by Michele Hauf
Before turning to open the door, she glanced down the hallway. Images of Domingos kissing down her stomach, her mons, her thighs, scurried a delicious shiver through her veins and tightened her scalp.
And those gorgeous fangs sinking into her skin...
“Miss you already.”
As she closed the door and assured herself it was locked, she scanned the neighborhood for anyone lurking who shouldn’t be. An ingrained habit. A habit that could save her and Domingos’s lives.
She hated walking away from him without a word, but if she didn’t eat soon she’d get a headache and her whole system would protest, leaving her off her game. If she intended to make this relationship with a vampire work, they both had to come to terms with the fact that they might be alike in some ways, but in others, they were vastly different. Especially when it came to eating habits.
“Relationship?” she muttered as she strode swiftly down the street, knowing a Metro station was not far. “I think his crazy has rubbed off on you, Lark.”
If so, she liked it. And with a broad smile curving her mouth, she quickened her steps toward the main street.
* * *
Rook inserted the laser-cut key card into the reader and the LED light blinked green before the lock clicked open and the door to the basement level beneath the cathedral opened to allow admittance.
He descended the stairs, lit by fluorescent lights and inhaled the dry air from the limestone walls. Above, an actual historical cathedral held daily tours through the majority of the nave, led by an Order employee. A perfect front for the Order of the Stake. No one had been the wiser in the two centuries they had used this facility.
Strolling down the hallway to his office, he could only lament that his office did not have windows. There were days he entered before sunrise and left after sunset. Hell, he could practically be a vampire. But he was not.
He tossed his car keys onto the marble-topped desk and then flopped onto the leather office chair and faced the dark screen of his computer monitor. For reasons beyond his figuring, this morning he couldn’t get the image of Lark’s determined gaze out of his thoughts. The woman had surprised him at every turn of her training. Never once had she backed down from all the rigorous exercises, drills and assignments he’d given her. Truly, she was a match to any male knight they employed.
And yet he could not help wondering if he had failed her in some manner he wasn’t capable of understanding because she was a woman.
Could it be so simple as male/female differences? Or perhaps he should claim it complicated, never simple. Not once had she failed to make a kill. Never. And always she completed a mission within twenty-four hours. When on the hunt, the woman was relentless. While training her, he’d used her grief to fortify her willpower, and he would never apologize for that.
So what had made tracking one insane vampire so difficult for her? Had some tendril of compassion invaded the hardened hunter’s mien to make her question the inevitable death punch?
Rook sighed out through his nose and beat a fist on the desktop. He could simply ask her. That would require...talking. Getting into a conversation that went beyond delving into her mind for weaknesses and strengths in the physical fight. It would require a certain degree of emotional understanding that he was incapable of employing. He was not without emotion. He just found it difficult to relate to the knights on any level other than that of leader to the flock.
And King would insist he not get emotionally involved with any particular knight. Made things messy, a lesson both had learned over the centuries of heading this organization.
He need only place a hand over her heart, though, to see her truths.
Still, he worried about Lark. And with good reason. He’d molded her into what she was at a time when conditioning had been easy because of her weakened emotional state and grief. Touch her in the wrong spot, and she could snap. Which was why he’d tried to keep her on regular missions and always busy so she would never have a chance to snap. To think. To wonder if what she had done was right.
She had done the right thing.
And he had done the right thing by taking her off the LaRoque job. But in order to continue to do the right thing, he’d keep an eye on her. Make sure she didn’t stumble off the path and fall apart. Or worse yet, stumble onto things better kept secret.
Chapter 14
Hearing a knock at her back door, Lark shoved up from the kitchen table, her runny eggs and crunchy bacon finished, and rushed through the bedroom. Quickly she opened the door and, though she wanted to beat her fists against the idiot vampire’s chest for putting them both in danger, instead she received Domingos’s hug and they stood inside the threshold, silently holding each other. He folded her into his shadow with an ease that made her feel as if she were a natural edge to his darkness, and their bodies melded as if the earth’s magnetic forces demanded nothing but.
Was this love? Not so quickly. And certainly she did not have room in her bruised heart to love another so soon after...
Maybe? It felt different this time around, this relationship with a man. Not forced, though certainly strange. Who could know if she’d find love a second time? Or if perhaps she’d already stumbled into it.
“I told you not to come here,” she finally said. “The Order is watching me. Stupid vampire. I would have returned to your home. And the sun is out!”
He tapped the goggles around his neck. And he did have a hood pulled down low over his forehead.
“You can’t cover all your skin. And there aren’t enough shadows on the rooftops during the day.”
He revealed the back of his hand. The skin had burned red and blistered. “Worth it to be close to you.”
“Don’t say things like that, Domingos. My God, you are a masochist.” She pressed her head to his shoulder, just glad he was in one piece and close enough to hold. He was moving far too fast in the emotional arena. Or was she? “You’re not falling in love with me, are you?”
“I don’t think I know what love is.”
“What?” She studied his eyes but found no tease or coyness in them. “You must have been in love. At least once?”
