by Michele Hauf
“Do you want some help?”
“No, but thanks for the offer.”
“’Night, Teddy,” Madison said. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Being there.” Madison pointed to the spot on the floor where he’d been sitting.
Teddy smiled. “You’re entirely welcome.”
Madison waited with her hand on the doorknob until Teddy had disappeared, almost afraid to go into her room. The tingling sensations at the back of her neck had started up again. Her nerves were humming, leaving her jumpy and on edge. If this was a premonition of something about to happen, it was a doozy.
Shaking off the idea of calling Teddy back, she entered the room with her senses on full alert, and sank against the closed door without taking another step or reaching for the light switch. Her eyes didn’t have to adjust to the dark for her to know that the room had been disturbed.
Her gaze moved to the window that stood wide open.
Her pulse pounded against her throat, inhibiting speech.
This was the same reaction she’d had from the beginning. Always the racing heart. Always the almost visceral need to step closer to a gathering storm.
The man causing this was here. No mistake. But if the police knew him, and thought him a good enough alibi, Christopher St. John couldn’t be part of any alien, otherworldly species. As for her earlier concerns, she had merely read St. John’s lips at the club. There was no second-guessing the laws of such a fierce, animal attraction.
What she should be doing was returning to the streets. Anyone with real strength of conviction would return to the West End to look for further clues as to Stewart’s whereabouts, in case it had been him she’d seen tonight.
A whiff of the scent of musk hit her.
She blanched, said, “I know you’re here.”
Christopher St. John’s closeness was like a brush of black velvet on her overworked senses. The surface of the door felt hard and unforgiving against her tense back muscles, but there was no way she’d leave it. She couldn’t have moved if she’d tried.
“If you used that window to get in here, I don’t know how you managed it without actually being Spider-Man,” she said.
The telling flutter deep inside her was taking over her interior. Waiting for St. John to speak, Madison perceived every other noise, from her own raspy breathing to the sounds on the street outside, but St. John, the trespasser, didn’t say a word.
“Vampire got your tongue?” she said.
With an unbelievable speed, St. John was beside her, crushing to the door in a replay of their closeness that first night in the secluded alley. His body was close enough for her to feel every exquisite inch.
“How dare you show up like this,” she said, fending off a medley of signals that were the exact opposite of the stern chastisement she’d meant to issue. The sheer, almost mystical power of St. John’s masculinity had the ability to make the choicest arguments fade. He was potent, and live with a virile form of raw sexuality. God help her, she was a sucker for those things. She could not turn away.
“Why are you here?” she demanded.
“You may be in danger.”
Her voice cracked. “There was a detective here not five minutes ago, and probably still within shouting distance.”
“Do you imagine that if I was the danger, that detective could stop me from taking what I want?”
Madison shook her head. “I don’t imagine anyone could stop you from doing anything.”
Whatever she’d said made him close his eyes. Although she couldn’t see that in the dark, she knew he had, because she had shut hers.
She was pinned to the door, and the intensity of whatever was going on between her and this man was not only insane, it grew stronger by the second. As crazy as it seemed, she wanted to tear his clothes off and feel his hardness firsthand. She wanted to finish what they had started the night before.
None of it was logical, but did it have to be? So many emotions were running rampant.
“Come away from here, with me,” St. John said.
“Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. I’ve got a job to do.”
His cheek, cool and smooth against hers, made Madison’s pulse sky-rocket with beats that filled the room.
The bed was a few feet away. She wondered if St. John would take her there and fire up this ongoing, raging desire once and for all, so that she could move beyond it. So that she could think straight, and get this guy out of her system.
When his lips rested lightly on her temple, she sucked in air as if starved for oxygen. He stayed there for a while before angling his mouth toward her chin in an agonizing trail of heat and tempered passion that was all the more seductive because of its soft, ethereal nature.
Nothing bad could be this good, surely? She was a hormonal explosion waiting to go off, and thankful she couldn’t fill in his outline. She was glad the darkness hid her face from him. Her lips were quaking with the need for him to find them. The rush of damp heat between her thighs signaled that her body was willing to take this as far as it would go, for better or worse.
In no way could she stop this tumultuous longing now, in spite of the fact that she and St. John were strangers, really, and despite the former, ridiculous suppositions that he might not be human.
She gave the desk a sideways glance. On it sat her computer, containing a hundred files on vampires. The detective had just told her someone had been turned to ash, near her shoe. The shoe she had been wearing when she was with Christopher St. John.
Was it possible that St. John knew anything about this? St. John, who could very well fit the bill of being an immortal, according to her brother. Hadn’t she, minutes before, been considering that very thing, because of the intensity of her insatiable lust for him, as well as her ability to think she heard him, and her inability to avoid him?
God...
St. John’s lips were on hers now, again. They drifted over her mouth in a flaming reminder of the former make-out session that had tripped every fail-safe switch she possessed.
“What do you want from me?” she asked breathlessly.
