Samantha Sommersby

by Forbidden--The Revolution (lit)

  Raif felt it and it scared the shit out of him. If he could have run he would have, but he had no place to go. His back was up against the wall. Sweat was beading on his forehead and the ends of his hair had begun to singe. Suddenly he wasn’t quite so handsome.

  “I could melt the skin off your bones without having to blink,” I told him.

  “You…you can have the job,” he managed to choke out.

  I laughed as I took a step back, then another, then another. I stepped back over Alex’s prone body and crouched down alongside of her.

  “I’m not sure I like you enough to work for you. I’ll think about it. If we decide to take it I’ll send you my requirements in the morning,” I told him, lifting Alex.

  “We’ll make it worth your while,” he said, picking a napkin up from the table and mopping his sweat-soaked brow.

  “No more tests,” I said as I cradled Alex in my arms.

  “No need,” he replied gazing up into the darkness of the fathomless ceiling. “Malcolm is satisfied that you can handle the job. You may go. Bruno is waiting outside. He can escort you back.”

  “Who the fuck is Malcolm?”

  “You’ll find out tomorrow night,” replied Raif. “Her first set starts at nine. You should arrive at eight.”

  Chapter Five

  Alex was stretched out on the large king-sized bed. Her long dark curls spread across the pillow and a look of pure serenity on her face. I could feel the thrum of each and every one of her heartbeats. I could feel them because they were under my control. They were mine. She was mine. For a beat or two I watched her chest rise and fall. I found myself matching her pace, moving closer, inhaling her fragrance. Her lips were gently parted. They were full and lush and they beckoned me.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” I whispered, “it’s time to come back to yourself. Open your eyes.” I moved out of the way and I waited. It didn’t take long.

  Alex bolted upright in bed. Her eyes were open in alarm, and her breath was coming in big huge gulps.

  I placed my hands on either side of her face and looked into her eyes. No thrall. No magics. Just me. “Slow down. If you don’t control your breathing you’re going to faint again.”

  “Again?” she gasped. “I fainted?”

  “Don’t talk,” I told her. “Just breath with me sweetheart. Try to match my pace, all right?”

  Alex nodded. She did try and as the seconds slowly ticked away, her breathing came to match mine in perfect synchronization. Then as I managed to help her slow it down even more, leading and pacing, an imperceptible thread stretched between us, the kind of spontaneous connection that develops between a man and a woman during a time of intense closeness. It wasn’t contrived. It was real. I closed my eyes and road the wave of intimacy that was building until I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Then I pulled back and opened my eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Alex asked me, reaching for my hand and giving it a squeeze. “What’s the last thing you remember clearly?”

  “You’re the one that fainted and hit her head, sweetheart, not me,” I told her, smiling softly. “I remember everything just fine.”

  I barely had time to register her intent she moved so quickly. Got to give it to the girl, for a human she’s fast, damn fast. Within the blink of an eye she’d reached underneath the pillow that was next to her on the bed, pulled out her Glock 19, and had the barrel shoved underneath my chin. I may be an Immortal, but I’m not stupid. I froze.

  “You’re one of them,” she hissed.

  “Alex…”

  “Shut up. I can’t believe I was falling for your stupid act. But you all eventually make a mistake.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you’re in shock,” I suggested, trying to sound reasonable.

  “You’re a vampire, Dell. I lost time. Someone had me in thrall. The holes in my memory… I thought it was that Bruno guy. I thought he’d taken us both. But that’s not what happened, is it?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t lie to me! The game is over.”

  I swallowed. “This isn’t a game, Alex. We’re on the same side, you and I. If I wanted to hurt you I could have, so many times. I didn’t put you in thrall to hurt you, I did it to protect you, to protect you from seeing what they are—”

  “What you are, you mean!” She pushed the gun further into my chin. My neck was hyperextended, my eyes now glued to the ceiling.

  “That too,” I admitted. “If you know what I am, then you know you can’t kill me.”

  “I can slow you down,” she said, her voice strong and certain. “It would take time for you to heal. By that time I’d be long gone and you’d be waking up in a morgue someplace. Who knows? Maybe before the autopsy, maybe after. Just how long does it take to regenerate following a cremation, Dell?”

  Christ. I was in trouble.

  “I’m one of the good guys, Alex.”

  “Shut up!” she growled. “Good guys don’t put women in thrall. I fall for it every fucking time! You’re all the same. In the end you all want one thing from me and that’s it. Blood.”

  She was holding her gun in her right hand. I was starting to feel a slight tremor echoing through the barrel. You can only hold a weapon in that position, that forcefully, for so long before the stance becomes tiring. She was going to have to commit one way or another soon, either shoot me or back off. I was hoping for the latter and I was hoping that she’d make the decision on her own.

