Her hand left his face and blindly felt the side of her throat. She probed the wound, and her fingers came away wet with blood. She rubbed the tips together. “He bit me.” Her voice had a faraway quality to it, and her emotions were…numb.
But Kohl was far from feeling such a lack of sensation. “He claimed you as his to feed on,” he repeated. Disgust and disbelief dripped from his voice. Not toward her. Never at her. No. This was aimed all at himself as the urge to put her fingers in his mouth and suck off the blood that smelled so fucking good, to sink his fangs deep into her throat, nearly overcame any other thought in his head. The instinct was so strong, he very nearly acted on it without thinking. But he caught himself just in time.
He knew who had done this. There was only vampire it could possibly be. Still, he wanted to be sure. The attack earlier was little more than a red haze in his mind. He caught her eyes with his. “Devon, who bit you?”
Anxious eyes searched for and found his. “I don’t know. I’d never met him before. He wasn’t at the club the other night. Or at least I never saw him.”
“What did he look like?”
She frowned. “Um...like a vampire. Black eyes, fangs.” He could see her struggling to remember, and tried to be patient. Rushing her wouldn’t help anything. “No. He only had one fang. The other one was broken, or removed or something. Light skin. Long, dark hair. Oh! And I think he was wearing a jean vest?”
Something way beyond anger rose within him, temporarily burying the instinct to feed beneath the more immediate need to smash his fist into Jaz’s face until he felt bones turn to powder beneath his knuckles, right before he ripped off the bastard’s dick and shoved it down his own throat. “Jaz.” Kohl closed his eyes, reigning in the violence surging through him. It wasn’t like him to feel such rage toward another. Especially not someone like Jaz. He felt the softness of Devon’s palm on his cheek, then his jaw, and then the side of his neck.
“I wish I could see better in the dark.”
Her sultry voice, tinged with worry, combined with her hand wandering lightly over his shoulder to feel his bare chest, and lower, instantly distracted him and intensified his lust. But not for Jaz’s blood.
For her.
He caught her wrist before she found out how much she affected him. Somewhere at the edge of his consciousness he realized the rain had stopped. “Devon, we need to get to shelter before the sun comes up.”
“What’s wrong? Everything’s okay. You didn’t hurt me. Why are you so upset?” She pulled her arm from his grip and touched his face. “I can’t see very well, but I can feel it. The strain in your expression. The tension in your muscles.” Her fingers wandered over his mouth and one finger skimmed his fang. “This. It’s just a bite. It’ll heal…right?”
It would be easy. It would be so easy. All he had to do was bite down, just a little, and the tip of his fang would pierce her fingertip and he would be able to taste her.
With a moan, he pulled his head back out of her reach. “We need to go.” Jaz had her blood in his system. He’ll be looking for them, and if they didn’t get the fuck out of there, he would find them. And who knows what he’ll do in his state of mind? “We need to go, Dev.”
“I don’t think you mean that.”
“You’re wrong. I do.”
“Then why won’t you let me sit up?” She smiled. “Are you embarrassed that I’ll see you naked? Because trust me, honey, from what I can tell by looking at you in your clothes, you don’t have a damn thing to worry about in that department.”
With a start, Kohl realized that not only did he have her trapped between his arms as he leaned over her, pressing her down with his weight, but his leg was thrown intimately between hers. He closed his eyes, but he couldn’t bring himself to move away. “No. It’s not that. I’m a shifter. I’m used to it.”
“Then why?”
His voice was barely above a whisper when he painfully admitted, “Because I want it to be me.” He pulled air into his lungs, and repeated his confession, louder. “I wanted it to be me.”
He heard the rush of her blood with each rapid beat of her heart, so easily discernible to his vampire hearing, and knowing how he affected her only made it worse. The scent of her desire filled his nose, intensifying the lure of her. With a moan, Kohl dropped his forehead to hers.
Her hands tightened on his shoulders. “What does it mean? When you say he claimed me? It’s not just that he bit me. Is it?”
He studied her face. Her eyelids were dark, the lids heavy, her lips slightly parted. Her tongue peeked out to wet the bottom one.
“No.”
“What does it mean?”
Her damp sweater was warm, heated from their skin. The soft wool grazed his nipples when he shifted closer, sending a shot of lust straight to his groin, scattering his thoughts. It took him a few seconds to compose himself. “He drank from you. Your blood is in his system.”
“What does that mean, Kohl?”
He tried breathing through his mouth. “It means we need to get the fuck out of here, before he finds us. If he gets anywhere within a couple of miles of you, your blood will call to him and he’ll be able to track you like a hunting dog.”
But she was shaking her head before he’d finished his sentence. “You need to fix it. How do we fix it?”
He continued to breathe in and out of his mouth. All it did was make his mouth water. “I can’t fix it.” Because the only way to fix it was for him to override Jaz’s claim with his own, and that wasn’t fixing it. That was just transferring the right to her blood from one vampire to another.
