by Maren Smith
As if this were all my fault.
“Where else have you been and to whom exactly have you been asking your little questions?” he demands.
I shake my head, utterly baffled. “What questions?”
A pulse of muscle leaps along his jaw. But up the very long street, a sudden splash of flashing red and blue lights draw his gaze from me and, with mild irritation blossoming into open annoyance, he grabs my arm and drags us both to our feet.
“What are you—” I break off with a gasp when he touches my side, peeling back the torn edges of my dress to get a closer look at my aching side.
“It’s just a graze,” he decides, but he hasn’t let go of my arm. In fact, before I can do more than gasp again, he bends, grabs the backs of my thighs and suddenly I’m over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” I shriek, grabbing at the back of his coat for balance when my feet completely leave the ground.
“Kicking myself,” he answers dryly. “Not only can I not recover what’s already been erased, but Bugattis only come with a leather interior. Try not to bleed all over my seats.”
“What?”
He tsks. Catching my chin in his surprisingly gentle hand, he forces me to look at him. “Sleep,” he commands.
And just that fast, my consciousness is sucked into darkness.
Chapter 5
Merris
I don’t know how fast we’re going. All I know is I’m coming out of what feels like a drug-induced haze. My eyes are open. They have been for a while. I’m sitting in the passenger seat of—bar none—the fanciest sports car I’ve ever seen, much less been in. We are very low to the road. I feel like I’m sitting on it, but while everything outside the window is blurring past us—and, I realize, has been for quite some time now—the ride is so smooth that it seems like we’re not moving at all.
My eyes burn, so dry that it stings just to blink. Holding them closed a moment, I roll my weary head the other direction and drink in the sight of the handsome stranger beside me. Tall and lean, well-dressed. He’s wearing the caliber of clothing one would expect from someone who drives a car like this. His seat is also pushed all the way back to accommodate the length of his very long legs.
“You’re awake,” he notices, just a bit too brightly.
I haven’t felt this sluggish since coming out from under the anesthesia of my appendectomy back when I was nine. I try to speak, but all I manage is a hum.
“I don’t suppose you remember who I am?”
Of course, I do. He’s the man who chased me through the nightclub, only to save my life when the shooting started out on the street. He got shot… I think. So did I. I try to look down at myself, but my heavy head drops all the way onto my chest and I almost go to sleep. I flop back against the headrest again, and struggle to keep my eyes open.
He tsks. “My pardon, darling. You may wake up now.”
I draw a deep breath, the heaviness in my body seeming to lighten almost immediately. Still, my head is fuzzy and finding a coherent thought is exhausting. “We… we need to go to the hospital,” I mumble.
“We’ll be fine,” he soothes me. “You were only grazed.”
With every breath I draw, the haze in my head is clearing, and I’m starting to remember a little bit more. “Did I bleed all over your prized Corinthian leather?”
Casting me a side-eyed smile, he shifts into a higher gear to beat the traffic light before it could flash from yellow to red. “Gaucho, actually, although they tell me the stitching is extravagant. And, no, not that I can tell. If you have, I’m sure the car will survive.” Taking one hand off the wheel, he holds it out to me. “Aleron, my darling Merris. I know you don’t remember this, but we are coming to be on quite friendly terms.”
Reflexive manners dictate I take his hand, but although habit tries to move me, my arm can’t. I look down, puzzled, at the seatbelt. Apparently, he buckled me in, arms, hands, hips and all.
“Ah,” he said, putting his hand back on the wheel. “Well, I suppose that’s my fault, although I’m not going to apologize. Safety first, darling. You are far too fragile as it is.”
“I’m not fragile.” It takes effort, but I pry my arms out from under the shoulder and waist straps.
“Compared to me, you are.”
