He pulled out and lay to the side, his breath just as ragged as hers. “I can’t tell you how wonderful that was, the best I’ve ever had.”
“I don’t know how,” she stammered. “I’m lousy.”
Drake turned his face to hers. “I don’t see how. You’re fantastic.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No, I’m not.” Drake moved over her and took her into his arms. “Even if it takes all night, I’m going to prove it to you.”
His cock pressed against her well-sated pussy. “How can you be ready again? I thought you came!”
“I didn’t,” Drake said with a sly smile and entered her again. “I’m ready to.”
With the fire of her orgasm still burning, Christine accepted him again. The moment he entered her, she noticed that his rubber had disappeared. He was inside her unprotected. “What are you doing?”
“Making love to you,” he murmured and came down to capture her lips again.
“But I thought we agreed no disease and no babies,” she warned him halfheartedly as his lips awakened every pore of her being.
“Don’t worry about the disease, and as for babies, well, that might not be such a bad thing.”
Christine’s better senses attempted to claw their way to the surface. “What if I don’t want to get pregnant?”
“I think you do, and I think I’m just the right man for the job.”
His mouth worked his magic again, and she tried to resist. “Please, I don’t want to get pregnant by you or any man. I have a job to do, and a baby will only hamper my situation.”
Drake looked at her with his eyebrows drawn. “Look, there’s a good chance you won’t get pregnant, so why not let things be? And if you did, well, I’m a rich man not without influence—”
“Which means you’ll pay for the abortion and be done with it.”
His face twisted into a mask of anger. “Not hardly. I would marry you and take care of you and the child.”
She made a move to get up, but Drake kept her in position with his hands on her shoulders. “Let me go. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“We’re going to talk about this a bit more, my dear Christine. You’ve got a lot of feelings pent up inside of you that need to come out.”
Drake released her, and she turned away from him so he couldn’t see the tears rolling out of her eyes. “No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do, so tell me about them.”
Why she felt this way, she wasn’t sure. Before she could stop herself, she told him of her past with crackhead Mom and all the times Mom tried to pimp her out to feed the crack addiction. She relayed her fears about having a child as well as her inability to trust and love.
She sniffed back her tears. “So, you see, this is what made me what I am. I can’t change.”
Drake held her tightly in the darkness of his room. “You can change, and from what I can tell, you already have.”
She wiped away the errant tears. “How do you mean?”
“Well, you trusted me enough to tell me everything, and you’re in my bed. I’d say you’ve made a big change.”
Christine stiffened and thought back on his words. Since this whole thing started, she’d begun to trust him somewhere along the line and hadn’t even realized it. “Maybe but that doesn’t change my feelings about myself.”
Drake grinned. “I’ll bet I can change your mind.”
* * * *
Christine awoke, still drunk on the never-ending stream of mindless orgasms offered by Drake’s hands. She shivered as memories of his being inside of her arose, pleasuring her no end.
Darkness enveloped the room, making it tough for her to figure out what time it was. She reached next to her and found Drake’s chilly skin. “Wake up,” she called out softly in the shadows.
“Hmmm, ready for another round?” he mumbled sleepily and turned over. “I thought I would have made you sore by now.”
Christine smiled. She was sore, but pleasantly so. “It’s not that, though it’s not a half bad idea. What time is it?”
“Does it matter? You’ve nowhere to be but in this bed.”
“Seriously, what time is it?”
Drake grunted and reached for his watch on the nightstand. He flicked a button and the face lit up. “Eleven a.m.”
“Why’s it so dark in here?”
Drake rolled over to his back and threaded his hands behind his head. “I had special electronic drapes installed that keep out light because I like to sleep late and the light bothers me.”
“Oh,” she said with a sigh. She really needed to get going and figure out what happened last night. Speaking of which, she turned to Drake. “You said you’d tell me what happened last night.”
* * * *
He yawned. “Not much to tell really.” Drake dreaded this moment from the time he saw her partner lying on the ground. He long grappled with the decision to tell her what was going on and not reveal his true nature or tell her everything. He feared that if he told her the truth, she’d bolt from him in horror. Perhaps if he downplayed the entire episode, she might think it to be just her imagination.
Christine was relentless in her pursuit of the truth. “Please tell me what you know, Drake. I can handle it. I’m a cop.”
He sat up and ran a hand through his wild blond hair. How much should he tell her? “There are things in this world you won’t and can’t understand, Christine, cop or no cop. What happened last night was one of those things.”
He couldn’t tell her about himself, especially since he had glamoured her a few times during sex when he’d bitten her and tasted the sweetness of her youth and beauty. He had made the wounds heal quickly and without scarring so she wouldn’t notice anything amiss. If she knew the truth, she’d faint dead away.
Her tiny fingers wrapped around his arm and tugged in a gentle but urgent manner. “I won’t freak out, I promise. Just tell me what happened.”
Drake raised his head to the ceiling and sighed. He was about ready to let go of the most perfect woman he’d found in a few hundred years? “Do you remember the story about Dracula?”
