But he’s a vampire, a little voice inside my brain insisted. Yes, but he was still a damn nice guy. He didn’t deserve to go out like this, not when I could help him. Besides, I had a gut feeling that I was going to need him down the line. We needed to find out about this prophesy thing The Monsignor had been talking about and more importantly, I wanted to know more about the man I had worked and killed for the last four years and why he wanted me dead. You have to know your enemy before you can defeat them.
What it all boiled down to was that I had to keep Michael around. And I could only do that by giving him blood. My wrists and arms were out. That left the femoral artery in my inner thigh and the jugular in my neck. That was a no brainer—the neck for sure. After one bad experience, I had sworn off letting guys put their mouths south of my personal border. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to go cutting my own throat. Which meant that Michael was going to have to do the cutting, or in this case, the biting.
I sighed. What I was about to do was dangerous but I couldn’t see any way around it if I wanted to save him. And I did.
“Michael,” I said, “scoot over so I can sit beside you.” I pushed on his shoulder but though his eyes fluttered weakly, he didn’t budge. Just great. Giving up all pretense of doing this neatly, I crawled up between his legs and straddled his hips. His blue jeans felt rough against my inner thighs and I felt suddenly exposed. It was an intimate position to be in, but I told myself I had no choice and tried to ignore the warmth of his body under mine.
“Michael,” I said again, leaning in close to him. “Can you hear me?”
“Kate?” His eyes fluttered open and he looked at me uncertainly. “Why…why are you on top of me?”
“I can’t cut my wrists,” I told him. “The right one still has stitches in it and the left one has traces of silver nitrate. So you’re going to have to drink from my neck.” I leaned down, trying to find a good angle to offer my jugular. The way he was slumped on the bed, I had to practically plaster myself against him. Again I told myself it was embarrassing but necessary.
“Here,” I said, nuzzling the side of my neck against his mouth. I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs at the warm press of his lips on my skin. God but this was hard. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. Couldn’t believe I was actually offering my neck to a vampire to bite!
“Wait a minute.” His voice was muffled by my neck and I pulled back so I could get a good look at him. He looked slightly more alert although still pale and exhausted.
“What?” I asked. “Drink.” Inside I was thinking, Get it over with!
“Drink?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you serious? Aren’t you the same woman who threatened to ‘pop my eye like a grape’ when my mouth got too near your throat a few hours ago?”
I scowled. I didn’t need a reminder that the irony factor was pretty damn high.
“Look, do you have any idea how hard this is for me to do?” I asked him bluntly. “I’ve spent practically my whole life trying to avoid becoming a vampire hors d'oeuvre and now I’m offering you my jugular on a silver platter. Or not silver maybe but—”
He raised a hand weakly to stop me.
“I get it. You’re nervous.”
“How could you tell?” I snapped, not bothering to hide my sarcasm.
“You’re babbling.” He smiled at me. “I haven’t known you long, but I’m pretty sure that’s not something you do very often.”
“I just…never expected to be doing this,” I confessed. “And I don’t like needles, remember?”
He ran his tongue lightly over the tips of his fangs which had lengthened considerably.
“Not needles exactly.”
“Anything hard, sharp and pointy piercing my skin equals a needle to me,” I said. “So can we please just get it over with?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Let’s not start that again.” I reached up and pulled my hair away from the side of my neck. I wished that I’d gotten a haircut recently because it was almost down past my shoulders and getting in my way. Then I realized that the collar of the tee-shirt might pose a problem too. I pulled it over my head, narrowly avoiding a wardrobe malfunction with the sundress which I had to tug back up into place. Damn strapless elastic band.
“How exactly do you want me to do this?” he asked, as I leaned down and offered my neck again.
“I can tell you how I don’t want you to do it,” I said. “You know how sometimes when you go to give blood you get a nurse who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing? And she pokes around with the needle like it’s a divining rod and she’s hoping she’ll strike oil?”
He laughed weakly, his breath puffing against the side of my neck.
“In other words, I get one shot.”
“Pretty much,’ I said. “But you should be able to do it. You’re a trained medical professional—right?”
“Right,” he said. “But I usually do my best work with my hands, not my mouth.”
“That’s going to have change right n—” I began, but my words ended in a breathless sort of moan as his mouth opened against my throat.
It was more like a kiss at first, the hot, wet sensation of his lips against my throat and the play of his tongue over my skin. I could feel him tasting me, tracing the cords in my neck.
I wanted to remain cold and objective—he was thirsty, I was giving him a drink, case closed—but I couldn’t. My breath began to come in little pants and it was all I could do to hold still against him as he explored my neck with his mouth. Michael seemed to sense my anxiety because I felt his large, warm hands stroking over my back.
“Kate,” he whispered, pulling back from the kiss for a moment. “Relax. I have a feeling I’m going to be good at this.”
“I can’t relax,” I muttered. “Not with you doing…that.”
“You mean this?” He planted another hot, open-mouthed kiss on my neck, making me squirm against him. If only I didn’t have to be so close for him to do this! If only the damn sundress wasn’t so thin and his body wasn’t so hard and masculine under mine. If only he didn’t smell so damn good.
