The Perfect Ten Boxed Set

by Dianna Love

  He leapt across the room and hit the intercom. “Eli, wait! Don’t leave yet. I’m coming up.”

  Without waiting for an acknowledgement, he raced for the stairwell. Seconds later, he burst into the penthouse, his fingers automatically keying in the sequence to prevent the alarm from sounding.

  “Delano?” called Eli from the foyer.

  Christ, they were almost out the door.

  Rage, hot and unreasoning, flooded his brain, his chest, his muscles. Moving at a speed he knew they would perceive as only a blur, he crossed the intervening space and snatched Ainsley’s bag from Eli’s shoulder.

  Eli reacted instinctively, shoving Ainsley behind him and drawing his pistol in one smooth motion.

  Delano found himself looking down the barrel of a SIG .40 caliber automatic, but he turned away from it to search Ainsley’s face. Her eyes, a blaze of violet-blue emotion, locked on his.

  Yes!

  The lone word sounded in his mind, as strong and as heartfelt as her earlier plea.

  “Dammit, Delano, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

  Delano was vaguely aware of Eli reholstering his pistol. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Eli looked from Delano to Ainsley and back to Delano again. “Delano, we agreed the safe house was the best course of action.”

  Delano’s anger took another bump. Hands fisted, he fought to keep his breathing regular, to expel the rage eating at his self-control. This was Eli, for God’s sake. His friend. A friend who was merely trying to carry out the orders he’d been given.

  Breathe deep, let it out. Again. Air in, murderous impulse out. When he’d mastered himself, he announced, “She stays with me.”

  “Oh, for the love of Pete!” Eli exclaimed. “Can no one around here stick to a simple plan? Your plan, I might remind you. This is the only way we can be certain she’ll be safe.” Eli grasped Ainsley’s elbow, maneuvering her toward the door again.

  At the sight of Eli’s hand on Ainsley, Delano’s tenuous grip on control snapped. With a snarl, he lunged for Eli, pinning the other man against the wall with one hand around his throat.

  “Del!” Ainsley cried.

  Eli’s hands came up to grip Delano’s hand, trying to pry open his grip. “Get … the hell … off me!”

  “Nobody touches her.” Delano tightened his grip remorselessly. “Nobody takes her from me.”

  Eli’s face was red now, his eyes starting to distend. He beat at Delano’s arm and head with savage blows, but Delano was beyond feeling it. What he did feel was the bone-deep, total-body need to feed, together with a powerful need to punish. The combination was dizzying. Growling, he dropped his jaw and let his canines erupt.

  “Stop it! My God, you’re killing him! Delano, let him go!”

  Through a haze of blood-lust, he felt Ainsley tugging at his arm and heard her agonized pleas. And he heard something else in her voice. Unadulterated horror.

  Suddenly, he saw what he was doing. He held Eli suspended a good four inches off the ground, and his friend’s struggles were weakening by the second. And oh, shit, Eli’d been beating him with the butt of his gun. A gun he could have used very effectively in his own defense.

  Jesus, God, what had he done?

  “Shit.” He eased Eli down until his feet met the floor again, taking the gun from his now lax grip. “I’m sorry. Eli, I’m so sorry.”

  Eli started to fall forward. Delano would have caught him, but Ainsley stepped between them, catching Eli and easing him to the tiled floor.

  “God, you’ve crushed his airway!”

  Delano bent to help her stretch a coughing Eli on the floor. Thankfully, he was regaining his color quickly. “His airway’s fine,” he said gruffly. Which it probably was, give or take some potential cartilage fracture.

  Ainsley fingers flew down the shirt she was wearing. Without a thought for modesty, she peeled it off, rolled it into a tube and slid it under Eli’s neck, her attention focused completely on her patient. “Eli? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

  Eli responded with a cough, followed by a string of pungent curses that bore testimony to his soldiering days.

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” she said. “No stridor, no muffled voice.”

