He typed out a quick text. Like to take you to dinner Sunday night. Place that has good music.
He closed the phone, put it aside. She was probably sleeping, wouldn't answer until later tonight. When she did, she'd probably tell him she'd already arranged to have musical entertainment at the bar, because he knew she was working on that. He wouldn't be surprised if she'd gotten Alan Jackson himself. The woman seemed capable of anything.
"Boss is grinning like he's thinking about a woman," Johnny said. "We know which one."
"Which is why we can't blame him for grinning like a fool." Kevin elbowed him. "She's only been here a few days and every man in the county has an eye for her."
Quinn scowled at that, and they all chuckled at his obvious displeasure.
"Looks like boss has already put his brand on her," Dave said.
If they only knew. Quinn thought it far more likely that Selene was thinking of putting a brand on his flanks. He better not plant that idea in her head, though his buttock gave an alarming little tingle at the idea, echoed by a turgid response from his cock. Yep, he'd definitely lost his mind.
"She seems to like him okay. Though she had Turley stay after hours last night and help her move some boxes around, and all he remembers about it is waking up with a smile on his face."
Quinn pinned him with a dark look. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing, boss." Kevin's face shifted to uncertainty. "We're just messing with you. I'm sure he was just helping her move boxes."
"Time to get back to work," Quinn said shortly, rising and picking up his hat. The butterfly had apparently had her rest. She lifted off, all the men likewise stirring themselves for the grueling afternoon ahead. Quinn watched the delicate creature float away, then returned to Midnight.
He couldn't explain his possessive feelings toward a woman he'd barely just met, but in truth, when he spent time with a woman, even if he wasn't planning to set up house together, he expected it to be just the two of them until one or the other called it quits. He put the image out of his mind of the husky Turley coming anywhere near that lush body, feeling the tips of her fangs at his throat...
Midnight snorted as he mounted and sat his ass in the saddle a little harder than he'd intended. "Sorry, boy."
He had a busy day ahead. His best strategy was to work himself into full exhaustion by the end of it so he wouldn't have enough energy to wind himself up over stupid shit like this.
*
Mission accomplished.
He barely got enough of a shower to wash off the muck before falling face forward into the bed. He'd contemplated just sleeping in the barn and saving the cleanup, but the bed was too inviting to pass up. Christ, his past life as a rodeo cowboy had a way of hitting him hard on the more strenuous ranch days. He wasn't twenty anymore, yet now he felt every stupid thing he'd done to himself between twenty and thirty.
He was an easy sleeper, his internal timer rigged to wake him up when it was time to get up. He didn't do a lot of waking up in the middle of the night. Unless something was amiss. His eyes opened in darkness, the clock reading two a.m. in his peripheral vision. And he knew he wasn't alone.
The funny thing was the lack of alarm he felt. He'd known it was her even before he'd opened his eyes, which suggested he was still sleeping, dreaming.
"Aren't vampires supposed to be invited before they come into someone's house?" he said groggily.
"That's a myth to make people feel safer." Selene gazed at him from the foot of his bed. "You wouldn't invite me into your home?"
"My house, my bed. Anywhere you want to be. How'd you get in?"
"Came down the chimney."
"Like Santa Claus. A sexy, blonde Santa."
As she moved around to the side of the bed, he saw her suppress a smile. He was so out of it, he was like a drunk, saying whatever came to mind. He turned toward her, biting back a groan at his stiff muscles, but he wanted to see her. She stopped just out of reach, still studying him. "You haven't come to me in three days. I got impatient."
"I wouldn't have been worth much to you. Been working my ass off. Probably not much good to you tonight."
"Turn over onto your stomach," she said.
He flashed on what she'd said on the phone, about fucking him that way. The surge of worry and anticipation woke him up a little more. But she didn't appear to be carrying any strap-ons with her. All she wore was a thin, short dress, and she was barefoot.
He complied and the mattress shifted as she slid onto it. She tugged his sheet all the way down. "You do sleep bare-assed naked," she said, amusement in her voice. "I like that."
Then she straddled his thighs and began to give him a massage, starting at his neck and shoulders and working her way down. It was fucking bliss. He practically whimpered but managed to choke back the unmanly sound. He realized when she sat down on his legs that he wasn't the only one bare-assed. She was naked under the dress. It made him realize, though she was any man's dream, she was not a dream. She was really here, in his room.
He turned, and she adjusted so he could be on his back, looking up at her. She stayed on his thighs, but he stretched out his longer arms, slid her up so he could take a better hold of her. It put her right on the length of his stiff cock, but that wasn't his intent. He just wanted her closer.
"Christ, I missed you," he murmured. "I wish I wasn't so tired."
She pressed her mouth against the palm he had cupping the side of her face, and then rotated her hips. His dick, brainless as it was, just got harder.
"Honey, I--" He couldn't do right by her tonight. But she'd come all the way out here. He needed to try.
"Ssh." She shook her head at him. "It's not a matter of you being able to give, Quinn. I'm your Mistress, and I take when and what I desire. It's that simple. You're going to learn I'm not going to be denied. Your only job is to follow the flow of the current."
