The Vampire Hunter

 

Hunter Liam McKiernan would do anything to lure vampire Jennifer Williams into his trap—even use her sister, Eve, against her. It was only fitting since he believed Jennifer killed his brother. But when he finally caught up with her, Jennifer was not the cold-hearted creature he expected. She was beautiful, warm…and lonely. Liam couldn't resist the urge to protect her—and the desire to make love to her.

 

But a member of the Secret Vampire Society
had
killed Liam's brother—a vampire who also wanted Jennifer himself….

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The splintered stake gouged her palm, drawing blood. Despite the pain, Jennifer Williams breathed a sigh of relief that her sister was gone now, whisked away in the arms of her lover. Professor Vossimer would protect Eve. It was Jennifer, standing alone in the alley with the man intent on murdering her, who had no one to protect her.

But herself…

She was all she needed, though. Jennifer wasn't the sickly girl she'd been twenty years ago; she was strong now. She was a vampiress.

Becoming a vampire had saved Jennifer from the cancer that had returned to claim her life. She hadn't become a vampire just to save herself, though. She'd done it to protect her sister from the invasive medical procedures their parents would have forced her to endure in order to help Jennifer. But once Jennifer had become a vampire, she'd joined the Secret Vampire Society and had had to obey their rules, which included never letting a human learn of their existence. To protect the society, no human was allowed to learn that vampires existed and live. So Eve had thought Jennifer dead for the past twenty years. She'd only come out of hiding now to protect her sister again.
From this man
.

Wrapping her fingers around the jagged piece of wood, she lifted it above her head. Then she stepped over the man lying on the asphalt at her feet. Before she could brandish the weapon at him, he swung the beam of his flashlight toward her. And her strength ebbed. This was no artificial light he trained on her face; it held the same UV rays of the sun. The sun that Jennifer hadn't seen since she'd been turned because it was the only thing, besides a stake through the heart, that could kill her.

And this man had brought both to the alley where he'd lured Jennifer. He had sent Eve after Professor Vossimer with the lie that the professor had killed Jennifer. His guest lecture on vampires being myths had been the last place she'd been seen. Professor Vossimer gave the lecture in order to protect the secret society, but he'd broken their main rule when he'd seen how sick she'd been. By turning her into a vampire like himself, he had actually been the one to save her.

So Jennifer hadn't been able to stay in the shadows and let her sister blame the wrong person for her disappearance. But before she'd been able to explain, this man had showed up. First he'd threatened her sister and then he'd attacked the professor when the vampire had leaped to her defense. If Jennifer had had any doubt as to his intentions before, she had none now. He was a vampire hunter, and he was going to kill her.

Unless she fought back. Rallying the remnants of the strength he hadn't stolen from her yet, she kicked the flashlight from his bruised hand. The metal clattered across the asphalt, his beam swinging around the alley like an out-of-control spotlight. It glanced off the weathered brick walls of the buildings between which they stood. One of those buildings housed an underground club that vampires patronized. If she yelled loudly enough, she could summon someone to her aid. But Jennifer had stopped needing to be rescued when she'd stopped being human.

Fueled with fear and anger, she launched herself at the strange man, throwing her body on top of his while she swung the stake toward his face. He knocked the splintered wood from her hand, so she swung her fists instead. His features looked, and felt, as if they'd been chiseled from stone. While his auburn hair glowed like fire in the flashlight beam, his pale blue eyes chilled like ice. He caught her flailing fists, holding her wrists tight in his grasp. He'd already taken a beaten, had been nearly strangled by the hands of the professor who'd come to Eve's defense before Jennifer had. But still this man was strong. Superhumanly strong? Was he a vampire as well as a vampire hunter?

“Who are you?” she asked. “And what do you want with my sister?”

“I don't want your sister,” he confirmed her suspicion, his voice as deep as gravel. His body was as hard as rock, too, every muscle rippling as he rolled her over, toward where the beam lit the asphalt. “I want you!”

