Beautiful Danger

Chapter 13

It hurt. Twin fangs pierced her skin and sank in deeply. Lark’s blood oozed out from her vein. Domingos’s mouth began to suck as he withdrew his fangs. She shoved at him as best she could, but he’d come at her from behind, and his cock was still embedded deep within her.

She wanted him to stop. This was not the wrong she had asked for.

Or maybe it was.

Fingers clinging to the edge of the dresser, she tilted back her head and shouted, “No!”

He clutched her tighter, his hands greedy at her breasts, his cock now slipping from her and his hips jamming hers against the furniture.

“You said you were mine,” he growled against the puncture wounds.

“Not like...”

A piercing shock of sweetness permeated the stunning intrusion and Lark gasped, finding the orgasm that had been imminent when he’d been inside her only with his cock had not subsided. It raged at her need to push him away, while at the same time, protested the abrupt disconnect, begging for it to continue. It was because of his sucking at her neck, drawing out her life, sneakily mining the roots of her pleasure.

It hurt and she wanted it to stop.

And it felt like nothing she had ever known before—and she wanted it to never end.

“Fuck yes.” Lark reached back and grasped for his head, pulling him down into her, inviting his feast upon her, allowing it, surrendering to what was impossible to fight. “Yes, Domingos.”

Spreading her legs and supporting herself against the dresser with both palms, she fed the enemy what he needed, giving him strength and depleting hers. And it was all good because she had wanted this wrong, even though she wasn’t sure what all that entailed. And now she had it completely.

Don’t regret, her conscience whispered.

I don’t think I will, she silently answered, as Domingos’s mouth slipped away from her neck and he sank to his knees on the floor behind her, his hand trailing down the back of her leg until he turned away to crouch forward, facing the bed.

“I’m so sorry,” he said softly, covering his face and bowing into his hands.

A drop of her blood spattered the floor near her toe. Lark breathed in. She felt woozy, as if no longer in her body, and the orgasm was fluttering away. Panting, her muscles stretched, her core worn to a luxurious exhaustion. At her neck, her skin burned and she felt her blood seep from the wounds. It spilled down her collarbone, dripping onto the floor again.

But she wouldn’t change what had just happened. Not at this moment. Later, when her head was clear and she stood outfitted in Order gear and wielding a stake, her mind-set might pull a one-eighty.

Until then?

Raking her fingers through her lover’s hair, she pulled his head back and against her stomach and held him there, feeling minute shudders rack his body and wondering if he was sobbing.

“You needed blood,” she said, stroking his hair, weaving in her fingers and clinging. “I’m glad it was mine and not someone else’s.”

He looked up, eyes frantically searching hers.

“I mean it,” she said. “I really do. But I don’t want to transform to a vampire.”

“You won’t,” he rushed out. “I licked the wound. It should heal before nightfall. Lark, you’re too good to me. And your blood—so sweet and rich. I needed it. I couldn’t stop myself.”

She squatted, bringing herself eye level to him. Teasing her finger along his neck, she stroked it over his shoulder to where the burned skin just peeked up from the back. Her damaged vampire lover. How strange was that to think? Yet she needed him as much as he needed her, because walking through this wrong had become so right to her.

“If the Order learns you’ve bitten me, I’m dead.”

“But you won’t change,” he protested. “I made sure of it.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve been tainted by the enemy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that.” She kissed him fiercely, bruising her mouth against his. He tasted like blood, but it didn’t offend her. “I could have kicked you across the room to stop you. You know that.”

He dashed his tongue out to taste the lingering pressure from her kiss. “I do know that. We’re a match to each other in the physical fight.”

“You just keep believing that, vampire.” She gave him a small smile. “I wanted you inside me like that. When your cock is inside me...” She traced a finger down his semihard staff. “It meshes us together intimately and without words. It’s a beautiful thing. And when your teeth were inside me...” She touched his mouth, and he allowed her to tap a fang. “It gave you the power I want you to know again. You owned me in those moments, Domingos. And I like how that made me feel. Controlled, yet never dominated. Did you feel that power?”

