Sanctuary (11 page)

Her temptation…his salvation.

Living in Sin

© 2014 Jackie Ashenden

Living In…, Book 2

At twenty, Lily Andrews has already lived a lifetime. Her battle with leukemia put her three years behind her ballet career, and now that the grueling treatment is behind her, she's eager to put her dancing shoes back on—literally and figuratively.

One man has been her personal light at the end of her tunnel, the one man she's sure will help her rekindle her passion for life. Kahu Winter. And she'll let nothing stand in the way of having him—not even Kahu himself.

When Kahu catches Lily sneaking into his club, the desire in her eyes tells him it's more than a delayed act of youthful rebellion. Her lively spirit calls to him, but Kahu is too cynical, too jaded, too broken for a sweet young thing like her.

But Lily won't take no for answer so he'll make her a deal: She's got one month to seduce him and after that, he's moving on—figuratively and literally.

There's just one thing he forgot to keep out of her reach. His heart…

Warning: This book contains a hot older man in need of some anti-cynicism pills, a snarky younger woman who's going to get past his defenses and make him beg, more forbidden lust, and naked ballet dancing. Advanced WTFery for experienced users only.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Living in Shadow:

“She's here again.”

“Oh fuck, really?” Kahu Winter leaned back in his office chair and stared at Mike, the bouncer who'd been working the door at the Auckland Club for the last five years.

Mike, a huge Tongan guy who used to do a lot of pro-wrestling, folded his arms. “Yeah. And she says she wants to see you.”

Since that's what she'd been saying for the past couple of nights, Kahu wasn't surprised. Jesus Christ. What a pain in the ass.

He had more important things to do than fuck about dealing with Rob's daughter. The guy was Kahu's business partner and would not be happy at the thought of his twenty-year-old daughter hassling for entry into one of Auckland's most exclusive private-member's clubs.

What the hell was she doing here? What the hell did she want?

“That's the third time this week.” Kahu threw the pen he'd been toying with back down on his desk. “And I'm getting pretty fucking sick of it.”

Mike was unimpressed. “Perhaps if you go out and see what she wants, she'll go away,” he pointed out.

Not what Kahu wanted to hear. Christ, the last two nights he'd paid for a taxi to take her home and if she kept this up, it was going to start getting expensive.

Of course, he could go out there and speak to her. But he liked being manipulated even less than he liked being told what to do. And he
hated
being told what to do. Especially when the person doing the telling was a spoiled little twenty-year-old on some mysterious mission she wouldn't talk to anyone about other than him.

Jesus, it made him feel tired. And pretty fucking old.

“Goddamn. I'm going to have to speak to her, aren't I?”

Mike lifted a shoulder. “Up to you, boss.”

Yeah, he was going to have to.

Cursing, Kahu shoved his chair back and got up. The work he was doing, going over the club's accounts, could wait. And he probably needed a break anyway.

In the corridor outside his office, he could hear the sounds of conversation from the Ivy Room, the club's main bar and dining area. Friday night and the place was packed with members having a post-work drink or seven.

The sound of success. Anita would have been so proud.

Yeah, but not so proud of the fact you're planning on ditching it, huh?

No, probably not. She'd left him the club thirteen years ago, when she'd first realized she was getting sick. A gift he'd promptly thrown back in her face by fucking off overseas, refusing to accept the responsibility or the reality of her illness. It had taken him five years to come to terms with it. To come back to New Zealand, to take on the club, and most importantly, to care for her. The lover who'd rescued him from the streets and given him the stars.

On the other hand, Anita was six months dead and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

As he approached the club's entrance—a vaulted hallway with stairs leading to the upper floors, a parquet floor, and a chandelier dominating the space like a massive, glittering sun—people greeted him. Since he granted all memberships to the club personally, he knew everyone. Some more than others, of course, but he prided himself on the fact that he knew everyone's names at least.

He ostentatiously kissed the hand of a politician's wife, slapped the back of a well-known actor, air-kissed with a socialite and shook hands with an awestruck nobody. But then that's what the Auckland Club was like. Nobodies and somebodies, all mixing together. It appealed to his sense of irony. And, fuck, it was a nice distraction if nothing else.

Kahu pushed open the big blue door that was the club's famous entrance and stood in the doorway, looking down the stairs to the sidewalk. There were no lines of people waiting to get into the club since it was members only, but tonight a lone figure sat on the bottom step, her back to him.

