Cake (10 page)

Blinking, I didn’t protest when I felt his hands on my head again. I let the shampoo and the showerhead wash all the blood out of my hair, not that you could distinguish it from the longish red mess it was now.

Marcus must have read the bottle and was following the instructions religiously. He slapped more shampoo into my hair and rattled my head around in an attempt to clean my hair thoroughly until I smacked his hands away in agitation.

“
Are all of you sex-crazed?”

“
You are my mate.”

I cursed as my eyes popped open at that statement and I ended up with more shampoo in them. I blinked and winced and blinked some more, turning my face back up to the shower stream.

Once I could see again, I shook my head slightly. “I assume this isn’t a ‘let’s meet the rest of our mates down at the pub’ kind of thing?”

“
I chose you as my immortal love when I saved you from death that night,” Marcus answered.

I tried to step away from him, but he just held onto me and tightened his grip. I started to confess quickly. “Before you came along, I was dating girls. I wasn’t good at it, and it wasn’t very often. Truthfully, I only dated two different girls, and I’m pretty sure it was because they both felt sorry for me. But until now, girls were my preference. Really, I’m not gay, so how can this work?”

Marcus caressed my cheek. I found it strangely comforting. “They did not appreciate you, and you were lying to yourself,” he said. “Like calls to like, my love. Those women did not see the potential inside of you. But I did.” He pressed his face up to my cheek as he whispered this, and I stayed still. I had nowhere to go.

“
How did raping me every day bring out the potential in me?” I asked.

“
If I had set up a treadmill and said, ‘Use it,’ you would not have. I had to make you fear me. Once you feared me, you did as I said. ‘Two hours on the treadmill, Sex, or it will be two hours on your knees.’ Remember?”

Yes, I remembered those words. And he was right; I would have done anything to get him off of me.

“
Now, look at this.” His hands ran over my flesh, tracing the well-defined shape of my lean and muscular physique. “This is what I saw when I first looked at you in that bar. This is what I knew was inside you. This is what I helped you to attain.”

I frowned. “You made me skinny, so now I’m your eternal bride?”

“
I wish it could be that simple, my Little One. Now that you are one of the Blood, I have free rein to pursue you as my mate. But, our bodies already know each other so well that it would be a shame not to let them fornicate as often as necessary.”

I shifted my shoulders and pulled at the hold he had on my waist. “Yeah, well, your ‘necessary’ is nowhere near my ‘necessary’. And if what you’ve said is true, you’re not getting near my necessary for quite a while.”

“
Marcus?” a voice called through the bathroom door. “Are we still going hunting? It is getting late if you want to go to that bar.”

I was surprised that Claudius hadn’t walked in and joined us in the shower. Only minutes ago he’d had no qualms about stripping completely on the bed in front of me. Why should he be so coy now?

What the hell is it with these vampires? Or is it just these two?

An index finger reached up and Marcus stroked away the furrow in my brow. “Now you see why I told you not to think,” he chided. “And yes, Claudius is a good friend, and you can rely on him if you need help, and I am not around. Ah, there, you are all clean. Go and put your clothes on. I have one more birthday present to give to you.”

I stepped out of the shower cubicle and grabbed a towel. Great, one more present from him…The last one had been a killer.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

I started laughing as I was hit with the absurdity of my life…err…death. I was still a fuck toy, only now, I had an extended lifetime warranty. Get up, wipe those tears away, and get dressed, I told myself, fighting the building hysteria inside of me. No matter what Marcus and Claudius had planned for tonight, nothing could be worse than dying.

Fuck…

I was so very wrong, because for my last gift, I found myself back in that very same gay bar that he’d taken me from to begin with.

Great fucking birthday present.

S
even

Killer Sex

The blaring music was pumping hard; I could feel it as it pounded through my chest. The light show had gotten a little bit more elaborate since that last time I was here, and a rainbow of colors was washing over the people packed in the room.

I was still looking around when I felt a hand slide down the front of my pants. I thought it was Marcus touching me up again, but when I turned around I found myself facing some dirty, dishwater-looking blond, with emerald contacts in his eyes. I opened my mouth to tell him to get the fuck away from me when he lunged forward and shoved his tongue down my throat. I brought my hands up to shove him off just as Marcus grabbed his wrist and yanked it from out of my pants.

“
You can look, but you do not touch.”

“
I can pay. I got crystal meth.”

I think my jaw hit the floor at the blond’s bold comment.

“
See me in about half an hour.”

I just stood there and blinked before turning on Marcus and saying, “Did you just sell my ass to a drug dealer?”

Marcus took hold of one of my hands and pulled me to the dance floor. “We will be gone before then. Let us dance. I need to find the one we are looking for.”

It really wasn’t dancing, what we did. It was more like bouncing in one place in time with the beat. Almost all of the people in the room were moving the same way, out on the dance floor. Considering it was after one in the morning, the place was still packed.

Being outside in the real world for the first time in a year was heaven to me, except for the groping. Someone else was reaching between my legs, cupping me from behind.

