Secret Unleashed sm-6

by Sierra Dean

  This Holden was as much an animal as the beast living inside me. He was undone, and I loved him all the more for it. His usually slicked-back hair had fallen forward, sweeping over his forehead and half-hiding his wild eyes from me. When he grinned, the flash of fang was as much a sign of his arousal as it was a gesture from a predator used to mock its prey. He was telling me—in no uncertain terms—he meant to keep me, and I wouldn’t get away.

  I arched my hips up to meet him, craving contact with something more than his fingers. His hand crept higher on my neck until he cradled my chin. Needing to taste some part of him but unable to rise up and go after what I wanted, I licked his thumb. He slipped the digit into my mouth, and I sucked hard, my fang nicking the skin, his blood pooling to the surface.

  It wasn’t a real bite, just a scratch of teeth, but the taste of his blood in my mouth was like getting a hit off the most addictive drug possible. I didn’t want to believe I was as much a vampire as I was, but the way his blood drove me wild left little room to pretend. I sucked harder, trying to get as much from him as I could, but he pulled his hand back, locking it around my throat again.

  “Bad girl.”

  “Stop teasing and do something about it, then.”

  His brow arched. “Was that a challenge, darling? I do love a challenge.”

  God, his voice. When he went back to speaking normally after this was all through, I would miss this new voice. How had I known him so long and only heard it now? It hardly seemed fair he’d been denying me that part of himself.

  “I’ll let you bite when I’m good and ready. Understood?” He gave my head a little shake. “Understood?”

  “Yes,” I rasped. But I wanted to bite him again and again and again.

  “Now tell me what you want me to do to you.”

  He eased up on my throat enough I could speak, and I said, “I want you inside me, and I want you to talk to me the entire time. Then I want you to let me bite you.”

  He stopped stroking me and pushed his pajama bottoms down with one hand, unleashing the eager erection I’d been feeling pressed between my legs. “As you wish.”

  As he thrust into me with a smooth arch of his hips, I was barely able to cry out. He used his free hand and the muscular strength of his thighs to part my legs wide for him, but once he was inside me, I wrapped myself around his waist, ankles locking behind his back. If he was going to keep me held prisoner, I would do the same to him.

  Continuing to hold me by the neck, he lowered himself onto me so his chest was pressed flush with mine. He found my ear with his mouth, nipping at the lobe, and started to whisper.

  “I remember when I first met you, irritating girl you were, all skinny limbs and hair. I thought to myself, this girl is going to die before she sees her eighteenth birthday. And then I saw you kill. I saw a fire in you unlike anything I’d ever witnessed, and I knew I’d been wrong. I knew you were a fighter, and that was the first time I understood what kind of a woman you could be.” With him close and his voice so different, it was like a stranger saying those words. Holden’s words in another man’s voice. Something about that was both off-putting and incredibly sexy.

  “More,” I commanded.

  His thrusts were gentle, one hand on my throat, the other on my waist, pulling me to meet each pump, then pushing me down as he withdrew, so each time he came into me I felt the full length of him.

  “You grew up, and you became beautiful. So goddamn beautiful. Every day I had to look at you it hurt because I was never supposed to have you. I was afraid of you because of your pulse and your stupid heartbeat. Whenever you breathed it reminded me I could lose you, and the longer I knew you, I understood I couldn’t lose you. I can’t.”

  He licked the shell of my ear, and his thrusts became more vigorous. I gasped each time he filled me, the pleasure bordering on pain. His neck was close, but the angle he held me at made it impossible for me to reach him. Like a sexual Tantalus, I was inches from what I most desired but forbidden from drinking my fill.

  Holden continued to speak, ignoring the way I scratched at his back and shoulders, burying himself into me with such force we both trembled.

