by K. L. Kreig
Surrendering
A Regent Vampire Lords Novel
K.L. Kreig
Surrendering
Copyright © 2014 by K.L. Kreig
Cover Art by Yocla Designs
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Dedication
To my husband. My life would be incomplete without you. I love you so very much.
Prologue
Kate
Rough hands gently roam her fevered body as a hot tongue leaves a blaze of fire in its wake. His burning gaze is fierce, but his hands touch her skin with a reverence she’s not experienced. Soft lips and sharp teeth nip down her midsection, pausing only briefly before continuing lower to a place she so desperately needed them to worship. When his tongue pierced her sex, she gasped, her hips bucked but he held her tightly to the mattress, devouring her, driving her higher toward madness.
“Come,” he darkly commanded, and her body obeys as an unexpected climax takes her crashing over the edge into thick, hazy, fog-filled bliss. Forcing her tightly clenched eyes open, she watched in sated fascination as he wraps her hips around his waist and thrusts into her wet, aching sheath, setting off an orgasm as equally intense as the first. Hips thrust, sweat poured and breaths were choppy. Every time was the same…unbridled passion and fervent coupling. Complete and utter perfection.
He plays her with expert precision, wringing another wave of pleasure from her well replete body before finally seeking his own pained release. They lay together, slick bodies quickly cooling as he worships her mouth in the same reverent manner.
“I—”
A car horn stopped short the words falling from her lover’s lips, evaporating them into the atmosphere like a fine mist.
She blinked her eyes open in both confusion and frustration.
Not again.
Dreams of him always ended like this. Without fail. They had mind-blowing sex so real she could feel her pussy ache when she awoke. But instead of satisfaction, it ached with emptiness. Emptiness she often had to remedy herself or suffer so greatly throughout the day she couldn’t function.
It was the same exact dream, with the same exact ungodly gorgeous man and something always woke her at exactly the same point. He was getting ready to say something profound, but the words never came. She daydreamed constantly on what followed the word “I—”
Perhaps it was “I…want to spend the night,” (only if you cuddle) or, “I…want you on your hands and knees next,” (uh…no need to ask twice) or perhaps even foolishly “I…love you.” (yes, that was foolish, Kate).
She may never know. Maybe she should be content with the erotic dream and the unwelcome feeling of surrendering herself to a man again, even if he wasn’t real. God knows she couldn’t do that when she was awake.
Never again.
She had been naïve. Well…not anymore. Getting your love callously thrown out by guy after guy like a waded up fast food wrapper tended to turn you into a cynical, heartless bitch who would end up in a sad nursing home, old and alone. The nursing staff that drew the short straw would have to take her wing for the day and listen to her pitiful tales of woe. Tales they’d hear until the day she died. The only thing that would keep her company in the years in between life and death would be her twenty-two cats, knitting hats for the homeless and her trusty binoculars, which she’d use to spy on the neighbors.
She’d surrendered her love too easily and too often, but this last time…well, it was like an adage her father always used to say. “Death by a thousand paper cuts.” You can make it through the nine hundred ninety ninth one intact, but that thousandth one, that’s the one that ends you. And John was her thousandth and most regretful paper cut. More like a goddamned ten-inch knife shredding flesh and bone, fatally piercing that small fragile organ held in the center of your chest.
Turning her head, the bright red digital numerals read five fifteen. A.M. An involuntary sigh escaped her lips. She’d gotten approximately three hours of sleep and that would be it. Falling back into her dreams could be a godsend, like tonight, or a curse like most. And although she didn’t need to be at work for five hours yet, she wasn’t willing to take a chance on the torment she might endure should she nod off. Today, of all days, she just could not stomach starting the day badly, waking from the throes of a nightmare which she wouldn’t be able to shake.
Try as she might to fight against it, her thoughts involuntarily drifted to John and the night one year ago today she’d found him with his secretary in his office. She’d been so cliché. Showing up in garters, heels and nothing else sans a tan, tightly belted trench coat. In the good old heart of god’s country, it had been minus twelve degrees that day and she had literally been freezing her tits off under the thin material. The phrase ‘colder than a witch’s tit in January’ surely originated from Wisconsin.
But she’d wanted to do something nice for her fiancée. As a marketing consultant, he’d landed a big new client and had been putting in long, hard hours to meet an unrealistic deadline. Most nights he wouldn’t get home until ten or eleven and he’d been too exhausted lately to keep up on their once active sex life. Cue Simple Plan’s Your Love is a Lie.
With a bottle of champagne and two cheap plastic flutes in hand, she took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor of John’s downtown Milwaukee office building. It was after nine and he’d said he had two more hours of work ahead of him before coming home, but it’d been more than two weeks since they’d been intimate and that just wouldn’t do.
She made her way toward his office on the east end of the floor, one lone light reflecting faintly through the fogged glass. The rest of space was dim with only soft night lighting and as she’d made her way down the hallway, lined with offices to her left and cubicles to her right, she had been surprised to see his door shut.
