Holiday with a Vampire 4: Halfway to DawnThe GiftBright Star (Harlequin Nocturne)

by Susan Krinard

  cooperation by threatening to kill her, would Kane have killed him?

  It was very possible. Even likely. Because Kane cared about her.

  And Alfie, at least, knew the feeling was mutual. “Too proud,” he’d said of her. Too proud to admit she wanted Kane the way she’d never wanted another man. With her entire body. And her soul.

  A soul that would begin to wither and die if she had to do what Kane had demanded of her. If she had to kill both him and Alfie to save them. And herself.

  Fiona realized she’d been lagging behind and caught up with Kane, taking care not to stumble lest he feel compelled to reach out and steady her. Alfie brought up the rear. They moved carefully north and east across the wetlands, intending to avoid the suburban communities at the junction of the old Highway 680, which passed by the house, and the major artery connecting the San Francisco Bay Area to Sacramento.

  The new storm Kane had expected hadn’t yet arrived, so they only had to contend with the marsh itself. Fiona’s boots soon became waterlogged from wading through the sloughs. Kane called a halt to give her his jacket, and she didn’t object. She had work to do, and she couldn’t get it done if she died of exposure.

  They’d nearly reached dry ground when the sun began to rise. There was little enough shelter in the area, but Kane and Alfie had deliberately aimed for a small, isolated stand of trees anchored on a low hill. They removed and unrolled tarps they’d fastened to their packs and stretched them between the lowest branches.

  Almost immediately Alfie fell onto his back, covered his eyes with his arm and sank into a heavy sleep, snoring like an old-time steam engine. Kane crouched beside him, staring toward the northeast.

  Fiona followed his gaze across the open ground toward the old community of Fairfield and the abandoned Travis Air Force Base east of the city. A perfect place for light-averse Nightsiders to hide.

  She knelt to face him, staying outside the small rectangle of shadow cast by the tarps. “I’m going to scout ahead,” she said.

  “No,” he said, hardly glancing at her. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You trust me to keep a gun but not to do what we came out here to do?”

  He looked into her face; his gray eyes were like finely polished daggers. “Will you come back?”

  She jumped to her feet. “If I wanted to, I could walk away right now, and you couldn’t follow me.”

  “You’re right.” He rose and glanced at Alfie, who was still blissfully asleep. “But if there are any Opiri scouts out there...”

  “They’ll be under cover, too.”

  “There’s one thing I failed to mention when I told you we have to stay together,” he said. “Some of the scouts have been outfitted with new protective suits, impervious to sunlight for a certain length of time. If you run into any of them...”

  “You think we didn’t know? I was given that intelligence, and so was Sandoval. We also know they haven’t been widely distributed among the Opiri ranks.”

  “Any scouts looking for the ambassador would be given such equipment.”

  “I can handle them. It’s what I’m trained to do.”

  “The way you were trained to deal with those rogues?”

  She couldn’t help flushing at the reminder. “I know it’s a risk. But it’s part of my job. I’ve always accepted that.”

  “I didn’t take you out of Goodman’s reach to let you throw your life away now.”

  “You said I wasn’t your serf. Have you changed your mind?”

  Kane’s jaw clenched. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Toward the old air-force base. That’s a likely shelter for any Nightsider scouts in the area.”

  “If you see anything,” Kane said roughly, “if you feel anything, come back immediately.”

  “Is that an order, sir?”

  He gave her a dry half smile. “I believe you outrank me, Captain.”

  She snorted. “Then this is an order. Get some shut-eye. I have a feeling you haven’t had much in the past couple of days.”

  “Opiri don’t need—”

  “Then why is Alfie fast asleep? You did get some blood, but I doubt it was enough to sustain you for long if you wear yourself out. I’ll be sure to wake you when I get back.”

  “Take the rifle,” he said, his face rigid. “And be careful.”

