Caleb

by McCarty, Sarah

  “You can let go of me.”

  He barely felt the tug on his grip. Another thing he’d forgotten in the last couple centuries: how much more delicate a human woman’s strength was than a man’s. He lifted his gaze to find her staring at him with wide eyes and parted lips, her expression a mixture of fear and fascination. As if she, too, were caught up in the chemistry between them. As if what was there was more than could be seen or felt. More than could be ignored.

  “Am I making you nervous?”

  “Yes.”

  He hadn’t expected the truth. “It’s a habit of mine.”

  “Staring?”

  “How do you know I’m staring?”

  “I can feel it.”

  “Ah.”

  Her tongue flicked over her lips again, leaving them glistening, revealing the uncertainty that didn’t show in her voice. “So, do you think you could give it a rest tonight?”

  “Your dream not going the way you planned?”

  “If I’d planed it, we’d be having a lot more fun.”

  “Hmm, I bet we would.”

  “I can’t be a vampire.” Her free hand slid under his, rubbing at her stomach.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Vampires don’t exist.”

  “Uh-huh.” At least she was trying to absorb a little, even if she was approaching reality from the outskirts and working in. He squeezed her fingers. “You’re going to need help with this, Allie. At least, initially.”

  “And here I thought it was all just going to come naturally.”

  He ignored the sarcasm. “Some of it will.” Especially the need to feed. Primitive and violent. When it came upon her the first time, it would consume all of the humanity she clung to so hard. He pushed the bangs off her forehead. “Some of it, you’ll have to work at.”

  “Like what?”

  Regaining her humanity after that first feed, retaining it from there on, but he didn’t say so. There was time enough for her to figure that out on her own. “Learning to sleep during the day, for one.”

  She didn’t smile. Her hands pressed into her stomach. “I don’t feel well.”

  Damn, he’d thought he had her nausea suppressed. He worked his palm between the sheet and her skull. Supporting her head, he turned her to her side. “Are you going to be sick?”

  “It’s not that kind of unwell.”

  “Then what?”

  The eyes that strained to see him over her shoulder were wide, fearful, and oddly determined. “I just realized if this isn’t a dream, I’m dead.”

  HER terror clawed at him, her cry for help unconsciously reaching along their connection. Help he didn’t want to deny. It wasn’t right that she hurt because of him, because of anything. Caleb followed the terror down the mental path, back to the seat of her fear and covered it with calm, sliding a tendril of energy out, feeding her shaky belief that this was a dream. Solidifying it. Adding a verbal push to his mental one as she rolled onto her back. “You’re not dead. This is a dream, remember?”

  It was wrong, but he wanted her to have the comfort of that illusion for as long as possible. Her nails sank into his forearm with the desperation lacking from her carefully modulated, “You’re sure?”

  “Baby, I’d notice if you needed to be put under.”

  Her big eyes narrowed with suspicion, “How?”

  “I’d be the one digging the grave.”

  She blinked at that. “If I’m not dead, but I’m a vampire, how will I explain?”

  “You won’t.”

  “But I’ll have to tell my family something.”

  Shit. This was the hard part. “Anybody looking for you will think you’re dead.”

  The shock of that hit her like a blow. She jerked and then went absolutely still. The rapid blink of her eyes kept back the tears he could see shining there. “Why would they think that?”

  He tucked her hair behind her ear, rubbing his knuckles on her cheek. Guilt flayed him with the deep cut of a whip as Allie lay there, looking into the darkness, trying to see his face, dreading what he was going to tell her, willing it to be different than what she suspected. “Probably because you disappeared and your car is in the river. When it’s found, everyone will assume you drowned.”

  The truth burned like acid on his tongue, but he owed it to her.

  “Damn you.” Her fist slammed into his cheekbone, one knuckle wedging against his eyeball snapping his head back. “I have a family!”

  He grabbed her hand, pressing it down into the mattress, blinking to clear his watering eye. She had a hell of a quick jab. Her body jerked as she snapped up her knee. He trapped it between his thighs, grunting when it grazed his balls. She bucked beneath him. She was no match for his strength. Within seconds he had her pinned. “I’m sorry. There wasn’t any choice.”

  “You had a choice. Probably a hundred of them. All better than that.” Allie turned her head and sank those small white teeth into his wrist. The bite burned through him like fire, a combination of heaven and hell. Blood scented the air. His vampire rose to the call. He threaded his free fingers into the soft silk of her hair and yanked her off.

  “God damn it, Allie, think.” A shake punctuated the statement. “There’s no explaining the unexplainable.”

  The starkness of his night vision turned the glitter of her tears to a silver sheen.

  “You don’t know my family.”

  “Are they the open-minded type that can accept the thought of their daughter sucking their blood?”

  She gasped and cringed into the mattress. “I would never touch them!”

  “But they would always wonder if you would, would always speculate if you could.”

  “We’d work it out.”

  “About all you’d work out is mass hysteria when people found out vampires really do exist.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.” He let her struggle until exhaustion forced her to drop back against the mattress.