A pause, then two beats. “Yes, I do. What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with it. What you saw last night were two of what Dracula was.”
The digits around his arm tensed then released. “I see. So you’re saying they were vampires?”
“Yes, they are and one of the most dangerous breeds.”
He waited for the screaming argument about vampires simply not existing and the crying about the injustice of what had happened. She remained solemn instead.
“Vampires are only legend, not fact.” A tense moment passed. “I’m afraid I’m having a hard time believing this.”
He saw the disbelief written on her face, and there was only one way to erase that. He didn’t want to do it, but she left him with no other option. Opening the nightstand drawer on his side, Drake extracted a small dagger he’d kept from his time. “Let me show you something.”
Fear radiated in her eyes, but she remained calm and quiet. “What do you intend to do?”
“Just watch.” Drake raked the dagger across the open palm of his left hand, grimacing at the pain. Blood poured from the wound.
Immediately, Christine attempted to put her hand over the bleeding wound to stop the flow. He stopped her. “Why did you do that?”
“Watch.”
Christine’s eyes widened as previously cut skin pulled together and became one again with no visible evidence of a scar. “H-how did you do that?”
Drake slewed his head toward her, a smile curling his lips. “It’s within the realm of my powers. I can heal myself and anyone I wish to.”
* * * *
“You’re a vampire?” Christine looked away and digested all of the newfound information. She’d bedded down with a vampire and didn’t have the good sense to know it. Why hadn’t her instincts kicked in?
; “Because your mind told you people like me didn’t exist,” he said, reading her thoughts as easily as he would a book. “You didn’t believe this was possible.”
She whirled about. “How in the hell did you know what I was thinking?”
He cupped her chin and forced her to look at him. “It’s within my power as well.” He opened his mouth. “There’s one last thing I’ll need to show you.”
She watched with horror as two canines elongated on each side of his mouth, right around the area of his eye teeth. Lethal looking, the sharp points make her shiver, the slick enamel shining in the moonlight.
Drake retracted them just as he forced them down. “I know that frightens you, Christine, but don’t let it.”
One question burned in Christine’s belly, one she didn’t want to ask. Several times during sex, she’d felt the sting of a bite at her neck and Drake’s icy lips over area. She’d been floating too long on a cloud of unending ecstasy to notice, but now thinking back, something didn’t gel. “I have one question to ask you, and I want you to answer it honestly.”
He tensed. “What is it?”
“Why haven’t you killed me and drank my blood?”
He pushed up from the bed and paced uneasily before the bed with all the rigor of a caged animal. “Because I’m not a cold-blooded killer, that’s why. I feed only when necessary, and it’s usually the dregs of society I feed on, not innocents.”
“You drank my blood during sex.”
Even in the dimness, she could see his eyes widen.
“How did you realize that? I had glamoured you into not noticing it.”
Her brow rose at this new term. “What’s glamouring?”
“It’s one of my powers to keep you from seeing things you shouldn’t,” he said in a low tone. “Are you telling me it didn’t work?”
Christine’s guard relaxed—slightly. He could still be dangerous yet had been so gentle with her. She knew she shouldn’t fear him, but part of her remained terrified of him. “I guess not,” she said and lifted up the covers. “Why did you bite me?”
“It’s a natural instinct for vampires to drink a human’s blood during sex. It heightens a vampire’s orgasm and adds to the human’s as well.”
“So you weren’t doing it to kill me, right?”
“No. I’d rather cut off my left arm than to harm you or let harm come to you.”
Christine thought on his words, knowing he’d spoken the truth. How she came by the knowledge, she wasn’t sure. All she could discern at this point were the fragile feelings growing for him inside of her. “Come back to bed.”
Drake kept away from her, his arms crossed over his chest while his brow knitted in confusion. “You’re kidding, right? After what I’ve just told you, you still want me to get into bed with you?”
She shrugged, attempting to hide the small amount of fear. “Why not? You’ve explained why you haven’t killed me already, and I hardly think it’s likely you’ll do it now.”
Drake took a reflexive step toward the bed and slid under the covers. “Why aren’t you running and screaming away from me?”
She curved herself against his body and allowed the relaxing feeling of comfort to wash over her. Vampire or not, Drake had taken very good care of her in the short time she’d known him. “We all have our own demons to fight, and yours are really no different than my own.”
She laid her head against his strong but cold chest and circled his nipples in lazy swirls. For some reason, the strength wasn’t in her to debate his nature as a vampire. Strangely, she accepted his truth and didn’t fight it for once.
He curled his fingers over hers and brought them to his lips. “I can’t believe you’re accepting me as I am and not running away screaming.”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you run into quite a bit of that when people find out who you really are.”
“Those are people who don’t care about you as a person and view you as someone to be frightened of.” For the first time in her life, she found herself speaking exactly what was on her heart. Most of the time, she guarded every word she said, but with Drake, she didn’t feel she had to.
“You really are special,” Drake murmured and pulled her up so she straddled his broad hips. “No words come to mind to tell you how much.”
