Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the MoonImmortal Obsession

by Michele Hauf

  St. John wasn’t smiling.

  She walked through the crowd with Teddy, without getting far. A brief flare of insight slammed into her like a dire warning alarm.

  Whirling toward the direction of whatever had dragged at her attention, Madison watched a shadow cross the stairs to the balcony. As that shadow passed beneath a high-tech wall sconce, a pale, proud face became visible for a fraction of a second.

  She was startled. Her body jerked. Tearing herself from Teddy’s casual grip, she ran toward the stairs, pushing people out of her way, sprinting after the man she would have known anywhere.

  Her brother.

  Chapter 10

  St. John was watching Madison when her expression grew stricken, as if she’d seen a ghost.

  He caught her at the exit with a firm hand on her elbow. Stopping her momentum, he swung Madison around and encircled her with his arms.

  “That wasn’t who you think it was,” he said as she wriggled to get free. “Trust me on this, you do not want to follow that man.”

  “Let me go!”

  Releasing her wasn’t a possibility, though they were making a scene by the door and people were eyeing them with concern. Beyond that crowd, St. John scented another immortal heading their way.

  “Not for you,” he said to Madison. “Do you hear me? What you saw is not for you.”

  When she refused to settle down and listen, he picked her up in his arms and headed outside so fast, her glossy scarlet lips parted speechlessly. Even there they weren’t alone. The queue for the club was long. The picture he presented by holding her in his arms attracted attention. To get out of this, he’d have to improvise.

  He pressed his mouth to hers, absorbing her rising shouts, blowing gentle breaths into her that were the equivalent of an instant dose of Valium.

  Her struggles ceased.

  “That’s it,” he encouraged. “Good.”

  Although her body relaxed slightly, Madison’s lips trembled beneath his as if she’d fight this directive if she could get any words of argument out. Those vibrations, so very alluringly feminine, forced St. John to take stock of his balance.

  She felt light in his arms. He felt the sleekness of her long, bare legs through his clothes.

  Her lipstick tasted like cherries.

  The physical desire he had developed for this mortal was beyond his comprehension. Each ragged breath she fought for was sweet, stirring in him memories best forgotten.

  But Madison had seen the shadows. Stewart had been moving fast, with a speed few human eyes should have perceived, and yet she had seen him. The truth was that Madison possessed at least some extraspecial senses, just as her brother did. She was showing signs of becoming exactly like her twin.

  St. John’s arms tensed. His mouth stopped moving over hers.

  It was possible, even probable, he thought, that Madison shared her brother’s tweaked genetics, and this was the source of the darkness he had detected. But two vampire hunters in one family was unheard of.

  He tasted that darkness now, with his lips on hers and her breath in his lungs. If Madison didn’t know about the darkness, it meant that her genes had to be latent. However, like her brother, she was seemingly driven toward vampires, instead of away from them.

  Bloody hell. It was entirely possible that the Chase twins had shared more than a womb, and had been sprung from a family of Slayers.

  As he continued to hold Madison, with his lips resting on hers, St. John’s mind raced on.

  The attraction between Slayers and vampires was legendary. Vampire hunters had some special cocktail added to their DNA sequencing that didn’t dilute or disappear as generations of them lived and died. This was a symbiotic relationship meant to keep the balance between mortals and the monsters that preyed on them. A negative relationship, really, since in the end both Slayer and monster became victims of the very drives that pushed them toward each other.

  Was this it? Had he found the key to Madison? The blood in their veins recognized each other?

  Or...perhaps he had merely lived too long, and his mind played tricks by offering a respite from the trials of his past in the form of an insatiable attraction to a beautiful woman.

  His guess, the one that felt right, was that Madison wasn’t completely human, and didn’t know that the traits hidden inside her were the same ones that hadn’t made things turn out well for her brother.

  That morning, he’d made it his task to find out everything about Madison Chase.

  The family that had produced the twins had been taken from them prematurely. Madison and her brother were raised by a foster family that they had left as soon as they were able to, due to some kind of trouble there.

  Overcoming the trials of their upbringing, the twins were both successful, bright and glamorous. But the loss of her one remaining family member might be the final straw for Madison. Without her brother, her twin, she was alone in the world.

  It was entirely possible, he thought now, that Madison had no idea how special she actually might be, if his intuition was right. Slayers were rare enough. Two in one family was a complete anomaly. As his mouth moved over hers, St. John tasted pain. He knew the cost and the toll pain took, but couldn’t afford to overthink how Madison’s might have affected her.

  For everyone’s sake, you must leave this city before others take your life from you. He silently sent messages to her. Maybe then you’ll have a chance.

  They were, after all, allies in the war against vampires. His vow as an immortal had been to protect the purity of the original few immortals, and see that their blood didn’t get spread around. No one despised the fanged hordes creating chaos on the fringes of mortal society more than he did.

  And Madison...

  What would make her leave London?

