by Amelia Elias
She laughed, her own hands going to the button of his jeans. Just once?
Don’t tempt me, wildcat.
Tempting him was exactly what Sian wanted to do. His desire and need filling her mind and his wickedly skillful kiss reducing her willpower to mush, all she could think of was having him inside her again. When he shuddered in her arms, she knew he’d picked up the thought and she stroked him through the denim, determined to make him as crazy as he was making her.
His hands left her breasts long enough to free himself from his jeans. Sian wrapped both legs around his hips as he slid inside her, blessing her lack of panties for once. Her moan mingled with his low hiss of pleasure as he sank deep. The shared sensations were enough to make her writhe with pleasure.
He thrust again and she arched against him. God, it was so good, so right with Diego, their joining an ecstasy like nothing she’d ever felt. Sian broke their fevered kiss to rain kisses all over his face and throat. If she dared to stay she’d do whatever it took to keep him, sleep all day and stay up all night to be with him, become a vampire if it was what it took to stay at his side. Surely she’d never find anything this perfect ever again.
His arms tightened and he buried his face in the curve of her shoulder, shivering with every caress of her hands over his back and hips. Her climax trembled just out of reach and he slowed, prolonging the moment, keeping her there on the edge of paradise. She dug her nails into his shoulders and whimpered with pleasure, beyond all words in her need. Diego growled and nibbled her shoulder. She felt him tremble an instant before fire swept through every vein.
Sian cried out, but the fire that consumed her wasn’t painful after the first moment. It surged with every slow thrust of Diego’s hips, heightening her ecstasy while still keeping her climax out of reach.
“Diego, please!” she cried, feeling her nails reopen one of the wounds on his shoulder. The sharp scent of blood intensified the burning and Sian finally realized the fire was consuming Diego, not her. “What—what is this?”
“This is the bloodlust,” he grated in a voice unlike anything she’d ever heard him use. Dark and rough, his voice conjured images of black nights and mortal peril, yet she had never heard anything sexier in her life. Take your pleasure, love. I won’t climax without blood this time and I don’t dare bite you again. His thrusts quickened, driving her closer to the edge. Let me feel you come instead. Share it with me.
She fought the spell of his sexy voice and the mounting pleasure of each deep thrust. No way in hell did Sian intend to take her pleasure without giving Diego his own. Their mental bond gave him no way to hide his need, his painful arousal and his frustration warring with his guilt at having taken too much of her blood last night. Come for me, querida, he urged in his black velvet voice, and despite his temptation Sian refused to be that selfish.
Her body trembled with the effort of resisting her climax. He needed blood and wouldn’t take it, but joined like this they shared everything. “Not without you,” she whispered, finding the reopened scratch and tracing it with her tongue again.
The burning surged and Diego cried out, his fingers diving into her hair as if to pull her away. Sian clamped her teeth around the little cut and held on. Not without you, she thought fiercely even as her climax started to overtake her. Come with me, Diego. I want you with me!
An instant later, Diego’s fangs pierced her throat. Pleasure overcame them both, a white-hot explosion that wiped every thought from her mind but the joy of the moment. Sian threw her head back and cried his name as the climax broke over her, wave after wave until she thought she might pass out from it.
The last crest had barely passed before Diego tore his mouth and his mind away, his hand flying up to his shoulder and coming away tinged with blood. The faintest red trace came away on his finger and he looked at it in horror.
“Not again,” he groaned, dropping his head down on her shoulder and holding her tight. “Dios, querida, this is one scare I really did not want to repeat. I’m so sorry, Sian.”
She smiled at his concern and threaded her fingers through his hair. She wasn’t a bit sorry. Having felt the bloodlust with him, she couldn’t imagine leaving him to endure it when she could do something to relieve his suffering. “It was my idea, and surely if what happened before wasn’t enough to do anything this wasn’t either,” she pointed out.
