No, it was the woman herself that made him willing to die to protect her. Her intelligence, her wit, her devotion to her sister. The courage she’d shown even as a twelve-year-old facing her parents’ attackers. Courage that hadn’t faltered even when she’d realized how close Cade was to killing her himself.
He turned to let the hot water blast his shoulders, remembering the horrific night seventeen years before when his desperate refusal to kill a child had collided with Val’s furious determination to survive. For just an instant, their minds had… fused.
Which was impossible. Neither of them should have been able to penetrate the other’s mental shields. Yet they had, and it saved them both. Without that connection, Cade doubted he could have found the strength to free her and her sister, then distract his sire until both children could escape.
Since then, Cade and Valerie had shared a link, if only in their dreams. When she’d begun having nightmares about the murders, her terror had reached out to him. He’d become Cowboy, slaying her dream vampires -- including himself -- and providing her with the male influence the death of her father had stripped away.
The dreams had stopped in her mid-teens. He’d thought, hoped, he’d never see her again, since every contact between them had the potential to draw his enemy’s attention. She didn’t need the risk.
But at twenty-two, she’d reached for Cade again. Her grandmother’s death had left her to raise eleven-year-old Beth alone, and she’d wanted comfort. When she came into his dreams to get it, Cade discovered that the courageous, wounded child he’d known had grown into a sensual woman he couldn’t resist.
Now, seven years later, there was something else she needed even more. Edward Ridgemont had reentered her life, and if he wasn’t stopped, he’d destroy her. But if Cade played his hand well, she’d never even realize how close she’d come to death.
He shut off the water with a twist of his wrist and opened the shower door.
The ghost child waited for him, wrapped in the steam from his shower and the wafting scent of the peppermint candy she’d loved in life. Two enormous bows framed her head, binding her curling black hair into pigtails. The toes of her kid slippers floated six inches above the tile floor, and her white silk dress belled around thin, stocking-clad calves.
The gown had once been their mother’s, cut down for Abigail after she’d outgrown all her own. When Cole had buried her in it in 1865, the dress had hung on a body wasted with yellow fever.
“Damn you, Cade McKinnon.” Abigail’s thoughts drove into his mind, carried on a psychic wave of mingled jealousy and fear. Her ghostly body still looked like the thirteen-year-old she’d been, but her mind had long since left childhood behind. “Valerie Chase is not worth dying for.”
Cade smiled slightly. “Oh yes, she is.”
* * *
“I wish you wouldn’t look like that,” Beth said.
Resting her head on the couch’s back, one hand steadying a mug of cocoa on her knee, Val opened one eye. “Like what?”
“So damn defeated.” Beth sat curled next to her, legs drawn up, her face worried. She reminded Val of an agitated cat. “You don’t do defeated. No matter how bad things get, you always come out slugging.”
Val took a sip of the cocoa. “It’s been a rough week.”
Beth studied her with those dark, knowing eyes. The kid was entirely too damn smart for eighteen. “Did that conversation with Kim trigger this?”
“Didn’t I ever teach you not to eavesdrop?”
“Yeah. Didn’t take. Come on, what did Kim say?”
“She hung up on me.” Leaning forward, Val put the mug down on the glass coffee table and ran a frustrated hand through her hair. The combination of the Cowboy dream and the week’s events had left her wrung out and battered. “What the hell is going on? Damn it, I have a right to know why I was fired from a job I’ve held for ten years. What do they think I did?”
“And why are they keeping it such a deep, dark secret?” Beth wrapped paint-smeared fists in the hem of her oversized T-shirt and pulled it down as she drew her legs up under it. A frown scored the skin between her dark brows. “This whole thing is weird.”
“Tell me about it.” Bracing her elbows on her knees, Val fixed brooding eyes across the room on the painting of a rearing stallion Beth had done in the tenth grade. “One day I’m Gerry Price’s fair-haired girl, the reporter who can do no wrong. The next I walk into the office and everybody’s looking at me like I french-fried a puppy. Gerry fires me on the spot without telling me one damn thing other than I somehow betrayed the paper, journalism, and basic human decency. Yet nobody -- not Gerry, not Kim, not even the guy who empties the trash -- will tell me what the hell I’m supposed to have done. And now even Cowboy’s sprouting fangs.” Unable to sit still any longer, she stood and began to pace.
