She stared down the demon. “Shoulder for a shoulder.”
The demon wheezed, grunted, snorted and then shot slime all over her and Rafe.
By the time Shannon had cleared the cold goo from her face, the demon was gone. She looked around, not trusting that it had left the area after only sustaining a little damage, and then shuffled across the icy grass to Rafe. He sat up, slime rolling in strings down his face. She would have laughed if she hadn’t been in so much pain. She knelt beside him on the slick ground and cleared the slime off his face, scooping it out of his eyes and flicking it to the floor.
“You okay?” she whispered when he slowly opened his eyes and then grimaced.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I hit it, it threw my stake right back at me, and then I think it sneezed on us.”
Rafe looked around. “It is gone?”
She nodded.
Rafe clutched his head, closed his eyes and exhaled sharply.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” She touched the side of his head and he winced. The light was too low for her to see what damage the demon had done. When Rafe looked at her out of the corner of his eye, she took her hand back and flicked globs of slime off her red jumper. “I think we should get cleaned up.”
He nodded and moved onto his knees. Shannon looked at the thick layer of clear slime surrounding them. This wasn’t going to be easy. She took hold of Rafe’s shoulder and eased herself onto her feet and then stood very slowly. Her left foot slid backwards but she recovered her stance and held her hand out to Rafe.
Who stared at it.
She could understand where he was coming from. She had never touched him before, not with concern as she had just now, and she had never offered to help him. She sighed and he placed his hand into hers. He was slow to stand and she worried it was because of the head wound rather than the slippery surface. His grip on her tightened as he rose to his feet and she took hold of his other hand. She tried to find her footing but lost her balance, slipped and dragged Rafe down with her. He fell face first into the muddy slime.
Shannon laughed.
Rafe growled.
She couldn’t help it. She managed to get it down to a giggle but it fired up again. Rafe’s scowl lightened into a smile.
“I’m sorry... it’s just... what a night.” She got onto her hands and knees and slowly eased her way over to him where he was laying in the mucus. Gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder, she took hold of him and pulled him up off the ground.
Her eyes widened when moonlight bathed the side of his face and she clearly saw the wound there.
“Christ,” she breathed as her gaze roamed over the jagged lines running through his black hair and the dark blood coating his cheek, ear and neck. “What did that thing do to you?”
Rafe got onto his knees beside her and then tentatively touched the side of his head. Thick black jelly caked his fingers when he brought them away.
Shannon grabbed the hem of her red jumper. “Keep still.”
She used the bottom of it to carefully wipe the mucus from the wound, trying not to disturb it, and cleaned the blood away. The voice at the back of her mind said that she was slipping. She was showing feeling for him and she should be letting him take care of himself.
Rafe closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. She slowed her movements and looked at him. Was it pain that made him close his eyes or was he enjoying her show of affection towards him?
Shannon dropped her jumper and crawled across the grass away from him. The moment she was in a clear patch, she got to her feet and ran her hands down her legs to rid them of slime. Her shoulder ached but she ignored it and focused on smoothing her appearance. She only wished she could smooth out her feelings. She glanced at Rafe when he reached her but couldn’t bring herself to maintain eye contact.
She grabbed her jacket and winced when her left shoulder grated in its socket.
“Shannon?” Rafe was beside her in an instant, one hand supporting her arm while the other lightly touched her shoulder. She turned to tell him that she was fine but stopped when she saw the worry in his eyes. He stared at her shoulder. “This looks bad.”
Shannon craned her neck and lifted her left arm. It hurt but she managed to get it into a position where she could see what Rafe was talking about. The demon hadn’t only jarred her shoulder. It had cut her too. There was a clean line slicing through both her jumper and arm, and thick slime covered it.
She watched, mesmerised, as Rafe gently cleared the slime from her arm with the cuff of his shirt. The concentration on his face turned to concern when his gaze met hers.
“I think we should find out what this demon is,” he said and dread settled in her stomach, weighing her down. She could read between the lines. He thought the slime might be toxic. If it was, he was probably immune, but she would be in trouble. “My house is the nearest and I have the best resources. We will get you cleaned up and get some antiseptic on that, and then I will look into the books while you report in.”
His gaze held hers.
He was waiting for her to argue with him about the location he had chosen.
She stared at her arm.
She couldn’t bring herself to fight him this time. He had the best books for the job, and she wanted to get the slime off her and get her wound fixed as soon as possible.
Her breath trembled and her body shook.
Fear.
It had been a long time since she had felt it sweep over her so strongly.
Her gaze rose shakily to Rafe’s and she searched his eyes for reassurance. Just this once she need to hear him tell her that she was going to be alright and that he would take care of her. Just this once she needed to feel his arms around her, holding her close, protecting her.
She didn’t want to die.
