“What the hell?”
“It’s you, Val,” Cade told her. “You did it. You’re in my body.”
Her eyes snapped open. Straightening with a jerk, Val looked up at Cade a little wildly.
“Damn,” he said. “We lost it.”
She pulled away from him, blinking. “What just happened? I don’t…”
“We fused.” He reached out to brace her as she staggered. “Your consciousness was in my body.”
The hair rose on the back of her neck. “What about my body?”
“Do you really think I’d let you do anything that would hurt you?”
“Well, no. But I still don’t get what happened to me.”
“When our minds fused, you passed out. Your autonomic nervous system continues to function, though, operating your heart and lungs and everything else. A doctor examining you would probably think you were in a coma.”
“My mind left my body?” Val didn’t like the sound of that.
He shook his head. “No, but the link is so deep it seems to. As soon as we separate, you regain consciousness.”
She eyed him unhappily. “This is scaring the hell out of me, Cade.”
“Unfortunately, it’s the only way we have a chance in hell of killing Ridgemont.”
“But what if we can’t?” She swallowed, remembering that terrifying dream. “What if we lose?”
“I’ll get killed.” Cade shrugged. “Fortunately, if I die when we’re fused, it won’t kill you -- it’ll just throw you consciousness back into your body.”
She glowered and fisted her hands on her hips. “To a very short life as Ridgemont’s sex toy. Not that I’d care, with you dead.”
“Do you want to back off from this?”
“He wouldn’t let us even if I did.” Val smiled tightly. “Besides, it doesn’t take telepathy to know you’ve never run from a fight in your life.”
He looked down at her, his dark eyes solemn. “I’d run from this one to keep you alive.”
“Yeah, well, the only way to do that is kick Ridgemont’s undead butt.” She sighed. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Try it again.” Cade stepped against her and slid his arms around her waist. “At least this particular method has its charms.” Smiling, he lowered his head and took her mouth with his. She reached for him, with her arms and her mind.
And became one with him.
The next thing Val knew, she was looking down at her own unconscious face. “This is just too creepy.” The words came out in Cade’s deep voice.
“Don’t do that,” he said, swinging her body easily into his arms. She was startled at how light she felt. “Look, don’t try to do anything at first, okay? Just watch…” He stumbled and caught himself. “Or you’ll trip me. My muscles can only obey one set of commands at a time. Besides, you’re not used to running a body this size.”
“I hope the neighbors aren’t watching, or they’ll think you’re talking to yourself,” she told him, switching to mental communication.
“It’s so dark, they can’t see a damn thing back here. And a good thing, too.” He carried her inside and laid her down on the living room couch. As he straightened, he looked down at the slim, pale woman on the couch.
“That does not look like me,” Val said.
“It’s really disconcerting to hear my voice saying somebody else’s sentences.”
“Sorry. Do I really look like that? I’m… small.”
“You’re used to seeing yourself from close up in the mirror, Val. Different perspective. Besides, I’m six inches taller than you are. Compared to me, you are small.”
“Should I get a boob job?”
An image flashed through his mind of her round, bare breast just before his mouth closed around her nipple. “No. You’re perfect.”
“That wasn’t a comment, I was just thinking. You know, sometimes thoughts just flash through your mind that you don’t want to share with the world.”
“I’ll remind you of that the next time some really stacked blonde walks by.”
Wickedly, she pictured a pig with fangs and a vampire cape.
“Yeah, well, you seem to have developed a taste for bacon, darlin’, so you’re just gonna have to live with it. Let’s get to work.”
As he headed back outside, she wondered how close she had to be for the link to work.
“I’m not sure,” Cade replied. “We could experiment and see. I think it depends on how strong we are.”
“We’d better find out. I’d hate for us to get out of range in the middle of the fight.”
“Good point.” He frowned as he stepped out onto the yard. Val was instantly distracted by the rich, floral scent of spring in the air. “Pay attention,” he told her. “We’re going to start with a series of katas.”
She was unfamiliar with the word, but she knew its meaning from his memories: martial arts routines designed to drill skills until they became automatic. “Why does somebody who can bench press a Hummer need to study karate?”
“When you’re planning to fight an eight-hundred-year-old immortal, you study any damn thing you can.” Cade slid into the drill, his body moving fluidly as he threw punches and kicks at imaginary opponents. He’d begun practicing the various martial arts in the 1970s, and he no longer had to think about what he was doing.
For Val it was profoundly disconcerting to see a long, thickly muscled arm or leg piston out instead of the slimmer, shorter one her mind insisted should be there.
And the sheer animal speed and power of his body was amazing. Feeling him move, experiencing the intense concentration and discipline he’d built over the decades -- it all touched off a slow, hot burn of arousal in Val. She wanted to savor that hard, delicious strength sliding into her, taking her…
He stopped in his tracks. “Val, if you don’t cut that out, I’m going to have to go back inside and ride that delicious little body of yours. Whether you’re in it or not.” There was a sensation of heat and heaviness in his groin she suddenly realized was a rock-hard erection.
“Oh,” she said, mortified. “I’m sorry!”
