Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) (19 page)

“I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, his voice rough. “It’s un-freakin’-believable.”

T
his was a life he could get used to. Owen rolled onto his side and curled his body around the soft curves of the woman lying next to him, pulling her close and running kisses along one silky shoulder.

“Aren’t you the early riser.” Lucy rolled into his embrace and pulled his mouth to hers.

He broke the kiss first, smoothing the thick, dark hair away from her face.

“Let’s feed, then I’ll show you how much of an early riser I am, love.”

She laughed and imitated his brogue. “Fine Irishman that you are. Your brother and Mirren don’t have much of an accent left unless they’re turning it on for effect.”

He collapsed on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “Aidan left Ireland and everything in it a long time ago.”

“What happened back then, to make you two hate each other so much?”

Owen threw back the blanket on the old mattress they’d dragged into the middle of the floor in a windowless back room of a deserted house on the outskirts of Penton—supplies Lucy had helped dredge up so they wouldn’t have to rut on the floor like bloody beasts. Lighting a candle, he walked to the living room and pulled the blinds apart slightly. All quiet. A light snow fell in the illumination of the streetlight.

He lit a second candle and returned to the bedroom with both of them. “My brother is a bloody hypocrite. He hates that he’s a killer, like all of us are. Don’t buy his noble act, girl. He’s done worse than me.”

Lucy sat up, letting the blanket fall to her waist, and Owen’s eyes took in the full breasts and slim waist. She was a fine-looking woman, no doubt about that. Trustworthy? Not in a million moons.

“I’ll agree that Aidan has a bad case of holier-than-thou,” she said, crawling from the bed and coming to stand beside him. “What did he do that was so awful?”

Owen slid an arm around her and pulled her to him again, burying his face in her hair. She smelled like lilacs, and his fingers felt rough as they played over her skin. “I’m bored with talk of my boring brother.”

Lucy moaned as he nipped her shoulder with his fangs and sucked on the wound. “God, that feels good—I’ve missed having someone touch me.”

He raised his head and cupped her jaw in his palm. “I’m sorry I killed your mate. If I’d known you, I wouldn’t have gone after him. Just wanted to get Aidan’s attention, that’s all.” He shrugged. It hadn’t mattered to him who he’d used to make his arrival known—Lucy’s mate had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She rested her head against his chest. “I loved Doc. I won’t deny that. But you exposed Aidan’s weakness. He didn’t act.”

Owen laughed softly. “So you wish he’d hunted me down and killed me then and there, do you?”

Lucy pulled away from him and dug around the pile of clothes on the floor till she found the black dress she’d worn before their daysleep. She slipped it over her head. “When it first happened, yeah, I wanted him to kill you,” she said, handing his clothes to him. “Better put these on—it’s cold enough to freeze a dead man.”

Owen tugged on his pants and sweater, wishing like hell Lucy was for real. But he knew more about her than she realized. “So, if you wanted me dead, why haven’t you done the deed yourself? Afraid Saint Aidan will be mad at his lieutenant?”

Good. She’d blanched at the reference. She hadn’t told him how highly placed she was in Penton’s organization. He wanted her to know that he’d done his homework.

“I left Aidan because he didn’t kill you,” she said, turning hard green eyes on him. “I realized then how weak he was, that he couldn’t lead Penton and deliver on what he promised. In my mind, that makes you a stronger ally.

“Besides,” she said, sitting in one of the chairs, “I’m no longer a lieutenant. He cut me off.”

“Is that so?” Owen studied her. He’d been alone a long time, and someone like Lucy could make life fun again. Hunting, feeding, seeing new places. He already knew the sex was brilliant. Tempting to try, but a mistake would be lethal. She wouldn’t get over the loss of her mate so quickly unless she was one coldhearted bitch, which was exactly how he had her pegged.

Question was, how far would she take this charade of having ditched Aidan? “What about the humans bonded to you—you have someone?”

Lucy paused before answering. “I just bonded a new one. Daniel. Why?”

“Seems to me as a show of good faith, you could share.” Owen leaned against the wall and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Our food supply is thin. Shite, we’re all thin.”

“That you are, but still sexy as hell.” Lucy stopped to kiss him as she walked to the corner and dug a cell phone out of her purse. Punching in a number, she waited for a moment and then spoke briefly, giving someone—Daniel, he hoped—directions to the house, with orders to keep it quiet, come to the back, and make sure he wasn’t followed.

They waited in silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Owen tensed at the soft knock on the back door. He didn’t follow Lucy as she headed through the kitchen, but he pulled a knife from his jacket on the floor and slipped it into his pocket, waiting to see if she returned with a stake-wielding Aidan or Slayer or a young stud she’d enthralled. Daniel came as a surprise. He was handsome, but at least forty.

He halted when he saw Owen. “I know who you are—you have the same eyes as Aidan.” He turned to Lucy. “Why are we here? He’s the one we’re supposed to stay away from. Does Aidan know he’s here?”

Owen scowled. No, and this blighter with his cocky mouth was the reason Penton was such a stupid idea. Sheep needed to know their place.

Daniel stiffened as Owen moved behind him and placed a knife at his throat. He pricked a small cut beneath the man’s ear and licked off the blood that welled up. Daniel shivered and looked at Lucy. “Wh-what’s going on? You said I’d only have to feed you.”

Lucy looked at the floor. “I said you were on the menu tonight. For both of us. I’ve cut my bonds to you so I can share.” She looked up at him. “It’ll be OK, Danny.”

The man didn’t try to pull out of Owen’s grasp as he snaked an arm around his waist from behind. “It will be OK, Danny-boy,” he repeated, staring over the man’s shoulder at Lucy. She met his gaze, bit her lower lip, nodded.