She shivered at the intensity of his declaration. But she wasn't arrogant or foolish enough to think that he desired her. So she continued to fight. Tangling her legs with his long ones, she locked her arms around him and rolled them away from the light. “Why?”

“You shouldn't ask why,” he advised, groaning as her arms tightened around his probably bruised ribs. His gaze focused on her lips, and he pushed his hard thigh between her legs and rolled them across the asphalt again. “You should ask how.”

She gasped as his arms tightened around her, his heavily muscled chest pushing down against her breasts. Only able to whisper between pants for breath, she asked, “How do you want me?”

“Dead. I want you dead.”

 

Liam McKiernan wished like hell that was the only way he wanted her. But his body had begun to betray him, hardening at the closeness to her soft curves and erotic heat. He'd always thought she'd be as cold as her heart, but he'd been wrong. Jennifer Williams was warm and alive.

But because of her, his brother was not.

“Why?” she asked again. “Why do you hate me so much that you want me dead?”

He hadn't expected her to recognize him. He'd only met her once, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and he looked nothing like his older half brother. “I want you the same way you left Bryan Truman.”

Her body tensed beneath his, and her green eyes warmed with affection. “Bryan. I haven't seen Bryan in twenty years.”

“Not since the night you drained him of all his blood and left him for dead,” he said.

A cry of pain slipped through her lips. He studied her face, which had drained of all color. He could see her clearly now, as the darkness lightened with dawn's approach.

“Bryan's dead?” she asked, her full lower lip trembling slightly.

Damn. She was beautiful. It wasn't just the golden blond hair and those mesmerizing green eyes; it was the vulnerability about her that drew a man to her, that made him want to protect her. While she was physically stronger now than the sickly girl he remembered from their meeting so long ago, her sensitivity belied an ethereal fragility. Those eyes shimmered with tears that softened him until he realized that it had to be an act. “Don't pretend you don't know.”

She shook her head. “He can't be dead.” Her voice cracked with what seemed like genuine distress. “Not Bryan…”

“Did you think you could do that to him and he'd live? There's no way a human could survive that. But then you might have forgotten…since you're not human any longer.”

A breath shuddered out of those trembling lips. “I don't know what you're talking about….”

“Yeah, I know all about your damn secret society of vampires.” And he wasn't dead even though he'd been warned any human who learned of its existence would be killed.

“I wasn't talking about the society,” she murmured, her voice growing fainter as the sky lightened. “Bryan…” Tears shimmered in her eyes. “He can't be dead….”

“How could you not know that he died?” Liam asked. Even though two decades had passed since his brother's death, Liam still missed him. With only three years separating the half brothers, they'd been more like friends than siblings—even though they'd lived in separate homes.

“I—I had to give up everything from my old life,” she explained. “My family. My friends. I couldn't go back. I couldn't keep in touch with them.”

Bitterness overwhelming him, he released it in a short chuckle. “But yet you're here for your sister.”

“I haven't been there for my sister,” she said, guilt dimming the brightness of her eyes. “I haven't seen her in twenty years…until tonight, until you put her in danger to draw me out. Why?”

“You know why.” Or at least he had been convinced she would know, but her confusion and surprise over his brother's death seemed genuine. “For Bryan…”

“Bryan wouldn't want you to hurt me,” she pointed out. Correctly.

“You're doing this for yourself,” she said. “For revenge for something I didn't do—for something I never could have done. I couldn't have hurt Bryan. He was my friend.” Her voice cracked again with undeniable pain. “My best friend…”

Liam's head pounded, maybe from the fight with the professor. The vampire had nearly strangled the life from Liam. If not for this woman's interference, the professor probably would have killed Liam. Despite his boot-camp training and sixteen-year career in the marines, Liam hadn't been able to match the monster's strength. While he'd made a point of learning everything about the secret society, he wasn't one of them. He was a vampire hunter, but the only vampire he'd ever sought to kill was
her
.

