Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set

by Jennifer Ashley

  He stood before she could respond, dragged the chair back to the corner, and then walked to the bed.

  Eve looked over her shoulder at him. “You’re not sleeping on the floor?”

  Tor raised an eyebrow at that. “Why should either of us sleep in discomfort? You sleep one side and I’ll sleep the other.”

  She rose to her feet, turned to face him, and eyed the bed. If she pushed, he would probably sleep on the floor, but he really didn’t see why he should end up getting no rest at all just because she was feeling dainty all of a sudden. She had blatantly ogled him all evening, probably knew his body better than he did, and now she was going to grow a sense of propriety?

  Tor sat on the side of the bed nearest the window, swung his legs up onto it and laid back with his hands behind his head. He ignored the sting of the wounds on his back, crossed his legs at the ankle and stared at her, waiting for her to make her decision. If she wanted to take the floor, he would probably protest about that too. He had his reasons for wanting her close.

  She huffed, walked around the bed, and pulled the sheets back on her side. The second she was settled under the covers, she wriggled, butting up against him and then shuffled to the edge of the bed, leaving a vast gap between them.

  “You take up too much room,” she muttered into her pillow.

  Tor couldn’t quite see how she had drawn that conclusion. There was an ocean of space between their bodies and he had no problem with her occupying it rather than trying to sleep balanced on the very edge of the bed.

  “You can come closer. I’m not going to try anything,” he said and her emotions shifted, the flicker too brief for him to decipher and understand.

  He looked at her and she rolled away from him. Was she disappointed that he wasn’t going to try anything?

  Fool. He needed to stop thinking about her in that way. He needed to stop deluding himself. Nothing could happen. Nothing would happen. Where had all the barriers he had put back into place gone?

  Tor stared at her back, idly tracing the curve of her shoulder, the gentle slope towards her narrow waist, and the flare of her hips. She had stripped down the last barrier when she had shown him compassion. She kept tearing them down. Every time she did, he put up a flimsier barrier, one that was even easier to destroy.

  She huffed and wriggled again, punching her pillow this time, as if it was to blame for her discomfort and inability to sleep.

  He frowned, grabbed her arm and dragged her closer.

  She rolled to face him and slapped his hand away. “I don’t see why you can’t sleep on the floor.”

  Tor wasn’t paying attention to anything she said. The moment she had rolled towards him, she had captured all of his focus, shutting down every other sense besides touch.

  Her front pressed against his side, only the covers and her robe separating them. He could feel her breasts on his ribs and her thighs against his, and her soft breath as it skated across his bare chest.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  What had given him the idea that he could share a bed with her and not feel affected by it?

  It had been a stupid suggestion. He knew it now as his body burned, every inch of him boiling with need. It had been a terrible mistake to pull her against him. The feel of her curves plastered against his hard body maddened him, filling his head with scenarios he knew she would never consider or consent to. She would turn on him if he lowered his hand and grazed his fingers down her arm, or brushed them across her cheek. She would defend herself if she knew his thoughts.

  She would kick him out of bed if she knew how she fired him up.

  How he burned for her.

  Tor stifled a groan and shuffled to his right, until there was a modest gap between them again, one that would preserve his sanity and stop him from acting on his needs.

  She burrowed into the covers and he listened to her breathing, monitoring it for the sign that she had fallen asleep. It would take her years to overcome her instinct to breathe. Her body didn’t need the oxygen anymore. Most vampires forgot the need by the end of their first century and definitely by their second. He had forgotten it shortly after his turning. Like everything else, the instinct had been trained out of him. All vampires, regardless of age, forgot the need when sleeping.

  Her breathing stopped and he risked a glance at her.

  The region of his heart heated again, the strange warmth flowing outwards from the centre of his chest as he looked at her. She was beautiful in sleep, soft and delicate. Her dark hair cascaded over her neck, with some long wisps caressing her cheek. Her lips parted, revealing a sliver of straight white teeth. Her left hand clutched the pillow, her right tucked beneath it.

  Tor rolled to face her.

  Discomfort wasn’t the only reason he had refused to sleep on the floor. He still wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t a danger to herself. This close to her, he would be able to feel if she woke and left the bed. He could monitor her without her knowing it, ensuring she didn’t get any stupid ideas about walking into the sun.

  Based on what she had told him tonight, he didn’t think that she would do such a thing, at least not until she had her revenge, but he still couldn’t risk it.

  Tor lifted his right hand and carefully picked the strands of hair from her face, placing them with the ones cascading down her throat. His gaze flickered to it, seeing it beyond her hair, imagining the smooth unmarked column. His fangs itched. Saliva pooled in his mouth.

  He withdrew his hand and shoved it under the pillow, trapping it there as he fought with himself, struggling to tamp down the hunger to taste her blood, to sink his fangs into her throat and mark her.

  He smiled ruefully at his conflicting desires.

  He wanted to protect her, from herself and from the vampires after her.

  But he wasn’t sure he could protect her from himself.

  He wasn’t sure how much longer he could deny his burning need for her.

