Matt looked down, suddenly realizing he was stark naked. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I’d better.” He allowed Rick to lead him back to the master suite.
The responders were already at work on the waste and vomit in the bathroom, the smell of disinfectant heavy in the air, a carpet cleaning machine running full blast. The stench was nauseating to Matt, and the noise deafening. Rick handed him another glass of blood and insisted he drink while he dressed. He was feeling better now, ultra-sensitive, but much more in control. Like his old self. His vampire self.
“I never should have let her come home with me tonight,” he told Rick, anguished. “I suspected I was turning. Look at the injury I caused her because of my own stupidity.”
“Ah, there’s the Matt I know and love! Never one to miss a chance at self-flagellation!”
“You think this is funny?”
“No, but I also don’t think it’s tragic. Cat’s going to be fine, and so are you. Although, God’s nightgown, it could have turned out much worse.” He sighed. “I told Cat to get out of the house. You told her to get out of the house. She wouldn’t listen.”
Matt nodded with the ghost of a smile. “Stubborn.”
“Just so you know, and there’s never any question, I’m not the one who stopped you tonight. Nor is she. You had already stopped feeding on Cat by the time I got here. She passed out. You stopped yourself, Matt, you wouldn’t over-feed on her.”
Matt released his breath in a heavy sigh of relief, and looked up to see a responder in the doorway.
“Miss Temple is awake.” He smiled. “She’s asking for you.”
The walk down the hallway felt a million miles long. Suddenly, confronted by her tender smile and rapidly improving color, Matt knew he owed her the truth. It might be the last thing he ever gave her, and she deserved to know she risked her life for a man who loved her with his whole heart. In an instant, he was on his knees beside the bed, her hand held gently in his. She lifted her other to soothingly cup his cheek.
“Hey there, little donor!” Rick teased. “I see you followed my good advice to get out of the house.”
Cat pulled the sheet primly around her, but never took her gaze from Matt’s. “I heard your advice, Rick. I just chose to ignore it. Advice has to be reasonable. Leaving Matt like that…just wasn’t going to happen.”
Rick shook his head in resignation. “Why do I waste my breath?”
Matt ignored their banter and continued checking her over, gently fingering the intravenous infusion, searching her skin to be sure the two deep puncture wounds on her left wrist were her only injuries.
“I’m sorry, baby.” He tenderly kissed the ugly bite marks.
“Matt, stop it. You couldn’t help it, and we both know that. Don’t apologize to me again. We did what we had to do.”
He leaned down to give her a soft, warm kiss. “I love you.” The words he’d sworn never to say escaped his lips in a tortured rush followed by another more desperate kiss.
She smiled against his lips. “I love you, too.” The next kiss was more ardent and deeper.
“Enough, you two. Don’t make me turn the hose on you.” Rick sounded more amused than squeamish.
Matt grinned and threw Rick a look over his shoulder. “Dad’s getting restless,” he murmured and smiled lovingly at Cat. “I may have to remove him before he gets overstimulated.”
Rick smirked at him in return. “Someone needs to be the adult in this situation. Cat, I’m taking Matt home with me, now.”
“Ohh!” Cat protested, but Rick, now the one in control, held up his hand for silence.
When he spoke his words were clipped and implacable. “He needs at least two more units of fresh human blood, and since you won’t be providing it, I need to take him someplace safe. Boris will stay with you until your transfusion is complete, which will take a few hours. Then, if you’re feeling up to it, he’ll bring you to my place. That is, unless you’d rather stay here, or go to your apartment.”
Cat stroked Matt’s cheek again, and he turned his face to kiss her palm, but in so doing, he could already smell the delicious scent of blood racing through her veins. Rick’s judgment was sound. Matt wasn’t thinking rationally, but was instead a chaos of emotions from love and devotion to guilt and remorse mixed liberally with a ravenous need to feed.
