“May you what?”
He raises his hand, stepping forward slowly.
“What, Chipper?” I say. “You can clearly see he’s going crazy, can’t you? He might bite.”
He laughs grimly. “I’ve got no problem with biting.”
“Well, that’s pretty weird,” I say, heart still hammering in my ears.
But there’s something about this man, about the way he looks at me. It’s probably the last thing that should be on my mind, but when I stare at him I feel like my freaking womb or something is screaming at me to leap at him, to wrap my legs around him and grind against him. I’ve never done anything that forward, ever. Nor would I. And yet the confusing urge is there.
“Because most people have a problem with biting,” I whisper, staring, enthralled, as he steps closer and closer.
“It’s okay, boy,” the man says quietly, so close now he could attack me if he wanted to. He reaches down and softly strokes Chipper, smoothing his ears. “I’m not going to hurt her. It’s okay. I know. But you don’t have to fight now. You’re safe. You’re safe.”
Emotion whelms in me when Chipper relaxes in my arms, and then, unbelievably, starts to lap at the man’s hand. I can’t help it. I let out a giggle and shake my head in disbelief.
“He’s not normally friendly with strangers,” I mutter. “Especially strangers in the freaking dark.”
The man nods shortly. “I’ve had many dogs in my time,” he says. “They are good judges of people. I’m Torsten.”
“Wow, cool name,” I say, and then immediately feel like the biggest doofus in the world.
Cool name, strange man who just emerged from an alleyway.
“I’m Tammy,” I mutter, and then bring some sassiness back into my voice. “But honestly I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation. I mean, you’d agree it’s a bit weird, right, Torsten?”
“Perhaps,” he says. “But I’ve never been overly concerned with what people perceive to be normal. Are you lost, Tammy?”
“Not lost,” I say. “Just … taking my time to get to my destination.”
He laughs, low, husky. “That sounds like you’re lost.”
“Well, you might want to fix your ears then.”
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with my ears, believe me.”
“What, you’ve got super hearing, do you?” I fire.
“Something like that,” he says quietly. His whole body seems to strain against his suit as he stares at me, the azure fire of his eyes blazing. “You’re right to be scared, though. Even in this part of the city, it isn’t safe for a lady to be alone at night.”
“Wow, isn’t that just very old fashioned?” I say.
His smirk widens. For a second, I think I see two extremely sharp teeth in his mouth, wolf’s teeth. But then he closes his lips a little and I’m left wondering if it’s just Halloween making me crazy.
“Old fashioned, yes,” he says. “I suppose I am a little. But it’s also the truth. Let me give you a ride home.”
“Um, what?” I say, laughing. “So let me get this straight. You swagger out of an alleyway, give Chipper a little massage, and now I’m supposed to jump in your car and trust that you’re not some serial killer psychopath.”
He nods and reaches into his jacket pocket, handing me a business card. When I take it, our fingers brush and I gasp. I drop the card and it flutters like a leaf to the ground.
His hand is cold.
His hand is the coldest I’ve ever felt.
He leans down and picks it up, handing it to me again.
“You need to invest in some gloves,” I joke.
“Yes,” he says, “I’ve been told that before.”
I glance at the sleek, modern card and see that he’s Torsten Haroldsson, CEO of Fenrir Industries.
“I’ve never heard of them,” I mutter.
“No,” he says, “you wouldn’t have. They’re a parent company and own many other smaller – but still large – companies. I’m not showing you this to show off, Tammy. But as a sign that you can trust me. If a CEO was going around murdering women, surely somebody would’ve heard about it by now.”
“Or they would’ve paid off the police and gotten away with it.”
“Do you really have such little faith in this city?”
I shoot him a look. “Do you even have to ask that question?”
He shrugs. “Then let me put it this way. There’s no damn way I’m letting a lady like you trudge through this city alone at this time of night. If something happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
A lady like me.
What the heck does that mean?
For an absurd moment, I let myself dare believe that Torsten is attracted to me, but of course, the very notion of that is just ridiculous. Maybe he has a hero complex and wants to play the good guy tonight, take a young woman home and maybe leak it to the press later.
Or is that just woefully pessimistic of me?
“Here’s the thing,” I say. “I’ve learned that trusting people, generally speaking, is a freaking idiot’s game. And that goes double for trusting strangers.”
I feel my womb going tight and tense inside of me, screaming at me, What the hell are you doing? Are you stupid? Go with him. Now. Now. Now.
Desire like I’ve never felt before flames in me, my mind filling with images of me tearing off that suit jacket, running my fingernails down his bulging chest muscles and his rock hard abs.
“Look at me,” he says firmly.
I stare into his eyes.
“I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”
I want to shoot him another feisty reply, but as I stare at him I feel like I know him. Like I’ve known him for a long time. Or like I’ve been waiting for him my whole life. It’s a stupid feeling, really, one I should ignore. My life has taught me better than this. And yet it rises within me like a deafening conflagration of fireworks.
“If I’m going to catch a ride with you,” I say, “you need to let me do something first.”