  He didn’t want to see her hurt. Being a Slayer-in-the-making would do more harm than good, with no skill set to back it up. Fledglings would continue to scent her.

  If she refused to leave without her brother, she’d have to be forced to go by removing the one hope she clung to, that of finding Stewart, even if doing so broke her. If she was going to be a Slayer once her inner and outer awareness merged, she’d be needed in the world. Eventually, she would help to keep the balance. They were in accord about this.

  As for her recognition of him...

  She couldn’t know about his true identity or purpose. No one could be allowed to find the Seven. He’d have to distance himself before she found out. He’d have to prove to her that he was no gentleman at all, and send her sprinting away. He’d play the bastard, and watch her run.

  The persistent ache in St. John’s chest told him he’d do this. He would do it to save her.

  Damn though... The back of his neck prickled with a physical warning that the ancient entity in the club who had seen them together had reached the door.

  Not only could he not distance himself from Madison at the moment, he had to make this moment count, and make it look good.

  “No time like the present for a show,” he said to Madison, drawing back slowly, meeting her dazed, questioning gaze. “Everyone loves lovers.”

  He crushed her mouth with his in a sudden, deep, drowning kiss, fighting to make himself believe this didn’t actually matter.

  He worked to keep his fangs from her as Madison began to spiral upward from numbness, waiting to see what she’d do next, telling himself that she would forgive him if she understood the problems at hand.

  What happened was the biggest surprise yet.

  She didn’t put up a fight, or slap his face. She didn’t go on about her brother. She sighed through parted lips. Likely those lips hadn’t opened for him in order to participate in the kiss, and only to protest such treatment, but an explosion of searing passion caught St. John up in a whirling vortex,
all the same.

  His nerves fired. The blood of the blessed immortals surged in his veins. He kept kissing her, deeply, seriously, as if his life truly depended on this meeting of their mouths, not wanting to confront the disturbing thought that fate might be offering him a final test regarding his vow, after all this time.

  He held a being that immortals called a Recumbent in his arms: a sleeping Slayer who hadn’t yet come into her own. And he could not stop kissing her, or wanting to possess her.

  Madison’s slick, lush lips opened for him like the folding petals of a night-blooming flower. Their tongues met, darted away, came back in a dance of tension and need that erased the boundaries of enemies in transition.

  Enslaved by her mouth, St. John pressed on, unable to help himself, physically enforcing a connection that now catapulted them to an arena where pure sensation ruled. He seemed to be drowning. After centuries, time finally came to a standstill.

  His fangs were extended. His cock was erect and aching for her. All the while, his heart thundered in time to hers, as if every inch of their bodies called out to the other for a unification that would have been dangerous in any circumstance, and at the same time sublime.

  Levels of awareness peeled back, hurtling him and Madison toward something forbidden, and wondrous. They were nearly there. Not long now, and their souls would find each other through a porthole that defied the rules of life and death. A space reserved for like minds and thirsty souls, no matter what housed those souls.

  Dangerous.

  Scandalous.

  Deadly.

  And bloody poor timing.

  Meeting Madison in that luminous place where the sun paled by comparison meant that the only thing left would be to take her soul in his hands and twist it out of recognition. Doing so would be the end of her, and a swift exit from his vow.

  Noise faded in from the periphery.

  Exulted by the open display of mouth-to-mouth sex on the sidewalk, the crowd beside them clapped their hands, laughed and jeered. “Get a room!”

  Stop kissing her. Pull away, St. John’s mind warned.

  Madison was limp in his arms, and not from any loss of spirit. She seemed to be waiting for him to devour her completely. Expecting it. She wanted to lose herself in the strength of his passion. He sensed this in her.

  In the end, he had done nothing to help her. He had, in nearly every way that counted, made the situation worse.

  Her bare arms clung to his neck, capturing him as surely as if she’d slipped a silver chain around his heart.

  Her skin scalded him. Her mouth was an inferno. St. John raked the points of his fangs across her lower lip, leaving a lipstickless line there, a line in the sand of sorts, and a warning of the impossibility of actually crossing a final boundary.

  He wondered how bliss like this could end, when he had searched for such a thing for so long without knowing it. When he hadn’t been moved in this way for more years than he cared to count, if ever.

  But the enormity of his pleasure came with its own shadow, in the form of an interruption.

  A fresh, looming darkness stretched across the promise of the light resting in his arms. As the crowd beside them trudged toward the club’s door, the etchings between St. John’s shoulder blades began to burn as if someone had tripped the tattooed sigils carved into his skin.

  Tearing his mouth from the lips clinging to his, he raised his head to meet the gaze of the immortal who stood in the club’s open doorway.

  A blast of frosty air ripped through the surroundings with a desire-wilting chill. This was a stern warning from the other entity, a pronouncement of that Ancient’s disapproval.

  St. John didn’t want to heed that warning. The bittersweet torment of having Madison in his arms was too great. Her heat spread through him like a violent, raging fire, warming him from the inside out. Until now, he hadn’t realized how cold he had been.

