He smiled at me thoughtfully. “Thank you. For everything.”
I could have cheerfully strangled him. I dropped back to my knees and began to shift.
—
People swerved off the sidewalk at the sight of my jaguar form. Michael just smiled and acted as if he always took a massive feline out for an evening stroll. I hoped the bright pink bow collar I’d fashioned out of discarded costume parts would alleviate some of the fear. It looked ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous wearing it, so I hoped it took away a lot of the scariness.
We turned down an alley, and I kept guard as Michael slipped a key from his wallet and then punched in a key code. The door clicked open, and Michael nodded at me. “Come on in.”
I quickly changed back to human form and followed him inside.
We entered a butcher’s shop, and my mouth watered at the overwhelming smell of meat. Even though it was put away in refrigerated cases, I could still smell it, the blood soaking the paper, everything. It was like walking into a buffet.
“It’s back this way,” Michael said, going behind the counter.
I stared up at the security cameras and crossed my arms over my breasts. “Are those going to be a problem?”
“Oh, uh.” He paused, scratching his head. “I guess they will be. Don’t worry. I’ll leave a note for the manager.”
“Won’t he wonder why you’re not on the camera and I am? Totally naked, I might add?”
“A long note,” Michael amended, then gestured for me to follow him. “Come on.”
Reluctant, I followed behind him.
Michael entered the meat freezer, and I tiptoed in behind him. He moved to the back of the freezer and began to run his hand along the back wall. I glanced at the gigantic sides of beef hanging from the hooks, the pork, the splayed racks of ribs. Wow. It all looked . . . juicy. The thought revolted me even as my stomach growled. My jaguar half wasn’t picky, but the human part didn’t like the thought of gnawing on raw meat.
“Here we go.” Michael’s hand found a seam in the metal wall, and he pushed at an invisible panel. The wall clicked and opened a crack, revealing a dark room on the other side. I followed Michael in and was surprised to discover that this was just a small antechamber, equally as cold as the meat freezer. The room was empty of everything but a windowless door on the far side and a numbered security panel set into the wall.
“The code is eleven twenty-nine,” he said, punching in the numbers. “Just in case you need to get back in while I’m unconscious.”
“Eleven twenty-nine? That’s my birthday.”
He glanced over at me, a hint of a smile flicking over his face. “Coincidence.”
Yeah. I gave his back a skeptical look as he turned toward the door. The panel beeped, accepting the code, and the door clicked, unlocking. Michael held it open for me.
If I was expecting something amazing on the other side, I was sorely disappointed. There was an easy chair, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, a game system on the floor below it, and a single bed on the far side of the room. The blankets were mussed, and the room was small, maybe twelve by eight feet across.
It wasn’t warm, either. I rubbed my arms, looking around. “This is your safe room?”
“One of several.” He moved forward, grabbing DVDs off the seat of the chair and placing them on a nearby rack. “I’ve been moving around in the hopes that Mariah would think I was gone and would get the picture, but she doesn’t seem to be paying attention.”
“She doesn’t seem to be very good at that,” I agreed, then rubbed my arms. “Clothes?”
He looked stricken. “None here. It’s a fairly new setup for me.”
I tried to ignore the chill. As a shifter, I was fairly immune to cold weather, but I was naked, and it felt a bit nippy even to my metabolism. “Mind if I get under your blankets, then?”
“Be my guest.”
I crawled under the covers and wrapped them around my body, noticing that his gaze followed me. “You hungry again?”
“I’m okay,” he said, too quickly. “You?”
“Hungry,” I admitted. “All that meat two rooms over isn’t helping.”
He grinned. “You like your meat raw?”
“Not that raw, but if I get hungry enough, it’ll do.”
He gestured back to the freezer. “There’s ready-made sandwiches out in the deli fridge.”
“Now you’re talking,” I said, smiling at him.
We retrieved a few sandwiches and another bottle of water, and I wrapped myself up in the blanket, crossing my legs and sitting up.
