by Tracy Tappan
She was wearing it up in a youthful ponytail tonight, exposing the vulnerable sweep of her neck and the downy little hairs there. Even from this distance, he could pick out each one with the same acuity as if he were standing right over her, head bowed to her neck, nuzzling that peachy fuzz in the last breathless moments before driving his fangs in.
He wrapped his hands around his knees and squeezed them hard under the table, saliva filling his mouth. Damn it all to—
His whole body jerked as Toni’s laughter echoed across the bar, the musical quality of it sending the already twitching mass of barely contained males into a near orgasmic seizure.
Toni clearly found humor in her inability to master the game of pool, even though Thomal was doing his level best to teach her the finer points of it…and finding every opportunity to touch her in the process. The little prick.
Ellen and Pedrr were a part of the group, as were Maggie and Luken, and the two couples couldn’t keep their hands off each other, either. Every little piece of byplay seemed to be a reason to laugh up into each other’s eyes, to pass some secret message of love and adoration. Grinding out a curse, Jaċken braced his elbows on the table and bowed his head, jamming his thumbs against the bridge of his nose. The hell if he was going to watch one more minute of a scene that held about as much relevance to his life as knitting.
You want some balloons for this pity party, Jaċken? Damn, but he hated it when he got all whiny. Yeah, okay, so he’d been handed a shit deal in the genetics department. No kids for him. Ever. So what. No wife, no love, no nothing. Whatever. He was here in Ţărână with friends, his brothers, and comrades. Gratitude was the only thing he should be feeling. Because by all rights he should still be living among the Om Rău.
Escape from their town had been impossible. Unless a person knew a direct route through the lengthy labyrinth of passageways which stretched from the Om Rău town of Oţărât to Ţărână, he wouldn’t get through fast enough. he’d end up cooking inside the tunnels that plunged so deep toward the earth’s core they were, quite literally, hot as Hell. If his mother hadn’t done the impossible and stolen a map of the Hell Tunnels from Lørke’s lair, and then smuggled Jaċken and his brothers out, a sacrifice which had ultimately led to her death, they’d all still be there.
A shudder crawled up the back of his neck. He still had nightmares about the heat they’d endured during their escape, along with life itself in Oţărât: the sparse food and water, the caved-in buildings, the stench of unwashed bodies and running sewage, the violence that had ruled any given day, providing the landscape for the most horrific of his nightmares—the unbridled brutality raging in the streets, men raping the women at will, beating the crap out of each other. Yeah, Om Rău weren’t exactly known for their mercy or self-control. He’d lost count of how many times he’d been beaten into unconsciousness over something as stupid as a chicken drumstick, and how many times he’d had to pound someone until his fists were raw and broken just to survive.
And then there was the unmatched terror of his father’s abuse….
Jaċken wrenched his eyelids tighter. In all of his fifty-six years of life, he’d never told a soul about his father’s little tattoo parties. Even he and his brothers didn’t talk about it anymore. But he’d told Toni. A bolt must’ve come loose in his brain for him to have done that, though it might’ve been worth it if he’d succeeded in driving the infernal woman away. She was supposed to have been disgusted by who he was and run like hell for the door. But instead she’d done this…thing where she’d shared one of her own vulnerabilities to make him feel better about confessing his.
To mess him up even further, she’d looked all helpless and sad during the telling of her story, probably just like when she’d been six-years-old and her bastard of a father had bailed on her. The sight of her like that had carved out a weird soft spot in the center of his chest that—
“Do you have a headache?”
He slammed upright at the sound of her voice, knocking his beer bottle into a wobble across the table.
Chapter Seventeen
Fumbling his Bud upright, Jaċken stared in appalled shock as Toni slid gracefully into the booth across from him into Nỵko’s spot, somehow avoiding the usual vinyl farting and butt scooting that went along with such a maneuver.
She set her cocktail glass on the table: a martini, straight up, with olives, probably the drink of choice among all Big Shot doctors when they went to their Big Shot fundraisers or wherever the hell they went.
