Blood Bond

by Alicia Ryan

“The inconvenience of murder—sounds like the title of a mystery novel, not a way of life.”

  “It’s not a way of life. It’s a way of death.”

  That set her back for a minute. “Is that how you see yourself—as dead?”

  He shook his head. “No. I still have the memory of my humanity—or maybe the habit of my humanity. Perhaps, after I’ve been alive longer, I’ll come to see myself as something completely inhuman.”

  “You just called yourself ‘alive’,” she pointed out.

  “So I did. And you see my point. It’s hard to have a mind and simultaneously think of yourself as a dead thing. It is, however, often made only too plain that, though I have the outward appearance of a man, I am one no longer.”

  She popped a piece of cake into her mouth and then laid the heavy silver fork against the edge of her plate.

  “Will you tell me something?”

  He hesitated. “What is it?”

  “If I asked, would you send me back?”

  She saw his body slump in his chair. His gaze searched her face. Finally, he looked up at the ceiling and gave her an answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “If you really wish it.” He lowered his head to once again meet her gaze. “After today, I can see why you wouldn’t want to stay here.” His eyes grew pained. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. After bringing you here, I at least owed you that.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t blame you. You couldn’t have known what would happen. I should have mentioned him the night of your party, but I thought he was just the usual sort of asshole. Not the rapist sort.”

  “He said something to you then?”

  She nodded. “Just called me a whore, basically.”

  Darren’s eyes narrowed. “Just in case you’re wondering, he wasn’t on the guest list. He’s no friend of mine. He rode in on Lord Carleton’s coattails. I couldn’t kick him out.”

  His fist hit the table, causing her cup to clatter in its saucer. “How I wish to God I had.”

  “Careful,” she said, steadying her cup, “replacing one of these would cost a king’s ransom.” She held her cup up to the lit sconce on the wall behind her. “You know, you can almost see through this china.”

  “It’s what they call bone china. Fairly new invention—it uses added animal bone to make the product whiter and more transparent, but it is also stronger than traditional porcelain china.”

  She set the cup back down. “Bones. Great.”

  He laughed but sobered quickly. “Are you going to leave me?”

  She cast her gaze over the delicately laid table, the well-appointed sitting room, and finally the vampire opposite her. “No,” she said quietly. “I’m not ready to leave yet.”

  “Not ready to leave me?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “You don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.”

  She frowned. “No, you’re right. I don’t.”

  An emotion flitted across his face that Roxanna interpreted, to her surprise, as fear.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked. “This thing between us?”

  Darren closed his eyes. “Not entirely, I confess. And I don’t know how to explain to you what I do know. I don’t know how to convey what a vampire feels.”

  “Does the vampire feel?”

  He looked at her with sad eyes. “Not in the way you mean. For me, it’s all tangled up.” He shrugged. “Take love. I never felt it when I was a human, nor have I felt it since. But, if I had, how would I know? I don’t know what love is. It’s all combined for me—hunger, thirst, emotion, need, pleasure. I’m a creature of need, instinct, and desire. I don’t think I’m a creature of emotion.”

  She just looked at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not explaining this at all well.” He looked down at the table and then back up at her. “Imagine you loved chocolate cake.”

  “Okay. Not much of a stretch.”

  “And chocolate cake was the only food you could eat. It met all your needs for food and drink and was delicious beyond anything you’d ever tasted. So good it also met all your sexual needs—at least what used to be your sexual needs. And eating it gave you a view into the person that made it—a forced intimacy that flooded you with emotions not your own.”

  She took a deep breath. “Sounds like a hell of a cake.”

  He smiled. “I’m trying to be serious.”

  “So you’re a confused ball of hunger and desire and don’t know if you’ve had a genuine emotion since at least the night you became a vampire.”

  “Ah...yes. That’s it more or less exactly.” A wry smile appeared. “Somehow I thought I was more complicated.”

  “Where does that leave me?”

  His look went from wry to anguished. “I wish you wouldn’t ask me that. I’ve already told you I’ve never needed anyone the way I need you.”

  “Need or crave?”

  He tilted his head. “I could ask you the same.”

  “Do you want me to need you?”

  “Yes. I’m selfish. I want you in ways I don’t understand, and I want you as desperate for me as I am for you.”

  She felt the flush rise on her skin. His eyes darkened, and she knew he’d seen it.

  “A blush arouses you?” she asked

  “Not just that. Your heartbeat sped up. I like knowing I can make you want me.”

  “I do want you.”

  Darren stood and offered her his hand. She rose, allowing him to wrap his arms around her. Again, his touch was gentle.

  “Were you a gentleman before you were turned?” she asked.

  He gave a soft chuckle. “I tried to be. I told you my father was a vicar.”

  “And now?”

  “A long life brings with it a certain sanguinity, I suppose. And it’s hard to judge others when you’re the worst kind of sinner yourself. Though the prospect of meeting my God in judgment is a bit more distant than it used to be.”

  She laughed. “Perhaps you should turn Phillip. Then maybe he’d be able to tolerate me.”