In retrospect, she knew what would be found behind a closed, but foolishly unlocked, office door at nine o’clock in the evening. She knew as she closed the short distance between her faltering footsteps and that offending piece of wood, that opening it would ultimately shatter her dreams and harden her heart.
Time slowed as she turned the knob and discovered her boyfriend of two years, fiancé of nine months, husband-to-be in six, fucking his beautiful red headed assistant over the edge of his desk. And since their backs were to the office door, she had the distinct pleasure of hearing the endearments he’d so freely lavished upon Scarlett. Yes, her name was Scarlett. She used to love Gone with the Wind. Now she’d never watch it again. They’d ruined her relationship and one of her favorite movies all in a matter of seconds.
Her only regret as she’d turned and fled while screaming at him never to show his cheating face at their house again, was that the flutes she’d hurled in their direction weren’t real glass so they would actually do some serious damage. If either had gotten a shattered sliver of adulterer embedded in oh, say in their corneas, well…that would have been called karma, bitches.
Curse her luck.
Chapter 1
Kate
“Come on, just one more drink, Katie pie. Pretty please,” Erin whined. Why, oh why had she
agreed to come out with Erin this evening?
“Begging doesn’t become you, sweetcakes.”
“It most certainly does…in the right circumstances.”
Ugh. She did not need to hear about Erin’s vigorous and adventurous sex life. She’d been on such a drought her vagina was crumbling to dust. Admittedly, the drought was self-imposed, but self-preservation required it. She’d met too many seemingly nice men over the last several years that turned out to be douche bags. Hell, she’d been engaged to the biggest d-bag of them all. So, no. Definitely time to take her sorry ass home. That, and she was dead-dog-tired.
“Sorry, but I need to go. I have an early class to teach in the morning.” It wasn’t that early, but with Erin, she always needed a good excuse.
“You act like an old maid, Kate. Not a twenty-seven-year-old single, available woman. It’s okay to have fun once in a while. It’s even okay to bump uglies occasionally.”
Sigh. She heard this speech from Erin nearly every time they went out lately, which was why she usually spent the evening in, drinking a nice glass of wine alone and watching mind-numbing TV. Yes, she fully admitted she was pathetic.
So what if she preferred the quiet of her office to the loudness of a club? So what if she preferred her own company to that of a bunch of sweaty men and small dicks grinding into her on the dance floor? So what if she preferred her research to that of a boring, meaningless conversation about the bond market or the latest tweet on Kim Kardashian’s ass?
“Don’t start, Erin.” Kate was a fiercely private person, letting very few people into her inner circle.
She’d met her one good friend, Erin, during undergrad at Marquette University. Erin had been her rock after her failed engagement. Kate had been convinced John was different from the rest of the men she met, but had been proven wrong. So very wrong. The sound of him pounding on their front door begging for forgiveness, that it’d been a one-time mistake—blah, blah, blah—still rang in her ears a year later. But Kate was a fool me once kind of girl. And he’d fooled her damn good.
Erin hugged her. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m just worried about you. You’re better off without him and his whoring ways. It’s been over a year now. It’s time to move on. Your Prince Charming is out there, and you won’t find him with your nose stuck behind a computer screen or in a ream of copy paper.”
Kate smiled inwardly. She’d already found her Prince Charming. So what if he was a figment of her imagination? He felt real enough when starring in her erotic dreams.
“I know, Erin. I’m just not quite ready yet. I’m getting there.” She wasn’t ever going to get there. She couldn’t allow another man to shatter her heart into a million pieces the way John had.
“Great! How about we go to this new club downtown on Saturday night? It’s called Dragonfly and it’s supposed to be the shits. I know one of the bartenders. He said he could get us in.”
Kate groaned. The last thing she wanted to do on Saturday night was go to a new bar, packed wall-to-wall with young singles trying to hook up. It would smell like sex, sweat, and a nauseating combination of perfumes and cologne. By the end of the night, her shoes would stick to the floor where too many drinks had been spilled and she’d have to fend off the inevitable wandering hands as she refilled hers at the bar because the slutty waitress was too busy with the table of hot, young up-and-comers to check on her.
So she said the only thing she could to get Erin off her back. “Sure, sounds great.”
Erin’s squeal nearly broke her eardrum. “Oh my God, Katie pie! It will be so much fun. I can’t wait.”
Yeah, neither could she. Eye roll. She said her goodbyes and drove the short distance to her house. With only two glasses of wine, she felt safe enough to drive.
It was already nearly ten o’clock when she got home and readied herself for bed, turning off the light. She lay there; eyes wide open, dreading the night to come. Because of the often dark nature of her dreams, she didn’t slept well, but the last couple of weeks had been particularly difficult, and walking zombie would accurately describe her.
