The Perfect Ten Boxed Set

by Dianna Love

  “And you can call me Delano.”

  “Delano.” She said his name experimentally, surprised at how easily it rolled off her tongue. “Okay, Delano, if I’m going to stay here, I’m going to need some things from my apartment. Can we make a trip over there tomorrow?”

  “I’ll have Eli do it. Just make a list of what you’d like to have and he’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And now, I really must snatch some sleep. Vampire hours and all that.” With that, he left as quietly as he’d come.

  Vampire hours.

  Suddenly, the fundamental, frightening paradigm shifts she’d been forced to make in the last hours caught up with her. Finding the lever, she lowered the head of the bed so she could lie prone again, adjusted her pillow and closed her eyes. She’d think about it all tomorrow.

  No, not tomorrow. Tonight.

  Vampire hours…

  Chapter 5

  CRAZY. FOUR DAYS, and he was going quietly crazy.

  Currently, she was in a completely different room, and still she tortured him. She saturated his senses, aroused every lustful hunger he possessed. He hadn’t counted on that when he’d hatched this plan.

  That damnable scented soap she used. Oh, it was very subtle; most people probably wouldn’t even notice it. But it had wormed its way into his olfactory system, right into his permanent memory. His scientist’s brain had catalogued the component parts insofar as he could distinguish them: sandalwood, vanilla, soft musk and some spice or other — nutmeg? Saffron, maybe? God help him, he could tell how far or how near she was from her scent alone. For pity’s sake, he could all but hear the blood in her veins. Surge and whisper, surge and whisper…

  Four short days and the frustration was a living thing under his skin. Last night, for the first time in decades, he’d been tempted to take to the darkest, most desperate streets of St. Cloud’s underbelly in search of a rogue. As restless and raw and as he felt, it would have been hugely therapeutic to pull a rogue off a victim and dispatch him straight to hell.

  Except that’s what he paid professional hunters to do. He couldn’t afford to indulge himself by engaging the rogues at that level. If a hunt went south, the research would die with him. Like it or not, his place was here in the lab.

  Besides, he knew from experience the therapeutic effect would be short lived. Hunting was better left to those with a genuine appetite for it, like Aiden Afflack. Handsome, smiling, easy Aiden. The man could dispatch a rogue without ruffling his evening wear, then head out to seduce his newest conquest with an equally unruffled conscience. Or maybe RJ. One part laconic, one part cryptic and two parts pissed-off. The man had been on the payroll forty years, and Delano still didn’t know what “RJ” stood for. Those men were natural hunters.

  You could visit those dark streets in search of something else…

  For a moment, Delano actually let himself consider the idea. Maybe with a stranger, a prostitute… Perfunctory, impersonal, detached. Maybe it would be safe.

  No! Not safe.

  He pushed the subversive voice back into his subconscious.

  Not. Safe.

  He lifted his head, nostrils flaring. She approached!

  Quickly, he bent to press his eyes once again to the viewer of the electron microscope. Not that there was anything especially fascinating to see yet; after all, it had only been a few days. But he needed some time to collect himself.

  “Dr. Bowen?”

  “A moment.” He made several superfluous adjustments, completely destroying the focus. When he’d taken a grip on himself again, he lifted his head, brushed his hair back from his face and replaced his eyeglasses. Glasses he wore not to correct his vision, but because it helped him fit the mold people expected. They civilized him, masking the intensity of his eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said. “How went the clinic?”

  She slid a hand under her hair to lift it from her collar and gave it one of those very female flips, causing a resultant wave of fragrant warmth to billow toward him.

  “Great,” she said. “Although it was kind of creepy, going back to your building after having been attacked outside it.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry. But you understand, I can’t have the clinic in my house. The traffic coming and going…”

  She grinned. “Of course. Your neighbors would have the police investigating you for suspicion of trafficking in something else entirely.”

  “I trust Eli’s presence helped allay your concerns?”

