King of Darkness (9 page)

“You never answered me.”

“About what?”

“How did you and Isabel get so tight?”

“Why do you care?”

His raised his eyebrows at her. If only to himself, he admitted that he didn’t want to think too hard about the answer. “I’m curious. I’ve been around a long while, and this is the first time I’ve seen a human kicking it in her living room with one of my kind as if it happened every day.”

“It does happen every day. I live here, remember?”

Yeah. “That’s kind of my point,” he said. This female was infuriating. “You going to answer me?”

“Eh.” She gave a halfhearted head tilt on her way toward the door. “Long story.” She paused just as she stepped into the building’s outer hallway. The leanness of her back and the revealing nature of her clothes gave a near-perfect picture of her spine when she turned slowly to make eye contact. It spiraled gracefully like an elegant staircase. “Actually, it’s not that long. I just don’t feel like telling you.”

She turned and closed the door behind herself before he thought of a good response.

Bitch
.

Having lived in the days when humans tended to chase after his kind with pitchforks and flaming torches, Lee was justified in his opinion of them. Where the hell did she get off acting so superior?

That his body responded to her as it would to any other attractive female just made his blood boil more. Taking humans as lovers on occasion was fairly common among his kind, but he had chosen never to do so. Certainly he had never wanted to feed from one. Not that he wanted to now.

It was curiosity. Novelty. He’d never wanted for willing partners of his own species, but he and Thad had been on the road for some time. The mission had him thinking with his dick.

He indulged for a second in the fantasy of what the rest of Alexia’s petite body looked like without clothes on and how or even
if
their bodies would fit together, given their size difference. She’d have to be on top. She was so tiny that it was hard to imagine not crushing her otherwise. His mind’s eye conjured up a picture of her riding him, hands stroking his chest, and breathing heavily like she would be after her workout. A pleasured snarl escaped from his lips.

He couldn’t deny that it was tempting; she didn’t seem to be the clingy type, and maybe he could engage in a noncommittal experiment to see if fucking a human was all the boys in the locker room had cracked it up to be before he and Thad blew town.

The erection raging between his legs was all for that ill-advised plan. It was still back on the part about what Alexia would look like in bed. Naked. Those skimpy gym clothes forgotten on the floor.
Christ.
He growled again and slid a hand over the hard length straining his fatigues, and then pulled it away with a groan.

No. He and Thad would be headed home soon enough, with or without Isabel. He could wait to find a hookup when they returned or at least get some sparring in with Tyra or Siddoh to take the edge off. He trained his stare on Isabel’s bedroom door. Even without strings, sex with the human was a distraction he didn’t need.

He’s mad at me.

Blowing off Thad’s declaration of burgeoning love was inevitably going to sting a little. This wasn’t the first time Isabel had needed to let someone down gently. Maybe he was a little disappointed, but what he’d felt wasn’t real. It was the drink. Wasn’t he smart enough to understand that? He was trying to hide it, but the flush of his neck and the tight ball of his fist spoke of a male who was grappling with aggression. And that bothered Isabel a lot more than it should have.

The passage of time was hard to grasp in her current state, but they seemed to have stayed there a long time—him staring silently at the ceiling with jaw set and eyes narrowed, and her grasping his hand and waiting. She didn’t know what to do with the insecurity that filled her and made her jittery.

She rarely got depressed when she’d been drinking. That was a big part of the draw. If she spent her nights buzzed on red wine, she didn’t ever need to be alone with all of her morose thoughts. All of a sudden, though, a well of hidden emotion sprang up in the center of this awkward silence they were sharing. She cursed the burn of tears in her eyes and blinked rapidly to clear them away before they fell. That she had upset him made her stomach knot up and her chest get tight, and she didn’t understand why.

Fuck him if he couldn’t handle it. Right?

She had untangled her fingers from his and started to pull away when he stretched his hand and began to rub her arm in long, slow strokes. Her skin buzzed and hummed at his touch. “Is it all right if I do this?”

She moaned quietly through her closed lips and nodded slowly. “Mmm. Feels good,” she murmured. Too good, in fact. She wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of such a basic but decadent pleasure.

He got bolder, tracing the veins over her wrist with his fingers, then traveling with the flat of his hand up her arm again and finally across her collarbone. His fingertips brushed over the raised network of scars, lingering longest at the big one on her neck. A deep, drawn-out inhale made her wonder if perhaps he was trying to tease out the scent of her blood, as her mother had once spoken about. Or if maybe the fact that two of the marks intersected just at her pulse point turned him off.

And why the hell did she care? She was fooling herself if she thought for one single minute that this idea of being the king’s destiny was even a remote possibility. Things like that didn’t happen to her. It wasn’t safe for her or anybody else if she got too close. That she had put Lexi in danger earlier that night was a painful reminder.

The moist heat of Thad’s tongue traveled over her throat. “I’ve never let anyone touch me there,” Isabel whispered. Oh, God. What was she saying? How many times had her blood hosts poured their souls out to her? They didn’t call red wine the “vampire hug drug” for nothing. That was twice in one night she had acted without thinking.

“I’m glad you let me.” A zingy kind of tingle spread throughout her jaw when Thad rubbed the largest of the scars again. The thickest, ugliest one that ran from behind her earlobe to the base of her neck. “I want you to tell me about them,” he murmured as he gently traced the small one on her cheek with a fingernail. It seemed impossible, but the feathery brushes of his skin against hers weren’t bothersome. They were… nice. Pleasurable.

And out of the blue, she wanted to tell Thad everything. Not wanted. She
had
to.

“That one…” Isabel swallowed against the gentle pressure of his hand. “A piece of glass got stuck in it.”

He nodded and continued a gentle one-handed massage over her jaw, neck, and shoulder. It made her whole body melt. “Was it some kind of accident?”

