by Karen Chance
Mircea groaned and his eyes slid to half-mast. Which was all very well, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Hm.
I swirled my fingers over the tip of him, getting them wet, and then trailed them lightly up my own flesh. Stomach, breasts, pausing to paint the nipples, feeling his fingers tighten on my skin, up to my neck, lingering over those two little marks, his brand of ownership—we’d see who was owned—and up to my lips. I traced my bottom one with the salty taste of him, and his own tongue flicked out, unconsciously mimicking my movement.
Then I sucked the whole finger into my mouth and his eyes closed.
“You taste good, too,” I told him, smiling, and felt his body shudder against me.
And then the next thing I knew, I was on my back, one of my legs crooked over Mircea’s shoulder, and even with the preparation, he was too big for there not to be a burn. But that was okay, that was perfect, because tonight I wanted to feel it. I wanted to know I was alive.
And it looked like Mircea felt the same, because he was driving into me hard enough that my breath caught and my body writhed and my fingers dug into his shoulders, and then he found just the right angle and stayed there. Sparks of intense sensation flashed up my spine and coiled in my belly, regular as clockwork, and then arrhythmic, treacherous, as Mircea modified his stroke to torment me all over again.
“Bastard,” I hissed, even as my spine was arching helplessly, trying to meet his thrusts and continue that extreme high. I would have come in seconds, but he wouldn’t let me, the man’s ungodly stamina keeping me hungry.
“You’ll live.”
“Make me want to,” I moaned, and Mircea was laughing as he gave in to my hunger, taking me deep and fast. Just the way we needed.
“Is this better?” he teased, but I didn’t have breath to laugh because I was coming, even as the hard thrusts inside me turned erratic. I was still riding the aftershocks as Mircea shuddered above me, sagging against the tight hold of my legs as he came, both of us grinning like fools.
After a moment, he pulled me up and poured us more wine, and we settled down in front of the fire. He nestled up against me, cradling my body against his and sliding his hands up and down my legs, while the logs hissed and the snow fell and I wished I did know how to freeze time. Because I’d have liked to stop it right here.
It was times like these that I thought he was right, that I made things too hard, too complicated. Tony had elevated paranoia to an art form, and I’d absorbed a healthy dose of it growing up. And occasionally it had been really useful. It had kept me alive more than once, causing me to doubleand triple-check things for no reason, or to abruptly leave somewhere just because of the ants running up and down my spine.
But sometimes it could be pretty stupid, too. More than once it had caused me to be too careful, to automatically say no when maybe I should have said yes, to guard myself and my heart so closely, I never let anyone in. I didn’t know everything about Mircea; I would probably never know everything about Mircea. But I knew the important thing.
I knew I loved him.
I had always loved him. Loving him was as natural as breathing, as essential as water. It had defined my life in a real way ever since I was a child.
Before I met him, I had lived in constant fear, even without realizing what it was. When you’ve never known anything else, fear just seems . . . normal. Jumping at shadows because of what might be in them; staying carefully out of sight, because attracting attention was never A Good Thing; monitoring every word, in case it caused offense that would have to be made up for somehow. Of course, there were those I didn’t have to act that way around—Rafe and Eugenie and a few others who came and went through the years.
But as much as I’d loved them, I’d always known the truth. They couldn’t protect me. They couldn’t, as it turned out, even protect themselves. Because they weren’t the master there.
The most powerful vampire I knew was Tony, and even without realizing that he had been responsible for my parents’ deaths, there’d been plenty to fear, including the rooms downstairs that none of the vamps talked about but that the ghosts in the house informed me were essentially torture chambers. People Tony didn’t like went down there, and most of the time, they didn’t come back up.
But I never saw those rooms, other than in a flash of vision I’d experienced years later. And after Mircea’s visit, I had known instinctively that I never would. Because Tony, as mercurial, deadly and downright crazy as he could be at times, wasn’t the most powerful vamp I knew anymore. Mircea was. And Mircea liked me.
And during his visit, it was impossible not to notice that Tony’s attitude changed. He wasn’t exactly jolly—despite his shape, Tony was never jolly—but he was . . . careful. He didn’t raise his voice to me anymore, didn’t threaten, didn’t menace. In fact, it had been a real revelation, seeing him, the always-feared head of house, practically groveling on his master’s perfectly shined Tanino Criscis.
And even after Mircea left, Tony didn’t treat me as he had before. If I didn’t get a useful vision for a week or two, there was a definite chill in the air, or he might confine me to my room or cancel one of my rare forays outside the house. But I wasn’t going downstairs. I was never going downstairs.
Mircea had meant security, protection, sanctuary. He had many other attractive attributes, ones that other women would probably value much more highly. But nothing came close to that sense of security for me. It had been the greatest gift anyone had ever given me.
It still was.
“I’m thinking you just hit good,” I told him, when I could talk again.
He thought about that for a moment. “Let’s try for excellent,” he said, and rolled me over.
Oh, boy.
Chapter Sixteen
“I knew it!”
