Microsoft Word - Blood and Sex from CE.rtf (6 page)

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If she’d had something to throw at him, she would have. Instead, she stuck her hand out to Elena. “Hi. I’m Christiana.”

“Hi.” The other woman shook her hand, then let go quickly. “Thanks for coming to help.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

Blane made another sound, but Christiana managed to ignore it.

“I’d like to go somewhere we can work in private.”

“Stay here,” Jonas said. “We’ve got business at the club.”

She nodded to him and waited for the couple to say their goodbyes. Blane walked out of the small gym without so much as a backward glance. Her heart felt heavy as he disappeared through the doorway. Some part of her wanted him to want her, as ridiculous as that was.

Emotions were getting the best of her again. There was no logical reason to feel so drawn to him and so in need of his regard. He was, as far as her family and status were concerned, too far beneath her for a real relationship. And he thought the same of her, making it an impossible, reckless fantasy.

* * * *

“Leave it alone, J.” Blane flung open his bedroom door, turning his back on the vampire.

He didn’t owe him an explanation, and he wasn’t going to offer one.

“She bit you?” Jonas laughed. “That’s a first.”

He grabbed a shirt from the foot of the bed. “I’m warning you. Back off.”

Jonas propped against a chest of drawers near the door. “What are you going to do?

Attack me because I asked about what I just walked in on? I think that after everything you’ve

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learned about me, you can humor me with a little info.”

The
fratello
had a point. Blane had been around for Jonas’s obsessions with Tori and Elena, before he changed her. This was nothing by comparison.

Still, he didn’t want to talk about it.

“Sorry, J. I don’t want to have this conversation,” he said, opening the door to the bathroom. “I just want to take a shower and go to work.”

Jonas nodded. “Understood. But keep in mind who she is. As a smart man once told me,

‘Dangerous game you’re playin’,
fratello’.”

Blane knew his own words just as they bit him sharply on the ass. He’d said that to Jonas when he’d witnessed something happening between him and Tori after she was bound to Michael. At the time, he’d thought Jonas had a death wish. Now, he was beginning to understand. That forbidden fruit cliché was starting to sound like a very, very accurate proverb.

“I’ve got work to do,” he muttered, then walked into the bathroom.

By the time he emerged, Jonas was gone. He didn’t see him at the club either, and he was grateful. It gave him time to refocus on his job. By midnight, he was working the crowd with his usual mix of sarcasm and excessive flirtation. There were the regular patrons who didn’t take him seriously, and a few new girls who weren’t sure whether to take him seriously or not.

When he went for his break at two, one of the latter slid up beside him at the bar. “I feel like you’re trying to avoid me.”

He glanced down to see a woman with short brown hair and an even shorter red skirt, then turned his attention back to the blood and vodka he’d been nursing. “I’m not avoiding anyone.”

“In that case, why don’t we go back to one of the private rooms?”

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Blane smirked. On any other night, he’d have done exactly that and enjoyed every minute of it. Tonight, though, the idea sounded a little monotonous. How many nights had he spent in those rooms with faceless women?

“Well?” She slid a hand down his arm.

He watched her hand moving over his, warm blood beating just beneath the surface.

There was warmth there. Not from love or even affection, but food. He was a predator, feeding on the blood of humans. Nothing would change that. If he could take it in a way that gave them pleasure, that’s what he’d do.

And he was hungry.

Pushing away from the bar, Blane grabbed the girl’s hand and led her down the corridor to the private rooms created for fetish exploration. The last on the left was his favorite—the boudoir room designed for lingerie and shoe fetishes.

The human moved to the couch and sat, watching him with big doe eyes. She looked the part of prey, and it made the beast within him stir.

Blane moved to sit beside her, listening to her heart speed up a few beats. “Nervous?”

She laughed, answering the question by the tremor in her voice.

He went for her neck. There was no reason to be subtle or coy. She wouldn’t remember it later. If she screamed, it wouldn’t matter. The fetish rooms were full of strange sounds and acts that would have normal people dialing 9-1-1.

