by Joey W. Hill
“That’s not possible.”
“If I want too much, I will be.” She made herself say it, face it. “I tend to want too much.”
“We all do, Ella. That’s just the nature of our hearts.”
As he lifted her chin, her eyes closed. She anticipated and then experienced his mouth on hers, the demand that she open to him. He had a strong mouth, a demanding, teasing tongue. She trembled as his touch upon her transformed, becoming something noticeably different. Now he was holding something that he perceived as his, that he wanted to be his. It made the pressure and heat of his grip feel so very different to her.
“I should have told you my intentions before the Puppy Night event,” he said at length, lifting his head. “A retroactive punishment is going to happen for that one.”
“Retroactive spankings aren’t recommended in the childcare books. It only confuses the child,” she said primly.
His hands tightened on her and she heard an anticipatory growl in his voice that tingled through her. “Don’t worry. It will make a very clear impression. On every level.”
“I need… Can you tell me your expectations, sir? So I can do my best to meet or exceed them?”
“It isn’t complicated. Within these walls, I’ll take care of you, but I expect you to take care of yourself, too. When you don’t, it will be my responsibility to address that.”
Within these walls. He kept saying that, enough that it gave her a little sinking feeling, but she pushed that away in favor of a better thought. Sure, the other staff watched out for one another. Gideon, James and especially Anwyn watched over them all, but to have a person considering it his responsibility to watch out specifically for her…that was new.
He brushed his lips lightly over hers, tugged her hair. “I’m taking you to the carnival next week.”
“Really?” The starburst his words lit inside her banished any lingering shadows.
“Really.” There was a smile in his voice. “Does Tuesday night work?”
“I have to work at one of my other jobs Tuesday night. But I could do Wednesday or Thursday night.”
With a disappointed feeling, she braced for Tuesday being the only night he could do it, but he nodded against her, reviving that pleasurable fireworks feeling in her breast.
“Thursday night, then. Tell me where you live, and I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“I’ll meet you here, because I told Mavis I’d help her check in new stock for the gift shop that afternoon,” she said. “When I do that, she lets me pick one item out for free from the old stock. Under fifty dollars, of course.”
“The woman is not a fool.” There was amusement in his tone. “All right. I’ll pick you up here. Now, much as I’d prefer to stay in this nest of yours all night, I better get to the set up for my twelve-thirty.”
“Oh. Of course.” She set the plush wolf aside and scrambled up, wobbly legs and all. She would have staggered if he hadn’t caught her.
“Stand here,” he said. “I’ll turn on the lights.”
His hands slipped off her with a nice lingering heat, and then the light came on. The switch activated a lamp on one of her low tables, filtered by a sheer red scarf she had wrapped over the shade. It gave everything in the room a nice, sensual wash of soft color, including him, and his bronze skin.
He picked a robe off the door hook and brought it to her, leaving himself distractingly naked. Whoever thought men couldn’t pull off walking naked in a sexy way hadn’t seen Wolf do it. His slow, powerful saunter made the most of every inch of revealed flesh, the ripples of muscle, shift of limb, the slide of his cock over his thighs.
He slipped her arms into the robe as she looked up into his face, searched it. He looked calm, hard-to-read, but not unpleasant. Wolf-like.
He didn’t tie the robe right away, instead putting his hands beneath it, on her waist and hips. He brought her close, lifting her onto her toes and then off of them to hold her firmly against him, flesh to flesh. She wrapped her legs around him, laid her head on his shoulder as he put his arms around her. She shivered as he kissed her nape, her bare shoulder where the oversized robe slipped off.
“What’s your schedule the rest of the night?” he said.
“Just working the floor, seeing who needs help where. I work until two.”
He wrapped his hands in her hair to turn her face where she could see his frown. “You work tomorrow at another job?”
“Mm-hmm.” She didn’t elaborate, because he’d said “within these walls.” She wasn’t going to pull him into anything else. Apparently, he had other ideas.
“When does that one start?” he prodded.
“Six. I do the breakfast shift at Joe’s diner. I’m off at noon, and I don’t start my courier work until three p.m. I finish that at seven and will be off tomorrow night. I have a couple days of that, then I’m back to Atlantis. I only have three days a week when I work three jobs. The other three days it’s just the two. I alternate days between the salon and the diner.
“You work six days a week.”
“Usually.”
He let her slide down to her feet and propped her against the table. “Leave the robe open. Back straight, and keep those lovely tits out.”
She obeyed, her body doing a little throb of reaction. He reached for his clothes. As he pulled on his jeans and T-shirt, his socks and shoes, he kept glancing at her. At her round breasts and smooth sex, all her pale flesh. When he finally finished getting dressed, putting on the T-shirt last with that nice ripple of upper body movement, she was warm inside and out again.
He came to her, tied her robe around her himself, though he kept the ends of the sash wrapped around his hands. He was still frowning, so she felt the need to reassure.
“I like the work I do,” she said. “And like you said, you’re my Master within these walls, right? You don’t have to worry about anything outside of them for me. I’m all good.”
She knew she brought out the damsel-in-distress mode in certain types of guys. But she’d also learned that could backfire, become toxic, so she avoided the trap for both of them whenever possible.
