“So you are not contrite in any way about any of this? You have broken the law, vampire.”
“I am aware of that. And I am not sorry to have done so. Given the same circumstances I would do the same thing. I know that many vampires look on humans as feeding stock, but I do not share that view. I see humans as innocent, intelligent, soulful creatures who are very much like ourselves.”
“Innocent creatures who murder, fall into the abyss of addiction, abuse and misuse one another, including their own offspring.”
“We, as a society, face similar issues.”
“Sycophants are not members of our society. They are lost to society,” Danton said.
“But they were once exactly like any law-abiding vampire. They made a choice using free will. The same free will given to humans who make similar choices. No society is perfect. Every society has its bad eggs. We may disassociate ourselves from the sycophants, but they are still a part of us. A shameful, degrading part of us, but a part nonetheless.
“I am begging you to spare her life. She and all of our other food sources are in danger. We are going to need humans and vampires alike to protect them. Renee is a police officer. She is trained to fight and use a weapon. She would be invaluable to us.”
“She is an officer of the law? Human law? And you think she is capable of maintaining such a difficult secret? It seems it would go against the grain of human law to keep our existence secret.”
“I can see where it might clash, but it is up to you to decide whether she has the wherewithal to face that challenge.”
“Yes. It is up to us. Not you. In the future you will come to us first before you reveal our existence to humans.”
“I assure you this was a special circumstance. It will not happen again.”
Rafe held his breath. This was when they would decide if he would face a tribunal.
“We must see if your judgment was worthy this time around. However, if she fails to meet the committee’s approval, there will be serious repercussions.”
“I understand that,” Rafe said, trying not to let his relief show. “I have every confidence in Renee.”
“Just how long have you known this woman?”
Rafe hesitated. “A few days,” he said somewhat honestly. It was more like forty-eight hours, but he was trying not to make it sound as reckless as it probably was.
“A few days?” The committee leader was aghast. “And after so short a time you think you can judge a person’s character?”
“I could judge her character after a single evening,” he said, confident in the assertion.
“She must be quite a woman indeed then. But we will be the judge of that.”
“Thank you,” Rafe said, giving the committee a short bow and exiting the room.
Once he was outside of the room and entering the elevator, he stepped back against the rear of the car and exhaled a slow, steady stream of breath. Now the rest was up to Renee. And even though he had portrayed confidence in front of the committee, he was afraid she wouldn’t pass muster. She was a strong-willed woman. She might clash with the equally strong-willed committee. That would be bad. The consequences were unthinkable. Not the consequences he would face, but the consequences she would face.
They would erase her memory without delay. She would leave that room with no knowledge of the past day. Perhaps even without knowledge of him altogether. It depended how deep they were going to go. The idea of her not knowing who he was made him more than a little sick to his stomach. He wanted her. For himself. He didn’t think it was right for them to take her away from him. He didn’t know what pulled him to her so strongly, but the pull was there all the same.
He wished he could figure it out. What was it that connected him to her? He had lived a very long lifetime, all of it in secret. Sometimes it had been difficult to keep the secret of who and what he was from the humans around him, but never to the degree that he would break the law willingly. Now he had done so. For a woman he barely knew.
And yet he couldn’t escape the feeling that he knew her on a different level than anyone else in his life. It wasn’t just sexual—although there was plenty of that—it was more. But he could not explain it, and he was giving himself a headache trying to figure it out.
Maybe it wasn’t meant to be figured out, he thought then. Maybe it was simply meant to be enjoyed. Yes. He would enjoy discovering her. Unless…unless they took her away from him and demanded he never see her again. Then he would be powerless. If they judged against her and therefore judged against him, he would be severely punished if he tried to strike up a new friendship with her afterward. And it was one thing to break the law, and quite another to do it again while flying in the face of the committee. As it was he was potentially facing a tribunal.
No. A lot rested on Renee, and it wasn’t fair to her. She would be under enormous pressure to perform well for the committee and all he wanted was for her to have the freedom to just be herself.
He wondered when they were going to call her to them. It had to be today. The longer she was out there without their approval, the longer they were in danger of exposure to the world. At least, that was their thinking anyway.
He made it back to his office without collapsing under the weight of his thoughts and found a stack of messages awaiting him. More delegates responding to the additions to the treaty. He was returning calls when his secretary rang through to him.
“Danton is here to see you,” she said.
“Send him in,” he replied.
Danton walked into the office and greeted Rafe with a nod of his head.
“Can you bring your human woman to the committee within the hour?”
“I’m not certain. She has a job, you know.”
“Yes, a job which risks our exposure. Get her and bring her here. You have two hours.”
With that, Danton turned and walked out. It was an unfriendly exchange, but Danton wasn’t his friend right then.
Rafe found his phone on his desk and dialed Renee’s number. It was nearing five o’clock and he thought she should be calling him to come and pick her up. She had promised him she would stay indoors and stay in touch. She had called him once early on in the afternoon, but since then there had been nothing.