Matt almost wished Cat had been horrified enough by this experience to announce she was leaving for home, never to return. That was a vain hope, of course, and something she’d never do, but it would make their inevitable parting so much easier. Still, in his hyper-emotional state he couldn’t make himself send her away until he was certain she was truly unharmed. Then, the wrench would be intolerable. How could he return to the solitary, bereft existence he’d known for decades before she’d demolished his carefully constructed isolation? How could he live an eternal life without her?
“I’ll come to your place.”
Cat and Rick had continued their conversation while Matt had zoned into his own thoughts. Her words jarred him back to a reality where his heart leapt, and then plunged into despair.
Matt studied Cat’s beloved face, and then gave her one more lingering kiss before getting to his feet and letting Rick lead him away. This would be their last kiss. He looked over his shoulder once. She was pale and succumbing to the exhaustion of her ordeal. Her eyes closed before they reached the door.
“He loves me,” she murmured contentedly as she drifted into sleep.
* * * *
Matt leaned his head all the way back, coaxing the thick drops of blood from a travel mug, compelled to drink and hating his need. Better to starve himself to death, which didn’t work. He’d tried that decades ago. It merely resulted in a total loss of control and peril to every mortal in his vicinity. Someone would get hurt, and it wouldn’t be him.
The powerful Maserati’s headlamps cut a path up the fog-shrouded hills. Matt was agonized, staked by his own woeful decision. The wound might be self-inflicted and purely emotional, still, he couldn’t imagine a physical stake being more agonizing.
“I can’t allow Cat to follow me to your place, Rick,” Matt decided grimly. “By this time tomorrow, I need her to be in New York City with no memory she and I ever met. Our chemists need to work with the responders and drug her and thrall her or…”
Rick took his gaze off the treacherous road long enough to stare aghast at him. “Dear boy, what are you saying? Only this evening, you agreed to wait to make any decisions.”
“This evening before I almost killed her?” Matt ground out. “Yeah, great plan.”
“Matt.”
“By the time we’re through, she’ll forget me, forget about vampires and everything that’s happened these last few weeks,” he insisted. “For her own good.”
“You must be mad if you think anything in the mortal or immortal world will make this young woman forget you.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” Matt insisted, drawing hard on the blood in his mug, hoping it would somehow give him the strength to do what must be done. “This is her life, and she almost lost it tonight because of me. That’s never going to happen again.”
“This is a mistake, Matt,” Rick insisted.
“You think I don’t know I fucked up?” Matt swallowed hard against emotions that threatening to overwhelm him. “The mistake is mine—losing my head and involving her with me, with us. I won’t let her pay for it again.” He clenched his jaw against the searing pain, and his tone testified to his devastation. “You’ve said for centuries that a vamp/mortal romance never works.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
“No. You weren’t wrong. I nearly killed her, would have killed her if you hadn’t gotten there.” Matt turned his head to look out his window at the fog, unwilling to let Rick see his tears so close to the surface.
“I disagree,” Rick insisted. “I told you, you’d already stopped feeding.”
“How long would that have lasted? You really think I wouldn’t have drained her once the
blood lust rose again? You know better.”
“What I know is, I’ve seen a lot of subs, maybe thousands. Women who have schooled themselves to submit to their masters at whatever cost. I’ve never seen this level of devotion in any woman.”
Matt almost vamped from fury. “This isn’t some fucking BDSM game!” He snarled. “She didn’t ‘submit.’ She loves me, Rick. She was willing to die for me.”
“Yes,” Rick interrupted quietly. “That’s my point. She’s not playing a game. She loves you that much—and you love her. If you throw this kind of love away, you’re the stupidest son of a bitch on the planet.”
A galling silence traveled with them as the coupe wound its way up the switch-back. Finally, Matt acquiesced. “I agree. I’m a stupid son of a bitch, but I’ve wised up. If I were human…”
“Humanité might make you human again!” Rick exploded, and Matt was stunned. “You’ve adopted this idiotic stance against turning her in the event of another accident, leaving Humanité your only option. It’s another mistake. She’d make a phenomenal vampire, and—”
Matt grabbed the steering wheel, skewing the car into a turnout area with a spray of gravel. He glared at Rick, deriding the elder vampire’s suggestion with a look, his entire being going stone cold at the thought of turning Cat. Rick righted the steering wheel, and without a glance toward oncoming traffic, floored the auto back onto the treacherous road.