Maybe his head also pounded because of the doubt now plaguing him. What if she spoke the truth? What if she knew nothing about Bryan's murder?

Her body went limp beneath his, her face paling as the sky grew lighter. He could kill her easily now. He wouldn't even need the special weapon he'd made to fire the stake into her heart. He could impale her chest with his bare hands. Then he would finally have the revenge that had driven his life for the past twenty years.

Unless she was innocent…

Then he would become the cold-blooded killer he'd thought he had been hunting for two decades. He would be just as much a monster as a member of the Secret Vampire Society.

Strong arms encircled Jennifer as the man carried her down the dimly lit, underground corridor. She hadn't been carried since she'd been a child. Hadn't been loved or protected in so many years. Since she'd become a vampiress, someone had been interested in her – so interested that he'd actually made her feel unsafe, and she'd been hiding from him as much as she'd been hiding from her sister. That man didn't love her, though.

This man didn't love her, either. And he certainly didn't intend to protect her. Liam McKiernan intended to kill her for what he thought she'd done.

“Why didn't you just leave me for dead?” she asked, her voice raspy as her strength slowly ebbed back. “Or wouldn't that have been good enough for you? You want the satisfaction of killing me yourself.”

“Is this it?” he asked, his pale eyes squinting as he peered through the shadows.

She glanced toward the door, in front of where he'd stopped, and nodded. “It's my apartment.” And she had no idea why she'd let him bring her here except that she hadn't been thinking when he'd asked where she lived. Jennifer had barely been conscious. The rising sun had weakened her physically and the news of Bryan's death had weakened her emotionally.

Poor Bryan…

How could this man think that she would have murdered her best friend? She struggled against his grasp, trying to slide down his body. But he held her tight.

“Where's your key?”

“Above the door.” What did it matter now if he knew where she lived or where she hid her key? The only way she would be able to stop him from killing her would be if she killed him first.

He clasped her against him with one arm, her face buried in his throat, as he fumbled above the trim. To kill him, all she had to do was bare her fangs and sink them deep in his throat. She'd never done it before, had never drank from another being—she'd only drank the processed blood the society supplied at places like Club Underground. But she was tempted to bite now, her fangs distending inside her mouth.

He smelled of musk and male sweat from his earlier physical struggles. Hunger clutched at her, tightening the muscles in her stomach, as the urge to taste him overwhelmed her. Just as he jammed the key into the lock and threw open her apartment door, she slid her tongue down the side of his neck.

He shuddered and finally released her, kicking the door shut behind them. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked, his voice rough while his pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Do you think you're going to kill me like you killed my brother?”

“Bryan's your brother?”

“Was,” he brutally reminded her of the death of her best friend.

Regret and grief overwhelmed her now. She backed away from him, through the brick archway that led from the foyer into the living room. He followed her then gasped, staring at the artwork propped against, and hanging from, all of the weathered brick walls. He circled the room before stopping in front of the portrait of his brother.

She'd painted Bryan as a teenager, the sun shining on his bright smile while the wind ruffled his brown hair. His eyes were wide with innocence and warmth. He couldn't be dead. Not Bryan…

“You must be Liam,” she said. But she saw nothing of the freckle-faced redhead in the auburn-haired stranger she'd struggled with in the alley. The kid was in one of the portraits, too. Although they'd only met once, she'd remembered the mischievous boy Bryan had loved so much. She had painted Liam in a tree with his older brother standing beneath him, ready to catch him if he fell.

Liam reached out and ran his fingertip over the ridge of the thick oil paint. “You did these?”

She nodded then realized he had yet to pull his gaze from the painting, so she replied, “Yes.”

He moved along the wall to another portrait. “Is this you?”

Her breath caught as she stared at the blond-haired girl lying in a hospital bed, tubes and machines hooked to her fragile body. “No. It's Eve.”

