Hunted, The Complete Edition: A Full-length Steamy Vampire Romance (New England Nightwalkers) (4 page)

“Thanks,” he murmured as he took the drink from her. Their fingers brushed and a jolt of electricity arced from her head to her toes.

God, he was fine. Fine in the way that made her tongue-tied and fidgety and hot and needy.

Annnd, he had just gotten hit by a car—
her
car—so maybe she should rein it in. But the fact was, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed herself as much as she had in the past couple of hours.

She looked up at Gabriel, that very admission on her lips, but it died as their gazes collided.

He was so very close. In fact, if she leaned up onto her toes, she could—

He was staring at her. Through her. Like he was trying to read her thoughts. Her cheeks flamed at the idea of it. Dear lord, the things he would see right now.

Her breath caught and his jaw flexed in response. She could feel it all happening like it was in slow motion.

Setting down her glass with a
clink
.

Rolling up onto the balls of her stockinged feet.

Pressing her free hand to the muscled wall of his chest.

Willing him with everything she had to dip his head lower to meet her mouth with his own.

“Zara…”

Her name sounded like it was torn from his lips on a groan and hearing the want in his voice made her blood sing.

Had she ever done something so reckless? Even considering a one-night stand had been too scandalous for her taste, but now here she was, hoping against hope that he would—

“I have to go.”

Her ears began to buzz as his words penetrated the haze of desire she’d been lost in.

“G-go?” she heard herself ask, sounding as confused as she felt. Had she seriously been so screwed up from all that had happened that she’d read him so completely wrong?

Her face burned with humiliation as she stepped back.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m so embarrassed. You’ve been so nice that I—”

He slid a hand into her hair and pressed a finger to her lips.

“No, it’s not that. I think I hear the tow truck out front, and he’s my ride back to town.”

Before she could respond, his mouth replaced his finger, slanting over hers in a kiss unlike any she’d ever felt. Firm, but sensual, his tongue magic as it swept over the tender flesh of her bottom lip. She gasped as he delved deeper, fisting a hand in her hair, moving in close until their bodies were plastered together.

If there had been a question in her mind as to whether he was attracted to her, it was put to rest as his thick erection pressed against her stomach. Her nipples tingled and peaked in response as a rush of wet warmth flooded her core. Instinctively, she tilted her hips toward him, seeking the relief her body knew he could provide. He responded instantly, wedging his thigh between hers until she was grinding against him.

And then it was over. He released her abruptly and tore his mouth away from her with a growl.

“Jesus, woman, you’re going to be the death of me.”

Her motherboard was too fried from the heat of their kiss to reply, and he took a step back, his molten gaze burning her alive.

By the time she found her voice, he’d set down his still-full glass and was gone, like a specter in the night. If not for the cinnamon and clove scent still lingering in his wake and the warmth of her lips from his kiss, she might have thought she’d imagined him altogether.

She rushed into the bathroom, her wine glass in hand, to find his rumpled, torn sweater still on the floor. She held it to her chest and stared at herself in the mirror, stunned by what she saw reflected back at her.

Flushed cheeks. Swollen mouth. Dazed blue eyes.

And a tiny droplet of blood trickling from her lower lip.

T
hree days and two nights
.

Nearly seventy-two hours since he’d kissed her, and Gabriel was still no closer to a solution to his problem than when it had first begun. On top of being in a near-constant state of arousal, he was starving, moody, and miserable as fuck. Especially since he’d been following Zara from afar every evening and skulking around outside her house like some sort of creeper.

It was the cruelest of catch twenty-twos.

The further away he stayed, the longer it would take for him to gather the information he needed to clear her of suspicion, and the longer he would suffer.

But if he got close to her again? Close enough to touch?

He didn’t know what he was capable of. And that was unacceptable.

He took a slug from his blood-bank-sourced cocktail and grimaced. It was bland and tinny in his mouth, just like everything had been since he’d tasted a single drop of the sweetest blood he’d ever encountered.

Zara.

He shouldn’t have nipped her. God knew, his brain wasn’t in charge at that moment, though. She wouldn’t suffer any negative effects from it, and it took a lot more than that to turn a human into a vampire, but it had been careless and stupid. While he doubted she’d even felt it, he sure had.

He hadn’t meant it literally when he told her she’d be the death of him, but as it stood now, it felt like it. Before he’d known her, he’d been able to choke down enough of the foul, plastic-bagged sustenance to survive without compromising his ethics. Now?

He craved it, straight from the tap.

Zara’s
tap.

And nothing less would satisfy him.

The thought brought a second, much more disturbing one on its heels. He’d heard tell of something like this. Read about it in books and legend.

