She held her breath, waiting for him to offer another hint of that Stephen, the one she wanted to save more than any fantasy or bite.
But he just kept nodding his head as Caroline Cornish raved about Umberto’s wine list.
Then Kim heard Mr. Cornish’s voice filtering through, and she knew that he was addressing her. Her eyes had trouble focusing on the older man.
“Excellent place to have a romantic dinner, Kim,” he finished. “You and Stephen need to go there sometime.”
She noticed that the elderly couple was giving Stephen one of those “meaningful looks” that meant they were trying to see just how serious he was about Kim, especially since he was going into her apartment at this time of night.
“We’ll check it out,” she said. “Umberto’s, that’s the name?”
Mr. Cornish nodded suspiciously, but his wife gave an “Aaaahhh,” as she bought Kim’s attempt to make Stephen’s presence harmless.
“I guess you computer nerds make pretty late house calls,” the mister said to Stephen just before Mrs. Cornish nudged him with an elbow.
At her urging, the older couple proceeded into the hallway, and Kim glanced at her vampire “date,” who seemed untouched by the entire encounter.
And here she was thinking that the earth had moved under their feet during that one long, jarring glance. Wow, great to see that any epiphany had totally passed him by.
Kim rolled her eyes. So…okay. She had gotten emotional about a vampire. It wasn’t enough that she had been obsessing over a bite, but she had to go and supplement that with actual feelings. Good move.
When they reached their respective doors, they all paused to say good-night.
Mr. Cornish sent Stephen a stern look as his wife entered their place without him. “I hear these computers don’t take too long to fix nowadays.”
He tapped his watch, only to be dragged inside by Mrs. Cornish. She popped out her head and waved a final farewell.
“Don’t mind him, Kim. You have a nice night.”
“You, too, Mrs. Cornish.”
When the lady waved one last time and then shut the door, Kim felt herself blushing. Good God, she couldn’t even look at Stephen because of Mr. Cornish’s shotgun-dad act.
“He misinterprets things sometimes,” she said, unlocking her door and going inside.
“Who, that nice little man?” Stephen shut her door behind him. “And here I believed you truly did need help with your computer. I was set to poke around in it.”
Her face heated up even more, spreading a flush throughout her body. Had that been some sort of tech-based innuendo? And why would it have made her all flustered?
“You poked around enough the other night when you erased my Web column,” she said, pretending she hadn’t gotten the joke—if he’d indeed been flirting in that dry British vampire way of his. She struggled to regain her composure by pointing to a black futon draped with Mexican blankets. “Why don’t you sit while I get us something to drink.”
But he just stood there. Finally, she brought herself to look at him, even though it was the hardest thing she’d done since…Well, maybe ever.
He was watching her intensely, yet, when she met his gaze, he assumed his usual negligent stance.
What were you just thinking? she wanted to ask. What’s going on?
But, after a loaded second, he grinned like a lady-killer and sat on the couch, finally obeying her command with amused grace.
She was on the cusp of blurting out everything that was going unsaid between them. Damn, she wanted to get it all into the open. But why? What would be the use? He was a vampire, and she’d studied up on them enough to know that there was no future here. Not unless he made whatever big sacrifice it took to be human again—if what she’d seen in his mind about how he missed those days was true and he wanted to go back to them.
Or maybe she could…
Kim swallowed, recalling her morning fantasy—the red dress she would wear for Stephen during one of their many nights together, the continual bites…Dumb. That had only been a daydream, an idle thought.
Hadn’t it?
Unwilling to even consider the ramifications of becoming one of the undead, she went into her small kitchen, busying herself by putting on a pot of water for tea.
“What’s your poison?” she asked, almost laughing at herself. Her. Kimberly Wight. A bloodsucker. She’d reached the edge of sanity.
“Besides the usual? I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
Kim paused while fetching a box of random tea bags from her cupboard. “Vampires are allowed to drink more than blood?”
“Yes, we’re allowed. But anything else doesn’t provide much enjoyment, so most of us don’t bother.” He watched her grab mugs from the cupboard, then shut it. “Alcohol doesn’t settle well.”
“I’m sure your addictions run more to the exotic, anyway.”
STEPHEN RAISED a brow at the comment. Addictions weren’t always exotic.
He shifted in his seat as Kimberly tucked a strand of red hair behind an ear. Sometimes addictions were based on a craving for the normal, for the one-in-a-million thing that brought a missing serenity to light.
As she moved around the kitchen, he appreciated every nuance—the way she determinedly cleaned up after herself as she put their tea together, the way she put a finger to her lips as she decided what to place on the tray.
It was easy to deceive himself into thinking that he was mortal right now, that he was waiting for Kimberly to sit with him and sip from her mug while they talked about their days at work. That they were so very happy—as happy as Kimberly’s neighbors—to see each other now that night had fallen.
But he had a rogue vampire to catch, and there was nothing remotely human about what would come afterward when Fegan got his greedy hands on the deviant.
Kimberly was walking toward him with the tray, two steaming mugs among the earthenware sugar and honey pots. When she leaned over to give him a mug decorated with a skimpily garbed superheroine who held a whip, he caught the scent of his favorite prey above the orange spice of the tea.
