by eden Hudson
It felt just as undeserved and wrong as it had after she beat Mikal. And good. Incredible. I hugged her tighter, lifted her off the ground.
She laughed. Her breath came out cold against my lips.
“Put me down before you rip out your stitches,” she said.
I pressed my forehead against hers. “You punched me into a wall a minute ago. Now you’re worried about the stitches?”
“I didn’t punch you,” she said. “I shoved you. A little.”
“I’m pretty sure that bullet hit me softer than you did.”
Tiffani got that serious look on her face. “Colt, what I want to do with you can’t be done standing up without tearing your stitches. Put me down.”
Even I wasn’t crazy enough to say no to that.
Tiffani
The heat of Colt’s skin burned through my shirt and against my khakis as he slid me down his body to the floor. As soon as my feet touched, I pressed closer. Tangled my fingers in his hair and pulled his head down. His lips were scorching, full of that unholy fire. The sound of his sigh tingled along the surface of my skin.
It had been so long since I last felt like this, since I’d wanted sex in this way. Not because his body heat was confusing my senses. Not because the primal crow magic had been whipped into a frenzy by the smell of blood and arousal. Not because I wanted something to drown out the pain. I had Colt back. He remembered me. He wanted me. I wanted to get as close to him as I could, to be a part of him.
I undid the button on his jeans, but the zipper wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder. The denim along his fly ripped.
“Damn it,” I said.
“Screw it, they’re old.” He tugged on my khakis’ button fly. “Help me with these.”
“Here.” I stepped back and unbuttoned my pants. Shimmied them off with my underwear, then pulled my shirt and bra over my head.
Colt had stopped moving. He just stared.
I fought the urge to cross my arms over my stomach or try to cover myself. I’d been naked or mostly naked with hundreds of people over the years. I was too damn old to feel self-conscious.
“Well?” I said. I’d meant for it to be a demand that he get his clothes off, too, but it came out more like a question.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just… Tiff, you’re so fucking beautiful.”
I bit my lip and tried not to swoon like some moon-eyed virgin. “Get your pants off.”
He pulled the zipper back up, messed with it for a second, then jerked it down to the metallic sound of the teeth popping.
“Break it?” I asked.
“Who cares?” He dropped his jeans and stepped out of them. Grabbed my hand and pulled me close again. His palms slid over my back, up to my shoulders, leaving fiery paths in their wake. It wasn’t enough to drive the cold away. I wished he could touch every inch of me at the same time. Wrap me up in his heat.
Colt hesitated as his hands came around to the front. He traced my collarbones, my throat. His heartbeat had changed. From desire to something else.
The super-smeller picked up on it: fear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just—” Heat rushed to his face. In the half-light from the window, I couldn’t see him blush, but I knew the tops of his cheeks were dark red. He took a step back and scrubbed his hands across his face. “Shit!”
“Colt—” I reached for him, but he shrugged off my hand.
“Got to be fucking kidding me,” he said. “How is this happening?”
Then I saw it. He wasn’t hard.
I hugged my arms around my chest. “Is it because I’m too cold? I know Mikal was hotter than human body temperature.”
“No—shit—I swear it’s not you.” The words sounded raw in his throat.
“We don’t have to do anything,” I said.
“I want to.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I wanted to. I don’t know. Fuck!”
The tone of his voice, his abrupt movements, and the coiled tension in his muscles warned the vamp senses to stay still and calm. Wheels turned in my head. The super-smeller went into overdrive, searching out the emotions. Anger. Fear. Something harder to define. Shame?
“Colt.” I took a step toward him. “You spent the last six weeks being tortured and raped—”
The air hissed out of his lungs. “Don’t say shit like that.”
“It’s true.”
“Everybody already knows I was Mikal’s bitch. I don’t need it all over town that I’m a limp-dicked pussy now, too.” He laughed, the sound short and angry. “Besides, it wasn’t that long before I was as into it as she was, so ‘rape’ probably isn’t the right term.”
