Duncan (32 page)

“Let’s get inside before it starts raining again,” he said, and started walking toward the kitchen door. “Ask Alaric to leave an update for me, please, Miguel,” he called without looking. “And tell him I’ll meet him tomorrow night.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You must be tired,” Duncan said at her ear.

“Not that tired. Besides, you did all the work,” she murmured back to him.

“Did I? Perhaps.”

Emma frowned, but didn’t say anything else until they had reached Duncan’s suite and closed the bedroom door behind them.

She unbuttoned her blouse and stepped out of her heels, watching him covertly, admiring the graceful way he moved, even when it was something so prosaic as taking off his jacket and stripping away his sweater. Although, granted, there was nothing prosaic about Duncan’s bare chest. Or his back, either. He was all smooth muscle, long lean stretches of it that came together over broad shoulders and powerful arms. Unable to stop herself, she slipped out of her blouse and crossed the room to him. All of her senses seemed suddenly more concentrated, as if being this close to Duncan brought everything into hyperawareness. The thick carpet was like silk beneath her stockinged feet, her hair almost unbearably warm on her bare shoulders, and the satin of her bra an exquisite torment over her breasts.

Duncan turned and watched her come toward him, his body perfectly still in a way that was his alone, his eyes glowing a soft bronze in the dim light. He held out a hand when she drew close enough. She placed her fingers in his, feeling the slight roughness of his skin as he closed his hand and drew her into his embrace, circling her waist with his arm and bending his head enough to touch his lips to hers.

“Emma,” he said softly. Just that. Just her name, like a promise.

Emma stroked her hand down his face. “What Victor did,” she told him quietly, guessing at the source of his discontent from this evening. “That’s not you. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” he said too quickly.

“But you still feel guilty.”

He sighed. “Victor was one of ours. We should have known what was going on and stopped it.”

“You
did
stop it,” she reminded him. “And now he’s dead.” She held his gaze. “Victor really is dead, isn’t he?”

Duncan studied her for a long moment, as if deciding whether to trust her. Emma held her breath, not only because she wanted Victor to be dead, but more importantly, because she desperately needed Duncan to trust her enough to tell her the truth.

“He’s really dead,” Duncan said flatly. He met her gaze for a moment, then tugged her against his chest. Emma wrapped her arms around him, her eyes filling with tears of relief.

“I want you to move your things in here, into this room,” Duncan said softly. “From the other bedroom.”

“I don’t have that much here, it’s—”

“It doesn’t matter.
This
is your room now.”

Emma rubbed her fingers up and down his spine absently. Was it simply that Duncan was used to giving orders? Or maybe it was that vampire possessiveness he’d warned her about? And did she really care? After all, it wasn’t like she was moving in lock, stock and barrel. He wasn’t even asking her to do that. It was only a few changes of clothes. She’d done as much with boyfriends in the past, when they’d each kept a few things at each other’s apartment. So why did this time feel different?
Stupid question, Emma
, she scolded herself. It was different because this time she was in love with the guy. And she had no idea how he felt about her. Oh, sure, he lusted after her, and, yeah, he was possessive as hell. But was that love?

She sighed. Duncan heard her, obviously. He could hear a pin drop at twenty paces, but more significantly, he understood the emotion behind her sigh.

“You’re mine, Emma,” he said softly, but in a voice that brooked no argument. “I want that clear. As long as you’re in this house, as long as we’re together, you’re mine. And no one else’s.”

Emma leaned back enough to see his face. “That goes both ways, vampire. I don’t share either.”

A slow grin spread over Duncan’s face, and he drawled, “I’ve barely enough strength for you, Emmaline.”

Emma laughed softly, letting him distract her. “Oh, you’ll manage somehow,” she murmured, then reached behind his head and tugged the leather tie off his hair.

“I keep losing those,” he complained.

“You have an entire drawer full of them,” she scoffed, threading her fingers through his hair. “Don’t be such a girl.”

Duncan’s brow arched in disbelief. “Girl?”

