Forbidden Touch (26 page)

Chapter
40

What Mitch really wanted was to go to the gym and hit that bag again. That can't happen, though, he thought as he pulled back into Lazarus' driveway.

He cut the engine and got out of the car. Something on the ground beside the house caught his eye, and he walked over to further investigate. As he got closer, he recognized it to be one of the sky lights from one of the tower rooms he had seen. How many of those rooms did Lazarus have? And what the hell did he use them for? They definitely weren't guest bedrooms. He had been tied to one of the tables when he had come to earlier, but he hadn't thought much about it then. What would they have done to him if he hadn't believed anything they had told him?

He stood and walked to the side of the house. There was another one there, and he was guessing that if he walked around the house, he would find more. He shook his head. He couldn't think about all of this right now. He needed to get some sleep. He would ask Lazarus about it all when he woke up.

"Get off me. I won't run away. You are right...about everything," Ciera said.

He froze above her when he felt her breath caress his face. He hadn't known her lips were only a breath away from his. He'd pulled her back in the car, shutting them both in the interior of the tinted, vampire safe, Lexus. Her body, along with the confinement of the car, was making his mind wander into very dangerous territory.
The feel of her soft lips on...

"Dane," she whispered, and made herself visible.

He jerked away from her, moving too fast to stop his elbow from smashing into the Alpine stereo, and his hand from busting the cover of the dome light. Ciera was laughing hysterically when he finally landed against the driver's door. "I'm sorry," he said, embarrassed by the weakness of his willpower. He hadn't meant to cross any of her forbidden boundaries. "Wait…what did you say? Did you say I was right...about everything? There must be some really big side effects to the tranquilizers."

She sighed, and the smile on her face was fading fast. "I've decided to live, and I don't want you getting in the middle of mine and Mitch's problem. I can take care of myself. In fact, I don't want you even going with me to get him when we get to Illinois."

"This is a trick isn't it?" he said as he eyed her with skepticism.

She shook her head. "No."

"Why can't I join you, then? Are you afraid your boyfriend will think something is going on between the two of us?"

"No."

"What is it then?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said, and averted her gaze from his eyes.

Curiosity got the best of him. She was acting differently toward him now. He had never enjoyed reading her thoughts, because if they did happen to be about him, they were never good. So, he had stopped peeping into her head long ago. His eyes narrowed. "Don't make me read your thoughts, Ciera. It isn't something I enjoy doing."

She huffed. "I just don't want you to get hurt when shit starts to get serious, that's all," she whispered without looking at him.

Her voice had cracked, and he noticed that something definitely had changed in her in the last few moments. Did she actually care about him? "Well, I can't let you go in there alone, so it looks as though you have a problem." He slowly moved his hand to her face, placed his fingers on her cheek and pulled so she was facing him. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears.

"If…" She choked on a sob, then tried again. "If something happens to you, it will kill me, Dane," she said, and the first tear fell, followed by another.

"What are you saying, Ciera? That you care about me?" he said, and then forced his body to move farther away from her, to keep from grabbing her and kissing her right then and there.

She sniffled, and nodded. "Yes…but not in the same way I feel about Mitch, I don't think. It is different somehow. I don't want you to get hurt, and I want you to be in my life." She shook her head. "I don't know how to explain it. I can't have both of you."

Dane had a sudden urge to drive as fast as the car would let him go to Illinois, and kill Mitch so the guy would be out of the equation. She wouldn't have to choose then. Process of elimination. He mentally shook his head. He couldn't do that to her. He would do exactly what she had said back at Euphoria. He would let her go, because he loved her that much. "I have some friends that live near Salt Lake City. One of them will have a safe place for us to rest for a while. They have blood bags."

By "blood bags," Dane meant that at least one of his friends didn't feed directly from humans, and they would have a hefty stock of blood bags. They must have a Getter in the family. Ciera nodded, then he put the car in drive.

Mitch had finally made it to his bed. He'd had to take another shower. The second time he attempted it, he sang a song the whole time he was under the water. He found that it was harder to think of Ciera if he was trying to concentrate on lyrics. He wasn't very good at singing, but he wasn't trying to be the next American Idol, only make sure that his ass was clean without her popping in to see him.

He knew it wasn't her fault that she popped in, and he was actually beginning to have doubts that everything Lazarus had told him was the truth. It just felt right to believe him, he had been his partner for a long time now. That was one thing that bothered him, about something Ciera had said before her voice left his mind earlier. She had said that he had known her longer. He had only known her less than a week. Lazarus had been his partner for a little over two years. And earlier when Mitch had been talking with him, he had said something about Ciera, what was it…The conversation that he and Lazarus had had earlier in the day slammed into his head like someone was trying to help him figure this whole mess out.
"Ciera found out that you were working the case of her victims, and she instantly took a fascination to you. She wanted you, and when I confronted her and told her to leave you alone, she put two-and-two together, I suppose. That made her want you more I guess. She knows about my many skills, and I guess she thought that you would be of some use to her if you were a vampire."

