The Merzetti Effect (A Vampire Romance) (2 page)

Delano Bowen watched the beaten vampire’s retreat long enough to be certain the creature was really leaving. He expelled his breath.
Thank God.
It had been close. For a moment, he’d thought he was going to have to destroy it. Black-hearted devil hadn’t wanted to give up his kill.

Well, they’d soon see who killed whom.

And speaking of dying, he’d better see to the woman before she succumbed to shock. He strode to the mouth of the alley where she lay crumpled on the wet asphalt. Kneeling, he rolled her over, bent close and deftly arrested her bleeding. He drew away from her to find that her eyes had fluttered open.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got you. You’re going to be all right.”

The assurance seemed good enough for her, for she slipped back into unconsciousness. He gathered her into his arms and stood.

“Come on, Ainsley Crawford. We have work to do.”

Hot sex.

No, not just
hot
sex. Incredibly erotic, deliciously forbidden
stranger
sex.

Ainsley knew it was a dream. Knew it wasn’t really happening. But dear God, it was good. And it felt so damned real. She could almost smell him, musky and male and incredibly arousing…

A small sound tugged at her awareness, but she clung to sleep. She wanted to stay in the dream, wanted the stranger to keep on stroking and licking and sucking her as her hands clenched in his hair. She wanted him to keep his mouth on her intimate flesh, his hands on her body. Just a few minutes more…

Then the sound came again. A beeping. Familiar but wrong. Out of place in the dream. What the hell was it? It sounded like a … oh, hell, a monitor alarm!

She came awake with a start.

The first thing she saw was the bedrail on the left side. Then the IV pole with the suspended bag of deep red fluid. She glanced down to see an IV line disappearing into her arm.

Holy shit. She was in hospital. And the beeping
was
a monitor. It blinked at her from its position right beside the IV pole.

Glancing at her hand, she saw the pulse oximeter had slipped off her finger. She slid the clothespin-like device back on and the beeping stopped. A quick glance at the monitor showed her oxygen saturation was okay.

Oh, man, she was really in hospital? Being
transfused
?

She pressed her legs together beneath the blankets, and the last traces of arousal from her sex dream withered. Urinary catheter.
Ugh
. She was definitely being transfused. But why?

Omigod, the alley! Heart suddenly hammering, she struggled to sit up.

“Ah, you’re awake. That’s good.”

She yelped, more at the unexpected hand on her shoulder urging her back against the pillows than at the masculine voice from the right side of her bed.

“Easy. You’re safe now. I’m a doctor.”

Her gaze locked on him and she let out a gasp.

It was
him
. The man she’d been imagining, the stranger/lover.

Okay, she was still dreaming. She must be. How else could she have conjured him to look exactly like the man in her dream?

Then another thought struck her:
maybe she was dead
.

Maybe she never escaped the alley after all. Maybe her lifeless body lay there still in a blood-darkened puddle, and this vision, this whole hospital room encounter, was just the result of her oxygen-starved brain dying.

She closed her eyes for a second and reopened them. The man beside her remained unchanged. Shoulder-length black hair, glossy under the lights, sprang back from a widow’s peak. Behind the lenses of Italian designer frames, dark brown eyes glowed like banked coals under heavy, slashing eyebrows. Dark, intense, sexy.

She started to lift a hand, thinking to touch his face to test if he were flesh and bone, but‌—‌
ow, ow, ow
‌—‌was quickly reminded that her arm had been harpooned with an IV catheter.

Okay, so it looked like she hadn’t dreamed him, she wasn’t dead, and she really was being transfused. So she had to be in hospital. But oh, baby, if this was the ER, this guy was new to the rotation.

“Where am I?”

“You’re under my care, and you’re currently being treated for blood loss and shock.”

Blood loss.

She shivered convulsively. The alley. A creature straight out of her nightmares had attacked her, driven his teeth deep into her neck and‌—‌

No!

Her mind shied away from the memory. Better to stick with the rational, the world she knew. Medicine.

Her gaze flicked back to the IV pole. “Whole blood?”

“Yes.”

“How much have I had?”

“We’re coming up on 2000 mls.”

She felt her face go slack. “So much?”

“By my estimate, you’d lost almost forty percent of your blood, Miss Crawford.”

Holy Hannah. Her gaze leapt back to the unit of blood suspended from the IV pole, her brain ticking at a hundred miles an hour. “Then you wouldn’t have had time to crossmatch the blood…”

“It’s perfectly crossmatched.”

She blinked. How’d he manage that feat? With this kind of blood loss, they usually started pushing the O-neg while they waited for typing and crossmatching, switching to the precise match as soon as they had the info. In any case, if they’d pushed that much blood, her coagulation factors would almost certainly be out of whack…

She lifted her right hand‌—‌carefully this time‌—‌to her neck, only to find her puncture wounds covered by a dressing. She clapped her gaze back on the hunky doctor who sat so quietly at her bedside. The doctor who in her dreams had blazed a trail of kisses down her body……

She blinked the image away, cleared her throat and asked, “What about the possibility of a bleed?”

He lifted a dark eyebrow. “You know your transfusion medicine.”

“I should. I’m an OR nurse.”

“Indeed.” The corner of his mouth lifted in what might have been a smile, but he obligingly ran down the numbers‌—‌hemoglobin, platelet count and the rest. “Based on what I’m seeing, I don’t think we’ll have to worry, but we’ll keep monitoring the situation.”

Okay, so she seemed to be out of immediate peril. Time to tackle the hard stuff.

“How’d I get here?”

One beat, two, three, as though he were weighing how much to tell her.

“I brought you.”

“
You
brought me?”

“Yes. I was there, in the alley. I saw the attack.”

