Blood Fury

by J. R. Ward

  As Saxton stood at Ruhn's open bedroom door and waited for his answer, he took deep breaths and smelled that wonderful combination of soap and shampoo that the male used.

  "Please," Ruhn said as he stepped back. "Come in."

  Saxton entered and thought immediately that the decor did not suit the male. It was not that the room was ugly or even badly done. In fact, it was a very elegant example of what he liked to think of as neo-monarchy, everything damask and silk and gilded up the yin-yang. The dark blue was okay, and worked well with the Old Masters paintings and all the gold leaf, but for what Ruhn would be comfortable in? It was too fussy and fancy.

  That farmhouse of Minnie's was better, everything handmade and practical, with clean lines and wood that was polished from years of hand waxing versus all kinds of layers of varnish.

  "Would you prefer me to leave the door open?" Ruhn asked.

  Saxton looked over his shoulder. "No. Please close it, thank you."

  There was a soft click, and then Ruhn stood to one side, his hands clasped loosely in front of him, his shoulders down and brought into his chest.

  It reminded Saxton of the first time they had sat together on Minnie's sofa, when the male had tried to make himself smaller than he really was.

  "I just want to tell you that..." Saxton laughed roughly as he paused. "You know, for a lawyer who deals with words all day long, I find myself curiously tongue-tied."

  "I will wait," Ruhn said. "For however long you require."

  As Saxton found himself over by the bed, he stopped and was surprised to discover that he'd been pacing. Turning around, he spoke clearly. "I am sorry that I seemed so shocked by everything. And I apologize for giving you any impression, if that's what you came away with, that my opinion of you has been altered in any fashion. I also want to tell you that I am a coward."

  The male's brows shot up. "I...don't understand."

  Saxton moved down to the foot of the bed. "May I sit here?"

  "Yes. Of course. This is more your house than mine."

  "That is actually not true, but we hardly need to debate the point."

  Saxton glanced overhead at the canopy and then regarded the drapes that came down the four posts. God, it was as if Tallulah Bankhead had left her gowns from the forties behind.

  He swung his eyes back to the male. "I am a coward in comparison to you."

  "Because you stayed in the truck when those humans came up to us?"

  "No, because..." He took a deep breath. "I was in love with someone. I say 'was' because the depth of my feelings were not reciprocated and I have had to live with that reality for a while now. It has been a very awkward situation for me."

  Ruhn blinked. "I am...I am so sorry. That must be so hard."

  "Yes," Saxton said softly. "It has been difficult to be regularly reminded of what I had wished for, and it is hard not to feel lesser than even when one is well aware that it is not an issue of fault--the heart wants what it wants." He shrugged. "And you know, I am also not the first, nor the last, to grapple with such a thing."

  Ruhn crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor. "Was it someone in this household?"

  "Yes."

  "Who?"

  Saxton hesitated. "Blaylock, son of Rocke." When there was no response, he sighed. "Blay is the one. Was the one."

  Ruhn was quiet for a time. "I find myself rather jealous of the male at the moment."

  "You are so honest." Saxton shook his head with admiration. "I am amazed at how transparent you can be."

  "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

  "I love it. It's almost as attractive as your smile."

  The male glanced up. Blushed. Looked away. "Blaylock is a very handsome male. He is kind, too."

  "He is also a fighter. Just as you were tonight."

  Ruhn frowned. "Are you trying to make me feel less guilty for my past?"

  "Yes, I can't help it. I have thought of little else since we parted. I hate that you feel badly for the torture you were subjected to. You were a victim."

  The male crossed his arms as if he were holding himself. "I don't want to talk about it anymore."

  "We don't have to. But I guess...you were honest with me and I want to be honest with you. I got my heart broken very badly, and I never thought that anyone other than Blay would reach into that part of me. I think I've believed that he broke something fundamental in my makeup. That I was forever changed. And then I met you."

  Ruhn's head whipped up, his eyes widening.

  "I remember the moment I first saw you." Saxton smiled. "It was at the meeting with you, Rhage, and Mary pertaining to Bitty's adoption. I couldn't stop looking at you."