Desire shot up through his chest like a hanging tree that had done all its growing in one thrust. Branch tips tore at him on their way up.
He contained himself, holding the warm mug while Kimberly sat in a lounging chair opposite him.
She cupped her mug awkwardly, looking just as ill at ease as he felt. Where had the siren gone? Who was this quiet woman?
And why did he want her as much as the other?
“I’ve been wondering about something.” She laughed a bit, telegraphing embarrassment.
“You’ve never hesitated in asking before.” Absently, he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and cradling the mug with both hands. He tried to fill his senses with the tea instead of her, but it was a losing battle.
“Okay…” She ran a hand over the side of her leg, as if wiping moisture off and onto her jeans. “You…Well, a few nights ago you said you didn’t bite women more than once, and you only made a mistake with me because there’ve been so many bites that you’d forgotten.”
This wasn’t a subject he wished to dwell on.
She kept her hand on her thigh, fingers curved. “But you’ve bitten me three times now. Why? I mean, before everything ends with the rogue and you go your way and I go mine, maybe you could just tell me.”
For some reason, her Southern accent was really coming out now, perhaps because she was forcing herself to be casual, even flippant. Usually, her words were less affected, just as he had trained his own to be over the years.
“I suppose my appetite has increased in this desert air,” he said in an attempt to seem removed.
Kimberly hesitated and, in that moment, he could see the stain of rejection on her lovely face.
In spite of himself, he rushed to make her feel better, his voice lowering to a near tremble that he didn’t recognize at all.
“Your spirit touches me, Kimberly.
Is that not enough reason?”
She raised her pale eyes to his, and lightning struck.
It illuminated all that he had kept back inside—the forgotten emotions, the maddening desire to hold someone dear, the pain of being unable to do so.
He wanted her to know, wanted to see how she would react to a vampire who had crossed the line and done the unthinkable—become enamored of his prey.
“Before now,” he said, words rushing, “I have been mired in a place that has kept me sane. A place where I have not been forced to feel. I was there when I first bit you. Yet you were there, too, weren’t you? Your sister had only just passed on, and when I took my fill of your blood, there was nothing to move me. Nothing but the same static I endured night after night.”
“But then your bite changed me.” Her eyes were so wide, so afraid. “I guess I became the one woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer from you, and you couldn’t help but notice me again…and again.”
“No, you didn’t force me to bite you more than twice, Kimberly. Unlike the first time, you have grown in strength, and you are the only bite who has ever been able to control me.” There. He had said it. “Not the other way around.”
“I…control you?”
She touched her chest with such stunned delicacy that he almost dropped his mug.
He set it on an end table before he mortified himself.
She cleared her throat. “I guess that’s something you shouldn’t have let out of the bag, huh, Stephen? I can go around making you my hot servant now.”
Though she was teasing, his hackles rose, and he spoke before thinking. “I am no woman’s servant.”
Before he could mark the hurt reaction he expected—a sight that would be his undoing—he stood, then walked out of her range. Her scent…her body heat…It was all starting to overwhelm him.
“Stephen.”
He stopped, slowly realizing that she had commanded him. But it was not because of a mind trick, he was certain of that. It was because she just had that power over him, and there was nothing preternatural about it.
“I’ve asked you before,” she said, “and you never answered. What happened to make you so…”
“Difficult?” he supplied, the word vitriolic.
Silence beat through the room.
Why shouldn’t he give her an answer? Maybe it would convince him of this folly in being with her if he heard himself say Cassandra’s name, if he relived an anguish that had escaped him for more than a hundred years.
“There was a woman, of course,” he said, coming to stand in front of a framed picture of another superheroine. The glossy surface didn’t reflect him, but in its clarity, he could imagine Cassandra’s face. “She provided a lesson in never hanging on to anything…anyone.”
“Just like the lesson you learned about your brother? Did this Cassandra turn her back on you like Nathan did?”
“No, it wasn’t quite like losing the love a family.” Seeing Cassandra—a woman for whom he had lived passionately—staring in utter dread at the sight of him wasn’t nearly the same. “My love for her was a different one. It was…all-consuming. It ruled me.”
When he risked a look at Kimberly, she was clasping her arms in front of her chest, as if enclosing herself.
“I would watch her in the upstairs window,” he continued softly, “her blond hair shining as she brushed it in front of her mirror. During each visit, I would draw an inch closer, closer, telling myself her performance was only for me. Then I would whisper, planting the thought in her mind that I meant no harm. Soon, she came to the window, where I romanced her. Yet there was never a bite, not even after she invited me into her room.”
“Did you two…” Kimberly didn’t finish.
“I made love without any sort of penetration, if you wish for the details.”
“It’s not that I want to hear them, Stephen.”
Her jealousy was all but palpable and, for some reason, that made him feel important, so very required.
A tremble skated over his limbs, burrowing under his flesh and to his belly. “I became too excited one night, and everything I had been holding back emerged—the monster. The ugly truth of what I am.”
