She huffed. “Oh, fuck the biggest bull! This word was not in the English books I studied.” Her pout was almost charming. “Did you…” Again she hesitated.
“Spit it out, Uta.”
Instead, she gestured with a loose fist, back and forth.
He sputtered. “How is that any of your business?”
She didn’t answer, only looked at her feet, apparently waiting for him to work it out himself. It didn’t take long, once he recalled the state he’d been in last night. “Oh.” He was beginning to hate that syllable; she dumbfounded him, perpetually.
“I had hoped that if you took care of your…business, I might find some relief. Across our bond.”
“No, I did not. I had other things on my plate—vampire test subjects, a Hunter invasion.” The passive murder of an innocent.
“Damned roaches,” she snarled. Then her voice changed to pure sugar. “Perhaps you could try now?”
He wanted to scream at her that he was thoroughly not in the mood, but she batted her eyes almost demurely. It was so incongruous he had to laugh. “Come on, it can’t be that bad for a woman.”
“Do not be stupid. It is bad. Swollen. Aching. Throbbing. It is a terrible distraction. In a fight with Hunter, I could only think about my…pićka.”
Bel laughed harder. Apparently that English word wasn’t in her textbooks either.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I would slap you, but it would shatter your cheek.”
He stopped laughing. If she decided to slap him, he’d likely end up with a concussion, possibly even a skull fracture. Maybe he’d been underestimating female arousal—it had usually seemed like women could take sex or leave it.
“We will discuss this no further. Only your experiment.” She spoke with the slightly stilted formality of Andre, like she’d skipped the lesson on contractions.
“Fine by me. I was thinking we could talk in the workroom.”
Uta furrowed her brow and looked around as if about to say, why not here? Then her eyes landed on the bed, and her lips pursed again. “A fine idea. I will follow you.”
She didn’t though. She apparently remembered where they were headed from her previous visit and she pushed past him and led the way. Behind her trailed an oddly familiar perfume he hadn’t smelled in years. His brain searched through memories, trying to place the flowery scent as they descended the stairs.
In the cellar, she sniffed. “It still smells like Hunter. I take it the one called Derek remains here?”
“He’s still a prisoner. No one wanted to kill him and we can’t let him go.”
She blew out a raspberry of air, clearly unimpressed by their show of mercy. “Are you keeping him for his blood?”
“No. Lucas has something else in mind.”
When they arrived inside the large room, Uta strode to a worktable in the center of the room. She ran one long finger along its stainless steel surface and then hopped up, straddling a corner and tilting her hips forward. The position was suggestive, damn near obscene. Was she trying to provoke him?
She closed her eyes and released a slow, hissing sigh. Well damn. She must be cooling off her aching lady parts on the cold metal of the table. She stared at the wall behind him and sucked her lower lip. Goddamn, he burned for the heartless bitch.
She whimpered, and pity dragged him down again—pity for this ice queen who had broken his little boy heart. Despite two centuries of hatred, he felt the impulse to help. He could give her what she needed, what he needed too. Only, it was her damn fault they were in this situation. She had helped to create him and this unnatural bond. She had bound him only to her, taken away his freedom to love anyone else. If he had to suffer this unslakable desire, then at least she suffered too.
After a moment, Uta freed that lush red lip from her teeth. “I know something about Hunters, but it is a secret I have kept from the beginning.”
He sighed, making sure she would hear his impatience in his tone. “The beginning of what?”
She huffed, as if the answer should be obvious. They were getting along great. On each other’s nerves in two sentences flat.
“My life as a vampire.”
He wanted to talk about his cure, not conduct an interview with a vampire à là Anne Rice, but damn, that was interesting. “You have a two-thousand-year-old secret?”
She glared at him. “Bel, keep up. You are not an idiot. No more stupid questions.”
Déjà vu crashed over him again. She’d said those words to him often, just as impatiently, but full of affection. The air in his lungs turned to water. He swam in the nostalgia of the moment, barely keeping his head up.
“Maybe you overestimate my intelligence.”
“No, you underestimate it. You always have.”
It grated on him that she acted like she knew him. He wanted to wring her neck, especially since he couldn’t really hurt her. Her jacket hung open, revealing the gentle curve of her breasts, big nipples erect through her top.
Uta’s eyes flicked to him suddenly, and he was caught with his tongue dangling like a dog.
She held his gaze while she squirmed. If she had stood up and stripped her clothes off and splayed her legs open on that stainless steel table, he would have been helpless. Free will be damned. He would have dipped his head to her pička and tasted his fill of her soft skin for hours. He wanted those thighs clamped against the side of his head. The whole damn Justicia could have circled around them and conducted their meeting, and Bel would have just kept lapping at her.
And on some level she knew it.
But instead of stripping, she shifted on the table, uncrossing her legs and wriggling until she found a spot not yet warmed by her body on the surface of the table.
She could have him, but she didn’t want him. Didn’t want him any more now than she had when she abandoned him all those years ago. He was just a little boy she got stuck with, had accidentally bonded to. And at every moment she was still treating him like he was eleven. That humiliating realization deflated his hard-on in an instant.
