Stringy white jets jerked out of the guy's fist and splattered on the floor.
Helena crested, and the orgasm broke like a dam. She lost control of her legs. Lost her grip. Collapsed into Alex's lap.
"You like this?" Alex smoothed his hand over her bottom. She realized he wasn't talking to her. His voice was different. Menacing. "You want some?" He gave her bare ass a cracking slap. She came again under the burning sting. Helpless. Moaning. Shameless.
The train jolted to a stop.
"You couldn't handle her," Alex said. "Show's over. Get the hell off my train."
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the guy bolt for the door.
"He's going home to fuck his girlfriend. He'll be seeing you the whole time."
Their bodies jostled with the train. Alex's eyes snapped, blacker than black in the harsh fluorescent light. This was an erotic game for him—and it was not. Part of him was crazy jealous. And she liked that. She ran her hands under his sweater, imagining the contours of his lean torso. The muscling of his abdomen. Those rosy nipples. Everywhere her hands passed, his skin jumped.
"If I'm sexy, if I'm wild, it's because of you. It's what you do to me."
His brow creased. He took a deep breath and kissed her, cradling her face between his hands. It was so urgent, yet so tender. She lifted her hips so he could open his pants, and she straddled his waiting erection.
Alex moaned as she took in the length of him. His head fell back against the window. His eyelids fluttered. "Jesus, Helena."
The sight of him like that—undone, vulnerable, paralyzed by pleasure—brought out the predator in her. She nipped his lips, his earlobe, the soft flesh under his jaw. Each bite a little harder than the last, pushing the limits.
It made him shake. Not with fear, she knew, but barely controlled excitement. He made her shake the same way. His chest rose and fell against hers with each of his hard, panting breaths. She mouthed the length of his throat, her saliva sharpening the odor of his skin. How she wanted to devour him.
"Do it," he gasped. "Bite me."
— she woke on the floor of her office with her hand between her legs.
Chapter 8
At twilight Alex poked his head into the living room. "Would you mind if I used your bathtub?"
His voice brought back the dream she'd been attempting to repress all day. That kinky, disturbing dream that still had her wet.
Helena nodded and gestured that he should go up to the master bedroom. He walked carefully into the living room, like a thief, like he shouldn't be there. In his hand he carried a black overnight bag. One of the things Mikhail had retrieved from the hotel.
The voice might be the same, but this was not the dream Alex. Emphatically not. As usual, he wore nothing but her sleeping bag. His skin had faded from red to a dead, clay white and was covered with a network of dry, painful-looking cracks. He headed up without a word, the tail of the bag dragging behind him, and she let her thanks for breakfast die unspoken.
An hour passed. She heard the bathtub draining, and filling again. What was he doing up there? She watched TV, taking in nothing, thinking about her parents a lot. If she didn't think about them, she thought about the dream. Both lines of thought were torture. She'd started in on a book when she heard the stairs creak, and looked up to see him pausing on the steps to look back at her. He'd transformed.
Giving her a hint of a smile, he continued down the stairs. Instead of wearing the sleeping bag, he carried it. He wore an expensive-looking white shirt and a pair of nice black pants. His feet were bare and his sleeves rolled up. Some of his hair had grown back, she realized. Maybe a quarter inch of black stubble covered his skull.
More striking, though, was his face. As he came closer, she saw that somehow he'd shed his damaged skin. His newborn skin was as pink and tender as the flesh you'd find under a blister, and here and there he had a scab where the healing wasn't finished. Still, it was an amazing improvement.
He'd lost weight. And the short hair made his cheekbones sharper, his eyes bigger and darker than ever. She found his frailty compelling. And familiar. They both needed comfort that night. In a perfect world they could snuggle together on the couch under a big blanket.
But the world wasn't perfect. He was a vampire. So she kept her distance. "You look better."
He shrugged, a little sheepish. "Elk."
"Did you really eat an elk last night?"
Like quicksilver his expression changed, becoming abstracted. "I drained one." He sounded like he didn't quite believe it himself.
"But what happened to your skin?"
His abstracted look faded and his dark eyes searched her face intently. "The dead skin fell off. When I drank the elk dry, I absorbed its life force, and that accelerated my healing."
"I thought you never killed when you ate."
"I'm not supposed to. I never have before. There's no rules about animals, but any vamp who kills a human or another vamp by draining them dry is anathema. It's a death sentence. Only the Knyaz exsanguinate their enemies."
"You mean Mikhail exsanguinates…" Helena wished she didn't know what that word meant. "Maybe I don't want to know more about that."
Alex smiled a little. "It's okay. The point is that it's all too natural to kill while eating. It makes you strong, but it's addictive, and it messes with the mind. I found that out last night. I don't know how Mikhail deals with it."
He shook his head, dispelling whatever he was thinking about. "Anyway, if we didn't follow our discipline, I don't know what would have happened to our kind. Or yours."
He tilted his head to one side. "I'm giving you too much information again. I know. But I was wrong in not giving you enough information when we met. And I'm not lying to you anymore. Or sugar coating. If you have any questions, I want to answer them."
"You're leaving tonight?"
"Isn't that what we agreed?"
Helena noted the careful choice of words. It was up to her. She figured it couldn't hurt to be polite for a few minutes. They'd been through a lot together. And she was still curious about him. About all this. "Would you like a glass of wine for the road?"
They walked into the kitchen. He picked up the wine bottle and she handed him the corkscrew as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be hanging out in the kitchen together.
"I wanted to thank you for breakfast this morning. That was sweet. I wouldn't think you'd be interested in cooking. I mean, I didn't think vampires ate food. But I suppose that's another one of those myths."
Alex laughed. "No, actually, you're right. I don't know any other vamp that cooks. It's pretty pointless."
"Then why do you do it?"
"Because I've always liked humans." He popped the cork. "Liked the human world. Wished I were human, often enough."
Maybe that was why his mother matched him to a human.
She took the bottle from him and gave him back a glass of Pinot Noir. "Why's that?"
"Why? I don't know. I guess I'm just curious about what goes on in the daytime. I want to know what it's like to swim in a clear blue Caribbean sea. I want to see the Grand Canyon in real life. I want to watch bees work. And then there's the food thing. We can't eat solid food, and I've always been curious about the different tastes and textures you humans get to enjoy."
"Does all blood taste the same?"
"No." The very idea seemed to surprise him. "Not at all. No more than all wine tastes the same. It's all blood, but each person's is unique. And each person's flavor changes depending on all sorts of things. Age. Diet. Stress. A woman tastes different in different parts of her cycle."
Oh really. "So you've had a lot of people. Some that you know well."
He put down his wine glass and looked her in the eye. "I can't count how many people I've fed from in my life, but since I've been an adult most of them have been women, and most of those have been my lovers. I prefer to feed while making love."