He nodded slowly, as if thinking about my words. Still looking up at the ceiling, he exhaled then, the barest edges of that anger coming off his light, even as he wrapped his free arm around my waist, tugging me further on top of him.
“All right,” he said.
He met my gaze, his eyes deadly serious, holding a colder kind of determination.
“You’re right. I want things from you.” His voice matched his eyes. “More to the point, there are things I want to do... and some of them require money. Which means I need to shift gears for awhile, build up the reserves. That means going to New York.” He paused, still holding my gaze. “You’re coming with me, Miriam. As in, I’m not going without you. If I have to, I’ll do it from here and hire proxies, but I’d prefer to be there in person.”
I nodded, ignoring his usual asking-while-sounding-like-giving-orders thing.
“Why New York?”
He grunted. “Why do you think? I want to make money... a lot of it... fast.” Pausing, he added, “Either way we do it, I’m not leaving you alone. You’re going to have to deal with overprotective me for awhile.” His jaw hardened as he studied my eyes. “Can you deal with that? Without taking it the wrong way?”
“You’re feeling overprotective?” I snorted.
His eyes narrowed. “What the fuck do you think they threatened me with while I was in there, Miri? Because it sure as hell wasn’t my life.”
I stared back at him, then swallowed. “Oh.”
“Yeah... oh.” His mouth hardened more. “There are other things too, Miri. But the rest of it can wait. I need money first. We start there.”
I nodded, relaxing into him more. I knew this was Black’s way of dealing with this. I was actually good with him being proactive about it, even as angry as he was. Resting my chin on my hands, which remained splayed on his chest, I nodded again.
“Okay. Do you want to tell me anything about why you need the money?”
“I’m going to build out the company,” he said. “And hire a lot more fucking people. I also need to start training them... some of them, at least... to kill vampires.”
I flinched at the word, but nodded again. “Okay.”
I knew that would be a lot more complicated than he was saying, given that his employees were human. I also knew Black already knew that, so mentioning it would be redundant. Black always had a plan for everything, anyway.
His voice remained hard as steel when he went on.
“There are other things, like I said, but we’ll start there. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, a little warier.
Black exhaled, staring up at the ceiling again, his jaw in a hard clench.
“So...” I ventured, a little more cautiously. “The plan is to go full-bore vampire hunter, is that it? Is that your new business venture?”
“It might be,” he growled. He looked over at me, his gold eyes flashing. “Miri, what exactly do you suggest I do?”
I held up a hand in a peace gesture. “Black, I’m not saying it’s wrong. But yeah, it makes me nervous. Aren’t there like... millions of them? Far more of them than there are of us?”
By “us” I meant seers, not humans.
That time, Black didn’t answer.
When he continued to stare up at the ceiling, I went back to massaging him with my hands. I could practically feel the wheels turning in that giant brain of his, but I tried to coax him out of it, wrapping him in more of my light as I took my time exploring his body.
When I followed my fingers with my mouth, he let out a low sound, laying back on the bed. After a few minutes more, his hands were back in my hair, even as I felt his light start to open. He was breathing harder, too, his light turning molten, into liquid fire. I felt desire come off him in a hotter plume when I started pulling on him with my light, using my tongue on his bare skin and pulling more of his light inside mine as I did.
I hadn’t been doing that for long when he let out a groan, that time from deep in his chest.
We’d both been deprived while he’d been gone... sex-wise, I mean.
I’d been deprived enough that I pretty much lost all sense of rationality every time we got into this. His mind flashed images at me, some of them explicit enough that I closed my eyes, gripping him tighter as I gasped against his skin.
Another reason I’m not going anywhere without you, Miri... he spoke into my mind. I need about a month of solid fucking as it is. He pushed at me gently, insistently with his mind. You’re coming with me to New York, Miri... you’re fucking coming with me... all right?
I knew that was a question in Black-speak.
Raising my head when he did, I nodded, still stroking his skin.
When I did, he closed his eyes, his face tightening as he lowered his head back to the pillow.
“Good,” he said aloud, his voice somewhere between a gasp and a groan. “Now give me head. Please. Before I lose my goddamned mind...” His voice got deeper, gruffer, even as his hands tightened in my hair. “Do that thing with your light, Miri... gaos... I’ll do whatever you want after... anything... I promise...”
He let out a heavier gasp when I pulled on him again.
“I’ll return the favor. For hours if you want...” He let out another gasp when I didn’t answer, but his voice remained deep, almost guttural. “Miri... please... please...”
I found myself kissing the bite marks left on his skin, as well as the bruises and cuts they’d left on the rest of him. He really hadn’t told me very much about what happened to him there, after the vampires took him from me, but his body told me some of it.
I didn’t realize I was crying until I wiped my face on his skin.
I didn’t look up to see if he noticed. I tried to push it from my mind, focusing on his light and skin as I worked my way down his body.
