by Karen Chance
I didn’t need this.
“What is it?” Louis-Cesare asked as I struggled out of his grasp, reaching for my robe.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you getting dressed?”
“Maybe I don’t like being the only naked one in the room,” I said sarcastically.
And immediately regretted it.
“That is easily remedied,” he told me, and pulled off his sweater. And damn it, that wasn’t what I’d meant.
But Louis-Cesare wasn’t a guy who understood half measures. He was either all in or all out, and it was kind of obvious which side he’d taken on this particular question. Before I could say anything, he’d slipped off his belt, toed off his shoes and somehow managed to peel himself out of those tight-ass jeans—
And proved that it wasn’t only the jeans that were tight. He bent over to drape his clothes across the tub, making my breath catch. It was a mouthwatering view, and then he turned around and gave me a better one. Completely unself-conscious in the way all vampires are after a few years, because when people can hear your every thought, modesty takes on a whole new meaning.
Not that he needed it.
Rumor had it that his father had actually been the Duke of Buckingham, instead of anybody with “de Bourbon” for a last name. This was the Buckingham who had started out as a plain old mister in James I’s reign and ended up a freaking duke, the most powerful person in the country outside the royal family, mainly because of the way he filled out a pair of hose. He’d been called the best-looking man in England, something I hadn’t heard until I met Louis-Cesare and started looking a few things up. But I had no trouble believing it.
No trouble at all.
Louis-Cesare was smiling, just a brief twist of his lips, but it was enough to set me off. “Are you listening to my thoughts again?” I demanded, because that was one side effect of fey wine—it tapped into my usually dormant mental abilities.
“No.”
“Liar.”
He stretched in a ripple of muscle, and flashed me an honest-to-God grin. “I don’t need to read your mind when it is all over your face.”
And okay, that’s it, I decided, and started for the door, only to have him catch my hand and spin me back against him. “I like when it’s on your face,” he murmured.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” I said harshly, trying to drag the damned robe on.
“And why not?”
“You know why! This is a bad idea.”
“Perhaps I like a challenge.”
“Perhaps you’re a glutton for punishment!”
“Perhaps I am in love.”
I stopped knotting the tie of the robe and looked up. And met clear blue eyes, which were suddenly far more serious than I knew how to handle. “That’s…You…” I stopped and licked my lips. “That’s not how this is supposed to go.”
“How is it supposed to go?” He looked genuinely curious.
“We trade witty banter for another minute and then I storm out.”
“Do you wish to storm out?”
“Yes!” And it wasn’t a lie. In that moment, I really, really wanted to get out of there. I wasn’t in the headspace for this battle right now. I wasn’t stupid; I’d known it was coming. But this wasn’t the time. I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to say yet. And I was tired and hurting and confused, and the arms he wrapped around me felt really good, like the hard chest he pulled me against, human warm under my cheek in defiance of all the legends.
“Then at least allow me to finish healing you.”
I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either, and when he turned me back toward the mirror, I let him. And when his hands went to the robe, I let him manipulate that, too, unknotting the tie, pulling it out of the loops, parting the soft old velour, but leaving it hanging on my shoulders like a frame for my body.
Somehow that made me look even more nude, and as a barrier, the robe was less than worthless. The velvety folds caught and enhanced the warmth radiating from the body behind me, and the thin material did nothing to camouflage the hard lines of the chest and hips and legs pressed against mine. If anything, it magnified the differences between us, soft and hard, small and big, cold and oh, so warm.
Damn it, I should have grabbed a towel, I thought resentfully as big hands slid around my waist.
The darkest bruises lined my rib cage, like somebody had been stomping on it with a boot. And even with everything, it was still amazing to watch the skin change under his fingers, to see the prints they left behind in pale, perfect flesh when he moved them. Power, so like mine but so different, pushed into me with each touch, waves of it, as though he was massaging it straight into my skin. I could feel it mingling with my own, warm and tingling as it sped up a process that should have taken hours or days into bare moments, until he brushed the bruises away like cobwebs.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. Louis-Cesare and I sprang from the same line—kissing cousins, in vampire terms—with his maker being the brother of my sire. And that line had always been known for its healing gifts. Among others, I thought, as those hands moved up the lattice of my ribs to cradle my breasts, to circle my nipples to aching hardness, to push back down my torso and frame my sex.
And suddenly, this wasn’t feeling so soothing anymore.
I tried to turn around—to leave, or maybe to touch him, too, I wasn’t real clear on motives right then—but he wouldn’t let me. He pulled one of my arms around his neck, causing my body to arch outward. His eyes met mine in the mirror, daring me to look away as his fingers smoothed over my stomach, around my navel, and then began to card possessively through my curls.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I, even though I knew I should stop this. We were looking at a whole world of complicated here, and not just because of my varied hang-ups. I somehow didn’t think the vampire community was going to be too pleased when their former golden boy showed up with a dhampir girlfriend. Not when he was already hanging by a thread.
Until a few weeks ago, Louis-Cesare had been a leading member of the European Senate, one of the ruling bodies for the vampire community, like the North American Senate was for ours. And he hadn’t been just any old member, but their Enforcer, the position that did exactly what its name implied. Powerful, respected, even feared—in vampire terms he’d had it all.