He said something low and fierce in Spanish and she closed her eyes, savoring his voice. “I love it when you speak Spanish to me,” she added, wishing she knew another language so she could whisper sweet nothings to him in it.
“That wasn’t a very sexy phrase, actually,” Diego replied, his forehead still on her shoulder and their bodies joined intimately. “And don’t ask me to translate it because I won’t.”
She laughed. “Say something else, then.”
He chuckled low and lifted his head to trace the shell of her ear with the tip of his tongue. “Tú es muy hermosa,” he murmured in her ear, his voice a deep, velvet seduction as he moved away from her enough to straighten her skirt and settle her feet back on the floor. “No sé cómo viví sin tú. Te amo, mi gatita, y yo siempre voluntad.”
His voice sent a thrill through her entire body and she pressed against him, loving the feel of his hands exploring her back in those long, slow strokes. He certainly knew how to touch her. “Now tell me what you said,” she said breathlessly. Whatever it had been, it’d been too sexy for any woman to stand and when combined with the unbearable passion they shared, her knees felt like Jell-O.
Diego nipped her earlobe and his hand slipped beneath her shirt to rest against the small of her back. “I said you’re very beautiful,” he replied softly. “I said I don’t know how I lived without you. I love you, my little cat, and I always will.”
Those words, which should have reduced her to putty in his hands, had the effect of a bucket of ice water being thrown in her face. Sian gasped, pulling out of his arms and staring at him in shock. “You can’t love me,” she protested. “You’ve only known me for four days and you didn’t even want me here!”
Diego didn’t try to stop her retreat even though she felt his desire to. Sian didn’t stop backing away until she felt the door at her back and she reached behind her for the handle, gripping it as though it was a lifeline.
“You don’t love me,” she repeated firmly, and she had no doubts which one of them she was trying to convince. “We had sex and it was great, but it isn’t love, Diego!”
He smiled at her, still leaning against the pool table. The temptation to run back into his arms was strong but she resisted. “Yes, I’ve known you four days,” he said, his voice utterly calm in the face of her panic. “And you’re right, I didn’t want this when it first happened.” His emerald gaze held her when she would have run. “I didn’t expect to love you, Sian. I didn’t plan it, but it happened and I’m glad. I wasn’t having sex with you last night, querida. This—” he gestured at the pool table, “wasn’t sex. I was making love with you.”
She closed her eyes, her heart pounding painfully in her tight chest. How could he love her? It had to be an illusion! “I have to go,” she whispered, giving in to cowardice and bolting.
Diego sighed as he heard an engine start in the garage a few moments later. It had been a gamble, telling her he loved her. He’d known it was when he’d said it. And like all gambles, the chance to win was always tempered by the risk of losing.
No one needed to tell him which side of that line he’d fallen on this time.
He hadn’t been able to help himself. She’d come to him like sex incarnate, wearing one of those short little skirts that tempted him viciously to let his hands disappear beneath it and thinking of some mind-blowingly sexy little scrap of a teddy she wanted to wear for him. All traces of rational thought had fled. Her unselfish passion rocked him to the core. When she’d begged him to speak to her in his native tongue the words had just tumbled out.
She didn’t believe he meant it. He couldn’t blame her.
He hardly believed it himself. Sian was opinionated, stubborn, suspicious, and occasionally frustrating as hell, but she was also sexy, passionate, intelligent, and just about everything he was stunned to find out he wanted in a woman.
He’d always thought reaching the age of one thousand without ever feeling the sting of Cupid’s arrow had meant he was immune to it. He shook his head, turning to resume his pool game in hope of making the time pass more quickly until their blood tie notified him that Sian was nearing home again. Some immunity. Four days with Sian and he was ready to start composing sonnets if that was what she wanted.
He actually found himself glad he’d been hit by her car that night, and if that wasn’t proof he was in love, nothing was.
* * *
Sian was almost to the gate before she even noticed what kind of car she’d taken. It was sleek and it was fast, which was all she’d cared about when she’d taken it.
