Undeniable

by Doreen Orsini

  Diana spun around, her eyes narrowing. Her hands rose to her nipples as she struggled to breathe against an explosion of fluttering wings in her chest. “What the hell was that,” she whispered, then turned to her friends and yelled, “Did you guys see that?”

  “Bobby Wilson’s out with his camera,” Mary cried out.

  Diana screamed, took a step toward her friends, then froze. If she ran across the lawn, she’d definitely be the latest hottie on the little runt’s website.

  Then again, she could be some animal’s dinner. Saying a prayer, she pushed her way through the hemlocks.

  Once on the other side, she glanced toward the house and, discovering that the third floor balcony gave Bobby’s camera a clear shot over the hemlocks, ran toward the dark cover of the towering pines separating his property from the next. As she ran, she kept glancing over her shoulder at the balcony. She caught sight of a tiny kitten directly in her path just before she hit a tree. Her heart lurched when she realized a tree could not possibly be this warm or wrap its branches around her and hold her prisoner.

  Flinging her head back, she opened her mouth to scream, then quickly clamped it shut when the towering shadow enveloping her descended. Her mind shut down, then exploded with sensation. Warm lips imprisoned hers, coarse material grazed her nipples and thighs and the hard, hot, unmistakable ridge of a cock pressed into her stomach. Logic claimed a man held her. Her eyes disagreed.

  A man shrouded by nothing more than shadows, the adult in her that refused to accept her father’s tall tales rationalized. A vampire, the child she’d ignored all these years insisted. A vampire who would sink his teeth into her neck and drain her until she drew her last breath.

  Her lungs seized, strangling her scream. Calling upon years of self-defense and kickboxing, she tried to knock his legs out from under him. Her heel slammed into the tree behind him. Diana yelped into the stranger’s mouth.

  He grabbed her under the arms and slid her body up higher. Thoughts of escape shattered when his clothes scratched her skin and the bulge of his hard cock found a new home in the apex of her legs. Even through his pants, she burned from the heat of his cock. She inwardly cringed when her body responded. Her mind wrapped around how long and wide his cock felt, how good it would feel pounding into her.

  Deep within her pussy, muscles tensed with need. Her clit radiated tremors of pleasure throughout her body. Surely, this stranger felt the moist heat of her desire through his clothes.

  Wrapping one arm around her back, he slid his hand down her side and over her hip. Her mind, fearing, anticipating its destination and intent, zeroed in on that hand.

  Something inside her shifted when his palm skimmed down her leg, cupped her throbbing heel and rubbed it with a tenderness she hadn’t expected. The pain vanished. Her fevered mind followed the path of his hand back up her leg, inch by inch, until it came to rest on her buttocks. His fingertips grazed the crease between her thigh and cheek, slid between her legs and stopped short of delving into her needy pussy. His body turned to stone.

  He drew her closer and pressed her hips into his.

  What she was sure had merely been a means of silencing her evolved into much, much more the moment a soft moan replaced her muffled screams, the moment her hands stopped pushing at his chest and clenched onto his shirt. The moment her body took control of her mind and scattered all rational thought.

  Passion overshadowed fear. Her body shuddered, then melted into his as he slid his tongue between her lips and licked her teeth as if they were just as enticing as her naked body. He ground the hard ridge of his cock into her and tortured her clit and swollen lips until she spread her legs and opened her mouth. Fortress walls no other could scale crumbled as she awaited his invasion.

  She wondered if the entire night had been nothing more than the beginning of an erotic dream. Shadows didn’t feel like this. She didn’t act like this. Her stomach fluttered.

  It had to be a dream.

  One she intended to enjoy as long as it lasted.

  She closed her eyes and let the dream unfold.

  Cocooned in heat, she burrowed closer, ran her hands over the massive shoulders of the stranger holding her in his arms and weaved her fingers through the long silken strands of his hair before clutching his head to hers. It no longer mattered what was happening or who held her. She’d never felt so needy.

