by Tisha Wilson
* * *
He was here. She could smell him in the parking lot. She closed her laptop and sat it on the nightstand before she walked over to open the door. She knew he’d be back. He wasn’t the type to walk away from this. It was too bad he couldn’t. She was going to have to take more drastic measures to make sure that he didn’t remember her or the creatures. But first…
A smile spread over her blood red lips as she opened the door. He stood there stupidly for a moment and she nearly laughed at him. She turned away and strode towards the bed. He was still standing there watching her when she fluffed the pillows and lay out invitingly. She wore the red bustier still but she had removed her shorts and leather boots to leave only a lace black thong to cover the bottom of her.
“Why don’t you shut the door? You’re letting out all the warm air.”
He blinked again and moved obediently into the room. He instantly removed his jacket and threw it towards one of the chairs near the little round table in the corner. She saw the muscles in his forearm tense and her mouth almost watered at the thought that those big arms would soon be wrapped around her body.
“It’s a hundred degrees in here,” he said a little hoarsely.
“I like… heat.”
She got up onto her knees when she saw that he wasn’t coming any closer to the bed. He hovered near the door as if he might bolt at any second. She began to unbutton the buttons at the side of the bustier. With every button her breasts came closer and closer to popping loose. She could see his pulse pick up speed as he watched her. She could hear the blood pumping hard through his veins. His heart sounded like a drum and the scent. The smell of him filled the room and she couldn’t have ripped her eyes from the vein at his neck if she tried.
It was as if she was suddenly possessed or something. She tried to force herself to slow down but suddenly heat pooled at the center of her body and she began to feel hungry. Damn. It had been too long since…
Her breasts were free now and she lifted one breast in her hand. “You’re awful far away from me, honey. Why don’t you come over here and help me out?” she said and her voice was husky and strange to her own ears.
He swallowed as he looked away from her. She could see the strain on his face as he answered her. “No.”
She stopped touching herself and dropped her arms, but still knelt in the middle of the bed. “No?”
He moved toward the air conditioner attached to the window and turned it on. It smelled like mildew for a moment before cool air began to pump out of it. “I can wait outside if you need to get your clothes back on.”
She’d never encountered this problem before. Not even before she’d turned into what she was. She sat back on her heels trying to force her blood to cool off some. She was so damn hungry… for him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath but this only caused more of his scent to come into her and set her on fire. Her nipples were hard and she was nearly dripping with wetness. What the hell. He isn’t that damn hot.
She sprung from the bed and went to the bathroom, gathering her shorts and bustier along the way. She hated cold. She hated cold showers even more, but she went into the shower thong and all. She let the cold water run over her head and down her body, instantly taking the heat from her body. She stood there until she was shaking with cold and her teeth were chattering. She stepped out of the shower and hurried into her shorts and bustier and didn’t bother to dry her hair.
The little AC had undoubtedly made the other room cold and she wanted to stay cold. If he wanted an ice princess then he would meet an entirely new woman. She looked at herself in the mirror and had to stop. What was wrong with her? She was ready to rip his head off. It was hard to tell why his rejection stung so much. She shouldn’t care. She knew that she was gorgeous. What if he didn’t even like women?
That thought warmed her a bit. He was extremely straight laced. Maybe that was his dirty little secret. The thought that he was gay took some of the bite out of it. She forced herself to take a few deep breathes. It would be so easy to walk out there and be a total bitch to him. It would be harder to act like she didn’t care at all. She put on a mask of indifference and strolled out into the room. She knew what she had to do, but she’d wanted to have a little fun with him first.
She stopped almost instantly when she came into the room. He had collected all of her weapons and sat them out on the table and across the dresser top. He had a silver bullet between his thumb and forefinger and was holding it up to the light. He looked over at her with a challenging look. She crossed her arms in front of her and leaned back against the door jam.
“You know. In some places it is considered rude to go through another person’s things.”
He moved over to the vacant table chair and sat down, any one of her weapons in easy reach. “You seem to be awfully concerned with manners,” he said with a hint of teasing in his voice.
“Perhaps I would not be so concerned with them if you learned a few, honey.”
“Point taken. I guess I did get some of my Uncle’s rudeness,” he said as he reached out to run his good hand over one of her Glocks.
“You know,” she said with steal in her voice, “If I wanted to take one of those guns from you… I would.”
She didn’t wait for a response but went to the pack of cigarettes that sat on the bedside table. She took one out of the pack and lit up. The nicotine played on her nerves for just a moment before the feeling of euphoria simply disappeared.
“Smoking is bad for you,” he commented. She laughed.
“I wish it was bad for me. The only thing that is bad for me is you sitting over there with those guns.”
“If I shot you with one of these bullets, would you burn like the creatures?”
She sat on the bed and grabbed the thin silver stake that she had worn in her hair earlier. She saw him tense but ignored it. She stabbed the space between the bones in her ring and middle finger. The spike imbedded itself deep into her flesh until it plunged through to the other side. Blood spurted and he rose to his feet automatically.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled as he rushed forward and grabbed her wrist.