Sonofabitch.

I grabbed Marcus by the forearms and swung him around so I was safely sandwiched between him and Claudius. Christ, I hadn’t been a vampire for an hour yet, and I was already getting more action than I’d ever had in the twenty-eight years I’d been free man. But really, that wasn’t much of a surprise, considering what I’d looked like for those twenty-eight years.

Claudius leaned over and shouted in my ear. “You have no idea of how gorgeous you are, do you? Look at them. They cannot take their eyes off of you. Marcus is highly respected in the Blood. You should feel honored that he is your sire and that he wants you as his mate.”

I was about to say something sarcastic back to him, when a sweet, earthy scent drifted to my nostrils, and wham…My fangs came down hard, cutting my lower lip in two places. Fuck, that had hurt, and I grabbed at my mouth. Claudius saw the blood dripping down my chin, and he pulled me off the floor, heading towards a pitchblack corner.

“
Let me take a look.”

It was weird; I could see him just as clearly in the dark as when we were in the middle of the dance floor with the bright spot lights shining across the room.

“
You have pierced your lip…both sides.”

“
I tink I smelt bud.” It was hard to talk with two extra long toothpicks sticking out of my upper lip.

“
This is a popular hunting ground for the Blood, vampires especially,” Claudius said. “You are going to have to work on fang control right away. You have got blood running…” He leaned over, and lifting my chin up, he proceeded to lick at it, cleaning up the blood trails a little too enthusiastically for my taste.

Marcus came up to us. “What has happened?” he asked.

“
Sex smelled another’s feeding. He punctured his lips when his fangs distended. He is bleeding. Shall I do one side, and you do the other?”

They had to have done this before; it was a little too coordinated to just be happenstance. I found myself backed into that dark corner with Marcus holding my right arm pinned to the wall, and Claudius holding my left. As Claudius took my lip into his mouth, sucking and laving with his tongue, Marcus was busy cleaning up the blood trails on the right side of my neck, but he stopped and gave me a quick sucking kiss when I made a small whine. Rising up, he took his side of my lip into his mouth, copying Claudius. And then both of them leaned in and started licking at my lips, their tongues sweeping and lingering over my skin.

This is so wrong. Get off. Get off. Get off me.

I must have broken their sensual haze because they blinked a couple of times, smiled indulgently, and then rose up to their full heights. Compared to them, I was the short man in the middle.

“
You are still bleeding on the inner lip,” Claudius noted, reaching out his fingers to my mouth and pulling the torn lip down.

I backed away from him. “Marcus can fix it.”

“
Well, I have truly been put in my place.”

“
Do not take it to heart, Claudius,” Marcus said soothingly. “You know this is my fondest wish.” His arms came around my waist, and he pulled me back against his huge linebacker body.

In height, Marcus was a monster. In contrast, Claudius was a few inches shorter, but he still topped me by about two inches. With my small frame huddled up close to Marcus’s large one, I began to wonder about what I looked like now. There were no mirrors in the place where Marcus kept me, probably because he thought I would smash them and use them to slash him up with, which wouldn’t have been far off the mark a couple of days ago. All I really knew was that I was no longer what I used to be.

Marcus murmured into my hair, pulling me from my thoughts. “Let us fix this mishap, and then we will continue on with the night.” He gently turned me to face him and kissed the corner of my mouth, and this kiss was nothing like what he’d given to me before. It was hesitant, almost pleading, sweet and pure. I leaned into him and opened my mouth as his tongue swept along my lower lip before darting inside. His tongue lightly rubbed on mine and touched tentatively across my wounds. Someone sighed, and this time it wasn’t me.

I opened my eyes, and saw the blond drug dealer staring at us.

“
That was the hottest thing I have seen in this place in a long time. I really want to get my hands on you now, pretty boy. I’ll be back in twenty.”

“
Pretty boy? What the hell are we doing here?” I was incensed. There was too much noise. There were too many people. And having both Marcus and Claudius sucking on my face had given me a hard-on, which I didn’t want to admit. But there was a spark of fire in Marcus’s eyes. He knew.

“
Do not be ashamed.” He turned me around so I could watch the dancing sea of humanity, gathering me back up in the possessive hold of his arms and pressing my spine into his chest. “It is a beautiful part of life, and it is only a small part of what I want to share with you as my mate.”

“
I’m not gay.” I sounded whiny even to my own ears.

“
This is not about sexual convention. We are Vampire. We sample what we want,” Claudius chipped in, as if he was a visiting lecturer.

I snapped my face towards him. “You’re fucking with my head. Both of you.”

Knocking Marcus’s arms away, I headed back out onto the dance floor, and I just stood there, getting jostled by the writhing sea of flesh as I contemplated my lot. Apart from stealing some corporate secrets from my boss’s company, I hadn’t really done anything so bad in my life that I should be reduced to this, had I? Now, instead of fighting with just one vampire, I had two. And since when did fighting ever win me any favors? Damn, I started crying.