Where are we? I look back out the window, watching the blurring scenery as we exit the interstate and head northeast. I don’t know when exactly we left downtown Tucson behind us, but we are well out of the city center, heading toward Oro Valley, where cheaper housing gives way to gated communities, which also give way to even better housing. By the time we get to the foothills, they can’t even be called houses anymore. These are mansions—adobe spackled walls and red clay tiled roofs, situated on giant tracks of land, carefully landscaped in rock lawns, palo verde trees and Arizona ash, and a colorful variety of desert grass and cactus plants.
“You do not live out here,” I say as he turns up the winding road into a spacious subdivision, the houses of which all had swimming pools bigger than my apartment. “What are you, a movie star?”
He’s amused. “Not quite. Although I feel like one tonight. I had to drive around aimlessly for some time after leaving the club. For a while, someone was following us.”
“Following?” I stutter, baffled. “Why? Who?”
“Those are the million-dollar questions, aren’t they?”
We pass two houses, one on his side of this long, curving road, and one on mine. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving or how long I’ve been sleeping, but it’s no longer the middle of the night. The horizon beyond the house I’m staring at, with the shadows of its desert willows like hunched old men standing in the yard, is plum colored. It can’t possibly be dawn already, can it?
He turns into the driveway of the next house, and up we wind that way now, leaving the dim garden lights of the fancy properties behind for an unlit stretch of yard that I can’t see much of, but what I can see is overrun with cactus.
“Why aren’t we going to the hospital again?” I ask, as the house comes into view.
“Because gunshots mean questions,” he says, easing up to the garage bay doors.
“We shouldn’t have run from the police.”
“Police,” he says wryly, “mean even more questions and quite possibly over a long period of time. And frankly, I don’t have it. Besides, you’re going to be fine. Your graze is barely more than a scratch. I promise. I’ll take care of it.”
Why am I not reassured? Why am I growing more uneasy by the second? All I can think about is home, how far away Tucson is, and in which direction it lies, just in case I should need to start walking. I’m painfully aware that, should I need to call a cab, I don’t know where I am or how to direct it to me.
Oh shit, I startle. My phone.
I pat myself down, but I don’t feel it slipped down the front of my dress, and I don’t see my purse either. Not tucked around the seat or on the floor at my feet. “Where’s my purse?”
“There was no purse on the ground when I picked you up. Did you leave it in the club?”
Letting my head drop against the seat, I groan. “Oh my God, no. Shit. Look, I can’t be here. I have to go home. Like, I mean right now. I have got to go home.”
He looks at me, then tsks again, and just as he pauses in front of a garage door which, as if having already sensed him, is rolling open, he turns to face me. “Look at me, Merris.”
I do, but inside, I’m already formulating excuses for whatever reason he’s going to give me for why I should stay. All except for the one he gives me.
“You no longer need to go home.”
The budding anxiousness inside me suddenly eases as a dark heaviness creeps over my thoughts, banishing out everything except the watery echo of his words floating out into every recess of my mind.
And then, as if the world suddenly just snapped its fingers, the heaviness is gone now too.
“Trust me,” he says, as if my going home with strange men is a per
fectly normal occurrence. “You are far safer here than anywhere else I can think of. I’ll take you inside, play doctor to your scratch, give you a comfy bed on which to sleep, in a room you can lock up tighter than Fort Knox. I will even provide you with a phone and a number so you can call Club Toxic and see if someone there found your purse. Now, are there any other issues you can think of? I really haven’t got all morning.”
“You got shot,” I remind him. “Who’s going to dress your wounds?”
By now, the garage door is fully open and waiting for us to drive inside.
He regards me with that slight quirk of a smile, but more calculation in his dark eyes than any real amusement. “I’ll be fine. It wasn’t serious and doesn’t even hurt. Here.” He holds his hand up, flat and steady for me to examine. “See? Not even the slightest tremor. Were I hurt, at the very least I’d be shaking, right?”
As if sensing him, the house is waking up. One by one, the lights are winking on, casting its much brighter illumination into the car. His hand is steady as a rock. I’m confused. I could have sworn I felt three distinct jolts of impact as he was shot while trying to protect me.