It was mid-winter and cold, his breath like a dragon's, a white cloud in the night.

Not as cold as London, though.

A random memory drifted through his head, of the European “cultural” trip with Anita. Of being in London in February during a snowstorm, and she'd tried to insist on going to some kind of classical music concert at Covent Garden. He'd seduced her in their fancy Claridges hotel room instead and they'd spent the rest of the evening in bed, away from the storm and the cold…

Kahu let out another cloudy breath, trying to shake the memories away.

He'd grieved when Anita had died. But the woman in that chair in the rest home wasn't the Anita he'd known and loved. That woman had died a long time ago.

The person sitting down on the bottom step suddenly turned and his drifting thoughts scattered. A pale, pointed face and eyes an indeterminate color between green and gray looked back at him. A familiar face.

Lily.

He knew her, of course. Had known her since she was about five years old, her father Rob being a close friend of Anita's, and who'd managed the club while Kahu had been sulking overseas. Who'd become a valued business partner since.

A quiet, watchful girl who stayed out of the way and did what she was told, if he remembered right. He hadn't seen her for five years, though, and clearly things had changed. Namely that she didn't do as she was told anymore.

Lily stood and turned around. She was wearing a black duffel coat, the hood pulled up against the cold, and dark skinny jeans, a pair of Chuck Taylors covered with Union Jacks on her feet. And a very determined look on her face.

“Lily Andrews, as I live and breathe,” Kahu said lazily, standing in the doorway of his club and crossing his arms. “Does your father know you've been sitting on the steps of my club for the past three nights straight?”

Her hands pushed into the pockets of her coat, brows the color of bright flames descending into a frown. “If you'd spoken to me earlier it wouldn't have been three nights.”

“I have a phone. Though perhaps young people these days don't use such outdated technology.”

“What I want to ask you is better done in person.”

“That sounds portentous. Come on then, don't keep me in suspense. What do you want?”

She didn't speak immediately, her mouth tightening, her eyes narrowing. As if she was steeling herself for something.

Jesus, whatever it was it had better be good. He had shit to do.

After a brief, silent moment, Lily walked up the steps, coming to stand in front of him. The light coming from the club's doorway shone directly on her face. She wore no makeup, her skin white, almost translucent and gleaming with freckles like little specks of gold. She looked sixteen if she was a day.

“Can I come in? I don't want to ask you out here.”

“What, into the club? Sorry, love, but it's members only.”

She shifted restlessly on her feet. “So can I be a member then?”

“Are you kidding? You think I just hand out membership to any fool that comes to my door?”

Her forehead creased into a scowl. “I'm not a fool.”

“If you're not a fool, then you'll understand that there's a reason it's taken me three days to speak to you.”

“I just want to ask you a question. Nothing else.”

“Then send me an e-mail or a text like any normal teenager. Now, if you don't mind, I have a few things I—”

“I'm not a teenager, for Christ's sake. And what I want to talk to you about is…personal.”

Kahu leaned against the doorframe, eyeing her. “If it's personal then why aren't you talking to your dad or a friend or whatever? You hardly know me.”

Rob had been Anita's lawyer as well as her friend. Kahu had met him in the context of dinners, where Anita had brought Kahu along and he'd sat there silently at the table while she and Rob talked, unable to join in because he didn't know what the fuck they were talking about—the dumb, uneducated Maori kid from the streets.

Sometimes at those dinners Lily had been there, a small seven-year-old with big eyes, whom he'd ignored mainly because she was a child and he had nothing to say to a privileged white kid from Remuera, born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

Then, after he'd come back from overseas and had reconnected with Rob over the management of the Auckland Club, he'd sometimes see her as he talked business with her father. A slender teen with a sulky mouth, who appeared to lurk permanently in the hallway whenever he arrived or left, big gray-green eyes following him when she thought he wouldn't notice.

She'd grown up a bit since then, the rounded features of adolescence morphing into the more defined lines of adulthood. But that mouth of hers was still sulky and she was still small and slender. And her eyes were still wide and big as they met his.

“Yeah, I realize that. But…” She shifted again, nervous. “What I want to ask concerns you in particular.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Me, huh? Well, spit it out then.”