Including a secret that, two weeks ago, brought it all down.
It turned out that the lover he’d had for centuries wasn’t his lover at all. She was a revenant, a woman he had tried to save from an early death by making her a vampire, only to have the process go terribly, tragically wrong. It had left her dangerously mad and him with a legal obligation as her maker to end her life. Instead, wracked by guilt, he had kept her with him, violating one of the most important vampire laws in the process. And when her hatred of her own kind finally led her to try to destroy the Senate, the truth came out, and Louis-Cesare had been in a world of trouble.
A lesser vampire would have probably gotten the ax—literally. Louis-Cesare just got it figuratively, losing his position on the Senate and remaining under a cloud of suspicion. But in vampire terms, that was bad enough, because they aren’t big on third chances. The last thing he needed was another unsuitable lover.
The last thing he needed was me.
But it didn’t look like he saw it that way, judging by how his grip had tightened. A knee spread my legs from behind, and a hand grasped my thigh, pulling it up and draping it over his, laying me open. His eyes darkened, blue shadowed to charcoal to almost black as his fingers began to fondle, to explore, making me watch as he pleasured me until my own eyes closed again in desperation.
The only reason dhampirs weren’t the lowest rung of vampire society was that we weren’t even on the ladder. We weren’t supposed to exist—the whole dead thing playing hell with fertility—and were conceived only through some pretty bizarre circumstances. In my case, my father had been cursed with vampirism, rather than bitten, and the curse
took a few days to complete the transformation. Leaving him plenty of time to sire an abomination that, like the hated revenants, was supposed to be put down as soon as he learned of its existence.
Luckily for me, Mircea had a major family fixation and a bad habit of ignoring rules he found inconvenient. He also had the devil’s own luck at getting away with things others paid dearly for. Others like Louis-Cesare. Who had somehow managed to find the only girlfriend the Senate would hate more than his last one.
His hands slid over me, my breasts, my belly, my mound, moving easily across my sweat-slick skin. His tongue ran up my neck to my ear, hot breath ruffling my brain, teeth tugging on my lobe. He bit down just as his fingers made a move inside me that shot sparks straight up my spine. My body bucked against him, clenching desperately in unwanted pleasure.
I squirmed, my hand tightening in his hair, holding on as the turmoil in my mind and the pleasure in my body tried their best to drive me crazy. I wanted to shove him out the window for his own good; I wanted to drag him to the bed for mine. I wanted to shut the door in his face and never see him again; I wanted to sink my teeth into his neck, scarring him, putting a claim on him that everyone could see. I wanted to scream at him for being stupid, and stubborn, and for not understanding that, yes, it did matter what people thought if those people could kill you. That sometimes the rules did apply, even to ex-senators, maybe especially to ex-senators. I wanted to curl up with him under the covers and forget the world existed and whisper stupid shit that didn’t matter because life wasn’t a fucking fairy tale and it never had a goddamn happy ending and—and—
And my thoughts fractured, the room spun, and I came with a sound of pure desperation.
Which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t the best idea when you live with a bunch of sensorially gifted creatures. Who, it seemed, couldn’t tell the difference between a cry of passion and a cry of pain. As was demonstrated when the bedroom door suddenly blew off its hinges and Louis-Cesare flew backward and disappeared.
Leaving me blinking in confusion at the new, vampire-shaped hole in my dresser.
And my closet.
And my wall.
Which were less noticeable than you might think with an eight-hundred-pound dragon taking up most of the space in the room.
For a moment, it looked at me, and I looked at it, and the dozen or so blond-haired fey swarming into the room through the door looked at both of us. And then a slight tinge of amethyst slowly suffused the delicate scales covering the beast’s cheekbones as it took in my lack of clothes—and blood and gore and missing limbs. “Oops?” it said gruffly, before melting back into my very embarrassed redheaded roommate.
I snatched my robe closed and plunged through my destroyed furniture and fluttering bits of wallpaper, into a closet that was now a wreck of plaster and hanging two-by-fours. And found that, yes, the hole did go completely through the house. Parts of my wardrobe were scattered all over the side lawn, with most of my bras for some reason decorating the neighbor’s fence. But that was better than what had happened to my boyfriend, who had ended up—
Oh, shit.
“Dory, what—oh,” Claire said in a small voice, coming to stand beside me.
Being two stories up, we had a perfect view of the car that had just pulled into the grassy drive along the side of the house, probably because it couldn’t fit anywhere else since it was a stretch limo. A stretch limo that now had a naked vampire sticking out of the ruined windshield, firmly wedged between the wipers and the mirror. Right in front of a driver whose usual icy sangfroid had been shattered by an up-close-and-personal view of the world’s greatest ass.
At least it can’t get any worse, I thought, and then three more vamps piled out of the backseat. And came around the car. And looked at Louis-Cesare, who was ignoring them in favor of staring up at me, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Should I apologize?” Claire asked, sounding worried.
“That…probably wouldn’t be the best idea right now,” I said calmly, looking down at two Senate members and a senator’s brother.