  Delano frowned, thinking about other potential injuries. “The vascular structures are more vulnerable than the airway with this type of manual strangulation.”

  “Yeah?” Eli coughed again. “Coulda fooled my airway a minute ago. Now help me up.”

  Delano helped Ainsley ease Eli up to a sitting position, braced against the wall.

  “I am so sorry, my friend.” Delano handed Eli’s pistol back to him. “I don’t know what to say, except that you should have used that weapon the way it was intended. You’d have been completely justified.”

  “Damn right I should have.” Eli wiped the gun on his pants before slipping it back into its shoulder holster. “On the other hand, looks like I did a pretty good job with the butt end.” He gestured to the left side of Delano’s head. “You oughta get a look at yourself.”

  Delano lifted a hand to probe his scalp. It came away covered in blood from several lacerations. Shit. More blood loss. Well, he had no one to blame but himself.

  He grimaced. “Fortunately, I’ll be handsome as ever come tomorrow night, whereas you will no doubt have some colorful bruises.”

  “That sucks. I won’t even be able to say, ‘You should see the other guy.’”

  Delano laughed and Eli joined in.

  Ainsley made an exasperated sound. “It’s not funny, Eli Grayson.” She turned to glare at Delano. “Nor will it be funny if he develops delayed airway troubles later tonight.”

  Delano sobered. “She’s right. We need to get you to hospital for some soft tissue scans.”

  Eli waved him off. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re asymptomatic,” Ainsley corrected. “That could change in the next hours.”

  “And if it does, trust me, I’ll call 911 myself. But until and unless my status changes, I have no intention of visiting the ER.”

  Ainsley turned to Delano. “Delano?”

  He shrugged. “He’s a nurse. It’s his call.”

  “Thanks, buddy.” Eli extended a hand, which Delano grasped to haul him up to his feet. “Now, if it’s not too much to ask, would you mind explaining what the hell happened here? I thought we were agreed it was best for everyone if Ainsley went to the safe house.”

  Delano sighed heavily. “We did.”

  “Then what happened? What changed?”

  Delano rolled back his sleeve and thrust his arm toward them. “This.”

  Ainsley’s heart slammed in her chest, but it wasn’t fear that made her pulse hammer. It was exultation, so fierce that it stopped the breath in her lungs; a dark, savage delight flooding her neurochemical system. For there, on the inside of his elbow, were three raised dots in the form of a perfect equilateral triangle.

  Yes, came Delano’s voice. You are mine and I am yours.

  Her eyes widened as she realized his lips had not moved.

  “A little uticaria?” Beside her, Eli snorted, although the effect was somewhat spoiled when his snort turned into a cough. “That’s supposed to flip some switch in my head to make this whole soap opera comprehensible?”

  “Show him your arm, Ainsley.”

  Ainsley, who still had not recovered her shirt, extended her own left arm.

  Eli caught her arm and examined the dots. “Well, I’ll be damned. Matching his-’n-hers hives.” He released her arm. “I presume this is something more than a curiosity for the medical journals?”

  She glanced at Delano, who bent to scoop her shirt off the floor. He shook it out and handed it to her, catching her eye as she took the garment from him.

  Let me field this.

  There it was again! Not precisely a voice sounding inside her head. More like her own thoughts, only not hers. His. In her head.

  Delano turned ba
ck to Eli. “We are blood-bonded.”

  “Blood-bonded? Holy hell, Del, do you mean to say you—”

  “No.” Delano held up a hand to stop Eli. “I’ll grant you that after that appalling display just now, you have every reason to think me mad, but I assure you I am not. I took no blood.”

  “Then how the devil did you get blood-bonded?”

  “It’s a mystery to me. I wasn’t even sure I believed in blood-bonding, to begin with. I thought it merely another of the myths that have grown up around my kind, like warding off vampires with garlic, holy water or crucifixes, or vampires casting no reflection in a mirror.”

  “But you believe it now?”

