by Jill Myles
I stared at Remy. “You couldn’t have had this wonderful new idea a few hours ago, before we came here?”
“I didn’t think of it until she mentioned New Orleans,” Remy said, turning me away until I didn’t face Mae any longer. She leaned in and said, “I think we should visit Delilah. She’ll know the answer to your questions.”
“That’s great,” I said, giving her a frustrated look. “But who exactly is Delilah?”
“Delilah’s the oldest succubus in America,” Remy said, squeezing my arm to encourage me. “She came over to escape the French Revolution and settled in New Orleans. If there’s anything that a succubus has run across, Delilah’s bound to know about it.” She smiled. “She’s also a part-time voodoo priestess, which should help.”
“Oh, sure,” I scoffed. “I was just thinking that we needed a big helping of voodoo to go with our curses and demons tonight.”
“What a coincidence,” came Mae’s smooth voice from across the graveyard. “Delilah is just the person that I need you to take my message to.”
I poked at my stack of pancakes, unable to muster the enthusiasm to eat more than three of them. “So I guess we’re flying out to New Orleans, huh?”
Across the table from me, Remy gave me a puzzled look and shoved a forkful of strawberry blintz into her mouth. “Why would we fly there?”
“Uh, hello? Did you forget that little interlude with the demoness tonight? You know, where I agreed to bring a message to her friend in person?” The fact that Delilah was the demoness’s friend as well as Remy’s still bugged me, but I didn’t say it aloud.
I trusted Remy. We bickered like siblings, but she was one of the best things in my Afterlife—sister, mentor, and buddy rolled into one. We might not always see eye to eye on things like who one should sleep with (and how many), but she had never let me down yet.
Remy wrinkled her nose and shrugged, forking another mouthful of blintz toward her mouth. “Yeah, but why do we have to fly? I have a better idea: a road trip!”
“There’s a flaw in your logic,” I said. “If I’ve got to have sex every day now, I’m going to have to bring along someone for the ride. No pun intended.”
“Bring Noah,” she said. “I love him.”
I fiddled with my pancake, stabbing it down the middle. “We’re taking a time-out on our relationship.”
She sighed. “Bring Zane, then.” Remy wasn’t exactly his biggest fan, ever since he’d held a gun to her head. “I’ll bring someone, too, so we don’t have to share.” She shoved the last bite into her mouth and grabbed the tab for our late-night breakfast. “Sun rises in a few hours, doesn’t it? Plenty of time to pack.”
And enough time for me to track down my vampire lover and screw his brains out. I was Itching like crazy and I needed him, bad.
For the hundredth time that night, I cursed Mae and her damned kiss.
By the time Zane got home, the sun was just cresting the horizon and I’d set my washing machine on spin cycle (again) in the hope that the low rotation would ease me toward an orgasm and relieve the Itching that threatened to drive me insane.
I heard the door slam from the other room and leapt up, intending to rip into Zane. I was cranky, horny, and irritable, and the sun was almost up. If I knew my vampire timing (and I did), I’d only have a matter of minutes before he’d pass out, taking up his hibernation for the daylight hours.
“Where have you been?” I stalked into the living room of my small apartment and scowled, intending to blast Zane with a few scathing comments before I allowed him to grovel and we could have blistering hot make-up sex.
The sight of him stopped me dead in my tracks. It wasn’t the angry snarl on his face or the retort that he bit off to me that passed, unheard, by my ears. It wasn’t the sexy leather trench coat or the messy fall of black hair over his forehead that made my burning body turn from a 6.5 on the Richter scale to an 11.
It was the burning red in his eyes as they met mine.
He was in need, just as badly as me.
“Oh … hey,” I breathed, all the argument whooshing out of my lungs as the flesh between my legs grew instantly wet. I took a step forward, toward him. “I’m pissed at you.”
It didn’t sound like I was pissed. It sounded more like Take Me Now, Baby.
He threw his car keys down on the table and glared at me. “I’m not in the mood, Jackie. I’ve had a shit night and all I want to do is lie down and sleep until tomorrow.”
Liar. He might not be in the mood for sex, but his eyes told me what he was in the mood for.
And I didn’t care if he was in the mood for sex or not. I was.
I grabbed him by the collar of his coat, noticing that he smelled heavily like alcohol and cigarettes. He’d been to a club, but at least there was no lipstick on his collar. He had not fed. I tugged him to me, his mouth angling toward mine reluctantly. I could see the barest hint of his fangs brushing against his full mouth, and lord, I liked the look of that.
I bit down on his lower lip, hard. The taste of cigarettes and rum touched my lips, and I swirled my tongue against his mouth, all the while pulling on his coat to bring his body closer to mine.
He groaned like a dying man. “Jackie, no. I can’t do this.” His breath was ragged and he tried to push me away, feebly. “Not tonight, not right now unless you want me to feed from you.”
“I have to have sex tonight, Zane. I can’t wait.”
Zane stared down into the intense blue of my eyes, his hands sliding over my back and ass as if he couldn’t help himself. “You’re in a bad way.”
“Very bad,” I agreed, my voice sounding like a sultry purr as his hands slid over me.
