by CC MacKenzie
Since his legs had turned to water he collapsed on top of her.
Gasping for breath Marcus rolled onto his back and took her with him, turning her to lie on top of him.
His hand pushed back her hair as he stared into her beautiful face.
Still pale, and apart from her eyes, almost back to normal, thank God.
He held her tight as she burrowed her hot face into his neck.
"Speak to me, my wee darlin’."
"I hate you," she muttered.
Relief had Marcus close his eyes tight as he stroked the silky soft skin of her back.
"That’s fine. That’s good."
Very gently he patted her bottom.
"Why did you do this to me?"
Her muffled voice, came from under his ear.
Ahh, the one thousand dollar question. The temptation to lie was almost overwhelming but he took a deep breath.
"You and me, we are destined."
Silence reigned now.
A silence that went longer.
And longer.
Eventually she sniffed.
"I have no idea what that means and I don't care. For as long as I live, I will never, ever, forgive you for this."
Well, he could hardly blame her could he? Since it would be a long time before he forgave himself for putting her through hell.
After another endless silence that seemed to last for hours, Anais raised her head and leaned sharp elbows on his chest.
"I didn’t know it would be so bad, darlin’," he said, lifting his hand to gently tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
That comment earned him a cold, hard stare out of blood-shot eyes.
"What do you mean you didn’t know? Are you trying to tell me this is the first time you’ve done this?"
Marcus frowned at the disbelieving tone in her voice, in her eyes.
"I’ve never taken the vein of a woman while making love to her."
Her eyes stared right through him, as if she was trying to gauge the truth of his statement.
With difficulty, Anais rose.
She thrust away his helping hand, grabbed the first thing she could find, his shirt and pulled it on. All the while keeping a wary eye on Marcus as he tugged on jeans and a T-shirt of black cotton.
Brain spinning and her heart pounding too fast against her ribcage, Anais sank to the edge of the bed and carefully took stock of her condition. The wound on her hand was burning and swollen. Her guts felt as if they'd been scrubbed raw with a wire brush. Every single muscle, every single bone in her body hurt. But worst of all was the way her jaws, her teeth, ached. Last year she'd suffered the agony of an impacted wisdom tooth. But this was beyond agony... her gums felt swollen and bloody. Her bottom lip was puffy, almost twice its normal size. But what really freaked her out were the black talons, lethally sharp, that had replaced her fingers, her toes.
She flexed them.
Oh God, how could this be happening to her?
The room swam as her eyes stung.
In her mind, the part of her that was still... her, was screaming in her head. While the rest of her mind was strangely, eerily, perfectly calm.
Perhaps she was losing it?
Perhaps he'd given her something, drugs?
Perhaps this was all just a bad dream?
But then a soft voice in her mind had her jolt upright.
'There is nothing to be afraid of, little sister. I am here with you. I have always been with you.'
Marcus now sat on the edge of a chair, long legs spread, elbows on his knees. And he was watching her like a hawk.
Okay.
So, now she was hearing voices.
Yep, she was losing her frigging mind.
The soft voice in her head laughed gently.
'We are vampyre.'
We?
'Yessssss. You are me and I am you. We are one.'
She was no longer human?
And if not human, what?
What on earth was she?
"Are you going to make me drink blood?" she said, forcing the words past the horrible fist of loss in her throat.
"I am not going to make you do anything. You may feed from me, or you can feed from scientifically manufactured hemoglobin with extra vitamins and minerals added." The way he said it, as if what had happened to her was No Big Deal, had her shaking her spinning head.
"Does your vampyre talk to you?" Anais asked Marcus as she lifted her hand and gingerly touched a claw to her head. "In here?"
He shrugged. "Yes. I was born like this. For me it is normal to talk to my beast."
Beast?
Now she leaned forward.
"You regard yourself as a beast?"
He winced and shook his head.
"No. Bad word choice. I am a man. But I am also vampyre. He emerges if he feels threatened."
"So your..." Finding it hard to believe she was even having this conversation, Anais took a deep breath, "vampyre... felt threatened by me?"
A softness entered his eyes as Marcus jerked his head to the trail of mass destruction on the ceiling.
"You weren't quite yourself at the time."
She narrowed her eyes at the intimate look in his.
"So you say you're a vampyre. Okay. Let's just say that for the moment, and for the sake of argument, I believe you. How do you feed?"
There was one thing she just knew she'd never be able to do and that was to cause harm or drink blood from a human. Even if he put a gun to her head, she'd never do it. She'd die first.
"Our scientists have developed synthetic hemoglobin. These days it is forbidden to feed from humans."
Yeah right, and she believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, too.
"So all that stuff about Dracula is nonsense?"
"Yes and no. It’s complicated."
"You’re telling me," she muttered. "Why did you bite me?"
His eyes went warm again with something like affection.
"Because," he purred in a way that made Anais want to punch him right in the mouth, "you are my mate. We are now bonded."
