by Mandy Rosko
“To making our own choices,” Cedric said when he pulled away and opened the doors. Without another word, or even a glance in Silus’s direction, Cedric’s dark-haired human friend took him by the arm and instantly teleported them off the grounds.
Silus sighed and eyed the long stretch of clear pool water in front of him. Now that he was alone, he could take a swim to cool his still heated body of the lust still raging within him.
To making their own choices, indeed. Silus only wished he knew which choice to make.
Chapter Six
When they reappeared on Cedric’s balcony and were safely inside, Ben threw out all the questions it seemed he’d been carrying on his mind.
Sun sprites generally kept the same hours as humans did, being creatures of the daylight, so their voices had to be hushed to keep from waking the house.
Cedric sighed and rubbed his face. “I’m going to meet him tonight, and I’m canceling the wedding.”
Considering the man knew how much he didn’t want to marry a woman he didn’t love, he expected Ben to be a little happier for him.
“I don’t like it.”
“What?”
Ben took a patient breath. “Let me explain. What I like is that you’re finally going to say no to them, like you should’ve done when you found out about this to begin with.”
“Oh, that is so easy for you to say. You’re human,” Cedric snapped. “Humans haven’t had to worry about this kind of thing for nearly a century. You could go off and be with whoever you want, but for my kind, this is still an issue.”
“Only because you’re making it one!”
Ben abruptly closed his mouth, rubbed his nose, and nervously listened in case he woke the house.
Everything stayed silent. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Ben snapped, voice quieter now, but no less fierce. “And I obviously don’t know as much about you as I thought I did, otherwise you would have picked someone other than a frigging vampire. You could be killing yourself by seeing him again. Do you even realize that?”
He did realize it. He’d poured his heart out to Silus and gotten the cold shoulder right before they worked that wicker couch real good. But Silus had freaking cuddled with him when they were done, and he still wanted to see him again. Those things definitely had to mean something. Normal horny guys who just wanted sex and only sex just wouldn’t do that.
“He knows I wouldn’t hurt him because I’ve had more than enough opportunities to do so. And you left me alone with him long enough that he could’ve snapped me in half if he wanted to.”
Ben shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t go very far. I always stayed within earshot.”
Cedric’s face went as hot as a stove element on max.
“When the sounds got pretty obvious, I covered my ears,” Ben said.
That so didn’t help.
“Look, just don’t go back again, okay? You told me what happened when he drank your blood the first time. Did he do it again?”
Cedric already knew where this was going. He threw off his ruined shirt and sat on his bed. “Yes, and I know you’re going to say he’s using me to get his rocks off or something, but technically I was using him too.”
Ben, it seemed, was choosing to ignore that comment. His dark eyes were hard and firmly focused on Cedric’s face. “Please don’t go back. As your friend and your guard, I’m very concerned that you keep wanting to go back there. Meet him at a hotel if you want to fuck him so bad, just don’t go back.”
Cedric didn’t know how to argue with that. It made so much sense. There wasn’t a flaw in Ben’s logic. Getting a nice hotel where neither of them would have to be quiet about what they were doing, not have to worry they’d be caught and someone would get killed, would be great too.
“All right, but he needs to know about this plan so he can meet me.”
Ben nodded, though he still didn’t look happy. “Find a place, make a reservation, and I’ll see to it that he gets the message.”
“Thanks, man,” Cedric said. He really meant it, too. For Ben to go to all this effort of keeping Cedric safe, and keeping this secret from the family that paid him, all so that Cedric could go off and do his thing with a vampire, was insane.
Ben sighed, scratching his hair. “All right, I’m going home to shower and get ready for my day, because I was out all night guarding your sorry ass.”
Cedric snorted a laugh, and then he got serious. “I’m going to talk to my dad again.”
“Jesus, Ceddy,” Ben groaned, “how many times do you need to do that? You don’t need his approval.”
“No, I know, I get it now,” Cedric said. “But I do need him to see that this is my decision. Whether he likes it or not.”
Ben eyed him, and then shrugged. “Okay, do your thing then. I’ll be back after I get some sleep.” Then, in that way he did it, Ben blinked out of existence without the aid of sunlight.
How the guy did it was beyond Cedric. There weren’t any UV rays for him to ride around on, so how—?
Cedric shook his head. He’d drive himself nuts if he kept on trying to figure out Ben’s power.
He got out of the rest of his clothes, took a shower, slept fitfully for a little while—he kept waking up with the jitters of what was to come—before he decided a suitable hour had come for him to wake up. He dressed in his best, a navy turtleneck to hide the bite marks at his throat with a black jacket and black slacks and waited for the right time to visit his father’s study. That meant just early enough for him to have gotten in and not started on any work, but late enough that he had his morning caffeine. There was no talking to that man unless he had his nerve calming coffee. He knocked on the dark, heavy door and waited. Nothing.
Cedric frowned. It was seven thirty. Cyricus should’ve been inside for going on fifteen minutes by now.
He tried knocking again. There was a slam and a thud on the other end, and Cedric jumped.