A crowd of people came up the steps behind her, laughing and talking. Kahu moved out of the way as they approached the door, greeting them all by name and holding out his arm to usher them inside.

Once they'd all gone in, he turned back to Lily, who remained standing there with her hands in the pockets of her coat, glaring at him almost accusingly.

He could not, for the life of him, work out what her problem was, but one thing was for sure: he was getting bloody sick of standing there while she continued to dance around the subject.

“Okay,” he said, glancing at his watch. “You've got ten seconds. If you haven't told me what you're doing here by then, I'm going to go inside and ring your father, and ask him to come and get you.”

“All right, Jesus,” Lily muttered. “You don't have to be such a dick about it.”

Kahu refrained from rolling his eyes. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”

She turned her head, looking back down the steps, clearly checking to make sure there was no one around.

“…six, five, four, three—”

“I was kind of wondering if you could perhaps seduce me.”

The penalty for his crimes is pain…and pleasure.

Rogue

© 2014 Eden Bradley

Midnight Playground, Book 5

Madrid, 2069

He is Rogue.

He has known no other life, no other name. Turned at the tender age of nineteen on the dark streets of London, he wanders Europe, angry and rebellious, haunted by the crime that has followed him for over a century. Always alone.

He is Ramsey.

Member of the Vampire Council, all he has are his memories of dazzling grief and unrelenting pain—his only respite is blood and sex. Until a young rogue vampire poaches in his territory…

Inexorably drawn to each other, the head of Madrid's Midnight Playground and the rebel from nowhere will find passion in each other's arms—and discover a dangerous secret that could irrevocably change both their worlds.

Warning: This book contains savage m/m vampire sex. Fangs and viciousness. The infamous, alluring, and dangerous Capture Gardens. Did we mention hot, kinky vampire sex? Take a breath and enter if you dare!

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Rogue:

Madrid, 2069

He prowled like a shadow around the perimeter of the compound that had once been Retiro Park. He was used to being a shadow. Invisible. Without a name other than the one he had given himself after his Turning. Rogue.

Rebel.

Vampire.

Vampire—yes. But he didn't subscribe to their ways. Their rules. Except for the edict to never take an unwilling victim.

Only once…

No. Don't think of it. Don't remember.

But the images came flooding into his mind like a movie he couldn't turn away from, burned into a hundred years of memory.

Her hair like red silk in his hands, and he so newly reborn he couldn't yet read through his enhanced senses to smell the drugs in her blood. All he'd smelled was
blood
. All he'd tasted was his driving need and the flavor of life in his mouth.

She was beautiful, like a flame in the foggy London night. A lovely face. He'd been as drawn to that as much as he was by the heady scent of human flesh. He hadn't noticed until it was over that her skin held the sick pall of an addict—a morphie they called them now, although he had some vague memory that they were once called junkies. He hadn't noticed until the breath was gone from her body that her red hair was matted, the skin on her arms torn where she'd scratched at it. He hadn't seen any of it until the girl was dead in his arms, her blood still tangy and warm on his tongue.

He'd waited for days afterward in a dank, abandoned apartment building in King's Cross, consumed by the thirst but unable to believe he
wanted
to drink human blood. He'd fought it. But there had been nothing to hold him back. No one to teach him. His attack on the red-headed girl had been savage, inexcusably vicious and cruel. Neither one of them had understood what was happening. And in taking her blood he had read her—even through the haze of blood lust—and everything he'd seen had been fear and pain and grief.

Awful.

It was only later, when he was nearly dying of the thirst, that some wandering group of vampires had come upon him trying to hunt in the alleys of London and had shown him how to feed properly.

He shook his head, tried to shake the memories away. Focused once more on the night around him, the pungent scent of blood discernible from behind the high wall. The tops of the cypress trees making a stark black silhouette against the sky. The moon hanging above like a lantern against the sheet of stars.

The blood.

Deer blood—one of them injured.

He'd heard the vampires who ran Madrid's Midnight Playground club, housed here in the park in the enormous greenhouse-like structure that was called the Palacio de Crista–the Crystal Palace—kept a herd of deer on the grounds. That their immortal guests were invited to hunt them down and drink their blood for sport.

He was not invited. But he would hunt tonight.

