Hunger Untamed H3 (6 page)

“I need a stake,” she muttered when he settled on an area. She’d be less likely to slip on the wet grass here or stumble into an animal-created pothole. Victor could keep some of his attention on the cabin.

Victor grunted an acknowledgment. He jogged over to a nearby tree. He stripped it of a single branch and as she came to him, removed the small twigs and leaves from it. “Make this work.”

She tested its heft in her hand, making a noise of approval as she did. “I guess this will be okay for now. Wouldn’t want to accidentally drive something pointier and sharper into your heart.” Her teeth gleamed with her smile.

Damn, if his dick didn’t thump.

Victor shifted his weight to his back leg, raised a hand and beckoned with his fingers. Lucy canted her head to the side, studying him, and it filled his confidence. But as he suspected would happen, her entire face gave her away. From the moment her eyes widened and her jaw set, he knew when she would spring. Still, her attack, the ferocity of it, almost caught him off guard. This woman had a true hatred for vampires.

She trailed the stake behind her as she rushed him, which was also a surprise. Maybe she’d watched one too many ninja movies. He wanted to remind her this wasn’t a sword. Although he liked the streamlined look she presented, it also meant it would take her an extra second or two to swing the stake around.

Most people would have come at him using it like a knife, arm raised and easy to deflect. While good for offense, if she were defending herself, that wouldn’t work. And against a vampire, her defenses would have to be optimal.

Lucy brought the stake around so slowly that Victor had time to lean away from her and then, using his left hand, smack her dominant arm. She winced. “That hurt!”

He almost laughed, and the distraction must have seemed an opportune time. A panting Lucy thrust her arm forward—again, a swordsman’s move—and attempted to gouge him with the branch. Although there was time to yank it from her, he chose to bat it away from his body, using more force than necessary.

Something inside of him twisted darkly when she grimaced. She was soft. Delicate.

Still, Lucy was determined.

Forgoing an attempt at grace, she whirled, throwing her arm back. Stabbing from up high, instead of the previous useless thrusts. He batted it away a second time, annoyed she hadn’t learned how to get closer. “Are you trying to stab me or scratch me?”

She scowled but then came at him with an overhand grip. At last. Except her white-knuckled grip on the branch betrayed her growing frustration. Damn it. She’d have to rein in her emotions. Besides, if she’d manage to make contact, the jarring impact of the stake hitting sternum might knock it out of her hand.

“Loosen up,” he barked. “Your first task is to get close enough to me to use that. Stun him and then drive it in. If you can’t get close, none of this matters.” Victor bounced away again when she lunged. Her movements were awkward and clumsy. Pathetic. “Are you even trying?” he growled.

Lucy’s face, already red with exertion, mottled with varying colors. “I can do this!” Her chest heaved as she fought for breath.

“Then show me,” Victor said. God, he wasn’t trying to bait her anger for the fun of it. “And damn it, I’m taking it easy on you. What happens when Sage actually starts to
fight back
?”

“Then I fight with him,” she shouted. Her voice cracked, but the same fiery determination sparked in her eyes. The branch hung loose in her limp hand.

“Yeah? Then fight me. Give me everything you’ve got.” Victor threw out a punch. He pulled back at the last second, taking away the force of it, because he knew she wouldn’t duck in time. With no intention of punching her, he relaxed his fingers. His open palm slapped just beneath her jaw, his fingertips stinging from the sharp impact.

She stumbled. His heart clenched hard, every instinct in him screaming to go to her. “That’s probably going to bruise,” he said gently instead.

Lucy dropped to one knee, but her head snapped up. Rage in her eyes. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t stop until Sage is dead. If you have to bloody me, make everything black and blue, you show me how to do that. I can take it.”

But he didn’t want this. He didn’t want to see her damaged and especially not by his hand. “I don’t think you can.”
Fuck
. Not knowing what to do next, he turned on his heel, headed back to the cabin. He’d been riding so high on his infatuation with her, it’d never dawned on him the real impossibility of her task. If they continued this, he’d be sending her to a death sentence. “Let’s go regroup,” he said. “Think about another plan.”