  He inclined his head. “I am obliged to re-evaluate my position.”

  “But still, I don’t get how you wind up with a blood-bond without the blood-taking part. Unless—” Eli’s gaze strayed to Ainsley.

  Blushing fiercely, Ainsley busied herself putting her shirt back on.

  “Indeed,” Delano said.

  “I see.”

  She felt her blush rise all the way to her hairline, which was patently stupid. They were all adults here.

  “But even so,” Delano continued, “it should have been quite impossible. Ostensibly, a blood-bond is possible only between vampires.”

  “I don’t know.” Eli’s eyes narrowed. “When you think about it, maybe the two of you aren’t really all that different. Maybe it’s a two-sides-of-the-same-coin sorta thing.”

  Ainsley’s gaze collided with Delano’s and her fingers stilled on the buttons of her shirt. “Or two sides of the same mutation.”

  “Exactly.” Eli massaged his neck. “Now, can someone tell me what this means?”

  Ainsley returned her attention to fastening the last two buttons, but her mind strained toward Delano, waiting for his answer.

  “It is purported to be a rare union between vampires, a union involving a bonding of the two on a physical, mental and spiritual planes.”

  “Hence the triangle?”

  “Supposedly.”

  “The triumvirate.” Eli grimaced. “Sounds a lot like marriage to me.”

  “Except I would challenge you to show me a marriage where one partner can’t let the other walk out the door,” Delano rasped.

  Ainsley glanced at Delano again to see that his expression matched the tone of his voice — grim. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. He resented being bonded to her. He didn’t want this link. Oh, Ainsley, what have you done?

  You didn’t trap me, little one. I’m just angry with myself that I lack the strength to put you away from me, even for your own protection.

  I need no protection but yours. I want nothing but to guard your back as you guard mine.

  “Can it be undone?”

  Delano blinked at Eli. “Sorry?”

  “Can the blood-bond be undone?” Eli repeated.

  Ainsley caught the slight lift of an eyebrow, which for Del bespoke profound surprise.

  “I really don’t know. In all my years, I’ve encountered only one couple who were purported to be blood-bonded, and I lost track of them long ago.”

  Ainsley wet her lips. “What does legend say on the subject?”

  Something flashed deep in his eyes, but he quickly lowered his lids. She reached out to his mind to try to catch the thought, but he’d veiled it as thoroughly as he’d veiled his eyes. When he lifted his lids again a second later, his expression was matter-of-fact, his thoughts unreadable.

  “According to the legends, it’s forever. The blood-bonded stay together as long as they live, which as you will appreciate can be a very long time. And when one of the partners dies, the other is said to follow.”

  “Like old married folk, you mean?” Eli coughed again, a reminder of the recent trauma to his throat. “You see it all the time. One goes and the other declines rapidly over the next months or years.”

  “This is more like the next day. Specifically, the next morning.”

  “Omigod!” Ainsley clapped a hand over her mouth.

  Eli looked from one to the other of them. “Omigod what?”

  “The sun,” she said from behind her fingers.

  “It’s only legend,” Delano said softly.

  Stifling a cry, she spun and raced from the room.

  Chapter 19

  “WHAT WAS that about?”

  Delano shot Eli an exasperated look. “For a man of above-average intelligence, you can certainly ask some asinine questions.”

  “Oh, shit. Of course. She has the life expectancy of a fruit fly, compared to yours, which makes her a bad bet for this blood-bond thingy.”

  “Eloquently put.”

  “Okay, how ’bout this for eloquent: if legend proves true, then we can hypothesize that your own life expectancy will be severely truncated.”

  “Much better.”

  “Thank you. Now what the hell are we gonna do about this?”

  “We’re not going to do anything about it. Ainsley will obviously stay here. I will continue to work on a vaccine. You will continue to keep us safe.”

  Eli snapped his fingers as though remembering something important. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  Before he could protest, Eli was gone, returning a moment later with a small paper bag bearing a local drug store’s logo. “Here.”