Beth watched her long, agitated strides. “I don’t understand it either. You’re good. Everybody knows it. And everybody knows you wouldn’t do anything unethical.”
Val stopped her pacing at the entertainment center to brace both arms against its oak cabinet. Sightlessly, she stared at one of Beth’s clay figures, this one a dancing nymph. “You and that job were my whole life. How could they do this to me?”
“It’s going to work out, Val. You’ve already got a new job. You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, right. Writing some rich guy’s memoirs. I’m a journalist, dammit, not a ghostwriter. I don’t know Ridgemont. Why did he pick me? I’ve never even written a book before.”
Beth was silent a little too long.
Val glanced over her shoulder, then turned to stare. “Oh, I know that look. What are you thinking?”
“I hate to mention this under the circumstances,” Beth said finally, “but don’t you think there’s something a little… off about that?”
“About what?” Her sister might be young, but over the years Val had discovered the kid’s instincts were uncanny.
“I mean, you lose your job, and the very next day some rich guy calls up out of the blue and offers you big bucks for his memoirs -- when you’ve never ghostwritten a word in your life. It’s way too convenient.”
“So you think, what? Edward Ridgemont got me fired, and now he’s offering me a job to lure me up to New York? Sounds like a romance novel.” Val walked over to pick up her mug, summoning a smile as she lifted it to her lips. “Although if he turns out to be some brooding, handsome, sexually insatiable millionaire, I guess I’ll just have to sacrifice myself for your well-being…”
“God, I hope not.”
She lowered the mug untasted. “That sounded awfully fervent.”
Beth bit her lip.
“Out with it.”
“I got a call.”
“What kind of call?” Something in her sister’s tone made the hair rise on the back of her neck. “When?”
“Right after you went to bed. He asked to speak to you, and I told him you were asleep.”
“Who was it?
Beth shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t recognize the voice. He said… I should try to convince you not to go to New York. That Ridgemont wasn’t what he seemed.”
Val thumped the mug back down on the coffee table, sloshing chocolate on the table. “Boy, somebody really is out to get me. First chance at a decent job I get, and he’s trying to ruin that, too.”
“What if he’s right? Val, you don’t know this Ridgemont. What if he’s not what he seems?”
“I’m a reporter, damn it,” she said, and began to pace again, her steps quick with simmering fury. “I check people out for a living. Ridgemont is clean. He’s been a New York businessman for more than a decade, and he’s got more money than God. There isn’t even a whiff of rumor attached to his name.”
“But…”
Val whirled on her. “I don’t have a choice, Beth! You’ll be starting the fall semester in a couple of months. Without that job, I can’t pay your tuition.”
“So?” Beth leaned forward and
braced her hands on her knees, her young face taking on a determined scowl. “I want to go to the art institute, but not bad enough for you to get mixed up with a crook.”
“You’re going to college, dammit!” She clenched her fists until her fingers went white. “You have talent, and you’re going to get the training to make the best use of it you can. I don’t care how many jerks try to scare me off, and I don’t care what axe they have to grind. I’m not failing you.”
* * *
“There’s got to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” Staring into the mirror, Cade ran a razor over his jaw. Though he could see his own reflection, he couldn’t see Abigail’s as she floated behind him; unlike him, she was pure spirit. He’d always been amused by the legends that insisted vampires had no reflection. God knew there was nothing spiritual about them. “I even called. Val was asleep, so I tried to put the fear of God into Beth. Unfortunately, Val’s not going to listen to her. She needs that job too much.” Tilting his head, he stroked the razor down his cheekbone. “Which means Ridgemont has to be dead before she flies in tomorrow night.”
“So get to her first. If you made her a vampire, she’d be able to amplify your power enough to beat Ridgemont.”