A slow, devilish smile spread over his mouth and he raised one hand to cup my cheek, grazing his thumb across my mouth. His eyes were locked into mine, fascinated by the intensity of color. “Been thinking of me all night? So much for Prince Charming, eh?”
A subtle dig at Noah. I nipped Zane’s thumb, distracting him. I moved my hands down the front of his pants, sliding against the hard length waiting there.
“Jackie,” he warned, but his hands dug into my hips, dragging me closer to him. Not much of a protest, and I knew I’d won.
Pushing backward, I edged him to the corner of the bed and knocked him onto it. Hooray for a bed. Most of the time we never made it to the bed before we had wild monkey sex.
He fell backward, and I felt Zane adjust under me, shifting to take the pressure off the long black sweep of vampire wings under his leather trench coat and crossing his back. I grabbed the front of his button-up shirt and ripped it apart, feeling a bit like an extremely horny She-Hulk. Zane wasn’t protesting any longer, though, and I straddled him, rotating my hips on top of his as I leaned over him to give him a long kiss.
There was nothing slow and easy about our lovemaking. It was a mutual takeover. His hands jerked at the waistband of my jeans, and I shifted along with him, helping him rip them off my body.
Even as I slid my naked flesh over his body, he strained. I could feel the wings ripple under him, trapped by layers of half-discarded clothing and his own body weight. “Need blood,” he said, his red eyes flaring as he guided my hips over his thick length and settled me over it.
My entire body quivered with anticipation at the longsought relief, so damn close. “No blood,” I said, rotating my hips and pressing him deeper into me. “Just sex.”
He groaned again, throwing his head back as I squeezed my internal muscles around him and lifted, then lowered again. “Jackie,” he warned.
I was past warnings. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I had what I needed and I was taking it.
My body clenched around him, fueling my rocking hips faster and faster toward the orgasm that spelled relief. His fingers dug into my hips as I rolled them over him, hard and fast.
It didn’t take long—a matter of moments, really. One moment I was shivering and tensing up, feeling the build as my body sped toward the orgasm, breath
catching in my throat as he slammed my hips down over his. The next? Lights exploded behind my eyes, and my body quaked into a rough, ecstatic orgasm.
I breathed a long, low sigh of relief, wiggling my toes.
“Glad one of us got what we needed out of this,” Zane growled under me, his fingers clenching against the soft roundness of my buttocks. He rammed into me again, his eyes piercing red as he thrust upward into my slick flesh.
Okay, so I felt a little guilty at that, and rocked my hips against his as he continued to pump inside me, fueling my body back toward another slow, delicious orgasm. Damn, I loved Zane’s body against mine. I was even feeling a little generous, now that all the urgent, yearning need had seeped back out of my body for a few hours at least. I reached out and twirled one of his nipples with my finger. “Problem?”
I gasped when he thrust hard and deep inside me, growling again. His fangs glinted against his full lower lip, and he stared at my throat. “You know what I need,” he rasped.
Blood—he needed to drink from me. Vampire eyes turned red like mine turned blue—a meter of how badly we needed to feed our urges—and his eyes were a stark, vivid red. But letting Zane drink from me meant putting my body in his control—totally and completely—once more. It meant giving him a taste of my powers, and succumbing to the mind-blanking numbness of sleep. A scary thing for one of my kind, seeing as how we didn’t sleep. Normally I would have said hell no, and slid off him like yesterday’s pony ride. But I was feeling unsettled and even a bit guilty.
I needed him for more than just sex—with Noah leaving me, I had no choice but to ask Zane to come on the road trip with me.
A compromise occurred to me and I leaned back over Zane, letting my breasts brush against the front of his chest as I reached down to kiss those pearly fangs. My carefully thought-out words died into an unplanned kittenish whimper of delight when he ground into me with one long, delicious stroke.
But I forced myself to concentrate (a difficult thing considering the sweet torment he was putting my body through) and kissed his mouth. “I need something from you too, Zane. Will you do me a small favor?”
His lips caught mine, and I felt the scrape of fangs against my lip, biting into me. The mixture of pleasure and pain and the taste of my own blood in my mouth left me coiling with excitement once more. “Ask,” he rasped, his lips trailing across my chin and down my jawline, hinting at my throat.
“I need a vacation,” I said. “A road trip. And I need you to come with me. Please,” I added, sliding my fingers behind his neck and pressing his mouth against the soft skin of my collarbone. If he bit, I knew I had him—and my trip.
“Whatever you want,” he growled against my throat, and I felt his fangs puncture my flesh. It was a sharp sting, followed by the most delicious feeling of warmth as he began to feed from my throat. Heat rolled through my body and coaxed me into another orgasm, hard and fast. His came moments after mine.
He clasped me to him, drinking from my throat and stroking my body until the aftershocks left me, his thrusts slowing. My eyelids began to flutter closed, my body drifting into the feeding-induced sleep brought on by a vampire’s bite. I wrapped my arms around my lover and held him close as my body shut down, and I felt his tongue rasp against my skin, closing the bite marks with tender care.
“It’s not like you to make deals, Princess,” he said, his voice sleepy. “Next thing you know, you’ll be working for the queen herself.”
I was nothing like the queen, or any of the other deal-makers who used people to get their way. But the thought disturbed me as I drifted away.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
