under all that preppy clothing,” she added grimly.

  Jess gave her head a slow shake, hardly able to credit it.

  “His thoughts alone made me feel unclean,” Ildaria said with remembered disgust, and then sighed. “Anyway, I wasn’t running. I had my own plans for him. I wanted to make him sorry, and I wanted to scare him. When I got him to the galley, I immediately turned, caught him by the throat, and lifted him up against the wall. I wanted to choke him to death, but I just held him there and opened my mouth so he could see my fangs drop. He was so shocked and terrified at that point that I had to slip into his mind and control him to be sure he didn’t piss himself. That would have ruined everything. Then I . . . Well, you saw what I did. I gave him what he wanted. I went down on him . . . in my own way. But he didn’t get any pleasure from it. I made it as painful and horrifying for him as I could.” Her mouth compressed and then she added, “I don’t usually enjoy feeding off the hoof. But I surely did that time.”

  “Off the hoof?” Jess asked uncertainly.

  “Biting a mortal,” Ildaria explained. “I’d rather feed from bagged blood.”

  “Then why don’t you?” she asked at once.

  “Because blood doesn’t come cheap,” Ildaria said grimly. “The immortal blood banks here are run by a very corrupt family who has doubled and then tripled the price of blood just the last couple of years alone. Only the richest immortals can afford bagged blood now. Vasco can, and usually does, but a lot of us can’t. That’s why he started the shark feeding tours, to feed those of us who can’t afford to feed ourselves.”

  Jess was listening wide-eyed. They had blood banks for vampires? Wow. Trying to understand, she asked, “But why would they charge so much if feeding . . . er . . . off the hoof is free? I mean, won’t it just ensure the poorer vampires have to feed that way?”

  “Because most can’t feed off the hoof. It’s not allowed here,” Ildaria explained. “The only reason we get away with it is because Vasco takes us out into international waters before we feed. We aren’t bound by the laws of the South American Council there.”

  “The South American . . .” Jess shook her head. First blood banks, now a council? How many of them were there, for God’s sake?

  “The South American Council is like our government. At least here in South America. There are other Councils in the other areas too,” Ildaria said quietly. “They make our laws and have Enforcers or Hunters, like immortal police, to enforce those laws.�
��

  “Oh,” Jess said faintly, and then frowned and pointed out, “But we weren’t in international waters yet when I saw you biting Tyler.”

  “Yeah,” she said on a sigh. “And I got in trouble for that. I could have been executed for it if the Council had got wind, but fortunately Vasco heard me out and just gave me a warning. But there will be no more warnings after this one,” she said unhappily, and then raised her chin and shrugged. “Even so, I don’t regret it. He deserved it.”

  Jess couldn’t disagree. If Tyler had acted that way, he’d deserved what she’d done to him. It was just a shame he didn’t remember it afterward, she thought. Instead, he’d come away thinking he’d had a great time.

  Ildaria grimaced. “Unfortunately, Vasco wouldn’t let me leave him the memory of his lesson.” Shrugging, she added, “But I have some hope that maybe somewhere in a corner of his mind there is a little nugget of memory that will give him nightmares, or perhaps temper his behavior. If not, perhaps he will do the females of the world a favor and kill himself. I am hoping getting involved with your cousin will help push him in that direction. It is why I put it into their minds that they should like each other.”

  Jess blinked in surprise at her claim, and then burst out laughing. “Oh, that explains their behavior when they got back from the ship,” she said with amusement. “And it’s priceless. I can’t think of two people who deserve each other more. She’s as horrible in her own way as he is.”

  “Hmm.” Ildaria nodded. “I read her thoughts. The woman is pure venom. She hates herself and enjoys nothing more than making everyone around her as miserable as she is.”

  Jess had no problem believing Ildaria’s assessment. It was something she’d suspected herself for some time. But her thoughts now turned to the woman before her. Her first impression of Ildaria had been a very bad one, and misleading. The woman wasn’t at all the monster Jess had believed she was. And yet that first impression of the woman had colored her impressions of everything else that had followed on this ship. It made her wonder if Ildaria wasn’t right, if perhaps, had she not been so horrified by what she’d seen Ildaria doing, and frightened into escaping, she might have seen things differently.

  Jess suspected she certainly would have ended up in bed with Vasco had she not seen Ildaria’s fangs and realized everyone on board ship was a vampire. Well, if the man had managed to keep his mouth shut long enough for it to happen. Really, the attraction between her and Vasco had been off the charts crazy hot, just as it was with Raffaele. Even knowing he was a vampire, she hadn’t been able to resist Vasco’s kisses and caresses. Jess doubted she would have been able to avoid sleeping with him if she’d stayed on board. And she certainly wouldn’t have jumped ship to swim miles to shore through shark infested waters if she hadn’t been desperate to escape a ship full of vampires. So . . . would she have come to see under Vasco’s roughness to the diamond Ildaria claimed lay beneath?

  “I was afraid of that,” Ildaria said wearily.

  “Of what?” Jess asked uncertainly.

  “That I was the reason you jumped ship,” Ildaria explained on a sigh. “I gave the game away, and scared you enough that you jumped ship and fled right into the arms of naked-Raff.” She shook her head unhappily. “If not for me, you might have stayed on board and fallen for Vasco instead.” Regret covering her face, she breathed, “I messed up Vasco’s getting his life mate.”

  “No,” Jess said at once.

  “Sí,” Ildaria insisted. “And after all he’s done for me too. God, I should be flogged.”

