by Ravyn Wilde
“The man is definitely photogenic. I didn’t know it was a crime to play dress-up.” Nicole put her hands under the table to keep from tracing the perfectly chiseled face in those pictures, just like she’d spent the last two months resisting the urge to touch the real thing.
She’d worked damn hard to ignore her attraction to Zane. Figuring any man who looked like he did had to already be beating women off with a stick. She wanted her snug little haven more than she wanted her hands on his hard body. With all that golden skin exposed, his dark eyes blazing in passion while he growled her name…
Stop it! Chastising herself, she took a calming breath. Sweet heavens, her hot-and-heavy dreams were bleeding into her waking hours. Normally she only allowed that to happen when she was writing. Why waste all those lovely sex fantasies when she could be using them in one of her books?
“This,” John said, tapping the picture of the gunslinger, “was taken in the early 1800s.” Moving his hand, he pointed to the picture of Zane with slicked-back hair, black t-shirt rolled at the sleeves. “And this one is from the late 1950s. The color shot was taken last month.”
Shrugging nonchalantly, Nicole fought to keep from reacting in any other way. The resemblance between the men in the pictures was uncanny. But there was no way these photographs could be the same man. “So, these are pictures of his relatives. Or people who resemble him. I still don’t understand—”
“All three pictures are of Zane Patrick,” JJ interrupted.
Laughing, Nicole pushed her stack of books across the table. “You need these more than I do.”
“What we need is your help to determine if Mr. Patrick is what we think he might be,” John said.
“What do you mean? This isn’t making sense to me. What do you think he is? Besides, why ask me? What do you think I can do to help you? I’ve spoken to the man a few times, its not like I know anything about him other than he used to own my little house.”
JJ ignored the first three questions to sternly explain why they’d picked her. “You have access to the compound. You can come and go as you please and no one pays attention to you. If you go for a walk and happen to hear anything interesting, all you have to do is tell us about the conversation. You can document when and where you see Mr. Patrick. Let us know when he has visitors and find out who they are. You can get inside his house and look for specific objects. It would be in your best interest to help us, Ms. Martin. Your government needs you.”
Okay—could the comment about it being in her “best interest” be considered a threat? Maybe. But this situation was too unbelievable. Under the table, she pinched her arm again. Ouch! Nope, still not dreaming.
“I’m not a very good choice for this. I’ve lived there long enough for everyone to know I rarely stick my head out the door. It would be out of character for me to go for walks or start trying to establish a relationship with the man when I haven’t made any attempt to talk to him in the last couple months.” And she hadn’t made any attempt…she just ran into him now and again.
Raising her eyes, she made a point of meeting JJ’s gaze. “I’m a writer, Mr. Jackson. I sit in front of a computer for hours at a time. Mr. Patrick could be holding drunken orgies every day and I’d never notice.” Shrugging her shoulders, she managed a self-deprecating grin. “I mark time by word count, not the calendar. I rarely know what day it is and seldom look out my windows.” Crossing the fingers of the hand in her lap, she told herself it was a tiny white lie. These men didn’t have to know she tried to catch a glimpse of Zane any chance she got. Her obsessive voyeurism wasn’t the issue.
Or maybe it was. Did they know she was passionately fixated on the man?
Oh hell. Thinking about that would make her turn all shades of red. So she changed the subject. “I still don’t understand why you care what Mr. Patrick is doing…or as you put it, what he is. If he isn’t hurting anyone and hasn’t done anything illegal, why bother with all this?”
“Because we don’t think he’s human,” Mike said.
Nicole burst out laughing. Walking past the table, the library clerk shushed her again. She almost missed what JJ said next.
Leaning forward, the man scowled. “If he isn’t human, the government wants to know about it and assess the danger. Let us assign Mike to you for the foreseeable future. He can pretend to be your boyfriend or your brother. As your guest, he can watch what goes on from inside Mr. Patrick’s compound and you can go about your business.”
Throwing her hands up, palms out, she violently shook her head. JJ stopped talking at Nicole’s fierce reaction to his suggestion. “No. Not happening. Absolutely not.”
“May I ask why?” JJ clenched his teeth. He was not controlling his anger well.
Tough cookies.
“Several reasons.” She began ticking them off on her fingers. “One…it’s absolutely insane to believe Mr. Patrick isn’t human. Two…I have no intention of getting involved in this little drama. I live a very private and secluded life because I have deadlines and don’t like outside disruptions. Three…I don’t want or need Mr. Maloney cluttering up my house with his attitude. Maybe you should be writing fantasy novels instead of me.” Nicole dropped her hands back into her lap and shook her head. “If there are things in this world that go bump in the night—and that’s a very big ‘if’—well…you’ve said he hasn’t committed any crime. Isn’t this an extreme case of racial profiling?”
She frowned. “Or other-racial profiling? This is too weird to wrap my mind around. I just know I’m not about to get mixed up in some witch hunt.” Nicole didn’t care that her points kept going in circles. She knew she wasn’t making sense. The whole situation didn’t make sense.
“There is only room for one race in this world, Ms. Martin. Humans. And we’re talking vampire, not witch. Or maybe werewolf,” JJ glared.
