by Opal Carew
All those years ago, after he’d given her the first mark, he’d taken a step prohibited by Council. He’d not only let her know what he was, he’d given her a detailed account of what a fully marked servant could expect in his world. The Council overlooked—reluctantly—letting a first mark go only if that person had the vaguest knowledge or none at all of the vampire world. But he’d trusted her. Her intellect was a match for his own, such that he felt like they already stood inside one another’s minds. He wasn’t going to pull her all the way into his world when she wasn’t ready for what that meant.
Though he’d told her all the opportunities that awaited her as a scientist, he’d also drawn a highly accurate, graphic picture of the demands placed on a vampire’s servant, as well as their lack of status in his society. When he was done, she’d been pale, her eyes wide, a slight tremor in her hands. He’d wanted to reassure her, but he’d forced himself to stay silent, wait for any questions she had.
“So I’d be yours, entirely.” Her brown eyes fixed on his face.
Something primitive stirred in him at the way she said it. His attention locked on her soft lips, how she swallowed under his steady gaze.
“Entirely. No rights but what I give you.” He fought back the overwhelming desire to sugarcoat it. He wanted this woman as his servant the way he craved blood. That alone was a warning to let her go. It made him sharpen his tone. “But I’m not the highest ranked in my world. There are others who will have the right to make demands of you and I…have to capitulate to them.”
He cleared his throat at her unreadable look. “Tomorrow night will be my last day here. If you decide to come with me, I’ll need your timetable for resigning and joining me at our facility in Alabama. If you don’t choose to come with me…”
He hadn’t been able to stop himself from reaching out, touching her face, the slim jaw, but then he drew his hand back, forced his tone to be as flat as if he were conducting a job interview. “If you don’t come with me, it’s been a pleasure working with you.”
When he’d retired at dawn and replayed it all in his mind, he was sure she would decline. They’d only spent a few days together, after all.
Yet though her submissive nature and cravings were a bottomless pool he’d only begun to explore, he’d intuitively recognized them as a mesh with the extreme demands of the vampire world and the type of servants who inhabited it. But she was socially awkward to the point of charming shyness. On top of that, she was an accomplished scientist and a woman well integrated into a modern Western society. How could she possibly agree to such an offer? “Come with me—you’ll have a fabulous lab, but you’ll also be a sex slave with no protection but what I can provide.” It was ludicrous for him to expect her to agree to that.
She’d shown up at the lab on time the next evening, a little more quiet and hollow-eyed, telling him she hadn’t slept. She hadn’t addressed the question immediately, and he’d held his tongue, not wanting to push. He expected he was putting off her rejection as long as possible. They’d worked through the early hours with minimal conversation, but as the night progressed and they started trading data, looking over one another’s shoulders and brainstorming what they were analyzing, their intuitive understanding of one another’s thought processes overcame the awkwardness of things unsaid.
“If you were a second mark, we’d be in each other’s heads. Think how much faster we could do the calculations and theorizing. And having a third mark…it’s like sharing one mind.”
He’d said it without thinking, fully caught up. He remembered how serious she’d gotten then. She’d paused a long moment. Then nodded to herself, as if she’d come to some type of irrefutable conclusion. Crossing the lab to where he sat on a stool, she moved between his spread knees. Her liquid brown eyes, framed by a fringe of lashes so black they made her look like she wore eyeliner, enhancing her pale, smooth face, had fixed onto his. Pulling her ponytail over her shoulder, she averted her chin in a delicate move, offering him her throat.
He was always a man who kept his passions under tight control. Yet when she offered her neck, he struck like a cobra, banding an arm around her waist and yanking her to him. She’d gasped, but her fingers had dug into his arms, holding fast. He’d felt her nipples peak against him, the insistence of her body revealing her response to his strength. He hadn’t even thought to use the pheromone mix that could ease the burn of the second mark serum, for the pain just seemed to goad her pleasure. He surged off the stool, carrying her to the nearest wall with her legs wrapped around his hips.
He’d gotten the necessary clothes out of the way and thrust into her with his fangs still in her throat. No finesse, just sheer brute demand. She was as slick as if he’d had his mouth between her legs. Feeling the clamp of her cunt on his cock, the quiver of her spread thighs against his pelvis, he didn’t ever want to stop.
“Third mark,” she whispered in his ear. “Please. Do it.”
Struggling for some rationality, he seized her hair, pulled her head back to stare into her eyes. “Do you understand what it all means?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. And then the second mark kicked in and he heard the first words directly from her mind. There’s nothing I will ever want as much as you.
Christ.
Tuning back in to the present, Brian saw her step outside, taking a break in the little courtyard garden outside her lab. Lifting her head to the sun, she noticed how pretty the day was, blue skies and fluffy clouds, a bright sun. Another perk to having a servant was the ability to see the sun, enjoy it through her. She registered the heat on her skin as she inhaled the flowers in the garden. She thought about sitting down on one of the benches, taking a quick cat nap.
As she sank down on the bench, she took a breath. Then another. The hints of sadness he’d sensed suffused her like a flood. It almost drove him from her mind, an instinctive retreat from the unexpected crash of emotion.
