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Something primitive stirred in him at the way she said it. His attention locked on her soft lips, how she swallowed under his steady gaze.
"Entirely. No rights but what I give you." He fought back the overwhelming desire to sugarcoat it. He wanted this woman as his servant the way he craved blood. That alone was a warning to let her go. It made him sharpen his tone. "But I'm not the highest ranked in my world. There are others who will have the right to make demands of you and I...have to capitulate to them."
He cleared his throat at her unreadable look. "Tomorrow night will be my last day here. If you decide to come with me, I'll need your timetable for resigning and joining me at our facility in Alabama. If you don't choose to come with me..."
He hadn't been able to stop himself from reaching out, touching her face, the slim jaw, but then he drew his hand back, forced his tone to be as flat as if he were conducting a job interview. "If you don't come with me, it's been a pleasure working with you."
When he'd retired at dawn and replayed it all in his mind, he was sure she would decline. They'd only spent a few days together, after all.
Yet though her submissive nature and cravings were a bottomless pool he'd only begun to explore, he'd intuitively recognized them as a mesh with the extreme demands of the vampire world and the type of servants who inhabited it. But she was socially awkward to the point of charming shyness. On top of that, she was an accomplished scientist and a woman well integrated into a modern Western society. How could she possibly agree to such an offer? "Come with me -- you'll have a fabulous lab, but you'll also be a sex slave with no protection but what I can provide." It was ludicrous for him to expect her to agree to that.
She'd shown up at the lab on time the next evening, a little more quiet and hollow-eyed, telling him she hadn't slept. She hadn't addressed the question immediately, and he'd held his tongue, not wanting to push. He expected he was putting off her rejection as long as possible. They'd worked through the early hours with minimal conversation, but as the night progressed and they started trading data, looking over one another's shoulders and brainstorming what they were analyzing, their intuitive understanding of one another's thought processes overcame the awkwardness of things unsaid.
"If you were a second mark, we'd be in each other's heads. Think how much faster we could do the calculations and theorizing. And having a third mark...it's like sharing one mind."
He'd said it without thinking, fully caught up. He remembered how serious she'd gotten then. She'd paused a long moment. Then nodded to herself, as if she'd come to some type of irrefutable conclusion. Crossing the lab to where he sat on a stool, she moved between his spread knees. Her liquid brown eyes, framed by a fringe of lashes so black they made her look like she wore eyeliner, enhancing her pale, smooth face, had fixed onto his. Pulling her ponytail over her shoulder, she averted her chin in a delicate move, offering him her throat.
He was always a man who kept his passions under tight control. Yet when she offered her neck, he struck like a cobra, banding an arm around her waist and yanking her to him. She'd gasped, but her fingers had dug into his arms, holding fast. He'd felt her nipples peak against him, the insistence of her body revealing her response to his strength. He hadn't even thought to use the pheromone mix that could ease the burn of the second mark serum, for the pain just seemed to goad her pleasure. He surged off the stool, carrying her to the nearest wall with her legs wrapped around his hips.
He'd gotten the necessary clothes out of the way and thrust into her with his fangs still in her throat. No finesse, just sheer brute demand. She was as slick as if he'd had his mouth between her legs. Feeling the clamp of her cunt on his cock, the quiver of her spread thighs against his pelvis, he didn't ever want to stop.
"Third mark," she whispered in his ear. "Please. Do it."
Struggling for some rationality, he seized her hair, pulled her head back to stare into her eyes. "Do you understand what it all means?"
"It doesn't matter," she said. And then the second mark kicked in and he heard the first words directly from her mind. There's nothing I will ever want as much as you.
Christ.
Tuning back in to the present, Brian saw her step outside, taking a break in the little courtyard garden outside her lab. Lifting her head to the sun, she noticed how pretty the day was, blue skies and fluffy clouds, a bright sun. Another perk to having a servant was the ability to see the sun, enjoy it through her. She registered the heat on her skin as she inhaled the flowers in the garden. She thought about sitting down on one of the benches, taking a quick cat nap.
As she sank down on the bench, she took a breath. Then another. The hints of sadness he'd sensed suffused her like a flood. It almost drove him from her mind, an instinctive retreat from the unexpected crash of emotion.
Bowing her head, she began to weep.
What the hell? Earlier, he hadn't taken the time to penetrate the chaos in her mind to see the source of her distress, but now he was neck deep and refused to let himself turn away from it. He took those tentative steps into an area he hadn't allowed himself to go before. A moment later, he floundered in a labyrinth of emotions, the depth of which startled him.
In this sad, dark place in her subconscious, Debra apparently kept everything she felt wasn't appropriate to share with anyone else. Including him. He had an intuitive sense that this maze of tunnels and perilous chasms had been a manageable space at one time. But she'd kept carving further into herself, trying to bury it lower and lower, until she was tunneling through her core.
It was like ants weakening the root system of a tree. He felt her despair. Life wasn't worth living anymore, not if it was always going to be like this.
He had to bite back a startled response to that, a demand that she talk to him, explain this, not ever consider such a thing as...leaving him. As he brought himself under control, he wondered if she sensed him. She'd wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking, softly whispering his name, a chant of comfort.
Whenever he confronted a seemingly incomprehensible tangle of data, he would start from the outer edges and work his way inward. So he forced himself past her pain to find the entry point of her distress.
Her grandfather. He was ill, dying. As soon as Brian targeted that thought, he was overrun with images of the man. With Debra as a child, a teenager, at her graduation, whenever she accepted awards, when she earned her master's degree. Early on in their time together, Brian remembered her talking about the man, a prominent figure in any personal references about her life and family.
The mortality of a servant's family was a transition all servants endured. However, feeling it as she felt it made him feel far less detached from it. But
beyond that, what startled him was what surrounded all of it.
Debra was profoundly lonely.
That first night he spent in the lab with her, Debra had remained with him until dawn, even though he knew she was scheduled to work that day. When he'd protested, she'd said she wanted to make sure he didn't have any difficulties using the lab instruments. She'd also wanted the opportunity to learn as much as she could from him during his temporary visit. In between waiting on sample results, they'd talked of countless things. The colleague who had given him use of the lab had told him Debra was shy, would likely say less than ten words to him while he was there.
But the damn woman knows everything, Brian. I expect she'll be running the place in five years.
He wasn't disposed to being chatty while working himself, yet he couldn't seem to stop talking to her. During the daylight hours, he missed her, even in sleep. He regretted not being able to tell her everything she wanted to learn. For the first time since his maturity, he considered taking a full servant.
She wasn't close to the servants in the lab or on the estate. Jacob was probably her only true friend, though most the others treated her with kindness and respect. Like Brian himself, she tended to be in her head so much it was difficult for her to focus on the minutiae of small talk. The things that interested her the most she assumed no one else would want to talk about.
A smile touched his lips as he recalled her telling him how she'd dissected a variety of creatures through her childhood. Their lives had been claimed by circumstance -- road kill for the animals, natural lifespan for the insects. Even so, she'd relayed her mother's horror, the first time she'd discovered her daughter investigating a rabbit's intestines in their basement.
She was on the phone with a psychologist the next day, trying to figure out if I was a budding serial killer.
But he couldn't rationalize that it was a lack of friends making her so lonely now. He was sitting in the midst of that labyrinth, and all tunnels came back to him. Her Master. He'd thought that she fed herself adequately on what science and sex could offer, but her heart was as hungry as his would be without blood for a month.