He instantly pulled the stake from her hand and pulled out his shirt tail to stanch the flow of blood. He wiped at her hand to find that the wound had already sealed itself and was nothing but a red scar. He turned her hand from front to back and looked at it in amazement. She had to repress a quiver at the feel of his rough hands on her skin. It didn’t even matter that the room was freezing cold and her hair was still wet. Her blood was boiling again.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered as he released her and looked at the blood that still stained his shirt.
“That’s right honey. It’s all a bad dream,” she said as she took another tug on her cigarette. He backed away and sat down still looking at his shirt. She blew out the smoke and nearly laughed at his dumbfounded expression. “You see. It would have been better for you to walk away from me. I’m not human.”
“What are you?” he asked as he looked up at her. His deep chocolate eyes bored into her looking for the truth.
“I hunt the creatures and to do that… I have to be like them. I might be worse than them because… unlike them… I can’t die.”
*
He saw her soul on her face then and it was… hallow, drained of something vital. How long had she been alive? There was humanity there. She didn’t think so, but he saw it just in the way she lamented not being able to die. What would it be like to live forever in the night, hunting those things, alone?
“But there are others like you?”
She nodded. “And I can never be with them. The hunter in us forces us to rip each other apart every time we get together. Trust me, that’s a laughin’ good ole time.”
“But if you can’t die… what would be the point of that? That would be like a fight into eternity with no winners.”
“You’re right. It’s a waste of time for us to even be in
the same room, unless we are learning some new hunting technique. There is no one better to practice killin’ on than someone that cannot die,” she said. A playful grin crept onto her face.
“Remind me never to come to one of your trainings.”
She laughed and the sound lifted his heart. He preferred her laughing. When she laughed it was honest. It wasn’t flirting, neither was it the soulless self condemnation that she practiced when she said she wasn’t human. He couldn’t tell exactly why he was so quick to defend her when she wouldn’t defend herself. He barely even knew her.
“No. I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she agreed still grinning.
“So… Training implies that there is some type of organization or secret military group or something. Are you like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman or something?”
Again she laughed and he returned the smile. Her laughing was easy on his ears and dangerous to his peace of mind. He was more attracted to her this way, if that was at all possible. When she’d opened the door wearing that thong… he thought he’d stepped into a live issue of playboy. It had taken all of his will power to turn her down. He saw himself in his mind kneeling before her and pulling those skimpy little thongs down her thighs and over her calves. He could almost taste her moistness on his tongue.
Her voice brought him back from his day dream. “We don’t have any invisible men among us. At least not that I know of, and we defiantly don’t have a billionaire’s bank roll.”
“Who does? So you do this job with this secret organization… for free?”
“Well not for free, but not really for enough to support the kind of life we have to live. We have to be careful about our money. It’s the only way we stay under the radar and sometimes, when things get out of hand, we have to be able to grease some palms.”
“You mean when people find out about you?”
“No. Not then. We have other measures for that.”
He paused to consider that. “When someone finds out the truth about you… You kill them?”
She grinned and shook her head, her long hair cascading around her. Why did she have to leave that long lovely hair loose and wet? He forced himself to focus. “We’re not the mafia. There are other ways to help someone forget.”
He sat back and watched her. “Did you give me something that made me think it was all a dream,” he asked, the missing pieces finally coming together.
She shrugged. He made the next leap in his mind.
“Why are you telling me all of this then?”
“Because, mon amor. You won’t be leaving this room with your memory. You won’t remember anything at all about the last few months I’m sure. Probably no big loss to you since you don’t do anything but patrol dark back roads in the middle of the night, every night of your life. Believe me. I know how repetitious that becomes. One night just runs into the next and into the next.”
He laughed out loud. “You’re right. I was bored out of my mind before you came along.”
“It’ll be like nothing ever happened. They’ll tell you you were in an accident and you’ll believe it.”
He nodded. That made sense. If people could remember it would be all over the news by now. “So are you like Men in Black? You have a flashy thing?”
“You watch too much TV,” she said as she sat forward grinning. He felt himself tense involuntarily, expecting her to pull one of the flashy mind eraser things out any way.
“No. I’m going to inject you with a big ole needle after I knock you out.”
“Knock me out? What, like you’ll hit me in the face cause I don’t think my face can take much more.”
Again there was laughter. “No. The brachial nerve.”
He knew that he should be afraid but at this point… to be able to forget everything would nearly be a relief. There was nothing he could do to stop her either. That just made him feel a little ticked. “Would it make a difference if I told you I’d kind of like to remember?”
“None whatsoever. You remembering will serve no purpose in the long run. It would only leave a loose end. The kind of loose end that we don’t need.”
He shook his head. “So it comes down to you just doing your job?”