  She took the weapon and turned to leave. But before she’d gone a single step, he had her by the wrist and jerked her back under the tarp. He pulled her against his chest, lowered his face to hers and kissed her.

  The part of Fiona that had longed for this since he had healed her—the part she had tried so hard to fight—melted against him and leaned into the kiss, opening her mouth to feel the push of his tongue, the graze of his teeth on her lower lip. His tautly muscled arms held her still as his mouth pressed against the corner of her lips, her chin, her neck. She felt him growing hard against her thigh, and she thought again of lying naked in his arms, feeling that hardness thrusting deep inside her.

  It was too much. For both of them. Kane released a shuddering breath and let her go just as she pushed him away. She scrambled into the sunlight where he couldn’t follow, panting and furious with shame.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” she snapped.

  “Not even if you ask me?”

  “Don’t count on it.” Without another word, she turned on her heel and left the Nightsiders to wait out the day, thinking to herself that she would be glad to shoot Kane if he forgot her warning.

  Who are you kidding? she thought as the sky began to cloud over again. She would far rather shoot herself. Even if he kissed her a thousand times. Even if they lay together and shared everything their bodies had to give.

  But that would be all they would share. Even assuming they both survived, there could never be anything else.

  * * *

  Kane woke to the moan of the wind.

  The tarp flapped above him, one corner beginning to work loose from its anchor on a low tree branch. Sleet gathered in the tarp’s folds and melted almost immediately. In a few hours, when the sun went down, the slow drip of water would turn to ice.

  “Alfie,” Kane said, pushing at the broad back turned away from him. “Have you seen Fiona?”

  Alfie rolled over, blinking heavy-lidded eyes.

  “She’s gone?” he asked, sitting up and running blunt fingers through his sparse blond hair.

  “I think you heard our discussion,” Kane said.

  With a false expression of chagrin, Alfie peered at the sky. “Been about six ’ours, ain’t it?”

  Six hours, Kane thought. She should have been back long since. “I should never have let her go,” he said grimly.

  “That lass ’as a mind ’o ’er own,” Alfie said. “You woulda ’ad ta tie ’er up ta get ’er ta stay once she got the notion ta go.”

  But that didn’t give Kane any comfort. Either she was in some kind of trouble, or...

  Or he had driven her to stay away as long as possible. He hadn’t intended to kiss her, and he had known as soon as he’d started that he had to put an end to it or he wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Neither would she. She might fight it with every fiber of her being, but he knew now that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. In every way.

  “Don’t worry just yet, guv,” Alfie said, heaving himself to his feet. “Still got about three hours o’ daylight left. She’ll turn up.”

  “I’m going after her.”

  Alfie grunted. “Sure ya is,” he said. “Go on ’n’ get yerself a nice suntan while yer at it.”

  Kane held out his hand. “Give me your jacket.”

  “Yer mad,” Alfie said, his face darkening with real anger. “Ya know our fatigues ain’t much use against sunlight.”

  “Your jacket, Alfie. And your shirt.”

  “Can’t let ya,” Alfie said. “It’ll be sure death.” But even as he spoke, the Englishman was pulling off his jacket and passing it to Kane. “The lass is
prob’ly fine,” he said. “Ye think she’ll thank ya fer gettin’ yerself kilt?”

  “If rogues have her—”

  “Ya think she’d be fool enough ta let ’em catch ’er in the shadows?”

  “And if she’s run into Opiri scouts?” Kane said, arranging Alfie’s jacket over his head and tying the wide sleeves around his shoulders. “The new daysuits remove any advantage she has.”

  “If they have ’em,” Alfie said, his long face giving the lie to his hopeful words. “I care about the lass, too. Let me go.”

  Kane draped the tail of Alfie’s shirt over his forehead for extra protection. “You know I have to do it, my friend. I need you to stay here, in case she returns.”

  “’Eroes,” Alfie grumbled. “They gets tiresome sometimes.”

  “I’m no hero.”

  “But ya care for ’er.”

  “Now you’re the mad one.”

