Playing Easy to Get

by Kresley Cole

  She reached down and cupped him beneath her before he could grip her wrist. In an instant her seductive look vanished, though she showed no surprise that he wasn’t hard. She felt around his cock, then arched an eyebrow to say, “Well, my word, Wroth. If you were hard, I wouldn’t know whether to be tantalized or terrified.”

  Then with blurring speed she was off him, and in the bed, lying on her stomach, chin propped on her hands. She was utterly unaffected by what had just occurred, while he was angered and…shamed that she’d felt him like this. He wanted to show her hard….

  “How do you plan to keep me here during the day? An unblooded Forbearer shouldn’t be so hard to vanquish.”

  Vanquished by her? Amusing. “I’ll send you back to the cell. You want to be my pet? I’ll take you out and put you back in your cage at my pleasure.”

  She blinked at him. “You don’t want to send me back. Who will entertain you? I can deal poker and make shadow animals.”

  He shook himself. This was just another instance of the Lore playing with them. She was not normal. He knew that anything he’d learned about females was inapplicable with her.

  If she could be unaffected, he could pretend it. “I need you to answer some questions. I need to know what you are and what your name is.”

  “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”

  “Done,” he said quickly. “Ask.”

  “Were you afraid when Kristoff stood over you?”

  “I was…tired.” Strange question.

  “Most mortals would have been terrified to see the Gravewalker.”

  “Is that what he’s called?” Kristoff would find that amusing. At her nod, he said, “Well, I’d seen a lot by that time.”

  “What’s his agenda? Does he want to replace Demestriu?”

  Wroth hesitated, then answered honestly, hoping that she would do the same. “He wants his crown back, but he doesn’t want to rule over any faction but our own.”

  “Uh-huh.” She raised an eyebrow as if she didn’t believe him, then asked, “That was your brother in the dungeon?”

  “Murdoch, yes.”

  “Turned vampires don’t usually have family within the Horde.”

  “Murdoch died in the same battle. I’ve two other brothers turned later as well.”

  “You’re young. Yet you’re a general. How’d you swing that?”

  He was over three hundred years old. Young compared to her? “I refused the dark gift if certain conditions weren’t met.”

  Her eyes grew bright with new interest, and she patted the bed for him to come sit with her. He felt he was on the verge of learning something, so he complied, resting against the headboard to face her, stretching his legs out. He almost laughed. The first time he’d been in bed with a woman in centuries, and she was easily the most beautiful of any before—and he could do nothing with her. He couldn’t even drink her, though his fangs ached to pierce the pale column of her neck. Thank God he’d fed before she’d been brought up.

  “Wroth, you countered with Kristoff as you lay dying?”

  When she put it like that it sounded more reckless than it had been. As Wroth had lain in his own cooling blood, nearly freed of the constant struggle, the ongoing war and famine and plague, he’d told Kristoff, “You need me more than I need to live.”

  Kristoff had seen him in many battles and agreed. “I did counter. I was used to giving orders and would take them from no one but a powerful king. I wanted my brother turned if he was dying, and trusted compatriots as well. Kristoff complied.” That wasn’t all. Wroth had asked for sixty years so he and Murdoch could watch over the rest of their living family—their father, four sisters and two other brothers.

  They’d needed only three months.

  “You know, I’d heard of you when you were a human. Weren’t you called the Overlord?”

  This surprised him. “On kinder tongues. How could you have heard of me? Your accent isn’t from the northlands.”

  She sighed. “Not anymore. I’d heard of you because I’m interested in all things martial. You were quite the vicious leader.”

  He felt his expression grow cold. “We were defending. I was anything I needed to be to see it done.” He could tell by her reaction that she liked his answer. Her lips parted as she tilted her head at him. Then she sidled closer to him on the bed as if she couldn’t help herself.

  Her voice more gentle, she said, “But in the end you lost.”

  He stared past her. “Everything.” The battle had only been like the final blow on a dying man. Prior to that, the enemy had scorched and salted their lands. Famine followed and there’d been no defending when plague erupted.

  “Wroth,” she said softly. He turned his gaze to her. Her eyes were so captivating in her elven-like face, so clear and lucid at this moment. “Let’s make a pact, you and I.” She eased open his legs to kneel between them. “Let’s vow that we won’t harm the other in this room.” She pressed him back until he lay fully on the rolled pillow. What would she do next?

  When he gave her one quick nod, she flashed him a warm smile that made him feel praised in some way. Her damp hair was spilling down over his legs, and with the back of her hand, she swung it to one side, baring her tantalizing neck. A rush of the innate scent of her hair swept him up, like a drug. Sweet and subtle, just like her skin. If she smelled like this, he couldn’t imagine what she would taste like. He wished she’d bared her flesh in offer to him.

  “Wroth, this is embarrassing,” she murmured in a sensual voice, “but I think I’ve caught you staring at my neck.”

  “You did,” he admitted, oddly feeling no shame to be contemplating his order’s most reviled crime.

  She brushed her fingertips over her skin. “Are you tempted to take a drink from me?”

  In the worst way.

