“Don’t,” he groaned.
She pulled away and glanced up to find him staring down at her.
“I…” he started, but words seemed to fail him. Surprise flashed in his gaze, followed by a fleeting uncertainty. Where he’d wanted to set himself apart from the men in her past, she had the distinct feeling that she’d just set herself apart from the women in his.
“It’s not about my pleasure,” he told her. “It’s about pleasuring you. That’s when I gain the most energy. I drink it in when you climax.” He shook his head. “I do the pleasuring, not the other way around.”
Until now.
Until Nikki.
Because she wasn’t his usual woman and this wasn’t his typical liaison. It was more.
She was more.
Hope flared inside of her, only to die a quick death as she snuffed it out and focused on the fierce, sexy picture he made towering over her.
He was massive, his chest broad and muscular. His arms hung at his sides, the familiar tattoos encircling both biceps. His face was flushed, his eyes bright and glittering.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, his voice laced with awe as he traced a fingertip along her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw, her chin. “So beautiful and so damned perfect.”
A rush of warmth went through her, a reaction that had nothing to do with the lust beating at her senses and everything to do with the reverent way he touched her, as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real.
She knew the feeling.
A vampire.
Her mind still reeled from what she’d seen and felt. But there was no denying that it was real. Not when she could feel the warm muscles of his thighs beneath her palm and taste the salty sweetness of him on her lips.
She trailed her tongue over her bottom lip and he groaned.
Hands reached for her and she found herself pulled into the solid comfort of his arms. He kissed her, plunging his tongue inside to explore and savor until she gasped for breath. She felt his erection, hard and eager against her stomach, promising the ecstasy to come, making her painfully aware of the throbbing and the wetness between her own legs.
When he moved his mouth to nibble a path down her neck, she tilted back her head. Pleasure rushed to her brain and the anticipation built. He licked his way down the slope of her breast.
He found her nipple and she gasped. She buried her hands in his hair, holding him close, arching her breast into the moist heat of his mouth.
But it wasn’t enough. She needed to get closer. Faster.
He read her desperation, locked her in his powerful arms and lifted her. The head of his penis nudged between her legs and the word condom popped into her head.
“Wait—” she gasped, but he silenced her with a quick, desperate kiss.
“You won’t catch anything from me,” he murmured against her lips. While it was probably the oldest line when it came to sex, she knew it was a valid one in this particular situation.
Because Jake wasn’t the typical sexually active male. He was much, much more.
For now.
His voice whispered through her head and she opened her mouth to question him. But then he urged her down in one swift thrust, and whatever she’d been about to say faded into a groan. Pleasure burst through her and the air lodged in her chest.
She clung to him, wrapping her legs around him as he buried himself deep. The delicious fullness sent jolts of electricity chasing up and down the length of her spine.
She didn’t know when he moved them. But one minute they were standing on the side of the underground spring and the next they were sinking slowly into the warm water.
The liquid welcomed them, gliding up over their skin until they were up to their waists.
Grasping at his shoulders, she held on tight as he cupped her buttocks and urged her to move. The water lapped at her bottom, sloshing and stirring, feeding the sense of urgency that grew each time she slid up, then down. Grasp and release. Over and over. Again and again.
When she felt the first wave of pleasure, she dug her nails into his flesh and held on as sensation rocked her body. Her head fell back and she clamped her eyes shut as heat drenched her and stole the oxygen from her lungs.
His groan slid past the thunder of her own heart, and she forced her eyes open in time to see him. His eyes blazed back at her. Hot. Bright. Like twin violet laser beams. The tendons in his neck tightened. His jaw clenched. His mouth fell open and his fangs gleamed in the dim light.
Fangs! her sanity screamed.
She had the fleeting thought that she should be terrified at that particular moment. But the pleasure was too intense, her orgasm too overwhelming. She tightened her body around him, milking him as he moaned, long and low and deep. He came then in a rush of bubbling wetness, his body bucking, his muscles strung tight.
He hauled her close and buried her head against his neck for several long, breathless moments. Nikki clung to him, relishing the feel of his pulse beat against her lips.
So steady and sure and real.
As real as the vampire who held her.
The truth sank in as they stood there in the water and held each other, his heart beating solidly against her own.
He really was a vampire.
Why…? How…? When…? Where…?
The questions rushed at her, so many that she didn’t know which one to ask first. Jake saved her the trouble of having to decide.
“I was turned back in 1883,” he murmured as he pulled away and stared down at her. “Not too far from here, in a small town called Junction.”
“I know that town.”
He nodded. “It’s a lot bigger now than it was back then.” He gathered her close and waded from the water. The liquid drip-dropped, the sound following them as he carried her over to the sleeping bag and eased her down. “I was thirty at the time.”
