Resurrection_Part One of the Macauley Vampire Trilogy

by Rebecca Norinne

  “A vampire.”

  He pushed into me hard and ground against my throbbing clit. “What am I?” he ground out between clenched teeth, his sapphire eyes locked on my face, my neck, my pulsing vein.

  “A vampire,” I answered, my voice strong and sure.

  His head darted forward and his fangs broke my skin, his mouth sucking hard at my neck, dragging my life out of me and into him. At that first luscious pull, my world split apart and I came with soul-shattering intensity, the world exploding into a flash of brilliant white and then receding to pitch darkness. A supernova of epic proportions, it went on and on and on and I had no idea where I began and William ended. Our souls fused, our lives intertwined. He was me and I was him and still it continued. I knew I’d never be the same.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Olivia

  “That’s the thing,” I told him a few nights later while we were tucked away in a private booth at an exclusive restaurant he’d invested in the year before. “I don’t know these things because you won’t share anything with me. Every time I bring it up, you change the subject, pick a fight, or get me to have sex with you.”

  “Can you blame me?” he asked, running his hands up my thigh under the table. “If you’d have asked me last week if vampires were real, I would have said no. If you had somehow been able to convince me they were, and you’d asked what they drank, I might have said animal blood. That Twilight movie made an excellent case for the practice.”

  “I assure you, Olivia, real vampires do not live off rodents, vermin, cats, dogs, deer, or any of the other animal you can name. Vampires drink human blood, period.”

  “I think we’ve established that,” I responded irritably.

  Our hate fuck three nights prior had been bizarrely amazing, unlike anything I’d ever experienced, but it hadn’t helped resolve our issues. Not really. Obviously we were sexually compatible—downright explosive—but we still had a lot to settle between us. Namely, how we were going to get past the question of his little murder hobby and the fact that he’d essentially told me to pack my bags and get the hell out of Dodge.

  William signaled for the waiter to bring the check and turned to me. “I’d prefer we not discuss this in public.”

  “You’d prefer not to discuss it at all,” I murmured and in that moment, understanding dawned. I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. He’d been awfully interested in taking me out tonight and even when I’d said I wasn’t in the mood, had insisted. “That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it? Because you knew I’d behave myself and you wouldn’t have to contend with any more questions?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” he whispered overly loud, but wouldn’t look at me.

  “That’s it exactly! Like when a man takes a woman to a public place to break up with her because he thinks it’ll keep her from causing a scene.”

  He fidgeted with his napkin and unused cutlery, continuing to avoid eye contact with me.

  “I wish you could see your face. You look so guilty right now.” I smiled smugly and crossed my arms over my chest. “Well let me assure you, I am perfectly capable of causing a scene. I don’t care one whit what anyone in this restaurant might think of my hysterics. You and I have unfinished business to attend to and whether you like it or not, you are going to answer my questions. I’ll even be nice about it. You can answer them right now, or in the car. The choice is entirely up to you, but you will be telling me what I want to know. Tonight.”

  I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard him mutter something along the lines of “save me from difficult women.” If he thought I was being difficult now, he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Curious, yes. Demanding? Maybe. But difficult? No, I could make this much, much worse on him before the night was through. Then he’d know what sort of difficult woman I could be.

  “We’ll discuss it at home,” he said, his word final.

  I could have argued with him, but what was the point? In the end, he’d give me what I want. No, not what I wanted; what I needed from him. And in fact, having the conversation back at the castle was probably better than hashing it out here, in public, because then I wouldn’t have to control my emotions as I’d need to in a busy restaurant. I’d told him I didn’t care about causing a scene, but I’d been bluffing. My mother was Marie Donnelly and she’d raised me with impeccable manners. I’d had a debutante ball and everything. Acting out in public was anathema to everything I’d been taught as a young girl. One did not behave like a hellion in public; one was polite and demure and lovely. Still, it did feel good to rebel every now and then.

  “I’ve already told you,” he said, walking to the window and looking out into the black void. It was storming outside and the clouds obscured the moon, casting the night in pitch dark.

  “Walk me through it again.”

  “Sometimes my meals come from willing donors and other times not; sometimes I kill, sometimes not. I need the thrill of the hunt, the ecstasy of the chase. Without it, I would go mad. First and foremost, I am a predator. It’s the way of my kind. If you’re going to stay, I need to insist you accept this about me.”

  “And that’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? I don’t know that I can. You’re asking me to accept something I find abhorrent. What if there was something about me you found morally reprehensible and I tried to force you to accept it? How would that make you feel? How would you handle it?”

  “You’re welcome to pack your bags and leave. I’m not holding you captive. You’re here willingly. You stayed willingly three nights ago.”

  “That’s not fair. You literally fucked me senseless. You had to carry me up the stairs for all I could walk on my own. I wasn’t exactly in any shape to drive and you know it.”

  “And yet when I came to your room tonight, there you were.”

