Books by Maggie Shayne (231 page)

Unfortunately he wasn't sure he was going to survive until sunrise, as bad as he felt.

"Awake, finally?"

He jerked his head toward the sound of her voice. She walked toward him, sank into the hay beside him.

"Finally?" Even speaking was an effort. "How long have I been out?"

"Long enough for all the coolant to run out of Stiles's radiator and the car to overheat, thanks to you."

"You're the one who ran me down."

"You should have moved."

"I didn't think you'd do it."

"You don't know me very well, then, do you."

"Not as well as I thought." He sat up, but waves of dizziness made it difficult. When he started to sway sideways, she gripped his shoulder, steadying him.

"How bad is it?"

"Bad enough so I didn't realize you were nearby." He pressed a hand to his aching head, felt the bandages she'd put there. "Given my usual reaction to your presence, it must be pretty bad."

"Oh, please. We're beyond that now, Edge. You can drop the act."

He lifted his head, searching her face.

She said, "We both know you were only using me to get your hands on Stiles."

He held her gaze until she turned her head away. Then he touched her face, turning it back again. "I didn't have to make love to you to get my hands on Stiles, Alby."

She rolled her eyes, pulled free of his touch.

Edge sighed. "Where is he, anyway?"

"Stiles?" She looked across the barn, nodded toward a corner where the man lay, unconscious, his hands cuffed around a beam. "I found some of Ms favorite tranquilizer in his little black bag."

"You should just kill him and have done with it."

She swung her huge, dark eyes back to his. "I need him alive."

He held those eyes for a long moment, before looking away.

"Why do you hate him so much?"

He shook his head, saying nothing.

"I'm not going to let you kill him, Edge. I can't."

"You drag him around the countryside with you much longer, Alby, he's going to get loose. He's going make a try for you. You know he will."

"Not this time."

Angry, he surged to his feet, but the weakness slammed into him like a wrecking ball, and he found himself flat on his back in the hay again a second later.

It shocked him when Alby's hair tickled his face. She was kneeling beside him, leaning over him, and she looked worried, in spite of her apparent determination to hate his guts. He closed his eyes.

"The damage to your hard head will heal when the sun comes up, but you're not going to make it that long, are you, Edge?"

"I'm fine."

She shook her head. "You need to feed."

"Good idea.'' God, even his voice sounded weak now. "Drag Stiles over here and let me have at him."

"I don't trust you not to kill him."

"Yeah, well, it's him or me."

"Not necessarily."

He shot his eyes to hers.

She shrugged. "There's me."

"No."

"Come on, Edge. You're fading faster than snow in a heat wave. You need blood. I've got it, and I'm offering to share. It would be foolish not to."

He felt the hunger stirring inside him at the very thought of it. Of tasting her. And while his body was weak, he was turned on as hell. "You've… never let a vampire drink from you before, have you, Alby?"

"No. I've heard it's… pleasant."

"Pleasant."

"Mmm." She lifted her arm, pushing her sleeve back, looking intently at the veins in her wrist.

"When I made you come, back there on the beach, and you were shaking all over and screaming my name, would you have, called that pleasant?''

"Edge, that's got nothing to do—"

"My drinking from you would be ten times as intense."

She blinked, clearly not believing him. "I think you're exaggerating."

He shrugged. "No one's ever tasted you. I've tasted plenty of humans, and even a vamp or two in my time. I know what it's like."

She met his eyes. "I'm not a human or a vamp. It could be entirely different with me."

And would be, he had no doubt of that. That was what worried him. God knew sex with her had been the most mind-blowing experience of his life. What would drinking from her tender veins be like?

He wanted it. He burned with wanting it. He wanted to be the first to devour her, just the way he'd been the first to take her body.

She was watching his eyes, which were no doubt beginning to glow with hunger by now. Trembling, she offered her forearm, extending it until her wrist hovered near his lips. "Go on," she whispered. "I can handle it if you can."

