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Like the phantom pain of a lost limb, the memory of Ryder’s bite lingered, reminding her of what he’d done. Reminding her that she’d begged for his violence.
There was no scar at her neck. No fresh wound, raw and bleeding. Instead, the pain was deep inside, as alive in her heart as the day two years ago when her lover had first revealed his vampire nature.
Before Ryder, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel anything for anyone, not since her father’s death. That she had lowered her defenses and made love with him only to find out he was a vampire had awoken the rage and anger she had thought under control. Dealing with it had been difficult.
Now, it was almost as painful to acknowledge where their two-year love affair had led them—to the wreckage of her carefully reconstructed life.
Diana grabbed her shot of Cuervo and downed it in one gulp. Then she immediately signaled the bartender for another. But she only stared at the drink in front of her, fingers splayed on the scarred black surface of the bar.
The Blood Bank was a favorite haunt of those in Manhattan’s vampire subculture and a great place if one wanted to offer themself up as a treat. But after the day she’d had she only wanted to lick her wounds and hopefully not add any fresh ones.
She didn’t want anyone to put the bite on her. Not even Ryder. Not again. Okay, maybe not again, she confessed when the heated recollection of their passion replaced the warmth of the tequila.
A reaction that reminded her all too vividly of why she was here, bleeding on the inside and just barely in control on the surface. A combination sure to bring trouble.
By anyone else’s standards, it had been an ordinary day. Diana had met her best friend outside a favorite Italian restaurant, a place Diana hadn’t been to in months. When, she’d wondered, had she stopped going to her normal haunts and started going almost exclusively to Ryder’s?
She’d dismissed the thought upon seeing Sylvia. There had been something different about her friend. She’d seemed positively radiant. Sylvia’s coffee-brown eyes had glittered with joy and her smooth olive skin bore a vibrant blush. Eventually, Diana noticed the swell of belly. Her friend not only confirmed the happy news, but asked Diana to be godmother to the baby.
Diana had been happy for Sylvia. At least, that’s what she’d told herself initially.
Until Sylvia glanced down at her belly and rubbed her hand lovingly over it. That motherly gesture drove an arrow of pain deep into the middle of Diana’s heart.
Her doubts about Ryder, about their relationship, overwhelmed her. Doubts, that if she was honest, she’d been having for months, since her brother had announced the coming birth of his own child. Diana would never know the sensation of a baby growing and moving within her, of seeing herself fecund with child. At least, not if she stayed with Ryder. He was a vampire, undead. He couldn’t bestow life.
“Are you going to put that drink out of its misery or let it sit there all night?”
Brought back to the present, Diana glared at Foley, the owner of the Blood Bank, as he perched on the bar stool next to her. As always, he was lethally elegant in a fitted black suit that punched up the paleness of his skin and hair and elongated the already sparse lines of his body. With a shrug meant to dissuade his attention, she replied, “I didn’t know an inanimate object could feel misery.”
The vampire’s clear gray eyes darkened. With one finger, he traced her heart-and-dagger tattoo through the fabric of her suit. “They do when they could be in something as delicious as you.”
Diana snared his hand and bent his thumb back at an awkward angle. “Don’t go there.”
Foley’s grin didn’t waver, although she knew that even with his vampire strength, she was likely causing some hurt. “Did you get that tattoo to prove how tough you are, Special Agent Reyes?”
She laughed harshly and increased the tension of her hold. “I got it to remind me of the pain.”
“You enjoy it, don’t you?” he asked. A sly look slid into his gaze, hinting that he rather liked the hurt she was currently inflicting on him. She let him go.
“I enjoy dishing it out.”
In truth, the tattoo was a reminder not to act impulsively, a trait she had been accused of more than once. After a night of too much tequila, she’d gotten the tattoo to remind herself to guard against the pain she had suffered after losing her boyfriend. Only later did she realize that the knot of sorrow within her had been about the death of her father and all that she believed in. Justice. Honor. Happiness. Herself.