****
Chapter 3
Rafe guided Shannon up the steps to the dark porch of his house. The walk had been long and she had started to slow after a while. He had placed his arm around her waist and helped her, and she hadn’t pushed him away. In fact, she had leaned into him. He wasn’t sure if it was the effects of a toxin or just the shock and her shoulder injury that was draining her strength, but he hoped it was only the latter. He didn’t want to lose her.
He wouldn’t.
If the slime were toxic, he would find an antidote for her. He knew a thing or two about concocting them and failing that, he knew people who could do it and who would drive through the night to bring it to him.
He opened the door and stepped inside. She hesitated on the threshold.
“You can come in. No invite necessary.” He smiled to reassure her and turned on the light in the entrance hall. The dark decor sucked the brightness from the light. She walked inside and went to her right, towards the study. He caught her arm and turned her around. She frowned at him. “Go and get showered. It is the first door on the right at the top of the stairs. There is a bathrobe in there you can use. Just leave your clothes on the landing.”
“We need—”
“What we need to do is get you cleaned up, Shannon. Get that stuff off you.” He led her to the foot of the stairs and removed her coat for her. She kicked her trainers off and then stared at him, docile and confused, a trace of fear running through her. He sighed and resisted his desire to brush his thumb across her cheek to comfort her.
She still stood there, silent and staring at him. Her heart beat hard against her chest. Her soft breathing filled his ears. Something had changed.
She had been close before, close enough that she had let him reach out to her and talk about things.
But she had never been so close.
So attainable.
If he just reached out a little, if he showed her a little more affection and stretched a little further than he had allowed himself to previously, he knew he could touch her.
Her gaze dropped to the floor and her cheeks coloured.
Did she feel it too? Something
had changed between them. It wasn’t just him feeling it. She did too.
“What about you?” There was a childish innocence to her expression, a distance that stirred warmth in him when her gaze flicked to the side of his head and then to his eyes. He could feel her nerves running through him. Turbulent emotions filled her green eyes as she looked at him. She curled her hands around the wooden ball on the bottom post of the mahogany banisters and held on to it as though it was her anchor in the storm of her feelings.
His head was killing him, the side of it throbbing and feeling as though it was trying to gnaw a hole through his skull. He was a complete mess but, right now, she was his primary concern.
Rafe smiled for her. “I will start with the research.”
She took the first step on the wooden stairs and then stopped and looked back at him. Her gaze darted to the side of his head.
“You can shower second.” With that, she walked up the stairs, leaving him staring at her backside.
Rafe would have given anything to have her say that he could shower with her instead of showering second. That was never going to happen though. At least, it wouldn’t happen yet. He stared at the empty staircase, distant in his thoughts.
She was changing. Not just since he had snapped at her either. Now that he had seen that change her, he could trace back through their time together and find other moments when she had given him strange looks or shown a hint of concern.
The shower switched on upstairs.
Rafe tried not to picture her naked in a steamy white tiled bathroom but it was difficult and his mind flitted between curling up in pain, her in the shower, and tracing her changing feelings in order to decipher them.
He reminded himself that none of those things were what he should have been doing and dragged himself away. He hung her jacket over the bottom of the banisters, placed her trainers on the floor below it, and then removed his long coat and boots. He put his boots near the door and hung his coat on the rack. He sighed and went into the study. It had been the dining room when he had moved into the house two years ago. A large room at the front of the house with a bay window he had since covered in layers of blackout fabric so thick that no sunlight had a chance of penetrating the barrier. Sometimes he woke early, before the night had set in, and had nothing better to do than study the demons and lore of his kind. He learned a lot in those hours and used all of it when he hunted. Tactics and knowing the enemy made his job a lot easier and quicker. That was something Shannon could learn. He had tried to teach her that research was the key to identifying weak spots and learning them by heart would give her the advantage in a fight when she could easily recall them and put that knowledge to use, but she had complained that she had never been a good student. She had even gone as far as to say that she had him around, so why did she need to study when she had a walking encyclopaedia of demons fighting with her?
That sort of attitude was going to get her killed.
What would she do now that they were being separated?
He should have made her study. There wasn’t time now. Perhaps he could leave the best books to her and make her promise to read them through once at least.
Rafe walked through the study towards the kitchen at the back of the house, rolling his black shirtsleeves up as he went. He washed his hands in the sink, dried them, and then looked himself over. He wasn’t too messy but the slime had soaked into his clothes and was sticking them to his skin. The shower continued to run. His mind drifted to picturing himself in the cubicle with Shannon and then he shook that image away. His head ached at the motion. He pressed his clean hands to his temples, dirtying them again, and grimaced. His healing ability had better kick in soon or he would be experimenting with painkillers. He wasn’t sure they would have any positive effect, but it would be worth a try.
He washed his hands again, splashed the water on his face, and then dried off. He looked down at his bottom and then at the chairs in the study. They were solid wood, without a padded seat, but he didn’t want to get them covered in slime. He wiped the towel across his backside to clean some of the mess away, casually tossed it into the sink, and then went into the study.