He nodded. Grabbing her across the back, he crushed her against him, nuzzling his face against her neck. “Don’t ever want to lose you. You put the music back in my life.”

If only that were true. Beyond the pain of being bitten, Lark could hope for Domingos to someday have back the piece of his missing soul.

“Will you ever play the cello again? I’d like to hear you.”

He shook his head against her body.

“Maybe someday,” she whispered. “No need to rush it. We’ve enough to deal with as it is. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the Order now.”

“What is there to do? They’ll never know. The wounds will heal to smooth skin. Not like my back.”

“Doesn’t matter if they scar. What I wonder now is, do I even need the Order of the Stake anymore?”

She stood and strode to the window, almost parting the curtains to look outside, but at the last moment, remembered and turned to admire her long, lean vampire wandering across the room to claim the half-empty wine bottle.

“You joined the Order for vengeance, yes?” he asked.

“Yes.” She slid a knee onto the bed and sat, one foot toeing the floor.

When he offered her the bottle, she tilted back a swallow, then wished for something more substantial, like eggs and bacon. He might have just quenched his hunger, but hers yet needed abating.

Stroking the bite wound carefully, she winced at the violence to her skin. She’d let him do it. No regrets.

“I vowed to stake one vampire for every day they made my husband suffer.”

“And how many days was that?”

“Three hundred and sixty-six. A year and a day.”

She spoke with surprising lack of emotion. Since she’d said goodbye to Todd while lying prostrate in the chapel, it was as if she could now stand beside all that had happened in her life over the past two years and look at it more analytically. With reason and acceptance.

And realizing that straightened her shoulders and made her smile. Not because she was glad to have put it behind her—what she’d shared with Todd would always be a part of her—but because she’d stepped into the ineffable idea of freedom she desired. Though the idea was not yet completely formed in her mind, she felt she was drawing nearer to it all the time.

“You would have been number seventy-two,” she commented.

Standing before her, Domingos lifted her chin and pressed the wine bottle to her lips. She drank from it as he fed her.

“I could still become a number to you,” he suggested.

“No. Never.”

“So, find a new seventy-two and move on.”

“It’s not that easy anymore. I...” Falling back across the rumpled sheets and flinging her arms high and above her head, she closed her eyes. “Do I need it anymore? Really? Like you said, I’m punishing vampires who weren’t even involved in his torture. When will it be enough? Can it ever be enough?”

“It’s enough when you decide that it is.”

“Right. And maybe enough is now. No, I know enough is now. It has to be.”

Curling to her side, she patted the bed and he snuggled up beside her, knees to knees, wrists to wrists, face-to-face. The man was beautiful in his darkness. He touched the bite wound, and the stroke of his finger sent tiny tingles of orgasmic bliss shivering through her system.

“Maybe,” she said on a gasp, “we were supposed to get entangled in this wrong to teach me a lesson.”

“If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

“How do you look at it?”

He touched the ends of her hair, twisting them between his fingers. “I see a gorgeous woman who tried to kill me but decided sex was more fun, and despite my manic moods—and having just bitten her—she still wishes to remain in my life. I don’t know why you’ve chosen to do so, but I’m glad you have.”

He kissed her nose, and then her mouth, and she tasted a faint hint of blood twirled within the wine.

“I’ve become a vampire’s lover,” she whispered. “There are many women who would find that sexy.”

“Yes, well, you’ve become the crazy vampire’s lover. I’m not sure how sexy that is.”

“It’s beyond sexy. It’s intoxicating.” She nuzzled up against his body, twining her legs with his. The smoky wine smell of him lured her to lick his biceps, and the muscles flexed beneath her touch. “And I don’t want it to stop. I can honestly say I don’t need the revenge anymore, and I have you to thank for that.”

“Learning to forgive is very sexy to me,” he said.

“Then when will you learn? I don’t argue with your need to slay the Levallois pack, but now I can only worry whenever you’re away from me. Where is Domingos? Will he get staked, or worse, have his head ripped off by a werewolf?”

