Chapter Five

Ivory

She must have been getting old. Or at least complacent. She’d gotten into fights before, but never with someone who knew what she was. Usually, all she needed was her thrall or the element of surprise. Fights were easy when no one expected her to knock them halfway across the street with a single punch.

As a whore, she usually needed her prodigious strength only to control the men she slept with, to keep her profession on her terms. Most of the time, they became amenable to being controlled with enough cajoling.

As a vampire, she’d had very little cause for concern. In comparison to many of her sisters and brothers—a small population stretched thin over the Earth—Ivory kept a low profile. Her actions in finding and creating a mate were quite uncharacteristic for her. And look how well that worked out.

A young virgin penitent had done this to her.

Ivory ached and stung every time she moved from the hole in her chest still trying to mend itself. He had attacked with the clarity and surety of religious passion, and she wished she could show him another way to apply such passion in more fruitful ways.

She’d gone soft on him, even in her anger. Because he was still young, even as a grown man. Because she knew his history. Because he truly believed he was doing right and doing good. Because his father was a supercilious Old World ass, and Fletch was just doing what his father had taught him. She still hated what he had done, but when Fletch had thrown around words like ‘devil’s whore’ and ‘demon’, the picture of how he saw her had become clearer.

He thought she was an evil demon. He thought he was ridding the world of some kind of disease, which was rather insulting. She’d seen first-hand the ravages of disease among the westward bound. Vampires spread their kind in unconventional ways, and sure, they weren’t technically alive, but that didn’t make them a disease any more than Manifest Destiny made human beings a disease.

Good Lord, he was so old-fashioned. This was the nineteenth century, not the Dark Ages.

If Ivory had learned one thing from being a prostitute—and she’d learned many things, but if she’d only learned one—it was that sometimes a man couldn’t be told. Sometimes a man had to be shown before he could even begin to listen.

His blood pumped fast and fragrant through his veins from their fight and from his fear. She wanted to know whether his erection had flagged, but there was plenty of time to rekindle his arousal if it had.

Fletch rocked his chest on the table to wrench out from under her hand, but she insisted that he stay. She wished she could take her time the way she usually did, inspecting the full length, width and breadth of his body, tasting the flesh before garnishing her feast with his blood. As long as Fletch would fight her out of ignorance, she didn’t have that luxury.

“No…don’t…” Fletch muttered, muffled by his mouth against the table.

“Shhh…it only hurts for a second. I’ll only be feeding,” Ivory reassured him. She brushed his hair away from his neck and softly stroked the tender, pulsing stretch of skin. “I won’t kill you. Yet. You’ll be no weaker than you’ve left me.”

The stake had been the worst of his weapons, but since a stake in the chest would effectively halt most living creatures, Ivory didn’t feel too embarrassed by how weak it had made her. The burns were superficial. They hurt, but they didn’t impede her or dampen her determination like Fletch had thought they would. Fletch thought these spells were holy. He didn’t realize how far back the symbols and potions and rituals went, in their various incarnations.

Ivory breathed deeply from the bouquet of his veins and poised her fangs once again. His blood would repair the damage of his conviction. He needed to know that his blood would restore her, and she didn’t have to kill him for that, nor for sustenance.

She was no killer.

Ivory sank her fangs into his neck, so slowly, savoring the moment, because she’d already tasted his blood and it promised to be a rich affair indeed. She also wanted to be aware the moment the pain ceased and he succumbed to the pleasure of her bite.

The blood flowed in thin rivulets over her tongue. Fletch stopped thrashing and his body went slack beneath hers. She felt her way to Fletch’s eyelids to make sure he was still awake and hadn’t fallen into unconsciousness out of pain or terror. His mouth moved under her palm. She shifted the use of her hand from exploration to encouragement, stroking his jaw and his lips, then teasing just past his lips. He took two of her fingers into his mouth willingly, pressing the velvet flat of his tongue against the pads.

She sheathed her fangs fully inside him, so deeply her human teeth broke the skin as well. Fletch writhed beneath her, but this time it was not to escape. They both moaned when she pushed all the way in. His moan vibrated all the way up her arm from where he sucked on her fingers. She fancied he experienced her moan throughout his body and into his heart itself.

His blood came to her in streams now. She hadn’t punctured anything fatal—she stayed away from the jugular and the carotid unless she truly wanted to kill a person. Just enough to take in the meaty, savory liquid, thick and dense with life.

Ivory had gone for years without blood before. Vampires could live forever with or without blood. But healing became harder to achieve without it, and one began to take on less human traits. Blood didn’t just keep vampires flush with youth and vigor, retaining whatever appearance and age they’d had before their death, and sometimes better—it also kept up the appearance that they were human and alive at all.

Fletch reeked of vitality, and his blood worked on her injuries right away, tingling like limbs that had fallen asleep and now roused from their slumber.

He jerked. His hips, slotted in front of hers, rubbed against the table. She swirled her tongue against his skin, coaxing more pleasure from him and through him, and he jerked again, sucking hard on her fingers. She withdrew her hand from his mouth, and the sounds that escaped now were positively obscene in their unrestrained, wordless sincerity.