She lowered herself onto his body, breasts against his chest, and rotated her hips again. She was able to fit the head of his cock into the mouth of her pussy, and then she was sliding down on him, inch by inch, her face so close to his. He stared up into her eyes, gripped her hips, and then he was hilt deep in her, her so still, their bodies fused together. The quiet darkness of the room closed around them. Powerful as his growing arousal was, the energy between their locked gazes was ten times that.
"I almost called you a hundred times."
"You should have."
"You have a bar to run. And I happen to know your boss is a real bastard."
She smiled at that, put her mouth on his. It was a slow, deep kiss, and he wondered if she lost herself in it as much as he did, because it seemed to go on for quite a while. They made incremental movements on one another, stoking that joining point down below, but their mouths nipped, played, flirted then dove deep, that all-absorbing rhythm of motion and timing to a really good kiss. By the time it was over, her hands were fisted in his hair and he had his arms banded across her back, one hand sliding down to cup her buttock, stroke the silk of it as she moved on him.
"You're heaven," he told her, too lost in a haze of exhaustion, arousal and half-sleep to worry about sounding stupid.
Her gaze softened. When she started to rise, he noticed she seemed a little unsteady. Tightening his hold to give her time to regain strength also kept her close. "What did you mean?" he asked, his voice a low rumble. "That night you said you couldn't feed from me because I wasn't a marked servant."
"I could have fed from you, but it was a little soon after the last time." She paused as if she was considering whether she wanted to explain. Or maybe if he was asking seriously or just yanking her chain. While he wasn't sure if he did believe any of it, he wasn't yanking her chain. The thought had drifted into his mind like everything else tonight. Random, unfiltered and yet somehow significant.
"At a certain age, most vampires consider taking a fully marked human servant. It lets them have a regular blood source, among other things." Her fin
gers whispered along his throat. "A vampire has to mark a human three times for him to be her full servant."
"You mean...drink from him three times?"
She shook her head. "A serum is released in the blood. It's best to do it three different times, because all together, they can be painful. In a not-so-good way." Her faint smile reminded him how he'd embraced the pain of the lash. "I've thought about that a lot," she murmured, following his thoughts there. "I want to do that to you again. I want to give you more pain, watch how hard it makes you."
She pulled the dress over her head, her hair funneling along her pale left shoulder as she finished the motion, let the garment flutter to the bedding beside them. He reached up, dove his fingers into the thick silk of her hair. Her vibrant blue eyes rested on his face, watching everything he was doing. His body was beat all to hell from the day, but he found he wanted to do everything to her, for her. Suddenly her words made more sense to him. "It's not a matter of you being able to give."
"I felt you here, even before I saw you in my room."
"That's the first mark." She paused, as if she'd thought better of having said that, but then lifted her shoulder, which caused an interesting movement with her breasts. He cupped the weight of one, enjoying the simple pleasure of stroking the curve. It really was like they were floating tonight. That edgy urgency that had brought them together before wasn't here, but that didn't make this less intense. Just intense in a different way that kept his throat thick, his movements dreamlike.
"I gave you the first mark, the other night. It's only a geographical locater. It tells me where you are, within a thousand miles or so."
"Is that all? The government's secret microchips do a better job than that."
When she made a face at him, he twined a lock of hair around his forefinger, splaying the others over her left breast. He did a slow, teasing pass over her nipple, watched it harden and her catch her lip in her teeth, felt her pussy contract on him. He wanted to do this all night, swim in languid arousal. "What do the other two marks do?"
"After a vampire gives the second mark, she can speak in her servant's head and allow him to hear her thoughts, when she wants him to do that."
"Hearing your voice in my head. That would be nice." He smiled absently and she caressed his jaw.
"You're half asleep, cowboy. No man wants a woman's voice in his head all the time. She'd devil him to death."
"True. But I think...when she's the right one, her voice is there all the time anyway. Right?"
She studied him. It was a surreal conversation, vampires and marks, but all of it fit together, in a way that fit her. He tried to grasp that, and was too sleepy. She stroked his face.
"You're a romantic, Quinn. I want to say it's unexpected, but it was obvious the first time I walked into your bar. You believe in things being how they should be, even if it's hard to find them set up that way."
Catching both his hands, she molded them around her breasts, a direction he was more than pleased to follow, kneading her curves, thumbing the nipples, lifting and bringing together the two curves as she made a sweet moan. He lifted his hips, embedded himself a little more deeply in her.
"When the third mark is given," she continued breathlessly, "a human becomes fully submissive to the vampire. Her property. She can hold his soul in her hand, crush it, possess it. His life force is linked to hers." Her gaze came back to his. "If she dies, he dies."
"I know a lot of old couples who would like that, so one of them isn't left behind." He sighed. "I think my folks worry about that now and then."
She tilted her head, the silken fall of her hair sweeping over one shoulder. "Where are they, your parents?"
"Happily living out their lives in a senior community in Arizona. When he was still working, they used to catch me on the rodeo circuit as often as they could." He'd seen a different side of his father then. The old man would never be a friend to his sons or offer praise easily, but showing up for those events and treating Quinn with rough approval had changed things. Though they couldn't find common ground as man and child, they'd made their peace with one another as men.