  “Damn you.”

  He already was. “There’s no going back. Just forward.”

  “Without my family?”

  “Yes.”

  Waves of grief radiated off her. Every shudder in her breath rubbed salt into the open wound of his guilt. “I hate you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She took another breath, held it, and then her eyes narrowed and her chin came up. “If this wasn’t a dream, I’d kill you for putting them through that hell.”

  They both knew this wasn’t a dream, but if enabling her to pretend for a bit longer spared her pain, he wasn’t going to stop any sooner than he had to. The reality was hard to take in small doses, let alone all at once. “Then I guess I’ll be giving thanks to dreams.”

  He held her, absorbing her grief and tension as she wrestled with the loss. Silent tears slid down her cheeks into her hair, dripping onto the inside of his arm where they lay in a pool of hot accusation. Snippets of scenes with her brothers and her father raced through her mind along with the love she had for them. One by one, he muted the memories, creating a buffer to tuck the pain behind. Gradually, Allie relaxed. Her fingers unclenched and spread over his shoulders. Her chin came down and in a small, very un-Allie-like voice she asked, “So, I’m really not dead?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  He brushed his mind over hers again. He felt her hidden determination to reunite with her family along with the bundle of tension behind her eyes that indicated her headache worsening. He pushed it back out of her conscious reach and fed her belief that this was a dream. It wasn’t as easy as it had been before. The woman’s mind was going crazy muddling what had once been a clear path. He braced himself as she took a breath. Allie on a tear could lead to anything.

  “When someone spots me drifting around at night, how are you going to explain that? Call me a ghost?”

  She was still working on how to get past her immortality, using logic to make sense of the illogical. “No.”

  Her
nails dug into his forearms. “My brothers won’t stop looking for me.”

  He stroked her hair. He could understand that. He wouldn’t either. “They won’t find you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I figured on changing your appearance.”

  “With plastic surgery?”

  “No. Illusion.”

  “Welcome to the witness protection program for vamps,” she muttered under her breath.

  Her resilience made him smile. “Pretty much, though it was easier in my day. More space, less technology.” In the last seventy years, hiding in plain sight had become more difficult; in the last twenty, almost impossible with people’s love of cameras.

  Her head canted to the side as she considered his statement. “The Internet must really screw with your lifestyle.”

  “Slade considers it his new best friend and digital cameras his mortal enemy.”

  “I can understand that. If you discount the Johnson hunk appeal, the man has geek written all over him.”

  His vampire stirred with a growl. “I’m the only Johnson whose hunk appeal you need to be noticing.”

  She waved his statement away like he was playing. He was glad she couldn’t see the vampire’s snarl at the thought of her with another man. One peek and she’d be running for cover. His desire to possess her completely was absolute.

  “So if I’m not dead, what am I?”

  “Stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

  She did not appreciate his sense of humor. That was clear. Her eyes narrowed and he got the impression she was just short of slapping him. She let go of his arm, depriving him of the sting of her claim, her hands bouncing off his shoulder, fingers grazing his neck, sending chills down his spine. Chills that bunched in his groin in pure anticipation as those same fingers wrapped in the hair just above his ears and yanked down.

  “Right now, at this moment, what am I? Vampire or human?”

  He let her pull him to within six inches of her face and then countered her tug with resistance. If he didn’t, one of them was going to end up with a broken nose. “Human.”

  “You’re sure?” She shifted beneath him, her toes brushing his legs, her hips moving against his. “You’ve checked?”

  He lifted his torso, giving her more room to maneuver, savoring the hot slide of flesh on flesh. It didn’t matter if she were only trying to get away. His body, so tuned to hers, took the rhythmic touching as an invitation and responded with hard impatience. “Not in the last five minutes.”

  “Check.”

  “Is that an order?” He did not take orders well, which was something she’d better realize if they were going to spend eternity together.

  Her impatiently rapped out “Please” wasn’t much less of a demand but he could follow it a hell of a lot easier. He placed his hand on her stomach. Her insides were in turmoil. Gathering for the change, the invasion begun but not completed. In a bit she would feel like hell, no matter what he did to block her discomfort, but she still had time. “Human.”

  “Good.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. She was up to something. The hands in his hair slid to his shoulders. “You’re not a bad guy, are you?”

  He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a total goner. “I’m no saint.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Not that didn’t need it.”

  Her grip lessened and then, as if winning an inner argument, tightened again. “And if your brothers hadn’t . . . influenced you, would you have attacked me?”

  “No.” But, he would have converted her eventually, he realized that now. Resisting her was a futile battle, but he would have made the conversion a pleasure, not pure hell. No way would she have described it, in the aftermath, as an attack. He slid his hand under her head, curving his fingers around as if he could protect her from the truth with a caress. “But now wouldn’t be any different.”

  She frowned, tilting her skull into the cup of his palm. “What do you mean?”

  “You’d still be lying in my arms, and I’d still be helping you through this.”