  “Heavens, no.”

  “You’re right. I doubt any amount of time would make a difference.”

  “You might be right, but I meant that he has qualities I would never voluntarily destroy.”

  She knit her brows at him. “What qualities?”

  “He exudes innocence. You must see it. I tend to avoid the truly innocent, the truly good. I often find their company...uncomfortable. But those qualities are so rare—I would never take them from someone who genuinely possessed them.”

  That gave her pause. “And yet,” she said, finally, “I wish I thought he was happy.”

  “I definitely can’t give him that.”

  He ran a hand through her hair and tilted her head up toward his. “And I don’t want to talk about the piano player.”

  “He may have saved my life, you know. He’s earned a place somewhere above piano player.”

  Darren smiled and lowered his lips to hers. “I still don’t want to talk about him,” he whispered. “I don’t want any talking for a considerable length of time unless it involves you crying out my name in the highest form of ecstasy.”

  She smiled against his mouth and stretched her arms to encircle his neck. “Any other man I’d have to chastise about the size of his ego. Lucky me to have found one who can deliver.”

  The kiss started out slow, with Darren kissing her lips lightly through his smile. But teasing soon turned to hunger. Roxanna felt Darren’s in his devoted invasion of her mouth, the way his hands moved with increasing urgency along her back. But it was her own hunger that shocked her more.

  She grabbed the sides of his face and pulled him closer to her, sucking his tongue deeper, harder. Then she broke their contact, leaned forward and bit him on the neck.

  His response was a guttural growl, and his grip tightened on her forearms.

  She licked the spot she’d just bitten. “Like that, darling?”
/>   He relaxed his grip. “Almost as much as I like you calling me darling.”

  She smiled up at him. “Careful, Darren. That was almost sweet.”

  He kissed her again, and she returned it with all the force and need building within her.

  “I feel anything but sweet toward you at the moment,” he said. “The words ‘wicked’, ‘evil’, ‘debauched’—all come more readily to mind.”

  She grabbed the front of his open shirt. “Then debauch a girl already.”

  He looked down at her. “Do you...do you want the pain this time? I don’t have to.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You do. This street of need runs two ways.”

  He stepped back and pulled her along with him until she was sitting astride him on the room’s immaculate velvet settee. She pulled up her wool skirt to get closer to him but then stopped.

  “Not like this,” she said. “I...I don’t want you to see the bruises. And I don’t want to see them.”

  A shadow passed behind Darren’s eyes, but he nodded and swung her around so she sat with her back against the arm of the couch. He removed her slippers and cast her an amused look from under a raised brow.

  “No stockings?”

  “Didn’t seem much point,” she replied, catching her breath as his fingers started a slow ascent from her ankle to her calf.

  “Planning to seduce me all along, were you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  At that, he grinned. “You’re a brave woman, Roxanna Collins. I quite like that about you.”

  Without waiting for a response, he bent to allow his tongue to follow his roving fingers.

  Heat flowed up from her toes to her more passionate parts, and the feel of Darren’s tongue and cool skin against her scars made her whimper for more.

  Darren slid his fingers further up her thigh and eased one between her legs—and then further, into her warm center.

  She grabbed his bicep and shuddered. His name left her lips on a moan, and slow strokes were the reward for her cry.

  “I want to feel you when you reach your peak.”

  She lifted her head to look at him. As she watched, twin, gleaming white fangs descended in front of his canine teeth. And he bit down with one of them into his lower lip.

  “Come,” he said.

  She leaned forward, feeling herself tighten around his finger as she moved.

  Darren grabbed the back of her neck, dragged her forward and slammed his mouth down onto hers. She tasted his blood and heard him grunt as he thrust his tongue into her mouth, cutting himself further.

  His blood warmed her; she could feel it traveling, making its way from her mouth to her neck, her breasts, her arms...lower.

  Before it could encompass her completely, she tilted her head and turned the tables on her lover, sliding her tongue against his, against his fangs—again and again, feeling each thin, beautiful cut.

  Darren groaned, moved closer, and thrust his finger deeper into her.

  She clutched at his shoulders, sucked deep, and felt him come into her—his hunger and need, just as he’d described—a burning, twisting, fiery ball. She also felt his desire to protect, and it touched her. But then emotions—his and hers—were swept away on a tide of pleasure so hard and swift she had to break away from him to cry out at the force of it. She felt herself clench around his finger as she rode it along with the waves of bone-melting sensation the taste of him brought to her.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered, leaning closer. “Roxanna, I need...”

  She felt his lips on the skin of her neck.

  “Do it,” she moaned. “Do it.”

  He shook his head back and forth as if he might deny them, but then his fangs sank deep.

  Roxanna almost screamed as she came again underneath him, overwhelmed with the penetration, with the sensation.

  He removed his hand and moved so he was fully atop her. As he drank, his body began to shake and he pressed himself into her. With a groan, he withdrew his fangs and arched hard against her.

