Beautiful Danger

by Michele Hauf

He kissed her nose, and then her mouth, and she tasted a faint hint of blood twirled within the wine.

  “I’ve become a vampire’s lover,” she whispered. “There are many women who would find that sexy.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve become the crazy vampire’s lover. I’m not sure how sexy that is.”

  “It’s beyond sexy. It’s intoxicating.” She nuzzled up against his body, twining her legs with his. The smoky wine smell of him lured her to lick his biceps, and the muscles flexed beneath her touch. “And I don’t want it to stop. I can honestly say I don’t need the revenge anymore, and I have you to thank for that.”

  “Learning to forgive is very sexy to me,” he said.

  “Then when will you learn? I don’t argue with your need to slay the Levallois pack, but now I can only worry whenever you’re away from me. Where is Domingos? Will he get staked, or worse, have his head ripped off by a werewolf?”

  “I’m smarter than that.”

  “Really? Even when the voices are raging in your head?”

  “The voices make me stealthier, sneakier and swifter.”

  Lark closed her eyes. He thought the voices did that for him, but she suspected it was a figment of power and confidence summoned by true madness. He was not safe so long as he continued to pursue the pack. But she didn’t want to be the one to stop him. Her tattered lover deserved that retribution.

  “Maybe I could help you?” she suggested.

  “It’s not your fight, Lark, nor is it the Order’s.”

  “I would never get the Order involved. I’m not stupid.”

  “You’re not. But this is my fight. The only thing I want from you is this.” He kissed her mouth, her breast, her shoulder where the brand raised the skin in a circle and then her neck where the bite wound tingled, yet no longer pained.

  “Will you need my blood every time we make love?” she wondered quietly.

  “Unlike normal vampires, I need blood every day. The UV sickness demands it or else I get loopy and you don’t even want to see me starving, Lark.”

  “How long before you’ll drink me dry?”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “Can you do that? I mean, the human body only has so much blood. It takes a while to regenerate. I used to give blood in college. They made me wait eight weeks between donations for the red blood cells to rebuild. If you bite me every day...”

  “I won’t. I swear it to you. You mean more than life to me, and I value you more than myself.”

  “Don’t say that. I need you to value yourself, to want to live, Domingos.”

  He nodded and nuzzled his cheek against her breast, and she cuddled him there until he drifted into a peaceful sleep.

  * * *

  Lark peered into the fridge in Domingos’s kitchen. Inside, a bottle of Bordeaux lay on its side, and next to that sat a box of batteries.

  “Right. Like I expected to find food in a vampire’s home?”

  At least there were no bags of blood. Vampires required warm, living blood for sustenance and couldn’t survive on blood that had been removed from the human body for long. To think about it? Ugh.

  But to have experienced the bite? Mmm...now, that had been a new kind of crazy-sexy-goodness. And to think she’d never wanted it?

  “What do they call those mortals who chase after vampires in hopes of being bitten?” She searched her memory of the Order’s lessons. “Fang junkies.”

  Closing the fridge door, she turned to lean against the cool stainless steel surface and rubbed her neck where she determined the bite wound had already begun to heal and scab over. No, not a fang junkie, but she couldn’t let any in the Order see her until the puncture wounds were completely gone. And then she chastised herself for the lie.

  She hated lying to anyone. And to be lied to? That burned her hide. But right now she realized she’d been lying to herself ever since she had walked through the doors of the Order’s headquarters and defied Rook to take a chance on her. Seeking vengeance for her husband? Who had she been fooling but herself?

  She would not argue that she hadn’t been cut out for the physically taxing job. Yet with hard work she had gained strength and was now damned proud of her martial arts and defensive skills.

  But mentally fortified for the challenge was another question. She’d taken on the brand of the knight at a time when she’d been most vulnerable. Grief had clouded her judgment. More than ever she had needed a hand to offer help, to console. Her mother had lived back in the States. They’d never been close. When she’d told her mother about the wedding, she hadn’t the money to make the flight and had been satisfied with the wedding photos. And the funeral? The bouquet of red roses her mother had sent for the service had died that same day.

  And when the Order hadn’t willingly offered that consoling hand, Lisa Cooper had reached out and grabbed it herself, by means of vengeance. Rook had tried to convince her she wasn’t capable. She had proven him wrong only through blind, stupid determination.

  But now?

  “Rook may have been right.”

  Clasping her arms across her chest, she wandered through the kitchen and into the bare room where the sun beamed across the hardwood floor. This was the room in which she had first witnessed Domingos crouch in on himself as he’d confessed the horrors committed against his very soul.

  Standing in that spot now, she lifted her head, inhaling through her nose.

  “I will fight for you,” she promised her lover who slept in the bedroom. “Because I have given Todd the revenge he deserved. As best I could. Now it’s your turn, Domingos.”

  It didn’t occur to her that perhaps it was her turn to take the solace and peace she needed. No, she preferred to look outward. Because that was easiest and required the least amount of soul-searching.