The sound of her feet pounding on the ground was his only warning.

Victor spun, going low into a crouch. Lucy ran toward him at an impressive speed, the stake clutched in her hand. When she was almost on top of him, she swung out with her left hand and then punched out with her right, the weapon’s hand.

He had to put a stop to this before she got herself hurt. He deflected both blows, her face coming into contact with his forearm. She’d been trying to reach around him while he’d been on the defense, but she managed to get in the way instead.

Without adequate time to pull back, the blow bounced off the side of her nose, glanced off her cheek. If the earlier slap didn’t produce a bruise, this assault guaranteed one.

In that moment, he watched her defeat blossom. As he rose from the crouch, Lucy dropped the stick. A moment later, she followed its descent.

Inwardly, Victor cursed a blue streak.

Lucy kneeled on the ground, blood dripping from her nose onto the grass in fat droplets. Her body was bowed, her arm wrapped around her waist as if she tried to hold in her guts. He hadn’t done nearly as much damage as he could have and Victor was bombarded with the absolute certainty of the wrongness of this all.

“Go home, Lucy. Go back to being a pretty little dress-up doll, if not for the vampires, then for some rich human looking for a trophy to display.”

She lifted her head, eyes blazing with fevered determination. “I can do this.”

“No, you can’t. You’re weak and helpless, and I don’t want to hurt you anymore. You don’t stand a chance against Sage. Your first instinct to hire someone to do this for you was right.”

Struggling to catch her breath, Lucy rose on wobbly legs. “It should have been me. It should have always been me. That man hurt me, and I won’t stop until I’ve hurt him back.”

“Wanting to hurt him isn’t enough!” Victor bit back another volley of cursing. She would be seriously injured, if not killed by Sage, and it would be his fault. If he didn’t stop her now, if he didn’t get her to understand what she faced, her death would be on his head. “When you go after him, he’ll fight back and he’ll do it savagely. He’ll do it not because he’s out for revenge or trying to wound you. He’ll risk everything to kill you first because he’ll be fighting for his life. His motivation is stronger and better than yours. You are going to die.”

“I’m going to die anyway,” she murmured, tears filling her eyes.

Victor’s gut clenched, but he was resolved in swaying her decision. He would not have her death because of him. “I—I’ll find someone you can hire. Someone who’ll take on the task for you.”

The smile she gave him held no mirth. No humor. Bittersweet, it spoke to the turbulent emotions driving her. She swiped away her tears and bloody nose with the back of a hand. Taking a deep breath seemed to help steady her. “At first, that’s what I wanted. More than anything, I wanted someone bigger and stronger than me to take care of him. Now that I’ve tasted what it’s like to be up close to Sage, to have his life in my hands, I want it. I have to be there when the life leaves him. You couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a throw-away, to be just an
objet d’art
, overlooked and uncherished. This? This makes me feel like I have some worth. I want to be worthy. Taking his life makes me worthy.”

“What did he do to you?” he whispered.

“One day I might tell you,” she said with a shrug. But today wasn’t that day.

He hadn’t forgotten about the lycans. He couldn’t forget. Yet, as he studied her now, Victor also knew he couldn’t walk away from Lucy. Whether he helped her or not, she’d go after Sage. To succeed or to die. By not helping her, he guaranteed her death. But by driving into her a fraction of the skills he’d learned over the years, maybe she’d have a fighting chance. Maybe.

“Stand up,” he rumbled at her. “Put your hands up. Feet shoulder width apart.”

The blood beneath her nose smudged in the direction she’d wiped it. Face mottled, she breathed hard through her mouth. Annoyingly close to her sensual lips, a bluish tint formed, the bruise burgeoning as he’d thought it would. Despite all of this, he watched her struggle into position, and she did it without complaint. Her determination was a beautiful thing.

“You’re not fighting me as hard as you will Sage. You don’t hate me like you hate him.”

“Sure about that?” she muttered beneath her breath.

Victor ignored her. “You need something to fight me for. How about I give you an incentive?”

