by Kallysten
In his mind, because of his own circumstances, sex was about pleasure, pure and simple, and none of the other things humans associated with it.
“How would you feel about it?” Virginia asked when he didn’t say anything. “You know, if… if I got pregnant?”
Anando had no idea how to reply, and even taking another sip from her cooling coffee to give himself time to think did not help in the slightest. “How would you feel?” he turned the question back at her.
She pulled the mug from him and set it down on the tray before taking his hand between both of hers. “No, you tell me first.”
He shook his head. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I never thought about it. About kids. The possibility of becoming a father was lost to me so long ago, I’m not even sad about it anymore.”
“Did you want kids, then?”
He squeezed her hand. “Back when I was human? Sure. It was a natural part of things. But that was a long time ago. I’ve made my peace with never having children centuries ago.”
Her lips curled in a fleeting mile. “It wasn’t that long for me, but I made my peace with it, too. If it happened… I mean, I don’t think it will, but I wouldn’t be sorry. As long as you—”
If Anando hadn’t known what to say earlier, now he knew what she wanted, needed to hear, and it was no hardship to give it to her. “I wouldn’t be sorry, either,” he cut in, then leaned in to whisper in a conspiratorial tone, “We’d have to be a lot quieter, though. And hide the toys better.”
She laughed, her worry from a few minutes ago forgotten, and went back to her cooling breakfast. She took a few bites before she said, “Anyway, that was just a what-if. It’s not going to happen. One shot, the odds are pretty slim. It doesn’t help that I’m getting old.”
Anando couldn’t suppress an incredulous bark of laughter. “Getting old?”
He took the tray away, setting it on the floor despite her protest that she wasn’t done, then pounced on her and proceeded to prove to her that ‘old’ did not apply to her in any way.
CHAPTER 8
Leo had worked behind the bar of On The Edge for fifteen years, longer than any other job he had held before, both as a human or vampire. If he’d been told he would last that long, he wouldn’t have believed it. He had a tendency to get bored with routine.
Working at the club had never been routine, though. The music was different every night, with two DJs on rotation and occasional musical guests keeping things fresh and unexpected.
Many of the customers were regulars, but new people came in nightly, whether long-time residents of Haventown finally checking out the infamous club everybody talked about, or visitors passing through town who wanted to see for themselves what was supposed to be the best place for vampires and humans to mingle in a safe way.
The other thing that kept him on his toes was the flirting. The first few years, he’d accompanied customers home every few nights—or sometimes only as far as their car, or even a back alley behind the club.
The thrill of the hunt and a few mouthfuls of blood had been what he was after, much like Lisa, and with Brett’s blessing a few moments of pleasure had always been welcome.
These days, he didn’t play with others as much as he used to; once every few weeks, if that. The game of seduction hadn’t lost its appeal, but taking it beyond flirting words and a few sultry looks seemed unnecessary when he would join Brett and Lisa before the night was over.
Tonight, a brunette called Carrie was trying to charm him. She’d been there a few times before. The first time, she’d barely been able to talk when she looked at him, and she’d sat at the bar for a good two hours, sipping on cocktails and watching people go down to the dance floor and come back up.
The second time, Leo had managed to get a few words out of her, including her name and the fact that she was terrified of vampires and wanted to get over her fear “because I hate to let anything have that much power on me, including my own fear.”
She’d almost fallen off her high stool when he had smiled at her widely enough to show his fangs. Despite her fright, she had returned, and each time a little bit of her fear had seemed to fall away. She wasn’t scared of vampires anymore, or at least, not scared of him, and it was fun to flirt with her even if he knew nothing would come of it.
She had just asked at what time he finished his shift when Lisa came to sit at the bar, leaving an empty stool between her and Carrie.
“I’m on a late shift,” he answered, before turning his attention to Lisa. “Done hunting already?”
She shook her head. “No bites. Give me some blood?”
Carrie’s sharp inhale drew Lisa’s gaze, and she nodded absently at the girl. Even as he grabbed a glass and poured blood from the container in the designated mini-fridge, Leo kept an eye on both of them, half expecting Lisa to chat up Carrie and see if she was potential prey.
Lisa said nothing, however, and while Carrie sneaked a few glances toward her, she didn’t initiate a conversation, either. Apparently, she still needed to work on her vampire phobia.
“Do you want me to warm it up for you?”
“No, that’s fine.”
He set the glass in front of Lisa but didn’t let go of it until she had looked up at him.
“What is it, three times this week? Since when do you have that much trouble finding prey?”
A tiny ‘meep’ rose from Lisa’s side. Carrie, it seemed, was not enjoying this conversation much. She stood, taking her glass with her as she retreated to one of the tables a few yards away. Leo liked her, and it had been a fun project to help her work on her fears, but at that moment he didn’t care that he had scared her. Lisa was a lot more important.
She was also glaring at Leo.
“Since when do you keep tabs on where I feed?”
