Must Love Vampires (20 page)

“I thought dinner might be more appropriate, given the time,” he began slowly. “I know you can’t tell without windows, but it’s about six o’clock at night.”

With a forkful of manicotti halfway to her mouth, she froze. A dollop of sauce dripped off and went
splat
right on her left breast.

She looked down, then scooped it up with the tip of her index finger, plopping it in her mouth while her mind played over what he’d just said.

“Excuse me?” she asked somewhat dumbfounded, letting her fork fall back into the aluminum takeout container.

“Here’s the thing,” he murmured, sounding less than willing to tell her whatever he was about to tell her. Walking forward, he lowered himself to the coffee table, staying perched on the very edge in case he needed to beat a hasty retreat.

“I sleep during daylight hours. I can stay awake, if I have to, but tend to be groggy and slow. Whether I can see dawn coming or not, sleep pulls at me, and I don’t wake up again until nightfall.”

Resting his elbows on his knees, he rubbed his hands together, looking at the floor between his feet rather than at her. “I suspect you slept alongside me nearly as long because of the shock you had when I bit you . . . and the blood loss. I was too eager. I took too much. Especially for your first time.”

Okay, so maybe stuffing herself with pasta and cheese covered in a thick, red sauce that looked entirely too much like the blood he was talking about hadn’t been such a great idea. Swallowing hard, she leaned forward and set the food back on the table. She kept the soda, though; she might need it to settle her stomach if the pitching and rolling didn’t stop.

“I think you’re going to have to explain this to me—whatever it is you believe you are—from the beginning,” she said softly.

So softly that she caught him off-guard. He’d apparently been expecting her to flip out and try to stab him with her little plastic fork. Which was still an option. And she had a little plastic knife, too.... She might be able to do some serious scratching with that, if she needed to.

His head jerked up and he met her eyes. When she only held his gaze, waiting quietly, he seemed to relax. Shifting on the corner of the table, he turned to face her more fully.

“I should have told you before,” he said. “Before we got married, before we even got involved. I’m sorry for that.”

A stab of guilt went through her, her fingers tightening on the bottle of soda in her hands. She was keeping something from him, too, wasn’t she? Something
she
should have told
him
before they got married. Before they’d gotten so seriously involved.

So she owed him the benefit of the doubt, at least, right? He might have bitten her last night—so hard he broke the skin. Maybe he really did believe he was a vampire. There were psychologists who treated those kinds of delusions, right?

As his wife—as shiny and new, fresh out of the wrapping as she was—it was her job to listen to him, support him, get him help if he needed it.

At least within reason. If he tried to bite her again, all bets were off. It was slice and dice with her cheap plastic takeout silverware all the way.

Taking a deep breath, she inclined her head a fraction. “Tell me what?”

She sounded so normal! So
not
freaking out inside her own head. Two points for Chloe Lamoreaux, showgirl and actress extraordinaire.

It was Aidan’s turn to lick his lips. He did that, then swallowed, his hands flexing and releasing where they rested on top of his thighs.

“That I’m a vampire. Sebastian and I both are.”

Her eyes shot wide a second before she blinked. Hard.

His brother was crazy, too? Or was that simply part of Aidan’s delusion? Did Sebastian even know Aidan was running around saying these things? Believing them?

“I don’t . . .” She paused, rethought what she wanted to say, then shook her head and tried again. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

Possibly not the best thing to say when one was sitting across from a man nearly twice her size who thought he
was
a vampire and already had a track record of flashing spiky fangs and chomping her on the neck. Especially when she was trapped alone with him in this windowless, single entrance
exit (that she knew of), dungeonlike apartment.span>

When, oh, when would she learn to keep her mouth shut?

Instead of being angry or defensive, Aidan nodded. “That’s what most of the world thinks, and we’re happy to let them believe it. But as hard as it is to process, I
am
a vampire, Chloe.”

Her expression must have told him she was still having trouble accepting his declaration as truth.