Only when the gates opened in front of her did she finally let herself think about what she was doing. The Aston Martin purred as she sat there and hesitated, her heart warring with her reason. If she drove though those gates, it would be real. She couldn’t take it back. She suddenly remembered her mother’s twisted, broken wedding rings still sitting on the counter of Diego’s bathroom and couldn’t make herself care that she’d left them. She was leaving something far more important than any inanimate object, no matter how sentimentally valuable. Her hands shook on the wheel as Diego’s face filled her mind and she closed her eyes, searching for the surety she was doing the right thing.
Her instincts told her to turn around and drive straight back, to tell Diego that Santonyo had found her and trust him to take care of her. They more than wanted it, they demanded it with a ferocity she’d never before experienced.
She didn’t dare. “I love you, my little cat, and I always will.” Diego’s words echoed in her memory and she wiped her eyes furiously when the high iron gate blurred in front of her. If only he hadn’t said those words to her.
“I love you, kitten, and I’ll keep you safe.”
Her father’s voice this time, almost the last words he’d ever spoken to her. Sian choked back a sob and stomped down on the accelerator, tearing past the gate and all it symbolized and not caring if her recklessness earned her a ticket or a wreck.
She couldn’t outrun the memory, though, not this time. Her father’s voice echoed relentlessly in her ears, forcing her to replay the horrible scene. “Don’t go into protection, Sian. I’ve been a cop for more years than you’ve been alive and I know how it works. They’ll take you away from everything and everyone you’ve ever known, take your name, maybe even your face if you’ll let them. They’ll stick you in some backwater corner of nowhere and forget you.”
Sian stared across the remains of her birthday cake, stunned at her father’s vehement objections to her leaving. Frank Lazuro had never been demonstrative with his affections and had made no bones about the fact he would have given anything had she been born a boy. The Lazuros were dying out. Frank had been an only child of an only child, and Sian had always known she was the last of her line.
The loss of the Lazuro name had bothered Frank far more than it had ever bothered her. Besides, Sian had no intention of settling down and being someone’s little housewife. It wasn’t in her personality and those foundations certainly hadn’t been laid in her childhood.
Frank had wanted a boy, and since all he had was Sian, he’d treated her like the son he’d hoped for. When other little girls were taking ballet, she was playing baseball. In high school, Sian wasn’t a cheerleader on the sidelines, she was a kicker on the football team. In college, she’d joined the ROTC and majored in criminal justice, and after four years as a military policewoman she’d transitioned smoothly into the Savannah Police Department, following firmly in her father’s footsteps.
She knew it was the loss of the Lazuro name that truly bothered her father, not the loss of a child who had always been a disappointment to him no matter how hard she’d tried. “I can’t stay here and be a sitting duck just so I can turn out a litter of Lazuro heirs someday,” she’d replied, demolishing her piece of cake with her fork and compulsively recounting the candles in a little pile beside it instead of meeting his eyes.
“Is that what you think this is about?”
The hurt surprise in his voice had drawn her gaze to his face and Sian was stunned to see tears in her father’s eyes for the first time in her life. “Kitten, I don’t care what your name is. You’re all I have left. It’s you I don’t want to lose, not some damn name.”
He reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing it tight. “Stay with me. I’ll buy a house somewhere and we’ll disappear. You don’t need the Witness Protection Program, Sian. If you need a new name, we’ll change our names. I love you, kitten, and I’ll keep you safe.”
Sian would never forget a single word her father had spoken to her that night. For twenty-eight years, she’d waited to hear him say he loved her, to show her he accepted her as she was, to say she’d won his approval even though she was a girl, and finally he’d done it. She’d risen from her chair, wanting to throw her arms around him. “Oh, Dad, I love you t—”
The movement had put her in line with the window. It had been such a beautiful night they’d left it open, and the closed curtains fluttered in the breeze. They were fluttering when Sian stood and took a step toward her father and the sniper Santonyo had sent took advantage of the opportunity.