“Maybe.” Cade ran the razor under the faucet’s stream, washing away foam and the remnants of his beard shadow. “Or maybe he’d hack off my head and kill you both.”
“He’d be a little late in my case, considering I died a hundred and fifty-six years ago.”
He gave the ghost an annoyed glower. “You know what I mean. And you know what he can do.”
“I’m willing to take the chance.” Her little face hardened.
“I’m not.” He turned back to the mirror and studied his own grim features. “Risking my life is one thing. Risking your soul is something else.”
“You’re not risking your life, Cade. You’re throwing it away.”
“I can’t think of a better cause.”
“If you Changed her…”
“But I won’t, and I’m going to make damn sure nobody else does either. We’ve done enough to that girl as it is.” He took a towel off the black marble rack and wiped away the last traces of shaving cream as he turned toward the ghost.
She wore the same determined expression he remembered from his boyhood. Even at thirteen, Abigail could have taught stubborn to a field mule. “The only thing you did was save her life. It was Ridgemont and Hirsch who did the killing. And they’d have killed her too if you hadn’t gotten her out of there. The way I see it, she owes you.”
Cade shook his head as he walked past her into the bedroom. “If she does, I’m not collecting. She hates vampires, and I’m damned if I’m going to make her one. I want her to have a normal life. Kids. A husband.” Never mind the fist that clutched his heart at the thought of Valerie with another man.
Abigail floated after him. “Do you really think she’d want Cowboy to die for her?”
Striding to the closet, Cade pulled out one of the chauffeur’s uniforms that hung in neat rows. He tossed it on his bed, then pulled out the starched white shirt that went with it. “Look, I know you don’t like this, but I don’t have a choice. Ridgemont’s got to die, and since he has seven hundred years on me, there aren’t a lot of ways I can kill him.”
“But --”
“I’m sick of this, Abigail!” he exploded, slinging the hanger across the room. “I was that bastard’s slave for one hundred and thirty-three years. I’ve finally broken his control, but I can’t leave because he’d track me down, kill me, and destroy you. And God knows what he’d do to Valerie.” Quickly, angrily, he jerked on his shirt. “Tonight he dies -- even if I go with him.”
Chapter Two
Cade stepped out into the mansion’s opulent hallway and closed the door behind him. Thick plush carpet sank under his booted feet as he put on his chauffeur’s cap and straightened his gray tunic with a jerk. Before he could turn, someone bumped him hard from behind.
Surprised, he pivoted just as a woman stumbled past. He glimpsed a white profile, dazed eyes, and a thin trickle of blood flowing from twin punctures in her throat. She faltered, sagged against the carved wainscoting, then pulled herself upright and started down the sweeping staircase that led to the mansion’s lower level.
Watching her descend, Cade stiffened. Just below the hem of her short skirt, red slashes marked her shapely legs. She’d been beaten across the thighs with a riding crop hard enough to draw blood. And he knew damn well who’d done it.
With a growl of fury, he turned just as Gerhard Hirsch stepped out of his own suite across the hall.
Lifting an elegant hand, Hirsch smoothed the blond waves of his hair. There was a smear of blood at the corner of the German’s wide mouth, and his gray eyes glittered with power from the aftermath of his feeding. Shooting the cuffs of his elegant gray suit, he started down the hall after the woman he’d abused.
It had been almost eight decades, but Hirsch still walked with the Master Race swagger of the Gestapo officer he’d been when Ridgemont Turned him.
Cade took one long stride to meet him and slammed his fist into that perfect chin. The impact sent the German stumbling backward with a startled yelp. Cade snarled and followed, fists bunched.
Hirsch caught himself against the wall and threw up a forearm to block any punches to that perfect face. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded, wiping blood from his split lip.
“I’m sick of watching you abuse every woman with the bad luck to cross your path.” Rage lengthened Cade’s canine teeth into fangs. He pushed closer as Hirsch retreated a wary step. “How long has it been since I showed you what I can do with a bullwhip, Gerhard? Maybe a cut for every stripe you just gave that girl…”
Unease flickered in the German’s eyes before he drew his muscled body to its full six-foot-six-inch height. “Try it, McKinnon,” he spat. “It won’t be that easy this time. I’m not a fledgling anymore.”