Chapter 15
THE LANGUID DESIRE that throbbed between Uta’s legs grew fervent, tightening her chest and curling her fingers. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and she wiped it off with the back of her hand.
Bel’s jaw muscles clenched. His anger had flipped on like a switch, and it only served to tighten the coil of arousal in her belly.
“Bel—”
“Don’t. Just tell me the goddamn secret. But don’t ever forget that you did this to me. I didn’t choose to want you like this.”
How could she forget? It haunted her every second.
“Not now. You need to know about the blood before the Justicia meets.”
His dark brows formed a V and then lifted quickly in a display of curiosity. Always a scientist first, her Bel, and the expression reminded her so much of when he was a boy that her throat closed up and she coughed, trying to choke back her grief over what she had lost—something she’d never had a right to in the first place.
“Your protein does not work because it lacks osjećaj.”
“Osjećaj—sentiment?” He leaned forward on the balls of his feet.
“Consider Blood Vine. Andre’s passion, his love of the homeland, his nostalgia—the sentiments, as you say, permeate the wine and make it nourishing.”
“But the wine has hemoaurum in it, like Hunter blood. That’s what nourishes vampires.”
“Pshaw! If a vampire made a cream puff with ties to the homeland, it would cure us too.”
“You’re bullshitting me. The hemoaurum has to matter.”
“I know nothing of it, only the osjećaj. Sentiment feeds bonds.” She crossed her legs and scratched at an imaginary spot on her knee so he wouldn’t see what she wasn’t saying. Sentiment fed all bonds, including those of mates. When she mastered her expression, she glanced back up. “And you cannot create that in a laboratory.”
“Osjećaj.” He narrowed his eyes at her, and his fingertips ra
sped over the stubble on his chin—such a masculine sound.
“Yes. Not just chemicals, but a state of sentimental connection instead of separation and exile.”
“You’re suggesting nostalgia for when Hunters and vampires lived together makes Hunter blood powerful?”
“I know it to be true.”
“That’s shite. I’ve seen the hemoaurum under the microscope—it is in Hunter blood, in Blood Vine, and in the blood of vampires when they drink from one or the other and are cured. That is scientific proof.”
“And yet it does not work.”
He scowled, shifting his focus to the ceiling, lost in thoughts she could almost sense in her own mind.
Such a scientist. He was already hypothesizing, when she had meant to deter him. This was a useless path, but she did not want to burst his hopes, only wanted to watch him stargazing, the memories of his youth rushing back at her like raindrops in a downpour.
She spoke without thought. “You always did look upward to think.”
He froze. His hand rubbing on his chin, his breaths—everything stopped.
Too late for her to hold back now. “I assumed it was because we spent so many nights lying on the beach talking. But you had the habit even indoors.”
Very slowly, he lowered his gaze to her, and his eyes glittered with confusion over the thin line of his lips. “Were we really friends? I hardly remember a thing before you dropped me like a burning coal.” His puzzled expression hinted at a boyish vulnerability, and it bit at her heart.
Had he really forgotten their attachment? She lay back and studied the corrugated steel of the roof. “We were true friends. I enjoyed your company more than anyone’s.”
She pressed both her palms to her chest, attempting to quell her pain enough to hone in on his feelings. Tightly controlled fury and hurt tickled at the edge of her awareness.
And then he spoke the inevitable question. “Why?”
She closed her eyes tight. “Bel, you know.”
“The hell I do. I’ve never understood.” A gentle thud sounded where he’d leaned against the table. “Why would you do that to me, right after Mother…” He swallowed a sob, the grief of a little boy abandoned at the very same time by the two women who loved him.
Maybe she could help him remember. She pushed herself up onto her elbows.
“Bel, lie back on the table and close your eyes.”
He spun, backing away from her. “If hell has frozen over, I missed the memo.”
“Please try. What can it hurt?” Both of them, a great deal. But she held his stare as if she believed the lie.
He remained in unmoving deliberation so she lay down again and focused on the ceiling. Twenty feet overhead, small spiders spun delicate webs that spanned the inches between the corrugation and the rafters. She envied them and she clenched her hands, missing her knitting needles. Where had she left them? Oh yes. In that horrid quilted tote bag Ingrid had given her that she hadn’t had the heart to throw away.
Without a warning, Bel’s weight settled onto the table with a creak, and he lay down, his head near hers, very much like they used to lie. After a few moments, his breathing became even.
She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed to the vast pantheon of Illyrian gods she had dismissed millennia ago. Please let this work.
She licked her lips. “What do you remember of your mother’s death?”
Chapter 16
BEL FELL INTO THE LONG BURIED memory with surprising ease. Maybe it was Uta’s familiar scent, luring him into the past. The last thing his mother had ever said to him leaped into his ear like it was only yesterday.
“Lobel Marasović, be home by nine o’clock. You are a growing boy, and you will keep normal human hours no matter how abnormal a vampire household is.” Mila hadn’t kept the bitterness from her tone. Whether it was over his friendship with Uta or one of her many other complaints against their family life, he didn’t know.