I jumped, because the angry voice spoke at almost the same moment that I rematerialized back in my bedroom in Vegas. I spun around, sending my aching head sloshing unpleasantly against my skull, and saw Billy lounging on the bed. A pack of playing cards hung in the air in front of him, laid out in a vertical game of solitaire. But they were ghostly cards, no more substantial than their owner, and I could clearly see his scowl glaring through.
For someone who regularly was up to as much crap as Billy Joe, he did disapproval really well.
“What?” I said defensively, clutching the mink and my dignity. Since I was barefoot, mostly naked and completely hungover, I was pretty sure I grasped only one of them.
“You slept with the goddamned vampire!”
“I—How did you know?”
Billy rolled his eyes.
“Well . . . even if I did, it’s none of your business,” I informed him haughtily. And then I ruined the effect by limping to the bathroom.
I flicked on the lights, but they hurt my eyes so I flicked them off again. But then I couldn’t see. Until Billy’s softly glowing head poked through the wall, like a pissed-off night-light.
“I thought you were gonna give it some time,” he said accusingly. “I thought you were gonna get to know him first. I thought—”
“Does anybody ever really know anybody?” I asked. And, okay, it was lame, but my head hurt like a bitch.
“Oh, man.” Billy looked disgusted. “He must really be something. One night and he’s got you wrapped.”
“He does not!”
“Like hell.” He crossed his arms. “What did you tell me right before you left?”
I sighed, wondering why I never had any damn aspirin. “I know. But—”
“But what? You told me you’re absofuckinglutely, posifuckingtively, not getting horizontal. ’Cause vamps aren’t like regular people, and you’re in the middle of negotiating the relationship and he’d take it as a sign of surrender, and—”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said, running some cold water onto a washcloth. And then slapping it over my aching eyes. Dear God, I was never drinking again.
“Oh, okay. So what was it like?”
“A . . . time-out,” I mumbled incoherently.
But apparently not incoherently enough.
“A time-out.” Billy did sarcasm pretty well, too.
“Yeah.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means it didn’t count,” I snapped, and then wished I hadn’t, because it hurt. I stifled a groan and put my elbows on the counter, supporting my throbbing head.
“And who decided this?”
“We did.”
“And which part of ‘we’ came up with the get-out-ofjail-free card?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Yeah,” Billy said. “That’s what I thought.”
I took the washcloth off so I could glare at him. “I don’t recall appointing you my conscience!”
“You don’t need a conscience. You need some goddamn common sense! You used to have some, remember? You’re the one who told me what those things are like—”
“Mircea isn’t a thing.”
“Oh, so he’s not a monster all of a sudden? He got upgraded? I guess I must have missed the memo!”
I turned and walked out of the bathroom. Billy’s faintly glowing backside was sticking out of the wall above the dresser, framed in the mirror like a bizarre trophy. But all things considered, I liked it better than the other half right now. Get him wound up and he could go for hours, and I was so not up for it tonight. Or this morning. Or whenever the hell it was. The room was dark, but there were blackout shades under all the drapes in the suite, so that didn’t mean much.
“Okay, ‘monster’ is out,” Billy said, getting himself sorted. “So what are we calling him now? Sugar Tits? Baby Cakes? Angel Boy?”
I got a sudden image of a very naked Mircea, fire-warm skin backlit by flames, the same ones that had formed a vague halo around his head. He wasn’t an angel, I knew that. But regardless of what Billy thought, he wasn’t the devil, either. And it had been only one night, and he’d sworn it wouldn’t make a difference—
“Why are you here, anyway?” I demanded, going on the offensive, because my defense kind of sucked right now. “I fed you before I left.”
“Yeah, and that’s all I care about! You were supposed to be back hours ago!”
“Well, I would have been, but . . . there was a delay.”
“A delay that left hickeys all over your neck and made you walk funny?”
“I’m not in jail, you know,” I snapped. “I can come and go whenever I—” I stopped. “What hickeys?”
He pointed silently at my neck. I pushed the old-fashioned collar of the coat aside and leaned closer to the mirror. And saw—
“Son of a bitch!”
“You didn’t notice?” Billy demanded.
I winced. “No. And keep your voice down.”
“Why? No one can hear me but you.”
I rested my forehead on the cool top of the dresser. “That’s kind of the point.”
He snorted. “And to top it off, you’re hungover!”
“It was the wine. It always does this to me.”
“Then why’d you drink it?”
“Because after the night I’d had, I thought I deserved it,” I muttered.
Billy sighed, and a moment later I felt a ghostly chill on the back of my neck. It felt good. “What went wrong this time?”
“Short version: everything.”
“And the long version?”
“I’m too hungover for the long version.”
“Gimme the CliffsNotes, then.”
I pried myself off the dresser and started sorting through a drawer. “Let’s just say, it looks like my luck runs in the family.”
“Ouch.”
I went back into the bathroom to change, and this time, Billy left me alone. I pulled on an old pair of khaki shorts and tried a couple of different shirts, finally settling on one with orange and white stripes. It was soft, thin cotton with a mock turtleneck and no sleeves. It had been part of my work wardrobe, worn under a jacket to keep me from dying of heatstroke in the Atlanta summers, and it looked a little dressy for the shorts. But it was better than announcing my evening’s activities to everybody I met.