“Yep. Besides. I wouldn’t want anyone thinking they’ve fallen madly in love with me and following me around like a puppy. Clearly that’s not going to be a problem with you, but there are men who find me attractive. I’d rather they forget.”
He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say you weren’t attractive. I just said that I didn’t want to be distracted. The only reason that you wanted to have me is because you wanted me to stop thinking about those things out there.”
It was her turn to roll her eyes. “Yes. I opened the door in a thong because I wanted to distract you from the fact that there are big hairy creatures out there in the forest. It couldn’t be for any other reason.”
He shook his head. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” she asked exasperatedly.
“Don’t try to play me. It doesn’t sit well on you. If I hadn’t figured you out by the eyes I wouldn’t be here right now. You would be long gone and I would forever think I’d had some wild dream and then met the woman of my dreams the next day. You would have walked out that barroom door and never looked back at me.”
“The woman of your dreams? You don’t even know me. I’m more like the woman of your worst nightmares.”
He felt his blood boil and spill over at her words. He was out of his chair and in her face before he knew what he’d meant to do. He took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. Suddenly the eyes were crystal clear and violet again. Hard steal pressed against his chest. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know where she had produced the small pistol from.
“You are the most beautiful and exciting thing that’s come into my life in a long time.”
“Isn’t that ironic. I was just thinking to myself this very afternoon how beautiful a monster I am. I wouldn’t even need this gun to rip your heart out with my bare hands. You better remember that the next time you decide to touch me without my permission.”
He took the hand that wasn’t holding a gun and pressed it up against his chest. Her hands were so small in comparison to his larger ones and it did something to him. “Go ahead and do it then. You’re not going to scare me off with that line. You are not a monster, no matter what you say. You saved my ass out there and I’m not going to sit here and listen to you bad mouth yourself for it.”
She looked confused all of a sudden as she pulled away and gazed up at him, her eyes large and innocent looking. “Why?” she asked him.
“Why what?”
“Why do you even care? The last time you met me you ended up in a hospital room with a broken arm and stitches. Can’t you tell that being around me is a hazard to your health?”
He thought about that for a moment. It was impossible to tell what was going through her mind.
*
She looked up at him unable to believe what he’d said. He was telling her that she couldn’t talk bad about herself. She couldn’t even count the number of times in the last few years she’d saved the life of one person or the other, but never, not once, had she seen this in their eyes. He looked at her as if… as if he wanted to save her. She tried to pull away but he held firm.
She could get away if she wanted to. She knew he knew that if she wanted to, she could toss him across the room. Instead… she was holding her breath like some stupid little school girl, afraid that that protective look would leave his eyes.
“It’s just the cop in you that has to say that,” she said grasping at something, anything, to deflect the emotions that had suddenly risen in her at his simple words. She tried to pull away again but he wouldn’t release her. She watched the muscle flex in his arm as he pulled her up to him.
“What’s the matter? Does me saying that you don’t deserve to be called an animal bother you? Am I the first one to want to break through that front
you put on? Am I the first one to think that you have more to offer than this beautiful body?” he asked as his hand snaked down and cupped her ass, pulling her up against him.
The look in his deep chocolate eyes nearly drowned her. She was completely unprepared for the attack on her senses. “Whoa there stud. We haven’t even had a first date. It’s a little soon for that kind of talk.” She tried to sound flippant but it came out a little breathless. She pressed into him and felt his desire pressed hard against her abs. Her breathing got so heavy she could nearly be moving under water.
“I told you not to do that. What does it matter to you to care about me a little? You’re going to do the whole Brachial Stun thing later so I won’t remember right?”
She smiled, despite herself. He had gumption. He wasn’t going to fight her on what she had to do, which made him all the more adorable to her.
“Why don’t you just fall in love with me for the next few hours? I give you full permission,” he went on.
“Few hours? My. We are full of ourselves. And what makes you think I will fall madly in love with you?”
“It’s my counter attack. I figure if you fall for me then you’ll forget all about the Brachial thing and just spill all of your secrets.”
“And what makes you think a little good sex will cause that to happen?” His lips neared hers and she felt his heat brush her lips. A tremor traveled up and down her spine.
“Cause if it doesn’t, I have one of those flashy mind thingy’s in my back pocket.”
She did laugh then. She laughed like she hadn’t laughed in years and then he was laughing with her. His chest rumbled with the laughter and made her feel warm inside. Even that stupid little hotel Air Conditioner wouldn’t cool her off now. He lowered his head and clamped down on her neck and she closed her eyes. As his tongue flipped over her jugular, stars exploded behind her eyes.
Her nipples pulled tight as he continued to play his tongue over the sensitive skin on her neck. She fell open to him like a flower and it seemed like he was there all at once, pressing his rock hard body against her. The few clothes she had on seemed to be very uncomfortable at the moment. Her knees were parted and her breasts rubbed against his chest. She rubbed against him until her breasts popped loose of the bustier and then she buried her hands in the length of his black hair, pulling his mouth from her neck to her breast.
