by Alyssa Day
He’d heard rumors of more than a few wild-eyed criminals turning themselves in to the police with tales of “coming clean to escape the monster.” He and Meara were invariably the monsters. Mr. and Mrs. Cassidy, who were bound to them by family loyalty and an enthrallment that was more for ceremony than out of necessity, chided them for it, but what did he care?
Savannah was the most haunted city in the country, right? A crazy report of monsters would be laughed at or ignored.
This was how the monsters thrived in the age of cell phones with video cameras: when anything and everything was fodder for televised entertainment, even the monsters were nothing to fear.
Until they ripped your throat out.
Bane fed from Luke for just a minute or so, and then he was fine. “Thank you.”
Luke nodded. “Whatever you need, whenever you need it, brother.”
“And,” Bane forced the words out, “about earlier. I should have known you wouldn’t have hurt him.”
Luke laughed, but it was a harsh, rasping sound with no humor in it. “Why would you apologize?”
Bane bared his teeth. “You’ll notice I didn’t.”
“We both know I’ve hurt humans before. If I’m not careful, I’ll do it again. I should have flown into that house and pulled them both out. If only I’d gotten there sooner…”
“All three of you would have died if you’d gone into that fire,” Edge said flatly. “Don’t be a fool. Even fire you didn’t create can hurt you, fire starter or not, as far as we know.”
“As far as we know,” Luke repeated, his eyes going blank and far away.
The image of ocean-blue eyes flashed into Bane’s mind. The woman whose image had seared itself into his brain. “The hospital? Did you remove any trace?”
Luke’s lips quirked. “Naturally. And Edge accessed their computers from here to fix the records. There was a curvy little doctor in his room that I would have loved to get to know better, but…” He paused, and his eyes narrowed. “It was the weirdest thing. She didn’t seem to be affected at all by my deliciously charming ways. In fact, her skin looked like it was glowing. I asked her what she was, but—”
Bane was up out of the chair before he knew he’d moved. “A doctor? What was her name? What was her name?”
Luke held up his hands and shook his head. “Whoa. Calm down. I don’t know her name. We didn’t get to the point of exchanging names. I tried to flirt, she called me an asshole—which, let’s admit it, I totally can be, but humans don’t usually call me on it—and then I told her she remembered nothing, and she agreed, and I left.”
Bane’s mind felt like it was splitting apart. Rage and lust and something…something else…all swirled around inside him in a tornado of emotion so intense he wanted to put his fist through a wall.
“What did she look like?”
Luke blinked. “What? Oh, I don’t know; I was in a hurry.”
“Think.”
“Why? I don’t—wait. She was ordinary. Dark hair pulled back from her face. You wouldn’t look twice at her unless you caught sight of those intensely blue eyes. Except like I said, and I know this sounds stupid as hell, but her skin was this weird glowy gold. Like that sparkly lotion Meara likes. Why would a doctor wear that to work?”
Bane glared at him, and Luke blinked.
“Right. Sorry. One of those white coats. Oh, right. Her name was on her coat.” He closed his eyes. “St. Cloud. Or St. John. No. Definitely St. Cloud.” His eyes opened. “That was it. Dr. St. Cloud.”
Bane’s vision shaded to red, and he knew he was a hair’s breadth away from sinking into a berserker’s rage. What he didn’t know was why. It almost felt like…jealousy?
It was definitely territorial.
“Your compulsion worked on her?”
Luke shrugged. “Yeah, of course. I told her she remembered nothing, she agreed, and I left. Why wouldn’t it work?”
Bane’s hands clenched into fists at his side, and he had to fight to contain the unexpected wave of fury rising inside him. What was happening to him? Why was he having the powerful urge to smash Luke’s head into the nearest wall?
An epiphany slammed into him with the force of a bulldozer. He felt about Dr. St. Cloud the way he felt about Savannah: she was his to protect.
She was his.
What the fuck?
He’d finally lost it. Three centuries of relative calm and a single human female had driven him out of his damned mind.
He took refuge in barking out orders. “Watch Hunter. You know the drill. Three days, constant heat, blood when he needs it. Mrs. C will try to come in and clean him up. Don’t let her. If he wakes up early and smells her…”
Edge nodded. “You don’t need to finish that sentence. We know. But where will you be?”
Bane shook his head. “Honestly? I have no fucking clue.”
Before they could answer, he was already gone.
He had a doctor to find.
Chapter Eight
Ryan changed into her comfiest PJs, because why not, and took some time to ponder the question of what else she’d been hallucinating about lately while she decided on a movie to watch. She was definitely tipsy, working her way toward drunk, but who cared? What did a little wine matter when she was already able to see little pink elephants—and big, hot guys—while stone-cold sober? She shook her head at horror, wrinkled her nose at science fiction, and then considered and discarded the entire genre of romantic comedies, because who the hell wanted to watch other people find true love and happily ever after when she’d never had anything close herself?
Damn. No self-pity tonight. No, Dr. Ryan St. Cloud was going to tie one on.