He was never invited, although he could have been easily enough. As a vampire he could walk through the front doors of any of Europe's Midnight Playground clubs, which were there to serve the needs and desires of the world's vampires, whether to satisfy their thirst for blood or for sex. But he far preferred his rogue existence, with no Vampire Council to govern his actions. He was too used to being a loner. He gloried in it now—and in these challenges he set himself, the thrill of breaking through their invisible net of invincibility.

It had been almost too easy sneaking into the clubs in Paris, in Berlin, Rome and London. Acting as if he belonged there and seducing the exquisite humans who flocked to the Midnight Playground clubs, offering their bodies and their blood. They had nothing to lose in a world which had little to offer mortals but poverty and pain. And the vampires were intriguing to mortals. They were all too eager to offer him their blood. He'd never taken more than the Little Drink, just enough to let them know—those vampires who ran the clubs—that a thief ran in their midst.

But tonight he would run with their deer.

He attuned his hearing, searching for any sign of activity behind the wall. He heard only the crickets chirping, the occasional snap of a twig as some creature walked among the trees—all sounds of a forest at night. Not that he couldn't have hunted during the day. Daylight was not the enemy of the vampires, as the old stories told it. That had been one shock to the world. He simply preferred the night. There was some sort of poetry to it. He paused to listen once more. No humans. No vampires that he could detect. Of course, a being who was older than his mere single century could mask themselves from him. But that was part of the game, wasn't it?

He laid a hand on the towering concrete wall, felt the lingering warmth of the day against his palm, his fingertips picking up every tiny crevice in its surface. He closed his eyes and listened.

Being at the farthest point from the palace itself, he could hear voices only if he concentrated very closely. But it was the park that interested him. It appeared to be clear.

He took a few steps back, gathered himself and sprang to the top of the wall, landing in a crouch between two of the security cameras mounted at regular intervals. He turned and smiled, let the smile spread into a triumphant grin before knocking the cameras out with a sweep of his hand. He paused, searching the grass and the trees, looking for the scent that had drawn him.

The deer were maybe a hundred yards in, hidden among the trees. He wouldn't go for the injured animal—that would be far too easy. But the rest… His hands itched to feel their downy pelts. His legs itched for the chase. His entire being itched to feel their innocent struggle beneath his hands.

He drew in a breath and leapt.

He was running before the animals caught his scent—he could sense their wariness. He made it to the stand of trees and ducked in. As he moved closer he could feel them, hear the beating of their hearts. Maybe two dozen of them. It would be a fine chase.

Rogue slowed when he saw the herd between the trees, their ears twitching. When they bolted, he dashed after them.

The run itself was glorious. The hunt would be even sweeter for it. His legs pumping effortlessly, he felled the first deer, inhaling the earthy scent of grass and fur before sinking his teeth into its neck and drinking it nearly dry.

The blood still warm and thick on his lips, he stood and ran again, skirting the edge of the herd, enjoying the stretch of his legs as he darted between the trunks of the giant cypresses. He ran faster, spotting his target up ahead, antlers glinting in the moonlight—a prize buck, the fastest of the herd. He sprang on him with a wild cry, taking the buck down to the ground, enjoying the strength of the beast's struggle for a moment, then leaning in, he tore at its throat. Blood sweet and primal, so different from a human's, yet he loved it anyway. He stood with the animal limp in his arms, cradling it as he drained it, then let the carcass fall to the ground—and fell like a stone as he was captured.

Arms clamped around his body, pinning his to his sides, pinning him to the ground.

He inhaled.
Vampire.
Like ancient stone and earth. Impossibly strong.

He struggled, but it was useless. He kept at it anyway.

“Quiet down now,” came the voice in English with a distinct British accent. “You know damn well you're not going anywhere.”

He was pulled to his feet by the old vampire, a male of pale, ethereal beauty. If they'd been human he would have easily taken this man down, but they were no longer men, either of them. Another vampire was with him, a female with long black hair in a braid down her back. Lovely, of course, as they all were.

“What's your name, little beauty?” Rogue asked, giving her a wink.

The male holding him wrapped a fist in his long hair and yanked hard. “Being caught poaching on the Midnight Playground lands without invitation is nothing to scoff at, rogue. There will be consequences.” He gave another sharp yank. “You'd do well to mind your manners.”

“I'd do even better to fuck her. Or you.”

The female laughed. “Ramsey is going to love this one,” she said in a soft Castilian accent.