The vicious bitch inside me flared up, dying to rip something apart. I forced it back down.
“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” I said.
“I want to!” He threw his hands up. “I want to, all right? I just—This isn’t—I can’t…like this.”
“Then tell me how.” I sounded more frustrated than I’d meant to. Eighty-five years’ worth of suppressing emotion out the window, just like they always went around him. And always at the worst damn times.
Colt glared down at the floor. When he opened his mouth, his heart raced. He closed his mouth and his heart calmed down again.
I tried to think of a way to apologize. A way to explain that I just wanted to understand so I could be there for him.
Hell. That sounded as cliché in my head as it would have if I’d said it out loud. How do you tell someone that you would do anything to be with them?
The image of Colt licking Mikal’s boots forced its way into my head as if to further punish me. He said that he’d been as into the pain as Mikal was. He begged her to hurt him. Colt—using Mikal’s memory as a mouthpiece—had told me that I could never give him what he needed.
Over the years, I had run into vamp groupies who wanted to be humiliated and controlled. I only played along when I was starving or desperate. The rest of the time I let the vampire superiority types deal with them. I had enough issues of my own to deal with, I couldn’t waste the energy worrying about why some humans became blood slaves. Maybe I should’ve been paying closer attention.
There was an unfolding sensation in my brain. Mitzi’s connection.
Oh, looks like I got here just in time, she said.
I snapped my eyes shut.
Come on, Tiffani, don’t be a bitch. I let you see Tough from every angle, his good sides and his bad sides. I want to see how Saint Lover-boy measures up.
Reacting would just encourage her. The only way to get rid of Mitzi was to ignore her.
Open your eyes, Tiffani, she whined. Tiffani? Tiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffanitiffani—
Like a damn child. Sometimes I could swear that getting made stopped your emotional development the same as it did your aging.
Fine, Mitzy snapped. Have it your way. Don’t say I didn’t try to help, though. When Saint Lover-boy’s begging for some kink and all you’ve got to offer are your old-dog-no-new-tricks excuses, don’t come crying to me.
She slammed the connection shut.
I took a deep breath in through my nose, then opened my eyes.
Colt’s face was burning. Even in the dark, the vamp senses could feel the hot blood in his cheeks. I wondered what I looked like to him. Was I glaring? Did he think I was mad at him? Hell, if anything I was mad at myself. Mitzi was right. I was an old dog. It was too late for me to learn the tricks I needed to be with him.
A memory of the day I had fed from Colt’s wrist flashed through my brain. His ropey muscles tightening, his heart pounding. Hearing him grit his teeth, feeling and smelling his body react. The pain had turned him on. Before Mikal, before any of this, I had turned him on.
Biting, hurting, attacking wasn’t even a trick, it was just instinct. The vampire ultimate predator senses lit up, eager for mutilation, sex, blood, living sacrifice.
As he reached for his jea
ns, the scents of Colt’s anger and frustration and embarrassment became bright slashes of color in the darkness.
I grabbed his wrist.
“You have to tell me if it’s too much,” I said.
Colt cocked his head at me as if he was afraid to ask.
“There’s a good chance I won’t be able to pay close enough attention once the blood starts flowing.” Blood, the predator in me growled, straining at the end of its leash. “You have to stop me if it hurts too much.”
“It won’t,” Colt said.
I took a step closer and pinned him against the wall. His heat soaked into my skin, waking dead nerves in little bursts of light. My fingernails bit into the plaster, dying to feel the warmth and give of flesh.
“Promise or get out,” I said.
“Fine.” He swallowed. “I promise. But it won’t hurt too much. It can’t.”
I grabbed the back of his head and pulled him into a kiss. My fangs punctured his lip. Blood welled up. The crow magic screamed at the taste. Colt made a sound halfway between a sigh and a wince. The tension in his body shifted, intensified. He slipped his tongue between my lips and searched out my fangs. I bit again. Not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to hurt. He picked me up and hooked my legs around his hips. I licked the bloody cut in his bottom lip.