Isabel turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, picking out the Big Dipper. It was the only constellation she knew, and she had made a point of putting it over the bed when she and Alexia had covered the ceiling with stars. Isabel’s version had a greenish-glowing likeness of Han Solo perched on the handle. Ready for battle.

It was pleasant but mystifying that, for the moment, she was more or less at peace. “My parents and I were driving across this bridge.” She took a very slow, very deep breath. As she let it out, a gentle shiver spread over her body, both energizing and relaxing her. “Traffic stopped. It was foggy… there was a pileup. This whole cluster of cars and trucks went off the bridge, and we were right in the middle of it.”

Thad’s fingers tightened around hers.

She kept going. “The windows all shattered and I was hit by a lot of flying glass. I…”
Just
breathe.
“I could tell my parents were dead. I got out through the back window, but I don’t remember anything else after I surfaced from the water. At the hospital I guess they thought I was dead, too. There were shards stuck in my neck and in my eye. Somebody was picking broken pieces out of my hair when I woke up.”

“I’m so sorry, Isabel.”

Isabel’s head rocked side to side in a lazy shake. “Don’t be. It is what it is; it’s part of who I am. Can’t change it now.” Not that she hadn’t tried. The past decades had been a ticker tape of bargaining and blame. Aimed at herself for arguing with her parents from the backseat, at her dad for hitting the car in front of them, at the truck behind them for not stopping soon enough, and so on. All in the not-so-subconscious hope that pointing enough fingers could somehow change the outcome of the past.

“It’s hard not to be,” he said.

Yeah, she guessed it probably was. She wasn’t ready to tell him about the human.

Most days, the emotions were suffocating if she allowed herself to think about that, and she spent a lot of effort on keeping the memories at bay. She could still see the orderly’s pale body on a stark white floor when she closed her eyes. The bright red trickle of blood that dripped from his neck. Could still feel the wax of a crayon-and-construction-paper drawing that had been folded up in the pocket of his lab coat. For once, she allowed the sorrow to wash over her and it wasn’t completely paralyzing. Isabel sighed. She’d done what she’d had to for survival. Why hadn’t knowing that ever helped?

Thad propped his head on one hand. “How old were you?”

“I don’t remember exactly. I want to say it was 1966. Maybe 1967. I guess I was thirteen. I remember that the Monkees were on the radio. I haven’t liked listening to them since then.” Their songs had always brought back unpleasant memories.

Thad smiled slightly, just enough to show the tip of a fang. “I never liked listening to the Monkees very much anyway.”

Isabel wasn’t sure she had ever laughed the way she laughed right then. Not because it was the biggest or the loudest laugh—really, it was barely a chuckle. But it was pure, something she had managed because she felt comfortable and safe like she never had before.

“So, listen. My father began his rule in the Middle Ages. Near the end of them, I guess.” He blew out a puff of air. “Anyway, I don’t know much about his life before he mated my mother, aside from the fact that he fell in love with a human and she gave birth to my sister, Tyra. That was a big scandal.”

Isabel wrinkled her forehead. “Did she become queen?”
Could
a human be queen? Not that she knew much about it, but that seemed unlikely.

“I don’t know the whole story.” He shook his head and licked his lips thoughtfully. It brought back a memory of what his tongue had been like sliding against hers. She took his hand in both of hers and began a little pressing and kneading action on his palm.

“Apparently she disappeared and then showed back up with Tyra, then disappeared again. No one really knew what happened to her after that. Dad loved Ty, but he was pretty tight-lipped about her mom. Like I said. Scandal. What you’re doing to my hand feels reeeally good, by the way.”

“Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘hand job,’ doesn’t it?” Isabel smiled and met his gaze for only a second. She did love to make others feel good.

His answering laugh was husky and sensual. “Right.”

“Your sister.”

“Yeah. So… my sister was born about twenty years before I was. Somewhere in that time, I guess my father and mother were mated, and then there was me.” For a short while, neither of them spoke. His chest rose and fell with his breath. “And then my father left the family estate alone one night and was killed. My mother felt his life force die out so she cut her own wrists as well.”

Isabel gasped. “Oh shit, Thad. I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. Really,” he added. Her doubt must have been obvious. “My parents loved each other so much that my mother couldn’t live without him. I miss them both, but it’s an amazing example of the kind of love I hope to have.”

“Talk about putting a positive spin,” she mumbled.

He smiled a little wider at that. “I try.”

Thad closed his eyes and seemed to revel in the motion of her fingers against his hand, or maybe he was trying to hang on to the wispy tendrils of a high that she knew was fading for both of them. In the silence, a significant question popped into her head.

“Thad?”

“Hmm?”

“You said your father became king in the Middle Ages? How did he go so long without a mate?”

He swore under his breath. “Technically speaking,” he said slowly, “our law does not require the king to be mated.”

“Technically?”

“Technically.”

“But
you
need a mate to be king?” Thad opened his eyes to look at her again. They really were quite lovely. Lexi had a poster in her room of a sunset off the coast of Fiji. It was the same kind of blue as his eyes. Rich and deep, with a glow that seemed to come from Heaven itself.

He turned to his side, facing her again. “I don’t need
a
mate. I need one very specific mate.” Slow and precise speech, it would seem, was his way of making sure she took him seriously. Or maybe he thought she was slow, but she preferred to think the former.

“Me,” she said, finally.

His response was to reach out with his free hand, brushing fingertips lightly across her lower back and tracing the stretch of skin that bore her matching scar. Each bump and pucker of her skin rose up to greet him as he stroked gently over the too-familiar shape. A hot throbbing sensation spread from its epicenter throughout the rest of her body. “It would seem so, yes. And I would bet that patch of skin where you’re branded is aching and pulsing just like mine.”