  Delano took the proffered bag and peered into it, though he hardly needed to. The odor of latex was clearly discernable to his sensitive olfactory system. “Condoms?”

  “Hey, you said it yourself — my responsibility is to keep both of you safe. I’m just trying to do my job. Now, if we’re through here, I have a team to transport to Cuernavaca.”

  “That’s a very thoughtful gesture, Eli, but I won’t be needing them.” He held the bag out for Eli to take back, but the other man ignored it.

  “You know, for a man of above-average intelligence, you sure can say some asinine things.”

  Ainsley sat up in bed before the knock sounded on her door, swiping at her cheeks. “Go away, Del. I’m tired.”

  The door opened. He stepped across the threshold, closing the door behind him. “I’m sorry, I can’t oblige. We need to talk.”

  Why? She lifted her chin. Why not just do this?

  “Because it takes a lot more energy to project a thought than it does to just say it, especially when you’re just learning.” He crossed the carpeted floor to stand by her bed. “Although I must say, you demonstrate an extraordinary raw talent for it, both projecting and receiving.”

  “That’s me. A veritable walking transistor.”

  He sighed. “We could talk about why that analogy is woefully inadequate, or we could talk about us.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. You wanting to talk about us. Or about anything personal, for that matter.”

  “I’d say touché, but then you’d accuse me of being stuck in a seventies romance novel or something.”

  “Which seventies?”

  “Good one.”

  She lifted both hands and raked them through her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m being a bitch.”

  “Which still leaves you miles ahead of me.” His eyes grew bleak. “I behaved like an animal out there. Like the very creatures I’ve been working so hard to curb.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Never that. But you did scare me.”

  “Not nearly as much as I scared myself.”

  He turned to examine the top of her night table, and she wondered what he’d make of the loose change, well-thumbed paperback and Hershey’s chocolate sitting there, within easy reach.

  “Eli is the closest thing to a brother I’ve ever had.”

  Ainsley made no reply.

  He picked up the paperback and turned it over to examine its back, but she had the distinct impression he wasn’t really seeing it.

  “He’s tough as boot leather, as talented at taking life as he is at saving it.” Delano replaced the book on her night table and turned to face her again. “H
e’s been my closest friend in over a century, and I love him dearly. But I almost killed him tonight. If you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t intervened…”

  “Delano, if I hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “True.”

  “Oh, Del, what are we going to do? Is this real? Or could it be as you suggested, a psychosomatic thing?”

  “Push over.”

  It took her a moment to process that he wanted to sit on the edge of the bed. She scrambled back, making a space for him.

  He sat, angling his body toward her where she sat propped against the headboard with her knees drawn up to her chin. “To answer your question, no.”

  She dragged her gaze from his thighs, encased as always in those civilized worsted wool trousers that utterly failed to disguise the powerful musculature beneath, and wondered what her question had been. “No?”

  “I’m not suggestible.”

  Ah, the psychosomatic thing. “Well, aren’t we feeling superior.”

  He sent her an admonishing look.

  “Sorry.” She grimaced. “There’s that bitchy thing again.”

  “I’m not saying my mind — the vampire mind — is stronger than yours, or better, it’s just … differently organized. The interaction of mind, brain, body and social context, while still present, is not precisely the same. In a stressful situation, for instance, we do not produce cortisol to the same extent as would an unmutated—”

  “You can skip the vamp biology lesson for now,” she interjected. “I believe you.”

  “Good.”

  She worried the cuticle of her thumb with her teeth for a moment. “So this can’t be in our heads?”

  “It seems doubtful.” He dropped his gaze to her mouth.

  Whoops. She dropped her hand to her lap again, feeling as self-conscious as a kid. “Then I guess we’d better figure out how to undo it, huh?”

  A pause.

  “Did I say I wanted to undo it?”

  Her pulse leapt, as much from the husky note in his voice as from the content of his words. “But it’s tantamount to a death sentence for you!”