He stared at her for another astounded three seconds, watching her dig through her purse. “Do you have a death wish?”
“I know.” She angled a quick, sardonic glance at him while still searching her purse. “Either I’m a glutton for punishment or the doctor in me just can’t stand to see anyone in pain. Ah!” She pulled out a pill box and extracted a couple of capsules. “Ibuprofen.” She pushed them across the table at him. “400 mgs ought to be enough to take the edge off.”
He thinned his lids. She was being nice to him?
She rolled her eyes as she shoved the pill box back into her purse. “They’re not poison, for Pete’s sake. Just because you have AMI doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”
He narrowed his lids down further. Great, more of her big ass terms. “AMI?”
She smiled innocently. “Anger Management Issues.”
He curled his lip. This women lent new definition to the B-word. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?” He searched the vicinity of the pool table, wondering how long it’d take for Thomal to stalk over here and accuse Jaċken of poaching Toni.
“Thomal’s in the bathroom,” she said, “then on a drink run.”
“Go away anyway.”
She plucked a peanut out of the dish and crunched it open. “I suck at pool.”
“Well, my brothers will be back any minute.” Petulant as a two-year-old, he jerked the peanut dish out of her reach.
Her eyes slowly narrowed on him, and then she tsked, the noise expressing something along the lines of stupid, stupid. “Do you know I once sat on my brother for fifteen minutes to get him to let me play with his red fire truck.”
A challenging glint entered her eyes, and then she…
Ah, shit.
She leaned across the table and yanked the peanut dish back, her ponytail swishing forward across her cheek, sending her scent swishing at him. You’re not going to beat me, was the obvious message, but he couldn’t give an unholy fuck. He was too busy trying not to bulldoze across the table, latch his fangs onto her neck, and ram another part of himself deep inside her.
Jesus, her fragrance had him engulfed in something between excruciating pain and mind-numbing ecstasy. His mouth watered, his gums feeling like they were bulging as a thousand pinpricks of sensation tingled along his skin and detonated a firecracker in his belly. He turned his head aside to gulp in a quick breath. It didn’t help much.
She rooted around the dish for another peanut. “So why do you like old movies?”
“You’re a real fucking whack job,” he growled, “you know that, lady?”
Her brows leapt high for a second in surprise, and then a laugh came out of her, the sound and her accompanying smile hitting his solar plexus with a whomp.
He shifted in the booth, his muscles tense and screaming for some kind of action. Somewhere in the vague recesses of his mind he registered that women generally didn’t smile at him. Most were pretty good at reading his stay back, dangerous animal sign.
Her lips twisted. “I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you to hear I’ve been called worse?”
“Hag?” He drawled the suggestion. “Nagging shrew?”
Her eyes danced with her humor.
He closed his hand into a fist around his Budweiser bottle, his heart banging in his chest. Either it was the lighting or his extra-honed senses, but her eyes seemed impossibly blue tonight.
“Feel better now?” she asked wryly.
He smiled savagely. �
��Much.”
“Wow, look at that.” Her brows popped up. “The man has teeth, and a good-looking set, too.”
He snapped the smile off his face as fire blazed into his cheeks, his stomach doing some sort of weird back flip.
“I mean, don’t go crazy on me or anything. I still think you’re a—”
“Thomal’s back,” he clipped out, jerking his chin at the bar.
She glanced over her shoulder. “He’s getting our drinks.” She went back to the peanut dish and asked again, “So why do you like old movies?”
“I don’t know,” he retorted mulishly. Evidently, he was still doing the two-year-old thing.
She went on searching for an acceptable peanut. “Yes, you do.”
He scowled down at the top of her head. “Other people eat those nuts, you know.”
“See how I’m ignoring your crabbiness, Jaċken?” She perkily popped a denuded nut into her mouth. “Are you noticing that?”