The cake exploded as the bullet whizzed past Sian’s shoulder and smashed into it. Frank vaulted over the table and tackled her to the floor just in time to catch the second one in the throat.
“Daddy!” Sian screamed, forgetting all the first aid she’d ever known and trying to clamp her hands over the pumping wound.
He shoved her away and pushed her toward the door with surprising strength for someone with a mortal wound. “Get out!” he croaked, drawing his service pistol and somehow struggling to his knees. “Car—go!”
And she’d gone, dialing 911 as she tore out of the drive to the sound of her father laying down cover fire through the kitchen window.
Sian wiped the tears from her face and tried to concentrate on the road—this road that led to San Francisco, not the one she’d driven, sobbing, to the Savannah Police Department three years ago. She’d run away that horrible night and she’d been running ever since.
And she was running now, running with Diego’s declaration of love in her ears and the nightmare image of him bleeding from a mortal wound branded in her mind.
As she headed toward the city, she saw the first pink tendrils of dawn caress the eastern sky, but her heart ached too much to enjoy its beauty. Never again, she swore as she raced away from Diego and the safety she’d felt with him. Never again will someone I love die to save me. The admission didn’t even make her pause. Yes, she loved Diego, loved him enough to leave him and save him, and despite all the reasons she knew it was right it still felt heart-wrenchingly wrong.
“Diego, I’m sorry,” she whispered, not even bothering to wipe away the tears trickling down her cheeks.
* * *
Two men watched the Aston Martin as it hesitated before the huge iron gates in the minutes before dawn. “Come on, girl,” the driver muttered, his knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel. “Come on, drive! Break the demon’s hold, you can do it. Drive away!”
His passenger grimaced when the little car didn’t move. “He’s too strong,” he said, reaching into his jacket and sliding his hand along the grip of his gun. “He’ll never let her go. She’s probably even one of them by now.”
“No, it’s too close to dawn,” the driver said. “She wouldn’t leave now if she was one of them.”
“She’s bewitched, I say!” the second man snapped. He pulled out the pistol. “We should finish her now before she breeds more of those monst—”
At that moment, the sports car surged forward, its tires kicking up a spray of g
ravel before catching on the pavement with a loud squeal. The driver let out a relieved sigh and crossed himself. “Our Lord be praised,” he murmured, closing his eyes in prayer. “Another soul is saved from the fires of hell.”
The passenger also crossed himself, but his face reflected anything but reverence. “Time to take the demon down.” He pulled out his cell phone and dialed. “Bait the trap,” he growled into it.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
Diego paced anxiously, ignoring James’s concerned stare. Dawn was almost here. Where the hell was Sian?
He tried her cell phone again, and again there was no answer. He threw the phone down with a snarl, running both hands through his hair. She knew to be back before dawn. Damn it, she knew there were vampire hunters out there! All right, perhaps he hadn’t told her specifically to be extra careful, but she wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t be foolish enough to stay out alone when she knew he couldn’t come to her aid should the Templars find her.
Not to mention the Outcasts. He groaned and clenched his fists. Those wicked beasts were able to walk in the daylight, unlike the vampires like him who did not harm their prey. Outcasts killed, devouring a human’s life force and using it to endure the searing daylight. Sian didn’t know that. He hadn’t told her, hadn’t properly educated his very mortal mate, had let her go out alone without the most basic education on the dangers of the vampire world. He’d let her run out of here in ignorance and now she was missing! Adrenaline surged through him at the thought of what those monsters would do to the mate of a Slayer—what they’d tried to do to her before—and his jaws ached with the effort of keeping his fangs hidden.
“Where the hell is she?” he growled, spinning on his heel and pacing some more.
James perched on the arm of the couch and watched his restlessness nervously. “I’m sure she’s fine, Diego,” he repeated for the umpteenth time. “You’d know if she wasn’t, wouldn’t you?”