“No, you’re not. And I’m not either. But we really need to get this down before we play.”
Trying to distract herself, Val focused on watching everything around them as he went back to his katas. But that only deepened her disorientation, since Cade’s vampire senses were even more acute than her own. The night was full of rustles and chittering and scuttling sounds she’d never heard before, while the air was redolent with smells she couldn’t identify. Even the trees and grass looked strange, each leaf and stem visible in the darkness.
Yet to Cade, it was all familiar. He knew that furtive rustle was a cat slipping over the lawn behind them. And that sharp, musky smell meant a possum had waddled through three or four hours earlier.
“Three or four hours? You can smell something that went by three or four hours ago?”
“Well, yeah.” There was an undercurrent of Can’t everyone? to the thought. It had been so long since Cade had looked at the world through mortal senses that he no longer remembered what it was like.
Suddenly Val had the dizzying sensation that she was becoming something not human. And it would only become worse as the years went on. Opening her eyes, she looked up at the living room ceiling, back in her own body again.
“Val?”
“Give me a minute.” She sat up on the couch, staring down at her hands as she laced her fingers together. She’d never noticed how delicate and thin they were compared to Cade’s huge paws. After the past half hour in his head, her own body felt like a stranger.
“Val, we have to do this.”
She looked up to see him standing in the doorway and felt the punch of vertigo. For the first time in her life, she knew what it really felt like to be somebody else. “I can never go back to what I was. I feel like I’m losing myself.”
“No, Val. You’re not. You’re stronger than you think. Hell, you’re the strongest
person I know. As time goes on, you’ll find yourself settling into being a vampire. It won’t seem so strange then.”
He walked over to sit down beside her and pick up one of her hands, clasping it between his own. Val curled her fingers into his and leaned against his muscled shoulder. She could feel him reining in his impatience, his drive to master this new skill so he could reach the goal he’d been working toward for the past one hundred and thirty-eight years.
Killing Ridgemont was more than an obsession to him, she realized, understanding him in a whole new way now that she’d been him. For Cade, slaying the ancient was a holy calling. His offer to run from the fight with his obsession revealed how much he loved her.
“What if we can’t do it?” she asked softly, the memory of the dream tormenting her. “What if I can’t do it? I don’t want to get you killed.”
Cade opened his mouth, then shut it and sighed. “I started to give you a rah-rah ‘buck up’ speech, but you know I’m not any more certain of pulling this off than you are. I just know we aren’t going to get a damn thing done sitting on this couch. C’mere.”
He didn’t mean physically. She gritted her teeth and launched herself into his mind, then watched while he rearranged her limp form on the couch.
“You’re going to have to start doing it with me,” he told her as he headed outside to begin another kata. “The idea is to amplify each other, so we have to work together.”
Cade stepped into the first move of the kata. She tried to move with him, but halfway into the turn his left leg locked. They hit the ground with a jarring thud.
“Dammit, Val, my…” he began, at the same time she said, “I’m sorry!” His mouth froze open, his throat locked, and a deep, grating sound came from his chest. She quit trying to talk, and Cade exploded, “…muscles can only obey one set of commands at a time!”
“Look, I’ve never done this before! What do you expect?”
His anger collapsed. “Ah, hell. I know this is difficult. We’re just going to have to learn to get synchronized.”
What if they did that fighting Ridgemont?
“We won’t,” he told her, reading her fear. “Once we drill long enough, it will become second nature.”
“How much time is that going to take, Cade?”
“I have no idea.”
“We’d better get started, then.”
Chapter Nineteen
They worked for hours, spinning, punching, kicking -- and often falling on Cade’s face -- until the sweat ran off his body and bruises mottled his skin. Gradually he began to move more smoothly as she learned the trick of merging so deeply with him, she was no longer even aware of herself.
Finally, he stopped, sweating and breathing hard. “I think that’s enough. We’ll work on the strength amplification tomorrow night.”
With a sigh, Val let go and opened her eyes to stare at the living room ceiling. The aches and exhaustion that had been building for hours were suddenly gone. In their place was a long, deep throb in her skull, a vicious headache that seemed to have appeared from nowhere.
The French doors opened and Cade limped in. His dark hair stood straight up, and his knee was bleeding from a nasty scrape. She sat up, making room as he trudged over to drop down on the couch. Knowing what he’d been craving for the past hour, she rose and headed to the kitchen to grab a couple of beers from the refrigerator.
“I think I got the better end of this deal.” Handing one of the delightfully cold cans to him, she popped the top on the other and took a sip. “We work your ass off, and I’m completely rested.” She felt another nasty throb. “Except for a killer headache.”
He downed the beer in one long, rippling swallow. Crunching the can in his hand, he said, “Wait till we fight Ridgemont.”
She winced.
* * *
Despite her relative lack of injuries, Val found herself feeling so battered, a shower was in order. But when she walked into the master bathroom, her gaze fell on the enormous garden tub that sprawled next to one of those gorgeous stained-glass windows. Around the tub stood bayberry candles in crystal bowls, while a bottle of peach-scented bubble bath sat on the tub’s tile surround. Evidently Camille had left them behind.