Even so, my mind never shut off entirely. In the not-so-distant background, some part of me was definitely nervous about Black’s plan to get revenge. Along with my fears for his life, the more clinically-trained, rational side of my brain knew his sudden desire to turn his security company into a vampire-killing army was driven by trauma as much as by anger.
That being said, another part of me––a bigger, maybe more seer part of me––was all in favor of his plan.
That part of me wanted to kill those damned things as much as he did.
Chapter 2
I’ll Replace It
He walked through my office door sometime after two-thirty in the afternoon, when I had only two appointments left for the day.
We’d been back in San Francisco for almost two weeks, but I still felt pretty weird trying to fit back into some semblance of a normal life. I’d mostly buried myself in work, and in Black himself. I’d barely seen my friends, and I missed them.
Truthfully, though, I was still worried about him.
The dreams hadn’t stopped. In fact, they seemed to be getting worse.
He’d also gotten more and more quiet about how he spent his days.
When he came by the office that afternoon, he was wearing a suit, which was always distracting. I’d only seen him in a handful of suits, and this one was new to me. It consisted of a black jacket and a white shirt, open at the neck. Both looked tailored, in part because they fit him perfectly, despite his height. He didn’t wear a tie. Something about the ensemble managed to make him look even taller and more broad-shouldered than usual.
He was also packing a gun.
He was moving fast, preoccupied. I definitely got the sense he was multi-tasking in his mind, and not only because he barely took a breath before he launched into speaking to me.
“...We’re going tonight. I have Kiko packing for you.”
I looked up from my desk, startled.
He’d entered the room so damned quietly, I hadn’t even heard him come in... which told me Gomey, as in Gomez Ramirez, my so-called administrative assistant, must have wandered out of the building again without telling me. If he’d seen Black, the fawn
ing definitely would have been audible, even with my door closed.
“...Hope that’s all right,” Black added, making one of those vague, graceful gestures of his with one hand, inexplicably motioning towards the window. “A few things came together today.”
I blinked, looked down at my laptop, then up at his face again.
“And sorry about having Kiko go through your stuff,” he said, more gruffly. “She claims she knows your side of the closet pretty well now. Oh, and she’s coming with us to New York. So is Dex. And Javier. I think your uncle wants a few of his people on us as well. Security, I mean. Seers. I’ll add to the group, depending on how long we stay, but I might be recruiting people while we’re over there, too. There are a few names in D.C. I’d like to check out. I want to look into getting a few people out of that prison too... Cowboy. A few others.”
I’d heard him mention Cowboy before, so I only nodded.
I continued to stare at him, fighting to catch up with everything he was saying. He hadn’t so much as mentioned New York since that night, and it had been two weeks. Truthfully, I’d wondered if he’d changed his mind... or found some other way to get the money he wanted.
It had been an odd day, even before now.
I’d seen four clients already––three that morning and one right after lunch. Most were people I’d been treating for awhile, but I was still playing catch-up from when I’d been out looking for Black. I’d arranged to have all of them covered by other counselors, but some were still hurt I’d been gone so long, and that I wouldn’t say much about where I’d been.
Only one gave me serious grief about it––and I knew her issues well enough to know why––but I still felt guilty.
Apart from individual clients, though, I still felt like an alien in this part of my life. It felt like I’d been out of the counseling game for so long that walking into my private practice office was like walking into a different world.
Everything looked the same. My calendar still hung on the wall, opened to two months ago. Dusty books on various disorders and treatment plans still stood on wooden shelves next to stress toys and psychological questionnaires and checklists.
My squeaky desk chair was as uncomfortable as it had ever been.
It all seemed to belong to a life I no longer lived in, though. I felt like a tourist here, like some part of me was waiting for something else.
It didn’t help that Gomey hadn’t watered any of my plants while I’d been gone, so my last two ficus plants and even the relatively indestructible ivy plant I used to have sitting on my highest window shelf were all dead. I’d spent a chunk of my first morning back tossing plant carcasses in the garbage and placing the earth-filled pots in the small garden downstairs to maybe reuse later.
Slowly, my regular job as a psychologist had been eaten away by the work I did for the police and now for Black himself.
When I pulled myself from my thoughts, Black was still standing across from me, his mouth pursed in a frown now.
“Do you care?” he said.
I blinked. “Do I care about what?”
“About this.” He gestured around the office. “About this side of your job?”
I smiled in spite of myself, fingering my long hair out of my face. I sat back from my laptop monitor, making my chair squeak. “Are you asking me if I care about my job?”
“No,” he growled. “I’m asking you if you care about this part of your job. I thought you weren’t so much into this side of things. The weekly therapy crap.”
My mouth pursed in a frown.
“I’ve always been somewhat ill-suited for it, if that’s what you mean,” I said stiffly. “I was trained more for research... and now Nick has me doing mostly forensics.” My voice came out a touch sharper, maybe even defensive. “That doesn’t mean I feel okay about abandoning people I have a professional responsibility to, Black. And I don’t think I could handle working for the cops full time either, frankly, not with––”
“What about me?” he cut in. “Could you handle working for me full time?”