“I’m just concerned,” he said, reaching to push a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “Something’s off with you, has been off for a little while. I think I know what it is. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nothing is off,” she said with a huff. She drank deeply from her glass, tilting her head back and exposing her throat.
The two marks on her neck, healed but still red, drew Leo’s gaze at once. He had put those marks on her that very morning, taking a few mouthfuls of blood from her before he had taken from Brett, too.
When he’d drawn away from Brett’s skin, Lisa had pulled Leo to her and kissed him. Lately, she seemed to make a point of kissing him every time he bit Brett, and Leo had no trouble figuring out why. She was tasting Brett on his lips and tongue.
“Why don’t you bite him?” he asked when she set down her empty glass. “You know he wants it as much as you do.”
She turned wide, shocked eyes to him, but Leo didn’t back down. He hadn’t meant to be so abrupt about it, but knowing her if he didn’t push at her first she’d never open to him.
“I… I don’t… That’s not…”
Her stammering, if nothing else, proved to him that he had hit dead center. She was the one who had brought him and Brett together, but some days he felt like the glue that held all three of them together. At times, he certainly believed he knew each of them better than they knew themselves, or each other.
“Why don’t you go to him?” he murmured, then leaned over the counter to press a chaste kiss to her lips. “He’s wanted it for years, Lisa. And now you do, too. Something changed. Why keep denying it? Why didn’t you give him the ring? What are you afraid of? We already agreed we’d turn him. The ring isn’t as much of a commitment, and neither is biting him.”
For a long moment, she watched him as if she’d never seen him before. Leo did not flinch under her gaze. He knew he was right, had no doubt about anything he had said, and he wished he could convince her that biting Brett would not be as shattering as she seemed to fear—or at least, not shattering in a wrong way.
She didn’t answer any of his questions, not that he had expected her to, but she looked troubled as she walked to the door mar
ked ‘private’ at the back of the room.
She turned back once toward him, and Leo wondered if she’d go through with it. He wished the end of his shift hadn’t been so far away, but maybe some time alone was exactly what Lisa and Brett needed.
* * * *
As Lisa headed up to the apartment, Leo’s words bounced back and forth through her mind. She had been expecting him to ask about the ring for a while now: why she hadn’t given it to Brett, and when she intended to do so.
She wished she could have answered either question, but in truth she had no idea. And the rest of what he had said jumbled her confused mind even more.
Was she feeding from patrons less often than she used to? If that was true, it was not on purpose. She still went down to dance and hunt almost every night. It just seemed that, at times, it was harder to find interesting prey.
Why feed from someone who didn’t appeal to her when all she had to do was go to the bar or up to the apartment and find as much blood as she wanted?
And why bother finding someone she was attracted to physically when she had two lovers, both more than willing to please her in any imaginable way?
That last thought came out of nowhere, and she froze on the next to last step, her head spinning with the realization.
She used to feed from customers every night, and follow one home for a few hours three or four times a week. As Leo had pointed out, it had been days since she had fed from a human throat.
What he didn’t know was that it had been even longer than that since she had slept with anyone who wasn’t Leo or Brett.
Unable to take another step, she sat on the stair, clinging to the metal railing even after she was sitting down, her mind still reeling as though she were tottering from a great height.
When had it been? Brett’s birthday with Anando and Virginia didn’t count, because all three of them had been there. The last time she had been with someone else had been before that, but she couldn’t remember when, let alone with whom.
Her flings had always been anonymous and ephemeral. She sometimes fed from and slept with the same person more than once, but it was always serendipitous, not something she planned.
Long ago, she had told Brett this was what she did. These humans were her prey, chosen to give her blood and pleasure, and if he could accept that without trying to change her, then he could be something different for her. Something more, even if for the longest time she had been reluctant to name that something.
Brett had never tried to make her stop doing anything. Even when he had given her a ring, he had called it a symbol of his love and promised her it didn’t have to mean anything more.
She had worn the ring on her right hand for a long time before deciding that she wanted it on the left, on her ring finger, the same way Leo wore his ring. She hadn’t explained herself. Brett and Leo had noticed, but neither had commented. She didn’t know what she would have said if they had.
What was going on with her?
The door opened behind her, and Brett’s voice rose, tight with worry, echoing her thoughts.
“Lisa? What’s going on?”
She stood and tried to compose herself before she turned to him.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked, taking the hand he was holding out toward her and allowing him to draw her into the apartment.
The hint of guilt that crossed his features answered her question before he did.
“I saw you coming up on the—”
“Video feed,” she finished for him, amused despite herself. “Of course.”
He closed the door and gave her a brief grin before his expression became more serious again. “What were you doing out there?”
“Just… thinking,” she replied, looking away from him under the pretext of kicking off her shoes.
After squeezing his hand, she let go of it and went over to the coffee table, where his computer was still open. Switching to the feed of the dance floor, she turned on the sound, and music filled the room.
She’d hoped for something bouncy to lift her mood, but the DJ was apparently in the middle of one of his slow breaks. That worked, too. Returning to Brett, who hadn’t moved and was watching her with a curious look, she held her hand out to him.