  Helping strays, don’t you know?

  Wandering back into the kitchen, she found paper and a pen and left Domingos a note that she had to run home because food was a necessity in her life. She’d return in a few hours.

  As she strolled down the hallway, she trailed fingers along the wall, and arrived at a spot close to the front door where the paint was peeling and the plaster dented in. Without doubt, she knew Domingos had beat a fist here many times as he’d fought against the pain of racing the sunlight, or even battled the ineffable voices from within.

  Before turning to open the door, she glanced down the hallway. Images of Domingos kissing down her stomach, her mons, her thighs, scurried a delicious shiver through her veins and tightened her scalp.

  And those gorgeous fangs sinking into her skin...

  “Miss you already.”

  As she closed the door and assured herself it was locked, she scanned the neighborhood for anyone lurking who shouldn’t be. An ingrained habit. A habit that could save her and Domingos’s lives.

  She hated walking away from him without a word, but if she didn’t eat soon she’d get a headache and her whole system would protest, leaving her off her game. If she intended to make this relationship with a vampire work, they both had to come to terms with the fact that they might be alike in some ways, but in others, they were vastly different. Especially when it came to eating habits.

  “Relationship?” she muttered as she strode swiftly down the street, knowing a Metro station was not far. “I think his crazy has rubbed off on you, Lark.”

  If so, she liked it. And with a broad smile curving her mouth, she quickened her steps toward the main street.

  * * *

  Rook inserted the laser-cut key card into the reader and the LED light blinked green before the lock clicked open and the door to the basement level beneath the cathedral opened to allow admittance.

  He descended the stairs, lit by fluorescent lights and inhaled the dry air from the limestone walls. Above, an actual historic
al cathedral held daily tours through the majority of the nave, led by an Order employee. A perfect front for the Order of the Stake. No one had been the wiser in the two centuries they had used this facility.

  Strolling down the hallway to his office, he could only lament that his office did not have windows. There were days he entered before sunrise and left after sunset. Hell, he could practically be a vampire. But he was not.

  He tossed his car keys onto the marble-topped desk and then flopped onto the leather office chair and faced the dark screen of his computer monitor. For reasons beyond his figuring, this morning he couldn’t get the image of Lark’s determined gaze out of his thoughts. The woman had surprised him at every turn of her training. Never once had she backed down from all the rigorous exercises, drills and assignments he’d given her. Truly, she was a match to any male knight they employed.

  And yet he could not help wondering if he had failed her in some manner he wasn’t capable of understanding because she was a woman.

  Could it be so simple as male/female differences? Or perhaps he should claim it complicated, never simple. Not once had she failed to make a kill. Never. And always she completed a mission within twenty-four hours. When on the hunt, the woman was relentless. While training her, he’d used her grief to fortify her willpower, and he would never apologize for that.

  So what had made tracking one insane vampire so difficult for her? Had some tendril of compassion invaded the hardened hunter’s mien to make her question the inevitable death punch?

  Rook sighed out through his nose and beat a fist on the desktop. He could simply ask her. That would require...talking. Getting into a conversation that went beyond delving into her mind for weaknesses and strengths in the physical fight. It would require a certain degree of emotional understanding that he was incapable of employing. He was not without emotion. He just found it difficult to relate to the knights on any level other than that of leader to the flock.

  And King would insist he not get emotionally involved with any particular knight. Made things messy, a lesson both had learned over the centuries of heading this organization.

  He need only place a hand over her heart, though, to see her truths.

  Still, he worried about Lark. And with good reason. He’d molded her into what she was at a time when conditioning had been easy because of her weakened emotional state and grief. Touch her in the wrong spot, and she could snap. Which was why he’d tried to keep her on regular missions and always busy so she would never have a chance to snap. To think. To wonder if what she had done was right.

  She had done the right thing.

  And he had done the right thing by taking her off the LaRoque job. But in order to continue to do the right thing, he’d keep an eye on her. Make sure she didn’t stumble off the path and fall apart. Or worse yet, stumble onto things better kept secret.

  Chapter 14

  Hearing a knock at her back door, Lark shoved up from the kitchen table, her runny eggs and crunchy bacon finished, and rushed through the bedroom. Quickly she opened the door and, though she wanted to beat her fists against the idiot vampire’s chest for putting them both in danger, instead she received Domingos’s hug and they stood inside the threshold, silently holding each other. He folded her into his shadow with an ease that made her feel as if she were a natural edge to his darkness, and their bodies melded as if the earth’s magnetic forces demanded nothing but.

  Was this love? Not so quickly. And certainly she did not have room in her bruised heart to love another so soon after...

  Maybe? It felt different this time around, this relationship with a man. Not forced, though certainly strange. Who could know if she’d find love a second time? Or if perhaps she’d already stumbled into it.

  “I told you not to come here,” she finally said. “The Order is watching me. Stupid vampire. I would have returned to your home. And the sun is out!”

  He tapped the goggles around his neck. And he did have a hood pulled down low over his forehead.