He sat down next to her and pulled his legs up. He braced his elbows on top of his knees and stared straight ahead. The tight line of his mouth told her that he didn’t see the cave wall at all. Rather, he saw his past as the words started to flow. “Contrary to popular myth, you don’t turn into a vampire just by being bitten by one. You must drink the blood of a vampire.” He clasped his hands, his knuckles tight. “I was attacked by one who then forced me to drink his blood.”
She wanted to say something, but she was too busy absorbing his words to form any of her own.
“I didn’t want to,” he went on, his voice low, almost hesitant, “but he’d all but ripped out my throat and I didn’t have a choice. I tried to fight, but it was no use.” He shrugged. His powerful shoulders shook and her chest tightened.
“That must have been terrible.” The words were out before she could stop them. Not that she would have. While the situation itself still seemed so unreal, his pain was all too real.
“The really terrible part came later. When I woke up, there was no sign that I’d ever been attacked. My throat was in one piece. There was no blood. Not even a scar. Nothing but this strange tingling in my gut that told me something was different.” He shook his head. “At first I could still walk in the sunlight. But with each day that passed it started to bother me more and more, until it became painful. And then I had these urges…” He shook his head. “I didn’t act on them. I fought the hunger, but eventually it got the best of me.”
Silence settled between them as Nikki absorbed the story while he relived it in his head. The loneliness. The desolation. The horror.
His voice was quiet when he finally spoke. Pained. “I almost killed a man. I was so crazed with thirst that I attacked him. I would have killed him in a hungry rage if not for Garret.”
“Garret? Your partner?”
He nodded. “I’d never met him before that moment. He’s the one who found me just as I was about to rip this cowboy’s face off. Garret stopped me and let me drink from his own vein until the hunger calmed enough for me to come to my senses. Before then I had no idea what I was. My wife had
just run off and our place was going to hell in a handbasket. I felt so sick that I couldn’t work the horses. I thought I was dying, but then I met Garret and found out that I’d already died.”
“So she really did leave you.”
“I told you the truth. Just not all of it.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I wouldn’t have made it without Garret. He was turned back during the Texas Revolution, a good fifty years before me.”
“That’s right around the time that Skull Creek was founded.”
He nodded. “He was older, wiser. He’d already figured out how to control the hunger for blood. The trick is to feed it slowly, regularly. Also, the older a vampire is, the longer he can go before he has to quench his thirst. He taught me that, as well.”
“It was him, wasn’t it? At the community center?”
He nodded. “Vampires can sense other vampires. I sensed Garret’s presence before I realized it was him and, of course, I shifted into survival mode.” His gaze caught and held hers. “I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt you, Nikki.”
A protective light gleamed in his eyes, and she felt a rush of warmth from her head to the tips of her toes.
“What about the hunger for sex?” she asked, suddenly eager to ignore the strange feeling. The lust, she could handle. But this…“Do you have to feed it often?”
He nodded. “Ideally once a day. Sometimes more. The less blood I drink, the more sex I need. I’m a slave to both.” He shrugged. “But then, that’s the story of my life.”
She remembered the story about his childhood and suddenly it made sense. He hadn’t slipped between the cracks. He’d been born and raised in a time where there’d been no services to protect children and so he’d been caught in a bad situation. Enslaved.
She reached out, her fingers trailing over the tattoo that encircled his left bicep.
“Is that why you got the tattoos?”
“I’m a vampire, sugar. We’re invincible to most everything, including needles.” He shook his head. “I didn’t do this to myself. It came with the territory. A reminder that while I have a shitload of power compared to the average Joe Blow, it comes from a higher source. One that calls the shots in everything I do.” He laughed, a hollow, heartbreaking sound. “I always thought that once I worked off my mother’s debt to Caskey I would be free, but that didn’t happen. I rode straight from his place to the nearest town and hooked up with the first woman who smiled at me. And just like that, I found myself caught in another bad situation. Then I was attacked and it went from bad to worse. One prison to the next. Stuck.”
She knew the feeling. She’d been stuck between her mother and her aunt her entire life. Making someone else’s choices, living someone else’s dream.
She was still doing it.
Sure, she’d bought her own house, but she had several gallons of yellow and red sitting in her kitchen despite the fact that she wasn’t one hundred percent crazy about either of them. She liked them both.
Stuck.
“Pick the color that you like,” he told her, his gaze drilling into hers, reading her thoughts. “You don’t have to be what they want you to be. You can be yourself.”
But could she?
“So what happened next?” she blurted, eager to change the sudden direction of the conversation. “After you met Garret and realized this was a permanent thing?”
“I accepted my fate. I had to. I moved from town to town, living for a little while, blending, until it was time to move on. I worked horses mostly. Tended herds. Times changed, but the need for good cowboys didn’t. I kept working horses over the years, moving from ranch to ranch, place to place.”
“When did you get interested in motorcycles?”