  Another flash of white teeth, which drew his attention to her lips.

  “I’ll say! People literally cross the street to avoid us when he puts his game face on.”

  Focus, Bowen. He lifted his gaze back to her eyes. “The blood samples?”

  “All squared away. The paperwork, too.”

  Efficient. Of course, he’d known she would be. Pity he didn’t have more real work for her. At this rate, he’d have to drum something up just to keep her busy enough to make a full-time position plausible.

  “And what about your clients? They were all well-behaved? You didn’t feel threatened or frightened?”

  She smiled. “You know I didn’t. I heard you checking in with Eli. I figure that’s why he hovered over me the whole time.”

  He shrugged. “After what happened on your first visit, I wanted to make certain your first clinic was as anxiety-free as we could make it.”

  “Well, thank you. I appreciated it. I think I fully relaxed when I recognized the fifth donor.”

  “Someone you know?”

  “Yeah. Well, sort of. I don’t know know him, but I recognized him from the all-night video rental spot on Arcadia Boulevard.” She shook her head as though she still couldn’t get over the wonder of it. “That’s when it hit me. They’re everywhere, aren’t they? Doing all kinds of night work. Running gas pumps, re-stocking shelves…”

  “Yes, and DJ-ing at radio stations, hosting late-night call-in shows, driving taxi cabs. And there are still more working from their homes. Telecommuting has been the biggest lifestyle improvement for these people since the all-night diner.”

  “Wow. They’re everywhere.”

  “Not everywhere, but more commonplace than you might imagine.”

  “It was strange, though. Doing a venipuncture and thinking, this guy is probably thinking about what my blood would taste like. And then thinking, no, he’s probably thinking how I’m thinking that he’s thinking about what I’d taste like, and what a rube I am for thinking it.”

  He laughed, a short bark of hilarity that surprised him.

  “Ah, you were right the first time.”

  “Oh, my Lord!”

  “Just think of it the same way you would a regular male patient. It’s as instinctive to a vampire to speculate about sampling your blood as it is for a normal man to think about what it would be like to have sex with you.”

  She goggled at him. “Men really think about that when I’m sticking a large-gauge needle into their veins?”

  A red-blooded man would be thinking about sex with Ainsley Crawford even if she were preparing to slice into their flesh with a scalpel without benefit of anesthetic, but he thought better of sharing that thought. “I’m afraid so. Blame it on the power of the male drive to procreate.”

  “Procreation…” Her brows drew together. “Is that something vampires do?”

  He sobered quickly. “No.”

  “They don’t have sex?”

  Christ, how had this discussion gotten started? “They don’t produce offspring. They are physically incapable of conception, whether you’re talking vampire on vampire, or vampire on non-vampire.”

  Her frown deepened. “That is so sad.”

  “No,” he said. “No, actually it isn’t. A vampire infant doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  She pulled back. “Why not?”

  “For a vampire, the thirst is constant. The men and women you met tonight, it takes extraordinary discipline for them to live
their lives the way they do. The call to feed, to take what they want from their relatively weaker, vulnerable human brothers and sisters … it’s unimaginably hard to resist. As is the idea of their own superiority. They are infinitely stronger, faster, more physically vital.”

  “Okay,” she conceded. “I see what you’re saying. We must look like dumb cattle. Or maybe sacrificial lambs, tied to the stake.”

  “To some, yes. But not to the ones you met tonight. The difference between them and the creature that attacked you is that they cling to their humanity. The hunger is no less powerful, but the discipline is there. A child vampire, however … well, let’s just say that in the world of vampires, it’s completely taboo to turn a child. An adult vampire needs to feed enough to maintain himself or herself. They need to take in enough blood to sustain them and to fight off the day’s aging. But a child … their needs are phenomenally heavy, given the burden of growth, and they lack the self-control to be integrated into the shared world. They are both innocent and deadly.”

