Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance

by Lori Perkins

  Those large hands she’d admired the entire flight here, and the all-too-brief stopover in San Juan, slid under her top. Mouths fused in a rush of fire and need. She unbuttoned his linen shirt, and ran her hands over the smooth paleness of his chest. Her fingers tingled at the sensation, and her breath caught at the feel of his skin beneath her palms.

  Kissing his chest, tongue darting out to taste him, Rebecca whimpered as Griffin squeezed her upper thighs, moved his hands to her backside and up her spine, taking her tank top with him.

  Rebecca abandoned herself to his hard muscles and the texture of his skin as it rippled under her questing fingers. This was passion—pure, unadulterated passion. And he was such a beautiful creature, she couldn’t help herself.

  Her mouth clamped down on his nipple as she unbuckled his pants. Griffin undid her bra and she wiggled free to shove his pants over his lean hips. Immediately twisting around, she pushed him onto his back and straddled him, wearing only a thin scrap of panties and her flat sandals.

  The look in his eyes as she knelt before him was hot and hungry, and her heart pounded in anticipation. No regret stirred within her as she took what she wanted, what Griffin’s demanding kisses and sure hands promised the both of them. Quickly stripping him, she crawled up his body.

  “Delicious,” she murmured. Strength, restrained power, and unbridled passion waited for her. All for her. “I need you now.” His hands secured her to him, his eyes a burning blue in the dimness.

  Legs clamped tight around his waist, Rebecca pushed down, rotating her hips against him. His hands gripped her, stilling her for a moment, but just a moment. Those long talented fingers of his skimmed along her breasts, nails scraping over her sensitive nipples, then down her belly, smoothing over the silken material of her panties.

  “You look like Aglaia,” he murmured, tangling his hands in her long curly hair. “The youngest and most beautiful of the Three Graces.”

  Surprised, Rebecca smiled, touched at the sentiment. “That’s sweet.” She thanked him, touching her lips to his in a soft kiss. Sweet or not, no matter how she appreciated his words, or that he even knew the names of the Graces, she wanted him—no, she needed him.

  Maneuvering her body onto his, she teased his rock-hard erection, touching him, caressing his skin with her hands and body.

  “Rebecca,” he growled. Grabbing her waist, in one quick move he rolled them so he hovered over her.

  Griffin pressed against her entrance, moved only the tip against her. He kissed her hard, stealing her breath, and she moaned as he released her from his powerful touch. Grabbing her beneath her knees, he pushed her legs back almost to her shoulders. With erotic slowness, his blue gaze watching her intently as she shivered with the anticipation of their joining, Griffin entered her. Stilling for a moment, now completely encased in her, he paused and she relished the feel of this connection.

  Whatever this was between them, it was strong.

  Her breath came in short gasps. She curled her nails into his arms, arching into him, silently begging him to move. He pushed her legs further back, leaned down, and kissed her again.

  Moving within her, pumping slowly at first, and then in a steadily increasing rhythm, he entered her again and again. Rebecca’s breath hitched, her passion coiling tighter, her body ready to explode. Griffin’s hands trailed down her, teasing heated flesh, making her ache for more. She wrapped her legs about his hips, straining closer as they clawed at each other. Passion built and exploded, and built once more.

  And still, they couldn’t get enough of each other.

  Rebecca yelled his name as her back arched in a mind-blowing climax. She clamped around him, gripping his arms tightly, thighs clenching around his hips. Feeling his body tense over her, hearing him rasp out her name, she reached up and held him close as they both peaked.

  Long, long minutes later, she opened her eyes and tried to remember how to speak.

  Happy to stay like this for the foreseeable future, Rebecca turned her head. Griffin watched her through half-open eyes.

  “I vote for staying here tonight.” His deep voice rumbled along her skin.

  Nodding as his hand skimmed over her hip, Rebecca agreed. “The lawyer can wait.”

  “We’ll never get there at this rate,” Griffin commented as he finished buttoning his pants.

