“God almighty… will you stop? You’re making it worse.” She grabbed his hand and shoved it away.
He snarled at her and her heart leaped into her throat.
“I thought you were just going to let your body push the fragments out?” she snapped and ignored his answering growl. She felt the warning in that one. Her vampire instincts knew he had threatened her and meant to keep her away from him.
Eve didn’t give a damn.
She didn’t care that it wasn’t her place to help him, whatever that crap meant.
All she cared about was getting the pieces of metal out of his flesh in the least painful way and seeing he healed.
She shoved him in the shoulder. “Face forwards and shut up.”
Surprisingly, he did as ordered. Eve went to work on his back, feeling each wound and then using the tweezers to remove the metal if there was any embedded in it. She dropped each shard into a glass on the counter beside her and had filled the bottom of it before she had covered half of his back.
She couldn’t believe he had been willing to live with so many sharp pieces of metal in his skin.
“Tor?” she whispered as she carefully tugged another sliver free of his flesh and dropped it into the glass. “What did you mean by it isn’t my place? I get that you work alone… I understand what it’s like… but why refuse help?”
He lowered his head and braced his hands against the counter in front of him.
Eve worked lower and her gaze dropped to his bare backside and the twin delicious dimples above it. She dragged her eyes back up, trying to get control of herself. He had been kind enough to give her some privacy when she had been changing. It was rude of her to ogle him when he was accepting her help. She felt as if she was taking advantage of him somehow.
“You shouldn’t touch me.”
She frowned at those low spoken words. “Why not?”
He turned his head slightly towards her, enough that she could see he had his eyes closed, his eyebrows drawn down above them. His shoulders tensed as she pulled a long shard out of his side and she mumbled an apology.
“Because it isn’t right,” he said and she wished he would tell her straight and stop dancing around the reason.
She pulled another piece of metal out, her actions rougher this time, her irritation getting the better of her. He hissed as he sucked in a breath and blood trickled down his back.
“Sorry,” Eve said, immediately regretting what she had done. Guilt swept through her and on its heels came an instinct she fought hard to deny.
She would not lick the blood or seal the wound for him.
She grabbed some tissue and pressed it to the wound instead, and closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of all the blood on his back. She struggled against her instincts, desperate to shut out the voice that tempted her into running her tongue over Tor’s back, capturing every stray drop of his strong blood. She wanted it. She needed it.
She had to take it.
Tor wouldn’t argue.
He wouldn’t deny her. He would let her crawl up his magnificent body and sink her fangs into his throat, drinking deep of his blood. He would enjoy it.
Welcome it.
Eve turned away and shoved her palms against the cool wall tiles as her head spun, the sudden onslaught of dizziness threatening to sweep the ground out from under her and take her down to her knees.
Tor’s strong hand caught her upper arm. “Eve?”
The sound of her name in his deep accented voice sent heat rolling through her and caused her trembling to increase. Her knees turned to jelly, too weak to support her weight. His other hand clamped down on her side and he lifted her. The spinning in her head worsened and she gasped as her backside hit something hard beneath her.
“Eve?” Tor’s hands grasped her shoulders and he held her steady, and she wished she could find her voice to thank him for it. She clutched his biceps, holding herself upright on the counter of the vanity unit. “Eve?”
She nodded to let him know that she was beginning to feel better. The hunger was passing. She was winning.
She sucked in a deep breath and held it in her lungs, trying to shatter the final threads of the hunger’s hold on her.
“You need blood.” He released her arms.
Eve tightened her grip on him, fear bringing her claws out. She pressed them into his flesh, desperate for him to stay, unwilling to let him move. She couldn’t let him go for blood. She couldn’t. He wouldn’t understand.
“I’m fine.” She pushed the words out, trying to sound normal, sure that he hadn’t heard the wobble in her voice. “I think this whole evening has taken its toll on me.”
Eve risked opening her eyes and meeting his.
The ice glittering in them said he wanted to call her on her lie, that he knew she needed blood and hadn’t fed recently.
He stepped back instead and Eve quickly averted her gaze when his actions gave her a dazzling reminder that he was naked.
He raised his hand towards her face and she cursed him for it, knowing he had deliberately chosen the one he had bloodied when trying to remove a piece of shrapnel by himself. The room brightened, the sudden sharpness hurting her eyes as they changed to their true vampiric state, blazing crimson, the colour of her bloodline. Her stomach turned as her fangs dropped.
“You might be able to fool Oneiric with your lies… but you’re not fooling me. The next opportunity we get, you’re feeding.”
He turned away from her and the shower switched on, the water beating down on the plastic tray, filling the thick silence. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t feed. The very thought made her stomach rebel and bile rise, scalding her throat. She forced her fangs away and faced Tor.
“I haven’t finished yet.” She looked at all the marks on his back, each red slash calling to her, making her fangs itch to drop again and her mouth water.
“You’re done. I shouldn’t have let you touch me.” He stepped into the shower and grimaced as water sluiced over his skin. The lower half of the glass was obscured, hiding detail from her hungry eyes.