He shook his head. “Yes, once, as a mortal. It was a yearlong thing. She dumped me for a guitar player. It’s always the rock stars who get the girls. But nothing like the love you had for your husband. Such a love must have been very strong for you to commit so many acts of murder.”
She didn’t like hearing it put that way. She had slayed vampires. That was not murder, but rather, removing a dangerous force from society. Someone had to do it.
“Everything I have done has been for him.”
Except when it came to getting her own needs met. Which she had indulged all day and last night. When had she decided to stop doing the right thing? It felt...not wrong.
Could the wrong she and Domingos had created possibly be right?
“You know he’s gone, Lark?”
“My husband? Of course I do. I told you I’d said goodbye to him while in the chapel. What are you implying?”
“Only that he doesn’t know what you’ve done for him. Vengeance doesn’t matter to anyone but you.”
“I can’t believe you said that. You can’t possibly know what I’m feeling. How my heart feels as though it was torn from my chest. How I’ll never, ever find the happiness I once had.”
“How if you speak the impossible sadness you felt, then it becomes ingrained in your being. You are making yourself unhappy, Lark.”
“Don’t give me psychological bullshit. I can’t believe this. An insane vampire is telling me how to think.”
He grabbed her by the arm. “Stop using your loss as a shield, Lark. Just let me inside you.”
She stepped back from him, defensive now, and eyeing the titanium stake she kept at her bedside. Yet the need for protection was a lie she immediately recognized. “I’ve done that already. Let you in. In more ways than one.”
“He’s still there, though.”
<
br /> She nodded. “He—Todd—will always reside in my heart. We were married. I was going to have his child. Can you understand that? But I’ve started to let him go.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. It helps that you’re telling me these things, though. But you said you were going to have his child?”
Hell, she’d let that slip. Lark sighed. Hadn’t been a slip. She needed Domingos to know her truths, all of them.
“I need to tell you why I married Todd, even knowing he was a hunter.”
“You knew that about him?”
“Yes, he never hid his job from me. Though, it was difficult not to think him a wacko, initially. I mean, vampires?”
Domingos raised a brow.
“Come on, you’ve always been myth, legend. But I eventually believed Todd. How could I not when he’d come home with bruises and injuries and shown me the stake? Anyway, we’d been dating four months when I found out I was pregnant. I was on the Pill.”
“Ah.”
“He did the right thing and asked me to marry him. I didn’t want to marry because of that, but when you’re only twenty-four and pregnant, and the father of the baby asks you to marry him, it’s...a relief.”
He met her eyes, and she could sense his question.
“That’s an awful way to put it, but truthfully, that was my first reaction. Relief that I wouldn’t have to do the single mother thing. I did love him.”
Domingos leaned against the bed and bowed his head. “But you have no child?”
Lark breathed in deeply through her nose and forced out what she’d not spoken about. Ever. “I miscarried two months later.”
She couldn’t cry about it now. All her tears had been ransomed during Todd’s captivity. And that sweet little baby that she never got to hold was now with Todd in heaven, she felt sure of that.
“I was never prepared to be a mother, but I’d accepted it, and was looking forward to it. Had even bought a little green outfit with puppy prints on the toes and ears on the hood. I gave it to charity afterward. Had to get it out of the house.”
She sighed, remembering the pain that had made her shiver while standing in line to drop off the bag of baby clothes at the charity thrift store. Nothing like a kick from a vampire to the gut. That pain had been marrow-deep. It had scarred her, surely.
“It was easier for Todd,” she said, forcing the doors closed on that memory. “We never talked about it. And he immersed himself in the Order.”
“You two never discussed it?”
She shook her head. She’d never been good at feelings, and sitting down and looking Todd in the eye and discussing things that made her sad, or even happy, had been set aside. And he’d mirrored her reluctance, which had probably made it easy for him to push away his grief, or at least, not share it with her.
“I’m sorry,” Domingos offered quietly. “That child’s soul was not ready for this world.”
She’d not heard it put in such a manner, and for some reason, his simple explanation lightened her heavy heart. “You think so?”
“I believe in a higher power, Lark, that grants life and takes it away. The universe has a plan for us all. Doesn’t mean the plan isn’t sometimes going to suck, but, well, there you go.”
“Like you being turned to vampire?”
“I would never compare my misfortune with your loss, Lark.”
“Thank you.”
And that was all she needed. Buoyed by her confession, Lark stroked the bite mark on her neck. The scab was gone and the skin almost smooth. “Our lovemaking has become more than sharing torments, yes?”
“I had hoped so. I make love to you for pleasure, Lark. Nothing but.”
“Me, too. But you need to know, I...wasn’t using birth control that first night we had sex. I am now. But, uh...”
He nodded and shrugged. “Vamps can get mortal women pregnant.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t even thinking.”
“It’s all right, Lark. Really. If it happens...” He smiled, almost too big for a man who should be pissed at her reckless sexual slip. “We’ll deal with it then.”