Okay. This was definitely a little scary. The man looked like he might start frothing at the mouth when he spat the words at her.
“You’ve got to be kidding me?” When he just sat there staring at her, she stared back. Vampire? Were these guys smoking crack?
She refused to think about the dreams she’d had for the last month—co-starring her next-door neighbor with some rather long, pointy teeth. As a writer, she always had weird dreams. “Well, I don’t care if he’s…whatever. I’m not getting involved and I am definitely not letting Mike move in with me.” Privately she shuddered at the thought. If Mikey-boy moved in with her, she’d be wanted for murder. The man was a walking Neanderthal.
Dismissing the unwanted thought from her mind, she sighed. Even if she didn’t get involved, she knew this conversation was going to drive her crazy. Now she’d spend all her time wondering what if? Where did I put my binoculars?
As if he’d heard her inner thoughts, JJ tried a different tack, modulating his voice to that of a coconspirator. “Come on, Ms. Martin. You can’t say the question of whether or not vampires truly exist doesn’t intrigue you. Let me answer that little detail for you—they do. I’ve been up-close-and-personal with one. Is Mr. Patrick one of the walking undead? I don’t know. We’d like your help to verify whether or not the man living next door to you is a hemoglobin-sucking fiend.”
Walking undead? Hemoglobin-sucking fiend? Nicole mentally snorted. Zane didn’t have an undead cell in his very alive and tantalizing body. The man was seriously hot.
Without waiting for her to reply, he continued, “And don’t believe any romantic nonsense about what a vampire might be like. They aren’t human and they don’t have feelings or a moral conscience. They don’t have civil rights so you wouldn’t be breaking any laws. They are creatures to be studied and used, plain and simple.”
Goose bumps rose on her arms at that description. It didn’t take an active imagination to picture Zane chained to a dungeon wall, being dissected and drained in the guise of science. Anyone who read vampire novels would find a similar theme in many of the plots. And it was never pretty.
“Think of he
lping us as your patriotic duty, it might just save your life. If Zane Patrick is a vampire, well…discovering the truth could keep you from becoming a late-night snack. If he’s human, then help us prove that so we’ll move on.” JJ waited for a moment, as if letting his words sink in.
JJ must have thought her look of horror meant she was listening to him and he pressed the advantage. “You don’t want Mike to move in with you, fine. We’ll do it your way. We’ll tell you what to look for, give you a list of questions you can ask anytime you get the chance to speak with Mr. Patrick and arrange a way for you to keep in touch with us. Let us make a believer out of you, Ms. Martin. If nothing else, think of it as research for your books. Wouldn’t this be more interesting than reading through all the tomes you have here?”
He waited for her to acknowledge him in some way. Nicky shrugged.
JJ sat forward in his chair, his eyes intent on her face. “If vampires are more than creatures of myth, you can use any information we uncover. After you do your part, we’ll share some of what we’ve already discovered about the beasts.
“Tell me you don’t want to know for sure if vampires exist…then ask yourself what might happen if you refuse us. How would you stand up to a tax audit, Ms. Martin? How safe do you think your nearest and dearest are from any…accidents?”
Those were definitely threats. Tax audit? Accidents? Obviously they hadn’t done the right kind of research on her. Nicky’s parents had died years ago and she didn’t have any siblings. She’d moved down from Portland to Eugene when she bought the house, and any friends in this city were still at the acquaintance stage. But she wasn’t about to give them correct information.
The man’s threats, his insane eyes and his use of the words “beasts” and “creatures” more than proved how seriously he believed all this. And what did she think? Did they exist? Up until this bizarre meeting, she would have said no. Damn the man. She didn’t like him but he might be right about one thing—it would be difficult to walk away without wondering.
“If I help you, what do I have to do?” She wanted out of here. If they thought she was going to play along, maybe she could leave. One thing she refused to budge on—no one would move in with her.
“To start, you can answer the question we asked you earlier. Are you sure you’ve seen Mr. Patrick when the sun is up and not just someone who looks like him? We thought he might be using a look-alike to go out during the day in the hopes of appearing human,” Mike said.
Oh, for crying out loud. “I’m sure I’ve seen him during the day. He showed me the house before I bought it and we met at two in the afternoon. I’ve also seen him out jogging.”
As Nicole pretended to listen to what the men wanted her to do, she wondered just what she’d gotten herself into. These men were threatening her and she liked Zane. The few times they’d met, he’d asked questions about her life and really listened to the answers. He’d held her hand in comfort when she’d related how her parents died in a car accident several years ago, leaving her alone. He’d laughed at her anecdotes and made her feel attractive. He was passionate about his horses. Since the moment she’d met Zane, she’d wanted him to be even half as passionate about her.
On second thought, “like” was such a shallow word for what she felt for the man. Vampire. Whatever.
Chapter Two
“Where have you been the last month?” Growling into the phone, Zane cradled a blood-red ruby in his hand. The size of an egg, the damn stone drove him crazy. Zane loved the feel of it in his palm. The weight. The heat. Which made no sense. It was a gemstone—there shouldn’t be any heat. And he shouldn’t enjoy holding it so much.
