by Michele Hauf
She cried out and clutched at his shoulders and back. But he slipped farther down her body and tasted the sweetness of her passion. He teased her with his tongue, stoking her desire again until hot juice spilled from her. Her hands tangled in his hair, pulling him back. “You—I need you,” she admitted, her voice cracking with the admission. “I need you to fill me…”.
Her desperate words threatened his control, but then he realized he was giving her what she wanted. Him. And he guided his cock into her slick heat. Her muscles gripped him as she arched, pulling him deeper inside her.
He groaned, his body shaking with the need to thrust wildly until he satisfied his own desperate need for release. But he slowed his rhythm—even as she dug her nails into his butt and urged him faster. He took his time, fighting for control, as he prolonged the orgasm that gripped her.
She cried out and sobbed, tears spilling from her closed eyes. He kissed away the salty moisture. Then he kissed her lips, swallowing those cries of release. He skimmed his palms down her body, closing his hands around her full breasts and stroking his thumbs across her nipples.
She arched and thrust her hips against him. Then she reached between them and stroked the base of his shaft.
A groan tore from his throat as his control snapped. He grabbed her hips in his hands, lifting her against him as he pounded his cock inside her. She came again and again, her muscles gripping him so tightly that he exploded inside her. He lifted her and turned, so that he collapsed onto his back but she was still joined to him, still part of him. Just as she had been these past fifty years even though he had believed her dead.
But she was alive. And he had the chance to tell her what he’d rued never sharing with her. “I love you.”
His words struck her with all the force of a stake through her heart. “No,” she said, denying his declaration and her own instinctive reaction to it, to reciprocate it. She could not love a man she’d spent the past fifty years hating. “No …”
Her hand on his chest, she pushed herself away from him, breaking the hold of his arms around her. If only she could break the sexual hold he had on her …
As she moved, he hardened inside her, spiking her desire for him, making her want him all over again … no matter the mind-blowing pleasure he’d just given her. Selflessly … as if he really meant the words he spoke, the words that warmed his glittering blue eyes.
“No …”
“I love you,” he insisted as he shifted beneath her, his cock hardening and moving inside her. “I loved you then, and I love you now.”
She gasped … over the sensations rippling through her with orgasmic aftershocks. But she shook her head, unwilling to believe him. “You didn’t even know me then.” They’d had only that one night together—that one endless night.
“I knew you,” he claimed, as he closed his hands around her hips and shifted her against him, burying his cock deeper inside her. “I knew who you were before I ever met you. Lost. Scared. Alone. I wanted to be there for you. Forever.”
She shook her head again even as she moved, arching to take him deeper inside her body—to the place only he could touch. “No. If I believe you, that you were only trying to turn me and not kill me—” as she’d been told “—then you cared only about yourself, about what you wanted. You wanted me to be available to you. Forever.”
Just as she had made herself available to him now. She needed to pull away from him, to break the connection of their bodies before another connection formed—one between their hearts and souls. She couldn’t accept what he claimed; she couldn’t trust his love.
But even as she fought those emotions, passion burned inside her … and the ripples of pleasure intensified until she shuddered with another orgasm.
He groaned and tensed beneath her, thrusting deep—once, twice and then he came on the third thrust. The warmth of his release poured inside her, as the warmth of his gaze poured over her face, his eyes aglow with love.
She wanted to believe he cared about her, but she’d already been a fool once for this man. She pulled away from him, separating their bodies. “You don’t love me,” she insisted. “If you loved me, you would have let it be my decision. You would have given me the choice of spending eternity with you.”
“I was selfish and stupid,” he admitted with a shaky sigh. “But having believed that I lost you, that I killed you, changed me. I know that what I did was wrong—that I should have cared more about what you wanted than what I wanted. Can you ever forgive me?”
“No.”
CHAPTER FOUR
NO. The word impaled his heart more effectively than the stake ever would have. She shoved the stake back inside her purse. Then she stepped into her dress and yanked up the zipper.
“You can’t leave,” he told her.
“Are you going to try to stop me like you did last time?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No, but it’ll be daybreak soon. You can’t be out in the light.”
“I know all the rules of this eternal life,” she informed him, her voice sharp with bitterness. “I spent the past fifty years learning them the hard way.”
“I’m sorry…”. He couldn’t say the words enough, but she refused to accept his apology. Or his love. But he couldn’t blame her. If their roles had been reversed, he doubted he could have forgiven her, either. So he didn’t try to stop her as she unlocked the door and left him.
He’d thought her gone forever once, and he’d been wrong. Somehow he doubted he’d get that lucky again. She wouldn’t be back. But at least she was alive.
How was she alive? He left the bed, rumpled from their lovemaking, and pulled on some clothes. Then he rushed out of the basement apartment. She was gone already. The streets deserted. The night was too late for mortals, dawn too close for immortals.