When I only looked at him, unsure where this was coming from, he frowned, averting his gaze as he clicked softly under his breath, another seer mannerism I was now used to. Usually it conveyed frustration or irritation, but it could be more nuanced too.
I got the sense I was seeing more of that nuance now.
“I’m not irritated with you,” he clarified, his voice subdued. “But I don’t think you’re hearing me, either... about me wanting you with me. I don’t usually stay in San Francisco full time. I’ve been here more or less full time lately because of you, but it’s not going to work with my plans now. Not anymore.”
He met my gaze, his gold eyes glowing faintly in the sunlight from the windows.
“I want you with me,” he repeated, his voice even less compromising. “That’s going to make it hard for you to see clients like this. Unless you’re willing to do more of it remotely. And assuming your clients are okay with that.”
But I’d more or less heard enough.
“Can we not talk about this now?” I said, frowning a little. “I can’t deal with this right now, Black. I know where it’s coming from, why you’re saying it the way you are, but it’s still coming across as pretty heavy-handed. I told you I’d go to New York with you. Can we just start there, and then see how things develop with––”
He held up a hand, his expression losing some of its tension.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice firm, but carefully calm. “You’re right. I’m not doing this right. I just want you to think about it. It’s not only my ‘issues,’ or whatever.” His jaw hardened as he met my gaze. “I could really use you... all the time, I mean, not just a few hours a day.”
He paused, shrugging as he adjusted the suit jacket he wore. “And I want to teach you the business,” he added, gruffer.
I found myself studying his face from where I sat. He was in lock-down military mode right now. I couldn’t help wondering what was behind it, and I suspected several things. Without thinking, I stood up, and walked around the desk towards him.
He backed off slightly.
Feeling a plume of heat off him, I hesitated, looking up at his face again.
When I did, I caught him looking me over in the short skirt and heels.
“Miri,” he said. “When’s your next appointment?”
His voice already sounded deeper.
“Jesus, Black.” I snorted a half-laugh in spite of myself. “I thought you were in a big hurry to get us out the door. Are you serious right now?”
“Dead fucking serious.”
He took a step towards me, moving fast enough that I backed up instinctively, running the back of my thighs into the desk. His eyes followed my legs to the desk and darkened more. When I looked up, his pupils had dilated, swallowing most of the flecked gold of his irises.
“Sit down,” he said, his voice gruff. “On the desk.” He made another of those graceful motions with a hand, his eyes closing longer than a blink. “Spread your legs.”
A flush bloomed in the middle of my chest. “Is now really the time for––”
“Yes,” he said. “It really is.”
I hesitated for the barest breath, staring up at him, and again he took a step towards me, his light coiling around me like a flicking tail. I felt a predatory thread in that and my skin grew hotter. I found myself sitting on the edge of the desk and looking up at him, feeling my breath catch when I saw his eyes.
Realizing he was waiting, I spread my legs, hiking up the skirt as I did.
“Wider,” he said.
“Black...” I said, almost a whisper.
“Do as I say, Miri.” His voice was calm, reasoned, almost cool. He went on without missing a beat. “You never told me when your next appointment was.”
My breath caught in my throat when he didn’t lift his stare. “Twenty minutes. But, Black... Gomey. He could walk right in here. He never knocks, and––”
He stepped up against me, using his hands to ease my thighs further apart. Then he pressed one of those hands up between my legs. He slid his palm over me at first, massaging there slowly with his fingers over the thin, silky lace I wore. Then, watching my face, he moved the fabric aside. His eyes grew more heated... right before he slid his fingers into me deliberately, all the way in, tugging on me with a slow, sensual pull of his light.
I let out a startled groan, watching his eyes close as he wrapped his other hand around my rear, yanking me hard up against him.
He’d been a different person since he got back.
With sex, I mean.
Something was different there. He was different.
I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around what those differences were exactly, what they meant. My body had zero problem understanding him in that area though, or understanding the feelings coming off him in increasingly violent waves.
I was still watching his face when he bent down, kissing my neck. I caught hold of his arms when he didn’t stop, and his light got even more invasive, pulling on me inexorably, with a directed intent that got more focused when he started using his tongue. His hand clenched on my ass right before he brought me tighter up against him. Then he was kissing my mouth... still fucking me slowly and deliberately with his fingers, his body melting into mine.
I let out another groan against his mouth, unable to help it.
Somewhere in that, my mind pretty much... stopped working.
That, or maybe his mind and light were just so far inside of mine, they eclipsed everything else. I felt him pulling on me, trying to get me to surrender to him, to give him whatever he wanted. A harder flush of desire came off him when my light started to open... then he wanted to fuck for real, to force me down on the desk and enter me, with me still fully clothed.
The sheer intensity of the aggression behind both things––the images he sent and what was coming off his light––forced another startled moan from my lips.
Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More Page 141