A pull like no other. An innate, inexplicable draw so strong, it eclipsed the more common bond between vampire and human that most referred to as Master and Familiar. From the dawn of his kind, nightwalkers had relied on human companions to do the things they could not. Sometimes these were business dealings. Managing banking and other activities that couldn’t be done under the cover of darkness. Sometimes the dealings were more personal. Vampires liked having a willing servant at their beck and call for sex or blood or companionship…maybe a fond reminder of their humanity.

But this other bond was far more insidious. Rather than as with the Master and Familiar, the exchange of power was irrevocably reciprocal. The Familiar of course needed its Master, but the Master became just as reliant, if not more so. And once it had begun, it was almost impossible to stop. The Familiar became a Necessary, and the emotional wellbeing of the Master relied on its counterpart.

From what he could recall, it was said to be something that happened almost never, and even then, after years together. Certainly not between near strangers, almost at first sight.

Which was exactly why this thing he was feeling for Zara was obviously nothing more than the unfortunate result of his lengthy celibacy combined with her balls-to-the-wall sexiness.

Besides, that Necessary nonsense was the stuff of old wives’ tales and Romantic poets. In all his years, he’d never met a single nightwalker who had more than secondhand, centuries’ old retellings of the phenomenon.

In any case, he still had to tread lightly. There was no denying that Zara Matheson had him wrapped up right now, and he needed to get some space from her before he did something reckless…something truly unforgivable.

A low knock on the door dragged him from his churning thoughts and he looked up to see Irena standing there.

“You were looking for me?”

He nodded and gestured toward the empty chair across from him.

She took a seat and arched a raven brow at him in question. “What’s up? I only have a few minutes. The club is packed tonight and I need to make sure we have enough staff on the Dark Side to handle any security issues.”

Irena was clearly still in paranoid-mode.

The club was nothing more than a convenience for their kind. A way for them to easily make and move cash around to support their lifestyles without raising eyebrows. The fact that it also allowed them to identify humans who were ripe for kinky sexual encounters in a setting that the vampires could control with ease was a bonus. But as pressing as she made all that sound, the staff was comprised of nightwalkers who were trained to handle almost anything, and she didn’t need to be involved in the day to day security.

He didn’t bother arguing, though. If feeling like she was needed got her through the night, then who was he to tell her differently?

That wasn’t why he’d asked her to stop by his office anyway.

“Look, I think we should take a short recess with the whole Zara thing. Let her go to DC for the holidays as planned. I’ll pick it up when she gets back.”

Irena’s perceptive gaze locked with his own and he didn’t look away as she tried to peer into his soul.

“Why?”

“Honestly? Because she’s almost certainly not a threat.” He kept his tone neutral as he spoke, hoping she wouldn’t see the edge beneath his cracking veneer. “I spent the evening in her home and have been watching her for days. She’s done nothing at all to raise my suspicions.”

That was mostly true. Every time she’d left the room when he’d been in her cottage the other night, he’d engaged super-speed and done some quick recon. No diary or journal, no weapons. Nada. Hell, the woman didn’t even have a copy of Dracula in her vast DVD collection.

But there had been one little thing that still niggled at him. The urn in a place of honor on the fireplace mantle.

Her mother had died when Zara was nineteen, and was buried in DC. From what he’d gathered, she was the reason Zara bothered to return to her hometown for holidays at all. She would go, visit a few old friends, and then spend Christmas day clearing off her mother’s plot and setting a wreath on her gravestone.

There was no father listed on Zara’s birth certificate at all, which wasn’t strange given the fact that her mother had been a teen when she’d had her, and he could find no evidence of any correspondence with a male that would fit the age range of a father-figure. She had no siblings, her grandparents were both buried in upstate New York on a family plot, she had no aunts or uncles, and she’d had never married.

Which begged the question…whose ashes were in the urn?

He shoved aside the mystery that had been gnawing at him for days, along with the guilt that came with hiding it from Irena. No point in lamenting over it when he was one hundred percent sure they’d all be better off if he took a step back and gained some clarity. A couple weeks to clear his mind and then maybe he could make heads or tails of whether the urn had any significance at all.

He clenched his jaw and turned his focus back toward his boss, even more determined to press his case.

“Her computer searches are innocuous, she goes from home to work and back again. No strange purchases, now or in the past, no indication of weapons training.” He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head slowly. “I got jack-shit on her. There’s nothing there, and while I waste my time on that, there are rumblings in other areas that could use my attention.”

She looked like she was about to argue, but her phone chirped and she peered down at it before holding up an index finger.

“Give me a second.” She accepted the call and listened as the caller spoke.

