The Vampyre Legal Chronicles - Marcus (13 page)

He took a deep
breath.

His eyes held
hers as if trying to send her a message by osmosis.

"You didn’t
make a mistake."

Silence.

Stunned, she
simply stared into dark eyes filled to the brim with what looked
like remorse.

"I mean, during
the meeting yesterday. You didn't do anything wrong."

Anais couldn’t
believe it when flags of color heated his sharp cheekbones.

Marcus
Gillespie was
blushing
?

Was the moon
made of cheese?

"But... you
said..."

"I know what I
said."

He cleared his
throat and that heat spread down his neck.

Mystified,
Anais stared up into his face and realised he was unsure.

"You lied to
me?"

Jet brows drew
together, but still those eyes stayed on hers.

"About the
contract, the deal, yes."

Utterly
bewildered, she thrust a hand through the heavy weight of her hair
trying to get her head around his words.

"But, why?"

Those amazing
eyes held hers.

She blinked in
disbelief at what she saw in them, for her.

Desire.

Affection.

"The first day
you walked into my office I knew I had to have you. I’ve dreamed of
you, yearned for you every single night, Anais. Today might have
been our last day together and I was desperate. For months you
didn’t give me a sign you even liked me." He cleared his throat,
ran his teeth over his bottom lip. "Until recently."

Her brain
simply refused to function as she blinked up into his wonderful
face.

"But you’ve
treated me to Mr. Granite Face every day. I don’t think you’ve ever
cracked a smile."

His smooth
forehead creased in a way that caught her heart.

"I
was
your boss. And it would have been totally inappropriate for me to
touch you. But you might have thrown me a crumb, Anais. A smile
would have been nice from you, too."

Part of the
statement hit her in the solar plexus.

"You
were
my boss?"

He took another
breath and shook his head.

"You were made
a full junior partner late last night."

Anais jerked
her arms free and folded them over her breasts as sheer joy coursed
through her veins even as she warred with utter disbelief.

"Marcus
Gillespie," she said in an icy tone that made him flinch. "Are you
telling me that I’ve been a junior partner for almost twenty-four
hours?"

He gave her a
boyish grin.

A grin that
melted her heart.

"Yep.
Congratulations." Then the grin slipped as worried eyes found hers.
"Tell me I haven’t screwed this, us, up. Tell me you have feelings
for me."

She shook her
head in total amazement that he’d behaved in such an underhanded
and controlling way.

He was an
unscrupulous bastard at times.

She’d always
admired that about him.

"You
son-of-a-bitch."

He winced and
ran his hands through his hair and over the back of his neck.

But then his
eyes met hers and her lips twitched.

He moved into
her and cupped her face between his hands.

"I adore
you."

She read the
sincerity in his eyes, heard it in his voice.

Anais tried
hard, very hard, to be angry at the way he'd played her.

She did.

But it wasn’t
working.

How could she
be furious with him when she’d just had the best sex of her entire
life?

Her eyes
flicked to the heavy arousal pressing into her flat belly.

Then she
wrapped her arms around his waist and gave him a cheeky grin.

"I’ve dreamt
about you for months, too. Do you always tie up your women?"

He had the
grace to blush even as his mouth caught hers in the sweetest kiss
she’d ever received.

He lifted his
head.

"Nope, that was
a spur of the moment thing and I wondered if I’d stepped across a
line with you."

She shook her
head.

"But what about
the contracts? The Chinese still haven’t signed."

He smiled,
kissed her nose.

"Not yet. But
they will. It’s all about saving face. James has it all under
control. He'll give little and they’ll give a little, it's all part
of the dance."

"You are one
hell of a sneaky, manipulative, underhanded..."

His forehead
came to rest on hers.

"I know it. Can
you forgive me?"

Dark eyes
stared into hers with the amazing intensity that always turned her
knees to rubber.

"On one
condition."

"Name it.’