While I ate, he turned the easy chair toward me and watched as I devoured sandwiches. “You want my shirt again?”
“I’m good for now.” Plus, his shirt would smell way too much like him, and having it rub against my skin again might give me ideas. Time for a distraction. “So,” I said between bites, “you going to tell me your story?”
“My story?” He looked blank for a moment, then laughed.
He was so handsome that I stopped chewing just to stare at him, my heart pounding. That laugh brought back so many memories and filled me with intense longing.
“You mean how I got turned?”
Not trusting myself to speak around the knot in my throat, I nodded.
He raked a hand through his hair, and it stuck up. “Well. After I, uh, dropped out . . .”
When we’d broken up . . . I said nothing, letting the awkward silence fill the room. What could I say? Yeah, when you caught me banging that guy? And then you quit school?
“I decided that I should see the world,” he said. “Took my Pell Grants and decided to tour Europe.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Transylvania?”
“Madrid, actually. I met a very lovely Englishwoman named Gemma who was touring the Continent. We took to spending time together while I was in Spain. She was fun and carefree and loved to laugh. I needed that, back then.”
Fun and carefree English Gemma. I hated her. That bitch.
“I spent most nights drunk, trying to for—” He shifted in his seat and paused. “Well. I wasn’t in a good place, so I didn’t much care what happened to me. Gemma was a bit of a party girl and a drinker, so I partied and drank with her. One night, I was on a bender, and I passed out in her room early, skipping the party. When I woke up the next evening, I found out that she had turned me into a vampire.”
“Turned you against your will? That’s awful!” I immediately burned with hatred for her. That bitch.
“Well, she hadn’t meant to,” Michael said with a rueful, affectionate smile that made my heart thump with a different kind of beat—jealousy. “Turns out she’d been sipping from me here and there when we were necking, and I’d made her drunk. Too much alcohol in my blood, and she lost her inhibitions. When I passed out in her room, she’d been unable to resist and drained a bit too much. I was in danger of dying, so she turned me instead.”
“This is a pretty rotten story,” I told him. “Did you hate her?”
He shook his head. “Nah. She was truly apologetic. Anyhow, she took me under her wing and taught me how to survive as a vampire. Then, when I had the hang of things, she gave me a nice settlement and sent me on my way.”
“You should have staked her,” I muttered.
“It’s not like that,” Michael said. “I like being a vampire. The feeding’s tricky at times, but it’s opened up an entire new world that I didn’t know even existed. I have new abilities, and I’ve met fascinating people I would have never met otherwise. I don’t regret it.”
I regretted it for him, though. He should have been living in the suburbs by now, with 2.5 kids, a dog, and a cubicle job or something. “You didn’t stay with Gemma?”
He shook his head. “Not long. She didn’t want a partner, just a drinking buddy. We parted on good terms. After she left, I traveled through Europe and Asia, visiting some of the vampire havens along the way. After a couple of years of that, I got bored and de
cided I wanted to come back to the States. And since I’m new to the area, I joined the dating agency.” He shrugged. “It’s uneventful, I’m sorry to say.”
He’d traveled the world and been turned into a vampire. I’d been working at the local storage unit and wishing I’d had the guts to stand up to my parents back when I had the chance.
He smiled over at me. “What about you? Living it up since college? What did you get your degree in?”
I chewed on my lip. Tell him the truth? Lie? I sighed after a moment and decided to go for the totally unglamorous truth. “I dropped out a few days after you did. I was . . . struggling.”
“I see,” he said, but it didn’t sound judging. “You didn’t go back?”
I shook my head, regret washing through me. “No. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I decided to work instead.”
“Where do you work?”
“Cool Storage,” I said, and then snorted. “I’m a security guard. Funny, huh?”
“Why? I think you’d be amazing at whatever you put your mind to.”