She dragged them up and settled them on his back. He carefully scrubbed the soot from his skin, taking his time around the wounds on his arms.
“Why can’t I touch you?” She threw her voice behind that question, wanting to be sure he heard it over the running water.
He paused with his hands in his blond hair, the wet strands tangled over his long fingers, filling her head with images of her hands like that. She pushed that vision out of her head. He obviously didn’t want her in that way. His eyes altered at times when he was looking at her, banked heat breaking through the ice for a heartbeat, but he had been naked around her and hadn’t shown a flicker of interest then, and something told her it was because he had drawn a line between them at some point. Since that point, his eyes hadn’t shown even a glimmer of heat.
Since the explosion and her admission that she had been betrayed and wanted revenge.
“I’m not worthy of it. You’re to be our Chosen Daughter.” He went back to washing his hair, those beautiful fingers working the shampoo into a lather, distracting her from what he had said.
Eve frowned. “A rank I don’t want.”
She knew what a Chosen Daughter was. She wanted no part of her bloodline and definitely didn’t want to help run the wretched thing.
“A rank you have, nonetheless.” Tor ducked his head under the water and turned around, facing towards her. He rinsed his hair, his eyes closed. The honed muscles of his torso shifted in a sensual symphony, luring and tempting her. He was beautiful like that. She could easily fool herself that he was human. Just a normal man. Not a killer.
Damn, she could fool herself into thinking that when he didn’t have his eyes closed. She could make herself think it when he was dispatching vampires.
He had been incredible.
Fluid. Graceful. Powerful. A predator.
Eve shook herself when he opened his eyes and they settled on her, a small frown making h
is eyebrows twitch. He had felt her staring and had probably detected her feelings. She shut them down and swore she would keep better control of them in the future. It hadn’t taken her long to realise how easily vampires could sense emotions in each other, especially when the other was broadcasting them loud and clear.
She looked away and scowled as her gaze hit the mirror behind her and she saw only the room reflected in it. Her vow to keep her emotions hidden shattered instantly, the reminder of what she had become cutting her to her heart. She quickly closed her eyes and clutched the edges of the counter.
Tor’s gaze lingered on her.
He was going to ask what was wrong and she was going to look foolish and weak again.
He stared at her for what felt like eternity and then went back to showering. Eve relaxed, her grip loosening, and risked a glance at him. He had turned his back again and she leisurely perused it, taking in every scar that marked a path across his broad shoulders, a trail she happily followed.
He did have a magnificent body, like nothing she had ever seen before, and the scars didn’t detract from its masculine beauty. They only added to it and the image she had of him, that of a lethal, fearsome predator, a cold killer to his bones. He was his bloodline’s name made flesh. Violent. Yet, it was a controlled and efficient violence. Methodical and calculated, expedient.
She had never met a vampire like him. If she had, she would have died and turned a long time before Adam’s betrayal.
That name sent a hot lance through her heart and she ground her molars against the pain that welled up, spreading through her veins like acid, eating away at her.
The glass door of the shower sliding open startled her and she tensed, her gaze leaping to Tor. His blue eyes were dark, ringed with crimson, and malice emanated from him again, a wave that swept over her and made her feel she should say something, that she needed to explain things to him so he could understand the emotions running rampant through her, emotions that awakened a feral, intoxicating response in him.
Tor wouldn’t settle for the surface details she had told Oneiric though. He would want to know everything and part of her wanted to tell him. She wanted to bare herself to him and show him the ugly, terrible things that haunted her.
Her deepest, darkest secrets.
CHAPTER 4
Eve managed to keep her eyes off Tor as he slung a white towel around his waist, giving him a moment of privacy and battling her feelings. She clutched the edge of the white vanity unit beneath her, her mind swirling, her gaze locked on the bright pale tiled wall opposite her in the bathroom. She wasn’t ready to tell him everything yet. She hadn’t told her father the full extent of what had happened to her. She hadn’t told anyone.
What was it about Tor that made her want to collapse and give up, to say the things she had held close to her chest for all these years and pour out her pain?
Tor moved closer, his eyes boring into her. He said nothing and she was grateful for it. She knew he wanted answers and she needed to tell him about what had happened to her. For once, she didn’t fear putting voice to what she had gone through, at least the edited version anyway.
He scrubbed a towel over his blond hair, tousling the pale lengths, his ice-blue eyes locked on her face and his air that of a man willing to wait however long it took for her to speak. She supposed patience was a virtue when you were an assassin. She had always been patient. She had never rushed into anything. It had probably saved her life countless times.
It was blind faith that had killed her.
Tor walked into the cream-coloured bedroom of their hotel room and she studied him, using her perusal to quieten her turbulent thoughts. Did he take everything in his stride, always calm and unflinching?
He had dealt with the vampires with ease, as if he had calculated all the moves he had to make ahead of time and had simply allowed them to play out exactly as planned. When the jet had exploded, he had calmly swept her into the shelter of his arms and carried her to safety. She had stood there like a fool, unable to react to the deadly wave of fire and debris surging towards her.