She gave him a
big smile that made him growl deep in his throat.

"Next time, I
get to tie you up."

With a deep
laugh rumbling in his chest, Anais found herself lifted high in his
arms as he strode back into the bedroom and laid her on the
bed.

Marcus stripped
off her skirt and tossed it.

The next moment
she was on her back with him towering over her.

"What are we
doing?"

"We’re going to
celebrate, darlin’."

"Celebrate
what?"

"Your promotion
and the beginning of a beautiful relationship."

***

He'd been expecting the
call.

The phone rang
and the creature sitting at the desk made of plate glass knew
hesitating to answer the summons was a dangerous idea.

He lifted the
cell, held it to his ear.

"Hello?"

All the while
his suspicious eyes stayed on the vampyre sitting in his designer
club chair. Even for a ruthless example of the breed, she was a
savage predator at the top of her particular food chain. She was
stunningly attractive, if you were the type who went for a vicious
babe who'd held a grudge for over two hundred years. He preferred
his women soft, subservient and easier to terrorise.

When he'd seen
the dark haired woman prince Marcus had marked as his own, his
groin had gone tight. Now the female looking at him as if he was
shit on her shoe made his dick shrink to the size of a walnut.

Bitch.

"What
happened?" The silky voice in his ear was too soft, too pleasant.
Totally at odds with the skinny worm of sweat running down his
spine.

"Earthquake,"
the creature said, deciding to keep it simple and to the point. He
had his talents of course, but making the earth move was not one of
them.

"You realise
that prince Marcus has more than likely taken her vein by now?"

Since he wasn't
sure if it was a rhetorical question, the creature kept quiet.

Plus, keeping
silent had the added benefit that the vampyre sitting across the
desk and watching him like a hawk was in the dark as far the
conversation was concerned.

Now her eyes
narrowed into his.

"Put Eleanor
on," the voice commanded.

Okay, maybe not
in the dark.

Without a word
he passed the woman the cell phone.

"My Lord?" she
said, her dark eyes going into icy slits as she listened. "It is
done."

She gave back
the phone.

The creature
held it to his ear and heard the dialling tone.

And with a hand
that trembled in relief he stroked his still tender neck and
decided he'd dodged a bullet.

In a move so fast the
human eye would miss it, Eleanor simultaneously unsheathed talons
in her right hand and sprang to her feet.

With a single
swipe the puppet who sat like a fat cat behind his desk was
decapitated. Fluid the color of ink spurted from his veins
splattering across walls and floor like a water hose with the
pressure too high jumping around a lawn.

Lifeless
otherworldly eyes the color of ripe corn stared unseeing into
hers.

Since failure
in her line of work was not an option and she was a vampyre who
liked to tie up loose ends, she bent low over the body as her claws
sliced his ribcage open. The stench of putrefaction had her turn
her head away, but she thrust her hand into his chest to grip his
still beating black heart. Shame she couldn't use all her powers
and simply incinerate the rancid flesh. It was too risky to use
magic after what had happened in the club last night.

She'd already
set in motion a chain of events that if it didn't kill prince
Marcus's woman, it would definitely make her transition to newborn
vampyre fraught with danger.

Now Eleanor's
dark eyes went wild, not quite sane, as she smiled.

She'd waited a
long time for this day.

Too long.

Revenge against
the Gillespie princes would be all the sweeter once she'd broken
every single one of their hearts, their spirit, along with their
will to live. Only then would she take back the man who'd been
stolen from her. She'd have him on his belly before her.

Old hurts, old
stings of rejection and worse made her hand fist around the heart
to pulverise it into a bloody mess. Sometimes the old ways of
disposing evidence were the best. She opened her mouth obscenely
wide and slid corrupt flesh down her throat, taking care not to
taste.

Then lifting an
unsoiled piece of the creature's silk shirt, she wiped her hand,
her lips, rose and left.

She had places
to be, things to do, a human to kill.