Bowing her head, she began to weep.
What the hell? Earlier, he hadn’t taken the time to penetrate the chaos in her mind to see the source of her distress, but now he was neck deep and refused to let himself turn away from it. He took those tentative steps into an area he hadn’t allowed himself to go before. A moment later, he floundered in a labyrinth of emotions, the depth of which startled him.
In this sad, dark place in her subconscious, Debra apparently kept everything she felt wasn’t appropriate to share with anyone else. Including him. He had an intuitive sense that this maze of tunnels and perilous chasms had been a manageable space at one time. But she’d kept carving further into herself, trying to bury it lower and lower, until she was tunneling through her core.
It was like ants weakening the root system of a tree. He felt her despair. Life wasn’t worth living anymore, not if it was always going to be like this.
He had to bite back a startled response to that, a demand that she talk to him, explain this, not ever consider such a thing as…leaving him. As he brought himself under control, he wondered if she sensed him. She’d wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking, softly whispering his name, a chant of comfort.
Whenever he confronted a seemingly incomprehensible tangle of data, he would start from the outer edges and work his way inward. So he forced himself past her pain to find the entry point of her distress.
Her grandfather. He was ill, dying. As soon as Brian targeted that thought, he was overrun with images of the man. With Debra as a child, a teenager, at her graduation, whenever she accepted awards, when she earned her master’s degree. Early on in their time together, Brian remembered her talking about the man, a prominent figure in any personal references about her life and family.
The mortality of a servant’s family was a transition all servants endured. However, feeling it as she felt it made him feel far less detached from it. But beyond that, what startled him was what surrounded all of it.
Debra was profoundly lonely.
That first night he spent in th
e lab with her, Debra had remained with him until dawn, even though he knew she was scheduled to work that day. When he’d protested, she’d said she wanted to make sure he didn’t have any difficulties using the lab instruments. She’d also wanted the opportunity to learn as much as she could from him during his temporary visit. In between waiting on sample results, they’d talked of countless things. The colleague who had given him use of the lab had told him Debra was shy, would likely say less than ten words to him while he was there.
But the damn woman knows everything, Brian. I expect she’ll be running the place in five years.
He wasn’t disposed to being chatty while working himself, yet he couldn’t seem to stop talking to her. During the daylight hours, he missed her, even in sleep. He regretted not being able to tell her everything she wanted to learn. For the first time since his maturity, he considered taking a full servant.
She wasn’t close to the servants in the lab or on the estate. Jacob was probably her only true friend, though most the others treated her with kindness and respect. Like Brian himself, she tended to be in her head so much it was difficult for her to focus on the minutiae of small talk. The things that interested her the most she assumed no one else would want to talk about.
A smile touched his lips as he recalled her telling him how she’d dissected a variety of creatures through her childhood. Their lives had been claimed by circumstance—road kill for the animals, natural lifespan for the insects. Even so, she’d relayed her mother’s horror, the first time she’d discovered her daughter investigating a rabbit’s intestines in their basement.
She was on the phone with a psychologist the next day, trying to figure out if I was a budding serial killer.
But he couldn’t rationalize that it was a lack of friends making her so lonely now. He was sitting in the midst of that labyrinth, and all tunnels came back to him. Her Master. He’d thought that she fed herself adequately on what science and sex could offer, but her heart was as hungry as his would be without blood for a month.
I don’t need him to be like a human boyfriend. I just need to feel…that he’s my Master. That I’m… She was talking to herself in that way a person did when crying, all the thoughts tangled in a rush of feeling, but even then she couldn’t voice it. As the emotions battered him like waves breaking against his own heart, he filled in the words she didn’t.
That she’s important to me. Now he understood why Jacob had acted like he was a clueless idiot when he spouted off about how brilliant Debra was. She knew that. She needed something different from him. So very different.
Two years into their relationship, Debra had told him she loved him, and asked if he felt the same about her. It was as if she’d forgotten everything he’d told her back when she had the first mark. That had been his fault, because he’d allowed their relationship to get so familiar, so comfortable, so…close. The next night, he’d taken a female vampire in front of her, Lady Carmela. He knew he needed to teach his servant a never-to-be-forgotten lesson about the vampire-servant relationship.
Though it had sat in his gut like food poisoning for weeks afterward, he hadn’t questioned his action. He’d told himself it protected her and him. He’d been relieved when she pulled out of the pain, finding a quiet dignity and strength to continue to serve him as she always had. Truth, that had surprised and impressed the hell out of him, but he’d forced himself to conceal that reaction. He’d made himself pull back, become far more reserved with her.
Yet was it possible he’d done such a harsh and cruel thing because her admission of love had spooked him? Because his own feelings for her had developed so strong and fast, he was afraid of losing everything he was working for? As a result, had he driven the lesson home like a railroad stake, when a pin prick would have been sufficient?
On certain issues, a scientist had to factor bias into his calculations. He’d worked so hard at appearing mature and in control, perhaps he’d made a horrible misstep by ignoring the fact he was immature in some ways. Particularly about relationships. And Debra had paid the price.