Tor moved around the room, gathering his wet clothes and hers, dumping them on a wooden chair in the corner off to her left, near the window there. He drew the pale curtains, shutting out the night, and smoothed them to ensure no crack remained where light could enter, a compulsive action that drew a small smile from her. His body shifted enticingly with each move he made, threatening to wreck her concentration. He was a wall of strength, but not just in a physical way. Not to her. It went deeper than that. He was solid and steady, always calm and quiet.
It was a strange comfort to her. Her life had been a whirlwind before she had met him, everything bombarding her, threatening to pull her under even when she fought for calm and struggled for control. She hadn’t realised it until this moment, when she sat watching him in silence, studying the way he moved and behaved, and his constant feelings.
They never shifted. Not up nor down. No spikes like she felt. No uncontrollable moments when her emotions raged and she couldn’t shut them down.
Tor was unwavering, constant, dependable.
She had been like that once, before waking as a vampire. She had been calm and in control, strong and clear-headed, able to take a moment to study her surroundings or her foes, to calculate every outcome of every possible move.
Memories surged, breaking to the surface of her mind, dark and twisted things she had fought to confine to her nightmares. She wasn’t a hunter anymore. She was a vampire now, and as a vampire she had witnessed the true depth of their evil, the most terrible extent of their darkness. They were vile, despicable, far worse than she had ever thought them as a hunter.
But not Tor.
He was nothing like the vampires who had tortured and tormented her, who wanted to kill her before she could satisfy her dark craving for vengeance and kill Adam, the hunter who had become one of them.
Tor’s solidity and steadiness brought her the calm she had been seeking without ever knowing it. Around him, she felt different, in control of her destiny again and able to see that not all vampires were like those who killed her, who had made her suffer when she had been lost and confused, thrown into a devastating tailspin by waking from death as a vampire.
“Eve?” Tor’s deep voice splintered her thoughts and she found him standing before her, his blue gaze steady on hers. “Did you hear me?”
Eve shook her head.
The corners of his firm lips twitched. What would he look like if he smiled? The lack of lines beside his mouth said it didn’t happen often and she found herself trying to picture it, to imagine how this dangerous, dark angel would look.
He frowned, shattering the picture before she had completed it. “Are you feeling ill again?”
“No.” She wasn’t even sure why he would think that. Because she had been lost to her memories or because she had been staring hard at him? Maybe he wasn’t used to women staring at him.
Eve almost laughed at that. With his face and his sensuality, deadliness and grace of a great jungle cat, he was anything but a monk. She didn’t doubt that he partnered a passion for hunting and killing with a passion for pleasure. Every hunter like him at Section Seven had been like that. Fresh from a kill, high on the adrenaline, they had hit the late nightclubs and slaked themselves on women, usually more than one.
She had even known a few female hunters who had acted the same way.
Not her though. She had used that high, that burst of adrenaline, to fuel her next hunt and kill.
“I asked what happened to you,” he stated, his tone flat and devoid of emotion. If he was annoyed with her because she hadn’t heard him the first time, she would never know it.
Suddenly, she didn’t feel ready to speak to him about everything after all. She drew her knees up, arranging her white towel robe so it covered her, and leaned her back against the mirror, wrapping her arms around her legs at the same time.
His expression softened, losing
the hard edge for a moment, a brief span of time that could have fooled her into thinking he cared about her if she hadn’t already convinced herself that she was nothing but a mission.
A package.
She still wasn’t completely certain that he intended to help her track down Adam and kill him. He had said she would have her revenge, and she had believed him at the time, but looking back, she couldn’t help wondering whether he had just said whatever it had taken to get her out of her catatonic state and on the move with him. Or worse, he had used it as a chance to pry into her heart and her head, to uncover things about her that he could pass on to Lilith and Lincoln, and others in her family, and they could use against her.
That felt almost like a betrayal, coming too close to what another man had done to her, turning her life into a nightmare.
Eve reminded herself that Oneiric had probably already passed on the details she had given him to her sister and Lincoln, and possibly even Tor knew some of them.
Maybe they were all out to betray her.
She shut out that dark voice and the insidious things it whispered to her, refusing to believe it. Lilith would never betray her, and neither would Oneiric. She hadn’t known him long, but she knew he had her best interests at heart, even if that went against what she wanted for herself.
“I told you. Someone betrayed me. The jet was his work.”
Tor’s pale eyebrows met above his steely gaze. “Earlier you said you thought it might be this man who betrayed you. Now you seem sure it was.”
She nodded and brushed her tangled brown hair behind her ears. “Let’s just say I’m thinking more clearly now. It was him. He did have a fondness for blowing things up.”
The thought that he had wanted to blow her up sent a pang through her heart though. He didn’t even have the decency to do this thing face to face, looking her in the eye while he killed her, and giving her a chance to be the one to kill him. Bastard.
“I need more details than that if you want my help, Eve.” There was a note of warning in her name, a harshness that she didn’t like.
He was ordering her compliance.
Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set Page 104