Chapter Six

Lucy squinted at Victor, suspicion riding her. “What kind of incentive?” Her stomach fluttered wildly. He aroused such delicious feelings in her, a visceral attraction she’d thought long since evaporated. A part of her that remained dormant.

“I know how much you’re looking forward to fucking me later.”

God
. “I—I’m not backing out.”

“I know. But maybe you’d like to earn a freebie.”

“I don’t understand.” She’d gone tense, unable to help it. Every time she considered Victor, her entire body grew taut. Regardless of what her mind wanted—what she
thought
her mind wanted—she responded to him.

Victor moved closer, forcing Lucy to raise her gaze. She tilted her head up to his, and the languid appreciation in his eyes made her stomach clench. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said, his gaze tracking over her face. When he used a thumb to swipe just above her lip, she didn’t flinch, but her stomach kept up the pattern of whorls. A spot of blood dotted his fingertip, and he became mesmerized by it.

He used his tongue to taste the spot. Despite familiarity with vampires’ sanguine affinity, she prepared to turn away disgusted. Maybe even have to fight despair that she’d been placed in this position again. Instead, her vaginal walls clenched at the utter ecstasy that filled Victor’s face from the minuscule offering.

“A deal?” she asked on a breath. Had to refocus.

His throat bobbed as if he struggled to make his voice work. “We’ll spar a little bit, give you more time to practice. Not as hard as a few minutes ago, and then we’ll make a bet.”

“Go on.”

“If you can tag me, you get a night off. One hit, and you’ll only owe me a kiss. Nothing more.”

“Not even...”

“Just a kiss.” Those brown eyes lowered, his gaze intent on her lips. “Is that fair?”

Lucy nodded, unable to believe the offer. She couldn’t say why it mattered that it gave her another day to get to know him first, but it did. Maybe because this way it felt less like a deal and more like, maybe, a date. A liaison between people who waited with pent-up anticipation until the time when they could be together. “Why?”

“Because I will have you sooner or later. Whether it’s tonight or tomorrow night. More important to me is that we improve your skills quickly. I can’t and won’t promise you the weeks and months of training that you probably need to accomplish what you want.” He stood there like a man with all the time in the world. Not quite arrogant, but smug enough to suggest he knew he’d get his way.

“I don’t have months.” Not even weeks. A foregone conclusion she’d accepted a long time ago.

“No, I don’t suppose you do. This will eat at you until you’ve gotten what you need, huh?” Victor folded his arms across his chest, the moon highlighting him in an ethereal way. Again, a pulse of power pushed away from him, and Lucy’s heart tripped at the sensation.

It scared the hell out of her. “Fine,” she said. “I tag you and I only owe you a kiss.”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight,” she agreed. Tomorrow she would be a blood slave again.

Victor backed away from her, his gaze trained on hers. There was prurient interest in his eyes, and it made her shiver. She’d found a stained T-shirt and jeans that slid off her hips to wear today, but the way Victor looked at her, she might as well have been wearing Sarrieri lingerie.

“Now...come to me. Stand here, feet shoulder width apart.”

For the next two hours, under his careful instruction, she threw punches at his face, neck and chest. Sweat circled her neckline, dampening her hair until it clung to her in places. Her arms ached, trembling with fatigue, but by the time he called a break, she felt proficient.

Lucy fell to her knees, exhaustion hugging her tight. She rolled her eyes to Victor, who studied her dispassionately. “You’re weak,” he said. Not an insult, an observation.

She nodded. As the weeks passed, she would grow weaker. Her blood would sickle, her entire body radiating pain. Breathing would grow more difficult. Eventually her organs would shut down one by one. “If I could turn back time, there’d be more hours in the gym with a personal trainer and less time at the MAC counter picking out complimentary colors.”

“What’s a maccounter?”

Laughing, she couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “It’s a girl thing,” she said when her mirth settled.

“I don’t know much about girls.” His imperfect mouth quirked.

She regarded its shape and function. For a split second, her mind wandered to the fantasy of what it would be like to kiss it. Could he move it skillfully over her lips, giving her a moment’s pleasure? “I don’t believe you,” she said softly.

As soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t. The stricken look on Victor’s face told many tales. He’d been teaching her to keep her expression neutral at all times, yet at this, he couldn’t follow his own advice. A soul-deep pain lanced her at the understanding that he’d been critically wounded by a woman or women in his past. The wrong side of his face remained passive and stoic, but the side that moved displayed misery. The urge to take his face in her hands, draw him down to her and kiss away the hurt made her tremble from the force of it.

Lucy kept her hands at her sides though.

What was it about him that provoked such responses from her? She rose to shaky legs, somewhat proud of the way they burned with fatigue. “Let me ask you something...you were born a vampire, right?”

Victor walked to a nearby sapling, and Lucy’s cheeks burned as she realized she followed the sway of his ass with rapt attention. He leaned his back against it, regarding her from several feet away. “No,” he said after such a long pause, she wasn’t sure he would respond at all.

“
Oh
. Well, if you had the chance to go back to being just a human, would you take it?”

“No.”

“Well, jeez. Take your time.”
Ass.
His eagerness to reply made it seem like being human might have been the worst assignation to hell he could have ever imagined.

“Humans are weak. Fragile. Food. What about any of that could I possibly find appealing?”

“We’re resilient. We love long and hard. We find joy and delight in the things you no longer appreciate.” A vampire’s pleasure came from feeding, but beyond that? They didn’t have much to look forward to from what she could tell. With their impossibly long lives, ennui had to settle in, inciting the coldness that seemed to inhabit each of them.

“Humans are petty.”

She took a step forward, anger beginning a slow simmer in her veins. “And vampires aren’t? You’re still enslaving people. We did once upon a time, and I’m embarrassed to have to admit to it, but we’ve learned our lesson. We’ve
evolved
.”

“You sure about that? You sure humans don’t make slaves any longer? Because I’m thinking about your drug addicts—slaves. And what about them little girls kidnapped while on vacation? Slaves. Oh, and hey, don’t forget about lines of credit putting a man deeper into debt than a single lifetime will ever get him out of? I call him a slave.

“Yeah, we have our blood slaves, but they come to us willingly. In exchange for their services, we care for them. We cherish them. Almost worship them.”

Rage and his naive ignorance made it impossible to speak for what felt like a full minute. Forcing the words, she said, “That is
not
true. None of it. I did not serve willingly. I was not cared for and I sure as hell wasn’t cherished. Vampires might have worshiped my body, but they cared little for me or how I felt. Everything they did was for them, not me.” Her throat tightened. “I was a slave in every ugly sense of the word.”

Victor pushed away from the tree, stalking closer. “I don’t understand this.” His deep voice went gritty with dark emotion. “How did this happen, and who knew about it? Sage?”

“I only met him recently. I-I don’t know how or when it started. It’s been almost my entire life. Like that. No bright side to being a blood slave except for having a roof over my head and hot meals. The rest of it simply wasn’t glamorous for me or my sister.”

“Your sister?”

Shit.
She hadn’t meant to let that slip. “We were brought in together.”

“Has she been freed too, then?”

Lucy found she could no longer look him in the eye, instead choosing to turn around and drop into the offensive stance he’d taught her. “Are you going to let me try to tag you now, or is there more you wanted to show me?”

Her heart raced in frantic beats, it too demanding the change in topic. The tension rolling off Victor’s body suggested he wanted to explore it more, but she wasn’t ready for that. His eyes went expressionless, but he moved closer. He scooped up a branch from the ground and held it toward her. “Use this. Come at me like you’re trying to stab me. I won’t hold back again.”

“You held back last time?” she almost shouted. Her nose still burned from where he’d bounced it.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said with a low, rumbling voice.

It sent a shiver through her.

Totally didn’t help that he still walked around bare-chested, a sensual beauty of a man. She longed to skim her hands over the dark hair lightly covering his pectorals and forming a perfect line down his abdomen. The muscles of his defined stomach made the most delicious contours. What would it be like to run her fingers—her tongue, maybe—over each ridge and shallow valley?

