Vampire Mistress (25 page)

“What kind of woman would I be if I accepted your help?” Anwyn shook her head. “You would
never
leave a woman in distress if there was any sacrifice you could make to save her. That’s not a decision, not a choice of your free will. Whoever she was, this woman for whom you’re trying to make amends, I am
not
her.”

Gideon’s jaw clenched. “You don’t like being second-guessed. Neither do I. Don’t go there. I’m the one making this decision, and I’m making it for
you
. And it’s not that fucking dramatic. I’m not talking about the full marking.”

“Don’t curse at me, Gideon Green,” she said, low.

“Don’t go off the handle before I’ve told you what I have in mind, then.”

She narrowed her eyes. Returning to the sofa with precise movements, she sat, perched on the end, her back stiff, and folded her hands with deceptive calm on her knees. “Fine. Tell me, then, since you two have this all worked out.”

She refused to look toward Daegan. The vampire hunter gave her an even look, but came back to the sofa. Interestingly, she noted he dropped to one knee beside her, rather than sitting next to her. He braced the points of a white-knuckled hand on the sofa, and his back was even straighter than hers, his jaw set. She wondered if he realized how she registered every nuance of his body language, looking for what that meant even more than his words. “I could let you give me one mark. It might not help as much as a full marking, but it might give you more stability, leave us both a little breathing room.”

A shift in the kitchen made him look back at Daegan. The vampire leaned on the pass-through, watching them both like a still raptor. “One mark would have minimal impact. But two
would
help, because that’s a bond between your minds.”

As Gideon digested that, Anwyn’s teeth ground together at the conflict evident in his gaze. Then it shuttered over. He nodded. “That makes sense.”

“It’s a chain between us,” she said sharply. “Gideon, I’d be in your head. For always.”

“Yes and no.” He lifted a shoulder. “The range isn’t limitless. When you stabilize enough to choose a real servant, all I’d have to do is travel out of that range, though I expect you’d learn how to shut it down. Lyssa was able to do that with Jacob at one point. She still had the ability to activate it, but she didn’t have to do so. And look at it this way. While a second-marked servant can still be killed in all the normal ways, they’re more resilient to injury and heal faster. During the transition, you can have more freedom when it’s just me around.”

“You would trust me that much? A vampire, the thing you hate most in the world?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You hate what I’ve become.” She fisted her fingers in his shirt collar, registered his tensing with a sharp nod. “See? You mistrust my movements, are prepared to fight me.”

“That’s just good sense.”

“I told you I wouldn’t tolerate you lying to me. Ever.”

“We’re not in the Queen’s Chamber. You also said the lies we tell ourselves outside of your dungeon doors help us be what we need to be.” Leaning forward, he met her eye to flashing eye. “If you don’t want me as your servant, that’s one thing. Hell, I wouldn’t wish that on any woman. But the good news is I’m about as much servant material as he is”—he jerked his head at Daegan—“so it’ll be easy to get rid of me when it’s time.”

She straightened her fingers, one at a time, so the nails dug into the tender flesh at the base of his throat, probably the only soft spot on him. She stared at the flush of blood beneath the skin that gathered around those sharp edges. “This is jumping the gun. It makes no sense to make this commitment now.”

“Yeah, it does. If the madness grows, even with the sire’s blood, the sooner you can use me to help corral it, the better.” Gideon sighed, reached up to grip her wrist.

Instead, her other hand closed on his, stilling the movement so he couldn’t alter where her fingers were. She let him feel the strength in her hand, which she already knew was growing to the point she occasionally could match him. Soon she would consistently surpass him. Lifting her gaze to his, she held the blue eyes. “Gideon, it won’t work.”

His fingers flexed slightly under hers, telling her he didn’t care for the grip, but his voice remained calm. Too calm. A cauldron of emotion boiled beneath the surface. If she did as he suggested, she would know every thought, every emotion, going through him, a temptation that had the shadow voices in her head practically frothing at the mouth.
He would be hers . . . unable to hide anything from her.

“No.” She surged up from the couch, removing herself from him. “Gideon, you’ve already said it. I heard you. You know what vampires are, what I’ll become. What do you think will happen, if you make yourself that vulnerable to me?”

