Blood Ecstasy (Blood Curse Series Book 8) (8 page)

Just for another
second
.
 

This was crazy.

Unthinkable.
 

Beyond anything Rebecca had ever known or felt.
 

She needed him…

Now.

Twisting to remove her blouse, and then shimmying out of her jeans, Rebecca stretched an arched foot toward his hard-cut abs and tried to reach his arousal with her toes. He growled deep in his throat, and she felt instantly encouraged. “Please,” she whimpered, barely recognizing her own
sultry voice.
“Oh, please, Julien…
please
.”

He descended like the darkness on a
moonless night, blanketing her body with his own, and her stomach clenched in violent anticipation. “Tell me what you need, baby,” he drawled, and her breath caught in her throat.

“You, I need you,” she moaned.

“Indeed, you do,” he rasped, and there was a faint hint of
something
unnamable in his voice—sarcasm, conquest, male satisfaction? He slid his glorious, powerful hands down the small of her waist, over her quivering hips, and hooked his thumbs inside the band of her lace bikinis.

And then he rocked forward, bit her in the throat, and began to drink her blood.
 

Nothing else mattered.

Nothing…

At all.
 

Rebecca had tumbled into an endless vortex of ecstasy, and she was luxuriating in the fall.

Julien Lacusta descended into the welcoming, velvet arms of the dragon—alcohol, blood, and liquid H—letting the heroin take him over completely.

Rebecca would never understand, nor would she ever forgive him.
 

But how could he explain?
 

And what other option did he have?

The last thing he wanted to do—the last thing he would
ever
want to do—is hurt his
destiny
, take away her reason, or remove her control, make her come to him through compulsion. But it was a helluva lot better than violence, harming her in
any
physical way, and she had pushed him so very close to that edge: He had almost lost his center of gravity, his hold on reality, if only for a moment, a split-second in time, when she had come at him with such rage and determination…

Her fist, her open hand, even spitting in his face; none of it had fazed him. She couldn’t harm a flea. But her words, those hate-filled actions, that unfiltered rage;
that
had been eerily familiar, too reminiscent of his past. Rebecca Johnston had catapulted Julien into another place and time.
 

Harietta Lacusta sat down at the small barn-wood table and pressed her back against the coarse stone wall, staring at her beloved child, Ian. He had just turned ten years old that morning
.
“Obviously, you can’t have a birthday cake, Ian,” she teased, nervously brushing her hands along the folds of her skirt, “but I think you will really like what I brought you. I fed from a very pretty young lass last night.” Despite her fervent attempt at gaiety, the mirth never reached her eyes. She held out her wrist, and Julien cringed, knowing exactly what Ian was thinking.
 

Ian hated feeding from his mother.
 

He hated it with a passion.

It was emasculating at best.
 

Yet Harietta was always so oblivious to Ian’s burgeoning darkness, the hatred that consumed his blackened heart. “Come on, Ian; just try it. It’s your birthday, after all. And I even have a gift for you…after you feed.”
 

Julien sat up straighter on the rough, wooden bench, staring out the narrow twelve-inch window at the back of the shanty—he did not want to watch the scene play out. It was always the same: Ian came
this close
to losing his control, and their mother pretended not to notice, like she could somehow will him into being something other than what he was.
 

An aberrant scourge of nature, just waiting to implode.

Ian sat back and smiled, and even from the corner of his eye, Julien knew there was something wrong, something malicious and distinctly sinister in that false, wry smirk. At complete odds with his smile, the child rose from his seat, towered over Harietta, and slapped her so hard the echo ricocheted off the earthen walls. “To hell with you, you evil, maniacal wench. You’re utterly insane!” He struck her at least nine or ten times, in lightning-quick succession, before Julien could move or intervene. “Go to hell! Do you hear me? Go straight to hell! I’m leaving this lords-forsaken hovel, and you’re not going to stop me because you are a weak, pathetic little worm.”
 

And then, Ian lunged at her throat.
 

Like a wild, feral cat—his claws fully extended, his fangs dripping with saliva, his eyes gleaming harsh, crimson red—he dove at their mother with pure, murderous intent.
 

Julien tried to intercept him—
gods help him, how he tried
—but Ian was like a demon, possessed. He moved faster than Julien’s eyes could follow. He struck so hard that Harietta’s skeleton collapsed. He ravaged her jugular with such ferocity that her flesh, her cartilage, and her bones were in his jagged teeth before Julien could rise from his seat.
 

Spurred on by some primal, instinctive hatred, Ian decimated the woman’s throat with the ferocity of a beast. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, Julien’s mother was dead.
 

 
The liquid O reclaimed
the vampire’s attention, and his eyes rolled back in his head as the memory drifted further and further away…

Thank the gods.

The blood seeping into his mouth; the soft, pliant body beneath him; Rebecca’s soft, erotic pleas demanding the warrior’s devotion were all he could feel, sense, or hear, and he whispered in her ear: “Tell me what you need, baby.”
 

Her breath caught in her throat. “You, I need you,” she moaned.

“Indeed, you do,” he rasped, satisfied that the compulsion had worked, that the madness had stopped, that he was at least feeling something he could control.
He slid two
strong, splayed hands down the small of her waist, over her quivering hip, and hooked his thumbs inside the
band of her lace bikinis—

And then it hit him.