Rafe sat at the oval dark wooden table in the middle of his study and pulled a stack of books towards him. Bookshelves lined the wall in front and behind him, dark with their tomes and handwritten manuscripts. An entire shelf was stuffed with papers he had written, notes on demons and fights he’d had that he had needed to learn from in order to survive another year. They were yellowing now, marking the passing of time and reminding him that he wasn’t getting any younger.
Not that that was a problem for him.
Eternal youth did have some advantages. He would never look older than he had when he had been turned in his late thirties. Some vampires complained about the age they had been turned at, wishing they had been transformed earlier or later depending on their age. He was pleased with his, and had a feeling that the woman who had turned him had been too. She had kept him around for a while, until he had grown stronger in his abilities and had grown restless with it. She had given him leave then and he had taken it. Only a year after that, hunters had attacked her home and killed all thirty vampires residing there. The pain of losing his sire swept through him again but he pushed it away and dragged one of the books down off the stack. It hit the table with a thud. He flicked the thick leather cover open and went to work.
Sometimes vampire abilities were a definite advantage too. He swept through the book, turning each page and scanning it within a second, and had finished it in under a few minutes. Nothing. He pulled the next book to him, pushing the first aside at the same time, and repeated the process.
By the time the shower had turned off, he was on his fifteenth book and was having more luck. This one mentioned slimy bastards at least.
There were many different ones.
Shannon’s soft steps arrested his thoughts and he froze mid page turn. She stopped on the threshold of the room behind him.
“You study too much,” she said, her quiet voice curling warmly in his ears and his heart. He smiled at the book.
“You study too little.”
“I guess that would make us perfect partners... in some respects.” Her voice trembled and her heart did the same, skipping a beat and then pumping hard. She had panicked herself. He decided to be a gentleman and not pick her up on her words.
They were perfect partners, and it was about time that she realised it.
He turned and looked over his shoulder at her, and froze again. She stood in the open doorway, his black robe swamping her slender frame, the collar of it turned up to cover her smooth creamy throat. Her blonde hair hung in tangled wet threads from her ponytail, strands of it caressing her cheeks. They coloured as he looked at her and she averted her gaze but it snuck back to him.
What was she wearing under there? Anything? Nothing? If his heart could beat, it would have been pounding at that thought. It didn’t need to beat in order for his blood to be going places where it shouldn’t be. He cleared his throat and stood so his body got the message that his brain was urgently firing at it. He was not going to get aroused in front of her and embarrass himself.
“It’s a little big,” she whispered and lifted the hem of the black towel robe so it didn’t drag. She shuffled towards him, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor. She peered at the books and he got the distinct impression that she was avoiding looking at him. “Did you find anything?”
He pulled a chair out for her. “Maybe. First things first though.”
She gave him a confused look but he didn’t pause to explain. He left the room, bolted up the stairs, gathered her clothes and the medical kit he kept in the bathroom, in the cabinet under the sink, and came back down to her. He set the kit down on the table, ran into the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement and tossed her clothes into the washing machine. He paused now, looking at himself and then back up at the door to the kitchen. He had to wash his thi
ngs too. He stripped off all of his clothes and put them into the machine, and then turned it on. A quick rifle through the clean pile of clothes on top of the dryer produced a pair of black sweat pants. He tugged them on, and then hit the stairs again.
He had only been gone a few minutes, but when he reached the study, Shannon was muttering dark things at her left arm as she tried to tend to it by herself. He stopped the moment her gaze settled on him and instantly dropped to his bare chest.
Now was not the time to be getting ideas.
He repeated it like a mantra.
He was going to tend to her, and then shower while she read the books. He dragged a hand over his face. He could do this. He had fought demons three times his size. Had tackled evil angels and things straight out of Hell. He wasn’t going to let such a small task defeat him. He swallowed when his gaze gravitated down to her arm. Her right hand was paused against it. She had removed that side of the bathrobe in order to get to her arm. The black towel fabric covered her right side completely but barely clung to her left breast, threatening to slip at any moment. The Devil only knew how it was staying put. He shouldn’t have looked. Fire settled in his belly, heating him through, sending all the wrong signals to his groin.
He cleared his throat.
Her gaze didn’t leave his torso, not even when he crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her.
“Here, let me.” His words seemed to do the trick, jolting her out of her thoughts. Her gaze rose to his, distant, pupils wide. The signal they sent came through loud and clear, and at any other time he might have obeyed the silent order it gave him, but not tonight. Not when she was hurt and afraid. He would be a monster if he took advantage of her like that.
Rafe made quick work of the wound on her arm, cleaning it with too much antiseptic before wrapping the crepe bandage firmly around it. He didn’t pause to relish the feel of her soft warm skin beneath his fingers or the way her gaze lingered on his face, her expression open and inviting. The moment he was done with her wound, he stood so quickly that the chair caught on the floor and toppled backwards. Shannon gasped and clung to the robe, her eyes wide.
Vampire for Christmas Page 3