Still lying on his back in the hay, he lifted his hands, closed them on her forearm, and drew it to his lips. He let his lips and tongue taste the salty skin there but kept his eyes on hers. Saw them light just a little. She might pretend to hate him, he realized. But she wanted him. In every way.

He parted his lips, sucking at the skin, and then, tightening his grip, he bit down. His incisors sank into her flesh, popped through the tougher walls of her veins. He didn't bite deeply. Just enough to draw a thin trickle of her lifeblood into him.

But when it touched his tongue, he was completely unprepared for the force that hit him. A jolt so strong it made his entire body jerk in reaction. The power of it. God! Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. Her head fell backward, and she shuddered.

He sucked a little harder, and her force arced through his body. Strength returned. Amber moaned, dropping backward into the hay, even as Edge sat up, dragging his mouth from her wrist so he could roll over onto her. Everything in him screamed for more, more than she'd offered. More than she'd given. He wanted all of her.

His hands found her blouse and slid underneath to find her breasts and close around them. She was shivering, her body begging him to take her. Her nipples were hard and hot against his cold touch. He pushed the blouse out of the way and bent to those peaks, sucking one of them and then biting it until she cried out in mingled pain and pleasure. He tasted her blood on his tongue and sucked harder.

She arched her back to tell him her cries were not protests. And he was hard, the furious hunger raging through him more powerfully than it ever had.

He wrestled her jeans off her, never releasing her nipple, and he freed himself from his own the same way. And then he was on her, pinning her to the hay and driving himself into her as deep and hard as he could.

She screamed and clasped his shoulders, then tore at the T-shirt he wore, peeling it off him. Her legs wrapped around his waist, locking at the ankles, and she tipped her hips up to receive him. He slid his hands to her buttocks, squeezing them hard, to hold her to him as he rose up, onto his knees, carrying her with him. As he knelt there, holding her, lifting and lowering her body over him again and again, he watched her head fall back, her hair slide sideways, baring her neck to him.

He pressed his mouth to her throat, kissing, preparing, and she whimpered what he took to be encouragement. So he sank his fangs into her jugular.

The blood flowed into him, and with it, everything she was feeling—and then everything she
was
. God, the power of this woman! It raged inside him, so shocking he surged to his feet, her legs still twisted around his waist. He staggered backward, slamming into a wall and feeling it crack behind him. Something crashed to the floor, a beam and several bales of hay from somewhere above avalanching from the ceiling, narrowly missing them, and he didn't care. He knew her, everything about her, everything she'd felt in captivity. Her furious love for her parents and her friends. Her grief for Willem Stone and fierce determination to save him. And her passion right now, for him, for Edge, overwhelming everything else. What she felt for him was so intense it humbled him, shook him to his core, and with it he felt her denial, her resistance, her fear.

And then there was something else, something… separate. Beyond it all, he became slowly aware of something more inside her. Within her, and yet separate. It was something new. Small. Only barely there. Deep, deep inside her.

Life.

His orgasm broke through him at the same time as the shock of his discovery, and he jerked his mouth away from her throat to break contact with the impossible truth.

She was coming, clinging to him, shivering and moving and milking him right to his core. And he held her while it ravaged her with its power and his own ecstasy pumped into her. He held her until the pleasure ebbed. And then he carried her back to the hay, laid her down there, very gently, pushed the hair away from her face and saw tears on her cheeks.

She'd lied to him. And he supposed he would be angry about that… later. But right now, he was too overwhelmed by his suddenly much clearer view of who and what she was. He was not ready for her. Whatever he'd been thinking about her, planning for her, he'd been wrong, because she was way beyond what he'd expected. Everything about her was… more.

She was physically stunning, her beauty on the level one would attribute to an angel or a goddess. A demon or a witch. Unnatural beauty. Her power—it was intense, not greater than his own, but different. The telekinesis, the precognition—yes, she had that, too; he'd felt it when he'd tasted her. The jolt of her blood hit his brain the way he imagined crack cocaine hit an addict. And he wondered if he would be able to live without it. Her passion—it was above and beyond anything he'd ever known any female to feel, and his own had matched it.