Vampires didn’t have relationships, he told himself. They had bonds forged from power hierarchies. Yet servants were their closest intimate bond, impossible to describe to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. Perhaps vampires avoided the irony of that by fanatically insisting it was a functional, master-slave relationship, and not what it truly was: Their only chance to establish a soul-deep trust with another being, meet that craving for love and connection that the human species accepted as a worthy goal. But unlike vampires, the human species—for the most part—had learned how to sit down at dinner without killing one another.
Our structure, our rules, are the only things that keep us from one another’s throats, Brian. His father’s voice, a lecture he’d heard over and over. I was part of the Territory Wars. You don’t understand what we become without structure. These rules have a purpose.
The dawn lassitude was pulling him down, making it hard to think. He fought it. He couldn’t leave her feeling like this. Damn it…
Debra.
She lifted her head, wiping away her tears. My lord?
I want you to come sleep with me. When you get here, I may already be asleep, but you will stay with me until I wake. Lie down with me and sleep as well.
But I have to finish the—
It will wait. Your Master gave you an order, Debra.
She froze at that. The sensual threat went through her like an ocean cavitation. In a drowsy haze, he watched her wrap up what she was doing, but only the minimum necessary so the results weren’t ruined. Then she locked up the lab and was moving through the corridors. Coming to him.
Debra.
Yes...Master?
He smiled. Take off your clothes before you come to bed with me. I expect my servant to be available to me in all ways when I wake.
He stayed conscious long enough to feel the ripple of reaction through her again, know that he’d elevated her pulse and made her heart beat faster. Then the dawn reached out to claim him.
She wasn’t sure what was going on, but his tone of voice, the purring promise of it, scattered her concentration. If he had wanted her to finish what she was doing before coming to him, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have trusted her results.
His chambers on the underground level of the estate always smelled of the cool earth that surrounded it, a soothing scent. She paused at his door, unsure if he’d changed his mind. But as he’d said, he was likely asleep by now. His words had been slurred when he spoke in her mind. She wouldn’t second guess him.
Slipping in the room, she saw she was right. He was motionless on the bed, a tempting silhouette. Though his inability to stay awake past a certain time frustrated him, it gave her an opportunity to observe him now. He rarely invited her into his bedchamber after he was fully asleep.
First she obeyed his orders, taking off all her clothes and folding them neatly on the dresser. He had a mirror in here, which he used for looking at objects from different directions, since he didn’t show up in the reflection. She caught a glimpse of herself in it, a pale, owl-eyed ghost floating across the room.
He had towers of files on most of the flat surfaces. His smaller lab, sitting room and spacious bathroom was through another door, but he tended to stack things in there as well. Every once in a while she helped him scan and load hard copies onto his computers, keeping the data in an organized fashion. But Brian had far more diverse interests than just the active projects.
Stacked up against the legs of one table were old science journals and sci-fi novels he collected from a variety of places, his form of leisure reading. On the book shelves, in front of his extensive library, he kept artifacts from his travels. She touched the statue of a slender woman that always reminded her of a willow tree. She thought the artist had intended it that way.
There were also randomly collected things, like rocks, shells, fossils. He was endlessly curious about everything, and she wondered what he�
��d found interesting about those particular pieces. They’d stopped talking about anything much beyond their work. It was easier that way, wasn’t it? Apparently for him, too.
Biting back the pain at that thought, she left off her examination of his belongings. Brian preferred a queen-sized bed, versus the oversized king most other vampires liked in their guestrooms when visiting the estate. He said he had no desire to sleep on a padded racket ball court. She smiled at that, then slid into the bed. Feeling absurdly brave because he was asleep, and because he’d asked her to do something as intimate as sleep with him, she tugged the light sheet down.
He wasn’t wearing anything. Usually he wore those brief shorts, a clingy garment that hugged him high on the thighs and elsewhere in very appealing ways. He often made jokes about his looks. How, if not for vampire metabolism, he’d be a typical soft-bellied, sallow lab goblin, but she had her doubts about that. All vampires trained to protect themselves, which included ensuring their stamina was enhanced even beyond what the gods had blessed them with. Brian did strength training with weights as well as punishing ten mile runs along the paths of the vast estate and marshlands. During those workouts, he listened to audio books and articles he downloaded to multitask, but the end result was that the muscles she saw now weren’t all supernatural-made.
Plus, the man was always active, never still. It was nothing to him to climb up a sheer cliff face to examine the type of nest that might be on the top ledge, or walk to the bottom of a river bed to get a silt sample. Unlike most vampires who disliked the water because of their lack of buoyancy, he found such weighted density—and no need for scuba gear—useful for underwater data collection.
She folded her hands beneath her cheek on the pillow and gazed at him. He had an aristocratic bearing, six feet with a good breadth of shoulders, tapered waist and fine buttocks and thighs. Freeing one of her hands, she slid her fingers over those areas, barely touching him, but then it was too much to resist. With the mood she’d been experiencing these past few days, she needed to touch him. Perhaps the intimacy would ease her heart, fill the emptiness in her soul.