When she didn’t pick up, he immediately began to worry. He hung up on her voicemail. He couldn’t leave her any messages just in case they wiped her memory of him. Otherwise she would be listening to a message from a stranger and wondering who he was. As it was her phone would have to be wiped as well since they had texted back and forth and she had taken his picture.
He tried calling again and when she didn’t pick up he decided to go straight to the station. It wasn’t exactly wise for him to be seen by all of her coworkers, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, they could go back into the memories of all of the humans he had met through her and try to erase him from her life. Maybe, just maybe, some part of their acquaintance would survive and she would be compelled to find him again.
But the odds were better that the committee would allow her to remember him as a brief dating acquaintance and then implant the memory that they had not clicked. He would be nobody to her.
Rafe ignored the remaining messages on his desk and grabbed his coat. He pocketed his phone and headed out of the building.
It was a relatively short ride to her precinct since they were on the same side of town. It was surprising that a sycophant had killed in that precinct, one that was close to the building that housed many of the lawful vampires in the state. A sycophant would have to be mad to hunt prey in lawful vamp territory.
But clearly all of the sycophants had gone mad and those invisible boundaries between their side of the city and the e-vamp side of the city were dissolving. The e-vamps had to do something and they had to do it quickly.
He arrived at Renee’s building and found out which floor the detectives were on. He found homicide easily, as it was labeled quite prominently, and began to loo
k around. The detectives were sitting in cubicles, some immediately visible and some blocking his view of whoever was seated within. He moved forward so he could see better and searched for a shining blond head amongst the balding and graying ones. It made him realize how young she was to be a detective. She had to have excelled in her career to be where she was right then. It made him inexplicably proud of her.
One dark head popped up and took notice of him. He got up and walked over to him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for Renee Holden.”
“She and her partner are in an interview at the moment. They should be out soon. If you want to have a seat…” He gestured to a row of chairs where others were seated and waiting as well. Rafe was impatient, however, and felt the need to stress, “This is very important. A time sensitive issue.”
“I’ll go see what I can do to speed her up,” the officer said, “but these things take as long as they take.”
“All right. I’ll wait,” Rafe said, finding a seat and trying not to let his frustration and worry show.
Luckily it wasn’t long before he saw Renee emerge from one of the side rooms. She was talking to two women and a man, making him wonder which of them was her partner. It only took a few moments of reading body language for him to realize it was the attractive male. She had mentioned her partner in passing during their first dinner, but she had just referred to him as her partner and not by name.
He wondered now why that was. Had it been a purposeful omission? Was she reluctant to bring up another male because they had a romantic history? As they said goodbye to the two women, Rafe realized they made a very attractive couple. They were in sync and seemed to work together smoothly. But then, she had said she and her partner had been together for two years now, ever since she had made the homicide unit.
Renee looked over and noticed him immediately. She stopped talking almost instantly and her partner followed her gaze to him. She said a final farewell to the women and walked up to him.
“Rafe, what are you doing here? I said I would call when I was ready to leave.”
“Who’s this?”
Renee’s partner had followed her to stand in front of Rafe, who rose to his full height, which was distinctively taller than her partner’s.
“Rafe DaSilva,” he introduced himself, holding out a hand. Her partner ignored the gesture and it ratcheted up Rafe’s suspicion of a romantic entanglement. Was he jealous? He turned to Renee. “I’m sorry, but it couldn’t be helped. Remember our meeting? It’s been moved up. We have to be there within the next half hour.”
“Our meeting?” Renee said blankly.
“With the committee.”
Renee’s cloud of confusion lifted and she immediately grew tense. “Oh. That meeting. Well, I still have some things to do here…” she hedged.
“What committee?” her partner asked. He was trying to come off as if he didn’t really care if they told him or not, but it was clear he was eaten up with curiosity. And suspicion.
“Oh, well…um…” Renee stammered.
“It’s for a charity foundation that I run. We help the homeless in the city. We asked Renee to give us her perspective, as a cop, on how better to serve the homeless in the area.”
“What areas are you serving?”
“Oh, we are all over the city.”
“But what shelters in particular? Most of the shelters are church run or city run.”
“We make donations to those organizations but we are curious if we are best spending our money that way or if there are better ways. That’s why we want to hear from city workers who deal with the homeless every day.”
“But what—”
“Jimmy, geez, what’s with the twenty questions?” Renee broke in. She wedged herself between the two men, who had moved closer to one another as they spoke. “Rafe, I just have to jot down a few notes then I’ll be ready to come with you.”
“I’ll keep DaSilva company while you do that,” Jimmy offered, giving Rafe a cool smile.
“No. You won’t. He’s a friend, not a suspect, Jimmy. Go write notes of your own. Rafe, come with me. You can sit with me at my desk.”
Rafe followed Renee. Jimmy trailed after them and took the desk across from hers. Rafe noted that their desks weren’t in cubicles, instead they were butted up against each other off to the side along a wall. The desks were old and heavy wood. Practically antiques.
“Why don’t you have cubicles like everyone else?” Rafe asked.