Wanting to come home after her classes today, Erin convinced her to go for a drink instead. She knew her friend meant well. Kate wished she could share her secret with Erin, but she didn’t dare. If Erin looked at her the way her parents did, she wasn’t sure she could handle it.
Probably because of her curse, she’d been obsessed with dreams and the psychology surrounding them since she was a teenager. She’d majored in psychology in undergrad and was now working on her PhD while she taught several classes at Marquette as an assistant professor. All coursework behind her, only her dissertation remained and her doctorate was finally within reach. So her exhaustion was in part due to her nightmares, but also her obsession with this research project.
She hoped she’d find a rational explanation for her dreams and what they meant. No luck so far, but she wasn’t giving up hope. They didn’t feel like normal dreams in the typical sense. Too often, they felt…real. She felt part of them, as if she were there in these strange, often disturbing settings. If she could find a way to stop them, or at least to forget them as most people did when they woke, she would. And sleeping pills didn’t help; they only made her groggier the next day.
The only dream she didn’t want to stop was that of her fantasy lover, the man she couldn’t stop thinking about night or day. The man she’d been dreaming about for four solid months now. Her very own Prince Charming.
He had dark, hooded eyes and eyelashes any woman would be jealous of. He had rakish, rough good looks; a constant five-o’clock shadow graced his square, strong jawline. His wavy hair curled just under his earlobes and was as dark as the deepest depths of the ocean, or what she imagined the depths of the ocean looked like. His lips were full and kissable, sexy. The baritone deep cadence of his voice felt like melted chocolate when he demanded she come.
He was… Sex. On. A. Stick.
And she wanted a big ol’ lick.
She woke up more than once, aroused and wet, with her hands down her panties, trying to relieve the ache. Big Blue, her BFF and constant companion these days, remained at the ready in her nightstand drawer for when her hands just weren’t cutting it. Speaking of Big Blue, she made a mental note to check the batteries in the morning…they seemed low last time.
Sigh.
Men like that just didn’t exist in real life, but at least he was good fantasy fodder and that was perfectly fine with her right now.
Settling in, she hoped tonight would bring her fantasy lover instead of the disturbing nightmare she’d had for several weeks now. While strange dreams had plagued her since childhood, one in particular haunted her and she’d spent over ten years trying to bury it. No, Kate, don’t think about that now. These dreams are not at all the same as that one. These dreams can’t possibly be real.
Young women in cells.
Blood.
Evil.
Fangs?
Nope. Not real. This dream made sense. But she couldn’t help the gnawing and growing sensation that these women were begging for help. Her help.
If that wasn’t scary enough—and it was scary—what terrified the hell out of her was the undeniable evil presence she felt. She’d awoken the last several nights in a profuse sweat; panic nearly choking her. She’d taken to sleeping with her bedside lamp on, like she was ten years old again.
Exhausted, but determined to stave off the nightmares as long as possible, she sat up, grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. With any luck, a couple hours of Duck Dynasty after the news should lull her into a good, hard sleep.
Reaching for her glass of water, it was almost to her lips when what flashed across the screen caused it to slip from her hand, drenching the sheets. Terror turned her blood to ice. She could only catch every few words the news anchor uttered, as all her senses were focused on the beautiful young face staring back at her. Begging for help.
“…missing…week…Northwestern…Sarah Hill…notify
authorities.”
Sweet. Baby. Jesus…this cannot be happening again.
The missing girl on TV—Sarah Hill—was the one Kate had been dreaming of.
Chapter 2
Dev
“Thanks, darling.” Dev gave her one last kiss before he ushered her out of the private room.
“It was my pleasure, my lord,” she purred. Hmmm…yes, it was her pleasure indeed. He was nothing if not a generous lover.
“Can I service you again, my lord?”
“No, Delia. You know the rules and you know your way out.” His voice was unnecessarily hard. He only took a lover once. Human females tended to get attached rather quickly and that was a complication he just didn’t need. He only wanted one woman attached to him, but he’d yet to find her. He’d be sure to tell Ronson, the manager of his new club, Dragonfly, to ban Delia from returning. All the courtesans were to be screened thoroughly. Apparently Delia had grander illusions in mind than simply providing her body…and blood.
Devon Fallinsworth was a very successful businessman. He owned a series of fashionable nightclubs and high-end restaurants in the Midwest. Expansion was underway in several more cities, including San Antonio, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri. His latest club, Dragonfly, had only opened two weeks ago and was already a huge success.
His clubs were his greatest accomplishment and his biggest success. The general area, always located on the main level, provided a traditional bar to his human patrons. The underground, however, provided a much-needed and controlled service to the vampires in his Regent. He offered a very pleasurable and well-paid job to human females and was able to create a safe environment for vampires to feed. Human females were revered in his clubs; they were not used and abused. They were safe and everything that happened in his feeding rooms was consensual or the offending vampire was banned from the premises for good. He’d had few incidents over the last century since he’d opened such rooms.