“Um, well, it’s just a—” She shrieked in surprise as he spun her around and threw her on the bed. In a flash, he had her bent over the edge, her skirt up around her waist, her panties on the floor. Emma started laughing, but then groaned as his cock pushed past her tender folds and deep into the hungry wet depths of her sex. She hissed in pleasure at how good he felt, how completely he stretched her open and filled her as he began pumping in and out of her with long, graceful strokes. He unclasped her bra and ran a long-fingered hand up her bare spine and she arched her back languorously, opening herself even more to his invasion. He leaned forward over her back and brushed her hair aside as he nuzzled her neck.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” he whispered flush against her ear. She groaned again as her vulnerable position let him go deeper than he’d ever gone before. He stopped moving abruptly, still buried inside her, nothing but the slightest flex of his hips slipping fractionally back and forth as he held her motionless. “This, my darling Emmaline, is a cock filling your sweet little pussy.
My
cock.”

Emma giggled. “Okay, I—”

“And do girls have cocks?” he interrupted. “No, they don’t.”

Emma rolled her hips gently against his, loving the smooth glide of his thickness inside her.

“I don’t think you’re taking this lesson seriously,” Duncan scolded. Emma yelped a surprised laugh as he slapped her ass smartly and began fucking her in earnest. She closed her eyes and went with it, loving the scrape of the velvet comforter against her hard nipples, the heated friction of his shaft, the zing of blissful sensation as he held onto her hip with one hand while the other reached around to toy with her clit. He bent over her again, his chest to her back, and she felt the warm caress of his tongue along the side of her neck. She shivered expectantly, and everything below her waist began thrumming with eager anticipation. The smooth, firm surface of his fangs brushed against her neck and she shuddered, her heart filling her throat and making it hard to breathe. But who needed to breathe? She only needed Duncan.

His fangs slipped almost painlessly into the taut skin of her neck, puncturing her vein like the pinch of a needle, quickly forgotten in the rush of exquisite pleasure that roared through her blood. The velvet beneath her breasts became a warm, seductive caress against her swollen nipples, clenching her abdomen and making her pussy shiver in anticipation. Without warning, she exploded in a climax that convulsed every muscle in her body, even as Duncan continued to pound into her, his hips grinding against her ass as he held her open to him. Somewhere in all of that, she was aware of the soft pull of his fangs against her vein, of his deep growl as she bucked beneath him, and then his head lifted and, with a roar of release, he filled her with the hot wash of his climax.

Emma no longer felt like laughing. Actually, she might have laughed with sheer joy if she’d been able to feel any part of her body, but she was so completely satiated, she couldn’t feel anything at all. Duncan’s cock flexed inside her, and she moaned as her clit sparked an answer. Okay, so not
every
part of her was numb, after all.

She felt the warm drizzle of blood slide down her neck a moment before Duncan gave her a sensuous lick and belatedly sealed the twin puncture wounds. He kissed them afterwards, murmuring a quiet apology, but Emma didn’t care. She loved the way he came, loved the feel of his cock pumping inside her, loved that he was so lost in his climax that he forgot to lick the wounds closed. What was a trickle of blood compared to that?

He straightened, then lifted her from the waist and pulled both of them fully up and onto the bed. Emma sat up enough to peel off the remains of her thigh-high stockings, then collapsed against him, her cheek resting on his muscled shoulder. She flattened her palm over the ridges of his abdomen, stroking with possessive pride. Duncan’s rumble of laughter vibrated beneath her ear.

“I hate when you do that,” she muttered.

“Do what?” he asked innocently.

“Oh, please. You read me like a book. Besides, I was just admiring your muscle tone.”

“All right.”

She lifted her palm and slapped the muscles she’d been admiring, but he only laughed harder. Emma smiled. At least he wasn’t sad, like he’d been earlier.

“Duncan?”

“Emma.”

“
Do
you actually read my thoughts? I mean, can you?”

He squeezed her closer and touched his lips to her forehead. “It’s not that simple. I can easily read the thoughts of any vampire sworn to me, and especially those of my own children, like Miguel and Louis. With humans, it’s the difference between listening to your neighbor’s music, or walking over and turning on your own. I don’t hear every thought, but if necessary, I can delve into almost any human’s brain and know what they’re thinking. I’m also capable of manipulating a human’s thoughts and memories. It can be something as simple as dissuading a cop from giving me a speeding ticket, or as complex as what Victor did in making those women forget. Though I like to think my own manipulations are far more skilled and far less malicious than anything Victor did.”