“Just luck of the draw. When these two detectives retired their desks came up and it was just as I was coming in. Jimmy was already here, but they moved us over here together. But we get to stay here because we have a ninety-one-percent solve rate. We don’t let many murderers go free.”
“Wow. That’s impressive.”
Renee pulled out a chair and indicated he should take it. Then she drew up another from an empty desk and sat in it herself. She put down her binder, which she had been holding all along, and opened it. She began to write in it, her attention fully on what she was doing. Rafe was satisfied to just watch her. She was really quite beautiful. Her face was so soft and round, her skin dusted with freckles. Her brows were drawn as she focused on what she wrote, her lips plump and pouty as she held them pressed together.
He wanted to kiss those lips. The desire hit him so powerfully that it felt like it had come with a hurricane blast. He wanted to hold her to him, keep her safe and close. He wanted to be inside of her, feel her around him, her legs clutching him tightly to her. He grew hard just thinking about it. Then he thought about what it would be like to take her energy at the peak of their climax.
He shifted in his chair and crossed his legs. It took all he had to keep a calm exterior. This wasn’t like him. He was a man of great control. He kept his appetites in check at all times. His position in the vampire world did not allow for passionate behaviors. Just look at where it had gotten him these past few hours, acting with his heart and not his head.
After a few minutes she tucked her pen into her binder and zippered it shut.
“Done?” he asked, trying not to exude impatience.
“Yes. I can’t work with you staring at me like that,” she said softly. “So we might as well go.”
He didn’t bother to deny that he had been staring. They both knew he had. He just wondered how much she had seen into him. Did she know how much he wanted her right then?
“I’m leaving, Jimmy. We’ll pick up tomorrow.”
“Don’t do anything I would do,” Jimmy said with a genuine grin for Renee. But when he looked at Rafe the grin faded. “Call me if you need anything.”
“Good night, Jimmy” was all she said as she grabbed her purse from her bottom desk drawer and snatched her coat from the back of her chair.
“No locker?” Rafe asked.
“Oh, they have them but I don’t really use them except for holding a change of clothes. Let’s go.”
Chapter 15
They left the homicide department and headed for the elevator. They got on just as a couple of cops were getting off, leaving the car with just the two of them. Rafe pressed the button for the parking structure. The minute the doors closed, he reached for her. He clamped two hands on her upper arms and dragged her forward until their bodies collided. She let out a little sound of surprise just as he covered her mouth with his and kissed her.
Rafe groaned at the pure pleasure of the feel of her. He felt as though he had been craving her forever. She resisted him at first, pulling away a fraction of an inch to protest, “Not here!” but then she closed the distance between them again and reached for his mouth. He kissed her as if his soul were on fire and she was the only way to quench the burning rage of it. But instead she made the fire burn all the hotter. The kiss went on and on, leading from one to another to another.
They turned as one and her back struck the wall of the elevator car. She reached out blindly, her hand slapping at elevator but
tons until she hit the kill switch that stopped the elevator in its tracks. It jolted to a stop just as he was dragging his hands down the sides of her body and then curving them over her backside. Renee moaned as his tongue glided over her lips and slid into her mouth with silky eroticism, with deadly hunger. He cupped her rear in his hands, dragging her up into his body until her feet lifted from the floor. It was a matter of instinct that had her wrapping her legs about his waist, her thighs holding tightly to his hips and her calves clutching at his backside. She drew him in tightly and she could immediately feel how hard he was beneath the soft material of his pants. He surged up against her, using the wall to keep her in place as his hands slid up her sides and around to cup her breasts. She was a very curvy woman, had very full breasts, and they were very sensitive as well. His hands were burning hot through the silk of her blouse and she squirmed with pleasure.
All the while their mouths dueled together. Their breath came fast and hard. Renee’s hands were in his hair at first, the luxurious strands sifting through her fingers. But now her fingers were gliding down over his slightly stubbly jaw and then the length of his neck and throat. She stroked over the ridgeline of his shoulders and then continued down to his chest. His body was fit and well-muscled. She wondered if this was the case for all vampires. Did vampires need to work out to maintain their incredible physical strength?
She didn’t care. He felt delicious. And he thought the same of her apparently. His hands couldn’t get enough of her, stroking and kneading, his fingers then working to unbutton her silky blouse so his hand could dive into her bra and find her nipple.
She gasped at the bold sensation, the brash confidence of his touch. He reached with his free hand to unclasp her bra from the front, freeing both her breasts in a single tug. He finished opening her blouse to the waist, his free hand caressing the warm skin of her belly while the other focused on her breast. He caught her nipple against his palm, rubbing her and then catching her with his fingers and pinching her in an erotic tug.
Renee’s hands went to his shirt and began to unbutton it. Distantly she was aware of the elevator bell ringing. The alarm that alerted others that the elevator was stuck or stopped. But she wasn’t worried. It could take the better part of an hour before someone would come to fix the “trapped” elevator.
Thirst Page 17