  Could I have placed her back into thrall? Could I have forced her to drop the gun? Yes. But I didn’t want to. This was it. This was that moment for us. The make or break. You reach it in every relationship, sometimes without even knowing it, that pivotal turning point that defines everything else that follows.

  “I’m not a feeder, Alex. I’ve never tasted blood. I won’t lie to you—”

  She laughed with distain. “You’ve already lied to me. You told me I could trust you!”

  “You can. Your blood calls to me, yes. You tempt me more than any other woman I’ve ever met. But…”

  “But what?” she growled, her teeth on edge, strain evident in her voice.

  “But I gave someone my word that I’d protect you, that I’d take care of you. My word means something to me. Christ, Alex, I had my mouth on your neck. Your blood was roaring in my ears. It would have been so easy for me to take, but I didn’t bite you. I didn’t. Not even after you bit me.”

  “You pushed away,” she said, lowering the gun.

  “I didn’t want to nick you. I told you, I’ve never tasted blood.”

  Alex threw the safety back on her weapon and tossed it onto the bed. “I don’t understand…”

  “We’re not all blood-sucking fiends, Alex.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I know that. Unfortunately, since you all don’t walk around wearing white hats and black hats it’s kind of hard to tell. Come here,” she said climbing to her knees and waiving me over.

  Call me suspicious.

  “Why?”

  She gathered up her hair. “Do you prefer the right or the left?”

  “For what?”

  “I want to try an experiment.”

  “I think you should lie down. You probably have a head injury from hitting your noggin on the stone floor,” I told her, holding my position.

  She didn’t buy it.

  I leaned back onto my elbows and did my best to stay composed as she walked over to me on her knees and batted my chest.

  “Come on, be a sport,” she cajoled.

  “A sport?”

  Alex sighed. “I need to understand what’s changed, Dell. Vampires can’t normally get that close to me. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know exactly why. I only know—”

  “I think I know why,” I told her, sitting up and gazing into her eyes.

  “You do?” she asked, her voice but a whisper.

  “Magic.”

  Alex became very quiet. I watched as a myriad of emotions
fluttered across her face.

  “I know it sounds crazy but—”

  Alex shook her head, then swallowed. “No, it doesn’t sound crazy. It is magic. Strong magic I was told. A curse.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Someone…”

  “Someone?”

  She looked away, embarrassed. “In a shop…in downtown Los Angeles. They do readings there. I was—”

  I reached up and cupped her cheek in my hand. “I know a bit about magic, Alex. More than a bit, actually. This isn’t a curse. It’s a protection spell, a very powerful protection spell.”

  “Did you use magic to get close to me?”

  It was a fair question.

  “No.”

  She leaned in towards me, slowly.

  “What then?” she asked, her lips just grazing mine.

  Did she intend to kiss me? My entire body hummed with the anticipation of her lips pressing firmly against mine, her tongue sweeping into my mouth. Kisses like that were dangerous. They brought with them the possibility of accidental blood spill and that was something I couldn’t risk, something we couldn’t risk.

  In one swift move I grabbed her shoulders, turned her body, and laid her down on the bed, pinning her to the mattress. I had her wrists pulled up over her head, secure in my hands and her body stretched out enticingly under mine.

  “You’re involved with someone, remember?” I reminded her.

  She looked away.

  “Yes,” she whispered, quietly. “Sullivan Cross.”

  “You’re seeing Deputy Director Cross?” Sullivan was the head of the profiling division, he was infamous.

  “I guess,” she sighed.

  “You guess?”

  Alex looked at me, then admitted, “As soon as we return from assignment I’m planning to break it off with him. It was inevitable. And now…”

  “Now?”

  She looked away.

  “Seems like Sullivan would be a pretty good catch. Successful, athletic, good-looking…”

  She scowled at me. “You date him then.”

  I laughed. “Sorry, sweetheart, men just don’t do it for me.” I started to move so that she could get up.

  “Me either,” she murmured.

  That stopped me.

  “You’re gay?” I gasped. “Because you could have fooled me the way you were responding…”

  She wouldn’t look at me. Her face was burning crimson. In fact her entire body was on fire. The smell of her arousal was strong and it was getting stronger by the second. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.

  “You crave the touch of an Immortal. You like vampires.”

  She didn’t answer. My mind was spinning as a flood of questions came to me. I started with the first, what I thought would be the least threatening.

  “Alex, when you said vampires can’t normally get that close to you, what did you mean exactly? It could be important. Maybe even important to the mission.”