“I’m smarter than that.”

“Really? Even when the voices are raging in your head?”

“The voices make me stealthier, sneakier and swifter.”

Lark closed her eyes. He thought the voices did that for him, but she suspected it was a figment of power and confidence summoned by true madness. He was not safe so long as he continued to pursue the pack. But she didn’t want to be the one to stop him. Her tattered lover deserved that retribution.

“Maybe I could help you?” she suggested.

“It’s not your fight, Lark, nor is it the Order’s.”

“I would never get the Order involved. I’m not stupid.”

“You’re not. But this is my fight. The only thing I want from you is this.” He kissed her mouth, her breast, her shoulder where the brand raised the skin in a circle and then her neck where the bite wound tingled, yet no longer pained.

“Will you need my blood every time we make love?” she wondered quietly.

“Unlike normal vampires, I need blood every day. The UV sickness demands it or else I get loopy and you don’t even want to see me starving, Lark.”

“How long before you’ll drink me dry?”

“I won’t do that.”

“Can you do that? I mean, the human body only has so much blood. It takes a while to regenerate. I used to give blood in college. They made me wait eight weeks between donations for the red blood cells to rebuild. If you bite me every day...”

“I won’t. I swear it to you. You mean more than life to me, and I value you more than myself.”

“Don’t say that. I need you to value yourself, to want to live, Domingos.”

He nodded and nuzzled his cheek against her breast, and she cuddled him there until he drifted into a peaceful sleep.

* * *

Lark peered into the fridge in Domingos’s kitchen. Inside, a bottle of Bordeaux lay on its side, and next to that sat a box of batteries.

“Right. Like I expected to find food in a vampire’s home?”

At least there were no bags of blood. Vampires required warm, living blood for sustenance and couldn’t survive on blood that had been removed from the human body for long. To think about it? Ugh.

But to have experienced the bite? Mmm...now, that had been a new kind of crazy-sexy-goodness. And to think she’d never wanted it?

“What do they call those mortals who chase after vampires in hopes of being bitten?” She searched her memory of the Order’s lessons. “Fang junkies.”

Closing the fridge door, she turned to lean against the cool stainless steel surface and rubbed her neck where she determined the bite wound had already begun to heal and scab over. No, not a fang junkie, but she couldn’t let any in the Order see her until the puncture wounds were completely gone. And then she chastised herself for the lie.

She hated lying to anyone. And to be lied to? That burned her hide. But right now she realized she’d been lying to herself ever since she had walked through the doors of the Order’s headquarters and defied Rook to take a chance on her. Seeking vengeance for her husband? Who had she been fooling but herself?

She would not argue that she hadn’t been cut out for the physically taxing job. Yet with hard work she had gained strength and was now damned proud of her martial arts and defensive skills.

But mentally fortified for the challenge was another question. She’d taken on the brand of the knight at a time when she’d been most vulnerable. Grief had clouded her judgment. More than ever she had needed a hand to offer help, to console. Her mother had lived back in the States. They’d never been close. When she’d told her mother about the wedding, she hadn’t the money to make the flight and had been satisfied with the wedding photos. And the funeral? The bouquet of red roses her mother had sent for the service had died that same day.

And when the Order hadn’t willingly offered that consoling hand, Lisa Cooper had reached out and grabbed it herself, by means of vengeance. Rook had tried to convince her she wasn’t capable. She had proven him wrong only through blind, stupid determination.

But now?

“Rook may have been right.”

Clasping her arms across her chest, she wandered through the kitchen and into the bare room where the sun beamed across the hardwood floor. This was the room in which she had first witnessed Domingos crouch in on himself as he’d confessed the horrors committed against his very soul.

Standing in that spot now, she lifted her head, inhaling through her nose.

“I will fight for you,” she promised her lover who slept in the bedroom. “Because I have given Todd the revenge he deserved. As best I could. Now it’s your turn, Domingos.”

It didn’t occur to her that perhaps it was her turn to take the solace and peace she needed. No, she preferred to look outward. Because that was easiest and required the least amount of soul-searching.