With time slipping away from him, he vaulted into the sky—flying through what was left of the night. Moments later he reached his destination and descended the cement steps leading down to Club Underground. The door was unlocked, and he walked into the empty bar. He glanced toward the dance floor, where he’d held Miranda—Brandi—in his arms. But he didn’t linger in the bar, passing through it to the hall that led to another unlocked door. The studded steel creaked on rusty hinges as he opened the door onto a room that was cold and dark and smelled of spilled blood and death.
A switch snapped and artificial light flickered then flooded the stark basement room. The doctor stood next to the metal table where he operated or dissected. “I’ve been expecting you,” the gray-haired man admitted.
He wasn’t mortal, not anymore, but he’d been old when he’d joined the secret society. Old and bitter.
“Why?” Conner asked. “Why tell me that she was dead?” He’d brought Miranda here, all those years ago, when she’d been unresponsive. She’d lost so much blood that he’d been afraid he’d killed instead of turned her. And this man had confirmed that fear.
The doctor sighed. “Because she needed to die. How in the hell had you believed you could have a happily ever after with her?”
Because for the first time in his infinite life, Conner West had fallen in love, and that heady rush of emotion had clouded his judgment and his common sense.
The doctor snorted his disgust. “She was a movie star. People would have questioned why she never aged. At least they would have fifty years ago. The secret society would have been discovered. She couldn’t live forever.”
“But she didn’t die,” Conner reminded the doctor, whose dark eyes burned with madness.
“I was going to kill her,” Dr. Hoekstra insisted. “But she was so beautiful … and so frightened and confused.”
Conner closed his eyes on a wave of regret, imagining how she must have felt when she’d regained consciousness to a new reality. To eternity. “Miranda …”
“I realized I could use her fear to persuade her to disappear. So I convinced her to hide,” the doctor explained, “from you. I told her that you’d tried to
kill her, that you wanted her dead.”
And she had believed the crazy doctor because Conner hadn’t been there when she’d awakened. He’d left her lifeless body with the doctor, believing the physician when Dr. Hoekstra had pronounced her dead.
The man continued, “I told her she needed to hide or that you would find her and finish the job.”
Conner laughed at the doctor’s failure. “Instead of hiding from me, she spent fifty years tracking me down.” For vengeance, not love, he reminded himself.
Dr. Hoekstra sighed in acceptance of his defeat. “I should have killed her when you brought her to me. I should have killed her then.”
Conner shook his head. “No. Except for lying to her and me, you did the right thing. She was no threat to the secret society. She’s one of us now.” No matter how much she resented being a monster.
“After tonight, after the documentary that aired, there’s renewed interest in her disappearance,” Dr. Hoekstra pointed out. “People will start investigating what happened to her, and we can’t risk them discovering the truth.”
“We?”
“The society,” the doctor said as he lifted a wooden stake from where he’d held it below the metal surgical table. “You need to kill her for real this time, West. Or I will.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
Miranda shivered at the icy resolve in Conner’s deep voice as he calmly assured the doctor he would murder her. Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back, silently cursing herself for being so weak that she had nearly believed his claims. He wasn’t sorry he’d taken her life; he didn’t love her.
She’d wanted so badly to believe him. Hell, she’d just wanted him so badly. Her fingers trembling, she unclasped her purse and reached for her own wooden stake. They hadn’t seen her yet, where she lurked in the shadows of the doctor’s underground operating room. Like Conner, she’d wanted answers. Hell, she’d wanted proof that Conner had told her the truth—so that she could return to his bed, to his arms.
She’d been such a fool. She barely held in a gasp as he reached for the stake in the doctor’s outstretched hand. He might not have meant to kill her last time, but she had no doubts about his intentions this time.
Until he spoke again, telling the doctor, “I’ll take care of her. I won’t let you anywhere near her.”
“Her very existence threatens the safety of the entire society,” the doctor insisted. “She has to die.”
Conner shook his head. “You’re not going to hurt her. You’ll have to kill me first.”
“You would have been killed,” the doctor said, “had I told anyone what you’d done, how you’d risked revealing our secret by trying to turn her.”
“I didn’t just try,” Conner reminded the other man, “I succeeded.”
She heard the surprise in his voice, and the relief. He really had suffered with guilt over what he’d thought he’d done to her. She hadn’t had to punish him; she suspected he’d spent the past fifty years punishing himself.
“But turning her puts us all at risk,” the doctor repeated. “The rest of the society will agree with me. She needs to die.”
Conner shook his head. “No. They’ll realize that she’s lived as one of us for the past fifty years with no one suspecting who she is. They’ll know she’s no threat.”
The threat was the doctor, whose hand held tight to the stake Conner tried taking from him. Miranda gasped aloud as the two men began to grapple over the weapon. Distracted, Conner turned toward her, and the doctor gained the upper hand. The stake pressed against Conner’s chest, right above his heart.
