In the Blood (9 page)

“I think he did it to show he is not pleased with me.” Viktor chuckled. “I would fire him, if he was not such a good assistant.”

“He’s not just an assistant, though, is he?” She took a bite and pretended not to be concerned with his answer. “Assistants don’t just break into someone’s house and go through their shit.”

“He didn’t break in.” Viktor looked up. “He used your key. And I did not send him. He went of his own accord. He seems to think you have…sinister motives, where I am concerned.”

“You’re a vampire, but he thinks I’m sinister.” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. You didn’t send him to spy on me.”

Viktor’s look of confusion seemed genuine. She had to give him credit for his acting skills, but at the end of the day, he was just like every other rich asshole in New York.

“You didn’t send him to look into my private life? To dig up stuff from my past?” She pushed her chair back and stood. “I appreciate you saving my life, but I can’t deal with this. I have to go.”

Something brushed her shoulder, and Viktor stood before her. She shrieked and took a step back.

“I will not harm you!” he said quickly, his face a mask of despair. “Please, I would never hurt you.”

She swallowed her fear, but her ears still roared with the terror coursing through her veins. “You’ll just break into my house, hypnotize me, send someone to spy on me? How is that not hurting me?”

“I did not ask Anthony to do that. I knew he had suspicions about you, but I never expected him to do something so drastic,” Viktor stated firmly. “I have already promised not to use tricks of the mind to control you. I do not wish for anything between us to be forced.”

“You might say that now, but I know your type.” A note of hysteria crept into her voice. “You have all the money in the world, so you think you can make everyone put up with your bullshit. You can’t buy me. I don’t care if I am a prostitute, you can’t buy me.”

“I do not wish to buy you.” He stepped forward and reached a hand toward her. “Cassandra, there is a deep wound inside of you. Right now, my only wish is to know why.”

“You want to know why?” He’d probably already seen the contents of his lackey’s manila folder. This was just the test, to see if she would be honest with him. If she failed, maybe she could go home, back to real life. But that wasn’t what she wanted. No matter how she might try to convince Viktor that she didn’t want him, no matter how she might try to convince herself, she didn’t want him to think she was a liar or a spy or whatever his assistant alleged. Viktor was the only person she had trusted in a long time, and she wanted to have his trust in return. “I killed my best friend.”

The silence while she waited for him to reject her…it was the most terrible silence she’d ever felt.

His whole being seemed to slump. The light of concern in his eyes dimmed, his shoulders slouched. This was it. This was when he realized what a monster she was.

“It was in college.” She hurried to fill the time until he ordered her out of his house. “I was at a party, drinking too much, doing drugs. Emily had been drinking too, but she didn’t touch any of that other stuff. She didn’t even know. I thought I was okay to drive.”

“You drove, with your friend in the car?” Viktor asked slowly.

“I knew it was wrong.” She took a shuddering breath. “I knew it was dangerous, and I did it anyway. The next thing I knew, I was on the side of the road and they were…they had to cut her body out of the car.”

He opened his mouth to speak, and suddenly Cassie didn’t want to hear him lecture her or yell at her. Usually, she thought there was nothing a person could say to make her feel worse about what had happened than she already did. But hearing him denounce her was, for reasons she couldn’t discern, unthinkable. “I know what I did then was wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m trying to…I thought you had a fetish, and Julie needed someone to cover you. No matter what Anthony says, I’m not here to hurt you.”

“I never thought you were.” Viktor’s voice was practically a whisper. “What has happened to you…it is a wound to the soul, and it will scar, but it can heal.”

She shook her head. “Really? Because it doesn’t feel like it ever will. And when Anthony accused me of trying to steal your humanity or turn you into a Minion or whatever it was he thought I was doing, it actually took me a minute to realize that he was wrong. Every day, I live with the consequences of being a monster.”

He touched her face, his fingers feather light as they brushed her skin. “I have killed. In my first days as a vampire, the thirst overwhelmed me, and I could not help myself. Do you see a monster when you look at me?”