He glared at her throat, this time without an eye toward biting it. Maybe he could just squeeze until she shut that gaping maw of hers and not kill her entirely.
She exhaled a long sigh. “Don’t make me be a whack job again.”
“Did you ever stop?” Ho, that put the challenging light right back into her eyes, and as soon as he saw it, he caved, to his utter shock, like a total lightweight. “I just like that everything was simpler back then, all right. Jesus.” He gave his shoulders a tight shrug. “I like the happy endings.” They were the only ones he’d ever get.
“Ah.” She braced an elbow on the table and propped her chin on her hand, her gaze poignant. “Yes, I like that part, too.”
He fidgeted, the tender look in her eyes burrowing into his newly formed soft spot. He glanced around the bar for a warrior. He needed someone to beat some Man back into him, like fucking quick. No worries: any minute, Thomal would probably step up to do the job.
“I’ve probably seen all of Katherine Hepburn’s films three times.” Straightening, she stirred her martini with the toothpick that was speared through her olives. “Of course, that was before I started on a steady diet of Matthew McConaughey movies.”
He jerked his eyebrows up in surprise. “You’re kidding me.”
“No.” She chuckled. “Why not? He’s gorgeous.”
“The guy’s pretty.” He snorted. “He might as well be a girl.”
“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you just said that. Have you taken a look around here, lately, mister? The men in this town give new meaning to the concept of beautiful. There’s not one person here, in fact, man or woman, who isn’t some level of good-looking, at least not that I’ve seen.” She clink-clinked her toothpick against the rim of her glass. “It’s kind of spooky, actually.”
“Actually,” he returned, “it’s genetics, Doctor, or natural selection, if you prefer. Vârcolac are attractive because they have to be in order to survive.” The muscles in his thighs clenched tight as he watched her lean forward to pluck an olive off the toothpick with her teeth. “We’re a breed of human who has to take in blood for sustenance. So Mother Nature was generous enough to give our species the kinds of faces and forms that would make it easy to seduce a host into surrendering a vein.”
She stopped chewing her olive and swallowed. “Dr. Jess said Vârcolac either feed on a bonded mate or a donor, neither of whom needs a whole lot of seducing.”
Well, bowl him over with a feather, she knew something about their breed now. He’d have given her a solid month before she would’ve opened her mind to that kind of information. “It wasn’t always that way. The first Vârcolac could take blood for nourishment without forming a permanent bond, which allowed them to pursue multiple sources. You can pick up on that old way of being if you pay attention around here: Pure-bred’s have a predatory edge to them because they used to hunt, whereas the Mixed-blood Dragons, who came later, are the charmers.”
“Ah….” She sat back, and her lips twitched. “And which one are you?”
He took a hard swig of his beer, an irrational anger gusting over him. The sparkle in her eyes and the teasing tone of her voice were bad enough, like some kind of damned flirtation, but her comment was also a complete face-shove into exactly why he could never have her. Or any woman.
“Actually,” he sneered, “I’m a genetic mutation, Doctor, if you really want to know, not entirely Vârcolac, not quite human, but a creature in every sense of the word.” He leaned toward her, jutting his jaw aggressively. “I’m a beast who hovers all of about two inches away from the edge of pure evil and the last thing you should be sitting your pretty little hinie across from.” He eased back, exhaling through tight lips. “You know, for someone who’s probably real smart about most things in life, you have your head particularly far up your ass about staying away from me. See my eyes, lady? They’re pure black. Don’t you think that ought to tell you something?”
She bit another olive off her toothpick and chewed…chewed and chewed and stared at him with such casual indifference that he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her head tumbled off her neck. What did it take to get rid of this woman?
“Are you trying to scare me, Jaċken? Because if you are, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that.” She lifted a shoulder. “So you’re a freak. So what? You’re the one who has his head up his ass if you think you’ve got the market cornered on that.” She polished off her drink, then tossed the toothpick into her empty martini glass with a sharp tink. “I feel like just as much of a freak as you do, pal, so you can take your holier-than-thou attitude and stuff it.” Snatching up her purse, Toni came abruptly to her feet. “But, hey, you want me to keep my hinie away from you? No problem. Consider me gone.”