“Bryan said you were the one who was sick,” he said, “who had cancer.”

“Yes, and I would have died had my parents not had Eve, not used her to save me.” That was why she'd painted that picture, to remind herself what her sister had gone through for her, what she would have gone through again had Jennifer stayed human. Their parents would have used her again, whatever the risk, to save Jennifer. Guilt was as heavy as the paint on the canvas.

Then, remembering what he had done to Eve, anger coursed through her. “You used my sister to get to me!”

“I didn't hurt her,” he said, his gaze finally locking with hers again, his pale eyes so cold and hard.

“I didn't hurt Bryan.” She gestured at the portraits she had done to remind herself of her best friend. “I couldn't have…”

“If not you,” he said, as if challenging her to change his mind about her guilt, “who would have done
that
to him?”

That
—drained him of his blood. She remembered the vivid, horrifying picture Liam had painted inside her head. “He must have tried to find me, must have learned about the secret society. They don't allow any human to learn about the society and live.”

“I'm alive,” he pointed out with that short, bitter chuckle that had her skin tingling in reaction.

What was it about the man that drew her when she should have hated him as much as he hated her? “You must not have told anyone.”

“Just Eve.”

“You might not have physically hurt her, but you put her in grave danger,” she said, fear pumping through her veins along with the rage. “You put her life at risk from them.”

“Them. They,” he repeated. “Don't you consider yourself one of them?”

She shivered. While she lived among the secret society, she wasn't entirely comfortable in their underground world – especially since one had taken that uncomfortable interest in her. But for a few friends, she kept to herself—moving from city to city, taking art classes or teaching them. At night. Always at night. But after all the years she'd spent in hospitals and her own bed, she'd grown used to going without sunshine. Eve and Bryan were all that she'd missed.

“Sometimes I don't know what I am,” she admitted, surprised she would confess so much to a stranger. “But I know what I'm not.” She stepped closer to him, so that only mere inches separated his heavily muscled chest from her breasts. Staring up into his handsome face, she stated unequivocally, “I am not a killer.”

But was he?

 

Liam wished she was lying. Then he wouldn't feel so bad about what he'd done, about how he had used her sister to further his own agenda. He hadn't thought about the danger he'd put Eve in; he'd thought only about vengeance. And if Jennifer was lying, he could have that now. He could pull another stake from the pocket of his long jacket, jam it into the gun he'd designed and fire it into Jennifer Williams's cold heart.

But her heart wasn't cold. Even if he hadn't felt her physical warmth when he'd wrestled with her and then carried her home, he would have been able to see her emotional heart. She'd put it into every one of her paintings, especially those of her little sister and those of his brother.

He turned back to the portrait of Bryan's grinning face. Unlike some of the newer canvases, which were propped against the walls, the one of Bryan hung in the place of honor over the mantel of the old Chicago-brick fireplace. “You loved him.”

“Yes.”

Liam hadn't needed her heartfelt confirmation. Her love for his brother was in every stroke of her brush across the canvas. Having felt about Bryan as she had, there was no way she could have hurt him. She never could have done to him the brutality that had been done. She'd loved Bryan too much.

Liam's gut clenched, almost as if he were jealous. Of her feelings for Bryan? He'd always thought he'd been jealous of her, that no matter how much his brother had loved him, he would have rather hung out with Jennifer Williams. When Liam turned back to her, and lost himself in those mesmerizing deep green eyes, he understood why. She wasn't just beautiful outside; she was beautiful inside, too. “He loved you, too.”

Tears trembled on her thick black lashes. “He was my best friend since kindergarten. When I got sick, other kids didn't want anything to do with me. They seemed scared that they might catch cancer. Bryan wasn't afraid of anything. He was fearless. And his friendship made me feel fearless.”

“His fearlessness is probably what led to his death.” When Jennifer had disappeared, Bryan had been determined to find her—with no thought to his own safety.