Only now that I was dressed, I found that I didn’t really feel like meeting anybody. I kind of felt like going back to bed. I walked into the bedroom, yawning. “What time is it?”
Billy looked up from his card game. “Four a.m.”
I sighed in relief and fell face-first onto the bed. Jonas was coming at one for our lesson, and I had nothing to do until then. And nothing sounded pretty damn good right now.
“Move over,” I told Billy, because he was hogging the bed as usual. He gave me maybe another two inches of space, also as usual. I turned onto my side, since it was easier than arguing.
The room was dark but the bed was spotted by watery blue-white rectangles, the light shadows from Billy’s cards. They moved across the duvet as he played, silent, intent. For about half a minute.
“You can call him what you want, but he’s still a monster,” Billy said, because of course this wasn’t over. “They all are.”
“I don’t know why you hate vamps so much,” I said sleepily. “What’d they ever do to you?”
“They’re creepy.”
“They are not.”
“Like hell.”
I didn’t point out the irony of this coming from a guy who would send most people screaming in terror if they could see him, because the door cracked open. A thin sliver of slightly less dark leaked in from the hallway and fell over the bed. It highlighted dust particles dancing in the air and a massive head poking around the doorjamb.
“Hey,” Marco said softly, like he thought I might already be asleep.
“Hey, yourself.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You have fun?”
“Yeah.”
“Thought so.” I couldn’t see his expression, but his voice was smug.
It would have been weird coming from a human, but vamps got a lot of their self-worth from their masters. Anytime Mircea did something well—negotiated a treaty, got recognition from the Senate, banged the Pythia—their egos all got a boost. In a real sense, when you dated a master vamp, you dated his entire family. All of whom thereafter took a proprietary interest in your business.
It was something I tried hard not to think about.
“You hungry?” Marco asked. “We got pizza.”
Actually, I thought one more bite of anything, and I might just pop. “I’m good.”
“Beer?”
“Just gonna get some sleep.”
“Yeah, you probably need it,” he said, sounding satisfied. The door closed.
“No, that’s not creepy at all,” Billy said sourly.
I sighed and pulled the pillow into a more comfy position. “It’s just the way they are.”
“And I don’t like the way they are.”
It wasn’t surprising. Billy had never liked any of the guys in my life, not that there had been many. It wasn’t jealousy so much—not the physical type, anyway—but more of a natural distrust. I guess getting drowned like a sack of kittens would do that to a person.
“You don’t like anybody.”
“Not when they look at you like he does,” he said sharply.
“Like what?”
“Like the way hardened gamblers on the riverboats used to look at young rich guys. Like here comes dinner.” He glanced at me. “I don’t want you to be dinner.”
“I won’t.”
“For anybody,” he added. “He’s no worse than the rest of them; they all want a piece of you.”
“That’s how the game is played.”
“Yeah, well the game sucks.” He wiped a hand across his own game and it dissipated like mist, leaving only a lightly glowing cloud above the bed. It made the room darker, but not cozier. Someone must have fixed the window, because the air conditioner was running like it was trying to make up for lost time.
I pulled up th
e comforter.
“What is wrong with you tonight?” I asked. Billy could bitch with the best of them, but usually he had a better reason than my missing curfew.
“It’s . . . I don’t know,” he said, turning to face me. The scruffy features under the Stetson were unusually sober. “It’s nothing I can put my finger on. But lately . . . it feels like there’re ants running over my skin, all the time.”
I didn’t say anything, but I had to consciously refrain from smoothing my hands down my own arms. Because I’d had the same feeling for days. Not localized on anyone or anything; just a general impression that something wasn’t right. And that had been before somebody tried to kill me.
It was one reason it had been so damn hard to leave that warm hotel room this morning. Last night really had felt like a moment out of time. For once, no one had been after me, no one had wanted to hurt me, no one had even known who the hell I was. It had been really nice.
But I couldn’t hide in the past forever. And now that I was back in my time, that antsy feeling was setting my skin to crawling again. It was less than reassuring to know that Billy felt it, too.
How bad did things have to be before the ghosts started freaking out?
“I thought after that son of a bitch Apollo died, things were gonna calm down,” he said fretfully. “But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it used to, when Tony’s bastards got too close. If we were still back in Atlanta, I’d be bugging you to start packing.”
“And if we were still back in Atlanta, I’d probably be doing it,” I said honestly. “But I don’t think running is going to help now.”
He waved a hand. “I’m not talking about running. Plenty of people ran; he always caught them. You got away because you’re . . . I don’t know. Not smart, exactly—”
“Thanks.”
“—but clever, resourceful, stubborn—and freaking lucky.” He saw my expression. “What?”
“It’s just . . . someone else said that to me recently.” Well, minus the stupid part.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.” Except that I didn’t want to have to be resourceful. I didn’t want to need to be lucky. I wanted to sleep late. I wanted to get up and putter around the suite. I wanted to go light a fire under Augustine before I ended up going to the damn coronation naked.