“Enter,” his father called in his gruff voice.
Cedric very nearly lost his nerve, but he turned the long handle down and opened the door.
His old man looked like shit. He wasn’t even dressed yet, and his housecoat with his name spun in gold threads over the right side hung off him limply. Cedric stepped inside and closed the door, not wanting any of the other guests to pick that moment to walk by and see his father like that.
“You okay, Dad?”
Cyricus put his hand over his eyes and sighed. “I will be. Very soon we’ll all be fine.”
Cedric turned toward the dark-stained oak bookcase. There were old hardcover books on law that never got read and a set of encyclopedias with gold script on the spines, but at the very bottom, sprawled on the scarlet carpet, was his father’s ledger.
Cedric lifted a brow at the man before going to it and picking it up.
He never figured out how to read these things, but he did know that when numbers were put in brackets, it was because those numbers were negatives. As he flipped through the book on the family’s yearly income, there were a whole lot of bracketed numbers. Cedric’s concern rose a fraction more.
“Dad, what’s going on?”
His father put a glass to his lips. A glass, not a mug. Inside, it looked a lot more like whiskey than coffee. He downed the contents and sighed that husky sigh of someone who took a drink of something strong and burning.
“Nothing. There will be nothing that we will concern ourselves with the day after tomorrow.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “What? Why?”
“Dacielle is still ill, but she’ll be well enough to walk down an aisle by then, my boy.”
Cedric’s insides twisted. “Dad, are we broke or something?”
Cyricus poured himself another drink and lifted it in a toast. “Not after you speak your wedding vows.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cedric tossed the ledger on his father’s desk, unable to keep it in his hands. “Thos
e numbers go back a long way. If we didn’t have money to spend, we should’ve done something.”
Cyricus sat down stiffly, his eyes becoming cold as he turned his hands into fists on the desk. “Like what? You seem to know so much, tell me what we should have done. Hmm? Sell our family home? Don’t be ridiculous. We have been here for generations.”
“Going broke apparently.”
Cyricus scowled. “We have not lived anymore extravagantly than our ancestors. Had Dacielle been born sooner, our financial woes could have been avoided.”
“What the—? Are you seriously blaming our money issues on the fact that Dacielle was too young for me to marry sooner?”
“Had there not been such an age difference, you both could have been wed by now, and her mother would have been forced to relinquish the dowry instead of spending it on frivolous things.”
The crazy thing was that Cyricus sounded perfectly serious. He saw no problem with blaming their poor finances on a young girl who had previously been too young to marry off.
Guess this explained why the wedding preparations had been going on since before Dacielle even turned eighteen. Still …
“Dad, you can’t think Aunt Sheila would just let her sister go to the streets or something. If you asked her—”
“The contract stipulates that her daughter is to marry my son for any of that dowry to come to us. We need it.”
His old man was going to have a heart attack when he finally said it. “But I’m not going to marry her.”
A blue vein just about popped out of Cyricus’s forehead, but he didn’t start clutching his chest and gasping for air.
Cedric almost thought that would be preferable to the Medusa look of death he was getting now.
“We have been over this again and again,” his father said through clenched teeth.
Cedric continued before he could say anything else. “And this time I mean it. I’m telling you, right now, to your face, that I won’t marry a girl ten years younger than I am just so you can get money.”
His father stood, a slow and calm movement, his golden eyes wide and hard like ice on Cedric. “You will do as you’re told.”
“Or what?”
Cyricus made a scrambling run around his desk. He took Cedric’s collar in his fists and shoved him back into the wall with a force Cedric didn’t know the man possessed.
They were nose to nose, and Cedric had an up-close look of how nuts his father’s eyes looked when he was denied something he wanted. “This is not some game for you to play. This is our livelihood.”
“And my life.” Cedric pushed against Cyricus, but the older sprite pushed back and grabbed a fistful of his hair, banging the back of Cedric’s head into the wall.
Cedric grunted on impact. It didn’t hurt. Not really. But the thing that kept Cedric from fighting was the shock of what was happening.
Cyricus then seemed to calm himself. As if realizing what he’d done, he stepped back and dusted dirt that wasn’t there from Cedric’s shoulders before straightening his now crinkled collar. “I have been more than patient with you. Of everything I have done for you, given you, you can do this one thing for me, and you will do it, without complaint.”
“You can’t think I can make her happy. I’m gay for fuck’s sake.”
A bit of Cyricus’s snarl returned. “That hardly matters. Do you really think I had a choice when I married your mother? My father required the dowry, much the same as we require Dacielle’s. One day, when your children are old enough and that money has run dry, you will understand.”
Cedric paled. Wow. He really didn’t need to hear that his parents had been forced together like that. But then he could’ve hit himself for being an idiot. Arranged marriages were part of the norm for his kind. How the hell did he think it happened?
“Dad—”
“I’m finished talking about this with you. Speak to me again when you’ve grown some sense.”
A dismissal if he’d ever heard one. Stiffening his shoulder, Cedric pushed passed his father and left. Even though it was childish and stupid, he slammed the door behind him because he wanted to be loud and show the old man how pissed off he was.