  She looked up at me for several long moments. I could tell that she wanted me. She wanted me badly and my body’s reaction to that need was not only obvious to me, it was obvious to her and pressing hard into the softness of her lower belly.

  “If you’re going to make me talk about sex, can you let go of my wrists and sit up?”

  It was my turn to blush. I let go of her wrists and did as she asked.

  Alex eased up onto her elbows. “It varies. Sometimes it happens at first base, sometimes second. With one I got all the way to sloppy thirds before he couldn’t hold back, tried to take a little nibble, and…bam!”

  “Bam?”

  “It’s like a charge of lightning or something. I tell them up front no biting or pain of any kind, but do they listen? No. It always ends in disaster,” she moaned, flopping down on the bed and throwing one arm over her face.

  “There are vampires that don’t feed, Alex. Lot’s of us,” I offered helpfully.

  “I seem to convert them after a few dates without even trying. They start out nice enough, then they go all Count Dracula on me.”

  “Hmm.” That was me. I didn’t know what the fuck to say. My mother is a psychiatrist and she says hmm a lot. It seems to work for her.

  “Is that all you can say?” she asked leaning up on her elbows again, her temper revving her up to a slow boil. Apparently the hmm thing only worked for shrinks.

  “What I can have I don’t want,” she moaned. “What I want I can’t have. So here I am this huge mess of unsatisfied, frustrated… And all you can say is hmm? Nevermind.”

  Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.

  “Are you saying you’ve never had sex?”

  “Define sex.”

  “Intercourse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, you’ve had sex or yes, you’ve never had sex?”

  “I’ve never had sex.”

  “You’ve never had sex? Are you sure?”

  Alex screamed and pushed me off of her. Actually, it was more like a growl. I reached out to grab hold of her and we both ended up rolling off the bed and onto the floor, wedged between the side of the king-sized mattress and the wall. She was on top, draped across my body in a way that I was certain I was going to have fantasies about later.

  “You know,” I began casually, “if you were getting some you probably wouldn’t have such a bad temper.”

  Alex started laughing. I felt her body relax against mine. Her face was buried in my neck.

  I laughed too. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Because in pretty short order her laughter began to give way to tears, then the tears turned into heartfelt sobs that tugged at my very soul and made me feel like an ass.

  I hadn’t been trying to upset her, honestly. It’s just that it was too unbelievable. Not the part about her being Sophie, which I was pretty convinced she was. Not the part about her being under some big-time protection spell, I figured that was true too. I even bought into the wacky irony that she had a thing for vamps and that somehow the spell identified most of us as a threat. It was the fact she hadn’t had sex with anyone, ever, that I seemed to be having a hard time grasping.

  “Is there anything I can say, anything I can do?” I asked, uncertain.

  Alex lifted her head just enough to look into my eyes. Hers were red and still brimming with tears. It wasn’t her most attractive moment, but that didn’t matter. I took one look at those beautiful green eyes and new that I’d do just about anything she asked.

  “I want you to try to bite me,” she said, offering her neck to me as if it were the most natural and simplest thing in the world. “No vampire has ever been able to put his mouth on my neck. Maybe the spell is broken.”

  I reached up to cup her cheek in the palm of my hand. “I’m flattered, tempted even. But you don’t understand what you’re asking. Besides, I can tell you that the spell isn’t broken. Raif tried to have himself a little taste tonight and was blown clear across the room. I thought it was my anger adding a bit of extra juice. Maybe it was, but it was also you.”

  Alex started to panic. There was no other word for it.

  “Oh, God!” she gasped as she tried to place one hand over my mouth and then pushed up with the other, her eyes darting about the room and her knee grinding painfully into my thigh and way too close to my dick.

  I reached out and gave the bed a shove, providing us with more space to move then I rolled, removing her hand from my mouth.

  “What the hell—”

  Alex wrapped her arms around my neck and brought my ear down next to her mouth.

  “They could be listening,” she whispered. “What were we thinking?”

  “The room’s been shielded.”

  “What do you mean by shielded?”

  “It’s…magic Alex. What’s said in this room stays in this room. It’s safe.”

  “What if I screamed?”

  “No one would hear you,” I assured her.

  “What if I made you scream?” she asked, brushing her lips hesitantly a
cross mine.

  God help me, the word scream had never sounded so enticing. Maybe it was the fact that I’d suddenly realized that in all the commotion her wrap-around dress had become unwrapped. Maybe it was the fact that she was playing with the hair at the back of my neck. Or, maybe it was that she’d parted her legs and lifted her knees so that my hips had lowered and the only thing separating my cock from the pull of temptation and the promise of rapture was my well-worn jeans and those wicked black lace panties.