“Okay …”
“I’m going to need to record a video of us together, stating the time and the place, and then upload it to my social media. When I get home, I’ll delete the video.”
“Sure,” he says. “Whatever makes you feel safe, Tammy. As I said, I’d never hurt you.”
“This is so weird,” I mutter, giggling despite myself as I take out my phone.
Chipper grins the whole time I’m talking into the camera and, when I’m done, he licks my face and then Torsten’s. Torsten smells of cologne and something deeper, muskier, up close.
I can’t quite place it.
All I know is it swirls all through me, right down to my center, so loud I can barely hear the doubts whispering in my mind.
CHAPTER THREE
Torsten
I guide the sleek black Jaguar through the night, Chipper curled up contentedly in the back seat and my woman sitting at my side, her scent filling the car that I have to use every tool of self-control I have not to pounce on her right here.
Somehow, I’ve managed to keep the blood-lust at bay, but only by pulling a sheet of coldness over me, that is uncomfortable even to me. Even with that shield of cold, every sinew inside of me is straining to get closer to her, to tear down her coat and free those alluring breasts, burying my face in them and sucking and biting, fuck, biting and drawing the blood from them and …
Stop, stop.
I beat down the vampire instinct and focus on the road instead, crossing the bridge in the late-night traffic, a slow swell of it even at this hour. Every time Tammy twitches beside me, I can’t stop imagining her naked and fresh, her body a canvas ready for me to paint.
I feel my seed, that impossible thing, flaring inside of me in its primal desire to fire inside of her and create a life, an impossible fucking life.
I think of those long-ago battles and how the warriors would claim women afterward, the savage way they’d take them,
a practice I never partook in. But I feel the savage emerging in me now, the years falling away so that I’m a Viking warrior again, and here is my prize, my well-earned prize, with her voluptuous curves and her lips made for sucking, for wrapping around my engorged manhood and taking right me right down to the root.
Stop, stop.
If I let my excitement flare too brightly, I might lose control and leap on her right here. My fangs are buzzing like electric saws, roaring, hungry to be near her throat, her breasts, the gorgeous meatiness of her thighs. I clench down on the steering wheel so hard I feel it straining under the pressure, ready to snap off completely. I have to relax my grip before I send up catapulting off the bridge.
“Hard day at the office?” Tammy asks.
“Not particularly,” I say. “Why?”
“Because you look like you want to kill someone,” she giggles.
The sound of her laughter is like music. It’s all too easy to imagine her laughing like that while standing over our children’s cribs, which is a thought I need to dash from my mind soon before it enslaves me. The image is too sun-bright, something I’ll never get to experience. I don’t even know if the amulet works.
Or if Tammy is the one.
No, that’s a fucking lie.
She is the one.
I can feel it.
All my long years have led to this, all the battles and the fighting and the hunger and the self-restraint has led me to this woman.
“No,” I say, forcing a smirk. “I suppose I’m just thinking.”
“Care to share?” she says.
“I’m wondering who you are, Tammy,” I say.
“Um, okay,” she says, laughing a little.
“What’s funny?”
“It’s just that people usually don’t care about who I am. You know, I’m not a stick-thin cheerleader, so why would they?”
“I’m interested,” I growl, wanting to find every bastard who has ever told her she’s less than perfect and make them realize just how mortal they are.
“Well, I guess I’m just a regular person.”
“I’ve lived a long time, Tammy, and in my experience, there is no such thing as a regular person. And you certainly don’t seem like one.”
I feel her blush, the tempting blood filling her cheeks. I scent her nervousness in the heat of the car. I scent something else, too, deeper. Her womb is begging for me. Her womb is flooding her panties with wetness and I can smell it, every fucking drop, the juicy tanginess of it calling to me.
The road.
Focus on the road.
“What’s a long time? How old are you?”
At least a thousand years old.
“Forty,” I say, giving her the age I was when I was changed.
“That’s not old,” she laughs. “You’re only, well, double my age. Not that that means anything. Age is just a number and all that. Sorry. I’m rambling.”
I can’t help but laugh, an instinct that has been rarer and rarer in me as the years have proceeded endlessly.
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “Maybe I like it when you ramble.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You were telling me about yourself,” I say, guiding us off the bridge and deeper into the rougher part of the city, the sort of neighborhood a queen like Tammy has no business living in.
“Well, you need to be more specific,” she says with a toss of her head.
I reach over and nudge her with my hand, without thinking, the sort of flirtatious act I haven’t done since I was a mortal boy.
“Why are you so sassy, eh?”
“What, you’re saying you don’t like it?” she banters, a thrill moving through her. “Listen, Torsten, I’m just your average orphan girl. Nothing special about me. I was raised in an orphanage and I got the heck out of there as soon as I could. I got an apartment and a job and I found Chipper, and he’s the best thing that ever happened to me. There. You have Tammy Holden in her entirety. What about you? What’s your life story?”
“Oh, about the same,” I say, smirking. “Just a regular man living a regular life.”
“With a multi-billion-dollar company and a sports car who wanders the streets the week of Halloween acting all freaky-deaky?”