"So you bit me because you wanted to have sex with me? A bit extreme don't you think, even for you?"
He smiled and she didn’t smile back as he continued, "And since we are sharing secrets, truths. To be absolutely accurate, you are not one hundred per cent human, either. It appears you have the DNA of our species." He nodded again to the damage on the ceiling. "As we can see."
He started to smile, and sobered instantly at her stony stare.
"There was one fundamental thing you didn't do, Marcus." The way he blinked at her, baffled, only added fuel to the fire of indignation burning deep in her belly. "You did not give me a choice. You decided to take what you wanted as if you had the right to do so. No one has the right to change someone's life, without even a discussion, without warning. And for that I will never forgive you."
Overwhelmed, she closed her eyes and dropped her throbbing head in her hands and felt the claws flex. If everything that had happened to her was real, what the hell was she going to do?
Well, it wasn't often he found himself on the receiving end of a spitting inquisition, and Marcus had to admit this inquisition wasn't going well.
She lifted her head.
Bloodshot eyes found his and held the stare.
For a man who was supposed to be one of the sharpest lawyers of his time, he hadn't thought ahead, had he? Now he wondered, what he'd been thinking? No wonder his brother James had been disgusted with Marcus's lackadaisical attitude towards bringing Anais into their world.
Now he wondered, how on earth he was going to make amends?
His heart squeezed as he watched Anais, just sitting there, with her hair, that gloriously slippy hair, raining down the back of his shirt to her tiny waist. She looked so fucking cute. If one overlooked the fangs, the claws and the bitter hatred in her eyes... for him.
He chanced another smile and prayed for a response.
Nope.
Nada.
"You..." she finally said in a tone of utter loathing. "Are a pitiful excuse for a man or a vampyre or whatever you think you are."
Anais struggled to her feet and when he leapt up, she slapped away his helping hand.
"Darlin’, I..."
The look in her eye made him close his mouth with a snap.
He winced, feeling her pain, as she limped on bloody feet towards the bathroom.
"Cut out the darlin’ crap. Just stay away from me." She flung open the bathroom door so hard it bounced off the wall of white marble. "God, I ache in places I never knew existed,” she muttered under her breath.
Before he could respond she’d banged the door closed and clicked the lock.
Lying flat on his back on the bed, Marcus studied the destruction on the ceiling and came to the conclusion that things might have been worse, a lot worse.
He could have lost her tonight.
Killed her through sheer ignorance.
Anais was angry and upset.
Who could blame her?
The rush of the power shower interrupted his thoughts as he rose, scratched his flat belly.
They needed to talk about the future.
Their joint future.
Together.
When she was feeling better and had calmed down.
Anais was a reasonable, intelligent woman.
Once she understood he'd had no choice, that she was destined to be his, she’d understand that they would be good together in a way that mattered between man and wife, vampyre and mate. After all, life went on. Anais would realise it and accept things were what they were.
A pounding at the door of their suite interrupted those happy thoughts.
The cavalry had arrived.
Typically, too late to do anything worthwhile.
Marcus unlocked the door and came face to face with the last person in the world he wanted to see.
"Hello there, lover boy." Saira Pattullo’s deep voice purred even as her full lip curled. Dressed from head to toe in black leather that could have been sprayed on her outstanding body, Saira certainly didn’t look like a medic. And Marcus happened to know that her bedside manner totally sucked. "Where is she?"
Rather than wait for a response, she strode past him on long legs followed by four huge Centuri medics dressed in black leather whose coloring told him they were part of the Pattullo clan. Italian. And every one a heart breaker.
"She’s fine now," said Marcus in an optimistic tone. "She’s in the shower."
Saira turned from surveying the damage to the ceiling, the plaster and the blood on the carpet.
She pursed her beautiful mouth and narrowed her spectacular chocolate brown eyes.
"Uh huh. This place looks like the scene from a slasher movie."
She swung round, strode through the bedroom, raised her fist and broke open the bathroom door.
At the lack of a glass-shattering scream from his woman, Marcus followed right behind.
From the corner of the ceiling, Anais perched with big eyes, blood-red eyes, glaring at them.
Then she flashed her baby fangs in a pitiful attempt at a warning hiss.
Hands on her hips, Saira turned to Marcus shook her head and shot him a hard look.
"Seriously, Marcus. You spanked her?"
Marcus had no intention of justifying his actions to Saira Pattullo.
She might be a medic but she was also a total pain in the ass.
However, he was mortified to find himself shuffling his feet under her horrified gaze.
"She attacked me. It was the only way to restrain her."
"Did your vampyre do this?" Saira demanded. And his hot cheeks told their own story. "Typical Neanderthal. You’ve probably traumatised the thing."
Now Marcus's brows snapped together.
His voice growled deep and low in his chest as the song of Scotland rose to the fore.
"Anais is not a thing. She is my bonded mate."
Her response was a sharp fingernail painted blood red poked into his chest.
Saira went nose to nose with him.
Chocolate eyes bored into his.