 He reached down and lifted her chin to look at him. “I would never probe your thoughts without permission, Emma, but you should know that the more blood we exchange, the closer our thoughts will become, and the more open your mind will be to me.”

“But you already know what I’m thinking!”

“I don’t. Not really. I’m a fairly strong empath. I read emotion. I’ve always had some ability along those lines, even when I was human. But with becoming a vampire, my ability to read the emotions of others is nearly perfect. And, as I told you when we first met, I have decades of experience reading the human body language that goes
with
those emotions.” He shrugged. “It’s only the words that are missing.”

His fingers were still playing along her upper arm, but she felt the rest of him go still, as if waiting for her reaction. She frowned, thinking about what he’d told her, about what it meant. He knew her emotions, her feelings . . . about him. That she loved him. Emma knew she should be embarrassed, but on the other hand, he knew she loved him, and he wasn’t running away screaming. So, okay, then.

“Hardly seems fair,” she muttered, pulling the small hairs on his chest.

“Ow! What’s not fair?” he asked, rubbing his abused follicles.

“That I can’t tell what you’re feeling, too.”

“You know how I feel, Emmaline. You’re mine.”

Emma sighed softly. Maybe it was a vampire thing, this whole
mine
hang-up. “So, who do you think the woman was?” she asked, changing the subject. “The one Violet heard yelling that night.”

“Tammy Dietrich seems likely,” Duncan said. “Powerful men always call their lawyers first when they get into trouble. And it might explain why she was at Lacey’s service. Grafton would have been too obvious, but Dietrich could show up to check things out, and no one would notice.”

“But why would she sign the mourner’s book? It would have been smarter not to leave a record like that.”

“Who knows? Force of habit? Maybe there was someone who knew her and she thought it would look odd if she didn’t sign it. Besides, who looks at those things afterward? She probably didn’t give it a second thought. They had to have known by then that Victor had disappeared, or at least couldn’t be reached. And with Lacey’s body being found, I’m sure they were eager to know what story was being given for her death, and whether the police were involved.”

“Well, that’s one thing we all agree on. No police.”

“No police,” Duncan confirmed. “I’ll take care of this myself.”

“
We’ll
take care of it,” Emma said firmly. “Lacey was
my
friend.”

“And you’re not a killer, Emma.”

“But you are?”

“When I need to be, yes.”

Emma considered all the years Duncan had been alive, and how different justice might have been back . . . She frowned. Back when?

“How old are you, Duncan?” she asked, wondering if he’d tell her. “I mean how old are you
really
?”

“I was born in 1836.”

The unreality of that took Emma’s breath away for a moment. Duncan was nearly two hundred years old, which meant that even when he’d been human, he was already old enough to be married, to have children, especially back then.

“Did you have a family? I mean before you became a vampire. Were you ever married?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, then he got up and left the bed. Emma thought she’d gone too far, that she’d touched on another vampire taboo, or maybe something that was too painful for him to think about. Duncan crossed over to a tall dresser, opened the top drawer, and removed a wooden box about the size of an old cigar box. Emma watched curiously as he lifted the lid and took something out, then stood staring down at whatever it was before finally turning and coming back to the bed.

He held it out to her, and she saw it was an old-fashioned photograph, the kind they called a daguerreotype. It was a portrait of a young woman and two small children—a boy somewhere around four years old, and a second child of indeterminate sex, maybe a year old, sitting on the woman’s lap. Emma stared at the photograph, then looked up at Duncan.

“My wife and children,” he said simply. “They died while I was at war.”

Emma’s heart clenched in sympathy. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “What happened?”

“They were murdered.”

She stared at him in sudden understanding. All along, Duncan had been the only one who understood her need for revenge, her need to be a part of the search for Lacey’s killer. And maybe that was because he knew firsthand the thirst for justice, not at the hands of the law, with its process and protections for the killers, but up close and personal. The biblical, eye for an eye, cold-blooded vengeance.