His passion, his emotions, the heated sexuality he poured over her like hot oil sliding down curved, quivering flesh, was as noticeably absent as if the vampire himself were missing.
Sometimes, while she worked at her computer, she could sense him watching her, but when she looked up, he was reading or watching the television, scribbling in his report ledgers. If he was in the weapons room, practicing, he worked himself into a ferocious sweat, which was almost an impossibility for a vampire. It was as if he were fighting an invisible opponent. A decision he didn’t want to make. That thought made her uneasy.
She could have asked at any time, but she wasn’t sure she was up to whatever it was yet, and figured he’d tell her in time. After all, she was forcing down blood that incited multiple seizures and made her feel as though she were being crushed in the jaws of a hideous monster. As it ground her in the back of its fetid throat, those gremlins nearly broke her eardrums with their internal shrieking. Ironically, while the sire’s blood was supposed to be staving off madness, those whispers and mutters were starting to be an almost constant presence in her head. There were days she thought about jamming one of Gideon’s guns in her ear, not out of any real suicidal bent, but because she so desperately wanted to obliterate the noise, even if it turned her brainpan into soup.
In addition to that, she was having to run a major business from her computer and phone, no hands-on work or direct contact. The number of things James and the others really couldn’t handle, that relied on her knowledge, were stacking up. She hadn’t seen the outside, breathed fresh air, in five days. Daegan had said she could perhaps start having escorted excursions in the next day or so, because though the seizures were no less violent or frequent, they were starting to have a minimum occurrence range. She could rely on two to three good hours at least between each one. One day, she actually slept six hours without interruption.
As a fledgling, she should be sleeping from dawn to dusk. However, Daegan had explained that, while sunlight was far more destructive to fledglings, they tended to be like infants, sleeping in fits and starts at first. The transition made it even more erratic. So here she was, up just past noon. Daegan’s mind was never open to her, but she could sense he was settling down in his room, probably staying alert until he was sure that Gideon was back.
Fortunately, that was now. She sensed him coming through the corridors of Atlantis, and smiled a little, imagining the rangy stride, the fuck-off-don’t-talk-to-me look he leveled at her staff as he made his way to the lower levels. The band of tension around her chest loosened.
While she’d had other concerns in the past few days, Gideon amazingly had not contributed to any of them. He was as good as his word. He was devoted to her well-being, no longer even flinching when she slid onto his lap or curled around him in the bed to draw blood from him. In fact, though he’d asked her not to use the pheromones, it was beginning to arouse him, his mind taking him past the mechanics of vampire nourishment to the primal significance of providing sustenance for a cherished mate. She’d seen that thought flash through his mind, and had chosen to savor it, rather than discomfit him with her knowledge that she’d heard it.
Like most males, and enhanced by the second marking, he was also more than ready to meet her carnal needs. She’d restrained herself, no pun intended, for the past few days since that volatile episode with her and Daegan. She’d enjoyed riding astride Gideon, milking him to climax, reveling in the clever and single-minded dedication of his hands, lips, body and cock to giving her pleasure. But the craving to take him over in stronger ways was growing again, such that she knew she wouldn’t be able to stave it off much longer.
She kept practicing that curtain between their minds, while he worked on his own version of staying out of her head, a kind of peripheral mind-vision where he looked past or over the thoughts that filtered into his brain. However, there were times she couldn’t help herself. She found herself hip deep amid his yearnings, seeing flashes of things he wanted, craved from her again. In the formless, shadowy world of his subconscious, she also saw hints of things he wanted from Daegan. But she kept that knowledge to herself as well.
She lifted her head, anticipating. Her servant was here. In fact, he
knocked
on the door. Waited.
What are you doing? Come in.
She heard the keypad tones; then he slid in the door, bearing a large duffel bag. Laying it down with a clank, he grunted. “I wanted to be sure that things were okay in here. Didn’t want to open the door, if . . .”
“If I’d gone all Tasmanian Devil again?” She arched a brow. “You can tell that by reading my mind. But that wasn’t it. You didn’t think you were welcome here. Have you been knocking every time you come back?”