Like an oncoming train.

Dear celestial gods
: He hadn’t converted her yet.

And if he took her right now, released his seed, and gods forbid, had even a passing thought about pregnancy, he would kill her before he’d even claimed her, before he’d even had a chance to get to know her. He was one mindless, drug-induced mistake away from being no better than his evil brother.

Julien jolted backward, recoiling from Rebecca’s touch, as he instantly released the compulsion. “Run, Becca!” he snarled. “Get away…and hide, but do not leave the house.”

She blanched, turning a sickly shade of green, as awareness and control slammed into her. He didn’t need to tell her twice. She scrambled from beneath him, rolled off the bed, and hit the ground running, scurrying out of the room.
 

She didn’t even bother to get dressed.

Julien moved with the same sense of urgency, shimmying to the edge of the bed, opening the nightstand drawer, and retrieving a strange-looking remote, a device created by Santos Olaru, one of the valley’s illustrious sentinels, who just happened to be a guru with technology, and Nachari Silivasi, a gifted Master Wizard in his own right: The device tripped both the alarms and the wards. The windows and doors would slide shut, secured by hidden, titanium bolts, and the magical wards, which kept people from crossing their barriers—in either direction—would also kick in.
 

With the push of a button, Julien’s house shut down.
 

No one was getting in or out.

And that included Rebecca.
 

He reached for a second item—also given to him by Nachari Silivasi—the pale blue crystal containing the Master Wizard’s memories from his time spent in the Abyss.
Although Julien wasn’t looking forward to the
viewing
, and gods knew he had other pressing matters to attend to, the H was gonna hang around for at least thirty minutes, and he needed the information. If there was any part of his heart that was actually considering using this Blood Moon to make an untimely exit from earth—
and there was
—then he owed it to himself and Rebecca to examine it more closely.
 

He needed to be absolutely sure of his next move.
 

Heavens knew; he had already screwed things up, six ways to Sunday.
 

Shifting onto his back, he folded one arm behind his head, crossed his legs at the ankle, and caressed the crystal resting in his palm. As the images in the stone began to come to life, playing like a DVD on his visual cortex, he sank deep into the mattress…and watched.
 

seven

Rebecca waited in the dark, huddled beneath a heavy trestle table in a long, narrow hallway, just above the twisting, iron-railed staircase that led to the second and third floors of the elaborate mountain home. She was somewhere on the third level, and she had already tried every hall, every possible nook and cranny, every doorway and window, on every successive floor, with zero success—nothing would open, and she wasn’t about to go anywhere near the gladiator’s bedroom to try to retrieve her cell phone.
 

It wasn’t worth the risk.

She tightened her grip on the soft brown throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders, which she had snatched from the great room, and winced at her curious choice of words:
Gladiator.
 

That wasn’t exactly accurate, was it?

The male had claimed to be a
vampire
.
 

And, as bizarre and utterly psychotic as that might sound, Rebecca had begun to believe him. After all, he had known her name in an instant; he had moved her body through space, using nothing but his mind; and bless her for being crazy enough to believe it,
but the male had flashed a wicked pair of
fangs
—fangs he had used to bite her, to siphon her blood, and to somehow seduce her like she was some sex-charged siren who couldn’t get enough.

She shuddered at the memory, feeling curiously ashamed.

Dear angels and saints, she had wrapped her ankles around him, writhed like a harlot beneath him, and practically begged him to take her—to use her like he owned her—and she would have seen it through.

How had he done that to her?
 

And with nothing more than a mere suggestion:
You’re going to desire every moment of this.
Rebecca Johnston didn’t do one-night stands, and she certainly didn’t go out of her way to seduce a brutal captor.

 
Yeah, Rebecca was pretty damn sure: Julien Lacusta was not a human male. He was a vampire, or at least an incredible magician, and if
any
part of what he’d told her was true, then the rest could be true, as well: the Curse, the twin sons, the terrifying Blood Moon, and maybe the fact that he was trying to…somehow…spare his own life.

She bit down on her tongue, trying to stifle a scream—it was all just way too much to process, and she felt like she was going insane. She brought her wrist to eye-level, a reality check of sorts, and stared at the very real emblems and symbols etched into her flesh.
 

The insignia of Hercules.

That’s what he had said.
 

And he hadn’t been high on morphine, or crack—or whatever it was that he took—at the time. Before she could consider the implications any further the fact that the vampire also ingested drugs, she heard a heavy set of footsteps meandering down a hall, on the first floor of the dwelling.
 

Oh shit, he was awake!

 
She backed further beneath the table, curled her body into a ball, and practically held her breath, trying to remain perfectly still…and quiet.
 

The footsteps continued through the great room, toward the foyer, and they were unerring in their progression—it was almost as if he knew
exactly
where she was. She tilted her head to the side, listening more intently, as he began to make his way up the staircase, his footfalls growing louder with every step.

No.

No!

No, no, no, no, no!

He paused on the second floor, but only for an instant, before he continued to climb the stairs to the third. And then, just like that, he took three long strides forward, advancing down the hall, and came to a sudden stop, about five feet away.

“Becca, come out from underneath the table, baby. We need to talk.”