“Maybe not, but you’re not free either.” Cade gave him a taunting smile. “I am.”
Hirsch stiffened. He still lived in Ridgemont’s thrall, unable to disobey any mental command his vampire sire gave him. “My freedom will come.”
“You’ll lick Ridgemont’s boots for another century. Maybe two.”
A low laugh rumbled from the other end of the hallway. Cade’s muscles coiled in involuntary reaction to a sound he’d associated with suffering for almost a century and a half.
“It’s been seventy-seven years, boys. Isn’t it time you learned to get along?” Ridgemont strolled toward them. His power beat against Cade’s psychic shields with an evil so intense it seemed to squirm. “I keep expecting to come in and find one of you has killed the other.” He paused an artistic beat and smiled. “At least wait until I’m around to watch.”
Ridgemont was four inches shorter than Cade, but his wool Armani suit was generously cut to accommodate the bull shoulders he’d built swinging a broadsword with Richard the Lionheart. His blunt, scarred face appeared no more than thirty-five, but something in those eyes was older than the Eden snake.
He gave Cade a slow smile. “I’ll be going out tonight. A… date with Elle. You will drive, of course, but perhaps you’d care to join us for the festivities?”
Cade remembered the last time he’d been forced to participate in one of the ancient’s hunts. “Sorry, I don’t find screams arousing.”
“It’s not the screams,” Hirsch said. “It’s the shamed moans afterward.” His grin gleamed white and repellent against his sharply handsome face. “Enough power to gorge on.”
“Some of us can get a reaction from a woman without resorting to torture,” Cade told him. “Try making one of them come once in a while -- if you can.”
Hirsch’s lips drew back from his teeth, but before he could retort, Ridgemont cut him off. “Ah, but wait until Valerie arrives. Now, that one will be truly delicious,” he said, in that velvet rumble that made Cade’s skin crawl. “You h
ave no idea what it’s like to take a woman who is one of us, my spawn. The pleasure… no mortal woman can match it. And the Change itself -- that first, deep feeding, so rich with the taste of terror. Then the final voluptuous surrender as you force her mind…” The ancient sighed like a gourmet contemplating some particularly rare French delicacy. “It’s a pity so few can survive the transformation. I’ve had only a handful of vampire lovers in eight hundred years.”
“Too bad you couldn’t resist the impulse to kill them all,” Cade said, his face expressionless.
Ridgemont shrugged. “I have a low tolerance for female defiance. Still, Valerie should last at least a century. And she’ll give me such power… Perhaps enough to bring even you to heel.”
Cade didn’t flinch; it was an empty threat. Even if his plan failed, the ancient would kill him for making the attempt.
His sire tilted his head, contemplating him in a way that made his muscles tense. “It’s fortunate you resisted the urge to kill her, all those years ago.”
It damn well hadn’t been an urge. It had been a psychic compulsion Ridgemont himself had planted after starving Cade for two weeks. Then the ancient had cut Valerie until the smell of flowing blood had ripped away what little sanity, he’d had left. “Yeah,” Cade gritted. “Luckily, I’m stronger than you expected.”
“Indeed,” Ridgemont said, with a slight smile. “I must admit, I was impressed that you managed to resist the temptation. But I’ve always wondered, McKinnon --” he dropped his voice to a suggestive purr “-- just how close did you come to ripping out that soft little throat?”
Cade managed not to flinch.
“You look a little white around the lips, gunslinger,” the ancient observed in the cool, cultured voice that had fooled so many into thinking he was civilized. He took a step closer until the lapels of his suit jacket brushed the front of Cade’s chauffeur’s uniform. “I’ve always wondered what would have happened if you’d lost that particular battle.” One corner of his mouth kicked up in a cruel smile. “I suspect killing that child would have snapped you like a bird’s wing. Then I could have made you do… anything.”
Forever Kisses Volume 1 Page 2