Gideon shrugged, a dangerous man looking suddenly awkward and out of place, as if they were strangers. Which, in many senses, she knew they were. “This is your home, Anwyn. And Daegan’s. I don’t make assumptions.”
“You don’t make commitments,” she responded, giving him a shrewd look. “But as long as you choose to be part of this, you live here, Gideon. Case in point.” She gestured with her pen. “You brought your belongings.”
“I figured I would be staying pretty close for a while, so the rest of my stuff would be safer here than where I’d stashed them.”
Not some of his belongings. In his mind, she saw this was all of them. Curious, she beckoned him closer and pushed away from her desk. “Show me what’s in it. Other than weapons. You and Daegan can drool over those later.”
He slanted her a glance, but came closer, went to a squat. The way he looked at her, that lingering expression, quickly hidden in the duck of his head, but not in the disguising of his thoughts, told her he’d come back hungry for something that wasn’t food. His hands were curled in the duffel bag, holding tight to it as if to keep his hands off her. She held that curtain between them to disguise her own reaction. She was pleased to see it might be working somewhat, because the denial of that window built his anticipation higher.
“Sorry if the knocking offended you,” he said gruffly.
“No apologies are necessary,” she responded. Reaching out, she stroked a hand over his head, teased the hair between her knuckles, and wasn’t surprised when he captured her wrist in his palm, squeezed a little harder than she knew he’d intended.
“Anwyn, I haven’t let anyone get close to me, let alone depend on me, in a long, long time. I have no friends, and one remaining family member.”
“Gideon, you’re not going to fail me.” She held his gaze. “I know it, even if you don’t. Even if you walked out the door tomorrow and never came back, you won’t have failed me. You understand?”
“No. And yeah.” He shrugged. “You have Daegan. I know—”
“Don’t.” She snapped it out, bringing him up short. She’d found very quickly, and so had he, that she wouldn’t tolerate him undermining his own worth. Temper sparked in his gaze, intriguing her as such things always did. Like Daegan, he didn’t like to be pushed or crossed. Her vampire blood delighted in it.
Down, girl.
She drew a breath. “Gideon, whatever brought you to my door, I haven’t been so personally, intensely interested in a client, in a very long time. That hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s grown stronger. The moment I saw you in that room”—she allowed herself to slide her finger down his jaw, letting the nail scrape—“I knew you were mine.”
There. That spark again, only something a bit different in nature. “Show me what’s in the bag,” she murmured.
He gave her a studied look, absorbing the command, but then he unzipped it. “Sure you don’t want to see the weapons? They’re really nifty.”
She suppressed a smile. “No, thanks. I was in your head when you and Daegan were getting practically orgasmic over
his
weapons.”
“Like women don’t get the same way over shoes.”
“Shoes make sense.” When she lifted her hand to touch his head again, Gideon’s hand whispered along her calf, where her foot was braced on the floor. A stolen touch, done without her permission, but he kept it there below her knee, tracing the skin beneath the loose hem of her skirt. Sinc he wasn’t a submissive, he didn’t automatically remember rules about touching versus not touching. However, he did have an innate awareness of it. Somehow he knew he could get away with touching her calf, but needed her invitation to do more, even as he inched higher, trying to seduce that invitation out of her.
She passed her fingers through his hair, sifted the strands. His hair was almost as dark as Daegan’s, if he grew his out. There was some gray there, something he was too young to have. “Who cuts this?”
“I do, when I have time. And a mirror.”
“Maybe you’d do better without the mirror.” She tugged, brought his eyes up. “I can have one of my girls cut it for you. Chantal does great hair. Show me what’s in the duffel.”
He swallowed, a look of such need and confusion there that she had to quell the desire to assuage it.
Let it build. Let him work it out.
Looking down, though, she felt her heartstrings pull anew. So little. Weapons, notebooks and a few files. About four days’ worth of underwear and socks, a pair of jeans and dark-colored athletic shoes.
