Cake (27 page)

“
Marcus!
Give the poor boy some rest and get down here!”

I had to break off a weepy laugh as Marcus dropped his head to my chest at his Sire’s agitated voice.

“
Busted,” I teased.

Marcus sat up and brushed my tears away with his fingertips. “Are you all right?” he asked, worried.

“
I liked it…”

“
Until you burst into tears.”

I felt him, still hard and pulsing against my inner thigh. “Do you want…?”

“
No. I can wait until later,” he said, pressing his forehead to mine. “I want you to dance for me again.”

I felt myself flush with embarrassment over that horny, rub-myself-on-the-couch fiasco. “That wasn’t dancing. I don’t know what that was yesterday.”

“
It was the most exotic thing I’ve ever seen in my two hundred and thirty-nine years,” Marcus retorted. “I would like to dress you in bronze leather, with your hair free, and have you dancing only for me. But, right now, I will cherish my memories of it until you are ready.” He sat back and offered me his hand. I blinked and met his palm with my own. Effortlessly, he pulled me up and off the bed.

“
Have a shower, Little One. I will lay out some clothes and get another mug of blood for you. I do believe that I have pushed Claudius’s patience to the breaking point.” He reached out and flipped my red hair off my shoulder, gently urging my face away, exposing my throat. “There is no scar. There is no sign of any scars on your neck. I am thankful for that small saving grace. You are too precious to be marred so viciously.”

I reached behind to feel my shoulder blades and Marcus came up, tracing both scars on my shoulders again. They were about as long as my entire shoulder blade. He pressed a warm kiss to the nape of my neck.

“
I will never forget that first sight of you in full wing, my red angel of protection. Now, go shower.”

I was surprised I didn’t have a guest join me in the shower cubicle. It took me longer than I expected to get clean because I now had more than double the amount of hair to shampoo. How the hell did that happen?

But growing hair down to my ass over night was the least of my worries. I had wings, or I had wings last night, but now they were mysteriously missing. I flexed my back, feeling the pull of muscles with none of that mind-numbing agony from yesterday. I felt along the side of my neck as I rubbed a bar of soap at it. The scar tissue Marcus had left me with was gone. My skin was smooth. In curious wonder I ran my hand against my upper arm towards the old lingering scar I received when I’d got bitten by a wolf-type dog at the age of nine. The skin there was now as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Ewww, bad imagery.

I finished up bathing and came out, toweling my hair dry. Marcus went by with his own towel but somehow managed to goose me.

“
You look like a half-drowned kitten.”

I glared at him and headed back to the playroom to discover that he’d laid out those damn low-rider blue jeans and another fuck-me-now t-shirt in metallic bug green. Fine, he wanted me dressed in those things, so be it. He would be the one to suffer the consequences.

Tucking everything securely away in the jeans, I struggled into the too-tight shirt. Crap, why don’t I just wear paint? The hem of the shirt hit me just above the navel, leaving more than a hand’s span of exposed flesh between it and my low rider pants. Easy access, my ass! This ensemble just screamed, “Fuck the whore.”

Sitting down on the bed, I started combing out my hair. It was nothing but tangles. I gave a couple of hard jerks, hoping to force the comb through my now extra-long tresses, but the comb snapped in half, depositing a few broken teeth into the knot and remaining there, tangled in my hair. Fuck.

I was trying to get one part of the comb free when Claudius, who had finally gotten tired of waiting, came marching up the stairs.

“
You both better have started moving or…Oh, do not yank on your hair like that, otherwise it will just get tangled even more. Have Marcus buy you some expensive conditioner. And how did it get to be this long?”

I stayed still as Claudius sat beside me and began picking the pieces of comb out of my hair. Once he had removed it all, he went and fetched a brush, and the gentle strokes he used on my head were so soothing. Too soothing. I felt boneless, and fell back against him.

“
Get up, Xavier. Marcus would not appreciate us being together like this. Let me fix your hair,” he urged.

It didn’t take long for me to end up with the same razor-tail style I had given Claudius the day before, though I still couldn’t believe that my hair had grown about two and a half feet over night.

“
Where did my wings go?” I asked him.

“
I am not sure. I remember the Emperor had them on some days and on others not. Perhaps Councilor Armanita would be the best person to discuss that with as…”

I had gotten to my feet, and whatever Claudius was going to say dried up in his mouth. “What?” I quizzed, and then noticed that my bared lower stomach was right in his face as he still sat there on the bed.

“
I thought you were going to talk to Marcus about seeing you in something more appropriate outside of the bedroom,” he said.

“
Later today maybe. Anyway, I finally have some clothes on, tiny as they may be. And I consider that a hell of a big improvement on what I was wearing before, which was nothing.”

“
Master Xavier, I have a fresh mug of…” Chesterton stopped on the stairs. While I hadn’t really taken a good look at him the day before, the dumbfounded expression on his face now wasn’t one I thought he would normally wear. His eyes were glued to that open space between my pants and my shirt. I caught the mug just as the tray began to tilt in his fingers.