“Yo, what’s up?” Nỵko drew up at the table, as nonchalant as if it was an everyday occurrence to find Jaċken chitchatting with a woman.
“Your brother’s a psychotic piece of bird crap, that’s what.”
“Oh, well….” Bobbing his head, Nỵko slid his hands into his pockets.
Toni waved at Thomal just as the blond warrior turned from the bar with a drink in each hand, martini in one, draft beer in the other, and headed back to him.
Nỵko stood in place for a second, then scooted into the booth, quietly taking a sip of his beer.
Jaċken just sat there, his whole body humming as if any minute it would shatter into a thousand pieces. He cleared his throat. “Where’s Shọn?”
“Back in his room at the mansion. I told him we’d watch a DVD with him. He said any flick but one of yours.” Nỵko moved his beer bottle around in its wet ring. “You okay?”
“Sure. Why not.” Lungs tight, Jaċken stared a hole straight through the top of the table. He was so screwed up. Now that he’d finally managed to get rid of Toni, he only wanted her to come back. He pressed his eyes closed as a round of boisterous laughter rang out from over by the pool table. Don’t look.
But he did.
The humming inside him instantly shut off, replaced by a prickly tension that made him feel like his whole body was wrapped in barbed wire. Over by the pool table, Toni was holding Thomal by the hand and pulling him toward the back door, her beautiful eyes sparkling at him now. Jaċken clenched his jaw so hard, the muscles in his face throbbed. Whatever low words Toni was saying to Thomal had the man nearly stomping a boot mark on his tongue.
Jaċken slugged back the rest of his beer as the two blondes disappeared out the back door. It was only by the narrowest margin of control that he didn’t throw back his head and howl until the roof caved in.
It wouldn’t take long for a horny little shit like Thomal to crowd Toni back up against Garwald’s outside wall and start kissing a path up her throat, tasting the softness of her flesh, succumbing to the sweet insanity of her scent. His fangs would unsheathe from the force of his desire, and from there, it’d only take a few whispered words to convince Toni to moan, yes. Next would come the sweet puncture of a vein, then the was
h of her blood into Thomal’s mouth and down his throat, the intoxicating liquid entering his body like living and breathing warmth, charging up every atom in his body with strength and energy, turning him into a man—a complete one, at last.
Then Thomal would take her, pushing inside her body to feel her wet heat close around him, savoring the hot, aroused cadence of her breathing in his ears and the sting of her fingernails at his back. He’d fill her womb with his seed, marvel at her belly growing with his child, cuddle up on a couch with her after dinner to watch The African Queen. Or not watch it, as they once again found themselves unable to keep their hands off each other.
But most of all, Thomal’s exalted status as Toni’s bonded mate would give him the right to ask her the name of her father so that he could hunt down the bastard and go Postal on his ass.
Lurching back in his booth, Jaċken exhaled a raw, cursing breath. He looked across the expanse of table at Nỵko. “Fuck it,” he said quietly. “I’m not okay.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nỵko said simply.
“What…?” The word got stuck halfway up his throat and he had to start again. “What am I going to do?”
Nỵko shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Jaċken. It’ll get better once she’s mated. Her scent won’t be all over the place, making you crazy.”
Yeah…. But no. It was way more than just her scent. She had him tied up in knots, smart-mouthed, pain-in-the-ass her, and seeing her get hooked up with another guy would just do a whole lot of making it worse. He propped his elbows on the table and grabbed his temples between his hands. He really needed to stop this train wreck before he fell completely in love with—
His thoughts jerked to a halt as his gaze fell on the two Ibuprofen Toni had given him, still on the table. His heart wrenched so hard that his eyes actually burned. “I need to get the hell out of here, Nỵko. Let’s head back to the—”
