Blood-Bonded by Force (29 page)

She finally got her mouth to produce a sound. “That’ll do,” she murmured. “Now out you go, love. It’s my turn to change.”

He didn’t say anything. Just left. As the door opened and he stepped out, she heard the warriors start in on him. The door shut, muffling the voices.
Right, then. Get yourself together
.

She tarted herself up in an ankle-to-neck leather bodysuit
a lá
Cat Woman. The garment might as well have been spray-painted on her body, too, it fit that tight. Like a second skin, it left nothing to the imagination, although it still did its job of covering the dragon tattoo on her back and her fecked-up belly. Metal zippers accented both sides of her calves, her left thigh, and her right breast. All the zippers were faux, except for the one over her boob. That one was unzipped, her breast swelling through the opening, appearing
naked, when, in fact, it was concealed by skin-colored material. But it took a double- or triple-take to realize it, and the effect was eye-popping sexy.

“Wow,” Dev said when she stepped out of the dressing room.

Thomal’s jaw locked down.

“Hey, look,” Gábor chirped. “It’s the Camel Toe Twins.”

Pändra called Duane to find out where the Iron Cock was tonight. Her former minion copped an attitude with her for being gone so many long months, but he also sounded creepily excited when he promised to meet her at the club tonight with Bo Bo.
Sorry, chums
. She planned to have all done and dusted well before those two showed. “Here’s the address.” She handed a piece of paper to Dev.

Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of a grubby four-story apartment building, the entire top floor of which was supposedly dedicated to the sex club tonight. They got out of the Dodge van, and Dev stepped up to Pändra and Thomal. “Here are your earpieces.” He held out two on the palm of his hand.

Thomal took one.

She took the other and jammed it into her right ear.

“Gábor, Nỵko, and I will man the perimeter.” Dev glanced between the two of them. “We’re here for you if you need us.”

Thomal shoved his earpiece deeper. “I think I can say with reasonable accuracy that my old lady doesn’t need help in the
seduction
department.” He spun around and stalked inside the building.

She and Thomal had to walk up all four flights of warped stairs, the elevator being clapped out—hardly surprising in a place like this. They passed a long line of scantily-clad people assembled on the stairs. Hungry, devouring stares followed their progress, necks craning, although for the first time ever in an arrival at the
Iron Cock, she wasn’t necessarily the headliner.

At the top, she blazed up a Camel, puffing smoke sideways to avoid giving the bouncer a face full. “’Ow do, Curtis,” she greeted the large black man. “Some good bagging off happening in there tonight?”

“There’s a cover charge.” Curtis didn’t bother to look at her as he passed on this information. His attention was stuck on Thomal. “Economic downswing.”

She
tut-tutted
. “Cor, what’s the world coming to when good folk won’t spend their brass on a proper felching or snowballing? Anyroad, get knotted. I brought a toy with me.” She waved airily at Thomal. “He’s my pass.”

Thomal played his part, forming his lips into a cocky smile that had Curtis rapidly reconsidering his straightness, his eyes nearly pinwheeling in their sockets.

She pushed past the bouncer and made her way inside, Thomal next to her.

The
Iron Cock’s typical dark, sordid atmosphere instantly engulfed them: loud music, streaks of white light slicing across the shadows, the suffocating heated
whoosh
of too many bodies packed into a too-small place. The smell of sweat and the distinctive musk of sex assaulted her senses. It had never bothered her before, but now she had to drag hard on her cigarette to keep the vom down.

Beside her, Thomal lifted his lip into a derisive sneer. “Look at them,” he said, a glare aimed at the dance floor, where people were moving in an undulating mash of simulated sex acts. “They’re making a travesty out of what sex is supposed to be. It’s grotesque.”

She held her Camel between the vee of her fingers and flicked her pinkie against her thumbnail as she surveyed the crowd. Edgar had to be here. The
Iron Cock only operated one night a week, and he never missed. “Didn’t know you were such the romantic type, hubby.”

“With the right woman.”