“You promised,” I reminded him. “If it’s too much—”
“It won’t be,” he said.
To prove him wrong, I bit into the bunched muscle at the top of his arm. The groan rolled out of his throat like smoke. He ground his erection against me. I dug my fingernails into his back. I wanted to rip him apart, gulp down his blood while he lay dying in my arms.
“The bed,” I said.
Vertigo spun through my head as he dropped me onto the mattress, then climbed on top of me. He hesitated. Leaned down and brushed his lips across my throat. The scent of fear grew stronger and mingled with his arousal.
I scraped my fangs across his pec, slicing into the skin near his nipple. He exhaled and pressed his lower body to mine again.
That was his release. The pain took him away from thought, pulled him out of his head, and focused him in the moment.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him down. For a second, I just held him close, feeling his fire all around me, licking the blood from his chest, listening to him take deep breaths of my hair.
Then he gripped the tines of my wrought iron headboard with one hand and began to move his hips. The muscles in his forearm flexed and relaxed.
My fangs ached to tear into his throat, slash and rip until they were bathed in that hot, red life. He was moving too slowly. I was too close for tender and drawn-out. I needed him inside me.
“Colt, please.”
“Fuck,” he breathed. “This isn’t going to take long if you keep talking like that.”
“I don’t care. Now.”
Fire burned through my nerve endings as he slid inside. I groaned. My vision faded out to heat signatures in the dark.
“Tiff.”
I couldn’t answer. Just started moving my hips. He took the hint and sped up. In seconds, I was at the breaking point. The orgasm crashed into me. I buried my teeth in his shoulder, sucking at the scorching blood that poured out. Colt growled, a primal sound that whipped the crow magic into a frenzy.
Emotions that had been dead and buried for years flowed to the surface. This was really happening. For so long I’d wanted the body I was holding to be him. So many nights I’d spent fighting tears, knowing I’d lost him forever. Now here he was. I had Colt back and he was mine. Just mine.
My chest felt like it was unfolding, expanding. I was breathing. Deep, ragged breaths that scratched my vocal cords as they passed.
This time the climax seemed to burst from deep inside my bones and flare toward the surface of my skin in sparks and surges. My teeth ripped into the closest bit of flesh, hit bone and tendon. Thick, hot, salty blood filled my senses. I heard Colt’s wordless shout, felt his rhythm stutter as he came. He didn’t stop moving until I pulled him down on top of me.
It felt like hours later that he rested his forehead against my temple. His panting warmed my ear and throat.
For a minute, I thought my heart was beating at full strength. Then I realized it was his. It was pounding so hard I could feel it through the wall of his chest.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I probably could’ve kept going if you wanted to.”
I shook my head. Kissed his jaw and kept my face pressed to his.
Suddenly, Colt pushed up onto his elbow and swiped his thumb across my cheek. “What’s wrong?”
The words caught in my throat. I was crying. Real tears.
“Tiffani?”
I couldn’t.
He laid down beside me, pulled me onto his chest. He ran his fingers through my hair while his heat soaked into me. I kept my face nestled in the hollow of his jaw and waited for the tears to stop.
Colt’s stomach growled.
I lifted my head.
“Hungry?” I asked.
Tough
Every light in the house was off when I got there. Jax’s little piece of shit car was in the driveway. Harper must’ve driven it home from the hospital. Or maybe Scout drove her home and left the car here. For a while I just sat in the truck and stared at the dark taillights.
Gone, gone, gone, gone. That candy-pop melody was still burning itself into my brain, the same crap over and over again. The damn thing was going to make me crazy if I didn’t get it out where I could hear it.
I got out of the truck and walked across the yard to the porch, slowly, keeping my eyes on the ground the whole time. I think I was looking for something like blood or flattened grass, but the summer had been too dry. All the grass was scorched and dead, and none of it cared enough that Jax had died on it to leave a sign.
