by Nina Bangs
The only thing that had been perfect for her was her tabloid job. What had started out being another I-don’t-care moment had morphed into a damn-I’m-good-at-this job. Her perfectionism had translated into awesome articles. The best part? She wasn’t competing with any of her family.
So what was she doing competing with Kelly again? Her sister had saved the day in Houston, and now Fin expected Jenna to do the same in Philly. If she didn’t ring that damn bell, it was bye-bye humanity. And this time she couldn’t walk away and pretend she didn’t care.
The last two nights proved she wasn’t ready for a prime-time performance. Last night she’d wasted her chance to shine by heaving up her stomach. Tonight she’d just stood frozen trying to breathe past the boulder in her throat. Kelly probably would’ve picked up a candlestick and splattered some vampire brains over the floor.
Then there was Al. He terrified her on a level so primal, her modern mind couldn’t wrap itself around the emotion. She’d looked into his eyes to night and seen death. He’d wanted to join Spin in the killing, and he’d had a tough time resisting all that fun. His soul had recognized her to night. And she had a gut feeling it was trying to decide where to file her. She hoped it wasn’t under “prey.”
So if she was that afraid, then why did she want to rip his clothes from his body and do things with him she’d never wanted to do with any other man? She didn’t just want sex, she wanted SEX—rough, raw, and savage. No holds barred. Was there something in the carnal, elemental male of him that called to the primitive remnants of her essential female? She was a thinking person, and something that spoke to instinct and not reason made her nervous.
Even though she was physically exhausted, her mind was awake and trying to dissect everything Al had said and done today even as it analyzed how those things related to her.
And when her mind took a breather from thinking about Al, it brought up all the violent images from the church. In living, or more accurately undead, color. God, she didn’t want to think about that.
So she did what she always did when she wanted a mental distraction: she turned to her laptop. First she checked her e-mail. Penis enlargement, hair replacement, sexy singles, and a message from her editor. She needed to up the level of her spam filter. Delete, delete, delete, and read.
Martha had succeeded as editor of The Scene by holding the strings to tipsters all over the world. When a tip came in, she found someone to check it out. This time she’d tapped Jenna.
Two tips had popped up from anonymous sources in Philly. Luckily, she had Jenna right in the city. Martha wanted her to see if there was anything to them.
Jenna glanced at the tips before saving them to her work file. Aliens were planning to steal the Liberty Bell, and some restaurants in Philly were fronts for vampire activity.
She’d had personal experience with the vampire restaurants. But the Liberty Bell lead held special interest. And just for a moment, she enjoyed the irony of her treating the tips as real when a few days ago she would’ve done lots of eye rolling.
Next order of business, Fin. Jenna didn’t know where to start learning about him, so she shut down her computer until her mind was clearer. Wait. There was something she’d meant to follow up on. Opening her notebook, she checked her facts. Yep, Al had been extinct by the time Ty rolled onto the scene.
She’d tell Kelly and Al about her finding first. Jenna didn’t trust Fin. He had the power to make her forget all about her discovery. But this could wait until the afternoon.
After taking a shower and pulling on her nightgown, she turned off the light and climbed into bed. If she could turn off her brain too, maybe she could fall asleep.
She was just dozing off when someone knocked on her door. The temptation to ignore it lasted all of ten seconds. Kelly? Not bothering to even run her fingers through her hair, she pulled on her robe, stumbled to the door, and flung it open. “What?”
Then her brain caught up with her mouth and she just stared. Al stood in the darkened hallway. He wore jeans and…jeans. His chest was sculpted perfection, and she’d always craved perfection. His feet were bare, and his skin gleamed damply as though he’d just gotten out of the shower.
And his hair wasn’t braided. It was a dark curtain that fell down his back and flowed across his shoulders. It looked clean, shiny, and just blow-dried.
He smiled at her, a sensual lifting of his lips that changed the hard lines of his face into something softer but just as dangerous. “I was heading straight to bed, but I started thinking about what happened to night. I need to talk to you about it.”
“It can’t wait until this afternoon?” She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to leave. The message was different according to which part of her body she asked. Her brain thought the faster he left the better. Other body systems thought she should open her door wide and invite his gorgeous ass in.
“I think it needs to be now.” His face might look softer, but he still had the eyes of a predator.
Now Jenna knew how Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma felt, because she was tuning out her brain even as she held the door open for him.
He shook his head. “Not here. The walls are starting to close in. The roof is good. I can see the sky.”
She glanced back at her nice warm room, her nice warm bed. “A little chilly up there.”
Al laughed, and there were no undertones, no unspoken messages. “Come see.” He held out his hand.
Jenna knew she looked doubtful. “Give me a minute to change and—”
“You don’t need to change.”
“I’m from Houston, the land of hot weather and thin blood.” But she wanted to stay with him, so she let him pull her toward the stairs at the end of the hallway. When they reached the roof, she expected to be met by a blast of frigid air. Instead they stepped into a heated glass room—four glass walls and a glass ceiling. No lights.
“Wow.” She spun in a circle, taking in the 360 degrees of city lights and night sky. The snow flurries had stopped. Too bad. “Did Fin do this?”