  The surrounding chill met that heat with a soft hiss. His shoulder blades pinched with a new discomfort as the stripes fused to his skin with the blood of the seven Blood Knights writhed like living things.

  This kind of alarm he could not ignore.

  How he wanted, against all his principles and the approach of a powerful ancient entity, to throw Madison against a wall and take her in every physical way possible, front to back, teeth to groin. Right there. Right now. He wanted her that badly. He had all but decided.

  Yet he could not possibly want her badly enough to ruin what he’d so carefully set in place. Or badly enough to leave so many others vulnerable to the network of evil that had ensnared one of the Hundred, and made one privileged Ancient a traitor to his kind.

  By listening to the song of his own longings, St. John might lose sight of the beast he had been after.

  With a last brief return to Madison’s lips, he pulled back. Madison should have been running by now. He wasn’t holding her so very tightly.

  A nonphysical touch pierced his mind. Coldness invaded, quickly overwhelming and replacing Madison’s marvelous heat. This cold was far more lethal than his ambitious liaison with Madison. This cold would eat the woman in his arms alive if it touched her.

  He set Madison down and stepped in front of her to deflect the chill. Although it was imperative that he keep hold of her, and hide her latent abilities from the others, it was equally as important to maintain his disguise. So much depended on that disguise.

  Madison moved at last. Sidestepping him, she looked to the immortal in the doorway, then back to St. John.

  She was a sight, with her dress creased and her hair in disarray. Her smeared lipstick gave the impression of a chin covered in blood. She looked wild, and so very lovely.

  Beneath wide, uncertain eyes, her swollen lips opened. Steadying herself with a bracing breath, she tried to take a step. Satisfied that she could walk, she took another step, then another, her heels making tapping noises on the concrete as she headed for the club’s entrance.

  There, as she made to brush past the two-hundred-year-old vampire who kept St. John in his sights, she paused, as though some part of her recognized that the entity in the doorway might be dangerous.

  Good God...had his kiss made that possible?

  Had his good intentions been wasted?

  St. John felt the shiver that ran through Madison. He watched her last step wobble. Do not let him know, he wanted to shout. Do not meet that creature’s eyes.

  Had she heard? She left the entity in the doorway alone, and said over her shoulder with a vehemence of tone that didn’t quite ring true, “Damn you, and the fantasy you rode in on, St. John. If you try anything like that again, I’ll sue.”

  Then she was gone.

  Reluctantly, agonizingly, St. John transferred his attention to the immortal gazing questioningly after Madison, not realizing he had just interfered in a life-altering moment, and that nothing from here on out, for any of them, would ever be the same.

  * * *

  Madison made it through the front door of the club before collapsing against a wall. Her hands were shaking. Her entire body shook along with the hands.

  Her brother had been here, hadn’t he?

  Christopher St. John and the old creep in the doorway blocked her from finding out, and now it was probably too late.

  What had St. John whispered to her this time?

  “What you saw is not for you.”

  The earlier anxiousness came tumbling back. If Stewart had been in this club, the fact that she had missed him was hurtful, unthinkable. Whichever way it had gone down, the man with the name of a saint and a mouth like fire had a hand in that. He had kept her from going after her brother.

  After regaining her balance, Madison found herself surrounded by Teddy and the other guys, a circle of males that wasn’t quite as comforting as it should hav
e been, because as it turned out, she had needed protection from herself. From her attraction to a monster, whether St. John was human or not.

  “Ready to go?” Teddy shouted over the music.

  Madison nodded. She had to get out of there. Alongside these guys, no one would dare to stop her exit.

  She’d made a fool of herself in public two nights in a row and needed some thinking time. She felt confused, frightened. Not one real answer had been found here, unless it was a question of Stewart’s possible, momentary whereabouts, and the realization of her own character flaws.

  That was something, right?

  Teddy handed her a napkin, and pointed to her face. Madison wiped at her mouth, removing the smeared lipstick, feeling stupid. Her walk to the door garnered smiles from people she passed.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Quite the show.”

  Although she had a good grip on herself at the moment, she dreaded going outside. Taking a firm hold on Teddy’s arm, she sighed with relief when there were no tall, fair strangers on the sidewalk, and no gray-haired creep in the doorway who actually looked like a vampire.

  Climbing into a cab at the curb, she couldn’t begin to comprehend the pang of regret running through her—not only about the possibility of Christopher St. John keeping her from going after a man that may have been her brother, but because St. John’s kiss had so easily disrupted her sense of purpose.

  And something else about the night nagged at her consciousness.

  Wait a minute.

  Madison snapped herself straight on the seat and blinked slowly to pull up a memory.

  She and St. John had been having a conversation near the dance floor, and neither of them had been shouting. With the music blaring, she had heard every word he’d said, when that was impossible.

  Goose bumps appeared on every available surface of her body. She rubbed her arms, pretty damn sure she actually was going mad. But no, everyone else had been shouting in order to be heard.