“No.” The denial emerged on an exhalation. She wasn’t even sure what she was denying.

“Yes. I witnessed it. I saw that creature attack you.”

Her heart started banging again. A man fiercely grappling with her attacker. A black-haired man.

“You were there.” A statement, not a question. She remembered now. And she remembered something else.

His was the face she’d seen when she’d surfaced from that cold hell she thought was death. Then she remembered what had wakened her from that icy place‌—‌his mouth, hot on her bare throat, like a lover’s.

No. No way. It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have. Just a dream, like the other one.

She wet her lips. “Where are we?” Lifting her head, she scanned the room. No nurses came and went. Nothing fit her experience with various wards at the hospital. “This isn’t the Regional.”

“You are in my home. But I assure you it is as well equipped as your hospital to deal with your particular emergency. Better equipped, in fact.”

This was his
home
? It looked more like a trauma treatment room. And how freaky was it that he’d brought her here to treat her?
Scary
-freaky
.
Fear warred with anger. By the slimmest margin, the latter won.

“I can see for myself that you’re well equipped. My question would be,
why?
And while we’re at it, why didn’t you call an ambulance to take me to the emergency room? That would be the logical response.”

Those glowing eyes narrowed to dark slits. “And what would you have told them at your ER, Nurse Crawford?”

She lifted her chin. “That I’d been attacked by…”

“A vampire?” he finished.

“Yes! You know I’m telling the truth. You were there. You saw it.”

He didn’t move so much as a muscle, but for all his stillness, he emitted an odd leashed energy. It poured off him in waves so potent, she could almost imagine she saw an aura of energy surrounding him.

“Indeed I did witness it. But the ER staff who would have attended you weren’t there. They didn’t see it.”

“You could have hung around and explained.”

His lips turned up at the corners in a flash of amusement that was gone so quickly she wondered if she imagined it. “Yes, I suppose I could have given them the
Readers’ Digest
version of events, but I rather value my professional reputation.”

“Okay, yes, they’d be skeptical in the extreme, until they’d seen
this
.” She lifted a hand to her throat, where she could still feel the pain of her wounds beneath the bandage.

“Remove the dressing.”

She blinked. “What?”

He opened the drawer on her bedside table and extracted a hand mirror, which he offered to her. “Remove the dressing and have a look.”

Panic flared. Did she really want to view those puncture marks? She knew the attack had happened. She remembered it in horrifying detail. But to look on her wounds would make the proof of it incontrovertible. If she looked in the mirror, she couldn’t then decide she’d dreamed it. She couldn’t then conclude, for the sake of preserving her own sanity, that she’d had some kind of psychotic break.

“Not up to it? I see.” He started to return the mirror to the drawer.

“Give it to me.”

“Are you sure?”

Her answer was to peel the adhesive dressing away with one swift motion.

“So be it.”

She accepted the mirror from him, angling it to get a look at the puncture marks. Once again, her pulse skyrocketed. The skin of her throat was smooth and unbroken, with nothing but some faint bruising and some redness from the adhesive removal to suggest any kind of trauma.

Impossible.

She put a hand to her throat, running her fingers over the area to confirm what her eyes had already told her. Sweet Jesus.

“You see why the medical staff at the hospital might question your story?”

“But how? I was bitten… I can still feel the burn. Where did the puncture marks go?”

Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes seemed to blaze even stronger than before. “These creatures cover their tracks by infusing their victims with a substance that promotes coagulation. It’s similar to the MPH beads you might use in surgery to stem a bad bleed, but it also promotes ultra-rapid healing of the wound.”

She laughed, a choked sound that bordered on weeping, which God knew was closer to what she felt like doing.

“You’re telling me vampires walk around with Bleed-X in their pockets, ready to sprinkle it on their victims’ wounds afterward?”

“They secrete the substance at will.” He pried the mirror out of her hand and put it back in the drawer. “Of course, the victim of an attack like this typically expires from shock shortly after the evidence fades.”

“Well, that must give the Coroner’s Office fits on cause of death.” She heard her own words and marveled at how reassuringly sarcastic they sounded. Was she really having this conversation with this stranger about
vampires
?

He shrugged. “Occasionally. Though many victims are street people‌—‌drug addicts, prostitutes, vagrants, runaways. No one investigates too closely when one of them turns up dead.”

The truth of the latter statement was undeniable. She’d seen for herself the ease with which street deaths were accepted. She’d even protested it. Until the business with Lucy. Until she decided she couldn’t afford to make waves over something she wasn’t going to be able to change anyway.

She forced her numb mind to work. “I still don’t understand why you brought me here. Why not call an ambulance and let someone else worry about it?”

“Because, as you must be coming to appreciate, I have a special expertise in these matters that conventional medicine lacks. Indeed, I think it’s safe to say I’m alone in my field.”

Well, there was something she had no trouble believing.

“Besides,” he added, “had you not been coming to meet with me, you would not have suffered the attack. For that, I feel a burden of guilt.”

Going to meet him? Then he must be… “My God.”

A smile ghosted over his lips. “No, not God, Ms. Crawford. Though on occasion, I have been accused of harboring a God complex.” He offered his hand. “Dr. Delano Bowen.”

D
ELANO WATCHED EMOTIONS
chase each other in the depths of those lovely violet eyes.

A few moments ago, he’d seen the exact instant when she remembered the events in the alley. Terror, followed quickly by doubt of her very sanity. He knew how hard it was for the human mind to confront the unacceptable. He also knew some minds splintered under the stress. But not this one. Through the window of her eyes, he’d seen her emotions roll and tumble together as she grappled to integrate that one simple, shocking, world-changing bit of information.
Vampires are real.