  After a long moment, he relaxed and licked his tongue over the bite, but he continued to shudder in her arms. As did she.

  “I wonder if this qualifies as addiction,” she mused, when her voice and breathing had returned to something like their normal state. “I don’t see myself not wanting this anytime soon.”

  “Then I don’t care what you call it,” he replied, his voice sounding a little shaky.

  That made her smile with what she supposed was pride.

  “As long as you don’t leave me,” he said. “I’m a happy man.”

  “Mmm...” She stroked a hand down his hair and then the smooth musculature of his back. They were both still basically clothed, but she thought she’d never had as intimate an experience.

  He raised himself up on his arms and looked at her. “But I could be happier in the bedroom,” he said with a smile.

  “Don’t you ever get enough?” she asked.

  “Of you?” He shook his head. “Not possible.”

  When Roxanna opened her eyes hours later, now in Darren’s great bed, he lay on his side facing her, one arm bent under his pillow, the other resting on her own bare arm. As usual, the sheer beauty of him struck her first. Features so perfect they might have been sculpted into marble out of some gifted artist’s ideal.

  But then the further resemblance to stone caught her eye. He wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t caught off guard by it at this point, despite not having noticed it before.

  A noise from over by the door drew her gaze from Darren.

  There, fading in and out of her vision, was Darren’s own image. She gasped, but bit it back when the figure put a barely discernible finger to its lips. Then it crooked its finger and beckoned her to come to it.

  She took a deep breath, telling herself she had nothing to worry about. Wasn’t this supposed to be the good side of Darren?

  Wedging out from under Darren’s hand, she slipped out of the bed but clutched the sheet to her when she realized she was naked.

  The figure rolled its eyes and extended its hands in a gesture that asked unmistakably what she expected him to do about it.

  Glaring at him, she stood and grabbed Darren’s silk robe from the dresser, wrapping it around her.

  Satisfied, he crooked his finger at her once more and then faded back through the wooden door.

  Roxanna turned the knob slowly, looking back to check that Darren was still asleep. He hadn’t moved, so she opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

  To her left were the stairs. An uncurtained window told her it was now night. But the figure hovered in the dark end of the hallway to her left.

  She approached gingerly.

  “I’m Andrew,” it said. “I assume he’s told you about me.”

  She nodded. “A bit, though I can’t say I feel like I have the full picture. Why are you here again?”

  “I’m here to help Darren. To watch out for him. To keep him from a path of darkness.”

  She frowned. “And what? You think I’m not a good influence?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” he confessed. “I want to know what your intentions are toward him.”

  “My intentions? Isn’t it the guy who’s supposed to declare his intentions?”

  “This isn’t something I’m prepared to jest about, Miss Collins.”

  She brought up a hand and rubbed her temple. “Alright. I don’t know what my intentions are. That depends on him a lot more than you seem to think. It’s hardly like we’ve had a long courtship.”

  “And yet he’s consumed with you.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know where you will steer him. I don’t know what kind of person you are.”

  Roxanna just stared at him. “Well, I’m not the murdering vampire kind of person. I don’t see where I’d be the one to lead him off the path to redemption or whatever.”

  “Would you ask him to turn you?”

  Her eyes got wide. “I d
on’t know. I’ve never even thought of it.”

  “But you understand why I might be concerned about the influence of another vampire on him?”

  “I suppose so, though perhaps you don’t give Darren enough credit.” She paused, considering what Darren had told her earlier. “I don’t think I would ask for that. And even if I did, I’m not sure he would do it.”

  “And I’m not sure he wouldn’t. I don’t know that there’s anything he wouldn’t do for you.”

  She leveled a glare at him. “That’s what’s really got your panties in a twist isn’t it? That he’s formed an attachment to someone besides you.”

  A frown was his first response. “You certainly won’t improve his vocabulary.”

  “But I’m right.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. A bit.”

  “So, if you don’t like me, why don’t you just ship me back to where you got me from?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to, not without Darren’s cooperation. It’s vampire blood that powers the magic.”

  “Lucky for me, I guess.”

  “So you don’t want to leave?”

  “I’ve already told him I don’t.”

  “I know he doesn’t want you to go.”

  “So maybe we should call a temporary truce. Until Darren and I figure out what our ‘intentions’ are. I won’t tell him you’re trying to get rid of me, and you won’t try to persuade him to do it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get rid of you. But I will if I don’t think you’re good for him.” He hesitated. “But I’ll admit the effect of your...relationship...is not yet clear to me. So we’ll have your truce. For now.”

  With that, he disappeared, and Roxanna snorted at the affront. “What? No polite English goodbye?” she called out.

  The empty hallway did not respond.

  The next morning, Roxanna was roused by someone banging on the bedroom door.

  “Yes?” Darren called out, raising himself up onto one elbow.

  “You asked to be informed when the young man arrived, sir.”

  She recognized Harris’ voice, though he didn’t open the door.

  “Thank you, Harris. Tell him I’ll be down shortly.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Looking down at her, Darren said, “You’ll have to get dressed, I’m afraid.”