  He wondered how many times Ivo had taken her and felt a spike of some unfamiliar feeling claw in his gut. “We don’t drink from living beings. It’s how we got our name.” It was this order’s pledge, their pact. Wroth had never tasted flesh as he drank. But then he’d never felt the smallest stir of temptation to before her.

  “Why?”

  “So we are never tempted to kill,” he said, giving her the official line, which was true, but the whole truth was more complicated, and they kept the details they’d managed to learn secret. Living blood, blood not separated from its source, brought side effects with it. A vampire would suffer torments from it, such as his victim’s memories. Kristoff believed these memories were what drove natural born vampires insane and made their eyes turn permanently red. As far as they could determine, the only way not to harvest them was to drink blood that had died, avoiding the evils—and the benefits.

  “What if you drank from an immortal that couldn’t be killed from that?” she asked, her words lulling again. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from hers.

  A tricky question to answer without saying that the immortal would have far too many plaguing memories, multiple in number to a mortal. He answered her question with one of his own. “Do you want me to take your flesh, creature?” The mere idea of it made his words rough, his fangs ache.

  At her titillated look, he feared she’d say yes, calling his bluff. What would he do then?

  “Rain check,” she answered brightly. Then, to his shock, she curled up between his legs, face nuzzling against his uncovered torso, and wrapped her pale, delicate arms and hands around his thigh.

  “I never asked my questions,” he said, staring at the ceiling, trying to sound casual about what was occurring. He’d seen a great many things in his life, but this female was throwing him.

  “We have all the time in the world for that, do we not?”

  He thought she kissed the scar on his lower stomach with her lips—and a slow little lick. He lay tensed, rasping, “At least tell me your name, creature.”

  “Myst,” she whispered, then she fell asleep.

  Myst. How fitting that she was named after somethin
g intangible and capricious.

  Long after, he was still roiling. In sleep, his little pagan clutched his leg with her pink claws. And they were claws, sharp and curling, though somehow elegant. He ignored the pain, for it was little compared to the odd satisfaction of thinking that she clutched him for comfort.

  He savored simply resting with her, doing nothing but watching as her hair dried into big, glossy red curls that spread out over his chest. For centuries their army had been constantly on the move, hiding in the shadows of the northlands in often grueling conditions, keeping their growing numbers secret. Everything had been about the war, all adding up to this attack, to furthering their cause.

  He brought a curl up to his face to brush it over his lips. So soft, like her flawless skin. Tomorrow night, if she hadn’t given him information—and he somehow knew she wouldn’t voluntarily—could he lash her skin to get at her secrets? After Myst had cleaved to him so trustingly? Could he break any of her delicate bones and have her gaze at him with pain in those green eyes? If she’d been his Bride he wouldn’t have to hurt her, would be forbidden from ever harming her—his life given over to protecting her.

  He ran the backs of his fingers down her silken cheek, feeling her light, quick breaths warm on his stomach. He’d never truly felt the sting of envy in his life, had never envied other men except those who enjoyed peace in their land. He’d been born affluent, his family aristocratic, and fortune had followed him until the latter years of his mortality. To envy was to lack.

  So why did he want to destroy any vampire who might be blooded by her?

  Chapter Three

  Where the hell is my freaking warlord?

  Myst jerked upright, waking from the first real sleep she’d enjoyed since she’d been taken by the Horde four nights ago. She was alone in his bed, her clothes washed and folded at the foot. She smiled to realize he’d drawn a blanket over her.

  She needed to keep up with Wroth until her sisters broke her out of this pokey. She swore again that this was the last time she would be bait—and this time she meant it. Rumor was rife in the Lore, but tales of Ivo the Cruel making dark alliances proved worrisome enough for them to “reconnoiter,” or undertake Operation: Myst Gets Nabbed. Yet she’d learned little about Ivo for her troubles—the acting, the getting too close and then letting herself get caught, etc.—only that he was definitely planning something major.

  She chuckled—that is, until General Wroth punked his ass out of a castle.

  No, she hadn’t learned much about Ivo, but this Kristoff and the general would make good dish. What if this king really wanted to kill Demestriu and stop vampires from terrorizing everyone else? Was it possible that not all vampires had a predisposition toward sociopathic evil? What if the Valkyrie didn’t have to war with these Forbearers? However, it was doubtful. Her sisters wouldn’t discriminate between the two vampire factions. Kill first and then say, “Gosh, were you actually good? My duh!” Vampires as a species were simply too powerful to go unchecked.

  Demestriu and his vampire Horde had been brutal to all the Lore, but especially the Valkyrie. Fifty years ago, Furie, their queen, the strongest and fiercest of them all, had tried to assassinate him. She had never returned. Tales abounded that he’d chained Furie to the bottom of the sea to drown again and again only to have her dogged immortality surge her to life for more torment. When the covens finally found her and freed her, Furie would be as none other on earth, awash in rage. She wouldn’t check for vampire affiliation before she slaughtered and would expect her covens to follow her example.

  So, until Myst’s covens decided on their plan of action with this new power, she’d go about business as usual, which meant she needed to find Wroth. Before he’d come, Myst had been powerless here. She could handle weapons as well as most in the coven, though a sword and bow were not her strengths.