Helping strays, don’t you know?

Wandering back into the kitchen, she found paper and a pen and left Domingos a note that she had to run home because food was a necessity in her life. She’d return in a few hours.

As she strolled down the hallway, she trailed fingers along the wall, and arrived at a spot close to the front door where the paint was peeling and the plaster dented in. Without doubt, she knew Domingos had beat a fist here many times as he’d fought against the pain of racing the sunlight, or even battled the ineffable voices from within.

Before turning to open the door, she glanced down the hallway. Images of Domingos kissing down her stomach, her mons, her thighs, scurried a delicious shiver through her veins and tightened her scalp.

And those gorgeous fangs sinking into her skin...

“Miss you already.”

As she closed the door and assured herself it was locked, she scanned the neighborhood for anyone lurking who shouldn’t be. An ingrained habit. A habit that could save her and Domingos’s lives.

She hated walking away from him without a word, but if she didn’t eat soon she’d get a headache and her whole system would protest, leaving her off her game. If she intended to make this relationship with a vampire work, they both had to come to terms with the fact that they might be alike in some ways, but in others, they were vastly different. Especially when it came to eating habits.

“Relationship?” she muttered as she strode swiftly down the street, knowing a Metro station was not far. “I think his crazy has rubbed off on you, Lark.”

If so, she liked it. And with a broad smile curving her mouth, she quickened her steps toward the main street.

* * *

Rook inserted the laser-cut key card into the reader and the LED light blinked green before the lock clicked open and the door to the basement level beneath the cathedral opened to allow admittance.

He descended the stairs, lit by fluorescent lights and inhaled the dry air from the limestone walls. Above, an actual historical cathedral held daily tours through the majority of the nave, led by an Order employee. A perfect front for the Order of the Stake. No one had been the wiser in the two centuries they had used this facility.

Strolling down the hallway to his office, he could only lament that his office did not have windows. There were days he entered before sunrise and left after sunset. Hell, he could practically be a vampire. But he was not.

He tossed his car keys onto the marble-topped desk and then flopped onto the leather office chair and faced the dark screen of his computer monitor. For reasons beyond his figuring, this morning he couldn’t get the image of Lark’s determined gaze out of his thoughts. The woman had surprised him at every turn of her training. Never once had she backed down from all the rigorous exercises, drills and assignments he’d given her. Truly, she was a match to any male knight they employed.

And yet he could not help wondering if he had failed her in some manner he wasn’t capable of understanding because she was a woman.

Could it be so simple as male/female differences? Or perhaps he should claim it complicated, never simple. Not once had she failed to make a kill. Never. And always she completed a mission within twenty-four hours. When on the hunt, the woman was relentless. While training her, he’d used her grief to fortify her willpower, and he would never apologize for that.

So what had made tracking one insane vampire so difficult for her? Had some tendril of compassion invaded the hardened hunter’s mien to make her question the inevitable death punch?

Rook sighed out through his nose and beat a fist on the desktop. He could simply ask her. That would require...talking. Getting into a conversation that went beyond delving into her mind for weaknesses and strengths in the physical fight. It would require a certain degree of emotional understanding that he was incapable of employing. He was not without emotion. He just found it difficult to relate to the knights on any level other than that of leader to the flock.

And King would insist he not get emotionally involved with any particular knight. Made things messy, a lesson both had learned over the centuries of heading this organization.

He need only place a hand over her heart, though, to see her truths.

Still, he worried about Lark. And with good reason. He’d molded her into what she was at a time when conditioning had been easy because of her weakened emotional state and grief. Touch her in the wrong spot, and she could snap. Which was why he’d tried to keep her on regular missions and always busy so she would never have a chance to snap. To think. To wonder if what she had done was right.

She had done the right thing.

And he had done the right thing by taking her off the LaRoque job. But in order to continue to do the right thing, he’d keep an eye on her. Make sure she didn’t stumble off the path and fall apart. Or worse yet, stumble onto things better kept secret.