“As I said, I can stand on my own when I need to do so,” she said, meeting his gaze. She laid a hand on his arm, hoping it was okay and would be taken as a gesture between equals. “I’m really happy about what you’ve offered me.”
His grip loosened, his brow furrowing. His eyes stayed on her, but flickering, as if he was mulling her words.
Show him you understand and accept what he’s willing to give. She slipped around him to unlock and open the door. It changed the environment of the room, made it less intense, easier to shift into a more casual mode with him.
Fortunately, Brownie helped out, coming to the threshold of her room. “So how’d your massage go?” she asked Wolf.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better experience,” he said after a moment, loosening the knot in Ella’s lower belly. She didn’t want him to change his mind, chalk it up to a bad idea before they could even give it a shot. And she really, really wanted to give this a shot.
His gaze went to her. “I’ll see you Thursday,” he said.
In front of a slack-jawed Brownie, he bent and captured Ella’s mouth with his own. He gave her a thorough kiss he combined with a firm hand on her backside, pressing her against his body. Her sore tissues, stretched by his formidable size, contracted, wanting him there again. At the thought, her settled stomach flipped over, and her head swam as he stroked her face with his other hand, cupped the side of her neck so she was far more aware of her pounding pulse.
When he straightened, his mouth had a more stern-looking set than usual. “We’ll talk more then.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
He nodded and left them. As he strode down the hall, Ella stared after him, the set of the broad shoulders, the gleam of his dark head from the hallway lights. The strong thighs and firm shift of his incomparable ass.
All those things were capable of increasing the h
eat he’d left burning inside her, but there was one thing that made the flame leap a little higher.
A carnival was definitely not “within these walls.”
Chapter Eight
Now there was no doubt about it. He’d lost his fucking mind. Tonight, he’d given her the first mark, a geographical locator. Not prohibited, especially if the human wasn’t aware of it. These days, a lover biting into flesh was considered kinky, exciting—not evidence he was a vampire. Hell, in their BDSM world, the sharpness of his canines would merely suggest he’d had them purposefully filed. It wouldn’t be until he fully unsheathed them that they would cause comment.
Her blood had been sweet, though, so hard to resist taking more than a few drops. But he’d given her the mark that would let him find her. It would help him do the job he’d told Gideon he’d do.
But that wasn’t why he’d done it. And now he knew what it felt like to be inside her, to have her ride him. To touch the full breasts and generous backside, both of which spilled over the limits of his large hands with endless soft temptation. He knew how her eyes flashed when he buried his fingers in her hair and yanked, to keep her mind on his demands. He knew her cries of pleasure and sighs of needy desire. He could still feel the dig of those surprisingly strong fingers into his muscles, begging for more.
But the sex wasn’t the problem. Sex for vampires was like morning coffee for humans. A daily occurrence, always a pleasure and admittedly close to a vital need for his kind, but not something that stayed on his mind like this after consumption. There was always plenty more of it in the pantry, in a variety of blends.
When he first started at Club Atlantis, he’d been curious why Anwyn kept particular tabs on the young woman. Ella seemed capable and independent enough. But then he’d realized she tended to ignore common sense and do as her heart led her, like sitting on the loading dock by herself in the middle of the night. And often she was too trusting. Like the other night. Inciting a group of young males in dog pack mode to chase her, for God’s sake.
As he’d told her, not nearly as forcefully as he’d wished, the only thing that kept people from crossing that white line in the center of the road was a mindset of cooperation and structure. When the right set of inflammatory circumstances occurred, civilized behavior was the first thing abandoned.
He hadn’t needed to become a vampire to know that. He’d learned the lesson as a soldier in Vietnam. Which, in a real kick-in-the-teeth irony, had better prepared him to be a vampire than most turned humans.
He could say the same for Anwyn herself, one of many reasons he’d clicked with the Mistress of Club Atlantis. She’d been the human owner of the successful Atlanta club when she’d been attacked by a pack of rogue vampires and forcibly turned. Vampires were driven by blood and sex, and they preferred to enjoy both as a Dominant. So Anwyn, as a Mistress, had been pretty set up for that outlook, though Wolf would never have wished such a traumatic experience on anyone, let alone Mistress Anwyn.
Unfortunately, her turning had left her with a unique and perilous handicap in the power-driven vampire world. Thanks to the diseased blood of her sire, she suffered violent seizures, but she managed them admirably, with the help of two males. He hadn’t known about the seizure part at first, not until he’d gained the gift of her trust. But he had met the two males at his job interview with her.
The first was Gideon, her servant and, remarkably, a former vampire hunter. Not just any vampire hunter, either. Gideon Green had been the most successful hunter known to the vampire world. How he’d escaped execution from the Council was obviously a need-to-know thing that only the Council needed to know, but Wolf was sure his permanent binding to Anwyn was part of the reason Gideon was still breathing.
The binding wasn’t forced, though. Gideon was as devoted to her as an army of pit bulls, and ten times as dangerous, though to most at the club he was simply Anwyn’s lover and a welcome addition to the security staff and management. He had a cynical sense of humor and liked yanking the chain of anyone capable of killing him, which only increased the awe factor of his continued existence. Until Wolf found out about the other male responsible for Anwyn’s survival.