A shiver ran down her spine. Vampires were monsters. Every Halloween, all those scary movies. There was no way to get around the fact that he was a monster. But from where she stood, he looked like a man. A man who was lonely, in pain. A man who thought more of her than she did herself.

“You don’t understand. It’s not the same as it is for you. You’re a vampire. You’re supposed to be a monster. I’m not. I was just supposed to be a regular person.”

“I had no aspiration to be a monster. I was supposed to be a regular person too and die a regular death.” He dropped his hand, clasping both in front of his body in a silent plea. Finally, he spoke again. “There is nothing you can say that will make me think any less of you, Cassandra. I have lived too long not to have learned that the past shapes a person, but it does not mar them forever.”

She closed her eyes, ashamed to feel a hot tear escape and roll down her cheek. “Don’t do this.”

“Do what?” His voice held all the helplessness of a man who saw pain and didn’t know how to fix it.

“Don’t try to make me feel better when I don’t deserve to.” She shook her head, dislodging more tears, but she wouldn’t open her eyes. “Don’t try to save me.”

She felt his nearness as he closed the gap between them. “You are worth saving.”

His fingers lifted her chin, and she opened her eyes to stare into his. The molten gray pools burned with a new intensity, and she couldn’t pull her gaze away. But this was no hypnotic trick. What passed between them was pure need.

She didn’t plead for him to make her pain go, or to help her forget the horrible memories, the nightmares, the blood and the pain. His arms strong around her, he leaned his head down and captured her lips.

The kiss should have brought the monsters to her, but their claws and shrieks receded under the cold touch of his mouth. She parted her lips, welcoming him to stroke her tongue with his. His arms tightened around her, then he released her abruptly.

“No,” he said, all but wiping his mouth in his disgust. “I cannot treat you this way.”

“How?” she demanded angrily. “I don’t understand what any of this has to do with me. I don’t know why, but the only person I feel safe with on this entire planet is you.”

“Then it is not right to take advantage of you in this position.” He turned as if to go, and she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“I don’t care. It’s not taking advantage. I want this.” She couldn’t find the words for further pleas, so she rose on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cold cheek. He turned to face her, a thousand conflicting emotions etched into his expression, a thousand denials poised to burst from him. None of them could overcome the one urge Cassandra knew he felt, because she felt it too, and it was too powerful to deny.

With an almost inhuman growl, he lifted her into his arms, kissing her with a passion she hadn’t thought someone so controlled would have been capable of feeling. He carried her to his bedroom and kicked the door shut with a reverberating slam. The moment he set her on her feet, her hands smoothed over his chest, into his jacket. He shrugged it off, his hands returning to dive greedily into her hair. Their lips met again as she divested him of his tie and went to work on the buttons of his shirt. He pushed her hands away and gripped the front of his shirt, pulling it open, sending buttons flying. Cassandra gasped against his mouth, then broke their contact to let him pull her shirt over her head. He ran his hands down her back, deftly popping the clasp of her bra before he grabbed her butt and pulled her hips flush against him.

Through her jeans, Cassandra felt the substantial hardness of him and gooseflesh peppered her skin in anticipation. The memory of what she had seen the night before sent new awareness flooding through her veins. She let her mind linger on the image of Viktor’s body, the crisp lines of his muscled abdomen flexing as he had pounded into a man. All that tight skin and hard body belonged to her tonight, and she shivered, remembering how powerfully aroused she had been just looking at him. Now, she didn’t have to just look. She ran her greedy fingers over his chest inside his open shirt. His skin was cold and smooth, slightly warm over the place where his heart would be. She looked up, questioning, and he closed his hand over hers, pressing her palm flat as he kissed her again. The gesture, so unexpectedly tender in the moment, took her breath away. When he looked at her, she realized with a shock he saw her and not some fantasy woman. He saw her, yet his eyes lingered on her in adoration.

She stepped back and let the black lace of her bra fall forward, the straps sliding down her arms. His breathing audibly quickened at the sight of her exposed flesh, and he leaned down to take one hard nipple into his mouth. Cassandra’s head fell back and his hand immediately caught her at the small of her back, supporting her as his mouth teased her sensitive breast mercilessly.