  “I’ve wanted you for so long. And I’ve watched you give your love to other men. I tried to tell myself it was okay, it was for the best because I loved you enough to let you have your mortal entanglements. I watched you with that stupid human boy who broke your heart, and it took everything in me not to rip him limb from limb when he left you.” It was a poor choice of words on his part, considering what had ultimately become of my ex, Gabriel, but I pushed the thought from my mind, focusing on Holden’s voice and the deliberate, commanding way he filled my body.

  “I watched those dogs circle, watched how they treated you like a toy they could share. No one has ever been good enough for you. No one has loved you the way I’ve loved you.” He growled into my ear as if his love were a threat, and the way he spoke it almost was, but I wanted this, I wanted to hear it all.

  He released my neck so suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do at first. “I will have you, Secret. If it takes me the rest of my life to show you I’m the one you should be with, so be it. But I will prove it to you.”

  He bit me, burrowing his fangs into the tender, bruised tissue of my throat. I yelped, but not from pain. The perfect agony of his bite punctuated his escalating thrusts. When I bit him back, we both came hard, the orgasm spilling over us before the first drop of his blood ever touched my tongue.

  I drank from him, and he from me, until all my darkness had been chased away and I let myself come apart, experiencing the aftershock like an explosion. It felt as if our bodies might be melting together, fused for all time. With his blood in me and mine in him, I could feel my own pulse as he must, heard my breath the way he could. I wondered if he was experiencing himself through me, learning how his closeness brought me peace as much as it did passion.

  I wrapped my arms around his back, licking the wound at his neck to speed the healing.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. Though there was so much more I wanted to say, I didn’t think there was a single human language that could tell him what he’d done for me. He’d saved me.

  “I love you too,” was his reply.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Maxime wasn’t the best at keeping a straight face. His smirk when Holden and I emerged from our bedroom spoke volumes about how much he’d heard. At least he had the common sense not to make any cute remarks. I don’t think I could have handled that.

  “You guys ready to go?”

  As a kindness to Holden I hadn’t worn the Yankees shirt, even if it was the most comfortable thing I had in my current possession. It didn’t seem right to wear something that smelled like Desmond after having mind-altering sex with Holden.

  Which left the leather bustier as the next best option for a top. There was no way I was wearing any of the skirts Holden had packed, so I was back in the leather pants and my knee-high boots. With the leather jacket thrown on, I looked like a dominatrix for a biker gang. The jacket wasn’t optional, though. I needed to wear it to cover my gun holster.

  Since we’d be driving to the mansion, I’d insisted on bringing my sword, even though I’d need to leave it in the car. Between a silver knife in my boot, two 9mm handguns, seven spare clips—the only reason I’d ever carry a purse—and a magic fae katana, I felt somewhat protected. I hadn’t fully shaken off the tension from the nightmare. Once I’d admitted I couldn’t lie in bed with Holden for the rest of my life, the reality of the evening ahead had sunk in.

  Yesterday this had seemed like a basic search mission. Go to a haunted mansion, try a key in a few doors and maybe find a clue about my father’s whereabouts.

  Now it didn’t feel nearly as simple. If I had been in my father’s dream—which seemed more and more likely—this was no longer about finding a missing object. I had to find him and this doctor he’d spoken about, before it was too late. And something told me I didn’t have a lo
t of time left.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” I said. “Moonlight’s burning.” I was trying to make my tone light and cheery, but I didn’t have it in me to force emotions I wasn’t feeling. Holden—who had gotten to see the worst of it—placed a hand between my shoulders and rubbed up and down, giving me his support without saying a word.

  According to Google Maps it was supposed to take about an hour to drive from downtown San Francisco to San Jose. Google Maps, as it turned out, was a filthy liar whose mother was a hamster and whose father smelled of elderberries. Close to two hours after we’d left our hotel, we pulled into the parking lot of the Winchester Mystery House. Between Google Maps, our GPS and Holden’s backseat driving, I was about ready to turn the car west and drive us all straight into the ocean. Adding insult to injury was the fact the parking lot was so crammed full of cars it took me an extra ten minutes to find parking.