Just as slowly as she’d penetrated him, she pulled her fangs out, catching the weak spurts of blood in her mouth before letting his shirt and jacket take the rest of it. Without her teeth inside him, his blood would begin to clot. In the meantime, fresh blood perfumed his skin, along with the new, clean, cooled sweat from their sparring.

He gasped at her absence, panting against the table.

Ivory eased back to give Fletch just enough space to maneuver instead of being forced hard against the table. She kissed up his neck to his ear, marking his skin with the stain of his blood. His breath caught as she took his soft, pliant lobe in her mouth, and she continued to lavish attention upon it as he cautiously pushed himself upright.

She released it when he turned around in her arms. There was an unmistakable bulge in his trousers, hot as a coal to her cool body.

She hadn’t retracted her fangs. Ivory wanted him to see her as the vampire she was, but also that she didn’t have to hurt him. As a vampire, she needed his life and the life of every man she’d fed upon—not their deaths.

His blood dripped from her lips and down her chin, falling to her collarbone. She licked as much of it away as she could, but then his gaze followed the drops to where they painted a line to the curve of her breasts. As he watched, Ivory undid the top buttons of her bodice. She wore no chemise and no corset underneath. The fabric gave against the pressure of her breasts and folded over. Blood trickled to one partially exposed breast. Fletch swallowed at the sight, making his Adam’s apple bob.

She ran her finger through the still-warm liquid before it reached the bodice. She slowly brought her bloodied finger to his lips.

Fletch grabbed her wrist with an implacable grip.

He didn’t push her away, make a run for the weapons she had discarded, or bark insults. He just stared and held her back. A war raged within, emerging in little twitches of indecision on his face.

His grip dug into the bones of her wrist, but she could handle a little pain. It certainly beat the hell out of a hole in the chest.

Fletch glanced down at his shoulder where his shirt was soaked through, but Ivory could smell that the healing had already begun in earnest. He was a strong young man. He wouldn’t recover as fast as Ivory did, but all he needed was a good cut of steak and some sleep to regain his strength and replenish his blood supply.

“Fletch,” Ivory said softly, trying to stroke his cheek and reassure him that everything was okay, that she was okay and he could be, too.

He grabbed that wrist as well.

It made her angry, not at Fletch but at Warner for making him so conflicted now. Accepting her as not evil—she was no saint, but she certainly wasn’t a devil—shouldn’t have turned his world upside-down. He shouldn’t have to fight this battle.

“Fletch,” she whispered.

Fletch closed his eyes, the eyelids wrinkled from the force of it. “No,” he said through clenched teeth, and when he opened his eyes again, his resolve was ironclad. He couldn’t hope to win against her, not when she was absorbing his life into her right at that moment. But he was sure as cinders going to try.

Teeth clenched and eyes sparkling with determined fire, he drove the two of them away from the table. He shoved her so hard against the door that the hinges creaked and the entire small house groaned.

Ivory cried out. In spite of her sadness that she couldn’t convince him of the truth, she was—more than human or vampire—a woman. And a man who fought her well enough that he’d almost killed her had just shoved her against a wall and held her there with his body. The musk of his skin and the enticing scent of his blood were all around her and inside her.

She had to kill him now, but damn, she was more turned on than she’d been since before her sire had died. Not turned on that she was going to kill him—she took no joy in that—but that he was going to make her work for it. That took spirit.

He panted, then grabbed the collar of her dress to whirl her around again. A few more buttons popped off as he yanked, and the bodice gaped open, her stained breasts spilling out. The place where he’d impaled her had already completely healed, courtesy of the contents of his veins, so all he would see was an extraordinary contrast of milk-pale skin and dark blood almost black in the lamplight. And her beautiful breasts, likely the first he’d ever seen outside his dreams, on full display for him.

He took a step back, unable to tear his gaze away. He clutched the base of his neck where she’d bitten him, digging his fingers in as though to remind himself why he needed to kill her. When he removed his hand again, it was stained with his blood, just like her. He looked between her breasts and his hand.

When she tried to move away from the door, he darted forward again to shove her back against it. His hand left a print on her chest.

With a strangled groan, he swooped down to lick his blood from her chin before kissing her mouth, bloodstains and all.

Now his hands marked more than just her chest.

He molded her to him, pushing her so hard against the door that he might have left an impression of her curves in the beams. She raised her legs and let his weight and force hold her there as she rustled her skirts around him and arched her back to fill his hands with her breasts. The hard peaks rubbed deliciously against the lines inscribed in his palms. That he smeared her with his blood only made it better.

He groaned helplessly. She ground against his erection as best as she could, kneading his shoulders and fisting his hair, getting his blood everywhere and gasping from the sweetness of his fierce kiss, as determined as his resolve just minutes before.

“This is wrong,” he murmured against her cheek. She mouthed and sucked on his jaw and neck, where she’d rubbed his blood over the skin.

“No,” she replied, practically purring from the taste of him. “No, this is good. So good.”