Sitting here, drowning her misery in tequila now, as much as she’d done at nineteen, warned her she was in danger of losing herself again as she had nearly a decade earlier when her dad had died.
“Bad day at the office, Special Agent Reyes?” Foley waved for a drink—a shot glass filled with liquid the color of ripe, succulent cherries. Freshly drawn blood.
“A nouveau Italian straight from Mulberry Street.” He held the glass up in a toast.
Despite her earlier recollection about where one too many tequilas might lead her, she hoped a few more would create the right degree of numb. Help her forget about babies, husbands, and houses filled with family—the kinds of things Ryder could never give her. She clicked her glass with Foley’s and bolted back the Cuervo. The sting made her wince as the liquor burned its way down her throat. Slamming the glass onto the bar, she motioned for another.
“Extremely bad, I guess,” Foley said, which only earned him a sidelong glance. He was sipping his drink slowly, savoring the grisly libation.
“What do you want?”
Foley leaned closer. So close that his chilled breath bathed the side of her face. With it came the metallic smell of blood. She almost gagged.
“Just to chat with a friend.”
She gave him a forceful nudge in the ribs to remind him he had invaded her space. “You and I aren’t—”
“Pals? Chums? Aren’t you and Ryder. . .friendly?”
Ignoring him, she laid her hands on the bar’s rough surface. Beneath her palms she registered the bumps, dents and gouges worn into it by misuse, by the violence for which the Blood Bank was known in the undead world. Again the phantom pain came to her neck and she inched her hand upward.
Foley ran the icy pad of his finger over the spot of the long-healed and invisible injury in a caress that made her skin crawl. “He’s bitten you, hasn’t he? More than once. And not just to feed. Yum.” He smacked his lips with pleasure.
She yanked away from his touch, angry with his intrusion into her private life. “So what? Taking a survey?”
“With each bite his control over you grows. Your need for him intensifies until. . .”
You beg him to take you. To make you like him.
Which scared the shit out of her.
She prided herself on having learned control a long time ago. In the year following her father’s death, she had lost her restraint and her identity in the ambience of places like the Blood Bank. It was only after waking one morning face-down in vomit, her younger brother passed out beside her, that she realized she was on the road to oblivion and taking her brother with her. She had mustered the strength to deal with her pain, to restore her sense of self and honor. It had taken her a long time to control her rebellion, to choose what she knew was right.
Lately she seemed to have less control over her emotions, over her choices, and worse, she didn’t have a clue as to whether her relationship with Ryder was right or wrong. Which only partially explained why she found herself here, in a bar catering to the undead. Sharing a drink with a vampire who would drain her, given the right circumstances. Avoiding the lover who made her plead for a passion so intense. . ..
That was the one thing she knew in her uncertain life. If Ryder was a drug, she was a Ryder junkie.
When she had first met him, Ryder had been living his life as humanly as possible. The attraction between them had been that of woman to man, man to woman. She hadn’t known then just how hard it was for Ryder to control the beast within him. Or, worse, how much she would come to like the demon and what it made her feel.
The spot at her neck tingled again. When Ryder had been mostly human, she could tell herself their affair was right, but now that he was finally exploring his vampire powers, now that he was becoming less human she could no longer avoid the truth.
The change hadn’t happened overnight. It was only in the past year or so, when they’d become more involved with Manhattan’s other vampires, that Ryder had begun to change. She hadn’t noticed at first, but recently it had become impossible to ignore. Ryder was darker and more powerful than she could have imagined. Worse yet, she liked his transformation. Too much.
And that was what troubled her the most—how much she wanted to share in his darkness, how much she craved the intense emotions only he could rouse. Was she losing herself to him?
Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she half slipped off the high stool and tossed some money on the bar. Foley grabbed her arm, but she tugged free of his grasp. “Don’t.”
“Afraid?” His feral smile held a hint of fang.
But Foley’s toothy smile didn’t scare her. It only served to remind her of the vampire underworld that called to the darkness within her. A darkness she had thought she’d left behind after her father’s death. One she didn’t want to revisit.