Heh. Tie one on. Why were there so many euphemisms for drunk? She’d wasted a lot of brain cells on that particular question, even while she’d been pickling those brain cells with far too much drinking over the past few years. It was even a kind of joke in the ER, where drunk tourists provided a steady feed of patients.
Three sheets to the wind.
Bombed.
Crocked.
Pickled.
Wasted.
Wrecked.
Feeling no pain.
Well. That last was a joke, wasn’t it? Pain was probably the reason most people drank too much in the first place. Pain. Loneliness. Despair.
There was far too much pain, and far too little celebration, in life overall, she’d discovered. At least in her life.
“And the winner of the award for Whiniest Self-Pity is…” She shook her head to shake off the mood. Enough, already. Better to think about movies than her boring, solitary life.
She had her best friend Annie, after all. She wasn’t entirely alone.
She opened her second bottle of the night, fully aware that she was drunk off her ass. “But who cares?” she asked the portrait of her grandmother. “Tonight I drink, and tomorrow I’ll go on a spur-of-the-moment and much-needed vacation.”
She finally settled on the best, most awesome choice for a drunken movie fest and settled in to watch it, saluting the TV with the bottle, having quit bothering with the glass a while back.
“Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!”
But before John McClane could get off the plane with that enormous teddy bear, things started to get weird.
She laughed. No, that was a ridiculous thought after the night she’d had.
Correction: things got even weirder.
Because that’s when the magical kidnapper from the hospital appeared on her second-floor balcony.
The balcony that had no stairs, ladder, or fire escape.
“I’m more the Hans Gruber type,” he said. “Hello, Dr. St. Cloud.”
She blinked and then took another swig of wine, still staring at him. “Hey, call me Ryan. I’ve decided I should be on first-name basis with al
l my hallucinations. And damn, but you’re just beautiful, aren’t you? At least my brain dreamed up a hottie when it decided to go ballistic.”
“I don’t… You…” He shook his head and then raised a single eyebrow and pinned his glowing gaze to her, decidedly non-glowing, own. “I assure you, I am quite real.”
“Right. And so, Mr. Quite Real, what did you do with my patient? You know, the one who was dying? The one I had no chance in hell to save, even before you picked him up and disappeared with him?” She was on her feet and shouting at him by the end but didn’t remember standing. Also, unpleasantly, the rage smashing through her was, to borrow one of Annie’s expressions, harshing her mellow.
“How do you remember that?” His eyes narrowed. “Luke said he’d compelled you to forget.”
“I’d like to forget so much about tonight,” she muttered. “And who the hell is Luke?”
“I’d like to explain, Doctor… Ryan, if you’d invite me in,” her magical mystery guest said.
Ryan pointed her bottle at him. “No. Nuh-uh. No way. You keep your glowy-eyed magical ass away from me. And how did you climb up to my balcony? How did you even find me, more to the point?”
“Invite me in, and I’ll tell you,” he said, but his voice had a weird, buzzy resonance that tickled the inside of her mind somehow.
It made her laugh. “Nope.”
His eyes widened. “So it was true.”
“What was true? And why are you here?”
He folded his arms and said nothing, which infuriated her.
“Where is my patient?”
“Invite me in, and I’ll tell you,” he said again, shrugging.
She blew out a breath. “Fine. Whatever. Come on in, Mr. Drunken Hallucination. And then you damn well better tell me where my patient is.”
He smiled and took a step forward, into the room, and she started toward him but tripped over the coffee table and fell.
Into his arms. Damn, he smelled good. She rested her overheated cheek against his chest for a moment and inhaled.
Wait.
“You were clear across the room,” she muttered, struggling to back up while pushing him away at the same time. Trying to push him away, rather, because he had chest muscles like iron boulders. Was that a thing? Iron boulders? Rock-hard steel?
Some kind of metaphor for hard, for sure.
Yummy. Hard.
Also, damn. Maybe opening that second bottle of wine had been a mistake.
“You seem to have been having a party,” he said, and there was amusement mixed with something darker in his rich, deep voice.
God. He was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen—imagined? Dreamed?—and his voice sounded like silken sin. A tingle of heat and electricity raced through her, and she could actually feel her nipples harden. Now she was really losing it, because her hallucination was making her hot.
No different from fantasizing about a movie star in the bathtub, she tried to tell herself. Except bath-time fantasies never came to life and walked into her living room.
She’d never felt one hold her in his arms before, either.
A tiny shiver of real fear managed to break through the haze of wine-induced fog, and she stumbled back and away from him. Then she glanced up to see that his eyes held the same confusing mix of emotions that she’d heard in his voice, or at least as much as she could actually read emotion from glowing blue eyes.
Maybe he really was thinking about pulling out his axe and murdering her.
“Do you have an axe?”
This time, he blinked. “A what?”
“An axe. Are you an axe murderer, here to kill me to shut me up, so I don’t tell anybody about your magical patient kidnapping? Not like anybody would ever believe me, but what the hell. Go ahead.” She swung around, looking for…what?
“I won’t kill you unless I have to,” he said in a reasonable voice that almost deceived her into not hearing that he would kill her if he had to.