“I want to have a family someday. But the right way. You know?”
“I understand. Me, too. I’d love a family.”
She took his hand, grateful for his understanding. “I’m just— It freaks me that you’d risk so much by coming here. I don’t want to lose you—” Too was the word she couldn’t say.
So much she had lost.
He nodded. “But I can’t promise it won’t happen again. If I could keep you with me all the time, then there would be no need to go looking for you. You left me a note.”
“I’m sorry, but I was hungry.”
“I’ll buy food to keep in the fridge for you.”
“I would appreciate that.” She gathered her hair with her hands and, pulling it into a ponytail, then released it over her shoulders. “So, we’re going to do the couple thing, eh?”
“Can we?”
“I’d like that. Does that mean you’ll allow me to accompany you when you track the rest of pack Levallois? I could be your sidekick. I pack a mean left hook, and there’s not a werewolf alive who can stand up straight after my kidney kick.”
“No.” He strolled toward the bed and with a jump landed on it, sitting. The vampire splayed out his hands before him in surrender. “I’m done.”
Lark lifted an eyebrow, her heartbeat thundering in anticipation. “You mean it?”
“You’ve shown me that there is no need to continue such a destructive path. I have so much to live for now. That is...” He winced and bowed his head, looking aside. “If you could commit to the two of us.”
Lark rushed to him before her training could stop her from doing something stupid with the perceived enemy. “I commit. I want us. I need us.”
“For more than what we get from each other,” he tried. “You know? We both feed a sort of twisted need for what you call is wrong. Right?”
She relented to agree with a nod. No way to put it in kinder terms. They were both damaged. The means they sought to soothe that damage were greedy and selfish. Yet beneath their quest for something better, something right, lay the roots of true need and trust.
“So let’s move beyond,” he suggested. “We’ve both been through a lot. We understand each other’s need for trust and acceptance. We also know to dwell in the past, and its horrors will never allow us to step forward. Can we stay in the pleasure we seek, and not stray back to the pitiful helping-each-other-ignore-their-torments stuff?”
“I like the sound of that.”
“We’ve put everything out there, yes?”
“Yes. You know all my truths now.” She pressed a palm over his heart.
“You know I can feel you touch my soul? I want to go soul-deep with you, Lark. Beyond the idiot revenge and surface labels of hunter and vampire.”
“Can you? Will the crazies in your head allow that to happen?” She tapped the goggles he wore about his neck. The sheers before her window let in subdued light, but she suspected the UVs couldn’t permeate as strongly and not to the distance where he sat on the bed. “Because if you can, I’m there for you.”
“That makes me happy. I need a happy.”
“We both do.”
“Then let’s figure out a new kind of happy that includes the two of us being right and not wrong.”
“Agreed.”
She kissed him soundly, lashing her tongue out to dance with his. Who would have thought this dark soul could lighten hers? She wasn’t going to question it anymore.
“And now we seal that agreement with some sex, yes?” Domingos’s eyes glittered expectantly.
“You’re wily, vampire, but I can’t think of an argument against some sheet twisting.”
Lying back on the bed, he pulled her down onto him. “You want to do this with the goggles, or can the curtains be pulled tight enough to give me darkness?”
“The goggles are kind of kinky.”
&
nbsp; “You like kinky?”
She teased her tongue along her lower teeth, tilting her head in a wondering gesture. “I think I could do the kinky, but not so much if it brings up a screaming vampire. I’ll pull the curtains. But don’t toss the goggles, lover.”
* * *
After a delicious session of licks, tickles and moans on the bed, Lark preceded Domingos to the shower to warm up the water. She stood before the stream, the tepid water beating down upon her breasts, head tilted back and eyes closed.
She slicked her fingers between her thighs, soaping up the achy sweet folds that her lover took pleasure in worshipping. He’d grazed his fangs along the sensitive skin there and it had brought her to some kind of crazy, screaming orgasm. Because the fear that he’d hurt her had mingled with the trust that he would not, and once again, she had easily released, falling into his arms. The sanctity of Domingos’s darkness.
He’d bitten her once, and promised not to do it so often. The man was good on his word. But for the same reasons she still wasn’t clear on what freedom meant to her, she also felt being bitten wasn’t so awful as a knight should believe.
Suddenly over the drum of water she heard the thumping sound of a familiar melody. Domingos was humming something—the theme from Psycho?
He tore back the shower curtain and at the sight of the naked man standing there with goggles over his eyes, Lark let out a nervous scream, then punched him on the shoulder as her fear gave over to relief and laughter mingled the two of them together beneath the warm water.
“Scared you.” He tossed the goggles out onto the bathroom rug, then encircled her around the waist.
“I do not like horror movies,” she said. “They scare the crap out of me.”
“Yet being this close to a man with fangs does not?”
“I can deal with the movies about vampires and werewolves. They are—used to be—fiction. Something I know could never hurt me. It’s the serial killers and knife-wielding clowns that can show up on a girl’s doorstep any night and take her out that frighten me.”