“Everything,” he said.
Okay. They would do this. Get it over with.
He wore no coat now, making it easier for her fingers to clench the fabric of his black silk shirt. His muscles tensed when she touched him, almost as if the gorgeous, overtly sexual St. John wasn’t used to being handled in return.
Tugged free of his waistband, his shirt bunched in her hands. He groaned when she pressed her fingertips into the bare flesh of his lower back. His roving lips paused, poised against her neck, beneath her right ear, above her thundering pulse.
The energy building between them was wild, and whining for release. Emotion? Hell, this was so far beyond emotion as to be laughable. What she needed right that minute was to join St. John on the floor if necessary, to resolve this. All of their scrambled heat needed an outlet.
Possibly it wasn’t even this illicit meeting that was causing the emotional arc, but instead, the pain of the last few weeks needing to be replaced by something mind-blowing and special.
“Come with me,” he repeated hoarsely. “Away from here.”
“So that you can protect me from the bogeyman?”
“Yes.” He lowered his voice. “The man you saw outside the club tonight has focused his attention on you, and your search for your brother. He is dangerous. You must take care.”
“He knew who I was?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is he a vampire?” Madison stumbled over the term. Though she’d used it partially in jest, there was nothing funny about her need to understand her brother’s obsession with fanged creatures, and her own growing belief that thing
s weren’t as they seemed. She had felt that old man’s strangeness when she passed him in that doorway. For a second, maybe two, she had believed him to actually be one of her brother’s creatures of the night.
“Why would that man care what I do?” she asked, feeling his teeth graze her very sensitive neck.
“You bring notoriety to private concerns,” St. John said. “Space is close to those interests.”
“Some Protector you are, then. Will you issue a warning, and then offer a kiss to make it all better? Will you keep returning to me as if I were your own personal plaything?”
The sound he made in response to that remark was as silky as his shirt, and wickedly delicious. “Yes,” he whispered.
He seemed to be anticipating something. A green light for a momentous sexual escapade? One thing was certain. This guy was all male, all man; no bit of ephemeral mist topped off with fangs. Who could step away from him, or this, when her feelings for him were so insanely intense?
His needs matched hers, washing over Madison in relentless waves. The air heating up between them was new and exhilarating. She’d never felt anything like it, like this, like him, and didn’t want this moment to end.
“Are you doing this to me? Making me susceptible to your finer points?” she demanded.
“You’re admitting I have some finer points?”
“This close, I’m fully aware of them.”
He drew back and smiled. “You knew I’d come.”
“I should be questioning how I knew.”
St. John’s hands reached up into her hair. He held her face so that he could gaze at her in a way she couldn’t return in the dark. She felt his attention, though, just as she’d been aware of his smile. Her body knew what was coming.
Her lips parted for him with no further thought. When his mouth claimed hers with an intimacy that was so much more than lips and tongues, it felt to Madison like a continuation of the ravenous mingling of two hungry souls.
When his hands drifted possessively over her hips, and down the length of her thighs, nothing else mattered except the relief of finally getting to the core of her cravings.
She had to get this unwieldy attraction out of the way, and giving in to that attraction was the only way to do so.
In a slick repeat performance of their time in the alley, his fingers found the hem of her dress. As the material rose over her thighs in an agonizingly slow ascent, time seemed suspended. St. John’s fingers were pure sensory bliss. The promise behind the rise of her dress had the impact of a shout.
Cool air on her skin told her that only the thinnest of lace barriers kept him from her now. She’d worn black lace tonight, in his honor. His interest in her partially naked body clearly showed.
Strong hands cupped her bare buttocks, freeing her from the door. With a flex of his arms, St. John lifted her slightly, settling her over him as if they were already fully unclothed, and getting down to it.
Dissatisfied with that, he slipped one hand between her legs, in search of the place that if he were to reach again tonight, skin to skin, would lead him to her sexual soul, if not her actual one.
Her head hit the wall, hard, and Madison didn’t care. The flames licking at her were coming fast. She was going down in those flames, and this time, she wouldn’t stop them. She had no intention of calling this off. She was completely under his spell.
The movement of his talented hands—over her mound, under the edge of her black thong—hinted at what pleasures were to follow. To ensure that those pleasures did follow, Madison separated her legs and uttered the sultry sigh bubbling up from inside her.
His lips came back to hers with a hunger that rocked her. Her body melted into him. Her hands crawled up the curve of his spine, expecting perfection, relishing in the feel of his bare skin.
She hesitated, surprised when she discovered several raised lines of what had to be scar tissue. The man kissing her had incurred injuries in the past, serious ones to leave such marks. Had someone hurt him badly? Was the cause of these marks an accident, or war wounds?
She knew nothing about him, her mind warned, and yet she desired to kiss those marks away, taste them with her tongue, trace them in the light. She hardly noticed when the pressure between her thighs increased, and how she willingly accepted this.