“Screw you, Foley.”
She walked away, chased by his laughter. Or maybe it was Foley calling, “Change your mind?” that pushed her onward.
She needed to be away from the Blood Bank and any other reminders of the surreal state of her life. She took a long walk before flagging a cab to go home.
Home. She needed to go home. Grab a pint of ice cream on the way and settle down to try to find some inner peace. Today had been just too normal. Lunch with a friend. The happiness and joy of Sylvia’s coming child. The yearning for the contentment home and family could provide.
Even before Ryder, Diana hadn’t thought much about that kind of life. Definitely not since becoming an FBI agent. Her career had taken up so much of her energy that she hadn’t considered that at some point she might want. . .more.
But now she couldn’t refute the possibilities and impossibilities. She had at one time thought she’d have a normal life. A husband and kids. Growing old. Dying. Everyday stuff.
She didn’t want a life of the abnormal—one hidden beneath the surface of the city. She had existed like that once before and it had nearly consumed her.
Just as Ryder and his darkness would consume her if she didn’t find a way to let go.
***
MONDAY WAS THEIR NIGHT. His club was closed then, which meant they usually had the leisure of a long dinner, possibly a movie. Mortal things. Things that people who were dating regularly did.
Like making love. A maybe-not-so-mortal thing with them.
Was that why she had called tonight to tell him she didn’t want to see him?
She’d been that blunt. Diana wasn’t the kind of woman who made excuses.
And he wasn’t the kind of man to. . .
But he wasn’t a man anymore, Ryder reminded himself as he perused the streets from the balcony of his apartment. Across the East River, the large red Pepsi and Silvercup Studio signs glowed. The erratic string of lights from the bridge and Roosevelt Island tramway twinkled. In the water there were a few scattered boats, not many.
It was late, although in the city that never slept, the activity was incessant.
Where was Diana in all that activity? Holed up in her office working on a case? Asleep in her apartment? Or somewhere else?
The last possibility bothered him more than he liked to admit. He had never considered himself a jealous man. But then again, he had never met a woman as complex and independent and as deliciously dark as Diana.
Ryder grew hard and his fangs elongated as he recalled their last bout of sex. She’d moved beneath him, pleading for his possession. For his bite.
Her blood had been sweet, spicing his mouth as she’d cried out her completion. He had become nearly feral with feeding from her body as he’d driven into her. Her blood, providing him. . .so much life.
He growled and shook his head to chase away the demon, the animal that had almost not let up the other night. He had come close to draining her. Had nearly made her like him, because she called to him like nothing else in his undead life. Now, he couldn’t just stand there, wondering.
He sprung over the ledge of his balcony like a gymnast vaulting over a horse and landed on the balcony of the floor below, where Melissa—the doctor whose family legacy was to care for his vampire health and serve as his keeper—now lived with her husband.
He caught but a glimpse of her, belly large with child. She stroked a hand across her extended abdomen with a beatific smile on her face. A moment later, her husband—Diana’s younger brother—Sebastian walked into the room, a similar grin on his features as he laid his hand over hers.
Ryder couldn’t linger. The scene was too painful a reminder of the life taken from him so long ago. Of the life he would be stealing from Diana if they continued their relationship.
Or if he sired her.
After biting her the other night, he had been forced to acknowledge just how badly he wanted her with him forever. After more than a century of avoiding humans and their emotions, he had allowed himself to care for her. She had restored him. Made him alive again. Losing her. . .
He knew pain. For close to one hundred and forty-three years, he had lived with the anguish of loved ones dying, of having everything familiar change. His response had been to shut himself off from other vampires, from humanity. From love.
But now, because of Diana, he was no longer alone. Would he be able to handle the pain of her death? Unsettled by those thoughts, he leaped down, floor by floor, to the street below. Once there he hesitated, uncertain of where he would go. Unsure that it was wise to give in to the beast who longed for more than just seeing her.
For so long he had controlled his vampire nature and striven for a human life, the kind of life he had lost during the Civil War.