Pändra clamped her teeth into a tight grind.
Aye, that’s right
. She was Dirty Pändra. Polish a pence to a high shine and underneath the gloss, it’ll always be copper, never gold. She squeezed her eyes closed against a spike of temper. God’s balls, why was she doing this? If she were back in
Ţărână right now, she’d be making faces out of snack time pretzels and raisins for her students. Not being reminded of all the arsed-up things she used to do. And be.

She felt Thomal stiffen beside her, and turned to see what had snagged his attention. He’d spotted a couple in the act of oral sex, the man propped against a wall, neck arched and mouth open around moans the music was drowning out. The woman was on her knees in front of him, her hands wrapped around his naked buttocks, her cheeks hollowing and bulging as she worked the guy’s stalk. Both the man and the woman were blonde, probably creating a decent facsimile of what Arc and Pändra had resembled the night of the “event.”

Pändra’s heart slumped into her stomach, and then both dropped away.
That’s that, then
.
The end of the road, girlie-girl
.
Accept it
. Thomal would never forgive her. Time to give up the fantasy that he’d eventually see all she’d done to make amends and give her a chance. He’d never acknowledge the changes in her.
Never
. There was just too much wreckage on the road between them.

Oddly, such a thing would’ve been a doss for Old Pändra to deal with. But New Pändra had feelings, too many for her not to care about that loss. “Let’s push off.” Her voice grated through the narrow opening of her larynx. She’d come so far these last months, only to discover she’d moved the sum total of a gnat’s whisker.

Thomal frowned. “You don’t see the guy?”

She did, actually. Edgar was at the bar. He’d already spotted her, zeroing in on her as if through a gun sight. “He’s here.”

“What’s the problem, then?”

She held her cigarette in front of her and stared at the glowing red tip as she worked to ice herself down, shoving emotions back into the trap of her ribcage like biting cobras. “Nothing,” she said in a jaundiced tone. “Everything’s brill.” She mashed out her cigarette against the wall and tossed it aside. “To the dance floor, love. It’s time to put on a show. We’ll have to pretend to get into a fight.” Her smile felt like it deformed her face into a unnatural mask. “Think you can pull that off, snookums?”

The hubby gave her a strange look.

Chapter Thirty-two

Thomal followed Pändra into the sweaty, gyrating flotsam and jetsam of the worst society had to offer, the song
You Done Told Everybody
by Pearlene booming a dance-grind beat from several six-foot-tall speakers. Multiple pairs of hands caressed his upper body and grabbed his ass along the way, igniting a hot knot of aggression in his gut.
Fucking ’verts
. Everyone might think they had the right to take whatever liberties they damned well pleased because this was a sex club, but being treated like tonight’s daddy-mack without even being asked didn’t exactly put lead in his pencil.

One woman made a grab for his dick, another ran her tongue suggestively over her teeth at him, her huge tits joggling and bobbling; without benefit of upper body clothing, those things made quite a spectacle. Others might find such enormous jugs par excellence, but Thomal had the misfortune of being married to the hottest thing on two legs. He’d turned impervious to every other female in existence the instant he sank his fangs into a certain black-eyed half-Rău.

Pändra found a spot on the dance floor near the bar and started shakin’ her thang. Taut, well-defined muscles flexed along her thighs and in her sweet ass, her body made to look even hotter by the tight covering of leather; like she was naked, but not really. It’d been a long time since he’d seen her wear something so sexy, and his balls were taking note of the outfit with a hard pull north.
Not
that he’d ever lost sight of how gorgeous she was for even a nanosecond.

Everywhere his wife had gone in the community over these past months, he’d gravitated to a place nearby. Partially out of a mate-thing, but also because of some strange…compulsion to watch her: observe the luscious curve of her calves when she scaled a ladder, ogle her perfectly formed rump as she bent over a playground sandbox, appreciate the way her bouncy breasts filled out a red lifeguard bathing suit. And watch her transform from black-eyed beast into some version of
woman
, vulnerable in some ways, wounded in lots of others.