Then she was on the floor. Not the bed. Urgency demanded that they couldn’t get that far.
St. John’s weight eased on top of her. He was propped on his elbows, with his face above hers. He still wore his clothes. She wore most of hers. There had been no time to draw this out.
Before her final shudder of expectation, he had pulled her underwear over her ankles. The action, and the knowledge of what it was going to lead up to, was as rich as it was dangerous.
“I—” she sputtered, cut off when he entered her with a slick, partial thrust.
Startled by the sheer pleasure of this, she cried out. St. John made a similar sound, his gasp of surprise threatening to bring her to a peak way too soon.
It seemed to her that his breathy response wasn’t indicative of a man’s victory over a woman, but of one closer to a verbal manifestation of pain.
She couldn’t hold on to any thought for long. St. John was well-endowed and talented. His next thrust, so deep and exactly right, filled her completely, bringing spasms of internal pleasure in what turned out to be only the warm-up. The introduction.
She wanted more. Wanted it all. Was nearly out of her mind with need.
He knew when to back off and make her writhe. He understood how to prolong her obscene craving for him. Holding himself motionless for seconds at a time, he then sent his hips forward, dipping into her slowly, almost maddeningly gracefully, while she clutched at his hips and his back.
She wanted him closer yet, deeper, and opened her mouth to demand satisfaction. But he had foreseen this. His next thrust was harder, slicker. Straight, true, this one stretched her to her limits, demanding full access to what she kept back.
She wrapped herself around him, used her muscles to encourage their connection. She dug at his back and shoulders with her nails, tearing at the silk shirt that remained the only cool sensation in a world on fire, wanting him to share in this crazy, sublime form of torture.
If he felt the pain of her talons, it only drove him on.
A rhythm built between them until their bodies slammed together with a damp, explosive heat. Madison gripped him hard. She beat at him with her fists, in need of something she couldn’t yet define.
In the dimness, the eyes above hers, once so blue, appeared a solid midnight-black in his pale face. St. John’s fair hair shone like moonlight. Her talented lover brought her to the edge of that peak of satisfaction over and over again, carefully monitoring how long she’d stay there, suspended on the verge of an orgasm. He left her panting, gasping, needing more.
Not one piece of her was left out of this taking. Arms, legs, breasts, thighs, as well as every nerve and cell she possessed, burned for him. The only thing left was to let him have it all, sure that no one could survive much more of this.
Relaxing her insides took effort. When St. John felt that last release, and the internal shudder accompanying it, he took full advantage. Pushing himself into uncharted depths, able to get past the last of her reservations, he stroked the sweet spot she had been saving.
The world dropped away as the intensity of this final action brought down a rain of feeling, emotion, fire and wonder. Madison screamed, not recognizing her voice, and with no idea that she was saying, “Vampire. Goddamn vampire.”
St. John’s mouth absorbed those curses, and the sob that followed. With his cock still buried inside her, his mouth scorched hers insatiably.
Madison’s muscles seized when the orgasm arrived, volcanic, exotic and vicious in intensity. St. John kept her in that shivering, sh
uddering place where essences mingled and the mind took a holiday. He held her there, sheathed to his hips inside her, and he didn’t move or ease up.
Madison rode this cresting wave of outrageous pleasure that made her vision go haywire. Behind closed eyelids, colors revolved, moving rapidly from black to gray to light, like the turning of a mental kaleidoscope, before landing on red. A vibrant, shimmering crimson overlay that overpowered all the rest.
Suddenly, she was no longer soaking up this pleasure, but was out from beneath him.
With lightning-fast reflexes, she rolled Christopher St. John onto his back, and straddled him, on her knees. Her hands, on his shoulders, pinned him down. A strange sound escaped her that was exactly like a growl.
Horrified, and reeling from the brilliance of her climax, Madison launched herself sideways. She opened her eyes, and said in a voice as shaky as the rest of her, “What the hell was that?”
Her lover was quiet for several beats. When he spoke, his tone was husky, his words drawn out. “So,” St. John said. “I guess we now know about you.”
Madison sat back on her heels, more confused than ever as she pondered what he had said. Know about her?
“Bastard,” she said. “Do you mean that I’ve proved to be an easy conquest?”
“I didn’t mean anything of the kind,” he replied. “It’s you who stopped the pleasure.”
Had she? The lingering rumble of her orgasm was fading into the distance like an earthquake blowing through. Breathing was tough. The rest of what had happened was a blur.
Yes. She had stopped this.
Was her reflexive disengagement from St. John her body’s way of rebelling against such incredible intimacy? Was she trying to protect herself from what would happen next, when Christopher St. John would smile and then leave, having successfully impaled the media sweetheart?
Could she be as vulnerable as that?
The room had gone dark again, but the fright of the red stain behind her eyes wouldn’t leave her. Instead of going back to St. John, on the floor, she got up on unsteady legs and backed away. This had been so very good. The best. A first. Jesus, this round of sex had made her hallucinate.