“Yeah. He has an ongoing psychic battle with Zero, and lately he’s had trouble unwinding enough to sleep. Being able to see the sky relaxes him.”
“Okay, that explains the floor.” The floor that was one big mattress. Great to sleep on, hard to walk on. Since there weren’t any chairs, she dropped onto the mattress and leaned back against the glass. Jenna watched as Al stared out at the night before turning toward her.
“If I ever have a place of my own, I’d like a room like this.” It was the first time he’d ever hinted there might be an “after” for him. “I don’t like feeling trapped.”
“You were an apex predator. I thought fear wasn’t in your vocabulary.”
“Maybe the human in me is bleeding through.” His gaze settled on her, impersonal but with intimate waiting in the wings. “Anyway, being up here drives the shadows away.”
You bring the shadows with you. “Well, it sure is spectacular.” Like you.
He stared at her in silence for so long she had to resist the urge to squirm.
“I saw your expression when you looked at me to night. Do I scare you, Jenna?”
“You scare the hell out of me. I looked into your eyes while Spin was tearing through the vampires, and I saw your soul. That would be scary for any human.”
For a moment she thought she saw regret in his eyes.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t trust you to keep me safe.” It doesn’t mean that I don’t want you deep inside me.
Al nodded. “I guess that’s better than nothing.” He settled down next to her. “No matter how much knowledge Fin poured in here”—he tapped his forehead—“when I get emotional, my soul tries to take over.” He shrugged. “I can fight it, but I don’t always win. Fin says as we spend time in our new bodies, human nature will exert more power over us.” His smile didn’t look convinced. “The upside is that I can call my soul out at will. That’s a good thing.”
“Are you sayin
g that all emotions trigger it?” What would it be like making love with this man? Would he bring his soul into the bed with them? Not a comfortable threesome. But even as she told herself she absolutely did not want to deal with the danger, a primitive part of her was anticipating the rush of so much primal energy focused on her.
He must have seen something in her expression, because his smile was all heated temptation. “Rage and sexual hunger. That doesn’t mean a woman will wake up with a dinosaur beside her, but it does mean we bring the same intensity to mating as we did millions of years ago.”
She took that to its obvious conclusion. “Not long on foreplay, huh?” Jenna smiled so he would know she was trying to lighten a conversation in danger of getting out of control.
His eyes darkened, “I wouldn’t know.”
Uh-oh. “How long have you had your human body?”
“I rose on November eleventh of last year and now it’s January, so about two months.”
She stopped herself before she asked the next question.
He answered it. “Sixty-five million years ago.”
A random thought cut through sexual tension so thick Jenna couldn’t have hacked a hole in it with a machete. According to her research, it had been more like 145 million years.
“Oh.” But what were a few million years between lovers?
Suddenly, he turned his head to stare directly at her. Those predator eyes seemed to gleam in the darkness. She suppressed a nervous giggle. She never giggled. “When you look at me like that, my over-the-top imagination kicks in. Did you see Jurassic Park?”
“Yeah. We rented it.” He smiled. “We cheered every time one of us ate one of you.”
“Not funny.” But she smiled back. “When I look into your eyes, I think of the scene where the power fails and everyone’s stuck in the tour cars. It’s dark and suddenly you feel the ground shaking as though something massive is moving through the trees. We all know the T. rex is coming. Nearer, and nearer, and nearer…We wait for it, wait for it…” Thud, thud, thud. She shook her head. Just the pounding of her heart. “And then all at once it’s there. So big it takes your breath away. And those teeth.” She remembered her terror when she’d first caught a glimpse of the Allosaurus’s massive shadow looming over their car as Jude scrambled out to face it. She shuddered.
He must have sensed a little of what she was feeling because he slid down until his head was lower than hers.
Jenna choked back a laugh. “Making yourself look smaller doesn’t help.” She shook her head. “You’re a dangerous man with or without a prehistoric soul. And I was damn glad of it in that church.”
He nodded, but Jenna couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.
“Take a chance and go out with me again. This time without Jude.”
“I won’t find any bells by hiding in the condo.” She couldn’t help it; she had to know. Reaching over, she slid her fingers through the long, glossy strands of his hair. It was as smooth and soft as she’d imagined. So not like the rest of the man. The way it framed his face, the clean smell of it, touched a primal part of her soul. “I thought you only left it free when you hunted.”
Something hot and hungry moved in his gaze. “Who said I’m not hunting?”
She didn’t know where to go with that line. He glanced away from her, searching for something in the night sky. His past? His future? “One of the guys in Jurassic Park said something that’s true. He said the T. rex didn’t want to be fed, it wanted to hunt. He nailed it. What makes us so dangerous is our need to attack, to kill. It’s hardwired into our souls. The man in me loves to sit down to a rare prime rib with mashed potatoes and gravy. My soul would rather stalk a nice fat heifer as it grazes out on the range.”
More info than she needed to know. Time for a change of subject. “It must’ve taken you a long time to grow your hair that long.”
“I wouldn’t know. The body wasn’t mine when the hair started growing.”