  “Omigod, it’s true. Vampires don’t age!”

  God, there she went again with the Hollywood stereotypes. “They most definitely do age. They just do it in a profoundly slower manner than un-mutated humans.”

  “Like turtles, you mean? Negligible senescence?”

  He managed a tight smile. “Yes, like turtles. And rockfish and sturgeon and bivalves. Once they reach physical maturity, the aging process is all but halted. And just like those species, vampires typically succumb to accident or predation long before they would meet their natural end from old age.”

  Her eyes shone. “This is so exciting! Just think of it, Del, if you could bottle that…”

  Del? He was Del, now? He didn’t know whether to be honored or horrified. He’d been Lane once, briefly, an eternity ago, but never Del. He chose to ignore her use of the diminutive.

  “Believe me, there are R&D companies trying to extract that mutation as we speak. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to separate that characteristic from the compulsion to gorge on human blood.”

  She goggled at him. “You mean every other bio-pharm company knows that vampires walk among us?”

  He laughed, a cold, cynical sound. “Ainsley, sweetheart, you don’t even want to know what they know and aren’t telling. You could keep Senate committees busy for years if they knew the whole of it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  She chewed her lower lip a moment, and all he could think was let me do that.

  “So, do they do it?”

  He shook his head, but the words didn’t realign to make any more sense. “Does who do what?”

  “Do vampires have sex? You’ve clarified they don’t procreate, which apparently is good because baby vamps are voracious, conscienceless blood leeches. But you didn’t say what they do about sex.”

  He cleared his throat. “They are more than capable of sex.”

  “With each other?”

  God, the woman’s curiosity was boundless. As was her temerity. “Very rarely.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Why not?”

  “Mainly because it’s not very satisfying. Typically, vampires have no appetite for vampire blood.”

  This time her eyebrows soared. “And vampire sex involves the exchange of blood?”

  “Most definitely. But with human/vampire couplings, it’s one way, human to vampire. Otherwise, the vamps would have converted your ranks pretty swiftly.”

  She scoffed. “That’s presuming there are ranks of females just waiting to be bitten. ’Cuz speaking as a card-carrying member of the once-bitten, I can assure you the experience would not be high on the must-do list for most females.”

  “Ranks of females?” He shook his head. “There you go again with the generalities. For your information, some male vampires prefer male partners. And female vampires take their share of partners, too, thank you, from both the male and female ranks. Basic sexual orientation isn’t altered by this mutation.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  He held up a hand to forestall her. “All I’m saying is that if every time a vampire had sex with a non-vampire, they opted to turn said partner, then the food supply would have been exhausted long ago. The vampire ranks would swell until there were no un-mutated humans left to feed them. Presumably, that’s why vampires have evolved in such a fashion as to not be sexually attracted to other vampires.”

  She grinned. “Securing the food supply. Smart.”

  “And again, for your information, it’s not an unpleasant experience for a woman. Or a man, for that matter, or so I’m told. Quite the opposite. It’s quite an extraordinary experience. So extraordinary, in fact, that certain people engage in relations only with vampires.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Vampire groupies?”

  He couldn’t suppress a smile at her expression. “If you want to call them that, I suppose it’s fair enough, at least in your view of the world. But I assure you, they have a very different view of themselves.”

  “What would you call them?”

  “Me?” He pushed his hair back. “I don’t know. Holy women?”

  Her eyes widened, fascinating written in their violet depths. “Holy women?”

  “Or men. Let’s not be sexist here.”

  “Wow.”

  “Think about it: why wouldn’t they be revered? They provide sustenance, comfort, pleasure, companionship, all at the same time.”

  “Why indeed? Shoot, I want me one of them.”

  That surprised a laugh out of him. “Sorry. You don’t qualify. Mutant variants only.”

  Her face got very still. Uh-oh.

  “What?” he said.