  “This being the physical transformation to vampire?”

  “Yes.”

  Her lower lip slid between her teeth. Damn, of all the powers he had, at that moment the only one he wanted was the one he didn’t have. He couldn’t rewrite history.

  “You would have given me a choice?”

  He brushed the bangs from her eyes. “Yes. I never would have taken that from you.”

  “But you think I would have agreed?”

  “Eventually.”

  She stretched her fingers, pressed with her palms. Embarrassment tinged her scent. Her eyes closed and then slowly reopened. “Because I made such a fool of myself over you?”

  He shook his head. “You’ve never been a fool.”

  The roll of her eyes was pure Allie. “Puh-lease.”

  He touched his nose to hers. “You’ve been sweet, funny, incredibly brave, and tempting, but never a fool.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  At the edges of her mind there was a fluttering. Was her memory coming back?

  “You saved my life.”

  Her fingers skimmed his collarbone, searching and finding the healthy skin of his neck, moving over the surface in widening circles. “I remember the wolf . . . ripping out your throat?”

  He leaned back. “Yes.”

  Her memory was definitely coming back.

  She shuddered, squinting against the dark. “There was so much blood.”

  “But you saved me.”

  Her fingertips explored farther. “There’s no scar.”

  “Vampires heal quickly if they can replenish.”

  Her frown deepened. “That psycho wolf was going to kill me.”

  Fear leapt with the knowledge. He hazed the vividness to a dream-like recall. “Yes.”

  “You didn’t let him.”

  He stroked her cheek. “No.”

  Nothing would hurt her while he lived. There was too little laughter in the world and too few who knew how to nurture its light.

  “He almost killed you.”

  “He gave it a good shot.”

  Her fingers stilled over his much slower pulse. “You risked your life for me.”

  “You risked yours for me.”

  “We would have made a good pair.”

  She said that as if her turning vampire negated everything good between them. He chose his words carefully, hating the haunting sadness in her eyes that spoke of good gone bad, hating he had been the one to kill the romance she’d envisioned between them. “We still could.”

  “No.” She pushed him away. “It’s impossible now.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a vampire.”

  Caleb probed her mind, caught images of he and she together, naked in a tumble of bedclothes, the white of the sheets contrasting with the darkness of his skin. Candles surrounded the bed. A breeze blew in through the window, making the candles dance and the gauzy canopy billow. It was an incredibly soft, romantic image. His heart twisted in his chest and his cock went hard. “Ah baby, I can still give you what you want.”

  “You can?”

  “Yes.” At least the sex part. He wasn’t sure about the romance.

  Her fingertips caressed his shoulders in small hesitant strokes. “Sex wouldn’t be enough.”

  He could feel the heat rise in her cheeks, see the darkening color. She was embarrassed. Damn, she wanted the romance, too. “I’d do my best.”

  “The same way you would if we were human?”

  “Yes.” And probably with about the same unlikelihood of success. He’d never romanced a woman.

  He slid his right hand down her side, grazing her flesh with his nails as he did, noting the hitch in her breathing, feeling the hunger of desire rise between them, feeding it. As his fingers curled into the lushness of her buttock and pulled her under him. His cock slid between her thighs, nuzzling into her
damp heat. She was aroused, and ready.

  Allie caught her breath again and then burst out, “I want an orgasm.”

  It was his turn to blink.

  She pressed her hips up in a silent plea that he didn’t think she realized she was making. “I’ve never had one and I don’t want to die, even in a dream, without connecting with y—someone that way.”

  He guessed he could understand that. If a body wanted a miracle to happen, a dream would be the place to make it occur. “And you’ve picked me to do something about it?”

  Her “You owe me” made it sound as if he’d be reluctant. When every nerve ending in his body had just switched their full attention south.

  “And you want repayment in the form of an orgasm?”

  She shook her head, her jaw setting in that determined way it did when she wanted something. “Not just any orgasm. I want the screaming, lose-my-mind, lose-myself kind I read about in books.”

  She read about that in books? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! “That’s a tall order.”

  He inched his thumb in, brushing the sensitive crease between her thigh and groin. She shuddered. She was very sensitive there. She bit her lip, controlling the response. That, they were definitely going to have to work on. The one thing he didn’t want from Allie in his bed was control.

  He must have hedged too long because she went on in a desperate rush. “It doesn’t have to be the real thing. I won’t know the difference if you manipulate my mind. I just need to think it was real.”

  She wanted him to fake her orgasm for her?

  He curled his fingers under her neck, pressing on the delicate vertebrae, arching her spine, presenting her breasts for his pleasure. “I don’t have any problem making love to you, but Allie girl,” he kissed the curve of her cheek, “there won’t be anything fake about it.”

  She frowned. “I’ve only got the one shot. Once I turn, nothing will be the same.”

  “I’ll still be here.”

  “But I won’t.”

  She believed the conversion would change more than just her physical body. He placed the next kiss on the mutinous pout of her lips. “I’ve got the picture.”