Stay the Night (24 page)

“Are you through?” he shouted.

“Why?” she yelled back. “Is it time for the directions?”

“What are you prattling about, woman?”

“You know
exactly
what I mean.” She turned and looked at him through the hair hanging over her face. “Is this when you make me kill myself, the way you did Norman?”

“What? Who?”

“Norman DeLuca, my partner in Chicago.” She scrambled to her feet, picked up his bow case, and heaved it at him. “Don't you remember? He was in that downtown bank you tried to rob.”

Robin caught the case and set it aside. “I've never robbed a bank in Atlanta.” He started after her.

“Don't you lie to me,” she snapped as she retreated. “We found one of your arrowheads imbedded in a wall. I've seen what you can make people do. I know what you did to Norman.”

“I don't bloody know any Norman DeLuca, you silly twit.” He snatched at her when she dodged around him, ripping her jacket.

Chris shoved a sofa between them as she told him the date of the robbery and the address of the bank. “Now do you remember him?”

Robin stopped chasing her as the details finally rang a bell. “I didn't rob that bank. I used the old underground tunnels to break into the vault so I could retrieve the manuscript—”

“Oh, more borrowing?”

“—but that was my only reason for being there.” He met her angry gaze. “The man who was robbing it escaped.”

“Yeah.” She braced her arms against the back of the sofa. “That would be
you
.”

“No, it was the other man. Describe this Norman to me.” He listened as she snapped out the details. “Wait.
He
was the sod who held them up. I stopped him from killing the hostages, but when the authorities stormed the building he vanished.” He glared at her. “He was also alive when he nicked out of there. I didn't touch him.”

“He was dead an hour later.” She turned her back on him and walked to the windows. “He blew his head off. Because you told him to while he was hypnotized. You controlled him. The same way you did that customs agent and that cop back in Atlanta. The way you've been trying to with me.”

“I never commanded him to do anything to harm himself. I only said . . .” Robin paused and dragged his hand through his hair. “Wait. It may have been the last thing I said to him. He was still under my influence.”

She whirled around. “What did you say to him? ‘Go blow your head off'?”

“I told him it was time to put an end to this.” Robin moved to the window before she could react and caught her by the waist. “I meant the violence and the robbery, Chris. Not his life. It's not as if he wore a sign around his neck saying that he was suicidal.”

“You bastard.” She tore away from his hands, reaching for the vase he had admired. He lunged, knocking her to the carpet, but she rolled out from beneath him before he could pin her. He grabbed the back of her skirt, using it to drag her back, whipping his head to one side as she smashed the vase against his skull.

Robin shook the glass shards from his face and hair before he gave her a grim smile. “Stop breaking the signorina's pretty things. I promised her we would take good care of them.”

She gave an outraged cry as she threw herself at him, pummeling him with both hands, striking him in the face and chest, pelting him with tiny drops of her blood.

Robin stayed on his back but wrapped his arm around her, tightening it until she could not wriggle free. He felt her jerking at the front of his trousers, and with his free hand he ripped off the remains of her skirt. As she freed his cock, he tore at her panties until she was naked from the waist down.

Robin slid into Chris at the same instant she impaled herself on him. The rough joining caused their hip bones to collide, and the jolt rocked through both of them, spurring them on. She clawed his shirt open to get at his chest, and he dug his fingers into her bottom, twisting her atop him so that he felt every soft, wet inch of her caressing him.

Robin swore as he felt her teeth on his flat nipple and her nails raking over his ribs. He grabbed her hair and forced her head up.

“You waste your time and energy, my lady. My flesh cannot be pierced by the teeth of a mortal.” He allowed her to see his fangs. “You need these to tear into it.”

“That's it.” She lifted herself until their sexes separated, and would have gotten to her feet if he hadn't held on to her. “I'm done with this. I am
done
with you. So take your fake little plastic fangs and shove them.”

“These are my
dents acérées
,” he snarled. “They are quite real, I assure you.”

“All right, then. Do it.” She extended her arm. “Go on. Bite me, suck my blood, whatever. Prove to me that you're a vampire right now.” When he didn't move, she sneered, “Go ahead. You might actually draw some blood. I've had an HIV test. I'm clean.”

Robin kept his eyes locked with hers as he seized her wrist and brought her forearm to his face. He breathed in her scent and traced the veins running beneath her skin with the tip of his tongue. When he felt her shudder, he lifted his mouth an inch above her flesh and then buried his fangs in her.

Chris inhaled sharply.

He drank from her, swallowing once, twice, and then lifted his mouth from the puncture wounds his fangs had made. “There. It is done.”

Chris had not cried out or said anything while he had fed on her, and now she stared at him, her eyes wide. “They are real.” She touched his lips. “Unless . . . are they implants?”

“After I feed they retract. See for yourself.” He guided her fingers to the sharp tips so she could feel them retreat into the twin recesses in the roof of his mouth. “Implants cannot do that.”

She stroked her fingertips gently over the open apertures before she took her hand away. “No, they can't.”

He didn't have to ask her if she believed him. He could see it in her eyes, her innocence gone, crushed by the truth. He thought he saw pain as well, and realized only then that he had taken her without any preparation. “Forgive me for hurting you. It seems you are immune to my scent, so I could not bespell you first.”

“It didn't hurt that much.” She turned her arm from right to left. “Everything else you said is true, isn't it? About being a vampire or whatever you are. About Norman and the bank.”

He nodded.

“He left his suicide note for me. He told me that he'd let the Magician get away, and that he was too tired and sad to start over.” She dragged in a deep breath. “He told me not to grieve for him. Because of that note, all the guys in the Chicago office thought we were sleeping together.”

“But you weren't.”