That was good. Perfect timing, really. It gave him a few moments to think of what other rumblings could possibly need his attention. Best case, maybe she’d have to rush off for some emergency and agree to forget all about Zara for a while. At least until he’d gotten his bearings again.

But as the one-sided call continued, her dark eyes narrowed. She leveled him with a strange smile, and he knew it wasn’t going to be so simple.

He focused, fine-tuning his hearing until he could make out the male voice on the other end of the line.

“Video feed coming at you live. Call me back and let me know how you want me to handle it.
”

“Roger that,” Irena snapped back.

She pressed the disconnect button and then waited in silence until her phone chirped again a second later. Then she looked down at it and let out a low laugh.

“Well, well, well. Your wish has come to pass, Gabriel. Looks like you can stop following your little lamb after all.”

It took a second to make sense of her words, but when he did, a cold knot formed in his stomach. “What do you mean?”

Irena aimed her cellphone toward him and enlarged the screen, offering up a birds-eye view of the club entrance. A woman stood there, dressed in head to toe black. He could only see her profile at first, but it was enough. A second later, her face filled the screen.

Zara Matheson, wide blue eyes darting back and forth as she spoke to the bouncer out front in real time.

She’d either come to Club Nitris to find herself some vampires to hunt, or she’d somehow traced him to this address and had come to find
him
.

Either way meant trouble.

Big trouble.

“Better get down there, old friend. I think you have some work to do.”

* * *

Z
ara tried not
to stare at the massive doorman as he spoke into his cell phone in hushed tones.

What was he saying? And why was it taking so long?

Nerves settled in her stomach like a lead weight and she resisted the urge to turn on her heel and run.

This was a bad idea.

Maybe the worst of all the ideas she’d ever had, and she’d had some doozies.

Like that time when she was nine and thought she had the skills to build a tree house because she saw Bob the Builder do it once on TV, and consequently almost murdered Suzy Pilkner with a nail gun in the process. Or that time she’d convinced Trevor Milliken that she was a savant with a slingshot and tried to shoot that apple off his head. She’d seen him at their high school reunion last year and he still had a scar, right between the eyes.

But this stunt? Walking into a mysterious bar that was a money-laundering venture for the mob at best, and a den for bloodsucking monsters at worst?

This one topped them all.

She’d clearly lost her mind. Maybe this apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.

Her thoughts drifted to her father, and her heart gave a squeeze. She should have given him a little more credit when he was alive. Maybe then the guilt and regret would weigh a little less heavily on her.

Sure, she’d placated him. Listening to his outrageous theories when he was especially manic, comforting him when he was low. She’d even abided by the rules he’d set from the time the first time he’d contacted her. He’d sent them via hand-delivered letter upon her mother’s death.

“Zara. I’m so sorry for the loss of your mother. If you want to meet up, it’s got to be off the grid, 24/7. Pen and paper only, and destroy all evidence. No pictures. No phone contact except via burner phones. No email. Always cover your tracks. Because some day, they’re going to get me, and when they do, I don’t want to lead them to you.”

She had no idea who
they
was back then, but, crazy or not, he was the only family she’d had left.

After some careful though, she’d agreed, and they’d met a few weeks later. And, with a sinking heart, she’d found out pretty quickly that
they
could’ve been anyone, depending on his mood.

The aliens that lived among them.

Or JFK’s
true
killers.

Or any one of the secret government agencies watching them…always watching.

But on his good days? Their best days? He was wonderful. Smart, and funny, and engaging. It wasn’t his fault he was mentally ill, and she had no doubt he believed every world he’d told her. So she’d understood his absence and had forgiven all without reservation, grateful she had him in her life.

When he’d died, she’d gone into a state of shock, going through the motions, but in a fog. She’d adhered to his wishes, ensuring an autopsy through the normal channels and a second opinion through the intermediary he’d set up before his death. It was weeks before she finally had the heart to clean out his house, and what she found there had chilled her to the bone.

Deep in the bowels of the ramshackle house was a secret room that he’d mentioned in his will. It was towering with crates full of newspaper clippings and drawings and notes scribbled on anything that wasn’t nailed down. Even in the mess, his focus was clear. Leading up to his death, he’d dropped the alien talk and the JFK conspiracies to fixate on one theory and one theory only.

The existence of vampires.

The room was full to bursting, and had kept her up many a night. She’d pored through it all. Every newspaper clipping, every note. So many similarities between the Bonfire Massacre and the way her father had been brutalized. But why had one been classified a mass murder, committed by a person on drugs, and the other classified an accidental death due to an unknown, wild animal?

Because someone didn’t want them connected.