"Yeah? And how much say did she have in becoming bonded to the great Marcus Gillespie?" She didn’t wait for his response, didn't need to because his guilty face said it all. Her brows rose. "Thought so. Get her clothes. Close the door behind you and leave her to me."
Chapter Thirteen
Two days later, Anais lay on her back on a couch in the sitting room of their suite. She kept her eyes closed and wondered if the whole experience had been a weird and terrible nightmare. But the bad tempered mutterings of her companions told her that this version of her new reality was only too real.
One of the shocking facts she'd learned, that she still couldn't get her head around, was that all the partners in Gillespie, Pattullo and Hindmarch, plus all their offspring, were vampyres. Vampyre Princes? Who would have thought it? For six months she'd been working right in the middle of a vampyre assembly, or whatever a collective of vampyres were called.
A Molotov cocktail of sheer terror, a roaring temper and dark unsatiated lust swirled sickly in her emotional core.
She’d learned the scary female vampyre, who could give GI Jane a run for her money, was Saira Pattullo. And that Saira was a medic. She'd lived up to the name of being a vampyre by inserting so many needles to take blood tests that Anais felt like a pin cushion. A portable lab had been set up in a spare bedroom and even now Saira's team were liaising with a pharmaceutical company to work out why Anais was stuck with her vampyre dominant instead of her human side. Apparently she was an anomaly, a deviation from the normal, because this had never happened before.
Marcus had refused point blank to leave her side.
All the while Anais battled to ignore her growing attraction to the man, thing, whatever the hell he was, who had done this to her. She kept her mind busy imagining barbaric ways of inflicting torture on him as he died a slow and agonising death.
How dare he do this to her?
She wanted her life back.
She wanted her job back.
And just how was she supposed to explain her appearance to her parents?
One look at her in this state and they’d either collapse of heart failure or run screaming for the hills and who could fault them for that?
Bored out of her mind by enforced inactivity, she'd drawn up a list of the benefits of being vampyre. And another list with the downside.
On the up side, her hair was longer and really shiny. Her skin was spookily flawless in a way that reminded her of touched-up magazine photos. She frowned now, thinking of the woman in the rest rooms at the Pepper club, whom she realised now had indeed been a vampyre. And her behaviour brought home the fact to Anais that not all vampyres were friendly towards human.
Her dark thoughts were interrupted by Marcus and Saira snarling at each other and Anais decided she didn't have the desire or the energy to interrupt them. And being a vampyre had another plus. She didn’t have an ounce of fat on her.
No cellulite.
Woo hoo!
Then there was the downside.
Testing, she drummed her claws on a hardback book cover she was reading and they made a spine chilling shctick shctick sound.
She studied them now through narrowed eyes.
A manicure wasn’t going to fix those babies.
"How are you feeling," Marcus asked for the tenth time today.
Anais refused to look at him.
"The same as I was five minutes ago," she said and thanks to the fangs in her mouth it sounded like, "The sshhame assshh I wasshh five minutessshh ago." She’d cut her tongue twice. The injection, the third in two days, of God knew what Saira had inserted into her veins was supposed to suppress her vampyre.
Yeah, right.
Her temper now on a nice slow and steady burn, Anais decided she was dealing with a crowd of imbeciles.
It had become apparent during Marcus and Sai
ra's slanging match that they knew nothing about what happened when a vampyre prince ‘took the vein’ of a ‘human hybrid.’
Even now a very frustrated Saira Pattullo took another verbal swipe at Marcus.
"If you’d kept it in your pants until you’d researched what to do, we wouldn’t be in this mess."
"You're not giving her more of that stuff until we’ve more test results from Constantine's lab." Marcus’s Scottish accent always became strong when he was about to lose his temper.
Now he went nose to nose with the medic.
Saira jabbed a finger at Anais.
"And how are we going to get that through customs?"
"We’ll fly her out, you turnip head."
"She won't be able to cope with flying in a confined space. It took four of us to restrain her, you festering baboon."
Anais had had enough.
She rose.
"School’s out, children."
Shocked that the words came out of her mouth perfectly, her fingers tentatively touched the fangs in her mouth. Fangs which appeared to have shrunk. The relief she was able to speak normally was so overwhelming it brought tears to her eyes.
Like a warrior Anais battled back emotions that were too raw, too close to the surface.
Marcus leapt to his feet.
"You’re looking much better."
He moved to touch her but the look she threw him made him think again.
If she didn’t know better she might actually believe he cared.
The time had come, Anais decided, to take back control of her life, rather than letting these monsters dictate what her future held.
Her eyes nailed Marcus.
"With immediate effect I resign from Gillespie, Pattullo and Hindmarch. I don’t care what I do. I don’t care where I go, as long as it’s far away from you."
The bastard just looked at her with deep affection, as if she was a five year old having a temper tantrum.
He spoke now in that annoying crooning voice he always used around her these days,
"You can't do that, darlin’. You’ll be like a wee lamb to the slaughter."