Damn it.

“
I’m sorry, sir. I…”

“
It’s okay, I get it…I’m too distracting in this getup,” I said, putting the mug down safely and making a decision.

Letting my concentration go, I relaxed my body and mind, closing my eyes briefly before opening them again and feeling the gentle burn of my vision shifting. This time, I easily found the Blood mark by Marcus’s closet, and as it opened at my touch, I grabbed the first thing that I saw…a black crewneck sweater. It was too big for me, but it covered everything, and I shrugged into it, pulling my ponytail free. Then, feeling more suitably dressed, I grabbed my mug of blood again and faced the others.

“
Better?”

Chesterton turned crimson. “I am sorry I stared at you, sir.”

“
Why?” I asked. “Because I look like an idiot?”

“
Oh, no, sir. You are unbelievably sexy.” He snapped his mouth shut, turned bright red, and literally bolted back down the stairs.

Okay, that was unexpected.

“
Did you not learn from your experience at the club, Xavier? You are like a god of lust, with your fiery hair, your exotic jade green eyes, your skin—so pale but responsive. Your face is easy to read, and the expression you have when you are lost in passion is something that others crave to experience, again and again. Humans would stand in a line around the block for you now. With your provocative dress…you invite caresses.”

As he finished speaking, Claudius reached out toward me, and then snapped his hand back. He stood up so he was well away from the memory of my exposed flesh. “You call to your own kind as well. I knew there was something intriguing about you, but I could not lay my finger on it, even as you were going through your birthing. In that back alley, while Marcus serviced you on his knees, you looked spectacular.”

So this black-haired hottie was telling me that he thought I was hot too. I knew I had to be dead now, for sure. I hadn’t been able to buy a date in high school or the years before being turned, and yet now I seemed to have people throwing themselves at me.

Marcus came out of the shower, a puzzled expression on his face when he saw me. “What happened to the shirt I laid out for you?”

I yanked up his sweater and flashed him that metallic green piece of plastic wrap that served as an excuse for a shirt, then dropping the black sweater hem, I pointed at him accusingly. “You told me that when I opened the Blood mark I could wear whatever I wanted.”

“
Yes.” He nodded his agreement. “You can wear whatever you want…from your own closet.”

I shook my head. “That is not what you said. You said whatever
I
wanted, and I don’t want this! After we’re done talking to Armanita, we are going shopping.”

“
But you have clothes. They are new and have never been worn,” he argued.

“
I have fuck-me-now clothes that you picked out for me. If you like them so much, why don’t you wear the damn things?”

“
They are too small, and I would look ridiculous in them.”

“
And I don’t?”

“
No!” both vampires answered in unison.

I paused and looked at the two of them. “I don’t care that I’m nothing but a bad lay or a, a, a…wet blanket here,” I stuttered, fishing for words. “I don’t want to be groped or stared at by everyone. Geez, even Chesterton couldn’t wait to get the hell away from me.”

Claudius piped in his two cents worth. “That was not the reason why Chesterton fled. He found you irresistibly attractive, Xavier.”

“
Does everybody want to fuck me?” I asked with exasperation, holding my free hand up to the bridge of my nose to try and pinch away the tension that had slowly been building.

The gruesome twosome responded in the same unanimous way. “Yes!”

GAH!

Taking my cup of blood with me, I started barefoot down the stairs. “We
are
going shopping,” I called back up into the room.

“
Who said you were a bad lay?’ Marcus asked from the top of the steps. I shot him the finger and decided to wander the lower level. I hadn’t really got a chance to look at it when I’d been stumbling down the stairs and eating cabbies and suits. As I reached the bottom of the steps, Claudius’s voice drifted down to me.

“
Somebody said that our little Xavier was a bad lay? Well, I most certainly did not. I quite enjoyed him.”

Oh God.
I covered my ears and hurried a little further down the corridor from the stairs. Marcus and Claudius being cute together, that was just too much.

As I walked, I could sense the house staff moving around. It was weird. It was sort of like seeing the heat waves rising off the pavement in the middle of summer, but this was air waves radiating around the area where a person was standing, maybe one or two walls over. The funny thing was, they seemed to know I was close, and buggered off the other way. That was cool. I got it. I was an unknown quantity, and I
had
tried to eat the head butler yesterday.

“
Master Xavier. Can I help you, sir?” Chesterton was suddenly standing there, and he couldn’t meet my eyes.

“
About upstairs…”

“
Please, sir, think nothing of it. I apologize for my behavior.”

“
If you are sure?”

“
Positive, sir. Would you like to see Councilor Armanita now, sir?”

I guessed I should get this over with. “She got spikes?” I asked. He looked at me with a blank expression. “Please, tell me, does she still have the hole in her shoulder?”

“
No, sir. She was given a transfusion.”

“
What the hell is that? It can’t be the same as what they do in the hospital,” I remarked, sipping at the blood in my mug.

“
No, sir. It simply means that a member of the household volunteered to feed the councilor,” Chesterton explained.