  They’d pulled their Jeep into a secluded path off what passed for a main road in Martinique for a quickie. Fleur de Martinique Plantation was in the middle of the island, and even with the rental’s GPS, he wasn’t certain they’d be able to find it easily.

  “You’re right,” Rebecca replied. “I just find it hard to keep my hands off of you.”

  Griffin shot her a grin as he started the engine on their Jeep. Though he’d never been to this particular island, he’d driven through several Caribbean ones and a Jeep with four-wheel drive was always best.

  Another hour, two wrong turns, and the condescending GPS recalculating the route later, they arrived at what was presumably their inheritance.

  “It’s got potential.” Rebecca finally said.

  “Doesn’t look at all like Collinwood,” he agreed.

  She slanted him an amused glance. “Dark Shadows?”

  Griffin shrugged. “You have a better comparison?”

  “No,” she sighed, dark eyes sparkling in the dimness of the turnoff. “Though I’m certain there are ghosts wandering the halls. Hmm,” she added as they sat there, staring at the monstrosity. “Maybe Brad Pitt’s house from Interview with the Vampire?”

  “Good one,” he laughed. “You’ve got that whole tropical feel, the dense rain forest. I can see that.”

  “I even have my own Brad Pitt.” She turned to look at him, wiggling her eyebrows up and down.

  Griffin returned her smile but said nothing. Then, before either could be distracted further from their destination, he released the brake and started down the rutted drive. It was just after noon, yet the sun was blocked from view by dozens of thick trees, their overhang forming a bower that reminded Griffin of Sleepy Hollow. Switching on the headlights and feeling absurd that it was necessary, he watched a small unrecognizable animal dart across the lane.

  The sun dappled the yard around the house, spots of bright Caribbean sunlight not doing a damn thing to dispel the murkiness that hung over the property.

  “This is reminiscent of every horror movie I’ve ever seen.” He shook his head as another bump loomed in the middle of the road.

  “One,” Rebecca said and laughed, an oddly carefree sound in the gloom of the driveway,

  “I promise not to sprain my ankle. Two, you’ve got someone with you who knows hand-to-hand combat. And three…” She paused, peering through the windshield. Her smile faltered. “Perhaps I should have packed my gun.”

  “I don’t think you can shoot ghosts,” he said. Swerving to avoid yet another pothole in the middle of the dirt path, he cursed. “Then again.” He parked the car and opened the door.

  Rounding and opening hers, he added, “Probably not a bad idea.”

  Taking her arm, Griffin led her up the stone steps. He was surprised to notice they weren’t cracking, rotting, or completely gone.

  “If it weren’t so far from everything,” Rebecca said as he struggled with the key the lawyer had given them, “we could make it into a hotel.”

  “And serve what?” he asked. “Damn it!”

  The key slipped against whatever covered the hole, and he banged his knuckles. No blood; he probably wouldn’t need a tetanus shot, which was just as well. If he left now, Griffin damn sure wasn’t returning to this place anytime soon.

  “Serve?” Rebecca asked as she took his hand and examined the knuckles.

  Griffin forgot the tongue-in-cheek comment he’d been about to make as Rebecca’s lips brushed each knuckle individually. “Serve breakfast and ectoplasm?” he managed.

  “Exactly,” she whispered, her dark eyes looking up at him from beneath thick lashes. “If you survi
ve your first night, the second’s on the ghost.”

  “Not a bad marketing campaign,” he agreed. She let go of his hand, and he tried the key again. “If we can get the ghost to cooperate.”

  More cursing, another clash between his knuckles and the door, and Griffin finally opened it. He was beginning to suspect there was a reason, other than what the lawyer implied, for him not joining them on this journey.

  “I wouldn’t even know how to go about paying them.” Rebecca said.

  Just then, the door opened with a creek. Griffin pushed it as wide as it’d go and stepped through. The lawyer said the electricity was still connected, so he felt against the wall for a light switch. Finding one, he flipped it up.

  Light flooded the foyer. Dust danced in the breeze from the doorway, but otherwise it wasn’t the house of horrors he’d expected.

  “The place doesn’t look as bad inside as it does from the out.”