He jerked the duvet from the bed and pushed her gently back, and she landed with a bounce on the soft mattress. She laughed, and in the next second she stopped laughing, because his hands were on her thighs, urging them apart. He knelt on the carpet and lowered his face to the bend of her knee, looking up at her with a hot, hungry gaze. Would he bite her? Did she want him to?

No, of course she didn’t. Though sharing blood with him had been a powerfully erotic experience, it had also been terrifying. With her tainted blood, the consequences were too dire.

As if sensing her fear—and how could he have missed it? Her whole body had tensed up like a line about to break—he said, “I have other plans for my mouth that do not include biting you.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just being stupid. I—” Her apology was cut off by a gasp as his cold mouth descended on the bend of her knee, and a flood of wetness rushed to her core. When was the last time anyone had ever made her feel like this?

Never, she realized as his mouth moved up her thigh, closer and closer to the lacy edge of her panties. None of the men she’d dated in college, none of the clients she’d serviced through the club. They’d wanted her to be overcome with passion, to scream their names and rake her nails down their backs. They hadn’t cared if she’d truly felt anything, just that their egos were stroked by their encounter. A tear slid from the corner of her eye, wetting the hair at her temple.

Immediately, Viktor lifted his head and came to lie beside her. “Have I done something to upset you?”

“No.” She swiped at her eyes, hating her stupid emotions for ruining everything. They’d never interfered like this before. “No, it’s just me. I’m screwed up.”

He didn’t respond right away, and that made her feel more vulnerable and exposed than when his head had been between her legs. She crossed her arms over her bare breasts and moved to sit up.

“No, please.” Viktor urged her to stay with a hand resting lightly on the tight skin of her stomach. “Tell me, what has upset you?”

“It’s just…” Why was she talking? She’d been with enough men to know that talking didn’t solve anything. “I haven’t been with anyone. I mean, when it wasn’t a part of my job. You didn’t do anything wrong, you just…surprised me.”

He leaned down and touched his lips to hers. Not a full kiss, just the lightest brush of his mouth against hers. “Allow me to continue to surprise you.”

She nodded and held her breath while he moved to kneel between her legs again. One finger slipped beneath the lace at her hip, dragging the scrap of fabric down. She exhaled shakily, lifting her hips so he could pull the panties off the rest of the way. He stroked the length of one leg, the lace trapped under his hand, and she was completely bare before him.

Reverently, he placed his hands at the junctures of her inner thigh and mound and traced the sculpted line of hair there. All her earlier tension left her, replaced by a completely different kind. She let her legs fall wider apart and watched, teeth sunken into her bottom lip, as he leaned forward and parted her folds with his fingers. The first shock of his cold tongue on her hot flesh bucked her hips and pulled an audible gasp from her lungs. She plunged her fingers into his pale hair, holding him there, wanting to pull him away, too weak to decide on either course of action and content to let him continue. No, desperate for him to. His tongue pulled in lazy circles around her clit, up and over and then down to taste the wetness at her entrance.

The sensations coursed through her body like electricity, jolting her every nerve with alternating currents of “too much” and “not enough”. She rolled her hips beneath his mouth, trying to bring him closer to where she desperately needed him to be, and he complied readily, fastening his lips to her clit with gentle suction as his tongue flicked over the hard nub.

Cassandra exploded, her hips bucking, a long, strangled sigh of disbelief pulling from her throat like a razor blade. She fell back and only then was she aware she’d arched up, straining toward his mouth, so hard she could feel the stretch of it in her muscles.

In a moment he was on her, covering her with his body while her cunt still spasmed from her release. The wide tip of his cock rubbed against her opening, and her hands flew to his shoulders to stop him. “Look, I know I’m not some delicate virgin, but…”

“But you’re asking me to be gentle?” He laughed, soft and low. “I will be.”

She couldn’t think of a good reason not to trust him, or to stop him. For the first time in years, she wanted someone and trusted him enough to let him into her body, not for money, but because she wanted to.