Something sliced open the inside of my bottom lip. One of my fangs. Without thinking about it, I’d been rubbing my hand across my mouth. I must’ve pushed a little too hard. Having something touch my face didn’t feel good or comforting anymore. I tried grinding my teeth, but all I got was a dull ache. The high was slipping away.
Pretty soon it’ll be gone, gone, gone, gone.
Like the dark. The sun hadn’t started rising yet, but the night bugs had stopped making noise, and you could feel everything else getting ready to wake up. I sat down on the porch and looked up at the sky. Just a couple stars left.
Sometimes, before this whole thing with Jason and Jax stealing my voice, when I’d get back from being with Mitzi, I wouldn’t go inside right away. There’s something about being around people right after you screw somebody. Even if the people are your best friends, even if they’re probably asleep, you just want to be alone for a while. A lot of nights, instead of heading right in, I would stand out in the yard and breathe in the air. Early morning felt different than daytime. Like it was a different place altogether, some foreign country or other planet. The air even tasted different. Cleaner. Purer.
I put my face in my hands and bawled.
Later on—I don’t know how much later on, but long enough for me to stop crying like a little bitch—the screen door screeched open, then bounced shut. Bare feet crossed the porch.
I smelled the tequila first, then Harper. She dropped down onto the top step next to me.
For the longest time she didn’t say anything.
Then she said, “Go away.”
I didn’t move. Honestly, I wasn’t too sure I could.
“I hate you, Tough,” Harper said. “I hate you.” She screamed it, “I hate you!”
Down the street, a dog started barking.
“I wish you were dead instead of him. You, Scout, me—” Her voice cracked. “—anybody but him.”
I wanted to put my arm around her, do something, anything to stop her from crying, but I couldn’t. I took a long breath of the clean early morning air. In, out.
“And I can’t even retaliate,” she sa
id. “It’s so pointless. There’s nothing I can take away from you to make you understand.” Harper wiped her cheeks with both hands and shook her head. “You’re not like a real person, Tough. You never were. You see something you want and you go for it. You pour everything you have into that one thing. But then when that one thing is gone, you go after something else. Me. Mitzi. Desty. That’s not what people do. Do you understand? No, of course not. How could you? You’re you.”
You’re telling me.
Harper stared up at the sky. “Do you know why I loved Jax? Because he loved me. He didn’t just want me. He knew I wasn’t perfect. You think every girl you like is perfect, but we’re not. Jax got that and he loved me anyway.”
And now he’s gone, gone, gone, gone. Like everything inside me. Or maybe there’d never been anything there to begin with. I took another breath and held it just so I could have something between my chest and my spine.
“I used to wonder what you were looking for,” Harper said. “Now I just hate you. I hope you never find it, you…man-slut…murdering…drunk.”
It wasn’t like she was saying anything I hadn’t heard before. Half the town talked shit about me to my face and the rest of them did it behind my back. Hell, I talked that shit to me. But Harper never had. Ever since January of our tenth-grade year, her and Jax had always had my back.
The dog down the street finally shut up. I could hear a teardrop roll down Harper’s cheek and drop onto her shirt. It soaked into the material like a snowball into a mud puddle.
We just sat there. The sky started to turn gray at the edges and I remembered that last dream I’d had—the last one I was ever going to have—of me and Sissy sitting on the porch at the farmhouse, watching the sun come up.
That’s it? I had asked Sissy.
I pushed myself up off the porch because, yeah, that really was it.
The vamp speed kicked on. I was upstairs in my room in a couple seconds. I dug a shirt out of my clothesbasket and pulled it on. It felt like I needed to. Like a layer between me and the rest of this awful world would help.
I grabbed the guitar case and brought it back downstairs with me. Mom’s guitar was inside, along with the agate pick Colt got me for my thirteenth birthday, the one with my name on it.