Acting on impulse, Val stripped, ran a tub of deliciously hot water, poured in a generous quantity of bubble bath, and lit the candles. With a sigh of sheer, voluptuous pleasure, she sank into the water and leaned back, closing her eyes. The pop and hiss of tiny bubbles filled her vampire senses as the silken flow of water caressed her skin. God, I needed this.
Relaxing into the heat and scent, she let herself half-float as her headache drained away.
Cade’s velvety voice purred, “Mmmm. A naked redhead in bubbles.”
Val opened one eye. He stood in the doorway, a delicate champagne flute in each big hand, wearing nothing but a wicked smile. She felt a sweet, hot tingle just looking at him. “A naked vampire and champagne,” she said, watching him stroll into the room. “I didn’t know we drank… wine.”
“We drink all kinds of things,” he told her, handing her both glasses. “If you’ll allow me to join you, I’ll demonstrate.”
“Come on in, if you don’t mind smelling like peaches.” She sat up and scooted forward to let him get into the tub behind her. Cade slipped in and settled into the water, which sloshed alarmingly near the tub rim. Val settled back against his hard chest with a sigh of pure delight, then handed him one of the flutes. He tilted the glass up for a sip, the relaxed under her. “God, I needed this.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“Sorry about the slave-driver bit. I’m a little wired when it comes to Ridgemont.”
She twisted her head around to look up into his face with a wicked smile. “Ya think?”
“Smartass.”
“In any case” -- Val stopped to drink a sweet, bubbling mouthful of the champagne -- “I don’t want to hear the ‘R’ word any more tonight. I just want to loll around in bubbles and candlelight and be hedonistic.”
He put down his glass on the floor beside the tub and reached around to gently brush his thumbs over her soft nipples. Instantly, they peaked and began to blush. “Is this what you had in mind?”
“Mmm.” Purring at the rise of pleasure, she let her head drop back against his shoulder. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“What a bad, bad girl you are.” Slowly, lazily, he stroked and tugged the little pink tips until they were stiff and rosy.
They weren’t the only things, either. Val could feel him hardening against her back. She bit her lip and moaned.
“You know, I really like bad, bad girls. Especially when they have such pretty breasts,” he rumbled in her ear.
She stroked his hard, strong thighs under the water, enjoying the delicate currents that swirled around her fingers. “You’re pretty bad yourself, Cowboy.”
“Oh, you have no idea. But you will.”
Murmuring dark, hungry words, they curled together, stroking and touching, listening to the pop of soap bubbles, inhaling the scent of sex and peaches. “I love you,” Cade said, his fingers sliding between her pussy lips, stroking and circling the firm little nub of her clit until she gasped. “No matter what else happens, never forget that.”
“And I… I love you,” she panted, lust stoked to a blaze by the way his free hand toyed with one nipple as he delved deeper into her pussy. “Loving you, knowing you -- it’s worth the risk. It’s worth it all. Even knowing we’ll have to fight --”
“Don’t say that bastard’s name. There’s no room in this tub for anybody but us.” He managed to roll her beneath him, though water sloshed out onto the tile floor as they rearranged themselves. Bubbles popping around her shoulders, she smiled hotly up at him.
Staring into her eyes, Cade slid into her in a long, hot stroke that tore a hum of delight from her lips.
As their gazes locked, Cade began to surge against her in slow, driving thrusts that sent more bath water spilling onto the tile flo
or. Dazzled, she watched him, memorizing the strong lines of his face in the glow of the candlelight.
He leaned down and took her mouth in a kiss that tasted of champagne, sex -- and desperation. She kissed him back as she felt her climax building with every long cock stroke. Until he spilled her burning over the edge into a long, rolling orgasm, then followed her down, blazing.
* * *
“I’ve got a feeling this is going to suck,” Val told him two nights later. They’d learned to move as one as she got the hang of sensing his next move, anticipating his punches and kicks. But what he had in mind now was a lot more complicated. “It’ll be a miracle if we don’t break every bone in your hand.”
“Not if we do it right.” Carefully, Cade positioned the safe door against the massive oak. He’d picked out the foot-thick chunk of solid steel at a scrap yard earlier in the day, then paid the owner and told him they’d be back for it later, after they got a crew together to transport it.
The “crew” consisted of himself and Val, though they were careful not to let anyone see them pick up the door when they returned that evening. It weighed close to a ton, and they’d had to borrow a neighbor’s pickup truck to transport it. As it was, the vehicle had sunk on its wheels when they’d loaded the door onto it.
Val was still a little shaken at how easy it had been to lift the damn thing.
“By myself, I could dent a door like this, but not much more,” Cade told her as he sank into a martial-arts horse stance, squared off in front of the thick steel slab, knees bent, weight perfectly centered. “Ridgemont could put his fist through it. We have to be able to do the same.”
She winced and thought longingly of her own body, lying unconscious on the couch. “This is going to hurt.”
“Pain is good for you.”
“No, it’s not. That’s why they call it pain. Normal people avoid it.”
Forever Kisses Volume 1 Page 26