  "But I thought it was because you didn't trust me or disapproved. I've always--anytime you looked at me, I figured it was..."

  "You are a very captivating male. But I assumed you were straight."

  "Well, I never thought in terms of straight or gay before. I always thought females were the only...you know, option. Until I met you."

  Saxton smiled again. "Just so you know...I think I could fall in love with you, too. And I didn't imagine I would say that about anyone, or to anybody, ever again. The truth is, though, I want to see where this connection is going. If it's something you're interested in. You were brave by saying what you did...and I want to be brave, too."

  The blush that hit Ruhn's face was one for the ages--and his shy happiness made Saxton feel like he was doing the right thing.

  You couldn't soar if you didn't leap.

  No one knew what the outcome of this was going to be. But he'd wanted to go traveling. He'd wanted to leave Caldwell and get out of this rut he'd fallen into.

  There was a journey to be had with Ruhn.

  "Yes," the male said. "I would like to know, too."

  "Can I kiss you now?" Saxton asked.

  --

  Ruhn moved across the room and felt transformed. It seemed impossible to travel such a vast emotional distance when going only a matter of feet, but as he came to stand in front of Saxton, he felt renewed.

  It was extraordinary. The world had previously seemed gray and closed off, but now it had a horizon with a glorious night sky full of stars. And all of that universe was contained in the handsome face that looked up at him from the foot of the bed he slept in.

  "Yes," he said as he touched Saxton's blond hair. "You may always kiss me."

  Except he was the one who bent down and it was his mouth that found the other male's. So sweet, so soft...and he instantly hardened in the place that counted most.

  "Lock the door?" Saxton said against his mouth.

  "Yes."

  One of them took care of it. He didn't really track which. And then he sank to his knees in between the thighs of the male. As he was tall, he was able to keep the contact going at their mouths as his hands found all kinds of things that had to go: jacket, shirt...

  He paused when he got to the male's button and fly.

  Saxton was also hard, his arousal a thick shaft under the fine fabric.

  Looking up, Ruhn drank in the sight of the bare chest, the shoulders, the collarbones. "I don't know how to do this?"

  "Oh, God...you do, you do."

  "Would you like me to..."

  "I'm about to come just looking at you between my legs. Do anything you want to me."

  Ruhn smiled and then fumbled with the pants. He didn't want to rip them--well, actually, he wanted to tear them off the male, but he didn't want to damage things. The slacks were polite, though. They all but melted open, revealing a pair of black boxer briefs...and that erection.

  Saxton rose to his feet. "Allow me."

  And then the male was naked.

  Magnificent was the only thing Ruhn could think of as he stroked up smooth thighs to a flat stomach and graceful hip bones.

  The erection was even better. Stiff, proud, begging for attention.

  Ruhn gripped it. Warm and hard. And Saxton moaned, the male's head falling back so only t
he point of his chin was visible.

  Leaning in, Ruhn opened his mouth. He'd thought it might be awkward. Instead, it was as the sex in that kitchen had been...the most natural thing to suck the cock in, and stroke it, and tease the head with his tongue.

  When Saxton collapsed backward onto the bed, Ruhn went with him. And he watched the King's venerable, proper solicitor arch with abandon--especially as the release arrived.

  Which Ruhn was more than happy to attend to.

  More than once.

  And then Saxton began to return the favor: Ruhn rolled over and watched with awe as he himself was stripped bare. That blond head dipped down and the sensation of wet suction had him cursing and fisting the duvet. Focusing on the canopy above him, he strained until sweat broke out all over him.

  He couldn't look. Not because he was ashamed or it was ugly.

  The glances he spared himself were too hot, too erotic, Saxton's beautiful face and stretched lips too much to handle.

  He came into the male's mouth.

  And called Saxton's name until he was hoarse.

  On Friday night, Novo pulled her black leathers into place, buttoned the fly, and pivoted around to the mirror over her bathroom sink. Her black muscle top was more than willing to get tucked in and stay put. Hair was back and braided. And in another minute and a half, she was going to have her combat boots on.