She turned to face him. “I don’t know what to say to that. I really have to give up drinking.”
His gaze, inexplicably, lowered to her neck. “I don’t think I’ll ever give up drinking,” he drawled, and even his voice was sexier than hell.
Whew.
“You need to listen to me, Doctor.”
She glanced up at him. “I don’t think so. And quit talking to me with that weird, buzzing voice. It tickles my brain.”
His eyes widened. “What did you say?”
“I said, the voice thing. And I don’t even know your name or how you’re here or why an axe murderer stole my patient and then stalked me at home, so I think you should go. Now.”
He started to speak, but then, before she could react or run or even think about running, he was somehow right in front of her, hands on her arms.
“How did you do that? Nobody can move that fast.”
He stared down at her, and his eyes weren’t just glowing anymore; they were burning balls of blue flame, and his lips twitched as if he were fighting a grin.
“Are you drunk?
“Well, duh.” She rolled her eyes in case he’d missed the sarcasm.
He muttered an impressive string of swear words under his breath. “Why can you resist my Voice?”
“Dude. You may be freaking gorgeous, but you’re not irresistible. And get your hands off me.”
He released her so abruptly she swayed a little, or maybe that was the wine. She couldn’t help it, then—she started laughing. An expression of wide-eyed shock spread across his face.
“Are you…are you laughing at me?”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, Buster. I don’t even know your name. And anyway, you’re not even real.”
“My name is Bane, and I certainly am real,” he ground out. “I don’t know why the compulsion isn’t working on you, but it did, at least briefly, when I touched you at the hospital, so—”
She laughed even harder. “Oh, sure. The old ‘the compulsion isn’t working, so let me feel you up’ line. Hey, does that ever work for you? Also, Bane? What kind of name is that? What are you, a superhero?”
He shoved his hair out of his face with both hands. Or maybe he was clutching his head.
Maybe both.
“You’re the most infuriating woman I have ever met in three hundred years of existence.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please. Exaggerate much? You’re the most infuriating man I’ve ever met in twenty-nine years of existence, and I know surgeons. From Harvard. Pretty hard to top, in other words.”
She looked him up and down, and suddenly annoyance turned to something else. Something darker. Dirtier.
Delicious.
She wanted another bottle of wine or two.
Or hot sex.
With him.
Yeah, definitely that last one.
Because if her hallucination had developed to the point of appearing with lights, action, and surround sound, she might as well get something out of the deal before she checked out, right?
“I don’t think I like the look on your face,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “What are you thinking?”
She could feel the slow, wicked smile as it spread across her face. “I’m thinking you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life, which is empirical proof that you don’t exist.”
It was the strangest thing, but she could have sworn her hallucination blushed. There was definitely a hint of dark red at his cheekbones that hadn’t been there before.
“But—”
She laughed. “No. No buts in my fantasies. Enough talking. Take off your clothes.”
Chapter Nine
This was not how things were supposed to go.
On the other hand, Bane was willing to adapt to changing circumstances.
“
Now you’re talking,” he said. Then he yanked his shirt off and threw it on the floor.
Ryan gasped. “You…oh. You can’t possibly look that good. I don’t know where I’d even get a frame of reference for a hallucination like you. I’d have to have seen some astonishingly high-class porn.” She whistled. “Or Brazilian soccer players. Yep, that’s probably it. I watched that soccer game with Annie in the doctors’ lounge, and my brain knows I like blue-eyed blonds, and here you are, with those muscles, and that six-pack—eight-pack? Oh dear heavens—and here you are, like sex on a stick, and—”
“You’re babbling,” he said, a feeling of smug, male triumph spreading through him like a river of warm honey. “Also, sex on a stick? I don’t know what that means, but I find that I like it. A lot.”
He took a step closer, unbuttoning his jeans as he moved. “Shouldn’t you be taking your clothes off, too?”
By all the gods, she was gorgeous, although she also…wasn’t. He blinked. In fact, her face was almost ordinary, as Luke had said.
What was happening to him? He, who’d seen and touched and tasted beauties from a dozen generations?
But then she smiled, and her face lit up like the sun.
As did her skin. He’d almost put her glowing skin out of his mind. She’d presented as completely normal—plain, ordinary human—when he’d entered her home. Until now. When she smiled, her skin had lit up, too. And the glow remained, making every inch of her uncovered skin luminous.
And any thought of ordinary disappeared. She was far more than the sum of her parts, this woman. The sheer intensity in her eyes had caught him—claimed him—and wouldn’t let him go. But maybe it was merely illusion that her skin was gleaming in the soft light in the room?
She’d let down her hair since he’d seen her at the hospital, and it was a gleaming dark fall of chestnut brown that reached halfway down her back. He couldn’t wait to see it spread across his pillow. And the curves that the lab coat had hidden were on full display in her silky nightclothes, which consisted of shorts and a cropped top that hugged her breasts. Were he a poet, he’d write odes to those breasts. They were so round and ripe, with nipples begging for his mouth.