“Yeah,” I say, laughing deeply, hardly able to believe that the sound filling the car is coming from me. “That’s about right.”
“You’re just being mysterious for the sake of it,” she says, jabbing me in the arm.
The brief contact sends a searing arrow deep inside of me. I imagine grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her onto my lap. Pulling the car up at the side of the road and grinding against her panties, her panties which are getting really wet now.
So wet that the scent almost overpowers the general smell of her the smell that led me to her, to begin with.
I imagine licking greedily droplets of her wetness from her sex, feeling the shiver that would move through her with each lapping tongue stroke.
But would I be able to control myself?
What if the blood-lust took hold of me and I snapped?
It’s been two-hundred years since I fed, but I’ve never met anyone like Tammy before. I’ve never had to be so close to a woman wreathed in tempting scents and painted in mind-numbing curves. I need to bend her over and press my body against hers, lean over her and squeeze and palm her breasts as I slip wetly inside of her from behind.
And then I’ll hammer her, take her pussy, fucking own it.
Because she is mine.
Her body, her mind, her womb, her blood, it all belongs to me.
The vampire darkness in me roars that she’s a mortal and if I want her, I should just take her, take her right now.
But I am not that sort of vampire and I never have been.
I pull up outside her apartment building, the security light flickering in the lobby. As the light flickers on, I see graffiti on the walls and an out of order sign on the elevator.
The place reeks of filth, and a jagged pain stabs into me at the thought of Tammy staying here.
“Yep,” she says, seeing my looking. “Home sweet home, right?”
“This looks like a horrible place to live,” I mutter.
“Jeez,” she says sarcastically. “Thanks so much for that pearl of wisdom, Torsten. You know, I’ve never actually considered it from that angle before.”
I glance at her, my smirk never leaving my face, not for one damn second.
“I know you don’t want to hear that,” I murmur. “Not when you have to stay here. But I have a proposition for you. A job.”
“What kind of a job?” she asks.
“Are you interested?”
“It depends,” she says quietly. “I’m not exactly qualified for much. I graduated high school, but I’ve never been to college. I’ve worked as a waitress, cleaner, and a courier in the past, but that’s about it. Oh, and in high school, I used to work in an ice cream parlor. I was a whizz at that. So?”
For an absurd moment, I’m almost certain I can feel my heart hammering in my chest at her words.
It’s not, of course, because my heart hasn’t done anything in hundreds of years. It’s still in there, I’m sure, and perhaps the amulet could wake it up again.
But a sensation comes over me, pulling me like a magnet to this woman with her perfect plus size body. Her spirit shines through each sentence she utters, unbreakable, the sort of woman who’d make a fierce and protective mother.
“It’s an antique’s store,” I tell her. “You’d be working with the manager, taking stock, serving customers. A car would pick you up and drop you off every day and the salary would be more than fair.”
She blinks, narrowing her eyes. In my long years, I’ve learned to read people, and right now I can see the indecision shimmering across her features.
“Why me?” she asks.
Because I need to make sure you’re safe. Because if anything happened to you I’d turn full night wraith and give into the blood-
lust. Because you are worth fighting a hundred, a thousand battles for. Because you are everything to me, already.
“Maybe I believe in fate,” I say.
“Ooh, mysterious,” she giggles.
“Maybe I believe that I found you tonight for a reason. Maybe you are going to make the perfect … employee.”
She reaches into the back of the car and scoops up Chipper, placing him in her lap and stroking him softly.
“I do need a job if I’m ever going to make rent on this hellhole,” she says.
“You’ll be able to get a better place,” I tell her. “And I’ll advance you a month so that you don’t have to wait.”
“Why?”
“Are you always so suspicious?” I tease.
“Well, yeah,” she says, smiling endearingly. “It’s sort of a survival mechanism. Although I don’t think I can really call myself suspicious tonight after getting into this car with you.”
She bites her lip, making me want to slide my hand up her thigh and slide deeply and wetly inside of her, making her bite it harder.
Then she lets it go and nods.
“I could work in an antique’s store, and if you’re offering a ride, then yeah, sure, I won’t exactly miss public transport. Shall we shake on it?”
As I offer her my hand, I feel the coldness I veiled myself with earlier slipping away. My body burns hot with the blood-lust and it’s only by focusing intently that I can stop my skin from burning the crimson of the feed.
She makes a small moaning sound as she takes my hand.
Hers is soft, clammy, beautiful.
“That’s weird,” she whispers. “You were freezing before.”
“Hmm,” I growl, unable to say anything else.
Every part of me is focused on stopping the red hunger from pulsing into my skin, a trait mortals usually find utterly terrifying.
“I’ll send a car for you tomorrow,” I breathe.
“Okay, thank you,” she says. “I’m apartment number fifty-one. Oh, and will I be able to bring Chipper?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, bye, Torsten. It was nice – you know, and weird – meeting you.”
“And you,” I growl.
The moment she leaves, I reverse and spin the Jaguar around, speeding around the corner and pulling into a nearby alleyway.
Her Vampire: An Instalove Possessive Vampire Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 207) Page 2