“I expect that depends on how he views being vulnerable to you. And how sure he is of the small amount of trust that has already grown between you.”

She snapped her attention to Daegan, still standing in that damned statuelike pose in the opening to the kitchen. “A tidbit of trust is nothing more than bait for a trap.”

A muscle flexed in Daegan’s jaw. Vampires didn’t tolerate defiance for long from anyone lower on the feeding chain, even someone with whom they had a strong emotional bond. Gideon expected Anwyn knew that, though. Or was upset enough that she didn’t care anymore, which might explain Daegan’s restraint.

He rose. “Before you two go crazy with the passive-aggressive innuendoes about your own relationship, can we get back on point here?”

He might have been grimly amused by the matching dangerous expressions that swung his way, if not for his own feelings about the topic.

“There are plenty of things in my life that I wanted more time to consider,” he said, meeting Anwyn’s gaze. “But my gut tells me if we give this more time, I’m just delaying the inevitable. And my gut’s always right.”

The forbidding countenance slipped, and he saw the woman beneath, the one afraid to take what he was offering, for as many reasons as his own brain could check off.

Ironically, it made his mind up. As he stepped up to her, he noted Daegan was cutting his wrist vein with a switchblade, mixing his blood with Barnabus’s. Her nostrils flared, detecting it, even as her eyes never left Gideon’s face. He stopped with a foot between them, a barrier he’d let her decide whether or not to cross. “Let me do this, Anwyn. I want to take care of you. I think that’s why I was brought here, though I can’t explain my feelings beyond that. We’re just going to have to muddle through.”

She studied him a long moment; then she reached up, touched his mouth. “Be still,” she said, when he would have reached for her wrist, or moved his lips against her. He capitulated as she traced his lips, passed her thumb over his jaw.

“You want to take care of me,” she said slowly, “but do you want to belong to me? Because that’s what this is about. I know it from watching him.” She nodded at Daegan. “From what he asks and demands of me. I also feel it growing inside of me. Maybe because of what I already am, it’s growing faster, or maybe it immediately happens, like the craving for blood.”

She dropped her hand. “Gideon, what’s in my head now . . . It’s not the usual thing; I’m sure of it. I am afraid of being out of control. But the way my mind reacts to your willingness to be marked . . .” She swallowed. “It’s the way a pedophile feels when he sees a child walking alone. Evil, dirty and unable to resist.”

He heard it in her voice, a confident woman being destroyed by terror of herself. It wrenched his heart out of his chest. He was cognizant of Daegan drawing near, the vampire also responding to her distress. She was holding the reins on it so tightly they could practically hear the blood pumping desperately under her constricted soul.

Reaching out, Gideon closed his hand on hers. “Your fear only confirms I’m doing the right thing. If you lose your grip on your conscience during all this, the second mark will connect us. I can hold on to it for you until you’ve got a good grasp on it again.”

“What if I refuse to let you go, after I mark you?”

“You’ll let me go.” His eyes shadowed. “Because we both know I’m not the right person for this. I’m just the best person right now.”

Daegan stepped forward then. “Perhaps it would be best if you go ahead and drink this,
cher
. If the sire’s blood stabilizes you more than we expect, it is a decision you might not have to make right away.”

Gideon tilted his head toward the couch. “Why don’t we go sit down there? The first time will be the worst, right?”

She pressed her lips together. “I want to go to my room. I’ll drink it there, alone.”

Daegan shook his head. “You’ll do it here,
cher
. Where we can watch.”

“Like some kind of drug addict you can’t trust. You’re right. I do hate you.” She said it in a monotone and Daegan didn’t react, other than to place the tumbler in her hand, curling her fingers around it with a look that said she would strongly regret throwing it at him, as her expression suggested she might be considering.

As they waited her out, watching her stare down into that cup, Gideon wondered how long Daegan would wait before he would in fact force it down her throat. She was likely due for another seizure soon, and having the sire’s blood in her before then would give them an early indication of how much it would help. Curling his fingers in a lock of her hair, loose at her brow, he tugged lightly.

“Maybe you don’t really want it in a cup. Maybe it’d be better to take it from my mouth.”