But I hadn’t actually seen it happen. I hadn’t seen the wounds either, but bullet wounds are bullet wounds, my head is telling me. But then he smiles and lowers his hand onto the gear shift.
“Let’s go inside,” he says, and so despite my misgivings, that’s what we do.
This isn’t a house, it’s a mansion. In the car, I’d been too focused on him to pay attention to anything else. But as he helps me from the passenger seat, offering me the steady support of his arm as I gasp and groan and hug my burning side, once the pain has subsided enough for me to notice anything beyond it, all I can do is stare. This place is huge—and I’m still only in the garage.
The man has eleven cars, all of them sportscars but one—the oldest of them being a vehicle that is more buggy than automobile, with the top folded down and the steering wheel crowning a very skinny pole that juts up in the middle of a very narrow seat meant for two.
“Mm,” he hums, noting my stare. “Mademoiselle has a discerning eye.”
“Does that even run?”
“Only when I choose to drive it.” He offers his hand. “Boys and their toys.”
“You have some seriously expensive toys.” I stare in awe as we pass a midnight-blue vintage Porsche, parked beside a stunningly modern silver and black Lotus Exige.
The expense did not stop in the garage. He doesn’t live in a house, he lives in a museum. It’s cool and quiet, and in every corner, something catches the eye. History and luxury bleed together in the most haphazard example of how someone with more money than sense might live. The interior is modern, with high vaulted ceilings lined with massive wood beams and rock floors polished to a watery shine. The entire front of the house is windows and the furniture is utilitarian and sparse. A Romanesque bust sits upon a Victorian marble top side table where Aleron deposits his wallet, keys and phone. The bust has a Diamondbacks ballcap on its head, and in a wall-recessed glass case directly above it, is a collection of hats throughout history the likes of which I could only identify because what’s a girl who stays at home to do except watch a lot of movies?
I see a Sherlock Holmes’ hat, a Bowler hat, Zorro’s hat, tricorns, World War 1 and 2 military officer caps, a gas mask, three musketeers black-felt hat, complete with red sash and a somewhat worn-looking plume, and a handful of ballcaps all stacked together with the top one sporting a drawing of a hot dog and the words, “That’s Mr. Hot Dog to you.”
“The bathroom is this way,” he says, and I follow him across the living room, past what looks to be an honest-to-God Van Gogh, a wall display of watches every bit as hodge-podge as the hat collection, and down a short hallway. He takes the first door and the bathroom is damn near cavernous. It’s huge, with dual square stone sinks and faucets made to look like old yard pumps. The inset whirlpool tub is big enough for six people. The toilet has its own private room. The shower does not—clear glass walls hide nothing of the gray-stone interior with its rain-forest shower head that hits me with a vision the minute I lay eyes on it. It’s so strong and real that I can all but feel the water droplets running off my body as I lift my face into the spray and run my hands through my long, brown hair, rinsing out the last of the silky creamer just as Aleron steps up behind me. The heat of the water flushes his skin, banishing back the paleness as he takes my wrists, pulling me back into his embrace even as he places my hands high up on the wall before me.
“Bound by my will,” he whispers, nipping at the lobe of my ear. I have no idea what that means, but I know what his next command does even as the heady tip of his cock caresses down the crack of my ass, slipping into the shadowy patch underneath, seeking entrance. “Tilt your hips back. Shall I take what is mine?”
“Yes,” my vision self whispers.
“Merris?”
I jump, snapping back to the here and now with the phantom pressure of his cock still pushing to enter me as I snap my gaze back to him. The phantom pressure fades, but the heady pulse and throb of my suddenly needy pussy does not. My breasts swell, growing heavy. Heat flushes my face as I catch sight of myself in the wall-length mirror beyond the sinks. I’m blushing, damn it.