Before coming to the club, he’d been working as a Dom at a club out in Colorado, doing paid sessions as well as his therapy sessions with PTSD-stricken service members. The work was satisfying, but the darkness in him needed a change. Allan and Fort had been getting on his nerves with their not-too-veiled observations about therapists using therapy for others as a way to ignore the need for it themselves.
When he’d heard that a vampire was in charge of a BDSM club in Atlanta, he’d gone through the proper channels to express his interest in visiting and seeking possible employment. He’d tied in Lord Richard, the Region Master of the Atlanta area, to ensure if he did find work there, it would be okay for him to switch territories. Wolf knew how to navigate the vampire protocols pretty well, and had enough money to pay the necessary relocation fee.
At his initial interview with Anwyn, Gideon had stood against the wall behind her, his gaze trained on Wolf as if he expected him to leap on her over the desk. Wolf had ignored him, as was appropriate, since the male was just a servant. He wanted the position enough to be far more tolerant than he normally would be of a human servant eyeballing him with such attitude.
However, during the interview, he’d had to suppress the urge to keep turning around. There was a large mirror behind him, and he was pretty sure it was two-way. He was also sure there was someone behind it. When Anwyn started asking him questions about his background as a vampire, he knew why the hairs were rising on the back of his neck. The one watching had to be a vampire; otherwise she wouldn’t be talking about that part of things. While he couldn’t sense the identity of a vampire, he normally could sense the presence of one…and if there was more than one. Yet he only detected Anwyn. But he knew he wasn’t wrong.
“Would you like your partner to come in and join us?” he asked, at a courteous pause in the conversation.
She raised a brow, showing she was surprised he’d realized another vampire was present—also curious—but she shook her head with only a brief hitch. “He will make himself known to you in time. Suffice it to say, there is another vampire in residence here.”
The steady look in her vivid blue-green gaze sent an important message. If you think you can take over here, you’re outnumbered.
He’d address that up front. He rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk she sat behind.
“I know you’re a fledgling,” he said evenly. “Which means I’m stronger and faster than you. In our world, that means I outrank you.”
He noted the servant tensed, but Wolf kept his attention on Anwyn. “If you treat me fairly, and are as good at running this club as your reputation says you are, you don’t have to worry about me taking advantage. I’ll be an ally you can count on if others try. I need a job, and a place to do what I do. Being a professional Dominant in a place run by a vampire has all kinds of advantages for me, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’m not looking to fuck that up.”
She pursed glossy lips, cocking her head. “Gorham recommended you to me. He confirmed your bloodlust impulses have settled. He said you have exceptional self-discipline and an even temperament. Since you have an excellent track record at your former clubs, experience seems to bear that out.”
“I don’t feed where I work,” he said. “I can keep it separate. If I let my temper loose, it’s because I’ve realized that it’s needed and unhooked the chain, not because it breaks.”
Not entirely true, of course. Any of them could be goaded to bloodlust, but she was right. He had exceptional control of it, more than most made vampires his age.
Her gaze shifted slightly, a disconnect. He knew the signs of someone speaking to someone else in their head, and so waited patiently, though the wheels of his mind were moving. Since vampires could speak to their marked servants that way, it could be she and Gideon were exchanging informat
ion. The flicker in Gideon’s gaze suggested it, but then, when both of them looked toward the door, he realized that the vampire behind the mirror could speak to both of them. Which meant Anwyn had trusted this other vampire enough to let him in her head with a blood gift, or Gideon was a shared servant. Dual-marked full servants were rare, because that level of trust between vampires was even rarer.
As the door opened, Wolf immediately came to his feet. It was the instinct of a soldier, because the power signature that preceded this vampire was a hell of a lot older than him or Anwyn. It made his inability to detect the other male even more unsettling. He’d never known a vampire who could cloak himself from other vampires, and reveal that side of himself whenever he wished, like now, for maximum effect. But for all that the guy’s aura was unsettling, meeting his gaze was even more so.
Jesus Christ.
He’d met the type during his missions in Vietnam. He was facing a killer. All vampires killed of course, but he meant one who did it for a living. An assassin. An assassin worked for someone, and in the vampire world there was really only one body that might employ one with this kind of power and age. Now he knew exactly why the male’s identity was so closely guarded by Anwyn and Gideon. There were whispers among the middle echelon of vampires, about how Council handled vampires who stepped too far over the line. If they weren’t or couldn’t be called before Council to be punished and atone for their misconduct, then they sent someone to deal with it. Maybe several someones.
Looking at him, Wolf suspected they only needed the one.
Lean, dark-eyed, with dark hair, the male vampire wore gi pants and a black T-shirt. He was barefoot, as if he’d been working out. It didn’t dilute his authority at all. Wolf inclined his head and the upper half of his body in a slight bow. He wasn’t an idiot. He already knew what title this guy probably carried.
“My lord,” he said, by way of greeting.
The male glanced toward Anwyn and Gideon. “He can be trusted,” he said, his voice deep and sure. “His soul is true.”