  Yes, there I’d been, and I’d struggled all day with wondering whether I should stay or go. I’d packed and unpacked my bags no less than three times and by the time the sun had begun to set, I’d been no closer to knowing what I wanted to do. When I’d heard William and Seamus talking in the hallway, I’d dumped out all of my luggage and thrown everything in the closet in case he walked in and saw I’d been packing. As much as I was pushing him now to talk to me about what he was—what I should expect if I chose to stay with him—I knew, absolutely knew, William was a dangerous man who I shouldn’t provoke. The best thing I could do for myself was leave him and never look back, but every time I got anywhere close to walking out the bedroom door, I physically couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hadn’t been able to blame William’s vampire voodoo for my inability to leave either since he’d still been in a preternatural coma. No, something else had kept me rooted to the spot. Until I understood what that was, I couldn’t leave.

  “The thing I don’t understand about any of this is if you find me so abhorrent, as you put it, why you didn’t leave when you had the chance. It would have been so easy to sneak off without so much as a goodbye.”

  “I wish I understood myself. I tried to leave—” his eyes flashed with alarming fury “—but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know! Like I’ve been saying all night, I don’t know anything. I don’t know why we met, or why now. I don’t know why I can’t say no to you. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  William stared blankly as I spoke, and I couldn’t read anything in his face. He could have been a statue staring back at me for all the emotion he held in his wintry gaze. When he finally canted his head and dragged his eyes over the length of my body, I shifted uncomfortably under his scrutiny.

  “What is it that bothers you more, the fact that you’re not in control or that I am?”

  I sputtered and trued to answer, but no words came because I didn’t know what to say.

  “Until you figure it out, I suggest we cool things off. You’re welcome to stay here if you’d like. Or go. I really don’t care either way Olivia.”

  I
stood there, too stunned to respond. What was the point of putting me through all of this—revealing himself to me, awakening my memories of my past life, making love to me—if he was only going to turn around and tell me we shouldn’t be together? That he didn’t care about me? That he couldn’t be bothered to care about us, about what we had been, what we could be if we could just get past this hurdle?

  He brushed past me on his way out of the room but stopped before exiting. Turning, his eyes roved over me again, lingering on my breasts and then trailing down to my sex. His look a moment before had been impersonal, perfunctory. This was something else entirely. Hot, possessive, demanding. Feeling naked under his gaze, I blushed to the tips of my ears and turned my back to him. I was powerless against those scalding stares, the ones that let me know exactly how he wanted to take me and promised me I was going to love it.

  “Such a shame though,” he said, his voice cold and emotionless. “The time we spent fucking one another’s brains out was magnificent.”

  I closed my eyes to keep myself from crying. I bit my lip to keep myself from begging him not to do this, not to say these horrible things. I clenched my fists into tight balls until my nails left bloody moons on my palms so I wouldn’t turn and reach for him. Or strike him. I breathed through the pain and hoped it didn’t show.

  When I opened my eyes, he was gone. I hadn’t even heard him move.

  His attitude tonight unnerved me. In the span of hours, he’d gone from cautious, to forthcoming, to cold and implacable. As the hours ticked by, his regard for me had waned and it was quite possibly the quickest 180 I’d ever experienced from a man. Now, I know this about me: I can be trying and hard to handle. I don’t know if it was the fact that I’d been an only child or if that was just my personality, but I could be a high maintenance girlfriend. Still, I’d never had someone get sick of me in the span of 36 hours.

  Between his confession and the explosive lovemaking that followed, and now this argument and his dismissal of me, it was a stark reminder I’d gotten myself into a very precarious situation. If I chose to stay with him—and I still couldn’t believe I was even considering it but the rational part of my brain seemed to have fled—it would be wise to remember William could turn on me at any minute and I wouldn’t even see it coming.

  He had promised me he wouldn’t hurt me and I had believed him, but he’d never said anything about inflicting emotional wounds, had he? No, he’d made sure I understood that I was physically safe from harm, but at no point had he guaranteed my heart would survive intact. He’d repeatedly—and emphatically—told me to basically get the hell out of his home but Seamus’s warning came back to haunt me. He’d said William would never let me go without a fight. Now I wondered if he’d believed it himself when he’d said he would let me go. What was the truth? Did his friend know his intentions better than even he did? Was I free to just walk away or would William try to stop me? If I decided being the lover of a centuries-old vampire was all a bit too much for me and wasn’t my life’s calling after all, what would happen? So many questions, not a single answer. I supposed there was only one way to know for sure. A trickle of fear slid down my spine even thinking the thought but I tamped it down, telling myself I was being paranoid, fanciful, dramatic. He’d said he wouldn’t hurt me and I believed him. Didn’t I?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Olivia

  The entire time I’d spent packing my bags, my body moved with a lethargy I didn’t comprehend. It was as if it fought the directives my mind put. My limbs ached and tingled and my mind, slow like molasses, tried to formulate a plan to move forward and forget this had all happened but I couldn’t focus. My brain said go, but the rest of me wanted to stay. Or maybe there were outside forces at work trying to keep me here? That was the thing about finding out the world wasn’t as it seemed; from that point on, you didn’t know what was magic—wicked or otherwise—and what was real.