  I hadn’t expected moonlight tours through an old mansion to be so popular. Thankfully we’d given ourselves plenty of extra time for the trip, and had prepurchased our tickets online. That spark of genius belonged to Maxime, and seeing the snakelike line of tourists waiting at the ticket kiosk, I was glad I’d listened to him.

  I’d have been a lot happier to bypass the tour altogether and just break into the place, but Maxime had shot my idea down in no time. Apparently the house was such a maze, many tourists a day would get lost in it, requiring retrieval. If we went in on our own without a tour guide to bring us to the Tiffany window, we’d end up spending hours going around in circles to find it. I had to admit once he’d explained it, it made more sense to do this the human way.

  We queued up in the prepaid ticket line behind a family from Florida. I knew they were from Florida because they all wore identical yellow T-shirts that proclaimed, Wilson Family Vacation Florida to California (or Bust!) in giant black letters on the back.

  “Man alive, what a line,” the mother said, laughing at herself like our wait time was hilarious. “Just lines everywhere.”

  “Mmm,” I replied. I didn’t want to engage her in discussion. If we were going into the house to steal something, I didn’t want to stick out in anyone’s memory.

  “Where y’all from?” Evidently I was wearing my Please talk to me hat today. I thought I’d burned that one.

  “New York,” I said.

  “Ohhhhh, New York. New York City? The Big Apple! City that never sleeps. Mad-hattan!” Again she laughed at herself as though any of what she’d said had been a joke. If she was angling for a prize because she knew eight thousand nicknames for the city I lived in, she’d be waiting for a while.

  “Yup, that’s the one.”

  Undeterred by my obvious disinterest in our conversation, she turned around to look at me. She had a sweet face, round cheeks and a short bobbed haircut that screamed mom. In her mid- or late-thirties, she wore the roundness of someone who no longer tried to be skinny but clearly stayed somewhat fit chasing the three rugrats at her side.

  “Oh my, you look so young to have a son.” She gave Maxime a once-over.

  We’d debated how best to sell Max to humans who might ask. I was twenty-three, but thanks to the blessings of my genetic makeup, I appeared younger. Young enough I’d still be getting ID’d at bars in ten years, and certainly too young to have a thirteen-year-old son.

  “Younger brother,” I explained.

  Her concerned expression faded. She gave Holden a cursory glance, and at first I thought she was going to ask what role he played in our weird family, but she got distracted by her cursory inspection and ended up not saying anything at all about him.

  “Very nice of you to bring him out here.” Her cheeks were flushed red, and she looked from Holden to Maxime. “Do you do a lot with your sister?”

  My God this woman was chatty.

  “I go where she goes,” he said with a shrug, playing the part of a bored teenage boy to a T. Instead of meeting her gaze and compelling her to leave us alone, he stared at his shoes and shut down any further questions she might ask him.

  “Have you been—?”

  “Oh good, the line is moving.” Next time, I didn’t care how lost we got, I was going to break in instead of mingling with human tourists. They talked too much. How could people talk this much to absolute strangers? What about me invited conversation? I didn’t think I had a naturally sweet face—and had been told as much on a number of occasions—so why me?

  We were ushered into a courtyard where I intentionally angled my “family” away from hers.

  “Secret made a new friend,” Holden teased.

  “Shhh, you’ll make her come over here. That’s the last thing we need. If Ma Florida latches on to us, we’ll never be able to break away from the tour.”

  That quieted him down.

  Thankfully my line buddy had two sons who were desperate to annoy the ever-loving bejesus out of our poor tour guide. We were handed flashlights, and most of the sensible adults tested them once to be sure they worked, then left them off until the tour began. The Wilson boys from Florida, though, managed to have a full-on lightsaber battle with theirs, complete with poorly conceived sound effects.

  Once their mother relieved them of the flashlights, they started in on a barrage of questions, only some of which related to the house.

  I wasn’t a big fan of kids, and these ones were the type so annoying they might convince non-parents never to conceive, but they were a blessing in disguise. If our guide was busy dealing with their nattering for the whole tour, we might get more time before they realized we were missing.