“You can’t discount the possibility of the Humanité,” Rick pressed, ignoring the irate driver who blasted a horn and flashed headlights behind them. “Now that we know about Maynard and the Colombian facility, there’s real hope we can find more. Where is this defeatist attitude coming from?”
Matt studied his friend with a raised brow. “You know, I think you might be a little in love with her yourself,” he accused.
“Maybe. A little. At least enough to know women like her come along maybe once a century, and you’re willing to break her heart, break her spirit?” He ground his teeth and his eyes flashed to opal. “If I have to be the one to help you clean up your mess, be goddamn sure about this. You give her up, you’ll never have her again. I’ll fucking see to it!”
“I don’t intend to give up. As soon as I’m sure Cat is taken care of, I’ll be in Colombia searching for Humanité.” He beat the travel mug a little too insistently against his leg, trying to free up the viscous fluid, needing it to combat the conflicts within and without. “What I won’t do is involve Cat in this disaster any longer.”
“So, you want to send her to some dorm in New York? You think anything can make her forget her college graduation? Maria’s death? Never mind you. Are you crazy?”
“You’re right,” Matt agreed. After some thought, he added, “We need to invent a different reality for her. One that includes necessary details but eliminates me.”
“Oh, I see, well…that makes absolutely no sense at all.”
“It’s not preposterous. It may be difficult. Get on the phone right now and have Boris sedate her. It won’t be easy, but her whole life is about to be relocated to New York with a plausible explanation for how she got there, and a new job at Consort Publishing. As far as she’s concerned, I’ll be just a fantasy.”
“You have a great deal of faith in our chemists, dear boy.” Rick shook his head.
“Aren’t you always saying they’re the best? If this is too difficult for them, I guess I could call upon the Council for assistance.”
Rick’s arm cut through the air in his rush to negate that notion. “The Council will terminate her if you don’t want her. Too much of a liability to the Family.”
“Then, I don’t see we have much choice. Unless you’re willing to watch them eliminate her.”
Rick jerked the Maserati into a furious one-eighty-degree spin as they entered the drive of the hilltop mansion. He yanked the emergency brake savagely and glared at Matt, his body vibrating with his transformation, his fangs dropping sharp and deadly.
“You expect me to believe you’d let them terminate her?” He demanded over a juicy growl.
Matt’s vampire emerged at the challenge. For a fraction of a second, he was ready to take on his best friend. With a submissive whimper and a show of his throat, he withheld his inner beast.
“You know better.” Matt turned his head to the window.
Rick sighed, shuddered and humanized. “I’ll call the chemists,” he capitulated. “First, we’ll get some good, fresh donor O-negative into you. I’ll put this in motion, hoping enough pristine blood will bring you to your senses. Maybe, we can find a virgin.”
“It won’t change my decision.”
“I’ll get Georgia to work on it,” Rick grumbled, “You really are a cock-up, you know?”
Chapter 17
Cat awoke slowly, as if from a perturbing dream. She squinted her eyes against the muted sunlight shining through mottled, leaded glass. The inevitable New York City street sounds filtered in through the window cracked for air. She glanced groggily around a pleasantly feminine, but totally unfamiliar bedroom.
On its tabletops and shelves, her dearest belongings now rested alongside foreign trinkets. Slowly, she pulled herself up against the padded headboard. The urge to shake her head to clear it was strong, but as she reached up to run a hand through her hair, her fingers encountered gauze wrappings, and she thought better of the idea. Her mouth and throat felt desert dry. She reached for the Waterford crystal tumbler at her bedside and nearly dropped it from shock. An exquisite manicure graced her nails. Manicures were not in her budget.
“Hello?”
“Ah, you’re up!” A silver-haired beauty in royal blue scrubs greeted her from the doorway. “I’ll call the doctor and let her know you’re awake.”