I was debating the odds that I could come up with some story to explain an underwear-strewn yard and a naked master vampire, when the brother looked up. “Oh, they do this sort of thing all the time,” he said, responding to some question I hadn’t heard. He shaded his eyes, and then a smile broke out over his handsome features. “Oh, there you are. Hello, Dory!”
He waved.
The other vampires turned to look at me, and I gave up. I went back into the bedroom, which had miraculously cleared of fey. Except for the one behind me, biting her lip.
“Dory—”
“It’s okay.”
“But the room—”
“It’s fine.”
“And your clothes—”
“I’ll get them later.”
“Later?” She frowned, watching me climb into the bed that I never should have left, earthquake be damned. “What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to sleep,” I told her, dragging a pillow over my face.
And a moment later I heard her gently shut the door.
Chapter Five
Of course, I didn’t really get any sleep. That would have been a little hard with a largish hole in the wall letting in the sounds of bass thumping out of a car radio, a neighbor mowing his lawn and a bunch of lilting fey voices laughing to each other as they chased my underwear. And somebody screaming bloody murder.
The pillow stayed over my face for a few minutes, anyway, because I really didn’t want to know. But I finally faced reality. If I didn’t go down soon, someone would come up, and I preferred to deal with whatever this was properly dressed.
I chose black—tank top, jeans, boots. Because that was what the cataclysm had left me and because it seemed appropriate. And then I had a drink, or two, from the bottle stashed under my bed, because this was going to be no kind of fun.
That had been a given from the moment I saw a certain curly-haired vamp climbing out of the back of the limo. The others might be explained away as family on a visit, although that was hardly a regular occurrence. But Kit Marlowe was the dreaded spymaster for the North American Vampire Senate, and he didn’t pay social calls.
So I knew this was going to suck even before I found a smoking vampire in the hallway.
He wasn’t Marlowe, or one of the other illustrious types who, by the sound of things, were camped out in the kitchen. He was about a foot too short, for one thing, and completely lacking in sartorial splendor for another. And the overlarge nose and pointed face were a bit too ratlike.
And then there was the smoke, which wasn’t coming from a cigarette.
He caught sight of me heading down the stairs and immediately turned around and showed me his rear. “Is my ass on fire?”
“Good morning to you, too.”
“Screw that and look at my butt!”
“Do I have to?”
“Damn it, yes! I’m dying here!”
I checked out the part in question, because today was already shot to hell, and found it covered by a scorched pair of khakis. They looked a little weird, and I finally figured out why. The scorching was coming from the inside.
I grinned. It wasn’t the worst predicament I’d seen him in. The vampire’s name was Ray, and he’d been a slimy nightclub owner when I met him—and soon thereafter beheaded him—on the order of the Senate, who didn’t care if he watered the drinks but did care very much about the illegal weapons he was smuggling in from Faerie. That should have been all she wrote, but one of the items he’d recently brought in happened to be the talisman now decorating the chubby body of Claire’s young son.
It was why she was visiting. The talisman had been stolen from the royal house Claire was shortly to join, and she’d come chasing it—because it gave its wearer almost complete invincibility. And although we’d finally managed to get it back, for a while, Ray had been that owner. Only it looked like whatever residual help he’d gotten had wor
n off.
“Your butt’s on fire,” I agreed, and had an evil blue gaze aimed at me from over his shoulder.
“Well, don’t just stand there! Do something!”
I edged around him and went into the kitchen, where, sure enough, four master vampires were hanging out, trying to pretend they belonged. That was despite the fact that one of them was wearing Claire’s terry-cloth bathrobe, which was knee-length and roomy on her, but which hit him midthigh and showed a distractingly large wedge of chest. It didn’t matter, since only one of them had a hope in hell of blending in anyway, and Louis-Cesare wasn’t that guy.
Neither was the vamp he was glaring at for some reason. Kit Marlowe had the aforementioned curly brown hair, a pretentious little goatee and an attitude problem. He was currently leaning against the sink, arms crossed, face stuck in a snarl that showed a tiny bit of fang. That might have had something to do with the fact that he was visiting a dhampir, a creature he ranked slightly below rodentia. Or because the window he’d parked himself in front of was streaming sunlight onto the back of his head, slowly roasting his brains.
But he didn’t move because he was badass like that.
“Is there a reason Ray is smelling up the hallway?” I asked, filling a jug from the tap.
“Because he’s an idiot?” Marlowe snapped.
“I’m not the one who dragged me out here in the middle of the damned day!” came floating in the door.
“No, you’re the one who panicked and ran screaming down the middle of the damned road.”
“Because somebody broke the damned windshield!”
“With his body, which plugged the damned hole nicely,” observed the fabulous creature at the kitchen table. Unlike Marlowe, he was sitting well out of the sun, because he wasn’t badass at all and didn’t care who knew it. He accepted a cup of coffee from Claire, who was looking faintly appalled. “Thank you, my dear.”
I wasn’t sure if Claire’s expression had more to do with fear that a guest was about to combust or awe at the spectacle that was my uncle Radu. Because that blending-in thing? That really wasn’t Radu’s style.