“I’m not evil, or a demon, or any of the other misconceptions horror movies make us out to be. I need blood to survive, but I don’t have to kill to get it. I can’t go out in sunlight, but I do have a reflection and show up in photographs, and I don’t turn into a bat.” His mouth twisted. “Although, technically, I suppose I could. My brother can shift when he really, really wants to.”

Oh, goody! Now he wasn’t just talking about the
I vant to suck your blood
stuff, he was throwing shape-shifting into the mix.

She shook her head again—to clear it or rattle some sense into herself, she wasn’t sure which. “I’m sorry, but this is all just a little much to absorb.”

“You don’t believe me.” It was a statement, not a question.

She didn’t think anyone would believe such an outrageous claim.

Taking a deep breath, he stood. “I guess I need to prove it to you.”

Six

Chloe jerked back into the overstuffed cushions of the sofa, her hands shooting up to cover the pulse of her throat on both sides. Aidan rolled his eyes at her knee-jerk reaction, as justified as it might be.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to bite you again,” he assured her. And then he raised a brow, sending her a hotly sensual look. “Not unless you ask me to.”

Without waiting for her to respond to that, he put his hands on his hips and began to pace. Back and forth, back and forth, he wore a path in the small space between the sofa and matching armchair.

“The problem is, I’m not sure how to do that. Especially since you’ve already seen the fangs and the eyes and the . . . you know,” he said, flipping his hand in the direction of the jugular veins she was protecting so diligently, just in case he was overcome by sudden bloodlust.

If she only knew. He was much more likely to be overcome by plain old lust-lust.

She was fully clothed again, in the same jeans and top she’d filched from her sister and been wearing when he’d first picked her up in front of the Bellagio so they wouldn’t be seen outside the Inferno. She was even wearing a bra, more’s the pity.

But even though she was no longer traipsing around in his shirt, with her legs and those sexy dancer’s feet bare, she still turned him on. Yeah, she could be wearing twenty pounds of concrete or the Big Top tent from Circus Circus, and he could be blind as the proverbial bat, and he would still be turned on just standing in the same room with her.

There had been another woman, a very, very long time ago, who’d touched him the way Chloe did. One he’d been this attracted to, cared for this strongly. She was long gone, though, and despite the thin thread of loss that would always run through him, Chloe was the first woman in decades, possibly centuries, that he’d opened himself up to in such a deeply emotional way.

He wasn’t ready to use the L-word quite yet.

Was it possible? Yes.

He thought about her often enough. Thought about being with her, making love to her, simply talking with her over a glass of wine or while they were lying in bed.

When they weren’t together, he wished they were. At dawn each morning, as he was preparing for The Deep Sleep, he pictured her in his mind, knowing she was likely getting ready for bed, too, after a long night of being onstage. When he awoke again at dusk, he thought of her once more, wondering if she was up yet and what she might be doing. He didn’t usually wait long to call and find out, either.

So the L-word was on the horizon, he was aware of that. And, frankly, he thought it would be rather nice to be in love with the woman he was going to be married to for the next several years. Possibly eternity, if it worked out that way.

He hoped it did. Sebastian might enjoy his lone wolf lifestyle, but Aidan needed more.

He was charming and intelligent, sure. He wasn’t too shabby when it came to business dealings, either. Sebastian might be the casino mogul, the one who owned milliondollar properties all over Las Vegas and the world, but if Aidan had wanted to, he very easily could have followed in his brother’s footsteps. He’d built this high-end apartment complex, hadn’t he?

The problem was, big business and real estate didn’t interest him. It was sad to realize, this many years into his existence, that he wasn’t sure what did.

No, he hadn’t spent his entire life—before or after his turning—aimless and uncertain. He’d had jobs. Careers, even. Hobbies and passions and moneymaking ventures. Sebastian had always been the more focused of the two brothers in that respect, but Aidan was no sloucher.

At the moment, though—for quite a while now, actually—he was floundering a bit. Nothing seemed to catch his interest, or at least didn’t hold it for long.

Nothing, that is, until Chloe.