  “I was just thinking that,” he commented, stepping through to the interior.

  It wasn’t well kept, and a thick layer of dust clung to everything, but the electricity worked, and they’d also been assured by the lawyer that the water was still on.

  “Maybe,” he said, turning to her, “we won’t need our camping gear.”

  Rebecca laughed, an easy sound, as she joined him in the foyer.

  “Definitely looks like something out of a flick.” Her voice echoed throughout the empty mansion. “An old Hollywood period piece,” she amended, “not a horror movie.”

  Griffin shrugged. “Did the lawyer, what’s his name, Mr. Desmarais, say anything about the owners?”

  “Not to me.” She walked in a circle, looking up the staircase. He wondered if she always did that—part of her FBI training—or if she just couldn’t stay still.

  “But I did some digging.” Rebecca stopped moving and turned to face him. “I meant to share with you.”

  “Not that we had time when we first arrived.” Griffin smirked as if she needed a reminder, but the heat in her dark eyes told him she didn’t. She remembered well enough what they’d done the moment they’d checked into the hotel.

  “Not that we had time,” she agreed in a husky voice. Clearing her throat, she said, “Basic stuff—sugar plantation founded in the late 1830s, my family lived here, yours lived in Fort-de-France, this and that happened, and it was a joint venture up through the early twentieth century.”

  “And the last relation died three years ago,” he added. His own lawyer had told him that.

  Repeatedly.

  “Exactly,” she said and nodded, stepping closer. “Took Mr. Desmarais this long to find us.”

  Spreading his arms wide he said, “And now we have this palace.”

  “Come on, Brad Pitt,” Rebecca grinned. She grabbed his hand and tugged. “Let’s check out all the rooms. Maybe there’s treasure under the floorboards.”

  Three shrunken voodoo heads, a single gold doubloon, an ancient German Luger, and one and a half wooden legs later, they gave up. The rest of the house was as dusty as the entryway, so they opened the shutters, unpacked their camping gear and set up camp before the unused fireplace.

  Before Rebecca knew what was happening, Griffin’s lips were on hers and they made love in an abandoned mansion in the middle of Martinique. It was the most pleasurable day she could remember spending in a long while.

  “No pirate treasure,” she sighed, propping her head on one hand and looking at him.

  “No, but lots of dust.”

  Rebecca frowned at his frown and traced the line of his jaw. “What do you expect?” she asked. “The place has been closed up for years.”

  She swept her arm out to encompass the end tables, coffee table, piano, and old-style chairs—some wicker, some old enough to be certifiable antiques. Not that she had any real notion of what a certifiable antique looked like.

  “Dust is created by human skin,” he mumbled. Shaking his head, he grasped her hips and pulled her atop him. “Are you sure you want to stay here for the night? Or do you want to drive back?”

  “Nah.” She kissed his lips. “Let’s just stay here. We haven’t explored a fraction of the place. Plus…” Her lips trailed along his jaw, and Rebecca wondered when she’d become so fascinated with a man’s jaw line. “Plus we’ll just have to drive back out tomorrow. What’s the point?”

  “Definitely not an ordinary woman,” he said against her mouth. “Most I know would rather head back to the hotel than stay here. In the middle of nowhere.”

  “Hey,” she said, smiling, “at least we have electricity.”

  The night was warm, and Griffin found himself dozing as they sat on the back porch, Rebecca next to him as they watched the stars. Having grown up in Northern Virginia, he never really had the chance to appreciate such a view.

  “What’s that?” Rebecca asked, breaking the comfortable silence.

  Griffin looked to where she pointed, far to the left, but could only make out lights from a neighboring house. “Neighbors. How unfortunate.”

  She chuckled, but didn’t take her eyes off the lights blazing in the darkness. Griffin watched her for a few minutes, then shrugged and went back to looking up at the stars.

  “It’s weird.”

  Looking back down at her, he laughed. “The fact we have neighbors?”

  “No.” She shook her head and looked up at him, dark eyes nearly impossible to see in the night. “The lights weren’t on beforel I couldn’t even tell there was a house over there until they blazed to life.”