His thick, hard cock nudged at her sore pussy again, begging for entry. She paused for a moment and wondered about a condom. “Before we go ahead, I do have one more question.”
“Still the cop.” He chuckled, slipped a hand between them, and probed her dripping pussy with a finger. “What is it?”
“Since you’re a—”
“Vampire,” he finished.
“Yes, since you’re not exactly alive, is it still possible for you to give me some sort of disease?”
“No because no virus or germ will live in me because I’m no longer human.”
“Good. That’s the last thing I want.” She didn’t bother asking about pregnancy because from what she’d read in the past about vampires, they couldn’t sire children because they were dead.
Drake slipped a finger into her drenched channel, and she winced.
“Oh, hell, you’re sore. We shouldn’t do this.”
Christine shook her head. “There’s nothing more that I want in the world than to have you inside me.”
Drake eased his hard dick inside of her, and she managed to take most of him by straddling his lean hips.
“I’m glad because there’s no other place I want to be.”
* * * *
Christine knocked on Lou’s door with David’s file in her hand, the blood hammering inside of her ears. Her sex, pleasantly sore, still throbbed from the wonderful night before. Her thighs clenched slightly to ease the pain. Hopefully, Drake would give her a day or two reprieve to heal.
She paused at the door. How could she tell Lou that vampires ran rampant in the city? Even with Drake’s words and his demonstration of his healing powers as well as teeth, she wasn’t entirely convinced herself. Too many questions still needed answering.
“Come in,” he said in a low tone and waved her in with a pudgy hand.
She stepped inside and closed the door, perching herself in a chair just beyond his desk. He glared at her.
“Got the files?”
She dropped the file on Lou’s desk with a casual flick. “Something’s going on here.”
His grizzled gray eyebrows arched. “What do you mean?”
“Look at the autopsy photos. Those aren’t David.”
Lou picked up the manila folder and opened it. He leafed through the photos, his eyes narrowing and stretching as if he could believe what he saw. “You’re right. This isn’t David.”
She tightened her fingers around the arms of the chair. “I know. That’s why I need to find out what happened to him. He’s out there, somewhere, hurt or injured and may need help.”
Lou leaned back in his chair and perched his elbow on the cheap metal desk, his thick fingers supporting his chin. His chair groaned its displeasure at having to support him. “This does make a difference, but you still won’t be on the case.”
Christine shot out of her chair. “Come on, Lou! This is ridiculous.”
“It’s the department’s rules, not mine. You’re too close to the case, so that’s why you can’t be part of this.”
Christine pounded a fist on the desk. A thin rattle of metal echoed through the hostile, stale air. “Bullshit on departmental rules! I know David best, and I should be the one to find him.”
Lou shook his head. “I’m sorry, but this is it. You’re a hell of a detective, Christine, but I can’t have you going rogue. On the record, you’re not to be near this case.” He leaned forward so no one could over hear him over the glass box of an office. “Off the record, what you do on your own is your own business. You’ll be on leave for a few more weeks. What you do is up to you.” Lou patted her hand. “Know wha
t I mean?”
Christine took a deep breath and calmed her already tense nerves. He’d practically given her his blessing to go ahead and continue. “Yes, I do,” she said and stood. “Thanks for all your help.”
Lou rose too and shook her hand. “Get some rest on your ‘vacation,’ and we’ll see you back in a few weeks.”
She gave him a warm smile. “It’ll be good to be back.” With that, she spun on her heel and exited the department through the side door. Relief flooded her, and she relaxed a bit. Her investigation could continue without any problems.
Christine reached her Mustang only to discover five women standing around, talking among themselves. Who were they? The closer she came, the more she realized they were the women from Drake’s vampire family.
The woman with the long black hair turned toward her and waved excitedly. “Christine! Glad to see you!”
She approached carefully and stared at the woman, not sure what to think of this. She kept her distance. “I’m sorry I don’t remember your name. I’m so awful with them.”
The woman approached and hugged her warmly. “Don’t worry about it. I’m Alex, short for Alexandra. Siobhan, Gabrielle, Tatiana, and Liz are with me.”
Instantly, she was able to put the faces to the names. “Glad to meet you outside of a noisy club.”
“I can’t agree more.” The plump Liz sighed. “Raphael doesn’t care for clubs that much, thankfully.”
She smiled. “What are you ladies up to?”
“Well, we thought you’d like to spend the afternoon with us at the spa. Drake’s treat.”
Surprise surged through Christine, her belly clenching. “I—don’t know—” she stammered. What if Drake hadn’t told them that she knew their secret?
Siobhan spoke up this time and touched Christine’s shoulder. “Drake told us he let you in our little secret. We aren’t going to hurt you because you belong to Drake and we’re a family. We protect our own.”
Christine’s guard dropped and so did her rigidity. “I’m sorry. I was so scared that all of you would be upset.”
Ranson, Tracy L. - Prince of Darkness [Bloodborn 3] (Siren Publishing Classic) Page 12