***

In a time and a place
where man may not venture, the being known as The Maker placed his
reality's version of a cell phone on a desk carved from granite. On
two walls flickered screens. Holographic screens showing different
worlds, different creatures, in their own space and time. The
sorcery he needed to produce power for those screens depleted him
now. He must rest. Even though Eleanor regularly risked her life to
provide him with sustenance, he was diminished. His power weakened.
Trapped. And all because of a betrayal by a human made vampyre, a
man he'd... trusted.

Now humans were
pushing the edges of science, again. The species knew no bounds.
How dare they attempt to measure alternate realities? They were
close, too close, to accessing time-travel, and to move between
those realities. At all costs, such a thing must be stopped. Humans
could not be trusted as custodians of other worlds. Look at the
destruction of Earth? Plus, humans were too easy to... corrupt.

However, it was
the vampyres on Earth who were the real issue. They held too much
power, knew too much. Their destruction was, he decided,
inevitable.

The Maker
turned towards a wall of electronic flat screens. Ah, the joys and
wonders of human technology were nothing short of a gift. It only
took keying in data to have an analysis of ongoing research
scrolling on the screens. All root and branch members of the major
vampyre families, the Princes, Precedential Elders, Juristic
Rulers, their connections, routines and histories going back to the
time of the first human geological epoch, the Anrthropocene, of
1610, a time of the transfer of species between the New World and
the Old World. A time when the first vampyres, created by The Maker
himself, carried smallpox to the Americas. The disease killed tens
of millions, basic agriculture collapsed and tremendous forests
grew. Those forests led to a global drop in carbon dioxide, a gas
which affected ancient ice cores and led to climate change. Now,
another geographic epoch has begun, only this time not by humans,
but by magic. The earth will quake, the seas will rise, birds will
fall from the sky, sea creatures will perish upon the tainted soil,
pestilence and disease will stalk the world and cleanse it of human
and vampyre alike. And then The Maker would begin again.

Eyes dyed the
color of a ripe blood orange studied the data with great care.

Those eyes were
conniving, clever, and crazed.

Marcus lay on his back
and stared unblinking at the ceiling.

He wasn't a man
who enjoyed human contact after sex.

Certainly he'd
never enjoyed a cuddle before, so why couldn't he get enough of
her?

Anais lay sound
asleep burrowing into his side and he found he didn’t mind it.

But lying on
his back he had to admit that he was one uneasy vampyre.

He'd managed to
back himself into the worst possible situation.

She trusted him
utterly and completely and he'd let her down.

Big time.

He'd risked her
safety by taking her out to the
Pepper
club, exposing her to
his kind in the worst possible way when she'd been too vulnerable
to defend herself. Anais was still human. Now his bottom teeth
dragged over his top lip. Actually, she was a hybrid - half human,
half vampyre. He wondered why the thought hadn't occurred to him
before. Already his vampyre was instinctually aware of the
beginning of the transformation within her. His DNA was busy
working and altering her blood cells, modifying the tissues of her
body, to prepare them for the next crucial stage. Their telepathic
connection was deepening, too. Just by tasting her blood from the
wound in her hand, he'd been able to receive the odd flash of her
thoughts, her emotions.

They were
connected irrevocably by a blood pact.

And Anais
didn't even know it.

When he'd been
deep inside her body tonight and so far gone with lust, his vampyre
had risen, and taken her vein. Without her permission. There was
nothing he could have done to stop it, he admitted. Now as the
truth hit him hard he made a face.

He'd done a lot
of things without her consent.

Once he'd taken
the life giving fluid from her vein it had been too easy,
effortless really, to use his psychic...
gifts
(some might
call it mind-control. And they'd be right) to soothe her into a
false sense of security, to trust him. And he'd betrayed that trust
by lulling her into a dreamlike state while encouraging her to
drink his blood, a lot of his blood. Maybe too much of his
blood?