Right before his eyes, Pändra had stopped being so ruthlessly contained. No longer did she listen to people with a blank, sphinxlike face, as if she was holding herself in constant readiness to react to the next bad thing coming down the pike—not a matter of
if
that bad thing was coming, just when and where. Which was a sad way to imagine her living, and the thought sometimes did weird things to his stomach.

These days she tilted her head when people talked to her, warmed her expression,
smiled
, which really weirded out his insides, sending his guts slipping and sliding, like icing off the top of a double-layer cake left in the sun too long. And all the while Pändra had been making this miraculous transformation, Thomal had remained at a fucking standstill.

He just couldn’t seem to figure out how to move forward. It didn’t help that he wasn’t sure what he wanted from Pändra. A part of him craved a wife in truth: somebody to come home to, a chance at a family,
regular sex
. But so much of those longings got ruined by the short-fused triggers littering the space between them: the word tequila, the cord that plugged his telephone into the wall, the shackles hanging in
Ţărână’s armory reserved for misbehaving Vârcolac. The sight of a blonde chick giving head to a blonde guy. Arc a ruined mess.

Hell, how could Thomal make a life for himself with the woman who’d so totally screwed up his brother? How could he allow himself to find happiness with the woman he should have killed?

He didn’t know how. He didn’t know what to do to save Arc or how to get his own head on straight. He didn’t know how to quit being such a cold bastard to the woman who’d set all this crap in motion or even if he wanted to stop. And
if
he decided he wanted Pändra, he didn’t have a clue how to take the first step toward her. No, the second step. Pändra had already taken the first with her apology. His dazzling response to that? A grunt. For shit’s sake, he was such a total waste of skin about this whole thing, he was more impotent than even when his dick hadn’t worked. A joyful thought.

Pändra spun around on the dance floor, her long hair whiplashing across his face, soft and filled with her sent. Tension landed square between his shoulder blades as his semi-aroused member launched upward another few inches. It’d been too long since he’d been inside his wife’s warm kooch.
For-fucking-ever
. In eight months of sexual functioning, he’d only been laid one time.
Once
. Which was absolute bullshit.

Pändra wrapped her arms around his neck, her body moving sinuously against him with her dirty dancing. A quick slice of her eyes acknowledged the stiff length of wood she found in the vicinity of his zipper, but then she was peering over his shoulder, padlocking Edgar. She gave the ass gasket a smoldering look that oozed
if I get my hands on you, your clothes are coming off with my teeth
.

Hostile jealousy spread like peanut butter cement in Thomal’s gut. He forced a swift breath.
Cool it, Costache. She’s only on the mission
.

Yeah, but
was
she? His body was rubbing hers as closely as vice versa, yet he might as well have been a department store dummy for all the reaction he was getting out of her. He knew her sex-scent—every time he fed on her, his olfactory lobe got a knee-trembling blast of it—and right now it was nowhere to be found. Maybe she really did want to fuck Videön’s scumbag friend. A girl like her had needs, after all, and she certainly wasn’t getting any action out of Thomal’s Fruit of the Looms.

“Edgar’s watching us,” she said into his ear. “Grab my arse or something, will you? He’ll want to think he’s nabbing me from you.”

Well, gee
… He complied, of course, grabbing and squeezing her moneymaker, ripe flesh over firm muscle in his palms, the solid curve of her lower buttocks rounding toward heaven’s tightest gate. Lust shot through his balls and ransacked his brain. With his hands, he jacked her hips forward, anger and arousal surging through him until he was insane with the need to have her beneath him, legs spread wide, the vigor of his hips pounding his cock deep inside her body.

Pändra lurched out of his hold, ignoring him as she danced around, putting her back to his front. She rotated her caboose against his crotch, and he nearly groaned as he imagined taking her from behind and…
screw it
. He grabbed her by the waist and pumped his hips forward as if he was doing that very thing. The feel of her butt cheeks bumping into his member squeezed some pre-come to the head of his fully aroused staff.
Shit
. His pants were so tight, if he accidentally shot his wad, he’d probably blow his boots off.