AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I tried to turn around—to leave, or maybe to touch him, too, I wasn’t real clear on motives right then—but he wouldn’t let me. He pulled one of my arms around his neck, causing my body to arch outward. His eyes met mine in the mirror, daring me to look away as his fingers smoothed over my stomach, around my navel, and then began to card possessively through my curls.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I, even though I knew I should stop this. We were looking at a whole world of complicated here, and not just because of my varied hang-ups. I somehow didn’t think the vampire community was going to be too pleased when their former golden boy showed up with a dhampir girlfriend. Not when he was already hanging by a thread.
Until a few weeks ago, Louis-Cesare had been a leading member of the European Senate, one of the ruling bodies for the vampire community, like the North American Senate was for ours. And he hadn’t been just any old member, but their Enforcer, the position that did exactly what its name implied. Powerful, respected, even feared—in vampire terms he’d had it all.
Including a secret that, two weeks ago, brought it all down.
It turned out that the lover he’d had for centuries wasn’t his lover at all. She was a revenant, a woman he had tried to save from an early death by making her a vampire, only to have the process go terribly, tragically wrong. It had left her dangerously mad and him with a legal obligation as her maker to end her life. Instead, wracked by guilt, he had kept her with him, violating one of the most important vampire laws in the process. And when her hatred of her own kind finally led her to try to destroy the Senate, the truth came out, and Louis-Cesare had been in a world of trouble.
A lesser vampire would have probably gotten the ax—literally. Louis-Cesare just got it figuratively, losing his position on the Senate and remaining under a cloud of suspicion. But in vampire terms, that was bad enough, because they aren’t big on third chances. The last thing he needed was another unsuitable lover.
The last thing he needed was me.
But it didn’t look like he saw it that way, judging by how his grip had tightened. A knee spread my legs from behind, and a hand grasped my thigh, pulling it up and draping it over his, laying me open. His eyes darkened, blue shadowed to charcoal to almost black as his fingers began to fondle, to explore, making me watch as he pleasured me until my own eyes closed again in desperation.
The only reason dhampirs weren’t the lowest rung of vampire society was that we weren’t even on the ladder. We weren’t supposed to exist—the whole dead thing playing hell with fertility—and were conceived only through some pretty bizarre circumstances. In my case, my father had been cursed with vampirism, rather than bitten, and the curse
took a few days to complete the transformation. Leaving him plenty of time to sire an abomination that, like the hated revenants, was supposed to be put down as soon as he learned of its existence.
Luckily for me, Mircea had a major family fixation and a bad habit of ignoring rules he found inconvenient. He also had the devil’s own luck at getting away with things others paid dearly for. Others like Louis-Cesare. Who had somehow managed to find the only girlfriend the Senate would hate more than his last one.
His hands slid over me, my breasts, my belly, my mound, moving easily across my sweat-slick skin. His tongue ran up my neck to my ear, hot breath ruffling my brain, teeth tugging on my lobe. He bit down just as his fingers made a move inside me that shot sparks straight up my spine. My body bucked against him, clenching desperately in unwanted pleasure.
I squirmed, my hand tightening in his hair, holding on as the turmoil in my mind and the pleasure in my body tried their best to drive me crazy. I wanted to shove him out the window for his own good; I wanted to drag him to the bed for mine. I wanted to shut the door in his face and never see him again; I wanted to sink my teeth into his neck, scarring him, putting a claim on him that everyone could see. I wanted to scream at him for being stupid, and stubborn, and for not understanding that, yes, it did matter what people thought if those people could kill you. That sometimes the rules did apply, even to ex-senators, maybe especially to ex-senators. I wanted to curl up with him under the covers and forget the world existed and whisper stupid shit that didn’t matter because life wasn’t a fucking fairy tale and it never had a goddamn happy ending and—and—
And my thoughts fractured, the room spun, and I came with a sound of pure desperation.
Which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t the best idea when you live with a bunch of sensorially gifted creatures. Who, it seemed, couldn’t tell the difference between a cry of passion and a cry of pain. As was demonstrated when the bedroom door suddenly blew off its hinges and Louis-Cesare flew backward and disappeared.
Leaving me blinking in confusion at the new, vampire-shaped hole in my dresser.
And my closet.
And my wall.
Which were less noticeable than you might think with an eight-hundred-pound dragon taking up most of the space in the room.
For a moment, it looked at me, and I looked at it, and the dozen or so blond-haired fey swarming into the room through the door looked at both of us. And then a slight tinge of amethyst slowly suffused the delicate scales covering the beast’s cheekbones as it took in my lack of clothes—and blood and gore and missing limbs. “Oops?” it said gruffly, before melting back into my very embarrassed redheaded roommate.
I snatched my robe closed and plunged through my destroyed furniture and fluttering bits of wallpaper, into a closet that was now a wreck of plaster and hanging two-by-fours. And found that, yes, the hole did go completely through the house. Parts of my wardrobe were scattered all over the side lawn, with most of my bras for some reason decorating the neighbor’s fence. But that was better than what had happened to my boyfriend, who had ended up—
Oh, shit.
“Dory, what—oh,” Claire said in a small voice, coming to stand beside me.
Being two stories up, we had a perfect view of the car that had just pulled into the grassy drive along the side of the house, probably because it couldn’t fit anywhere else since it was a stretch limo. A stretch limo that now had a naked vampire sticking out of the ruined windshield, firmly wedged between the wipers and the mirror. Right in front of a driver whose usual icy sangfroid had been shattered by an up-close-and-personal view of the world’s greatest ass.
At least it can’t get any worse, I thought, and then three more vamps piled out of the backseat. And came around the car. And looked at Louis-Cesare, who was ignoring them in favor of staring up at me, an unreadable expression on his face.
“Should I apologize?” Claire asked, sounding worried.
“That…probably wouldn’t be the best idea right now,” I said calmly, looking down at two Senate members and a senator’s brother.
I was debating the odds that I could come up with some story to explain an underwear-strewn yard and a naked master vampire, when the brother looked up. “Oh, they do this sort of thing all the time,” he said, responding to some question I hadn’t heard. He shaded his eyes, and then a smile broke out over his handsome features. “Oh, there you are. Hello, Dory!”
He waved.
The other vampires turned to look at me, and I gave up. I went back into the bedroom, which had miraculously cleared of fey. Except for the one behind me, biting her lip.