Mitch blinked a few times. Lazarus had said that he had confronted her, and that she knew of him and his many skills. But Ciera had said that he had known her longer than he had Lazarus. One of them was lying. He couldn't swear that Ciera hadn't ever lied to him, well nothing big anyway. But Lazarus had been lying to him his whole life. Lazarus had gone to work for the Police Department not long after Mitch had took the job in homicide. The guy hadn't said anything then, and it seemed that the more he thought about it, Lazarus had always been around him. It was weird how Mitch's partner just up and decided to transfer a week before Lazarus was released to come back to work off medical leave.

He tossed in the comfortable bed. The mattress wasn't the reason he couldn't sleep. He wished that he hadn't ever been assigned to the serial case. It actually seemed that it was inevitable; he was destined to do that case and become what he was now. A vampire.

He finally found a comfortable position and drifted off to sleep...with Ciera on his mind.

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Chapter
41

They had been traveling for a while, and had actually had several civil conversations with each other. Ciera found, as she listened to Dane talk, that he was actually an outgoing and down-to-earth individual. She had pegged him for simple minded, but he actually had a very educated mind with many dreams. Of course, he had mentioned several times that she was his biggest dream. For some reason, she wasn't repulsed by the thought of being the star in Dane's dreams, day or night. Just about everything he talked about doing one day included her there with him. And as he talked more and more, she found that she would enjoy doing most of those things with him.

She was beginning to think that Mitch had gotten better control over his skill, because they had passed Salt Lake City, UT, and was almost to Dane's friend's house. They had been on the road for more than six hours without her feeling so much as a tingle. It was fully dark now. Then she felt it.

She went very still, and Dane stopped talking. "He's pulling you to him again, isn't he?"

Ciera nodded nervously.

"Well, fight it! Try not to go. He is only going to make you feel bad again, Ciera," he said.

She shook her head. "I'm trying, but there really isn't anything I can do about it." And with that last word, she was pulled out of her body and to Mitch.

When she opened her eyes, he was all wrapped up in the arms of a woman. Ciera gasped, and before she thought about what she was doing, she was on top of the girl and pulling her hair back from Mitch's mouth. She froze as she realized that she was looking at her own face. Mitch was gawking at her to.

She was in his damn dream. She picked
the other Ciera
up and tossed her to the floor.
The other her
instantly disappeared. She looked back at Mitch, who still had his mouth gaping wide.

"So…" she said, crossing her arms over her chest, "you can be mean to the real me, but you conjure up a fake me to make out with?" She rolled her eyes. "That's not right, Mitch."

He blinked a few times. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Ciera growled. Sometimes the subconscious wasn't aware of what the conscious knew. He was probably in denial about everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. His subconscious wouldn't pick up on something, if the mind was trying to keep it out.

She turned her head to the side and looked at him. "So you aren't mad at me?"

Mitch held out his arms to her as he lay on his bed. He was already half undressed, and oh, how she wanted those pajama bottoms to come off the rest of the way. She went to him without another word. Her lips met his hungrily, and he quickly put her underneath him. He kissed her neck, and when her top got in his way, it disappeared. He kissed his way down to the soft mounds of her breasts, and when her bra got in the way, it vanished as well.

Ciera was thinking how cool it was that he could do that in his dream, when he took her nipple in his mouth. The moan escaped her throat instantly. No man had ever gotten this far with her, and she was so glad that she had waited for Mitch.

"Wake up Mitch!" a man's voice shouted, and Mitch's head shot up and looked at Ciera.

She shook her head. "No Mitch, don't go. Stay here with me."

The whole bed began to shake. "I don't think I have a choice. I don't know what is happening."

When Ciera sat up, she realized that she was fully dressed again, and that Mitch was fading from her sight. "Remember that you aren't mad at me. Remember that you love me, Mitch. I didn't do any of those things. They took you away from me. Believe me."

Mitch woke up to Lazarus shaking him. He sat up quickly, and Lazarus stepped back from him with a grim face.

"I sense that your little dream walker has been visiting you. Don't let her fool you. She isn't at all what she seems." Lazarus walked to the bedroom door, then looked back at Mitch. "C'mon, son, you have much to learn."

There was something about that dream. He knew Ciera had been there. The real her. He had summoned her spirit to his dream. He hadn't been upset with her at all. He raised his brow as the image of her, shirtless and braless, popped into his mind. She had felt so good beneath his body, and he was almost positive that she would have let him go all the way. Of course it wouldn't have been real, because it was only a dream, but it had been real to her. That had really been her in his subconscious.

He needed to get hold of Alice, but he didn't want Lazarus to know anything about it. There was something strange about the guy that he just didn't trust. He may indeed be his father, but that didn't matter to him one little bit. He hadn't been around his whole life, and if he found out the guy was lying about all of this, he wouldn't care if he never saw him again.

He held onto Ciera's words. Somehow he found truth in them.
"Remember that you aren't mad at me. Remember that you love me, Mitch. I didn't do any of those things. They took you away from me. Believe me."