His admiring tone bothered me. I gave him a bitter look and flicked my fingers, as if brushing off his compliments. “No, you don’t. You think I’m a loser because I’ve been stuck in a dead-end job in the same city since you last saw me. I didn’t get a degree, I don’t have a family, and I’m resorting to meeting men through a dating agency, even though I should be able to find someone easily since shifter women are rare. Yet here I am, on the lam with a vampire on a date that won’t quite end. A vampire who dumped me four years ago, I might add.” I tightened the blankets around my body and resisted the urge to turn my face to the wall. “Kind of a shitty date, if you ask me.”
Silence. He raked his hand through his hair again, then scratched his head. “I’m sorry, Ruby.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s being unreasonable and ridiculous.”
“You’re not unreasonable. Or ridiculous,” he said vehemently.
“No?” My tone was bitter. “You, of all people, should find me so.”
“I would never think that about you,” he said, his eyes going black with emotion. “I loved you,” he said, and my heart stuttered for a moment. “. . . back when we were in college.”
My heart stopped stuttering.
“You’re just as warm and funny and strong now as you were back then, and I still want to be your friend. You are the furthest thing from unreasonable that I could imagine.”
My cheeks pinked a little. I was having mixed feelings about the way he kept tossing “friend” out there, as if he were trying to remind me that our relationship was now platonic. Well . . . maybe not so platonic. Friends with benefits.
Speaking of. “So, um, do you really need to drink three times a day?”
He shrugged, raking a hand through his spiky hair again. “We can skip meals, but, just like regular people, we start to feel light-headed and weak.”
“Huh. Any other stuff about vampires I should know?”
He gave me a thoughtful look, then leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. The casual pose was so utterly Michael that my heart gave that crazy little flip again. “Let’s see. The garlic thing works. Holy water, yes, crosses, yes. Can’t see reflection in mirrors. There’s an old tale about not being able to cross water, but that’s not true. Oh, and we can’t turn into bats. Sunlight will supposedly fry us to a crisp in about ten minutes, and I’ve never felt the urge to test it.”
I was distracted by his long hands and the tilt of his body as he shifted closer. When he leaned forward, he was almost touching my foot with his fingers. It wouldn’t take much for him to slide his hand under the blanket, where I was naked and waiting for him. “And your heart?” I asked lightly. “Does it beat?”
“Nope,” he said, and a boyish grin crossed his face. “Want to hear?”
“Is it weird if I do?” I sat up straighter on the bed, clutching the blankets close.
“Nah. It was the first thing I wondered about, too. Well, that and the bat thing.” He got up from the chair and sat next to me on the bed. “Come listen.”
He lay back, and I crawled forward, hugging the blanket to my bare breasts. He smiled at me, and I felt that same weird little surge. It felt as if time hadn’t passed and we hadn’t spent four years apart, wishing things had been different. I could almost imagine that we were together again.
I laid my ear against his chest and waited. And waited. And then I realized I would keep waiting, because I wasn’t hearing anything. It was like pressing my ear to a block of wood.
“Wow,” I said, a laugh surging from me. “That’s kind of freaky.”
“Not that freaky. If you can overlook the cool skin, you can overlook the heart thing, right?”
I felt his hand touch the strands of my hair that spilled over his chest. Desire flashed through me, and I sat up, looking down at him. His pupils had darkened again, the laughing smile gone from his beautiful face.
I let the sheet drop, exposing my breasts to his gaze. “Thirsty?”
The Adam’s apple in his neck bobbed. “Always.”
The fangs sprouted from his mouth, and I watched them descend, so long that they practically scraped his chin. I touched one with my finger, curious, and enjoyed his shudder.
“Do my . . . changes . . . frighten you?” He gestured at himself, his voice thick as if it were difficult to speak around his fangs.
I shrugged. “You’re talking to a were-jaguar. You’re different but not frightening.” My smile curved, and I leaned in to run the tip of my tongue over one tooth. “Besides, I think my teeth are longer in my cat form.”