“And she screamed,” Kimberly said, as if privy to Stephen’s vision. And perhaps she was by now. “She screamed until her family broke down the door. But you were already gone.”
“Gone,” he repeated. “Yet I returned to her window again and again, hidden, knowing I could never have her. As I watched, the anger grew until I could feel it no more. Every night made me into a walking, used-up vessel.”
Bit by bit, the past faded from his gaze, revealing Kimberly, her jaw tight as she shook her head.
“You don’t agree?” he asked.
“You’re not half as bad as you think, Stephen. You believe you’re this brooding terror who can’t relate, yet here we are—the vessel and the victim who didn’t scream when you turned your so-called worst on me.”
All too true—she wanted the vampire in him. It was that simple—and that terribly wrong.
“Yup, here we are,” she repeated, almost as an afterthought. She swallowed hard, and her voice cracked when she added, “Here I am.”
Everything plastered into a timeless second. Even his heart stopped beating.
A choice. She was offering him some sort of choice, but he wasn’t certain what it was. Truthfully, he didn’t want to know, and that was keeping him from pursuing its meaning.
Say something, he thought. Tell her what you have been keeping back. Tell her that you are so bewildered by what is happening that you—
Kimberly’s phone rang, and she jumped.
Please answer it. Please.
It rang again, but she only stared at him, as if thinking his response was imminent.
Finally, he could stand it no longer. Out of pure desperation, he went to her carrying bag on the kitchen table and flipped open the phone himself.
“Hello?”
“Uh, hello?” said the male voice at the other end of the line.
It sounded like one of Kimberly’s League people, thank goodness.
“Let me give you to Kimberly,” Stephen said, walking to her and handing her the cell.
Their fingers brushed, and he tried to get away as fast as he could, but she grabbed his wrist.
The male’s voice kept saying “Kim? Kim? Kim?”, punching the atmosphere where the thud of heartbeats should have been sounding instead.
But Stephen didn’t have the heart for this.
Breaking away, he left her to take the phone, her expression falling.
Enraged more with himself than anything else, he headed toward the door.
“Wait, Stephen,” she told him, hand covering the mouthpiece. She spoke into the phone. “Powder, Darlene’s there and she’s talking about the attack?”
Suddenly, Stephen was not about to go anywhere.
ON THE DRIVE OVER, Kim had been so spurred by Powder’s phone call that she barely had time to be uncomfortable around Stephen.
True, there were about a hundred-thousand reasons to be fidgety, and 99.9% had to do with offering up herself to him and then being rejected.
Luckily for her ego, she’d been so busy replaying Powder’s phone call on the short ride to headquarters that both of them had a reprieve. And she could tell Stephen was grateful for it, because he was in typical male-avoidance mode—all manly quiet and relatively relaxed as they sped along in her Chevy.
Vampires. Not so different from human guys, after all.
“That’s all Powder kept telling me,” Kim was saying as she pulled into the subdivision where Troy’s house was located, one sand-colored dwelling after the other flying by. Most of them seemed to be empty lately because residents normally fled the summer desert heat for cooler vacation spots. “He kept saying that Darlene was asking for me and I should get over here.”
“I’m curious to see how she fares.” Stephen was in his corner, gaze trained out the windshiel
d. “I appreciate your allowing me to come along to assess her.”
“Assess. How formal.”
He laughed quietly, knowing a potshot when he heard one.
Hell, he deserved a poke or two. So did she, because they were both acting as if neither of them had gushed their hearts out back at the apartment.
As she pulled into Troy’s driveway, she continued to do her best to pretend what had happened hadn’t happened, even though she knew damned well it had happened. Talk about confusing.
She’d impulsively tested the waters, and Stephen had spit her back out.
Or had he? He’d been reluctant to reveal his own thoughts, and she’d taken that for a negative. Was she right?
Sure she was. A girl with as much experience as her knew how to read a male pretty well, vampire or not. His desire to have a hole split the ground and swallow him up had been about as obvious as a real crater in her apartment floor would’ve been.
After shutting off the car and getting out, she invited him into the house, but he refused, citing the many crucifixes that Troy had recently positioned by the entrance. Instead, Stephen asked Kim to somehow bring Darlene outside so he could scan her.
Cut bait and run—that’s what he was doing. She knew the drill for setting yourself up for an easy escape when she saw it.
After she left Stephen to do his thing outside, she entered the house and saw Powder pacing in the family room, where the TV was off. That was weird, but it was even stranger to see the look on his face—absolute befuddlement.
Then she heard the laughter from a guest room, where Darlene usually worked on the computer.
“Sounds like a pickup bar back there,” Kim said.
Powder shrugged.
They both headed toward the sound, and Kim halted at the bedroom’s threshold.
There, on the bed, sat Darlene, her dark corkscrew hair loose and wild, her skin glowing with the aid of sexy, smoky makeup. She was dressed in a way that made Kim’s eyes about bug out of her head—a black top that showcased her ample breasts, tight matching pants and screw-me heels. Jeremy and Troy were gathered around her, leaning forward in telling body language—some kind of dialect brain-dead guys with hard-ons would speak.
The Ultimate Bite Page 16