Whatever. Cyricus could pretend all he liked that this was over, but Cedric wasn’t done. They could set the wedding up, force him in a tuxedo and send him down that aisle with a gun to his head for all it mattered. Cedric would never say “I do.”
A few of his distant cousins walked along the same hallway. Shit, it was now late enough in the morning that everyone was up for breakfast. They spotted him and offered their congratulations for his upcoming marriage. Cedric had to pretend a cough just to keep them all at a distance. He had to do this three times before he made it back to his room.
The first thing he did was call the New York Palace Hotel. His parents had booked him and Dacielle a Tower room for their honeymoon, but Cedric saw no problem with letting the receptionist know that another change had been made. The woman on the other end of the line had been all too happy to change the time for him again.
Cedric couldn’t wait to spend that time with Silus.
Silus.
Cedric lay back on his bed. He’d spent the entire night tossing and turning, and he was feeling really sloth-like at the moment, which allowed his thoughts to wander easily.
He hoped Ben would show up soon so he could tell Silus where they were going. For a half second, Cedric had been so caught up in his anger that he’d practically changed the time of the reservation just to be petty.
No. He wasn’t doing that. He wanted to be with Silus for real, whatever real meant in whatever it was they were doing. Silus had seemed pretty damn bored with his story about a forced marriage.
So what did Silus want out of this? Guess he’d find out tonight.
Chapter Seven
Normally it would take about two hours to drive into New York City to get to the Palace Hotel, but with the hour of their reservation approaching, Cedric wasn’t too concerned. Ben said he would teleport them both, no harm no foul, and because Cedric was playing sick amongst the family and guests, and was currently on his father’s hot list, no one would be expecting to see him anytime tonight for dinner or the entertainments.
The thing that bugged him most was what he should pack, and whether he should pack at all. They could be going just to sort out whatever it was they were doing. Didn’t really mean either would be spending the night.
He just about snorted. Yeah, right.
To have or to not have Superman quality sex. That is the easy question.
Regardless of how hard it was to read Silus, it was real obvious the vamp loved having sex with him.
However, whether Silus wanted more than just a fuck buddy, well, that was a little harder. Did Cedric even want to be someone’s fuck buddy? No, not really. And this was a vampire he was dealing with. For all he knew, Silus only wanted him for his blood and the apparently amazing orgasms it gave him.
Despite the fact that Silus was technically an undead, Cedric wanted that undead man to not think of him as just as hole. He liked the vampire, which was weird because he was, well, a vampire.
If he packed it would look like he expected to spend the night with Silus regardless of what they said to each other. If he didn’t then he’d have no guarantees of lube and definitely no clean clothes if they did decide to hit the sheets.
Cedric stood over his empty suitcase pondering this. Decisions, decisions. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“You look quite lost in thought.”
“Jesus—!” Cedric jumped in the air and flew over his bed. He landed on his face on the floor by the time he identified that silvery, sexy voice as belonging to Silus.
Heart banging some sort of uppity mix, Cedric fisted the sheets in his bed and smiled. “What are you doing here? Actually, forget that. How did you even find me?”
Sun sprites didn’t formally have surnames, but they kept legal last names as a courtesy to their human counterparts. Still, it wasn
’t as if that name was listed in the phone book or anything.
Silus continued to stare as though he expected Cedric to leap up again, this time out a window or something. The vamp looked like he’d just come from a business meeting. A long black trench coat was undone, exposing a pressed black suit beneath with bloodred tie and gleaming vest. “Aside from my own blood, there is only one other family of outstanding class that lives in this general area. You mentioned a wedding, and there are more cars here than even I own and a decorated gondola in your garden.”
Oh.
Ben next appeared in that popping-into-existence way he tended to pull off so well. He seemed taken aback at the sight of Silus. “How the hell did you beat me here?”
“I am a creature of the night and stars. Indeed, if you look out that window you will find that it is night and the stars are shining.”
“No, no, no, I went to your room, told you about the change in plans and teleported out. I stopped at a gas station for three seconds to get a drink. That’s it. I should’ve beaten you here.”
Cedric looked, and there was a half empty red Gatorade bottle in Ben’s hand. He didn’t drink that much mid-teleport so he obviously stayed at the store a little longer than three seconds.
Then Ben frowned. “How did you even find out this was the place anyway?”
Cedric decided to stop being such a chick and get out from hiding behind his bed. “It’s okay, Ben, he obviously wants to talk here.”
And that really didn’t give Cedric much hope about their current standing.
What the hell had he been thinking? This was a vampire lord for God’s sake. Silus wouldn’t be used to, or like, having plans he’d made changed on him last minute.
Cedric kept his eyes on Silus’s dark ones. Neither of them gave Ben the time of day anymore. But from his peripheral vision, he could see Ben looking between the two of them with that glare of distrust Cedric was becoming more and more familiar with.
He made to walk out the door behind Cedric, then stopped and leaned in close enough to make one of those whispers that everyone could hear. “I’ll be around if you need me.”