  It felt so fucking good to be in her own skin again. To have her energy back. To stop wondering, every second, whether her heart was going to go into a fatal arrhythmia.

  Too bad this wasn't her first shot back in the field.

  No, no. It was bachelorette party time. Yay.

  No, really. YAY.

  But hey, at least she wasn't fresh out of surgery, peeing into a bag. The comparison was...well, at least a moderate improvement in terms of torture.

  Okay, fine, the two were neck and neck.

  In this scenario, though, she only had to endure an hour or two before she returned to her real life. With the stabbing and operation, she had had to die a couple of times and dig herself out of the owie-hole over the course of days and nights.

  Walking out into the main room, she went over to where she kept her weapons in a locked fire safe the size of a small refrigerator. The safe was the most expensive thing she owned in the shithole she lived in, but as soon as she had gotten into the training program and received her first stipend, she had invested in the beast. The last thing she needed was a human breaking in and getting a bunch of guns with no serial numbers, knives made by a master smith who was a vampire, and explosives.

  And let's face it. This wasn't the best of neighborhoods.

  The hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot shoebox she rented was part of the basement of a walk-up and it had no windows, which was secure, but it meant things smelled a little moldy even in the winter. The building was owned by a vampire, however, which made everything easier, and the best thing? It was hers.

  Her family didn't even have the address.

  Pulling the blanket up off the safe--yeah, 'cuz, oh, that was savvy camouflage--she put in the code, cranked the door open, and took out her nines and one short-bladed dagger. On second thought...no, just one nine. Any more firepower and she might be tempted to turn her sister into Swiss cheese.

  Oh, wait. That was going to happen anyway.

  She holstered both the knife and the gun on her hip in such a way that they looked like nothing more than a cell phone on one side and a walkie-talkie on the other. Then she grabbed her wallet and her phone, threw on her jacket, and she was out into a cramped, cold hallway. At the end, there was a door and a short flight of concrete steps up to street level.

  Outside, the wind was in the same mood she was, aggressive and nasty, and as it whipped around her body, it was like being on the subway and having people bang into you as you held on overhead.

  Her last thought, before she dematerialized into hell, was that Peyton hadn't been in touch.

  It had been the plan, and what she'd asked him to do. But he'd still surprised her. And it was embarrassing, really, how often she had checked her phone for texts or calls. Thank God she lived alone.

  What was really pissing her off? How frustrated she got every time it wasn't him--which was each time she picked up her phone, as it turned out. She'd gotten a number of texts: Paradise asking her to come to some birthday party, Boone wanting to know if she'd like to read any of his books, Axe to see if she was interested in working out. No Peyton.

  And her sister and her mother had Bridal-mageddon'd her, of course.

  OMG, guys, I'm feeling so much better. Yeah, that was a close call, that whole almost-dying thing. But I'm good and you were soooo helpful during my recovery. Thanks! heart made from two fingers/two thumbs over chest Love you!

  Jesus Christ, this night was going to make her stabbing seem like a cakewalk.

  Going around the corner of the building, she found some dense shadows and dematerialized across town to--

  Holy. Mary. Mother of all that was estrogen.

  Like an ocean swimmer surrounded by chum, she looked left and right, not because she couldn't recognize that there was a great white with bad dental work heading right for her churning legs, but rather because she was searching, praying, for a lifeboat of any kind on the horizon.

  Nope. No one was coming, and more sharks were on the way.

  The venue was pink on the outside and uplit by purple lights. Inside, through the glass bay windows, she saw lace curtains and framed posters of Paris. Lots of round tables and mismatched, cheerfully painted chairs. Flowers. Teacups. Towers of tea sandwiches even though it was eight o'clock at night.

  Imagine My Little Pony meets KUWTK and serves gluten-free food.

  The only thing that was a surprise was how big it was inside. As she entered, the air was thick with powdered sugar and melted butter, but it turned out the front tea room was just the start of things. Behind that section, there was a proper French-ish restaurant that had a very un-frat-boy, Cosmo's-only bar, and a dancing area that had certainly never had a mosh pit anywhere near it.