The woman arched toward him and fumbled to grab his sides. She tried to slow him down, but it was too late. Blane’s teeth hit her skin and sank home before she uttered a word.

The hot liquid filled his mouth with her taste. Everything from the drinks that she’d had earlier to the iron supplements she was taking were in that crimson fluid. But there was

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something else. Her essence, that part of her that was her life, flowed into him and filled him with a power that made the drink intoxicating.

How easy it would be to keep drinking, to rob away her life to extend his own.

Blane pulled hard, taking another long drink of the girl. She squirmed and moaned beneath him, feeling a little too much like Christiana had felt beneath him in the gym.

He pressed harder into the woman’s body to keep her still and swallowed another gulp of her. He wasn’t going to get lost in thinking about that annoying, snotty vampiress he had been assigned to watch.

Or how much he wanted her.

The woman beneath him moaned a little more softly, drawing his attention. Her heart was beating more slowly. He’d taken enough blood. Even if he wanted to keep drinking, to finish her off, he wasn’t a murderer. At least, not when his own life wasn’t at stake, or when he was defending others.

He pulled his teeth away and closed the wound to stop her from bleeding out. The human’s eyes were closed. The fringe of dark lashes made her look more like a child than she was. Innocent. And he the monster who’d just violated her was staring down at her, filled with the blood she needed to animate her own body.

Blane swallowed hard and slid off the couch. He’d have to wipe her memory, and then he was out of here. As much of an asshole as he felt when he acted cowardly, he couldn’t stick around for a chat with dinner.

33

Two Weeks Later

“Blane.”

Hearing his name over the music, Blane turned back toward the crimson-and-black booth where Michael and Jonas sat looking up at him. Michael was in a crisp, dark suit and looked like the hard-ass leader he was shaping up to be. Jonas, on the other hand, looked like something out of the movies. He only got away with it in public because it was his club and everyone thought he was in costume, like the rest of the vampire staff.

The changes in both of them were obviously due to the
fratello
relaxing with their new mates. It was enough to make Blane wonder what it might be like to have someone like that. A female to come home to, to be his other half.

But only for a second.

Blane pulled the toothpick he’d been chewing out of his mouth. “Yeah, Boss?”

“The plane’s leaving just after sunset tomorrow night. Don’t make me come after you.”

Jonas’s pasty skin drew up on one side of his mouth, giving him a wicked smirk. “It’s okay. I’ll go after him.”

Blane laughed. “Man, you need to find a hobby.”

Yeah. No way in hell was he going to tangle with Jonas. He’d taken on
all
of Luciano’s traits. Watching him fight the agents had been enough to ensure that none of the
cosca
crossed him. Things had been quiet because of it. “Why don’t you take up cage fighting? I hear G’s got a great setup just outta town.”

Jonas let out a laugh that drew a few gazes in their direction. Mostly from other vampires,

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since they were the only ones who could hear that well over the music.

“Just be on time, Blane.” Michael took another drink from his glass. “I’m depending on you for this trip.”

“Sure.”

Blane popped the toothpick back into his mouth and strode out into the main room. If they were leaving early, he needed to feed. There were a lot of hours between Collins Bay and Venice. Sure, there would be blood on the plane, but nothing straight out of the body. It would be that reheated, processed shit they got from the blood bank. And if Michael was finally giving him a chance to be more than the brain of the group, he needed to be at his best.

He scanned the dance floor, looking from face to face in the changing lights. There’d been a couple of girls he’d let in earlier. If they hadn’t left—

There. At the edge of the dance floor was a young girl in a strapless black dress. She was no more than twenty-two, with a body made for porn. Even G had been checking her out, and he didn’t go for women under thirty.

Blane ruffled his hand through his hair and strode toward her. When he was only a few yards away, the girl glanced up, then back to her drink. Even across the distance, he could see her nipples harden. Yeah, she was into him.