And he can’t help but notice. Just like I can’t help but notice in the mirror that the wallpaper on the wall right behind both me and the still open door is an exact match to the wallpaper I saw in my vision at Club Toxic. That narrow stretch of wall right there behind the door is the place where Aleron will slam me, right before he rips this dress apart in his haste to bare me to his hands, his hungry mouth, and that first breath-taking thrust as he impales what I first thought was my sister, but now know is me on the full length of his pounding cock.
“Merris?” he asks, turning to face me fully now. His head tilts. He looks awfully concerned for what I suddenly know he is. I see it in my head. I see it in the powerful undulations of his body as he fucks me. I see it in the way he grabs my chin, turning my head to bare my neck—a neck that already bears his mark. I see it in the flash of fang just before he bites me, and my wobbling knees almost go out from under me.
I catch the door in one hand and the counter with the other. Because my visions, while sometimes hard to puzzle out, are never wrong. I know what I’ve just seen will at some point become real, and I don’t know what frightens me more: the irrefutable fact that Aleron is a mythological creature that should not exist, or the rush of absolute pleasure that rips through me as Aleron’s hungry teeth puncture my neck, his driving cock scrubs me vigorously against the wall, and I come.
Harder and longer than I have ever done before.
I come in the arms of a vampire.
Aleron
Her eyes do that thing again—pupils expanding until all I can see is blackness. She’s staring, first into the shower, and then past me into the mirror. I look, but I can’t see what would make her suddenly blush and then pale the way she has. She’s trembling. Violently. But her nipples are tight little buds that my mouth waters to taste, and she’s flushed. That soft pink color I am fast growing to love.
“Merris?”
Her gaze snaps back to me, pupils returning quickly back to their normal size. Her breath catches on a shaky inhale, and she stares at me now the same way that she did at the mirror.
“Show me your teeth,” she says, her gaze focusing in on my mouth.
My God. Has she remembered?
Stunned, at first I can’t react, not until she suddenly bolts, out of the bathroom and down the hall. And this right here is why I never bring humans to my house.
I almost roll my eyes at myself, and then I race after her. It would be so much easier just to catch her, but I don’t. I simply run in front of her and stop—a great blur of motion that to her human eyes magically forms a solid wall of me, right before she smacks into my chest and bounces off. I grab her arm, but only so she doesn’t fall. It hurts her greatly. She grabs h
er ribs, but as soon as she gets her balance back, she’s already yanking to free her arm from my hand.
I let her go, holding my palms up in surrender. “Be calm,” I say, but she’s already running again. Back into the bathroom she dashes, grabbing the door, but I’m still faster. Another blur of motion and I’m behind her even as she’s turning to slam it shut between us. Catching the door, I help her hold it shut. Only I’m in the bathroom with her, but that’s her problem. I have no desire to continue this dance all the way up into morning. I simply haven’t the luxury of time.
When she sees my hand above her own, she snaps around and flattens herself against the door. I smell her fear. The scent of her arousal is every bit as attractive. And those budding little nipples of hers—are they pink? Are they tan? It doesn’t matter—beguiling both, trapped behind the flimsy cover of a gaudy clubbing dress that I now know would look vastly better torn to shreds on my bathroom floor.
I halt her next move with a staying hand and a soft-spoken, “Listen to me, Merris.”
It’s a compulsory thing, the urge to reach into her mind and soothe away everything but her sudden willingness to do exactly that—listen to whatever it is I decide to say next. When one has lived as long as I have, certain skills become second nature. Most vampires can compel—offering suggestions that can often modify a human opponent’s next behaviors. The success of the suggestion depends on the age and strength of the compeller, as well as the intelligence and will of the human involved. Old as I am, strong as I am, I have taken suggestions to a whole other level.
I don’t just walk through my victim’s minds, I dance through them. There isn’t anything I couldn’t make Merris do right now, but I find myself strangely reluctant to say anything at all. Yes, I want her to calm, but I’d rather she calmed because she knows I won’t hurt her, instead of because I’ve commanded it. If that dress ends up in tatters, I want it to be because she tears it off herself out of desperate wanting for me.