  “No,” Jess said firmly. “If you want to blame someone, blame Tyler. If he hadn’t attacked you, you wouldn’t have set out to teach him a lesson, and so on. But none of that matters anyway,” she added, and then hesitated, trying to think of a way to say it without being insulting. “Ildaria, I’m starting to kind of like you. I mean, at least I’m not scared of you anymore, and I understand why you did what you did to Tyler. And I even think your tough exterior hides a really nice person. But that doesn’t mean I want to be—or even engage in a relationship with—a vampire.”

  “An immortal,” Ildaria insisted.

  Jess sighed with exasperation. “If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

  Ildaria scowled at her with irritation. “But we don’t walk and quack like ducks. We aren’t soulless. We can go out in sunlight, and into churches. Garlic has no effect on us at all except to give us bad breath like everyone else. We are just humans with a medical issue who need extra blood because our bodies don’t produce enough. And many of us get that blood through donors and blood banks. I and the others under Vasco are only doing it this way because we can’t afford to do it the legal way and we don’t want to lose it and attack some poor mortal because we are starving. We are not vampires.”

  Jess considered her for a minute, and then asked abruptly, “Where did the fangs come from?”

  Ildaria waved one hand impatiently. “Apparently, they evolved millennia ago to allow us to get the blood we needed before blood banks existed. And that is another way we differ from these mythological vampires,” she added firmly. “We do not kill or turn everyone we bite. In fact, we never kill our hosts. That would be foolish, like killing a cow you want milk from. And we are only allowed to turn one mortal into an immortal in our life. That is so that we may turn our life mate. We aren’t the monsters you think we are,” she finished.

  Jess stared at her silently, her words running through her mind. Ildaria was actually making her think that her kind, these immortals, truly weren’t the horrors she’d first thought. Maybe they were different than the mythological vampires she’d been thinking them.

  Except they drank blood, and could read minds and control humans, some part of her brain reminded her grimly. That still sounded like a vampire.

  “We are human too,” Ildaria said firmly, still reading her mind. “And we—” She paused and snapped her mouth closed when the cabin door opened.

  Turning, Jess watched warily as Vasco entered the cabin. His gaze found Ildaria first, before moving around the room and settling on her. A smile immediately began to bloom on his face.

  “There ye are, me lovely! Finally decided to stop playing hard to get, did ye? Well, I’m a happy man to hear it, I can tell ye,” he said, starting toward her. “I’ve done nothing but dream about yer tuzzy-muzzy and jugs since last I enjoyed them. Come give me a kiss, lass.”

  Fourteen

  “Where the hell are they?” Raffaele snapped, pacing the dock in front of Zanipolo and Santo.

  “I am sure they will be here soon,” Zanipolo said for the sixth time in little more than thirty minutes. “Lucian said the South American Council was sending Enforcers over at once to help clear up the situation.”

  “Well, how the hell long is ‘at once’?” Raffaele snapped impatiently. It seemed to him that “at once” meant eventually or in a while here in Santo Domingo. Although the truth was he suspected it really meant never. The local enforcers hadn’t done anything about Vasco after their earlier calls reporting on how he and his crew were luring tourists onto their ship and feeding off of them. Why would they do anything now? Jess was merely one more mortal tourist to them. Her being his life mate probably wouldn’t matter much either. He wasn’t from here. He too was just a tourist.

  Raffaele growled under his breath, very much afraid that they were waiting for backup that would never come. He needed to get to Jess, but had promised Lucian and his uncle Julius that he would not drag Santo and Zani into a situation where it was the three of them against an entire pirate crew. Rogues didn’t fight fair. They also generally played for keeps, and while he had great faith in his own and his cousins’ abilities to take care of themselves, three against thirty or fifty rogue immortals was . . . well, those weren’t good odds. Still, the only reason he’d agreed to wait at the time was because Santo had managed to read from the younger female immortal’s mind that Vasco wasn’t waiting on board his
ship, and would be a while returning. Things had changed, though.

  Whirling impatiently, he stared out at the sloop, and the small rowboat next to it. The captain had returned just moments ago, paddled across the water by a couple of his men who had brought the boat in to get him. He was back . . . and Raffaele could no more leave Jess to the rogue’s tender mercies than he could drag Santo and Zani into this mess.

  He’d go alone, Raffaele decided grimly. He’d have his cousins ride out to the ship with him, but leave them in the boat while he snuck on board. He’d then find Jess, throw her overboard for his cousins to collect, and then follow if they managed that first part without being discovered, or stay to fight to give Jess and his cousins a chance to escape if they were discovered.

  “Now that Vasco has returned, they could sail away with her,” Santo said quietly. As if Raffaele hadn’t already thought of that himself. That was what worried him the most. Now that the captain was aboard, the boat could leave at any moment. Of course, Vasco’s return meant other things might happen now as well. Things Raffaele didn’t even want to think about. Jess was his, but if Vasco too was a possible life mate, she would be helpless in the face of life mate passion.

  Growling under his breath, he turned back toward the harbor and quickly scanned the nearby boats.

  “Where are you going?” Zanipolo asked with alarm when he started to stride off the dock.

  “To get us a boat,” he growled.

  Jess stared at Vasco like a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching vehicle. Then panic managed to kick her out of her frozen state, and she began backing quickly away, squawking, “No.”

  Much to her amazement, Vasco actually stopped. Eyes wide, and head tilted to the side like a dog that didn’t quite understand a command, he frowned and then asked, “No?” as if he’d never heard the word before.