Then a guttural growl emanated from his throat, and he fought back. But she suspected he wasn’t fighting for his own life but for hers, knowing that if he didn’t prevail that the doctor would kill her next.
“Get out of here!” he shouted at her, confirming her suspicion.
“No,” she said, “I’m not leaving you.” She rushed from the shadows, her weapon clutched tight in her hands. But before she could help, the metal table crashed over and the two men fell to the floor, locked in combat.
Another cry rang out in the room, this one of excruciating pain. Then silence fell, broken only by her agitated breaths. “Conner!”
For fifty years she had wanted him dead, but now she begged for him to live as she knelt near the tangled bodies. The doctor shifted, rising from the floor. And she tightened her grasp on the stake, ready to defend herself. But the doctor rolled over, as Conner pushed off his body. Blood spurted around the stake buried deep in Dr. Hoekstra’s chest.
Conner stared at the other man, his blue eyes wide with horror. “I—I killed him.”.
How had she ever considered him a murderer? Would he ever forgive her for doubting him?
He had become what she had thought he was—a killer. Although, hours ago, the society had exonerated him of any wrongdoing in the doctor’s death, he knew better than to hope she would. And so he packed his belongings to leave Zantrax and her. Forever.
“Where are you going?” a husky female voice asked.
Startled, Conner whirled around to the door where she stood, her amber gaze on him. “Miranda …”
“Or Brandi,” she said as she crossed the room to him. “I’ve spent more years living as her than Miranda.”
He opened his mouth to apologize again, but she pressed her fingers across his lips.
“I see it in your eyes,” she said. “You don’t have to keep saying it.” She stroked her fingertips over the stubble along his jaw. “You don’t have to keep feeling it.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. I took everything away from you. Your career, your future …” And he would never forgive himself for acting so recklessly, so selfishly.
“My career?” She laughed. “I would have been forgotten long ago if not for my mysterious disappearance. I was a second-rate starlet. You made me a legend.”
Confusion … and desire … filled Conner as she stepped closer, her body brushing up against his. She’d changed out of the black satin dress for a curve-hugging knit one in nearly the same red as her hair. “You were so mad at me,” he reminded her, “mad enough to kill me. How can you forgive me?”
“I haven’t,” she said even as she arched her hips against him.
“Of course.”
“And I won’t … if you leave me,” she said as she wrapped her hands around his nape and pulled his head down to hers. She kissed him hungrily, her lips pressing his apart so that her tongue slid into his mouth and tangled with his. Their fangs scraped, sparking his desire into smoldering passion.
He slid his hands down her back to her hips. He cupped her butt in his palms and lifted her as she tilted her pelvis, rubbing her hips and abdomen against his erection. A groan slipped from his lips, and his control snapped. He couldn’t take it slow; he couldn’t make love to her as thoroughly as he had before.
He needed her now.
Her hand pushed between their bodies, and she un-snapped and unzipped his jeans, freeing his cock. He lifted her dress and tugged aside her panties as she guided him inside her. She was wet and ready for him, her body moist and hot as her inner muscles gripped him.
Her nails dug into his shoulders. “Hard,” she urged him as she wrapped her bare legs around his waist. She slid up and down.
Not bothering to knock the suitcase from the bed, he stayed on his feet, widening his stance to brace himself as he thrust inside her … as frantically as she rode him. Panting for breath, she pressed her mouth to his throat, nipping his skin with her fangs, but she didn’t drink. Instead she invited him, “Bite me.”.
He met her gaze, and seeing the acceptance and excitement in her eyes, he buried his face in her neck and sank his fangs into the silky skin of her throat. Her blood trickled over his tongue, sweet and sticky, like the passion that poured over his cock as she came.
All his muscles taut, he thrust again and again … and joined her in blissful oblivion. “Brandi!”
>
She smiled against his mouth as she kissed him. “I prefer Brandi,” she admitted. “Not just the name but the life. I don’t feel so lost anymore…”.
In his arms, she felt just the opposite as that abandoned child who’d never known love. She felt as if she belonged … with him. To him.
“You didn’t take away my future,” she assured him. “You gave me one … with you.”
His blue eyes bright with hope, he met her gaze. “Are you saying …”
“That I love you?” she asked then nodded as he smiled. “Yes, I love you. And I want to spend eternity with you.”
His arms tightened around her, pressing her breasts against his chest, where his heart—the heart she’d doubted he had—beat hard and fast. “I love you,” he vowed.
This time she believed him, not just because she trusted him now, but because she realized she was worthy of love. Her parents might have abandoned and forgotten about her. But in fifty years, he never had. Happiness filling her, her lips curved into a smile. “I know.” “I love you now, and I will love you forever,” Conner promised.
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, holding
him tight. “That’s good because I spent so long looking for you I’m never going to let you go.” She’d tracked him down for vengeance and had found love instead.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