  CHAPTER 7

  Eve sat crouched on the Amsterdam rooftop beside Tor for the third night running, her gaze scanning the people moving along both sides of the canal below her. A light drizzle coated everything in a fine layer of moisture, including her. She huddled into her black jacket, wishing for warmer clothing. Tor didn’t seem to care about the chilly temperatures or the damp. When she had dared to complain, he had pointed out that as a vampire, she didn’t feel cold in the same way she had as a human. It was just her mind playing tricks on her.

  She didn’t believe that. She was cold.

  She turned her back on the street three storeys below, leaned against the decorative wall that ran across the top of the building, and rubbed her arms, needing a break. So far, there had been no sign of Adam or any vampire she recognised. There had been a few weaklings weaving among the constant flow of human traffic, but when Tor had gone down to track them, he had quickly come back saying that they were local. Apparently, Tor spoke Dutch. He also spoke Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and a slew of other languages.

  She had been learning about him little by little over the last few days, including more details about his time as a captive of the Nocens in Budapest.

  And that he didn’t speak Hungarian.

  When he had first told her about the ordeal he had been through, the horrific torture another vampire had inflicted upon him, she hadn’t been worried about his state of mind for her sake. She had been worried for his. No man deserved to go through so much pain and torment. The edge to his eyes at times and his behaviour told her that being held and starved weren’t the only horrible things to have happened to him.

  Eve looked at him, studying his profile as he crouched beside her, keeping vigil with his cold blue eyes scanning the streets below them and his hood up to conceal his pale hair, putting his face in shadow, hiding him from the eyes of those below him.

  His oversized sweatshirt concealed the weapons he wore strapped to his body too. Not just his gun, but a belt with flash grenades and other items,
weapons used to distance himself from his targets and make his kills easy ones.

  She had seen his scars, ragged marks that must have been made by holy wood or had been so gruesome that he hadn’t been able to heal the wound properly. He had been put through Hell and it had moulded him into the man before her—the silent, methodical, cold-blooded killer. It made everything she had been through pale in comparison. She had endured weeks of torture and neglect, and the constant threat of death and pain, of exiting this world before she was truly ready.

  He had endured years.

  She wanted to know how to be that strong.

  Eve turned back to the street and began scanning the crowds again as they idly walked up and down the street over the canal from her. The trees obscured them at times but her senses continued to track whoever she had set her sights on. The majority of the traffic were male and they loitered in front of the tall windows where the women gyrated behind the glass, no doubt salivating over them and considering spending some time in their company. She shook her head.

  “Perverts,” she muttered to herself but Tor glanced at her, his left eyebrow quirking. She looked across at him, unapologetic for her outburst and all the ones that had come before it over the past three nights.

  She hated all the men below her, all the ones who disappeared into buildings or were led away by women. How many of them had women of their own waiting for them somewhere? She hated them for betraying those innocent women.

  She hated Adam.

  Her focus sharpened and picked out the very male she had cursed in her mind. She was sure it was him, would know his gait and his spiky dark hair, and preferred clothing of blue jeans and a beaten up leather anywhere, but she needed to be sure before she alerted Tor.

  The man slithered through the crowd far off to her right, beyond the old church that towered ominously in the darkness, a beacon of good and hope in the midst of so much depravity. Even around the haphazard mash of shapes that made up the church, with its rows of dark stone side-chapels with huge arched stained glass windows and steep triangular roofs that lined the side of the church and formed a semi-circle around the back, there were more thin houses. These ones butted right up against the church, almost a part of the building, their large red windows displaying scantily clad women to the passing men.

  Eve breathed deep to attempt to catch the man’s scent as he drew closer from the other end of the street, past the church, the stores and eateries, and the harlots.

  It was faint, but she caught his scent. It was definitely Adam. If her heart had still beat, it would have been racing now. As it was, her hands shook and she had to fight to hold down the growl curling up her throat, wanting to break free and make her anger and anguish known to her calm, silent partner.

  Eve nudged Tor and pointed. “Adam is here.”

  Tor’s focus immediately locked on him and his ice-blue eyes narrowed, his mouth settling in a grim line.

  “He’s not alone,” Tor said, his voice scraping gravel, little more than a growl. “I’ve spotted at least three other weaklings roaming the streets, scoping for prey.”

  “They’re just hunting?” She kept her gaze locked on Adam, unwilling to let him slip her grasp.

  She wanted to leap off the roof, race across the canal and attack the bastard. Every instinct she had pressed her to do it. To go down and tear him to shreds. To introduce him to the pain she had suffered at his hands and pay it back tenfold. She clutched the carved stone in front of her instead, keeping herself pinned to the spot. Payback was going to have to wait. Tor had her drinking animal blood by the quart but she still wasn’t strong enough for an open confrontation with Adam or the others he was working with.

  “No.” Tor’s smooth deep voice anchored her, calming her rampant emotions, making them settle far quicker than she ever could have alone. “I get the feeling they’re not hunting human prey at least.”

  He jerked his chin towards a tall slim man dressed in a long black coat walking a few metres ahead of Adam along the canal. Her senses said that he wasn’t human. Another vampire. This one stronger than Adam.