This wasn’t supposed to be erotic, I reminded myself fiercely. This was a necessity, nothing more, nothing less. So why did my body react to his warm hands all over my back and the slow hot kisses he was trailing over the sensitive flesh of my neck?
His mouth on my skin was making me hot in ways I didn’t want to think about—stirring up things inside me that hadn’t been stirred up in a very long time. What saved me from melting completely was fear. Every muscle in my body was tense, waiting for the bite. Waiting to feel him sink those three inch fangs into the side of my throat. That was what all my experience with vampires had led me to expect—pain, not pleasure. And I knew as long as I could hold onto my fear, I could keep control of myself. Self-preservation is a powerful motivator.
But Michael was as good with his teeth as he had been with a needle. I know it’s hard to believe but when his fangs did slip into my flesh, there was only a brief moment of bright pain that was over almost before it began. In a way, it reminded me of losing my virginity, although the guy I had been with when that happened wasn’t nearly as gentle as Michael was being.
Once he’d pierced my neck, I knew the worst was over and I allowed myself to relax, just a little. He would drink from me, he would recover, we would put this behind us and never talk about it.
Then I felt it.
At first it was just a pulling sensation as he drank from me. Then something else—a tingling that seemed to start where his mouth met my throat and ran the entire length of my body. Soon the tingling turned into a heat, making me feel flushed and hot in all the wrong places. The elastic top of the sundress was suddenly too scratchy against my newly sensitive nipples—it rubbed against me with a pleasurable kind of irritation. Between my thighs, I could feel myself getting wet and hot—I was nearly throbbing. The cotton bikini panties I had on were begin
ning to get damp as my body went into overdrive.
What was going on?
Whatever it was, it was affecting Michael too. With the way I was straddling him, my pelvis pressed against his, there was no way to hide it. I felt the thick length of his shaft rubbing against me, parting my swollen folds through my panties as he sucked at my throat. It felt so damn good I groaned and pressed against him like a cat in heat. I could feel the seam of his jeans through the thin cotton and it was rubbing me in just the right spot. My sundress was coming down from the friction of our bodies grinding together and I didn’t give a damn. In fact, I would have pulled it down myself if Michael hadn’t done it for me.
As the scratchy elastic slid down, large warm hands cupped my breasts, rolling the hardened nipples until I had to bite back a moan from the intense sensation. Sparks and jolts were running straight from my breasts to my swollen center. And still he sucked at my neck, feeding from me, giving me this feeling I had no name for.
God, how long had it been since I’d had a man between my legs? How long since I’d given myself permission to feel this kind of pleasure? At that moment, it seemed like the answer was ‘never.’
I’d like to say that I pulled away from him once I realized something was going on. That I stopped whatever it was that was happening immediately. He was a vampire, a monster, the kind of creature I had sworn to destroy and I knew to my bones what I was doing was wrong. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself, couldn’t seem to ask him to stop.
His mouth on my neck seemed to form some kind of strange connection between us. Through it I could feel not only the tingling and sucking sensations as he drew my blood, but also his pleasure in touching me. He was enjoying the warm firm mounds of my breasts and the little pants and moans I was making as he tugged at my nipples. He loved the faint floral smell of my hair and the delicate flavor of my skin. And my blood tasted like nothing he’d ever had before.
Rich and hot and salty-sweet it poured down his throat like salvation. The rarest wine he’d ever had was like mud compared to it. It was life, love, desire and flame all rolled into one and it was instantly addicting.
I had been bitten by vampires more times than I could count—it pretty much goes with my job. But never once had I ever experienced anything remotely like what I was feeling now. I wondered if he could feel my physical sensations the way I was feeling his. It was the strangest thing I had ever gone through and yet, also the most intimate. You can’t crawl inside someone else’s skin and feel what they feel and taste what they taste without knowing them a hundred thousand times better than you ever did before. Than you ever intended to in the first place.
I could feel the ache in his cock. The age-old masculine desire to penetrate and possess. He could feel the damp heat of my cleft pressing against him through his jeans and he wanted to slide inside me and thrust until he filled me up. Wanted to breach my defenses and tear down my walls and own me forever.
Forever. It echoed in my brain, freezing my emotions and dousing the fire that swept through me in the icy chill of fear. I had finally had enough. Ignoring the pleasure that was cresting inside me, I tore myself away from his mouth and hands.
It was like yanking a tooth out by the roots. Like ripping a fingernail to the quick.
In other words, it hurt like a sonofabitch.
I fell back on the bed, a hand clapped to my still bleeding neck gasping from the pain. Michael, completely revived, sat up suddenly, a look of shock on his face. It was like I had severed some kind of connection between us too abruptly and I knew by the agony in his eyes that it had hurt him too.
Good! It ought to hurt. Ought to hurt like hell to do something so forbidden. So wrong. What would Uncle Harry think if he could see what I was doing and who I was doing it with? What about my order—the line of Cosenza? What about the oath I had taken when I first became a slayer?
“I’m sorry.” Michael was bending over me, anxiety written all over his face. “I shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have touched you that way. I don’t…don’t know what got into me.”