  Every nerve ending seemed to scream for attention. Her core pulsed in time with her heart, her labia contracted and flared in anticipation. Her body hungered for and accepted this stranger who must have been lurking in the dark, watching, waiting to seize what she’d refused all others.

  “Diana?”

  The fear in Terry’s voice sliced through the haze of desire engulfing Diana. She sucked in a breath, filling her lungs with her captor’s sweet breath. The possibility that she was wrong, that this was no dream and she might lose her virginity in the woods with a strange man who, for all she knew, could be a peeping Tom or serial killer sent ice through her veins and a scream into the stranger’s mouth.

  He abruptly broke off the kiss. She expected to feel the ground strike her back, expected him to quickly drop his pants and take what she had worked so hard to preserve. Instead, he tenderly covered her mouth with his fingers.

  His face still hid in a shadow darker than she thought possible, but she knew his eyes were intently focused on hers. A sense of calm filled her. She closed her mouth. He pressed his forehead to hers, brushed his lips between her brows so softly she barely felt them, lowered her back to her feet then brushed his fingertips over her eyes. Against her will, her lids lowered. When she raised them, her phantom was gone.

  Shaking uncontrollably, she scanned the shadows lurking between the trees and searched for one blacker than normal. A tiny mewl nearly sent her sprinting back through the hemlocks. Clenching the muscles in her legs to fight if necessary, she turned, looked down at the base of the tree that she would have run into if the shadow hadn’t blocked her way and watched in awe as a kitten too young to be away from its mother’s teat scooted forward on its rear end.

  If she didn’t know any better, she’d swear the ink-black shadow on the ground pushed it toward her. She peered into the shadow, willing herself to see more, but failed to make out anything in the murky blackness. “Who’s there?” she asked, her voice cracking.

  The kitten stopped moving. The shadow shrank back and joined those between the trees. Part of her grandmother’s prediction, the part she’d refused to dwell on all these years, the part that warned her soul mate would be an abomination in her father’s eyes, replayed in her mind and sent chills down her spine.

  Just as she thought of reaching into the shadow and trying to make out the features of his face with her hands, her phantom lover flew straight up into a forty foot tall pine tree. Tilting her head back, Diana watched in awe when it burst free a few feet from the top, sending a shower of pine needles down upon her before sweeping across the ebony sky.

  A rustle in the woods jerked her attention back to the base of the tree.

  Another shadow hovered beside it, pulsing like a giant beast drawing in one large draft of air after another before charging.

  Never taking her eyes off the shadow, somehow aware that she would not survive this phantom’s embrace, she lowered her trembling hands until her fingers grazed fur, then grabbed the kitten, spun around, and with a burst of adrenaline-fed speed, ran. Once again blackness engulfed Diana.

  * * * * *

  “Honestly, Nana, I ran into a tree. Other than knocking myself out and having a sick dream, nothing happened last night.” Diana listened while her grandmother rambled on about visions and dreams. “Nana…Nana, can I call you later? I’ve gotta get some ice on this bump…love you too.” She closed her cell phone, then sank back against the soft cushions lining her window seat.

  “Not a dream,” she mumbled to herself, then smirked and rolled her eyes. “I think I know the difference between reality and a dream.”
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  Last night, when the moon held domain over the world and its eerie light cast shadows that trembled and swayed, when fanciful dreams converged with childhood beliefs that still lurked within, she’d believed in her dark phantom.

  But this morning, when dawn shed her radiant light and revealed that a tree was just a tree and a dream was just a dream, when her brilliance cast the stars from the sky like so many unfulfilled wishes, Diana could not…would not accept that his caress, his kiss, his dark embrace ever existed. To do so would mean that she was just as delusional as her father.

  She shuddered, recalling that in her dream, for one terrifying moment, she’d actually believed in her father’s creatures of the night.

  Leaning her cheek against the warm glass of her window, Diana watched her father drop a handful of pink daisies down the ornamental well he’d bought a year after her mother left. Blowing a kiss after them, he sat on the ground, leaned back against the well, then started to read.