“You don't blame me anymore?” she asked.

“I don't think you killed him.” He'd had doubts in the alley—enough to spare her life then. But seeing the portraits had cemented those doubts and completely changed his mind. She couldn't have killed someone she'd cared about so much. “But I still blame you.”

She flinched as if he'd slapped her.

“It's your fault for taking off like you did. If he hadn't been looking for you, he wouldn't have found whoever killed him.” So that anger he'd felt for her, while it didn't entirely consume him as it once had, it still gnawed at him.

“I didn't think he'd look for me. I thought he'd assume what everyone else had—that I was dead.”

“He said he would have felt it—if you were dead,” he said, explaining his brother's romanticism. “You were so close that he was convinced that he would have known if you were really gone.”

A tear spilled from her eye and streaked down her cheek. “Oh, Bryan…”

“How come you didn't just know like that, that he was dead? Didn't you love him like he loved you?” She'd painted her feelings for him, but her love looked more like deep affection. His brother's love had bordered on obsession. At sixteen Liam hadn't understood that kind of love—the kind that lasted longer than a week. Hell, at thirty-six he didn't understand. He had never loved anyone like that—maybe because he'd spent so much of his life obsessed with this woman. Not out of love but out of hate and his insatiable need for revenge.

“I loved Bryan like a friend,” she said. “Just a friend…”

But his brother had wanted more, had believed that eventually she would have developed the same feelings for him that he'd had for her. If only he could find her…

“He wanted more than friendship.”

She shook her head in denial of his claim. But how could she not have known when she'd painted that love in his brother's eyes?

“That was why he never stopped looking for you,” he continued, “until he was murdered.”

She shook her head again, with another denial and with pride. “No one I know would have harmed Bryan.”

“It had to have been the professor who killed him,” Liam reflected. “Bryan would have tracked him down first, like I had. The professor's lecture on vampires being a myth was the last place you were seen twenty years ago. It had to have been the professor.” Liam should have killed the vampire while he'd had the chance. Even though he'd fired his makeshift weapon, he hadn't had it pressed tight against the professor's chest. He hadn't quite been able to bring himself to kill.

Again. He'd killed before, in the line of duty, as a marine. Not as a vampire hunter. He'd only become a hunter to kill one vampire. Jennifer Williams.

“Professor Vossimer would never hurt anyone,” Jennifer insisted, “least of all a sweet boy like Bryan.”

“You hope that's true because you trusted the man to protect your sister, and you might have put her in danger instead.” She'd urged Eve to leave with the professor and had confronted Liam alone in that dark alley. She was brave as well as beautiful.

“You put her in danger by sending her after him—after me!” Her anger returned, brightening her eyes and flushing her pale skin. She closed the distance between them and stabbed her finger in his chest. “How could you do that—”

“The same way I can do this,” he said as he wrapped his arms around her and lowered his head. He pressed his mouth to hers, and the passion that had simmered between them now sizzled. Heat fused their lips together in an intense kiss of possession and anger and undeniable desire. Her breasts molded to his chest, her heart pounding in the same crazy, rampant rhythm his did.

Her lips parted on a moan, and he slid his tongue inside her mouth and over her tongue. But then a sharp fang scraped it and he pulled back, as he remembered who and what she was. He dropped his arms from around her and stepped back to separate their bodies.

“Why'd you do that?” she asked, between pants for breath.

Stop or start? He knew why he'd stopped but not why he'd started. Except that she was so beautiful and she'd looked so vulnerable…

“Why'd you kiss me?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, afraid that he'd lost his mind. “Why'd you lick my neck earlier?”

“I wanted to taste you….”

As he had earlier, when her tongue had left a damp trail on his skin, he shuddered. He believed she hadn't killed Bryan. But that didn't mean that she wasn't capable. After all, she was a vampire.

Would she stop at just the taste—or would she take all of his blood as someone had his brother's?