From the second he’d taken the ruby out of a dying man’s hand, he hadn’t wanted to put it down.
“I had to disappear for a while. Make sure my charges were taken care of. I’m assuming your piece of my pie arrived unscathed?”
The man made him insane. Even though he had a secure phone and knew Zane had one as well, Yuli insisted on speaking in code. “The pie arrived in one piece, Yuli. But the plate was broken.” He understood the need for secrecy, just not to this manic extent.
One of his oldest friends, Yuli was the caretaker of Russian chachkas. Only the ones he guarded weren’t cheap, showy trinkets. They were the real deal. Priceless objects hidden away until the turmoil in Russia died down. Yuli ensured they were kept out of corrupt hands that would sell or destroy them. Someday, the general populace would reap the benefit of Yuli’s forgotten charges when they could be displayed in a museum. Until then, Yuli hid them. Moved the pieces of his pie around to friends he could trust when political unrest threatened their security.
Like this ruby egg. Presented to Catherine the Great in 1777 by the king of Sweden, the flawless, uncut pigeon’s-blood ruby disappeared a few years later. On today’s market, the stone would be worth untold millions because of its size. Historical value made it priceless.
At some point Catherine had been presented with another ruby. One that was really a crystal spinel and not worth nearly as much as was first assumed. But through the years, the pinkish-hued ruby that now sat in some museum had been mistaken for the really priceless gem he held in his hands.
Which meant the blood-red ruby had been lost to history.
“Someone broke my plate?” Yuli’s accent made the words almost indecipherable. “Then you must take extra care, my friend.”
“Yeah. I figured.” When Gustof, Yuli’s deliveryman, handed him the ruby egg and died a few minutes later from a stake lodged in his heart, Zane realized things might get dicey. Since that night he’d been sleeping with the ruby under his pillow and carrying it on his person whenever he left the house. He was more secure than any safe.
As Yuli hung up after promising to keep in touch, the slam of a car door enticed Zane to walk across the large bedroom and look outside. Standing by the bay window overlooking his back acreage, he glanced toward the cottage he’d sold when the death of his closest friend had threatened his sanity.
He should have burned it to the ground instead of opening himself to an entirely different torment.
Pushing aside the curtain, Zane watched Nicole run up the steps to the front door she’d painted red. His enhanced eyesight made it possible to see every small detail of the woman’s curvaceous body. Even though her cottage sat half a mile away.
Unable to keep from fantasizing, he shuddered with suppressed lust.
Intently cataloguing every movement of her body, he noticed the rigid line of her spine. The beautiful, ebony-haired spitfire was upset. As usual, she wore her long hair confined in a single braid that hung to her waist. He longed to see her hair down, wavy and wild and spread over his pillow. Just before slipping inside, she looked over her shoulder at his home. He wanted to believe her expressive blue eyes were looking for him.
And that was crazy. He couldn’t afford to get entangled with her. Nicole was his neighbor and that made having a brief relationship a very bad idea. Given how strong his fantasies were lately, it was an extremely bad idea. Closing his eyes, he waited for the torture to start.
His neighbor was an erotic romance writer…apparently one with a very vivid imagination. Zane hadn’t read any of her books, but in the last month he’d somehow managed to mentally connect with her every time she wrote a sex scene.
His life had become a hellish existence of cold showers and masturbation.
Groaning, Zane tensed, afraid that Nicole would go in the door and immediately start on her latest work in progress. He couldn’t take much more of this. It didn’t matter that the connection made no sense or that he’d never heard of anything like this very selective mental bond. He just knew when she thought about sex, he was right there with her.
When she anticipated trailing fingers along a man’s thigh, it was his flesh she stroked. As she wrote a blowjob scene, his cock vibrated with the sensations she imagined when she slipped the hero’s shaft between the heroine’s full lips. Zane couldn’t help imagi
ning it was his shaft sliding between Nicky’s lips.
Keeping to his side of the compound was killing him. Tempting himself, he’d followed her to town a few times. They’d had coffee at her favorite coffee shop and once he’d managed to talk her into having dinner with him. He fought to convince himself that starting a short affair with his hot neighbor was not in his best interest.
Until the next time he saw her, then it would start all over again.
It frustrated him, this uncharacteristically focused interest in a specific woman. Besides, she never seemed to notice him. Nor did she pay attention to any of the guards or groundskeepers. Which was a good thing. If one of the men touched her, he’d lose command over this all-encompassing need to scream “mine!” and lock her in his bedroom. He barely maintained control as it was.
One of these days, he’d snap. And then what would happen?
Maybe she didn’t like men. Zane discarded that thought immediately. If she didn’t like men, her fantasy life and the sex scenes she wrote would be completely different. He knew she got aroused when she wrote those scenes. Afterward taking long, hot showers with her vibrating showerhead. He knew because he was in her mind during those moments as well.
He should have torn the small two-bedroom cottage down instead of selling it in a rare emotional response to Thomas’ death. Because he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the place, he’d set himself up for an entirely different type of hell. In a million years he’d never have believed the deep, soul-numbing obsession he had for the woman living there now.
