Hunger Untamed H3 (9 page)

Chapter Nine

She had no idea when they’d fallen asleep.

Victor had her tucked in beside him, his leg wedged between her thighs again, his early morning woody poking her in the behind.

Heat flooded her face as she recounted their last conversation. She’d been overwhelmed by her desire for Victor, a man who saw her as a transaction. She’d thought about how she’d even come to be here with him and how she was letting Cindy down by turning her focus on his body and what it could do, instead of avenging Cindy’s death.

She’d been flying high from the victory of tagging Victor, the eroticism of a kiss that begged to be relished and continued, and from the understanding that she yearned for more in the depths of her belly. She’d wanted to be seduced and touched. She’d
needed
it.

Did it matter if she could pinpoint the exact moment he’d stopped being an instructor to her and had become someone she’d wanted to touch and be touched by?

She groaned, embarrassed.

Victor squeezed with his arm. “Feeling okay?” he murmured. “Too hard on you yesterday?”

“What—uh, no. I’m fine.” But now that he mentioned it, her nose throbbed and muscles screamed at her. Nothing a couple of ibuprofen wouldn’t cure if she could get her hands on some.

She waited for him to mention their last conversation, to make her want a hole to appear in the ground and swallow her, but Victor seemed content to slowly rock his hips against her instead. The friction of his cock sliding against her skin sent warmth shooting into her blood. Lucy swallowed hard, cautious about the stirring of feelings he caused, but she couldn’t deny that this excited her.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, throat incredibly dry.

Victor ran traced his fingers over the sensitive skin of her forearm, making every hair stand on end, electricity arcing between his touch and her. Her nipples hardened into beads, her breasts growing heavy.

He grasped her hand, then dragged it low, stopping when she could touch the vee between her thighs. “Touch,” he said in a low voice.

On reflex, her fingers tightened on his, a sudden jerk away from what he wanted her to do. Her stomach rolled. “But I thought
you
wanted...”

“Most definitely I want. But I’d love to see you get yourself off in front of me.” He applied more pressure to her fingertips.

“Please...don’t.”

He released his grip but dropped a kiss on her shoulder. “Not today, but someday. I want to watch you.”

She ducked, still waiting for a nonexistent hole to swallow her. “What is it about guys and wanting to see that?”

“We’re very visual. And you are a beautiful woman. What’s in my head cannot be anything like seeing the real thing up close and personal.”

“Well, don’t hold your breath. I’d probably evaporate on the spot if you watched.” She waited for him to ask her more about their discussion, push for more details. It made her tense, her skin itchy with the need to bolt.

But he never asked. Never pushed. He seemed content to lie in bed with her all day, caressing and kissing. What was she supposed to do with that?

“What about my training?” she asked when his hand strayed to the curve of her breast.

He grunted, a noise of disappointment, but then said, “Ready when you are.”

She waited a few minutes more, mind drifting to impossible scenarios, before rolling away from him. It took the sudden memory of Cindy to get her moving because the contentment she felt weighed a small ton. It tried to keep her glued to the bed and plastered to Victor’s side.

Neither spoke much as they finished their morning ablutions and Lucy opened another tin of peaches. A wave of dizziness settled over her mid-chew, and she pushed them aside. Victor’s vow to make a trip into town might be more necessary than she’d previously thought. Maybe Peggy, her housekeeper, hadn’t rotated out the stock quickly enough.

“That’s not sufficient,” he said when they took a break from their sparring a couple of hours later. Like yesterday, she’d soaked through her clothing with sweat, the T-shirt and jeans clinging to her skin. She was caked in dirt and leaves, testament to the many times Victor had flipped her over his shoulder and she’d landed in an indelicate heap on the ground.

“That burger you had last night was a start, but you need more protein for what we’re doing. We should head into town tonight, see what we can get for you. Clothes for me.”

The patty, rock hard out of the freezer, had been tasteless and dry, but it had filled a hole. Although, her stomach ached today.