Lucy mentally shook loose the decadent images bombarding her imagination and planted one foot behind the other. She dropped her shoulders, raised her arms and kept her fists loose.

“Protect your face,” Victor barked at her. He swung out with his left hand, demonstrating how she’d left herself vulnerable.

Lucy ducked, but from the corner of her eye focused on what his right arm was doing. Her defensive crouch turned into a lunge away from him, when as she’d anticipated, he struck out with the other arm. She grinned big as soon as the swing missed her by a country mile. “Is the student surpassing the teach—
ooph
!”

Damn it. Hadn’t seen that one coming.

She landed hard on her ass after his kick caught her in the side, the shock hurtling up through her spine and throbbing like hell. Her teeth rattled, her eyes watering as pain radiated outward.

He stood over her, glaring. “You stay there, and he’ll kill you. No matter what happens, get back on your feet. Distract him, show him your tits if you have to, but get back on your feet.”

She rolled to one knee, pushing away from the ground with a grunt. Victor stood close enough that she kicked out, screaming in rage as he knocked her foot aside. Almost forgetting about the stick, she shoved it forward, trying to catch him in the ribs with it. Victor whirled, as fast as any being she’d ever seen, knocking it out of her hand.

It arced several feet away, landing in a clump of dirt. Lucy scrambled after it, but Victor grabbed her by the feet and yanked. She went down again, the wind knocked out of her lungs.

Gasping for air, she waited for the pain to catch up. When was the last time she’d hurt like this?

“Get. Up.” Victor stomped over to her. “You get up or you die. If you learn nothing else from me today, you get it through your head that you don’t stop. Not until you’re dead, you don’t ever stop. Because he won’t stop. You go after him, and that ruthless vampire will rip out your throat for being bothersome. Now...get up!”

* * *

Two instincts warred within Victor. The first, the loudest, wanted to pick her up from the ground, crush her to his side and make sure she never saw hurt or pain again. But the second one, the violent one, saw a woman he craved, vulnerable and wide-eyed, in a helpless position. His teeth elongated, hunger burning in him to ravage her on the spot.

She lay there, panting. Her breasts rising and falling as she gasped for breath. The pulse in her neck fluttering with mad insistence, calling to him. His cock hardened, and he could almost taste the blood rushing through her veins.

A small voice whispered warning. That this human, this blood slave, was delicate. Fragile. If he fell on her now, he’d do damage he could never reverse. Not just the physical kind.

“Lucy...move.” He didn’t know if he said it more for her benefit or for his. “Crawl if you have to, but you do not stay still.”

“Go to hell.” But she began to drag herself away.

It put a smile on his face.

Victor crouched down beside her, not bothering to attack a second time. What would be the point? “You know what else humans are?”

She raised her middle finger in the air.

He laughed. “Humans are tough. If I told you to stop now, would you?”

She whipped her head around to him. “No.” Rising on unsteady legs, she turned to face him, slowly dropping into the defensive posture he’d taught her. She grimaced but held. “You’re right about the fact that he’s not going to take it easy on me, so I can’t expect you to.”

“Good girl,” he said softly.

The previous hunger for her blood had abated, but now a different kind of appetite rushed to the surface. Victor studied this beautiful woman, her strawberry blond hair wild and untamed. Her cheeks pink from exertion, hazel green eyes dark with emotion. He took it all in, his heart thudding hard in response.

A small part of him regretted offering her the chance to put off their liaison for another night. A different part knew with unwavering certainty, however, that a simple night of denial would make her taking that much more potent. When they came together, it would be a momentous event that rocked his world. He refused to think about what would happen when he was forced to let her go.

“You want to try again, or should we move on to drills?”

“Which is easier?” she grumbled.

Without looking at a watch or consulting the sky, he said, “It’s a little after midnight. Why don’t we do drills for a few more hours? Then afterward I’ll give you one final chance to tag me. You don’t do it by dawn, then I collect regular payment. If, however, it snows in summer, hell freezes over, pigs fly, the sun rises in the west and you tag me, we’ll call it a night with my lips on yours.”