  “I tol’ the lass no one fools ol’ Alfie,” the Brit said, wrapping his huge arms around Kane. “Ya bloody well better not get yerself kilt, ’ear me?”

  Kane stepped back and grinned. “Trust me, Alfie. I’ve found I have something to live for.”

  Alfie turned his face away. “Yer not back ’ere by sunset with that woman o’ yers, ye’ll ’ave me ta answer to.”

  Knowing there was nothing left to say, Kane plunged into the sunlight. Not that there was much light; the thinner patches of cloud cover were beginning to fill in with a heavier gray. That gave him a small advantage as he picked up Fiona’s faint tracks and headed across the empty brown fields toward the base.

  Dim as they had seemed at first, the sun’s diffuse rays began to penetrate Alfie’s jacket before Kane had gone more than a hundred yards. By the time he had come to the end of his second mile, his fatigues and Alfie’s jacket were no longer providing much protection. His skin had begun to burn, though at first it felt no worse than the kind of sunburn he had occasionally suffered in the trenches.

  Ignoring the pain, he focused on the long runways and low buildings that rose up from the fields approximately three miles to the north. He was staggering when he reached the perimeter of the base and pushed through the fallen fence, his boots tracing a crooked path across the broken surface of the runway with its handful of abandoned aircraft. He had found no trace of Fiona, nor any sign of Opiri troops. He didn’t dare call out for her, though every instinct told him that she was in trouble.

  So was he. His heart had begun to race so fast that he couldn’t catch his breath, and his muscles were cramping with such force that he could no longer stand, let alone walk. He fell to his knees on the concrete, aware that his skin was beginning to blister and crack beneath his clothing.

  And his mind...his mind began playing tricks on him, replacing the modern jets with the primitive biplanes that had performed their deadly aerial dances above the battlefields of France over a hundred years ago.

  Somehow he dragged himself across the runway and into the high grass on the other side, losing Alfie’s jacket in the process. If he could reach the nearest building, he might recover enough to look for Fiona again after nightfall.

  He didn’t make it. The last of his strength gave out, and he lay facedown in the grass, his darkening mind oddly fixed on one irrelevant thought.

  Tonight would be Christmas Eve. And he would never see Fiona again.

  Chapter 6

  The sun had nearly set when Fiona found Kane. She didn’t have to look closely to know how badly he had been burned. The only question in her mind was whether or not he was still alive. And how much she would be forced to hurt him if he was.

  Let him be alive, she prayed silently.

  “Kane,” she said, lying flat on her stomach beside him. “Kane!”

  His burned eyelids twitched. Offering up another prayer, this one of thanks, she rolled him onto his side, crouched and maneuvered him across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, pushing herself to her knees and then to her feet. He was heavy, his body dense with muscle, and she knew that if she let herself think about just how heavy he was, she would collapse under his weight.

  But it never occurred to her to give up. Saving him was all that mattered—more than the presence of Nightsider scouts waiting to make their move, more than the knowledge that her team’s entire mission was in danger of failing.

  Far more than her own life.

  The sun was sinking below the horizon by the time she got Kane into the nearest building, the hangar in which she’d set up a barricade against the bloodsuckers. She dropped to her knees behind the wall of crates near the back corner of the vast, nearly empty interior, letting him slide to the floor.

  He rolled onto his back, and she examined his face. Her heart rose into her throat.

  God help her.

  “Fiona?”

  His voice was a raw croak, as if even his vocal chords had been seared.

  “I’m here,” she said. She bent over him, gently arranging his arms at his sides. He flinched but made no sound to indicate the extremity of his pain.

  “They’re out there, aren’t they?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know. I think there were about a dozen of them when they pinned me down. They were wearing those special suits you mentioned, and they only stopped shooting when there wasn’t enough daylight for me to get back to you.”

  Speaking softly, she told him how she had run across a troop of Opiri scouts, obviously on their way to head her people off. Believing she had the advantage of daylight, she had tried to get past them and return to Kane and Alfie’s shelter before dark.