  Her preferred weapon was men. And now she had one—a big, scarred one with gorgeous eyes, and with skin that she wanted to lick until her tongue got tired—in her clutches.

  Or she’d had him.

  Manipulating them, playing them, making them believe she lived for them alone in order to have them do her bidding were her m.o. Furie had once asked her, “Why would you ever send a man to do a woman’s job?”

  Confused, Myst had answered, “Because I can.”

  The problem with Oblak’s vampires was that they had no appreciation for her whatsoever. At least Wroth liked to look at her.

  For them, the blood superseded all, and she could neither withhold it nor capitalize on it. Though the eyes of every creature in the Lore turned a certain species-related color with intense emotion, theirs were permanently, wholly red from sucking the life from their victims to the very marrow—not from merely drinking as these Forbearers feared. One kill put them in a downward spiral, because with the kill came the bloodlust riding them to do it again and again. Then the subsequent accumulation of their victim’s memories over the years drove many of them mad.

  Yet for the last four nights, Ivo and his men had never drunk from her, vacillating, examining her as she had yawned with boredom. She’d snapped to Ivo, “Get dental with me or don’t, but make a damned decision.” His eyes had slitted with menace, his red gaze a contrast to his pale face and shaven head, but in the end he’d avoided her blood, thinking her madness might be catching. Worked for her. In fact, she’d never in her life been bitten.

  She wondered what it would have been like to have Wroth take her neck last night when his pupils had flickered black with want. She was an awful person, she knew it, weak with perversion to even entertain these thoughts. Probably the only Valkyrie on earth who’d ever fantasized about a vampire. She frowned. No. There’d been one other….

  Myst tapped her chin, wondering if she should tell the Forbearers that they forwent for really no reason.

  Neh.

  Maybe if the scrumptious general continued to be nice to her she’d hint a little. She had heard of him back in the day. Of course they’d had a correspondent in the field following that war and she’d reported back that Wroth had been big and brave and deliciously ruthless to his enemies. Though the Overlord had lost in the end against a much larger force, he’d bought his people at least a decade of protection.

  Myst and her sisters had sat by the hearth, sighing over tales of his deeds as though ogling an issue of Tiger Beat. Myst remembered that she had felt loss at the news of his defeat because she’d known it meant the death of a great man. But he’d made a comeback, and, in person, he hadn’t disappointed. Except for the fact that he was now a mortal enemy—or rather, an immortal mortal enemy. Oh, and a leech.

  She tried the door to his room, just in case he’d decided to trust her, but it was locked—though not mystically reinforced like her cell was. She could easily have broken it down, but she didn’t have to be back in the dungeon until dawn. So she took her time dressing and piling her hair up in a way she thought he’d like, and still had time to root through all his things. Though she kept her eyes from the shiny jeweled cross, lest she get sticky-fingered with it.

  Digging through his clothes, she realized she liked how he dressed, his style modern but still aristocratic somehow. And she loved his scent and his careless but sexy hair. She’d rolled in the bed with one of his big cable-knit sweaters, her face buried in it, uncaring if he returned and found her like that. But he never showed, and instead two guards had arrived to escort her back down as per his orders.

  They wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  Well, shite, they knew something she didn’t. Wroth hadn’t kept her as she’d hoped. She was in trouble, and she suspected she knew why. If you do happen to have information, I can get it from you, he’d said.

  When they closed the cell door behind her, and she realized she was the only one in the dungeon, her fears were confirmed. The low beings here—those who made up the Saturday night creature-feature underbelly of the Lore—had been taken away, no doubt to be tortured and killed.

  She w
as the only girl left on the dance floor, but not for long, she knew, because none of the others would’ve talked. Of course, she’d threatened to peel them, and their families, for revealing any information, and there was a reason that “And may you never feel a Valkyrie’s breath at your back” was a drinking toast among the Lore. The vampires might come and take one’s village, but the Valkyrie would creep in, hiding under a bed to take one’s head from one’s pillow. Their word was law.

  Which left her…She looked up when she heard boots clicking over the stone.

  “Listen carefully, Myst,” Wroth said as a guard opened her cell before leaving them. “I’m going to ask you questions about your kind and about the different factions in the Lore. You must answer them or I’ve been ordered to get the information from you by force.”

  “Torture? Ordered? Can’t disobey Kristoff for me?”

  “Myst, you know I’d be dead if not for him. My brothers and friends as well. My life has not been my own since that night.”

  He was actually serious about this. But then Myst hadn’t been kidding either when she’d said that torture really pissed her off. She’d been giving Wroth preferential treatment because he was, like, a celebrity in martial circles, but now he’d taken a plunge into vampirism—and she needed to remember that. She’d push and cajole to the end but after that … Bring it, leech. Still bubbly friendly, she said, “Wroth, you could help me escape—”

  “I swore my fealty and I’ll see my order through. Answer or you’ll face the consequences,” he said. “I’ll begin with the most basic. What are you?”

  “Pussy Cat Doll?” she asked, immediately doing a slow headshake at his look. “Judge, jury and executioner.” He scowled. Her eyes lit up. “Transient! What? Really. No? Babe in Toyland?”