  “I was just thinking about what you said … does that mean there are circumstances when it’s safe to be bitten? When there’s no risk of infection ensuing?”

  Stupid, Bowen. Real stupid. What now?

  He decided to stick with the truth, or at least enough of it that the lie could be in the omission.

  “Absolutely.” He leaned back in his chair, the picture of relaxation. “The vampire controls the exchange. Obviously, in the sex situation, he — or she — wants to keep their partner not just alive and well, but uninfected. However, in your case—”

  “In my case, he was doing his damndest to drain the very last drop of my blood, so he probably wasn’t being too particular about whether or not he infected me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And he was. A sorry sonofabitch, that is. “Don’t think about it. Besides, I told you no harm would come to you, and I meant it.”

  She held his gaze, her violet eyes shadowed, and Delano felt another lash to his conscience.

  “You’re right. No point worrying about it. My blood work has been fine so far, right? No abnormalities?”

  He nodded. “Definitely normal, and no post-transfusion reaction.”

  “I still can’t believe you typed and crossmatched me so quickly. If I’d gone to the ER, they’d have started me on O-neg while they were waiting for the lab.”

  He gestured to the equipment around him. “As you can see, there’s not much I don’t have at my disposal, and no competition for the resources. Not to mention lots of blood.”

  “And speaking of blood, isn’t it time for me to roll up my sleeve again?”

  He checked his watch. Two o’clock in the morning. Precious as those vials were for his research, he hadn’t planned on drawing any more until at least four.

  She rubbed the back of her neck. “I know it’s a little early, but I wouldn’t mind turning in for some rest, if we’re done here. I’m feeling a little wiped.”

  The last thing she needed was an iron deficiency, which wasn’t out of the question the way they’d been harvesting samples. By rights, he should postpone the next draw until she got up. But he had a solid four hours left in the lab tonight, if he had new samples to work with. And her hemoglobin was fine… “Sure, we can do that. I’ll just buzz Eli.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,”
she protested. “He’s been on call pretty much around the clock since I came here, and he only just got to bed. Let the poor guy sleep.”

  “Very well.” He inclined his head. “We’ll take the next specimen tomorrow. I’ll ask Eli to wake you for it.”

  She laughed. “No, I didn’t mean postpone it. I meant you could do it. You did run the clinic by yourself before I came, right? Or you and Eli.”

  Good God! Draw her blood?

  In a flash, he saw himself tying off the tourniquet, swabbing that warm patch of skin on the inside of her elbow, probing the delicate blue veins, introducing the needle…

  Bad idea. Very bad idea. He cleared his throat.

  “Eli is paid very handsomely to do what I ask of him. He certainly won’t mind being roused for this. He’s as anxious as I am to find … to know that you’re going to be all right.”

  There! She wasn’t imagining it. Ainsley blew out an exasperated breath. For some reason, he was completely loath to touch her. She’d been here for days, under his direct care, and he’d yet to lay a finger on her. Well, apart from carrying her here that first night.

  What exactly was his problem?

  He sure as hell wasn’t a germaphobe — hell, he’d performed countless venipunctures on vampires. Creatures who were capable of visiting a blood-borne, gene-warping, physiology-altering pathogen on their victims, at will.

  So if it wasn’t disease or germs he feared, it had to be her.

  “Why are you afraid of me?”

  He snorted. “Afraid of you? Ms. Crawford, believe me when I say there’s very little in this world that frightens me.”

  His words rang with the authority of a man who dealt with deadly forces every day, but dark patches of color now rode his cheekbones.

  Interesting.

  She smiled. “I don’t doubt your ability to hold your own in this … underworld. But I was thinking … maybe it’s the fairer sex that scares you?”

  His forehead, which had been pleated in a fierce frown, relaxed, and he laughed. He actually laughed, dammit.

  “Ummm, how shall I put this? No. Women hold no terrors for me, Ms. Crawford. Not even women as smart, attractive and driven as you.”