  “You can’t cover all your skin. And there aren’t enough shadows on the rooftops during the day.”

  He revealed the back of his hand. The skin had burned red and blistered. “Worth it to be close to you.”

  “Don’t say things like that, Domingos. My God, you are a masochist.” She pressed her head to his shoulder, just glad he was in one piece and close enough to hold. He was moving far too fast in the emotional arena. Or was she? “You’re not falling in love with me, are you?”

  “I don’t think I know what love is.”

  “What?” She studied his eyes but found no tease or coyness in them. “You must have been in love. At least once?”

  He shook his head. “Yes, once, as a mortal. It was a yearlong thing. She dumped me for a guitar player. It’s always the rock stars who get the girls. But nothing like the love you had for your husband. Such a love must have been very strong for you to commit so many acts of murder.”

  She didn’t like hearing it put that way. She had slayed vampires. That was not murder, but rather, removing a dangerous force from society. Someone had to do it.

  “Everything I have done has been for him.”

  Except when it came to getting her own needs met. Which she had indulged all day and last night. When had she decided to stop doing the right thing? It felt...not wrong.

  Could the wrong she and Domingos had created possibly be right?

  “You know he’s gone, Lark?”

  “My husband? Of course I do. I told you I’d said goodbye to him while in the chapel. What are you implying?”

  “Only that he doesn’t know what you’ve done for him. Vengeance doesn’t matter to anyone but you.”

  “I can’t believe you said that. You can’t possibly know what I’m feeling. How my heart feels as though it was torn from my chest. How I’ll never, ever find the happiness I once had.”

  “How if you speak the impossible sadness you felt, then it becomes ingrained in your being. You are making yourself unhappy, Lark.”

  “Don’t give me psychological bullshit. I can’t believe this. An insane vampire is telling me how to think.”

  He grabbed her by the arm. “Stop using your loss as a shield, Lark. Just let me inside you.”

  She stepped back from him, defensive now, and eyeing the titanium stake she kept at her bedside. Yet the need for protection was a lie she immediately recognized. “I’ve done that already. Let you in. In more ways than one.”

  “He’s still there, though.”

  She nodded. “He—Todd—will always reside in my heart. We were married. I was going to have his child. Can you understand that? But I’ve started to let him go.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. It helps that you’re telling me these things, though. But you said you were going to have his child?”

  Hell, she’d let that slip. Lark sighed. Hadn’t been a slip. She needed Domingos to know her truths, all of them.

  “I need to tell you why I married Todd, even knowing he was a hunter.”

  “You knew that about him?”

  “Yes, he never hid his job from me. Though, it was difficult not to think him a wacko, initially. I mean, vampires?”

  Domingos raised a brow.

  “Come on, you’ve always been myth, legend. But I eventually believed Todd. How could I not when he’d come home with bruises and injuries and shown me the stake? Anyway, we’d been dating four months when I found out I was pregnant. I was on the Pill.”

  “Ah.”

  “He did the right thing and asked me to marry him. I didn’t want to marry because of that, but when you’re only twenty-four and pregnant, and the father of the baby asks you to marry him, it’s...a relief.”

  He met her eyes, and she could sense his question.

  “That’s an awful w
ay to put it, but truthfully, that was my first reaction. Relief that I wouldn’t have to do the single mother thing. I did love him.”

  Domingos leaned against the bed and bowed his head. “But you have no child?”

  Lark breathed in deeply through her nose and forced out what she’d not spoken about. Ever. “I miscarried two months later.”

  She couldn’t cry about it now. All her tears had been ransomed during Todd’s captivity. And that sweet little baby that she never got to hold was now with Todd in heaven, she felt sure of that.

  “I was never prepared to be a mother, but I’d accepted it, and was looking forward to it. Had even bought a little green outfit with puppy prints on the toes and ears on the hood. I gave it to charity afterward. Had to get it out of the house.”

  She sighed, remembering the pain that had made her shiver while standing in line to drop off the bag of baby clothes at the charity thrift store. Nothing like a kick from a vampire to the gut. That pain had been marrow-deep. It had scarred her, surely.

  “It was easier for Todd,” she said, forcing the doors closed on that memory. “We never talked about it. And he immersed himself in the Order.”

  “You two never discussed it?”

  She shook her head. She’d never been good at feelings, and sitting down and looking Todd in the eye and discussing things that made her sad, or even happy, had been set aside. And he’d mirrored her reluctance, which had probably made it easy for him to push away his grief, or at least, not share it with her.

  “I’m sorry,” Domingos offered quietly. “That child’s soul was not ready for this world.”

  She’d not heard it put in such a manner, and for some reason, his simple explanation lightened her heavy heart. “You think so?”

  “I believe in a higher power, Lark, that grants life and takes it away. The universe has a plan for us all. Doesn’t mean the plan isn’t sometimes going to suck, but, well, there you go.”

  “Like you being turned to vampire?”

  “I would never compare my misfortune with your loss, Lark.”

  “Thank you.”