Her emotions—God, they were intense. What she felt for him was shattering, and even the mere glimpse of it he'd been allowed was enough to put him on the edge of panic.

Beyond that, he felt he'd committed a sacrilege, defiled something sacred. He hadn't even begun to understand what she was, just how special she was, until now. His mistake. Whoever the other man was, he was probably far more worthy. So he supposed it was just as well. Or he told himself it was.

He touched the tears on her cheeks, absorbing them into his fingertips. "I shouldn't have… "

"Yes, you should."

He closed his eyes against the soulful look in hers. "Are you all right? Did I take too much?"

She nodded, but seemed sleepy, her eyelids heavy.

"God, what have I been doing with you?" he whispered.

"You didn't take that much, Edge. I'm fine."

"That's not what I meant."

She frowned at him, then nodded. "Oh." The word was icy, and suddenly she didn't seem as sleepy anymore. "Stop looking so worried, Edge, I'm not an idiot. I know it didn't mean anything. We both got carried away, that's all." She rolled onto her side, putting her back to him.

Probably, he thought, so that he wouldn't see the lie in her eyes. "Of course it didn't mean anything. How could it?" Given what he knew now.

His body was surging with more energy than he'd ever had. More power. It made itself known to him more with each passing second. Her blood was… different. Supercharged and potent. It sang in his veins, making his skin tingle with heightened awareness. His mind raced with sensations; his body itched with pent-up energy.

Alby dragged herself to her feet. She searched for her clothes, putting them on slowly, clumsily. He moved closer, wanting to help her in spite of himself, but she pulled away from his touch. She might be tired and dull right now—thanks to him—but her anger was as sharp as ever.

No doubt she, too, was finally becoming aware of the distance between them. Probably thi
nkin
g about the other one, whoever he was. He was as far beneath her as he could be. He wasn't worthy of an angel, and, frankly, he didn't want to be.

"I'm going to have to find another vehicle," she told him. "Stiles's car is stranded a few miles from here where I left it when it overheated. And I won't get far on foot."

So she didn't even want to talk about what had just happened between them? Or the secret she was keeping?

It occurred to him then that maybe she didn't even know.

Hell, that was it. She didn't know.

"Where is it we're going?" he asked her.

"I have to take Stiles to Eric and Tarn's place. Eric has a lab there."

"And when you get him there?"

"I make him talk, make him tell me about his formula for stealing immortality, and then we create our own batch."

"Using his blood?"

She buttoned her blouse without looking at him. "I wouldn't let him pollute Willem with his evil. No. We'll be using mine."

He nodded, understanding her reasons for that, but unsure it was a very good idea. He'd seen her worst nightmares—and they all involved Stiles and the time she'd spent as his prisoner. All the more reason to kill the bastard. The sooner the better. And why he should still feel that way, knowing what he did, was beyond him. He really was pathetic.

"You don't intend to let me go with you, do you, Alby?"

She glanced at him, smiled sweetly, though he could see the pain behind the smile. It swam in her blue-black eyes. "As soon as you curl up for a good day's sleep, Edge, Stiles and I are out of here."

"And you think I won't follow you?''

"You don't know where they live."

"Windy Ridge," he said. "Or something like that," he replied.

She made a face. "What state?"

He lowered his eyes.

"I really don't think my dear friends in Salem are likely to tell you. Especially not once I get to someplace where my cell phone can pull in a signal and call them."

"You have it all figured out, don't you?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Only one problem, love. Right now, I'm stronger than I've ever been in my life. And you're a little on the weak side." And he was getting angrier by the minute, as well, he thought. Bad enough she'd lied to him; now she was acting as if he were the enemy, all in an effort to protect a pig like Stiles.

She shrugged. "So?"

He smiled his most evil smile, spun on his heel and strode across the barn to where Stiles lay limp. He gripped the man by his throat, shook him so that his head flopped on his shoulders like a rag doll's. "Wake up, you bastard. I've been waiting a long time for this."