  Her betrayer tailed the man through the crowd, keeping his distance but constantly drawing closer, and then he halted beneath a tree and allowed the man to move on ahead. Eve frowned. Why?

  The answer became apparent when Adam signalled and she spotted the other weakling vampires. They converged on the man, moving through the crowd like the predators they were, only the humans were safe tonight.

  Before the man could turn on them, Adam moved from behind his hiding place and brushed against his back and he stumbled. The men working with Adam swiftly closed in, grabbing the man as he collapsed and slinging his arms around their shoulders. Their raised voices rang out above the crowd, easily reaching her where she perched on the rooftop across the canal from them, a raucous mix of laughter and crude banter, and comments about their friend not being able to handle his booze or his women. Noise designed to make the humans think nothing of what they were seeing.

  Eve watched on in curiosity as they hauled the man off into the shadows close to the church, where the trees were taller and the crowds thinner.

  She lost track of them and turned to Tor, expecting him to make a move. He remained still, his blue eyes fixed on the church, a growing sense of menace flowing around him.

  Minutes dragged by and eventually Adam and the weaklings emerged and dispersed into the crowd. Eve watched Adam until he had moved out of sight at the opposite end of the street and then switched to her senses, keeping tabs on him until he had gone too far for her to track anymore.

  She looked back at the church. They must have all gone inside, but the other vampire hadn’t come out.

  Tor swiftly stood, caught her arm and pulled her onto her feet. “Stay close.”

  His hand locked around her wrist and he pulled her with him, leading her to the back of the building and down the metal fire escape. She fell into step beside him as they walked down a narrow alley between two buildings and came out onto the busy street that lined the canal.

  Tor shifted his grip, slipping his hand into hers, sending a hot shiver coursing up her arm and down her spine. Heat radiated from the point where they touched and only increased as he moved again, linking his fingers with hers, twining them together.

  She tried to keep her focus on the street as they walked along it, heading right towards the bridge that spanned the canal and would bring them to the church but it kept gravitating back to his face, kept studying him together with her senses in an attempt to grasp whether he felt anything like she did. Did he not feel the heat between them?

  Eve stared up at his profile, flashbacks of every day she had fallen asleep beside him only to wake with him gone from the bed careening through her mind, interspersed with glimpses of him looking at her, watching her when he thought she wasn’t watching him.

  She couldn’t understand him.

  Sometimes she could swear he desired her, that she hadn’t read the signals wrongly and this powerful male was as drawn to her as she was to him. Other times she swore he felt nothing behind his icy eyes and she had imagined every emotion she had detected in him, and all the desire and need that echoed within her.

  Someone bumped her as they crossed the bridge and she almost growled at them for interrupting her perusal of Tor and her confusing line of thought. The young man grinned at her, cocksure and charming, and possibly a little drunk judging by how he leaned precariously on the balustrade of the bridge for support. He said something to her in a language she didn’t recognise and stepped closer.

  Tor pulled her against him, angling his body at the same time so it created a barrier between her and the man. He tossed a dark, deadly glare at the man, a look that promised only pain, and snarled something in the same language.

  The man backed away, almost falling over the railing into the water in his haste to place some distance between them.

  Tor slung his arm around her shoulders, hauled her into his side,
and began walking with her again. She looked over her shoulder, her gaze tracking the man, concerned that he was going to end up falling into the canal and would drown if it happened.

  Tor’s grip on her shoulder tightened and he growled at her, a threat her instincts read clearly and she immediately responded to by facing forwards, tearing her eyes away from the human.

  Now she felt more confused than ever. The growl had been territorial. She had felt it deep in her gut as a command her vampire instincts understood, a warning not to look at other men.

  Did Tor desire her as strongly as she wanted him?

  She lifted her gaze back to his face and didn’t flinch away when he swung his glacial eyes her way, pinning her with a black look that revealed the depth of feeling that had been behind his growl. He looked over her head, towards the man, and crimson bled into the blue around the rim of his irises. His pale eyebrows dipped low above those beautiful dangerous eyes and his firm lips thinned as his jaw clenched.

  Eve could sense the darkness in him rising, the anger and the hunger for violence. She could sense the man’s eyes on her still, lingering on her body, threatening to set light to Tor’s fury and send him on a warpath that would end in bloodshed and death.

  She did the only thing she could to defuse the situation before it exploded.

  She turned into Tor and pressed her hands against his broad chest, her stomach somersaulting at the feel of his hard muscles flexing beneath her palms.

  His attention immediately dropped to her, his tempting sensual lips parting to reveal the tips of his fangs and his eyes clearing, the blue winning in its battle against the scarlet of their bloodline. His body was still beneath her touch, a perfect statue that she wanted to run her hands over, to explore with her fingers and mouth. She heated in response to the images flowing through her mind, taunting her and increasing her awareness of Tor.

  He swept his fingers down her arms, the light caress igniting a cascade of feelings, a sensory overload that wiped out her awareness of the world around them, leaving only him behind. She stared up into his eyes, her breathing coming quicker as his hands closed around her arms. The tightness of his grip thrilled her. It was powerful. Possessive.