“Where am I? Who are you?” Cat demanded, struggling to speak over her parched throat.
The nurse, for surely she must be one, poured more water from a cut-crystal decanter and handed it to her. “I’m Georgia. What do you remember?”
Cat frowned, her fingers coming to rest on the gauze wrapping her head. “My…name is Catherine Temple.”
“Yes.”
“I graduated from college this year.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I came back to Los Angeles for a trial…and…” Cat’s memory faded into limbo. She frowned, struggling, and rubbed her forehead.
“It’s very common, given your injuries, that you don’t remember more,” Georgia reassured. “You’re in New York City, not Los Angeles. You attended Columbia your last semester.” Cat nodded, remembering. “Do you remember the accident?”
“No.”
“I understand you returned to the city shortly after the trial verdict. That was nearly ten weeks ago. You’ve been in guarded condition since then, in and out of consciousness.”
“My head.” Cat gently ran a hand over what she now realized was a bandage, her fingers identifying a two inch line of stapled sutures running down the back of her head.
“The surgery was two weeks ago. You’ve made significant progress since the pressure was relieved.”
“Where’s Matt?” Cat asked with a gasp, the memories of him flooding her in a panicked rush.
“Matt who? Is he a friend or relative?” Georgia gently questioned.
“No…he’s my…my boyfriend…he lives in LA. What is this place?”
“You’re in your apartment. Mr. Hiatt arranged private nursing care for you at home, feeling you might recover more quickly in this setting.”
“Hiatt? Yes! Richard Hiatt! Matt’s best friend, his business partner,”
“Well, if that’s so, I don’t understand why only Mr. Hiatt has been here to see you.” She paused, looking concerned and spoke gently. “Is it possible the person you speak of was killed in the accident?”
“I need to see Rick. I need to see him right now!” Cat insisted, and watched in awe as a flurry of activity erupted around her.
Another woman, also dressed in blue scrubs, entered the
room with medication. She was followed by the doctor, who frowned with concern. Georgia snatched a phone from her pocket and pressed an automatic number.
“Mr. Hiatt, please.” she requested, and then waited. “Sir? This is Georgia Gregoriev, Ms. Temple’s nurse.”
* * * *
Cat felt almost human again after she’d been helped to shower and assisted into fresh, soft pajamas and a robe more luxurious than anything she ever owned. Walking to the chintz-covered fainting couch, she reacquainted herself with legs that plodded heavily. She fisted and unfisted her hands to feel her arm muscles move. Georgia helped lift her legs onto the chaise when Cat’s attention was distracted by the chime of the doorbell. Matt?
“I’m gratified to see you out of bed, Cathy.” She glanced up to see Rick’s slender, muscular silhouette dominating the doorway of her room. “They tell me they’re cooking you something delicious for dinner.”
“Where’s Matt?” she demanded without preamble.
“Who?” He frowned as if in confusion as he advanced into the room to stand beside her.
“You know who.” She searched her mind for Matt’s last name. It eluded her. Cat snapped her fingers, and then tapped her forehead in a vain effort to remember.
“Please, try not to upset yourself,” Rick directed. He reached for the buzzer beside her and rang it.
“Matt!” she cried in frustration. “Matt…Matt.” Her mind reached out for the name. “Tall, dark, immortal, your best friend.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “A vampire.”
A look of incredulity raised his brow almost into his hairline, but his voice remained calm, as if he were speaking to someone slightly deranged. “I’m sorry, Catherine, they said you might have had some strong dreams. There is no Mack, and I know you don’t really believe there’s such a thing as vampires.” Glancing around at the elegant furnishings with a satisfied smile, Rick made a sweeping gesture. “I took the liberty of moving you into the apartment you’d chosen before you left town. I hope the furnishings are to your liking.”
If it hadn’t been for the sedative damping her agitation, Cat would have turned on Rick with physical blows. “What do you mean no such thing as vampires?” she shouted. “You’re a vampire!”
Blood Rising Page 20