"They don't miss the ranch?"
"No. Surprised the hell out of me. But when Dad hit sixty-five he said he'd seen enough of horseshit and roughnecks and they headed for the place a lot of their friends had found."
"Your parents are close," she guessed. "They have that connection."
"Yes. I didn't get it for a long time, because he seemed so hard, but I guess the key was in how he listened to her even when he didn't seem to listen to anyone else. Love can be a powerful thing." He fixed his gaze on her.
Now her hands closed over his, stilling them. "It can't be like that for us," she said. "Vampires don't fall in love with humans. Humans are their servants."
"What if the human servant falls in love with the vampire?"
"That's acceptable, as long as the vampire isn't swayed by it, as long as she never forgets that the human is not her equal, that he belongs to her."
He studied her. "You believe that bullshit, that people--vampires, humans--can shut it down like that?"
"If they know that the alternative is far worse." The shadows that crossed her face had him sliding his hands to her shoulders.
"Come down here."
She gave him a look at that, as if she was going to put him in his place, tell him she was the one who gave the orders around here, but in the end she surprised him, letting him draw her down so her face was nestled against his throat. When both his arms banded around her, she slid hers under his shoulders, held on, their bodies now linked as intimately above as below. Maybe she was right about him being a romantic, because it felt more important, a stronger desire right now, just to hold her as close as he could, than to thrust to completion where he was buried to the hilt inside her.
"Have you...fed lately?" he asked.
Her fingers curled against his skin and he ran his hand down her bare back. When she didn't respond, he added, "It might just be the moonlight, but you look a little paler than usual."
Lifting his chin, he made it clear he was giving her better access. He stroked her cheek, applied pressure to guide her. Offering.
*
Selene could close her eyes and hear the thud of his heart, the coursing of blood through his veins. During broad daylight, she was sure he was still questioning her sanity, or determining how much of her vampire delusion he could handle. However here, in the shadows, with that touch and look, it was clear he'd already accepted what she was...what he was becoming to her.
She'd been told by other vampires it could happen this fast. Most of them had acquired their human servant within only a handful of days of meeting them, an unbreakable bond that could span over three hundred years. Vampires didn't indulge in romanticism, not when it came to humans, but Laurent had used those terms so she could understand.
"You were a human," his lip curled as if reacting to something distasteful, "so love at first sight is the closest approximate, though it has nothing else in common with that other than the quick ignition of the attraction. Lord Brian, who conducts scientific studies on vampires, says there may be some chemical inside certain humans that makes them more amenable to the idea of becoming a vampire's servant, and that chemical may attract vampires to them. In fact, in some of these chemically compatible humans, he's noted their libido increases considerably after only the first mark from the vampire who will become their Master." Laurent's gaze had gleamed with indifferent amusement. "It's as if they're preparing themselves for the demands we will put upon them, despite their bodies still lacking the second and third marks needed to handle that demand physically. You could fuck a first mark to death in no time.
"In short, the powers-that-be have ensured we have a pool of human servants willing to serve our needs, even if they don't realize it as quickly as we do."
She wanted to give Quinn the second mark, badly. It was the only thing that could explain it, some kind of chemical
receptor. She wanted to talk in his head, hear him speak inside hers.
But a decision like that would impact Quinn's life dramatically. Quinn, who'd worked so hard for his ranch, whose body bore the dangerous roadmap of his rodeo life to meet that goal. She wasn't an impulsive teenager, no matter that sixty was considered little better than a college student in the vampire world. She was his bar manager, his sex partner. His Mistress for playtime, not for real life. No matter how it felt otherwise.
Instead of taking the vein offered, she pushed up, sitting astride him, and leveled a gaze on him. Saying nothing, she began to pleasure herself, gripping him with her internal muscles, sliding up his shaft, commanding him to service her as she desired. His brown eyes got that intent look that sent a thrill of pleasure through her, and he put his hands to her hips, adding strength to the rhythm she was setting.
She'd told him she'd take, no matter what, that she'd never be denied. But with every movement in sync with her, the way his body arched to drive up into her, how his eyes stayed on hers, making sure he was satisfying her, he told her he'd give even beyond the point when the well was dry. That was the type of man he was, not just when he wanted or desired, but when he loved. It wasn't until now she'd realized what a dangerous drug that was, offered so freely to a vampire. Nigh irresistible.
She dug her nails into his chest, hard enough to draw blood, and his pulse leaped, his cock thickening inside her. She wanted to do everything to him, use the whip on him again, tie him down and fuck him, just like she'd described. She could see staying in this little corner of Texas her entire life, running his bar...
Her entire life? Centuries of it, long after his bones were dust?
She was no longer human. She couldn't afford to think this way. She translated emotional needs into physical ones, redoubling her efforts, driving them ruthlessly, pulling the climax out of him that his exhausted body was going to give her, come hell or high water.
He kept up with her, eyes still on her face. How much did he see or understand? "Take your hands off me," she ordered. "I want them over your head."