He stepped out the front door and let it slam, racing off to meet Uta at the shore. They often walked there or in the hills in the dark hours before his curfew. Auntie Uta dressed as a man for their hikes—trousers and a cap with her dark red hair tucked up. That evening, for the first time, Bel noticed the shape of her long thighs, and how they curved into small, round cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off her backside or stop wondering how it would feel to cup it in his hands.
They sat on the beach and watched bats come home from their hunting to fly back into the trees. “Why do you suppose people think vampires turn into bats?” he asked.
“I have heard some bats suck blood.”
“That’s right, vampire bats. I forgot about them,” he admitted. “Too bad for you it’s not true.”
“Is it? I’m happy to fly in my own skin.”
Her words were like an invitation to look at her skin—luminous in the moonlight and so fair she surely would have had freckles if she weren’t a vampire, might have had before she was turned into one. How had he never noticed her beauty, with those dark, intelligent eyes?
“But being a bat would be almost as good as being a fly on a wall. Think of all the spying you could do.”
His words earned him a laugh. “Indeed, that is an advantage I had not considered. Who would you spy on if you were a bat?” Boots off, Uta dug her bare feet into the sand, and her toes peeked out.
His mother called Uta’s tinted finger nails and toe nails garish. She was the only female on Šolta to have adopted the French fashion. Bel kind of liked the look of her cherry tipped toes in the sand.
Then he realized she had asked him a question. “What’s that? Spy?” Yesterday his answer would have been simple—to watch Kos flirting with a girl or to overhear his parents arguing in order to better understand their troubles. But there, on the moonlit beach, the image of a slim Uta naked and slipping out of a bathtub entered his mind.
“The usual things,” he squeaked, without looking at her.
“You must tell me. I’m certain you’ve thought of something naughty. I must know.” Then she reached around him with her long arms and began to tickle him.
He froze. They always roughhoused and wrestled, but it would be different to roll around in the sand with her as that picture burned in his mind.
“Sorry to disappoint.” He stood abruptly. “I haven’t got any good ideas. And I know better than to tell you, anyway. You’ll just steal them and go off spying while Mother forces me to sleep.”
Uta stood and brushed sand of her trousers, laughing. “True, that is exactly what I would do.”
The wrestling disaster averted, Bel’s tension eased as they walked back toward the Marasović house. “What will you do tonight?”
“I believe your father is coming over to play cards. I won his grain silo from him, and he’s asked for a rematch to win it back.”
“Seems fair. He did give you the chance to win back your carriage.”
“He did. The difference is, I am a much better loser than Andre. I always accept my defeat graciously.”
The statement was so preposterous, Bel couldn’t take another step until his laughter ebbed. “Sometimes I think you and Father would have been a happier couple than he and Mother.”
Uta stopped in the middle of the road, and Bel did the same, turning to look at her. A dove cooed nearby, until it was silenced by an unseasonably cool breeze. “Your parents love each other very much. And they are both very dear friends to me. But friendship is easier than marriage. When Andre gets on my nerves, I stay away. We didn’t speak for eighty-seven years in the twelfth century.”
“But you are very much alike.”
“In some ways, but there is no spark of passion between us. We are like brothers.”
“Brothers?”
“It’s what Andre says. That I can take care of myself like a man, so I am not like a sister, but a brother. And he says I look like a boy.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know…” She held her hands out in fr
ont of her, pantomiming a large pair of breasts. “And…” She did the same thing behind her, as if there were something wrong with that little round bottom.
Bel turned away, knowing she could see a blush in the dark. “Well, women shaped like that never go out hiking like we do. I think you’re better off.”
She didn’t seem to notice his embarrassment. “You think so now, but maybe not when you’re grown.” She was talking to him like she always had, with no idea that his thoughts were becoming less and less boyish.
How would their friendship change when she realized he was growing up?
They had arrived at the dirt road leading up to his family’s home. He stood there and asked, “Auntie, how old were you when you became a vampire?”
“Old enough to have grown as tall as a tree, but not to bear fruits…” Again she held out her hands as if her small breasts were lacking.
He laughed because she expected him to. Inside, a confusion of emotions roiled—he didn’t want her to go home; he wanted to stay with her, to keep talking, to feel the warmth of her affection toward him. And he wanted other, new things too—to touch her face, stroke her thighs, he would even suck on one of her red-tipped toes if she would let him. This was all wrong. She was a grown woman, a powerful and ancient vampire far older even than his father. And she was his godmother, his aunt by sentiment if not by blood.
He swallowed the confusing emotions. “Good night, Auntie. Best of luck at cards.”
“Good night, Bel. Sleep well. Perhaps one day, you’ll be a vampire and have no need for sleep.”
“Perhaps,” he shouted over his shoulder as he hurried away from her.
The next morning, he woke up to find something unexpected—his very first hard-on. He was nearly twelve, so, according to the timeline Kos had laid out, this erection thingy was right on time. Nothing to worry about there. But one thing concerned him—his unsettling suspicion his newly hard cock was thanks to Uta.
She was all he could think about. He had a new toy and he wanted to play, to stroke it, to explore the sensations that were beckoning him. But if he did, his imagination would be full of Uta’s body, her face, her silken red hair. It was wrong. If she knew about his new desires—
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