“Ruby,” he said with a groan, and his hand reached for the back of my neck, as if he wanted to pull me down against him. “You don’t have to do this. I know you don’t want to be here.”
“If I didn’t want to be here,” I said softly, “I’d have changed and left two days ago.”
When I leaned in to kiss him, his arms wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me against him. His fangs retracted when my mouth touched his, and his tongue darted to brush against my own. Immediately, I felt that wonderful blossom of pleasure from his mouth, the languid kiss of the aphrodisiac. I fell onto him, my breasts pressing against his shirt.
He gave a low growl of frustration and, with supernatural speed, flipped me to my back on the mattress.
I laughed. “Now, that was a neat trick.”
He grinned back at me, tugging his clothes off. “I’m about to show you another.”
When he’d removed his shirt and jacket, I reached for him, running my hands over the cool pads of muscle. He’d always had a trim, muscular body, and I loved that it hadn’t changed. I sighed at the simple pleasure of being able to run my hands down his chest.
He leaned in and kissed me, the kiss increasing in intensity and longing. When it broke, I was panting for breath. His hand slid to my breast and cupped it, and then he moved lower, until his mouth hovered over my nipple, the other gently teased to a peak by his hand. I could feel his breath over the tip of my breast. “Ready?”
I writhed under him. “Ready for what?”
He didn’t respond, just leaned in and licked my nipple. I sucked in a breath at the feel of his mouth on the sensitive tip . . . and then the aphrodisiac kicked in. I moaned as intense pleasure spiraled through my body, the nipple growing hot and hard with desire. I surged up under him.
“Oh, my God.”
“I know,” he said smugly, and then licked my breast again. The second lick felt as if it were pulsing directly to my sex, so intense was the pleasure. My hands fisted in the pillow behind my head, and I groaned with pleasure, panting when he moved his mouth to the other breast and did the same. Moments later, my breasts were twin beacons of exquisite, intense pleasure, and Michael wasn’t done with me yet. He slipped down my belly, pressed a brief kiss to my belly button, and then hovered at the apex of my thighs.
“Ready?” His low, sensual murmur rolled over my s
kin, increasing the intense pleasure. My nipples were so hard they ached, and I felt as if I’d come off the bed if he didn’t put his mouth on me again. “Michael, please. Oh, please—”
When he put his mouth on my sex, the entire world upended itself, right then and there.
Everything began and ended with Michael.
—
A few hours later, after Michael had fed and we’d had sex again, we snuggled under the blankets. Neither of us had chatted much afterward, but we weren’t ready to sleep, either. The sun would be up soon enough, and we’d sleep then. Until he closed his eyes, I’d kiss and caress every inch of him.
His fingers brushed circles on my skin, and I traced the contours of his chest, feeling every ridge of his six-pack. “So why is Mariah obsessed with you?” I finally asked.
He sighed heavily. “I think it’s because I’m new to the community. She views me like an exotic toy, and I’m single and have no blood partner. She thinks that since she’s a female vampire, I should be grateful that she wants me for a blood partner.”
“And why don’t you want her?” I asked, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
“I don’t want to be with Mariah. A blood partner is for life, and eternity is a long time to spend with someone who’s just a convenient meal.”
I continued to run my fingers over his chest. “You mentioned blood partner. Is that like marriage?”
“Somewhat. Vampire rules are pretty fluid, but one thing that is sacrosanct is a blood partner. If you’re in a mated pair, you’re off-limits to others. You wear the mark of the other’s bite on your neck proudly, and you spend eternity together. I don’t like Mariah enough for such a big commitment. She’d be much better off settling with Angelo, but as long as she has the hots for me, he’s going to try to remove me from the playing field. He seems to think that if he gets rid of me, her attention will turn back to him.”
“So there’s your answer,” I said, sitting up. “You need a blood partner.”
He smiled up at me, brushing his fingers over my cheek. “I haven’t found a vampire I want to spend eternity with yet.”
The Undead in My Bed Page 26