  “You’re faster than me,” she said. “I knew once night fell I could send you back to warn Sandoval that they would be walking into an ambush.”

  But the Nightsiders hadn’t let her get more than a few hundred feet outside the hangar where she’d taken shelter. “I don’t know why they didn’t stop me from getting you now,” she said. “Maybe because the daysuits only prolong the time Opiri can stay in the sun, not allow indefinite exposure.”

  “Very likely,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “Where’s Alfie?” she asked.

  Kane must have heard the worry in her voice. “Safe,” he said. “But he won’t...stay where I left him. He’ll come after us.”

  Of course he would, she thought. Even though he had little chance of getting past the scouts outside.

  “You should go,” Kane said. “Try to...get back to your people. Maybe...I can keep them occupied.”

  “How? You can’t hold a rifle, and I won’t let you die here alone.”

  He reached up to touch her face, though the effort must have been agony. “Fiona...if we’d had more time...”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve...wanted you since the moment I saw you.”

  Bending over him again, she touched her mouth to his cracked lips with infinite tenderness. “I know. Yesterday I would have said it was only the blood, the hunger. But when you kissed me, I knew it wasn’t just instinct. And I wanted you to bite me. I wanted you inside me, taking my blood right there under that tree.”

  He shivered, and his body stirred, his erection straining under his pants in defiance of his terrible injuries. With utmost care she laid her hand over the hard ridge beneath the heavy fabric.

  “Fight,” she whispered. “Fight, damn you. I won’t let you die. I want you. If you live, you can have me in every way a man can have a woman. Even if that man is a vampire.”

  He tried to smile. “Is that a...promise, Fiona?”

  “Yes. And I don’t break my promises.”

  At that moment she almost said words that shouldn’t be possible between a human and a Nightsider. But she swallowed them down, more afraid of those three syllables than of a whole army of bloodsuckers.

  “Sleep now,” she said, bringing her face as close to Kane’s as she dared. “Sleep will help you get better. If you heal enough to walk, maybe we can make it out. Together.”

  Kane closed his eyes, too exhauste
d to argue. The last feeble rays of the sun striped the floor of the hangar, then vanished. Fiona could almost feel the Nightsider forces preparing to come in after her.

  “Human!”

  The slightly accented voice was amplified, carrying easily across the distance to the hangar from the building where the Opiri had waited out the day.

  Fiona shifted position to rest her rifle on top of the highest crate, aiming between the abandoned refuelers and tractors that no longer served any purpose save to give her a slightly better chance of holding the bloodsuckers at bay. Thick snowflakes began to fall like a curtain across the open door.

  Strange, Fiona thought, that such a feeling of peace could come over her now.

  “I’m here!” she called back.

  “Give yourself up,” the voice said. “We won’t harm you.”

  “You won’t harm me?” she said. “Isn’t that what your kind do to us when you take our blood?”

  “You know that is not why we are here. If you cooperate, at least your ambassador and his escort can live.”

  His response told her all she needed to know. They were here to stop the mission.

  “You’ll let us live?” she asked. “As serfs? Vassals?”

  “You cannot stop us. We will take you and them,” the voice said. “But we will permit you to offer your people the chance to surrender without bloodshed.”

  Surrender? That was something her team would never do. Giving herself up wouldn’t change a thing.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “We know you have a vassal in there with you. Send him out.”

  Fiona tightened her grip on the rifle. They had seen her rescue Kane. Did they think she was holding him hostage, or did something more sinister lie behind the demand? Was it possible that Kane’s Bloodmaster was actively hunting him and these scouts had been able to identify him before she’d dragged him into the hangar?

  “There is no vassal here,” she called. “Only a free man. And he’s ready to fight to stay free.”

  The only response was a brief laugh. “Why are you protecting him, human? Why did you save the life of an Opir when we are your enemies?”