  Things grew dimmer the further in you went, but the decor never lost its seven-year-old, pink-and-purple girl palette. And the waitstaff did get a little more intense, although it was more like you just added extra red dye food coloring to the frosting: In the front part, you had human women in pink forties' dresses with white aprons; in the restaurant, you had men and women in soda-fountain hop clothes; and finally, around the dance floor, security was one-hundred-and-twenty-pound swizzle-stick men with climate-change-awareness T-shirts and facial hair that was right out of Paul Bunyan's playbook.

  Then again, those boys were unlikely to have to ask anyone to leave, much less throw somebody out. The clientele were so Sophy's peeps, eighty percent of them women with pressure of speech and the kind of hand gestures that professional boxers couldn't keep up with for long.

  Novo felt like a fly in a bowl of vichyssoise--and as she went down into the restaurant proper, she certainly got that kind of attention. All the pretty girls in their pretty clothes looked over at her, their expressions ranging from who-let-that-in to bless-her-heart, depending on where they were on the Mean Girls spectrum.

  She found her sister presiding over her court of like-minded intellectuals at a special lineup of tables by the dance floor. There were a good number of them, well over a dozen, and that was not a surprise. A queen needed her ladies in waiting.

  The second Sophy saw her, the female looked down at her place setting. Then she glanced over at her right-hand girl as if drawing strength. When the other female, who looked a lot like old-school Lynda Carter, nodded and squeezed her shoulder, Sophy put her napkin on the table and got up.

  That smile was as bright and false as a pair of dentures.

  "Novo, I'm sooooo glad you're here."

  It was like getting embraced by a powder puff, and as Novo stepped back, the female's spring-bouquet perfume lingered on her leather jacket like somebody had sm
acked her with an Easter lily.

  "I've saved a seat for you. Down there."

  Novo looked at the other end of the table. There were a couple of empty chairs there, and she was willing to bet that was on purpose.

  "Thanks."

  Joke's on you, Sophy, she thought as she sauntered her way to her dunce-cap seat.

  This was the best thing that had happened to her all night: If you took the infectious-disease model, there was no inoculation that could work against the Pollyanna pathogen, so isolation was best.

  --

  "So what do you think?"

  As Saxton posed the question, he looked across the restaurant table. Ruhn was chewing slowly and looking as if he were trying to understand the dialect of a language he was only nominally familiar with.

  "It's delicious," he announced after he swallowed. "What is it called again?"

  "Chicken tikka masala."

  "And this?"

  "Garlic naan."

  The waiter came up to the table and spoke with a beautiful, fluid accent. "Is everything to your liking?"

  "Oh, yes," Ruhn said. "May I please have another plate of this? And more of the rice?"

  The human man bowed. "Right away, sir."

  Saxton smiled to himself. And was still smiling when the second wave arrived twenty-five minutes later. Ruhn ended up having thirds, too.

  He was a precise eater, nothing sloppy or loose about his forkfuls or his hands, and he wiped his mouth constantly. He also asked very good questions.

  "And then what did the sire do?" he was saying.

  He was also so very handsome in the light of the little candle that sat between them, his eyes luminous, his face accented by the shifting shadows from the flame on its wick. As Saxton stared at those lips, he remembered how they had spent the day downstairs at Miniahna's farmhouse, intertwined in that old rickety bed, the heat of their bodies providing all the warmth they needed, their passion banked, not extinguished.

  Ruhn was proving to be the kind of lover Saxton had been looking for all his life. There was great hunger and rough dominance, but all of that was mediated by a wellspring of consideration and caring. It was the yin and the yang of sex, the grabbing and the caressing, the biting and the kissing, the pushing down and the cradling.

  "Saxton?"

  "Sorry, just admiring the view--and the memories of the day." On cue, that blush was enchanting--and there was the temptation to stay on the subject of making love. But he let it go for the time being. "Anyway, the sire relented. She will be allowed to mate the male she wants. In the end, love wins."