  Every morning he sat at her mother’s makeshift memorial and read the news, the latest novel, or excerpts from Diana’s childhood diaries. No one had been able to convince her father that the woman he’d loved had turned her back on them both.

  Running her fingers through the soft fur of the kitten sleeping on her lap, Diana wondered if her mother really was dead, if her spirit hovered beside her father.

  She doubted it. She’d spent too many nights and mornings crying for her mother during those first few months, shed too many tears when her mother failed to reappear. No, if her mother was dead, her spirit would have found its way back, even for a moment, to soothe the child she claimed to have loved.

  She wished she had the nerve to pound on the window and scream down at her father that his daughter was still here, his daughter never left. His daughter could use a little of his love. She blinked away the tears she refused to shed.

  When he spoke of her mother, when he insisted only death could keep her away, Diana’s heart broke that he hadn’t seen what a child barely old enough to read had seen.

  Part of her agreed that only death would keep a mother from her child, but part of her remembered the odd emptiness in her mother’s eyes when she had tucked her in that last time. Diana had told everyone who’d entered the house the next day that something had been wrong with her mother’s eyes, that they’d grown distant a moment before she’d silently strode out the door without turning on Diana’s Little Mermaid nightlight. No one had understood that her mother would never leave her in the dark.

  Her hand instinctively rose to clutch the locket her mother had given her that night. They had talked about her father’s vampires. Her mother had laughed softly and promised that vampires only dwelt in the minds of those who never grew up, those who never accepted a nightmare was nothing more than a nightmare.

  Touching the tender bump on her forehead, Diana told herself that a shadow was nothing more than a shadow.

  She stood up. Could a prediction be nothing more than the ramblings of another damaged mind in her family? Her grandmother had sworn on the phone that Diana’s soul mate had found her last night. Other than her phantom lover, no one she might consider even dating had entered her life.

  What if she’d missed him?

  * * * * *

  Three nights after the encounter at the lake, Sebastian spent his second night in Cabana’s, a small waterfront club in Lake George Village. He missed the tranquility of Mina’s Cove and his fellow creatures of the night, missed chatting with them as they strolled down Main Street. There, the scent of a multitude of flowers tickled their heightened sense of smell. There, only the sound of the breeze rustling through the leaves and hushed voices met ears more sensitive than a human’s.

  Here, the stench of ammonia, sour beer and myriad perfumes and colognes mingled with the smoke billowing in from the crowded deck. Here, music blared and people yelled to be heard.

  He had foolishly thought nothing could be worse than maintaining his shadow form while pitching from side to side in the backseat of Diana’s ‘76 Camaro as she sped around each curve they encountered on the trip here, but a faulty air conditioning system in a club crammed with humans proved him wrong. Every foul odor wafting up from the sweat-covered bodies clung to the oppressive air filling the club and seemed to converge on the corner where he’d spent the last three hours. His stomach roiled.

  Normally, he merely closed his mind to an offensive sense, but while stalking Diana he had to keep all of them on alert. The past few nights had proven that the hunter’s daughter held some kind of power over his kind. Why else would he find it so hard to maintain control three nights after the effects of Damien’s attack had worn off?

  Although the room already vibrated in time with the bass, the DJ cranked the music up another notch. Those people more interested in socializing than dancing raised their voices accordingly. Only the melodic sound of Diana’s laughter penetrated the din and soothed the pounding ache in Sebastian’s head. He honed his sense of smell on her scent and wondered how it remained fresh and enticing in this inferno.

  His eyes focused on Diana. Her skin glistened as she gyrated in time with the music beside her latest partner. From the moment she’d stepped onto the dance floor, he’d envied the men she blessed with a dance. Recognizing the lust in their eyes, he tore each and every one from her spell. Lost in the music, Diana seemed unconcerned when each partner stopped dancing and strode away.