“I started riding back in the sixties. That’s when I started to fiddle with machinery and my interests switched from horseflesh to steel. The motorcycles lend themselves to the same type of wandering lifestyle. My destiny—or so I thought. But then I met this man about ten years ago. He was an old man. Crazy Cooter. That’s what people called him. He told me this story about how he’d once been a vampire but he’d escaped the hunger by killing the vampire who’d turned him.” Another shake of his head. “It was wild, but it turns out he was telling the truth. I looked into his eyes and I knew, and that’s when I realized I didn’t have to keep living like this. If I could find my sire, I could break free.”
“So what have you been doing in the ten years since?”
“Looking. I didn’t have much to go on. Just a name. But it was enough. I’ve tracked down every Sam Black from here to—”
“Wait a second,” she cut in. “Sam Black? The Sam Black who founded this town? He’s the one who turned you? But he’s a hero.”
“He stopped being a hero the day he was attacked and killed by those Mexican bandits.”
Her mind started to race. “You mean…?”
“They were vampires. They didn’t just kill him. They turned him. That’s why no one found a body. He was turned smack dab in the middle of town—and he’ll go back there Sunday.”
“Why?”
“It’s the turning instinct. We all have it. Every year, on the exact date that a vampire is turned, at the exact moment, he must return to the spot where death ended and life began again. The afterlife. He feels the pain again and relives the moment where his soul fled and the hunger took its place.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It feels a hundred times worse. But it’s a must. We all do it. I prepare for it by making sure that I have a blood source on hand to feed so that I don’t hurt anyone during those few seconds when I lose control.”
“A blood source? Like what?”
“A dead animal or even a few bags of the bottled stuff from a local blood bank. It’s hard to come by but possible. Garret dated a woman who worked at one last year, so I had plenty when my time came. But I doubt Sam takes the same precautions.” His gaze met hers. “There are vampires out there who relish the change. They like the wildness.”
“You think Sam is like that? But he’s—was—a hero.”
“The hunger has a way of changing you. It can bring out the worst if you let it.” His mouth drew into a determined line. “Sam won’t get the chance to doom anyone else. This year I’ll be waiting for him. I’ll destroy him while he’s mindless and in the middle of reliving the experience, and by destroying the source I’ll be free of the hunger. In less than forty-eight hours,” he went on, “I’ll be human again.”
The realization of his words struck and hope fired to life inside her.
“I’ll be able to walk in the sunlight and eat real food and live a normal life. I’ll walk away from here really and truly free.”
Regret welled, snuffing out the hope as quickly as it had flared.
“For the first time in my life,” he went on, “I won’t have anyone or anything dictating my actions. Do you know what that means?”
That while he’d turned out to be a vampire rather than a man, he was still every bit as temporary as she’d originally thought.
And the problem was?
No problem, she told herself. It wasn’t as if she wanted a happily ever after with him. Far from it. Sure, he was hot and hunky and he’d given her the best sex of her life, but only because he was a vampire.
Jake the man wouldn’t have the same effect on her.
Even as she told herself that, she knew it was a lie. Because she’d seen more than just a vampire this past week. She’d seen the man, too. And damned if she didn’t like him just as much.
Love him, even.
The notion stirred a wave of panic and sent her scrambling to her feet. She didn’t love him, but it would be easy to fall in love with him if she didn’t end things right here and now.
“What’s wrong?” his voice followed her, his gaze drinking in her frantic movements as she hurried to retrieve her dress.
“I really need some air.” Air that didn’t smell like Jake. Or feel like Jake. She jerked on the yel
low material and pushed it down over her hips. “It’s getting really late. I should go home.” She snatched up her shoes and started for the only visible exit, a monstrous hole that gaped dark and ominous, ready to swallow her up.
“Nikki, wait!”
But she couldn’t.
She had to get away from him before she did something really stupid like throw herself into his arms and beg him to stay.
“Nikki!” Her name rang out a second before he caught her arm in a firm jerk that brought her whirling around to face him. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Me? There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s you. You,” she blurted. “You’re no different than the rest of them. They all had their own hidden agenda and so do you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re leaving here.”
You’re leaving me.
The thought hung in the air between them as she stared up at him and he stared down at her, into her.
“Stay with me tonight.” His voice was low, husky, compelling. “Please.”
She wanted to. She wanted to so much that it scared her and made her fight that much harder. Because she’d never wanted a man the way she wanted Jake McCann.
She shook her head frantically and pushed at his hands. “I can’t. I won’t.”
She might want him, but she didn’t need him. Nor did she love him. Sure, she was falling. Stupidly, blindly falling, but she intended to catch herself. Now. Before it was too late.
She yanked free and stumbled blindly forward, feeling her way down the dark, winding cave until she broke free into a small clearing. Moonlight pushed down through the trees, lighting up the darkness.
She was about to pick a direction when she heard the grumble of his motorcycle. A few frantic heartbeats later, he pulled up beside her.
“Get on.”
“I’ll walk.”
“You don’t know where the hell you are.”
She was scared not stupid, so she climbed onto the back of his bike, slid her arms around him for the last time and held on while Jake sent the bike roaring through the trees.
Love at First Bite Bundle Page 15