  “And how is that weird?”

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  “Maybe they’re vampires,” he suggested with a grin. He didn’t know her well enough to say anything beyond that. Didn’t know how suspicious she was, what her job at the FBI entailed, so kept to horror movie references.

  Instead, he settled back against the newel post on the steps. There hadn’t been any chairs for them, or any he deemed sturdy enough, to hold his weight.

  “It’s still weird.”

  “Maybe they also inherited the mansion, finally found the place with the condition of the roads here, and are now exploring.” He didn’t believe it any more than her look indicated she did, but Griffin had no other explanation.

  “Maybe.”

  He couldn’t tell how much more time passed before a scream broke the stillness of the island night.

  “Did you hear that?” he demanded, suddenly wide awake.

  Tearing his gaze from the suddenly not-so-beautiful night, he watched Rebecca slowly nod. “Yeah. It’s the scream from every horror movie ever produced in history.”

  “Exactly. Little Halloween with some Freddy Krueger thrown in.” His words belied the pounding of his heart.

  “I was always partial to Jason from Friday the Thirteenth,” she said. But Griffin noticed she wasn’t as relaxed as she sounded. Her hand blindly groped at her side—for the gun, he surmised, that she wasn’t wearing. “Sure, he had like a hundred and eighty-two sequels, but…damn it!”

  She glanced at her hip, confirmed what she already knew, and locked eyes with him.

  Another sound, a scream-screech sound, cut through the night.

  “Could’ve been an owl,” he offered.

  “Could’ve been.” She nodded, already standing. “Where was that antique gun we found?”

  Moments later, they were back in the attic. Rebecca tore through boxes as he angled the bare bulb in her direction as much as possible without burning his fingers.

  “Got it!” she called, holding up the German Luger as evidence. “No cleaning kit, but I did find several bullets.”

  “Good enough,” Griffin said as they went back downstairs to the veranda. They were being ridiculous. Talking about horror movies, scaring themselves like a bunch of kids around a campfire. Nonetheless, he detoured into the front room where they’d left their camping stuff for a flashlight.

  “You know,” he said, “it was probably just an owl or some other indi
genous creature.”

  “Agreed.” She gave a short nod. He could see the federal agent in her now: the practiced movements, the clean motions. She loaded the Luger with ease, though it didn’t look like it’d been cleaned since World War II.

  “I doubt that’ll even shoot,” he said. They were now on the veranda, the night once more silent around them. “It’s a movie prop.”

  Rebecca chuckled, but gripped the gun firmly.

  This time, the scream sounded definitely human. And it didn’t stop. The sound echoed around them, continuing long after human lungs should fail from lack of oxygen.

  “We have to investigate that, don’t we.” It wasn’t a question. The scream continued on, sending chills up his spine. Griffin spent time in a downtown D.C. hospital emergency room.

  This was worse than anything he’d ever heard there.

  “Yup.” Rebecca glanced over her shoulder. Even in the darkness, he could see the steel in her eyes.

  “Let me find a shovel or something,” he conceded.

  There was nothing lying in the yard or around the sides of the house, so Griffin raced back inside and into the basement, doing his best not to think of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  Horror was a favorite genre, but after this, he wasn’t so sure he’d look at them the same way.

  Gripping the shovel, he met her at the back door. Rebecca stood with her back to the house, her gaze on the building across the fields, gun held firmly in both hands. When she saw him, she laughed, shrugged, and nodded to the house. “Let’s go.”

  Holding the flashlight before them, he walked beside Rebecca as they traipsed across the uneven ground. The other house was further away than it had seemed from the veranda.

  Griffin pulled up short. There was a man in front of them. He hadn’t been there before, Griffin was certain of that. The flashlight was pretty strong and yet the man loomed out of nowhere. The screaming stopped, and an eerie silence descended on the field. He had a feeling it wouldn’t last.

  “Excuse me,” Rebecca said in an even voice. No answer. “Excuse me!” she said more forcibly. Turning to him, she asked, “Know any French?”