She had caught his interest in the blink of an eye. The sparkle of a sequin. The twitch of a tail feather. And unlike everything else that had come and gone, she was still holding on strong.

Meeting her had been the catalyst to Aidan’s beginning to think about what he
did
want for his life these days. It wasn’t money; he had plenty of that. Or fame; he was no Brad Pitt, and the attention he got just from being a frequent partygoer was plenty enough. Or immortality; he had that, too, in spades.

What he wanted—he was pretty sure, anyway—was a home. Family. All of those things that came to mind when studying a Normal Rockwell painting or watching a scene on television of a busy park full of playing children and parents watching them with eagle eyes.

He couldn’t have all of that, he knew. It was possible for vampires to procreate, but not easily. And no children had ever been born of a vampire/human mating, which meant kids were off the table entirely unless Chloe agreed to be turned. Or they adopted, but that opened a whole other can of worms.

But that wasn’t even the issue. If he’d wanted kids alone, he could have limited his dating to other vampires. There weren’t a lot of them out there wandering around—certainly not as many as there were sun walkers—but they did exist, and he’d had his fair share of affairs with several of the fanged-and-female variety over the decades.

What he wanted was the home and hearth and haven of being with someone he truly cared about and who cared about him. Someone to come home to, to wake up with in the evening, to maybe adopt a shelter dog with so they could take long, leisurely walks in the moonlight.

Plus, Chloe was the first woman in a hell of a long time who had sent all of his wheels spinning to a milliondollar jackpot. So he’d met her first, then started feeling the tugs toward commitment.

And she’d seemed just as eager to settle down with him. Sure, he realized his wealth was a heady lure. She could very well have been a gold-digger, out to hitch her wagon to his star and live extremely well off of her husband’s millions.

Something told him, though, that wasn’t the case. She was too open, too genuine for those kinds of games or deceptions.

Which made him think they might actually have a shot at making things work. Yes, he was a vampire and probably should have told her that before he’d popped the big question and talked her into eloping. But once she came to terms with his little condition and accepted the changes that would have to be made to adapt to his unique lifestyle, they could still do the modern blood-drinker’s version of the white picket fence, right?

A vampire could hope.

Of course, there was still the small problem of Chloe not believing one hundred percent that he
was
a vampire.

He’d already bitten her, drained her of enough blood to send her reeling, and given her any number of amazing, otherworldly orgasms. Did she think she could come like that with some lame-ass mortal man? Yet she apparently required further proof.

Not an easy feat, considering how well his kind blended with the rest of humanity. With the exception of being allergic to the sun, sleeping rather soundly during the day, and needing to ingest blood to survive, he doubted anyone could pick a true vampire out of a lineup.

“We’re going to have to wait until morning,” he said suddenly, spinning around to face her. The crack of his voice in the otherwise dead silence startled her so that she jumped and finally let go of her neck.

“What?”

“Going into the sunlight. It’s the only thing I can think of that will convince you. But obviously we’ll need to wait a while, since it’s dark outside right now.”

“What are we going to do until then?”

An easy smile spread across his face and he waggled his brows at her. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

Her own brows rose to her hairline above her Frisbee-wide eyes. “Doubtful, Bite Boy. You really are crazy if you think I’m going to let you touch me after being told I married a vampire. One who bit me on my wedding night, no less.”

“I told you I was sorry about that.”

Her mouth twisted wryly. “I don’t know if you can apologize for putting a hole in someone’s jugular.
Two
holes.”

He didn’t know quite what to say about that, so he said nothing.

A minute later, her nose scrunched. “How do you go around biting people and not leaving big, ugly, very
obvious
wounds on their necks?”

She wasn’t cowering in fear anymore, which he took as a good sign. And if she was asking questions, wanting to know more about how he lived, then maybe she was opening up to the idea of exactly what he was.

Moving slowly, he stepped to the sofa and took a seat at the opposite end to her, making sure not to spook her by getting too close. No throwing up his arms like he was wearing a cape and doing the whole scary Count Dracula thing.