I nearly choked on a bitter laugh. He thought this was all about inappropriate touching. Thought I was mad because he’d touched my breasts without permission. That wasn’t the part of me I was worried about him touching but I wasn’t willing to admit that, not even to myself.
“Kate, I…” His eyes flicked down to my chest and up to my eyes again.
I looked down and realized the pink sundress was rolled down almost to my waist. I tugged at the bunched elastic as I scrambled away from him, trying to hide my breasts. I needed to get away from him, from the connection we’d shared, from the things it had made me feel.
“Kate…” He held out a hand to me, appealingly. “I’m so damn sorry. You were trying to help me. Hell, you saved my life and I—”
“Forget about it,” I said, straightening my dress with as much dignity as I could manage. “Nothing happened.”
“What?” His eyebrows drew down in a confused frown. “What do you mean ‘nothing happened’? Are you trying to tell me you didn’t feel that…that…I don’t know what to call it.” He gestured helplessly. “It was like some kind of electrical current flowing between us. And it went both ways. I didn’t just feel what I felt—I felt what you felt, too.”
“You’re not making any sense,” I said tightly.
“You know what I mean.” Michael scooted to get closer to me and I climbed off the bed and stood there, half-way between fight and flight. “I don’t have a name for it because I’ve never felt anything even remotely like it before,” he said quietly. He sat still, not making any further attempt to get near me. “But I know you felt it too, Kate. I could feel you feeling it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. The words tasted like dust on my tongue and my mouth felt dry as a bone. The place where he’d bitten me throbbed angrily, like an empty socket—an amputated limb.
“You’re lying,” he said.
I opened my mouth but no words came. I grabbed my kit from the foot of the bed and marched into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. Time to call it a night.
Chapter Seventeen
The wound still had to be disinfected. Connection or no connection, mystical electrical flow of pleasure aside, it was still a vampire bite. You might have a cobra or a rattle snake as a pet, (well, you might if you were crazy.) You might even love the damn thing. But if it bites you, you’d better damn well get yourself to the hospital ASAP. Because loving something with a poisonous bite doesn’t mean you’re immune to the effects of the poison—it just means you don’t shoot it when it bites you. The first time, anyway.
Not that it was a very good analogy, I told myself as I dug a vial of holy water and a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of my kit. It wasn’t like I loved Michael. I had only been doing what was necessary to help him survive. The weird sensations I’d felt when he bit me weren’t my fault. What was my fault was allowing it to continue as long as it had. Next time, (and I didn’t kid myself that there would have to be a next time. I mean, where else was he going to get blood?) Anyway, next time I was slitting a wrist, stitches or no stitches. It was the only safe way—if there is a safe way to feed a vampire, that is.
I poured some of the blessed liquid over my throat and winced as bloody pink foam ran down and circled the sink drain. It hurt like hell disinfecting a bite in such a tender, sensitive area. But the pain was no more than I deserved. Actually, it was a good thing. Maybe it would remind me to set some limits next time.
“Kate?” Michael was knocking on the bathroom door. “Kate, please. Can I come in?”
“I’m decent if that’s what you’re asking,” I said and poured another dribble of holy water over the two puncture wounds on my neck. I was trying to walk the line between a thorough disinfection and wasting the water I had left. Now that I no longer had an endless supply of the stuff, I needed to be a little more careful with it.
Michael had changed into a
pair of soft-looking navy blue pajama bottoms and his chest was bare—for sleeping, I guessed. I tried not to look at his well defined muscles or the small patch of golden fuzz between his nipples. Tried not to think about what those large warm hands had felt like against my skin and how his full mouth had kissed and licked me so gently before he bit. No matter how damn scrumptious he was, it didn’t change the fact that what we had done was wrong.
He stepped through the door, saw what I was doing, and froze.
“Oh, God.” His eyes filled with guilt. “Do you…is that really necessary?”
“I have genetic immunity which means I won’t turn into a vamp and I won’t die,” I said. “But if I don’t disinfect the bite, I could get what amounts to a very nasty case of blood poisoning. So to answer your question, yes, I have to do this. Anything else on your mind?”
“There’s a lot on my mind, actually,” he said quietly. “Like why you won’t talk about what just happened.”
“Michael—” I looked at him warningly.
He held up a hand. “I know, I know, it never happened. Fine, I got it. But can I just say that I didn’t mean to hurt you? That I didn’t mean to betray your trust?”
“Nobody’s been betrayed, here,” I said, capping the holy water and moving on to the rubbing alcohol. “So you can stop being so damn melodramatic.”
“Kate…” Michael took a step towards me and stroked a strand of hair out of my face.
I stepped away from his hand.
“Do you mind? In case it slipped your notice, I’m a little busy here.” I poured a cap-full of alcohol on the puncture wounds, wincing at the sharp bite of the sterile liquid.
He sighed and I looked up at him, not bothering to hide my irritation.
“Something else you wanted?” I asked.
“Just to say that I’m not going to do that to you again. I don’t want to drink any more of your blood. Not after seeing the way it hurts you and what you have to go through afterwards.”