  Point one for the Wilson family from Florida.

  The tour commenced, and the guide—a chubby, curly-haired kid who was about seventeen—began his monotone, memorized speech about the house’s history. Since we were on the moonlight tour, I gathered we’d be given a few spooky bonus facts along the way, but in the initial few rooms we relearned all the stuff I’d read on the website.

  The guide led us into an old storage room where all the guests wedged in together to hear him tell us about the cost of carpeting and how many different kinds of wood were ordered to make the parquet floors. The back wall of the room was floor-to-ceiling glass, and behind it were several backlit Tiffany windows.

  I caught Maxime’s attention and jutted my chin towards them, wondering if the window we were looking for might have been moved among them. I didn’t see it, but I wasn’t as familiar with it as the young vampire was. He might be able to see something I was missing.

  He shook his head.

  The group followed our guide up a set of switchback stairs—the Wilson boys stomping loudly and making ghost noises as they went—and we remained towards the back, letting everyone else get ahead of us.

  The house was just as bizarre as I’d imagined from Maxime’s history lesson, but seeing it in person made me a little sad. It lacked a lot of the color and polish I’d seen in the older pictures. Maybe it was because I was seeing it at night, but I felt as if some of what made the house special had slipped away over the years.

  For a house to have life, someone needed to live in it. And though hundreds of people visited the Winchester Mansion daily, everything had the gray, dismal feeling of abandonment. No one lived here, no one loved the place the way only a homeowner can. I was sad for the house, and sad for Sarah Winchester that her legacy was these depressing walls and weird corridors.

  In one of the upper parlors a vignette had been staged with actors portraying Winchester and her psychic. They’d gone overboard on the clichés, dressing the psychic in full gypsy gear with giant hoop earrings and a glowing crystal ball. Her long fingernails clicked on the glass, making the small bulb inside vibrate. The employee they had playing Sarah Winchester wore a terrible wig and gasped at everything the gypsy said.

  In the back of the room, beyond a velvet rope meant to keep guests out, I saw a weak blue-white light. It drifted, barely visible beyond the old glass doors, and I couldn’t make out a face. I knew
a ghost when I saw one, and there was no mistaking that glow. It seemed to be watching the playacting with the same attention as the tour guests were. When the show was over, the light bobbed slightly, then drifted out of sight.

  In a house this old any number of spirits could have gathered, but I had my suspicions I was seeing the former owner herself.

  Poor Sarah. In life she’d wanted so badly to avoid being haunted she’d moved here to build this place. Now she was forced to roam the halls of her unfinished monstrosity forever.

  We followed slowly, not wanting the acting employees to notice us lagging behind. They were an element we hadn’t considered, and I had to hope they’d go back the way we’d come in, rather than trailing after the tour.

  Now that we were on the second floor my heart had begun to beat quicker. Every door teased me because it wasn’t the door in my dream. I wasn’t sure that door existed, but since it was the only clue I had to go on, I was going to follow my gut.

  “And here we have the most expensive window and the least expensive window in the house installed side by side.” The guide’s delivery suggested this was meant to be a punch line, but I’d missed the joke if there had been one. The group’s forced laughter told me I hadn’t missed anything.

  We were wedged into a corridor near a flight of stairs, our guide leaning against the wooden balustrade. He told us about how much the Winchester fortune had been worth, and how much Sarah had siphoned into the house on a weekly basis.

  “The window to my right…” he pointed to his left, “…cost a thousand dollars at the time of purchase. For perspective, that was about the same amount Sarah earned in a week from her husband’s fortune. It was designed by Charles Tiffany for Sarah, in the hope he’d created the most beautiful stained-glass window to ever be touched by the sun.” Whoever wrote their speeches had a flair for the dramatic. “Unfortunately, when the window was installed, it was placed on this interior wall and has tragically never seen the light of day. Now if you’ll follow me…”