“Dance with me?”
He took her hand and drew her to him, their bodies as always fitting so well together. One slow song turned into two, and they continued to sway until Lisa couldn’t have said if she was following the music or the rhythm of Brett’s heartbeat.
“Are you going to tell me what you were thinking about?” Brett asked after a while, his hand stroking languidly up and down her back.
Should she? It was all so muddled in her mind… Would saying these things aloud help her see more clearly, or would it complicate everything?
“I was thinking about you,” she murmured. “You, and Leo, and me.”
His lips brushed against her cheek, and she could feel his smile.
“My very favorite subject,” he said, the teasing brightening his words like a ray of sunshine. “Anything in particular about us? Like how it’s a pity Leo is working late tonight?”
She opened her eyes to tell him… But tell him what? How could she even begin to explain what she wasn’t sure she understood?
Shaking her head at her own thoughts rather than his words, she pressed her face to his neck. She hadn’t been looking for the bite marks there, but her lips found them at once, a little rough and always so sensitive that Brett shivered against her.
When she kissed the scars, Brett’s arms tightened around her, and he stopped swaying to the sound of the music. He breathed out her name in the quietest of murmurs.
“Can I?” she whispered, and she was breaking the last barrier, the one she had erected between them their first time together.
It had been nothing more than coincidence that first night: she had already fed and didn’t need his blood. The times after that, though… Had she known, even then, how special he would become for her? Setting him apart from her other prey had felt… natural. But now that other prey had lost their attraction for her…
“Anything.” Brett’s voice was shaking, but not with doubt, she was sure of it. Leo was right: Brett wanted this, and had wanted this for years. “Anything I am, it’s yours, you know that, don’t you?”
And she did. She had known for a long time. She let her fangs extend, opened her mouth, and bit Brett as gently as she knew how, making her marks an inch or so away from Leo’s. His blood was hot, sweet, but all she could taste was his love.
CHAPTER 9
Most days, Virginia enjoyed going to work. There was nothing thrilling about long spreadsheets of numbers, rows, and columns matching just so, with a few phone calls and emails going out when they happened not to match the way they were supposed to, but she didn’t need thrills at work. She had enough of those at home.
This day, though, she came home with frustration rolling off her with every breath she took. Her new supervisor, Tony, had been in place for three and a half weeks, and already she despised the man, his too soft voice and his knowing smiles. More than once, she had caught him staring at her neck and the scars Anando had left there.
Whenever Anando reopened his marks and drank from her, Virginia wore a scarf the next day to hide the redness. She wasn’t ashamed of anything, but she didn’t care for her friends’ anxious questions about how much she let Anando take from her. Tony didn’t ask questions, but his gaze sharpened when she wore a scarf. The way he sometimes licked his lips was also unnerving.
She wished she could make a formal complaint to HR, but he’d never said anything to her that was less than professional, and the looks could have been all her imagination.
Except they weren’t.
Anando knew her well enough to see right away that something was off. She hadn’t been home for more than a few minutes when he asked, “That idiot gave you a hard time again?”
A small part of her wished she hadn’t t
old him about Tony. She was a grown-up, and she didn’t need a knight in shining armor to run to her rescue.
Another, quieter part wished she hadn’t refused so quickly when Anando had offered to have a ‘nice little chat’ with the man. She knew Anando would never hurt anyone, but the thought of him towering over Tony and flashing his fangs at the little weasel did have some appeal.
“Idiot is the right word,” she muttered. “And still smart enough not to do anything too overt or where anyone else might notice. God, but I wish Kara hadn’t left the company. Maybe I should give her a call, see if her new place is hiring.”
She didn’t mean it. Her old supervisor had moved three states away, and Virginia had no intention of moving that far—or even anywhere at all.
Anando encircled her with his arms and nuzzled her neck, pressing his lips to those same marks that always seemed so fascinating to Tony. “I know what would make you feel a lot better,” he said in a sultry voice.
Lust coursed through Virginia, obliterating her annoyance. She tightened her arms around him and hid her grin against his shoulder.
“You do?” she said, affecting curiosity when she knew quite well what he meant. “And what would that be?”
He raked his teeth over the bite marks before he answered, and sparks of pleasure shot through Virginia’s body. “You still haven’t tried your new toy.”
A pang of need caused Virginia to clench her thighs while the very core of her thrummed with excitement. She didn’t need to ask which new toy he meant. There were a couple of them, waiting in the toy box for a special occasion or for one of them to decide a new game sounded fun.
When he said ‘your’ new toy, however, he didn’t mean something she had bought, or a gift he had offered her. What he meant was the toy that only she could wear, only she could use to pleasure him.
And while a moment earlier she would have admitted wanting to be taken care of and pampered, the way Anando always seemed to do so effortlessly, now that he had brought the strap-on and its new, untried accessory to the forefront of her mind, she wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until they had played this new game.