“I see.” Jenna decided not to ask how Fin had acquired the bodies. She was trying to think of something to say to keep the conversation flowing when he put his hand on her thigh. But then, who needed conversation?
“I don’t play games, Jenna. I want you. And if I broadcast my emotions, it’s because they’re that strong, so strong that I can’t hold them down. And sometimes they get all mixed up. My soul strings emotions together. One leads to another. That’s why you might get feelings coming from me that scare you on a whole bunch of levels. Sex, rage, hunger. All primitive emotions, and all churning in my head at the same time.”
“So when you’re lusting after a big juicy steak, you might hit me with one of your emotional punches without meaning to?”
He smiled. It was slow, and beautiful, and so sensual she had to remind herself to breathe. She’d met more gorgeous men since coming to Philly than she’d ever seen in her entire life, and they all had incredible smiles. But Al owned her with his. It was tuned into every erotic fantasy stashed away in that dark little corner of her mind with the sign reading: Never Gonna Happen. His smile made her think it just might.
“I’m not lusting after steaks.”
She had a hard time concentrating on his words as he pushed her robe aside and slipped his hand beneath her gown to massage the flesh high on her inner thigh. Thinking was becoming hard work.
But the voice in her head that separated truth from fantasy was stubborn. In her line of work, she was always searching for the angle. Did he have one?
Shut up. But her mind wasn’t that easy to silence. Even though mind and body had their own agendas, mind kept on blabbing in the background. A man got turned on at the drop of an innuendo. A man didn’t need to even like a woman to get aroused. A man wouldn’t hesitate to use sex to manipulate. And a man with the soul of a prehistoric predator would expect to always get what he wanted.
Enough. She didn’t care.
Leaning over, she drew one finger down the side of his jaw and watched it clench. His eyes burned with need, and she felt the heat and heaviness building low in her stomach. Her mind might be ambivalent about him, but her body didn’t have any doubts.
She waited for the blast of desire from him she’d experienced before. Nothing. So maybe this was an act. If Al was just shoring up his companion status with her because of Fin’s order, then she didn’t want any part of his seduction.
Her head was firmly back in control. They’d settle this some other time when she was more prepared. “Look, I think we’re both tired. Let’s call it a night.”
He was still sitting, his back propped against the glass wall, when she started to stand.
“No.” The one word was the angry growl of a predator not to be denied its prey.
She was the only prey in the room. “Yes.” Well, this antelope had attitude.
Wrapping his arms around her hips, he pulled her back down to the thick mattress. Then he loomed over her. Hunger tightened the muscles in his face until every line stood out starkly. His eyes burned with what he held reined in for the moment. “You don’t dismiss what I’m feeling, what you’re feeling, with just a few words. I thought I could control it this time so I wouldn’t scare you. Can’t do. Too bad, sweetheart.”
Okay, no words. Then what? She swallowed hard as he lowered his head. If she was lucky, she’d stirred up the perfect storm.
The moment his lips touched hers, every suppressed emotion she’d locked away since coming here exploded in one focused attack. She reached up, tangled her fingers in all that glorious hair, and pulled him closer.
Whatever his motive might be, his reaction matched her intensity. His lips moved hard over hers at the same time his tongue demanded unconditional surrender. He tasted of mint toothpaste and aroused male. Her favorites.
When he finally broke the kiss they were both breathing in short gasps. Gripping her robe, he peeled it off. Her gown followed close behind.
With her last bit of rational thought, she scanned the area to make sure no one could p
ossibly see them. Safe.
Then she fumbled at his jeans. She wanted to see the powerful muscular whole of him exposed for her enjoyment. With an impatient sound, he stripped them off and flung them aside. No underwear. Good.
His soul finally made its appearance. And if she wasn’t already flat on her back, his emotional punch of amped-up lust would’ve knocked her onto her deprived butt. The blast of desire wrung a cry from her. It left Jenna wet and clenching at the image of her legs wrapped around him while he plunged into her again and again and again.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. She knew what watched her from Al’s human eyes. His beast wouldn’t see any use for sensual words or sexy compliments. Ruled by its senses, all it wanted was to hear her panting and screaming as she climaxed.
Jenna welcomed him, no matter who was in the driver’s seat.
He leaned over her, and all that shining mass of hair skimmed her bared body. Jenna shivered as she gathered it into her fists, rubbed it between her fingers, savored its silky texture and clean scent, then let it spill out of her hands again, a dark waterfall for her pleasure alone.
There was no playfulness, no teasing foreplay in his sexual dictionary. His mouth touched her everywhere—breasts, stomach, and a long sensual nibble from the back of her knee and along her inner thigh.
Her breathing came hard and fast as he gave her no chance to do anything except dig her nails into his broad shoulders and hang on.
He was a silent lover. No doubt his beast saw no reason to make useless noises. But it did crave as much contact as possible. Al straddled her and then lowered his body until it was barely touching hers. He supported his weight on his forearms as he lightly scraped his torso over her breasts and stomach. Back and forth, back and forth. The friction against her nipples and stomach drew a moan from her.