Her attention shifted to him, and as it did, he began backing up, keeping that light, nonrestraining pressure on her fingers, just the tips. She followed him, one step, two steps, until he skirted the coffee table to reach the sofa. Daegan moved behind them, and Gideon sensed his gaze on his face, but he made his whole focus Anwyn and her intense blue-green eyes, filled with so much he couldn’t tell what emotion was holding the upper hand.

He waited until she was seated next to him, and then he carefully took the tumbler from her hand. “Ready?” he asked. “Remember, you’re consuming your enemy. That’s what this is.”

Her jaw firmed in promising resolve. Daegan had taken a seat in the chair across from them, fingers steepled and damnable Sphinx expression firmly in place. Gideon wasn’t fooled by it, though. He didn’t care if the male was vampire or human; none of them fared well against a female cold shoulder. But he gave the guy reluctant credit—he wasn’t letting that detract a bit from what he knew needed to be done. He wasn’t sure he could have refused Anwyn the right to drink the foul stuff in the privacy of her rooms, but he knew Daegan was right. Her brain was just too unpredictable. She might run it down the sink.

Lifting the tumbler to his lips, he let the blood fill his mouth. Though he tried not to inhale, it was hard not to get the scent once he’d brought it onto his taste buds. It was curious . . . There was a sour, fetid odor, the odor he expected for blood. But there was something else. He didn’t want to say it was a pleasant smell, but there was an appealing element to it . . . something additional that almost made him want to swallow, for reasons he couldn’t explain.

Fortunately, she didn’t keep him waiting. Threading her fingers under his hair at his nape, she slid her other hand up his thigh, bracing herself. Stretching her slim neck, she brought her mouth to his.

He’d done it like this, thinking someone of her sensual nature might find it more appealing. Totally selfless, thinking only of her. That wry thought was lost as the tip of her tongue eased into the seam of his mouth, still closed against her open one, and delicately tasted what he had to offer. With a slow curl, she gathered more of the fluid onto her tongue as he carefully parted his lips, letting the blood begin to slip in a controlled way into her mouth. He felt the motion as she swallowed for the first time, and relaxed somewhat. Of course, other parts of him became far less relaxed as the heel of her hand inched up, her fingers stroking high on his thigh. She tilted her head, pressing closer into the kiss, letting more of the blood slide from his mouth into hers. He put his arm around her waist, bringing her closer, so she slid onto the knee closest to her, the hand on his thigh coming up to his shoulder to hold on.

He wondered what Daegan thought, watching the two of them, and then decided that was something he didn’t want to know. But considering he’d put the tumbler down on the coffee table and had to pick it up again to do the next swallow, he was going to have to look toward the male. Instead, he felt the tumbler pressed into his hand by male fingers, and two hands guiding his arm into a bend up toward his face, so he didn’t have to break the kiss until the last moment.

Daegan had moved to sit on the coffee table, his knees spread to accommodate Gideon’s, the vampire’s own knee pressed into Anwyn’s hip where she sat on Gideon’s thigh. Gideon turned his head while Anwyn moved to his cheekbone, over to his ear and the vein that pulsed beneath it. It leaped under her mouth, much like his cock did as her hand lowered, stroking him through denim, though for once his mind stayed with her mouth rather than migrating to his cock. If she actually marked him, would she bite him there? How would it feel? If the sire’s blood worked better than they expected, would they even have to do it? And why did that give him a small, absurd feeling of disappointment?

It was because he was fucked-up. The only successful relationship he’d seen close-up these past couple of years was his brother’s, with a fucking vampire queen. But, Christ, Anwyn’s mouth tasted so good, blood or no blood. He gave her another mouthful, now experiencing three textures: that sour, repulsive one, the curiously pleasurable one, and the undeniable feast that was Anwyn’s tongue and lips. Thanks to Daegan’s steady hand, he didn’t have to let go of her, his hands spanning the nip of her slender waist, thumbs on her rib cage, close to the curve of her breasts, fingers splayed out to feel the hint of womanly hips. He brought his mouth back to hers and the provocative dance started over again, her tongue coming in to tease his mouth open slowly, letting him offer her the nourishment.