  Sebastian smirked. So many stunned faces, so many men wondering how they ended up on the far side of the club dancing with someone else.

  His eyes strayed to her hips. For three nights he’d watched them writhe as she brought herself to orgasm in her bed. Temptation sizzled beneath his skin and blurred his vision until Diana’s gaze swept over the faces of the men surrounding the dance floor. A young man stumbled from the crowd and joined her.

  Sebastian tensed when she met the man’s heated gaze with a welcoming smile. Diana seduced, teased and flirted like the woman his mother had described. He sensed the fire coursing through her veins every night, watched her bring herself to orgasm when she finally slid into bed and caught glimpses of her erotic dreams as she slept. Her constant state of arousal ate away at his control.

  As far as he was concerned, they should be following and watching Diana’s grandmother. A woman with the power to harness such a sensual being could easily weave a spell around one of their vamps.

  With nerves raw from fighting his own desires and those of the men around Diana, he watched her enter the dark alcove housing the restrooms. A man twice her size and at least four beers past drunk followed.

  A few minutes later, Sebastian drew in a deep breath and cursed. Fear now marred her scent. It took only a few seconds to transform into mist and weave through the crowd, but his senses told him even that was too long. He merged his mind with hers so that he could hear what she heard, see what she saw and feel what she felt. Immediately, he felt the sweat drenching the drunk’s shirt seep through Diana’s halter and coat her skin, felt her breasts and stomach shrink away. Their minds were so connected that he tasted bile when, no matter how far she turned her head, the drunk’s rancid breath managed to creep up her nose.

  “Get your hands off me, you asshole!”

  The man imprisoned Diana’s wrists above her head with his left hand and groped one of her breasts with the other. “Come on, baby. I saw the way you looked at me while you were dancing.”

  “I’m warning you, back off!” Diana’s voice revealed none of the fear that trickled from her mind into Sebastian’s.

  When the man’s fingers squeezed and twisted Diana’s nipple until she yelped, Sebastian cast caution aside and flung a lanky teen out of his way. He entered the alcove and merged with a shadow just in time to see the man land on the floor.

  Keening like a wounded goat, the man clutched his nose and drew his body into the fetal position. Blood poured from between the man’s fingers. Sebastian stared at Diana in awe. If he hadn’t seen through
her eyes how quickly she’d taken the drunk down, he wouldn’t have believed it. The man topped her by at least a foot and had muscles even Sebastian found impressive.

  “Why’d you give me that look if you weren’t interested,” the man yelled from behind his hand. “You crazy bitch!”

  “I’m crazy? I’m crazy?” She kicked him soundly in his ass.

  Grinning, Sebastian leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. He recalled the kickboxing trophies he’d seen in her room, and the thought of her muscular legs wrapped around his hips sent all his blood straight to the erection he’d been carrying around since that first night by the lake.

  His gaze followed taut muscles up her legs to the hem of her skirt, continued on past her exposed stomach, then came to an abrupt stop.

  Diana cupped her left breast with both hands. The pain in her eyes filled him with rage. Her lower lip quivered as she turned her face to the wall.

  “All I did was glance around at the club. What am I supposed to do? Close my eyes when I dance?”

  Her voice, strangled by the sobs she fought so hard to suppress, nipped at his heart and released the beast that dwelt in them all, that fed his rage and demanded he rip open the man’s throat. Shocked that his body shook with a need to avenge the woman he intended to destroy, he dug his nails into his palms and forced the beast back into submission. A rustle of movement caught his eye.

  The man rose and swung his fist at Diana’s lower back. Sebastian blocked the punch and tossed the man out of the alcove before Diana even felt the rush of air from the approaching fist. She spoke and for a moment he thought she spoke to him, but when he turned around, he found Diana hadn’t moved.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do? Let some guy maul me just so the bar doesn’t get a bad rep? Damn!”

  He longed to caress her bruised breast and replace her pain with pleasure, nearly took a step closer to do just that, but a commotion in the club brought him up short.