He didn’t really understand how the sheltered existence he had so carefully built had become filled not only with Diana, but with an assortment of people and vampires who demanded he acknowledge what he was.
After despising his vampire nature for more than a century, he hadn’t expected ever to enjoy the power and passion and strength that releasing the demon would bring. For so long, he had kept the beast at bay, afraid of what it could do. He had seen the aftermath of vampire violence against others, against himself.
A physician before a supposed act of kindness had turned him, he had devoted his life to healing, to saving others. He hated that the demon within was the total antithesis of what he had been—a good man.
But over the past two years, he had discovered that he could use his vampire powers for good—if he could control the violence that accompanied the demon. The violence it was becoming harder and harder to restrain around Diana. Was it because the beast didn’t want to lose a mate after so much time alone?
Tonight the demon screamed for him to let it loose. Reluctantly he did. With a quick look to make sure no one was watching, he transformed. Long fangs erupted from his mouth and blood surged through his veins. All around him, colors and noises became more vibrant. Sounds sharper, almost painful to his heightened hearing. Smells, all those luscious smells, ripe around him. And beneath it all, the awareness of the humans close at hand, throbbing with life.
Speed beyond that of a mortal drove him. Where, he didn’t quite know. He just reveled in the freedom of the night. The piercing glow of the moon and stars lit his way. The chill of the night air flew against his heated skin. As he brushed past one human on a side street, the scent filled his nostrils. The thunder of heartbeat and blood called to him. Sweet blood, pulsing.
Ryder badly wanted a taste. He imagined sinking his fangs through fragile skin before his mortal side rose up, reining in the vampire and urging him to a nearby rooftop. Hurtling from one edifice to the next, he reached an old and narrow cobblestone alley in Tribeca. The Blood Bank.
Hunger gnawed at his stomach.
Ryder stared at the entrance to the club. He didn’t normally frequent the place, not much caring for Foley, the owner, or for the other vampires who so blithely indulged their baser instincts there, without a care. Without conscience. Totally unlike the vampires he had befriended in the past year. They tried to live nearly human lives. They also refused to feed from humans and didn’t sire others like themselves. At least, they usually didn’t.
Ryder had learned from his new friends that despite their best intentions, sometimes the beast won out. Their experience had confirmed what he’d already known—balancing his mortal and demon sides required dedicated effort.
So now here he was, the pit of his stomach clenching at the thought of fresh blood. Saliva pooled in his mouth like that of a hungry man sitting at a feast. Shaking his head, he took a deep breath to quell the demon’s urges—and smelled her.
Diana.
She had either been nearby recently or was still close. Inhaling sharply, he picked up her scent and threw himself over the ledge of the building. He landed on his feet as quietly and gracefully as a panther on the prowl.
Her smell grew stronger at ground level. Ryder followed it to the door of the club, flashed some fang to get past the bouncer and hurried within, eager for even a glimpse.
She had made her feelings known, but one night away from her was like an eternity.
In the stifling lifeless air of the club, Diana’s smell strengthened and he followed it to the bar. She sat with Foley, letting the vampire lean toward her, touch her.
Ryder fisted his hands, barely controlling the desire to rip Foley’s finger off.
With perverse satisfaction, he smiled as Diana did some damage of her own, but Foley, sick animal that he was, kind of liked it. So do you, his inner voice rebuked. You like the violence she hides at her core.
Anger barely subdued, he stepped into the shadows. The noise and music were too loud and uneven for him to make out their discussion. Interminably long minutes passed before Diana left.
Ryder hesitated, debating whether to follow Diana or to beat Foley into monster mash. First, because the vampire had touched Diana. Second, because Ryder had never liked Foley. He was everything Ryder hated and never wanted to be: a hedonistic animal, devoid of any mortal sensibilities.
And for some reason, Diana had ditched him for the undead cad.
Ryder’s human side urged him to curb his resentment. After all, she had left the bar alone and rebuffed Foley’s sole advance. But the demon. . .The demon damn well wanted some satisfaction.
Satisfaction that words wouldn’t provide.