“These were the vamps I was tracking.” He indicated the files. “I destroy the paperwork after I get them. I don’t take a lot of notes, mostly statistics and things. Lots of it is in my head, in case a vamp gets to tracking me and wants to figure out who I’m going after next.”
She nodded. “Do you have photos in your wallet?”
He reached back, pulled it out in that unconsciously male gesture that stretched his shirt over his shoulders, twisted his waist and tightened his jeans briefly over his thighs and groin. He’d picked up a new T-shirt from somewhere, probably a street vendor, a plain navy color. Featureless, which would make it easy for him to blend into the night. Though he’d be on hiatus indefinitely from his profession, he still thought and prepared like a vampire hunter.
As he flipped open the wallet, she saw he had no credit cards. Only a driver’s license. When he pulled out the three photographs he had, she noted he hesitated before extracting the last one. From his mind, she knew who was in that one, even saw the picture in his head, so she focused on the other two and let him keep that one tucked behind the others.
Two young boys, leaning against each other with open smiles and a sunny background. Gideon and his brother, as children. In the younger boy, she saw the facial structure of the man she’d seen in Gideon’s head. Jacob. The other photo was a couple, obviously his parents, probably at the age they were when the other photo was taken. She passed her fingers over the snapshot. “How did you lose them?”
Daegan hadn’t told her they were dead. But if this man had parents left, he would have still been connected to them. In fact, she suspected he would have been a different person entirely. As a vampire hunter, she also doubted he’d carry a photo of any living family members, just in case. Since Jacob was already part of the vampire world, he was protected in a way a pair of vulnerable parents wouldn’t be.
“Lightning strike. We were at the beach. We got ’em out of the water, did CPR I’d learned in a class at school. Jacob didn’t know how, but I walked him through it with Mom while I worked on Dad, but it was too late for both of them. Are your . . . are your parents alive? Any f amily?”
The significance of the question wasn’t lost on her. “No. I had a sister, who died young. My parents also. My mother died during a miscarriage, and my father had a heart defect that killed him on a jog in his early thirties. I lived with my uncle and aunt until they divorced, and then I lived with my aunt until I was eighteen. We’re not close. Don’t even exchange Christmas cards.”
“There’s more of a story there.”
“Yes, there is. But I don’t want to dwell on it today.”
“Would you give me a piece of it?” He cocked his head, and she saw how he wanted to know more, everything about her being of intense interest to him. He was both a delight and a danger to her currently way-too-fragile ego.
She stroked her finger over the picture of his parents, thinking of her own. “It’s a typical story, Gideon. My uncle liked good brandy and young girls. He thought an orphaned teenage niece was fair game. When his wife figured it out, she did the right thing. Divorced him, reported him, but she could never bring herself to forgive the thirteen-year-old for being what he wanted, instead of her.”
She wasn’t surprised to see and feel the violence on her behalf simmering within him. As she raised her gaze, she realized his eyes were not exactly like his parents’. There was Irish warrior in those intense depths. “It isn’t why I’m a Domme, but it took me a while to figure out. When Barbie first started smacking Ken around”—she gave him a tight smile—“I thought it was because I was angry and wanted to punish someone. So when I was old enough to give a name to my Dominant nature, I thought it was destructive, connected to that time period, something I needed to deny myself. But then I realized that pain and punishment aren’t always about vengeance. Sometimes they’re a path to freedom. I wanted to offer others what I hadn’t had; a moment of pure safety, of knowing you could surrender yourself into the hands of another and feel completely, truly safe and cherished. It’s a rare thing.”
“Yeah, it is.” His eyes fell on the picture of the two boys, who were obviously at a beach, their arms around each other. When she withdrew her hands, he placed the photos carefully back in his wallet. Stroking a strand of hair from where it was teasing the corner of her mouth, he curved it back behind her ear, his eyes warming on her face, so close, his fingertips caressing that sensitive place.
“You should learn not to touch me without permission.”
“I hear what you want in my mind, feel it. I don’t think I’ve touched you without permission yet.”
Her body rippled at the sensual heat in that male voice, the truth of the words. “Then I want you to learn to wait until I ask you directly, whether in my mind or with my lips.”