She was handing over her human to gain his trust. Maybe she was on the level. Or maybe he’d been right the first time—she was a coldhearted bitch.

“Join me, love.” He reached around Danny and held out a hand. She walked toward them slowly and wrapped her fingers around his, pressing herself against Danny from the front so the man was sandwiched between them. Owen closed his eyes, hearing the thunder of Danny’s pulse, feeling the rush of blood from vein to vein, smelling his fear.

He looked over the man’s shoulder at Lucy again, and smiled. She angled her head to the right, licked Danny’s neck just below his ear, and bit. The man grunted, and then relaxed as she began to feed.

My turn.
Danny tilted his head back, eyes closed, as Lucy fed. Owen had clear access to the other side of his neck. He bit without bothering to lick and anesthetize, and held on to Danny’s waist as the man jerked and groaned.

Owen felt Lucy pull away, but he had no plans to stop. Would she let him drain her human? He opened his eyes to see if she looked upset, but she’d turned her back and walked to the window. Well, then. She was willing to let him die.

Danny’s legs collapsed beneath him, but Owen held him upright, closing his eyes again and feeding deeply. He felt the man’s pulse weaken, his heart fluttering like a hummingbird’s
wings. When he was gone, Owen dropped the body to the floor with a thud and swayed from the rush of being sated for the first time in a while. The girl he’d drained before his meeting with Aidan had been so used up, she’d barely slaked his thirst.

“We’ll need to get rid of him,” Lucy said, still facing the window. “Somewhere Aidan won’t find him. With me cut off from the scathe, they’ll just assume he left Penton.”

“They’d let him do that? Just leave?” Owen felt drunk with the glut of blood. If he hadn’t been starving, he’d never have been able to finish a human male off in one feeding. Even then, he suspected that the guy had some kind of heart problem or he wouldn’t have buzzed so fast.

Lucy turned back to him with the face of someone who’d suddenly aged. “He’d been an alcoholic for years. Lost everything he had. We helped him shake the habit, hoping he’d want to stay on with us. But if he wanted to go back to Atlanta, Aidan would let him.”

Owen grimaced. “Aidan’s too soft.”

Lucy didn’t answer. Owen still didn’t think he could trust her, but he was beginning to really, really wish that he could.

K
rys jammed the iPod buds into her ears and relaxed on the sofa, listening to soft acoustic music with a Celtic lilt, one of Aidan’s additions to her song list. It was almost seven, and the hours just after sundown had become her favorite for reasons that she didn’t want to examine too closely.

Five nights had passed since the big vampire unveiling. Amazing how fast she’d eased into a routine once she’d agreed to stay for a month. She’d get up at eight, shower and dress, and find her breakfast tray on the floor by the time she’d dried her hair, always with an Atlanta newspaper alongside it. Lunch came at noon, then dinner at six—usually with a fresh flower laid atop the container. Sometimes it was a rose, but more often it was an enticing bloom whose name she didn’t know. Somebody had exotic taste in flowers.

She’d go stir-crazy if she had to live this way forever, but she believed Aidan when he said it was only for a month and, truth was, she had nothing to go home to except a lot of debt, a
crummy apartment, and an endless parade of nights in whatever emergency room or clinic she eventually landed in.

So in the quiet, empty hours, she read from one of the books Aidan had brought her, worked crosswords, and thought about her life, including a lot of the crap she usually avoided dwelling on for very long. How had she never realized that every goal she’d set for herself, every plan she’d made, had revolved around her father—getting away from him, staying away from him, trying to get past the head games he’d played with her?

The last time she’d lived under his roof, she’d been seventeen and just a few days out of high school. She’d kept her acceptance letter from Auburn University, and her scholarship notification, hidden in her room for months, but somehow graduation had made her feel brave; her impending freedom had brought an unfamiliar happiness.

“I got accepted at Auburn. I start in August,” she’d said at the family dinners her dad always insisted on having. “I think I want to major in biology.”

Her mother’s face had brightened, and Krys had had a fleeting hope that her dad would be happy for her. He didn’t say anything except a noncommittal “Hmm,” and then ate his dinner in silence. Before the meal ended, he’d risen from the table, gone to the counter to pour himself another drink, and blindsided Krys with a punch to her left jaw. If he’d been sober, he would’ve broken it. Instead, she’d hit the floor and protected her head against his kicks. All he ever said was, “You ain’t going nowhere.”

When he’d staggered out of the kitchen, Krys pushed herself to a sitting position and saw her mom still seated at the table. Her voice was soft. “Reckon you better plan on getting a job ’round here.”

It had taken seventeen years, but Krys realized then that her mom would never come to her rescue, never defend her, and maybe even needed her to absorb some of her dad’s wrath. That night Krys had stuffed the few clothes she owned into a pillowcase, climbed out the window, and found her way to a shelter. The only time she’d seen her dad since then had been after her mother’s suicide, at the funeral.

She had let his criticism and bullying define her. Now it felt as if her life had been stripped bare, and she wasn’t sure who Krystal Harris was or what she wanted, except that it couldn’t be a life defined by another controlling man.

Which made her fixation on her kidnapper—her
vampire
kidnapper—even more ridiculous. She waited for Aidan Murphy to show up every night as if he had been God’s chosen, and then practically fell over herself trying to coax a smile or a rare laugh out of him. Somehow she’d gone from being the victim to worrying about the guy who victimized her. Seeing him not as a monster but as a good man who worried about the people for whom he felt responsible. She’d grown able to read his moods, from the tightness around his eyes that meant he was worried about something to the stiff set of his shoulders when he was stressed.