She took her frustration out on a nearby tree as she practiced leg sweeps. Hours of practice in, and he hadn’t mentioned another modification to their contract. Must have been sympathy on his part, but her luck would only hold for so long. If she were honest with herself, she didn’t know if Victor’s temporary injunction was a good or a bad thing.

“Aww, you’re thinking of covering up that body?” she asked sweetly. “Too bad, because I like seeing you run around looking all lord of the jungle. Topless and with a pair of raggedy shorts that don’t quite fit.” Every bone in her body creaked as she rose, kinks working themselves out of her system. Fully erect, she took a deep breath, trying to suck in air that wasn’t there. “Just need to make that
aa-aaa-aaaah
sound, and the elephants’ll come charging.”

“Someone’s been watching one too many black-and-white Johnny Weissmuller movies.”

She stopped to stare at him. “Oh my God. You actually know about them?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her, an amused tilt to his mouth. “You’re asking a vampire if he knows about black-and-white movies?”

“I know, but it’s just so...
old
. I doubt even cable is showing those episodes anymore.”

“So now you’re calling me old? Should I point out that you, a human in the twenty-first century, know who he is too?”

Lucy waved an errant hand. “That’s neither here nor there.” They continued to make their way back to the clearing, the conversation fascinating her. “
The Lord of the Apes
just doesn’t seem like your kind of flick. I’d expect you to go more for something involving muscle cars and lots of guns.”

“Stereotypical much?”

“Well, look at you!” she cried. “You’re a walking stereotype.” If he was offended, she couldn’t tell. If anything, Victor seemed pleased she’d associated him with such masculine matters.

“For that, you get to run some laps.”

She gaped.

“Go on. Get. Burning moonlight.”

“Ass,” she muttered, but started jogging anyway. She felt like death warmed over, muscles achy and breathing as if she’d dunked her face into pea soup on an inhale, but she was doing
something
.

The weight of Victor watching her followed Lucy through the small circle she made. It wasn’t like back in high school when the guys had made rakish catcalls, lewdly staring at her bouncing breasts. What he did was follow with analytical intensity, like trying to solve a puzzle. Even when she couldn’t see him for the forest trees blocking her view, she knew his stare.

Gasping for breath, she threw her hands in the air, willing her racing heart to mellow and for oxygen to fill her starving lungs. Her vision blurred, the world bouncing in tune with her frantic pulse.

Victor ambled over, still analyzing. “Do you see me?” he asked.

Lucy continued gasping, too busy praying for a lung transplant, to follow. “What?”

“When you look at me, what do you see?”

“A sadist,” she griped between breaths. God, breathing through a straw would have been less difficult.

He reached for her, gently cupping her chin. He tilted her face toward his, his eyes searching for something undefined. “Seriously. Do you see
me
?”

Her ears buzzed, making it difficult to focus. Between that and her struggling breaths, Victor’s question made absolutely no sense. She would have answered him if she had any clue about the direction of his question, but she had more important tasks to focus on right now.

What was going on? Why couldn’t she get her damned lungs to open up and gulp down air?

She pulled away from him, stumbling, searching for a place to sit. Maybe she needed to keep walking though. Her legs carried her away from him on a blind path back to the house.

Lucy began to cough, each spasm like a knife being plunged into her chest. She arched her back, the only defense against the shredding pain blossoming through her body. Her fingers curled in, the muscles of her forearms and hands bowstring tight.

She slammed her eyes shut, too caught in this terrible storm to let loose a scream. The barking coughs turned into hacking combined with an attempt to stop the assault on her body.

“Lucy?”

The shooting pain found new places to attack. Somehow every joint had become a bottleneck of coalesced torture. She collapsed, moaning.

Heavy footsteps raced toward her, and between fluttering lids, she saw Victor drop to a knee beside her. “Hey. Talk to me. What’s going on? Where does it hurt?”

This—this torment. She’d been through a fraction of this before. Her body attacked itself, her blood no longer capable of supporting her.

“P-poison,” she croaked.

“When? How?”

If he expected her to spit out an explanation now, he held her capacity for suffering on a different level than she did. Lucy wanted nothing more than to curl up and die. The memory of Cindy helped keep the thought at bay, but it was so hard.