“No, the only guy I've slept with in the last couple of years is you. So what does that make me?” Her gaze moved from her wounds to his face. “Food. Food that you have sex with. Oh, Jesus.” She put her hand over her eyes. “That's why you blindfolded me that night. Why I tasted blood when you came back and I kissed you.” She stiffened. “You didn't get it from me. Who did you bite? One of the girls in your harem?”

“I do not have a sodding harem. I took what I needed from my stores. Bagged blood, Chris. The same as you'd get in a hospital.” Robin brought her down against him and held her until some of the stiffness left her body. “You are not food to me. We do not think of humans in that manner. We need only a little blood to sustain us. We do not kill for it.”

“Then what do you need me for?”

There was a terrible bleakness in her eyes. The despair of someone who had seen too much truth and known too little tenderness.

“It rhymes with Chris.” He brought her up, sliding her over him until he could reach her lips. She hesitated, and then groaned and opened her mouth for his.

Before, they had gone at each other like animals; now Robin wanted only to take her back to the night when she had come to him, willing and curious and oh, so passionate. He lifted her and carried her to the back of the apartment, into the signorina's bedroom, where he placed her like a jewel on the thick red and gold velvet duvet covering the bed.

“Pretty.” She stroked the material. “We shouldn't use her bed.”

“She does not need it, and I am not making love to you on a floor covered with broken glass.” He pulled off his clothes and bent to remove the rest of hers.

“Making love.” Her expression turned bemused. “Is that what we're doing?”

He smiled down at her. “Move over and see.”

She rolled onto her side as he joined her, and stroked his arm with her hand. “I'm human; you're not. I'm a federal agent; you're an international art thief. I'm going to grow old and die; you're going to stay young and live forever. You have a harem, probably three or four, and I have . . . This is never going to work.”

“I do not have a harem.” His hair tickled her cheek as he kissed the edge of her jaw. “What do you have?”

“Nothing. No one. I've never been in love.” Her cognac eyes darkened before she looked away. “I don't know how. I don't think I can.”

“Then I will show you. I am a man; you are a woman.” He pressed her back against the pillows. “I am hard; you are soft.” He shifted his hips, settling between her thighs. “I am the blade; you are the sheath. Watch how we fit together. This is us. This is the love we make.”

He rubbed the swollen head of his shaft against her, parting her as he pressed in. Their violent joining earlier must have left her tender,for as he worked his penis into her she made soft sounds in her throat and lifted her hips, adjusting herself around his girth.

“Are you hurting?” Robin asked once he had penetrated her completely.

“Not anymore.” She arched her back, rubbing her breasts against him as she tried to smile. “What about you?”

“Some of my parts are aching.” He slid out of her several inches before carefully easing back in. “This one particularly, Christiana.”

“I don't know any Christiana, but I could give it a massage.” Her hand moved down and curled around the base of him. As he came out of her, she tightened her fingers. “Hmmmm. You must be in a lot of pain. I can feel it throbbing.”

“That it is.” He clenched his teeth as she held him. “Let me in, love, before it bursts.”

She released him only to cradle the delicate sac beneath as he pushed in. His balls tightened against her palm, ready even now to pump her full of his seed.

“You need to come,” she said.

“Not yet,” he begged, stroking faster, pressing higher. “I want you with me.”

“I don't think . . .” She closed her eyes as he used his fingers to open the folds over her clitoris so that every thrust dragged his shaft across it. “Yes, there. Oh, God. Right there.”

Robin fucked his cock into her body over and over, working her into her pleasure until he felt her muscles clasp him and the ripples inside her spreading. She came around him with a thin cry, and he buried himself in the center of the storm, shaking and groaning as she pulled at him, filling herself with the furious streams of his semen. He collapsed on his side, shifting her before their bodies separated so that he could feel his penis soften inside her.

“So good.” She buried her face in his chest, her breasts heaving, her hands still clutching.

When this was over, Robin thought, stroking her shoulder slowly, he would not give her up. She belonged to him now, and for all that had been taken from him, he deserved her. He would move heaven and earth if need be, but he would have her, and be the love that she had never had, for the rest of their lives.

I'm human; you're not
.

 

Luisa watched the nurse change the bandages covering her left hand and felt bemused. In one of her visions, she had seen Alexandra Keller do the same thing for a Frenchwoman who had been badly burned, right before she held her hand and told her something that made her cry.

Bad news, she'd thought, and had deliberately shut down the vision.

Some things were never meant to be shared. She had never told the doctor or anyone that the men who had attacked her were Brethren. Like the lost book, and the painful choices that would have to be made because of it, that truth was not for Alex Keller or the Darkyn to know before the proper time.

Luisa
.

The connection she shared with the shadow prince allowed him to call to her, too, but she had to wait until the nurse left her room before she could answer him.

I'm here
. She closed her eyes so that anyone who might walk into her room while she was in the waking dream wouldn't see her eyes change.
What's wrong?

She saw that almost immediately. Her prince stood over the small, unmoving body of a baby deer. It lay on the grass next to a highway, and although it was still breathing, the twisted condition of its legs and the blood soaking the ground under it told her it wouldn't be for much longer.

Yes
. She felt his despair match her own.
Unless you can help it
.

For the first time since he had come into his talent, he wanted to try. He began taking off the glove covering his right hand. Only his fear of failure made him stop.
I can't
.

Then do nothing
. She hardened her heart.
It's only roadkill
.

The shadow prince picked up the fawn and carried it into the woods, away from the road. He laid it gently on a bed of leaves and took his gloved hands away.

Luisa watched and held on to hope, thin as it was. However much she wanted the fawn to live and the prince's wounds to heal, she couldn't choose for either of them. She could only pray that the baby deer would cling to its life, and the prince would overcome his fear of death before the poor creature bled to death.