  As I trundled down the stairs—my bags thrown over every inch of my body and bumping along behind me like I was some sort of sherpa—no one came to investigate the noise. I half expected Seamus to show his face and, if not to lend me a hand then to at least say goodbye and good riddance, but he remained elusive. Somehow, despite the hundreds of pounds of luggage I carted with me, I managed to get through the castle’s front door and to a convertible waiting for me in the pebbled drive. It was blowing like the winds of hell were hot on my tail and the black sky portended a massive storm any minute, but the fucking garage had brought around a goddamned two-seater convertible with rear wheel drive. If that wasn’t a big old “fuck you” from a paid underling, then I didn’t know what was. It was like they wanted me to lose control of the vehicle and careen head first into a tree. I may as well have asked William to kill me himself and have been done with it.

  I’d loaded the last of my bags into the back seat—so much for trunk space!—when William unexpectedly appeared by my side. I hadn’t heard—nor had I seen—him approach. We stood staring at one another for a handful of seconds, neither speaking. After all, what was there to say? He’d told me he wanted to cool things off and that it was best I leave so that’s what I was doing, hard though it may be. His jaw ticked and fists were clenched in a white-knuckled grip at his side. I cocked my hip and crossed my arms. His crystalline eyes, blazing with fury, bore into me. I was forced to look away or fall to my knees from the heavy weight of his regard.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I snorted.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “You look like a fucking psycho is what you look like.”

  The old adage about not poking a sleeping dragon flitted through my mind and I had to stifle a manic laugh. With the way my luck was going, the next bomb William would drop would be something about being a crazy dragon shifter. Somehow, I thought, in the span of a week I’ve gone from living an ordinary, boring existence to being dropped smack dab in the middle of a paranormal romance novel.

  At this rate, I figured learning my lover was a also a dragon probably wouldn’t faze me; just another day in the life of Olivia Donnelly, doppelgänger extraordinaire! Speaking of romance novels, wasn’t this the part where the brave, plucky heroine stood up for herself and the big bad monster fell to his feet and begged her to love him?

  Yeah right, the voice in my head mocked. This is the part where the big bad monster tears your fucking head off for being insolent and challenging him. You better watch yourself.

  Ah, so it appeared I still had a shred of self-preservation buried somewhere deep inside of me. That was good to know since I had started to wonder if all my good sense had fled completely. Maybe I shouldn’t hate on that snarky bitch at the root of my sub-conscious. She seemed to be the only one of us who was actually capable of thinking rationally.

  To prove my point, I derided him some more. “What?” I said mockingly. “You’ve got nothing to say to that one Vampire?”

  See? No sense of self-preservation.

  Poke, poke, poke.

  William took a menacing step forward and I took a hurried step back, the back of my thighs hitting the car behind me.

  “Get back in the house Olivia,” he growled.

  “Get out of my way William,” I challenged.

  My heart battered my ribs and my ears rang with the heightened adrenaline that rushed unbridled through my bloodstream as my fight or flight instincts kicked in and took control. William’s nostrils flared and he blinked slowly, swallowed. I watched as his tongue moved in his mouth, swept over his incisors.

  As if I hadn’t taunted him enough, I twisted my head and exposed my neck for his examination. “Is this what you want? Can you hear my blood racing through my veins?”

  He growled low in his throat.

  “Are you absolutely sure you can control yourself?”

  “Olivia …” he rumbled a fierce warning as temptation pulled at him from all directions.

  Unfortunately the
re was no deterring me now that I’d thrown down the gauntlet. One of two things was going to happen here: he was either going to rip my throat out or we were going to prove once and for all that I was his equal. In the heat of the moment I wasn’t sure which I wanted more. I realized with some shock I might have had a death wish.

  “How badly do you want to sink your fangs into my creamy white skin? What’s stopping you William? Don’t you just take what you want, when you want it? Go ahead. Take it. Claim me. Show me who’s in charge. Show me I’m nothing but a bag of flesh to you. Prove you’re the killer you say you are.”

  He growled as his hands clamped violently around my bicep in a grip that would leave bruises tomorrow. If I lived that long.

  I stretched my neck even further, pulling the muscle taut, the skin tightening over my thick artery. “GO AHEAD!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “DO IT!”

  In a flash his fangs—longer and more pronounced than I’d ever seen them—slid past his lip, the spiked ivory moving threateningly close to its target.

  “Do it William,” I whispered one last time as I waited for him to strike, for the moment when he’d do to me what he’d done to Ceara centuries before. For him to bring us full circle.

  “Go!” he roared just before he flew from me and disappeared in a burst of agony and torment.

  Seconds passed but time seemed to stand still as I realized what I’d almost done.

  What he hadn’t done.

  I collapsed in a heap and let my tears flow.

  He hadn’t done it. He’d let me go.

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  William

  I paced my study, throwing back my fifth whiskey of the night, waiting for it to dull the sharp ache in my chest that’d taken up residence since Olivia had left me a week ago. When she’d peeled out of the driveway in a cloud of dust and spraying rock, I’d been tempted to run after her, stop her. To tear her from the car and sink my fangs into her beguiling throat and drink from her until I’d drained her body into nothing more than a withered husk of skin and bone. Until I’d done to her what I’d done to Ceara. Until I’d repeated that grisly history and proven to myself that was the man I truly was, all the monster I’d ever be.