Tears trickled from her eyes, the fat droplets a cooling reprieve from the heat flooding her system. She fought to not lie on the ground, stop breathing, stop feeling.
So sorry
,
Cindy.
Maybe she couldn’t do this after all.

She cried out when strong hands grabbed her, hauling her upright into a sitting position. Pain flared out, but in the moment she tried to scream against the horribleness of it, her lungs opened up and a desperate sob brought her the oxygen she’d been lacking.

Victor jerked her upright again. “C’mon. Breathe.”

Misery washed over her, but she took another breath, this one as vital and desperate as the last. She started to slump over, but Victor held on. Held tight.

His intense eyes, his surety, a focal point as she took another breath.

And another.

Another.

* * *

Fuck. He hadn’t seen that coming.

He’d been trying to ascertain what she saw in him, why she could possibly seem attracted to him. Why didn’t Lucy care about the defects that greeted him when he dared a glimpse of himself in a mirror? On every one of those occasions, he wished he’d been born into his vampirism, inheriting the inability to see his own reflection. God knew he didn’t want to look at the droop to his eye and cheek or the way his lips didn’t close quite right. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for others to sit across from him and pretend like they didn’t notice.

But not Lucy. When she looked at him, he always heard the subtle gain in the tempo of her heart. The beginnings of a smile tipped her lips, pure delight in being near him another emotion she wore on her sleeve like a bright red ribbon. He didn’t understand it.

Then the color had drained in her face, a cross between surprise and fear punctuated a moment later as she struggled to breathe. He still had no idea what had happened. He’d discarded his first instinct to call 911 for the human. With a small prayer of thanks, he was relieved that his second instinct—to move her to sitting and open up her lungs—appeared to have brought some measure of relief.

Victor remained in a crouch beside her, low enough to inspect the flood of color returning to her face. She kept her eyes cast away from his, embarrassed. The occasional cough racked her body, but as quickly as they recurred, they seemed to subside.

“Better now?”

She nodded. “It was nothing,” she whispered.

“The fuck it was,” he bit out, his voice rising.

“Really, it’s nothing.” Lucy found some invisible spot in the grass to focus on, feigning interest in something there. As if it would be enough to distract Victor from reliving the nightmare of seeing her struggle for air.

He could respect her privacy. Ignoring her sudden illness would be the smart thing to do. But he was coming to know Lucy a little. There was more going on here than she wanted him to know about, and if he let it slide, he’d be missing out on something crucial.

He recognized the bond they’d started to form. The slippery slope away from strictly professional to something a little more personal. Maybe friendship. Maybe more...

“The way I see it,” he said, not allowing her to shy away from him, “is that you did some simple exercise. Nothing strenuous at all. You seem in shape and jogged that circuit without looking like you were going to pass out or anything. You fought with me yesterday and did little more than break a sweat. But today, something happened, something you don’t much want me to know about. That wasn’t allergies or an asthma attack or not being able to catch your breath after running a mile. I heard someone in the throes of a death rattle. Someone with one pinky toe out of the grave. Someone who’s really sick. That sound about right?”

Her lips parted, and at first he thought she’d actually give him a reply. Instead, Lucy drew in more breaths with concerted effort. “I’m better,” she said at last. Her body decided to betray the lie by forcing her into a coughing fit that lasted almost a full minute.

When she settled, Victor tried again. “This got something to do with why you’re after Sage?”

“Why do you think that?” She still wouldn’t look at him.

“Because I’m not stupid. This ain’t just being tenacious about him, you’re obsessively stubborn. You’re acting like you’re on a deadline and you’re determined to see it done yourself, even if it kills you. Literally. Thing is, you ain’t holding the cards in this. I am. So for the last time, if you don’t want me to walk away right now, you tell me... What did he do to you?”

The hate-filled look she shot him should have cut him down on the spot. He considered it an improvement over the mild catatonia she’d been caught beneath. “He killed my sister,” she hissed. “And he’s killed me too
.
”