Bad Mouth (8 page)

He drew away from her and pushed his hands through his hair, his biceps bunching with
tension. “No, I couldn’t have.”

“Yes, you could. You’re the third most powerful vampire in the
Immortalis
. You can do what you want.”

“Dammit, Val, trust me,” he snapped. She recoiled at his harsh demeanor. “Our races
may appear similar, but we’re so fucking different. You’re assuming the rules restricting
transformations are ours. They are not. These men are falling through
your
cracks, not ours. Criminal background has no bearing in our approvals. None.”

She felt the shock of his words down to her toes. “That’s insane.”

“Why would it matter to us what they did in their former life?”

“Why do you think?” she asked. He shrugged, driving her mood from horrified to outraged.
“Because they could commit more of the same crimes.”

He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Yet they were all released from your prisons
as free men.”

That took some of the wind from her sails. “That’s different,” she said. He didn’t
look convinced. “Now that they’re turned, they have an eternity.”

“When you freed them from prison, telling them their debt to society was paid in full,
did you stipulate the remaining length of their lives?” His point made, he didn’t
wait for her answer. “Val, aside from the recent derangements, when was the last time
you’ve heard of an
Immortalis
-related crime?”

“I—” Shit. She’d been a little girl at the time.

He nodded. “In my culture, breaking protocol just isn’t done. It has dire consequences
no matter who you are. If the
Rex
himself broke protocol, he’d be subject to execution the same as anyone else. Turning
these approved men doesn’t break any rules. But refusing the order to turn them? Fuck,
Val, there’s no hiding that. I might as well offer my nuts on a platter right next
to my head.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Can’t you change the protocols?”

He dropped his hands to his hips, his jaw clenching and releasing as he considered
her. She’d give just about anything to know what he was thinking as he watched her
with such intensity. Then he reached for her waist, pulling her in close to his body
that had grown considerably hotter as they’d stood at his entryway.

“For once, I wish I could.” His gaze caressed her face. “Only when I become the new
Rex
will I have a chance at setting protocol, and even then, it’s a tricky mindfuck to
get the
Immortalis
behind it. Most see change as an enemy they need to defy.”

That was news to her. She’d always thought anything Olen
Rex
said was law. “But if you were the
Rex
, don’t they have to do as you order?”

He chuckled close to her ear, and her senses went on high alert, absorbing the heat
of his breath on her skin. “A leader is only as powerful as his followers allow. Yes,
they’ll do as they’re commanded, but there are boundaries. If the boundaries need
to be pushed, it must be done gently.” He trailed his hand up the valley of her spine
and tugged a lock of her hair. “I don’t do gentle well, Val.”

She gasped and then clamped her lips together. A shot of desire hit her hard and throbbed
between her legs.

His knowing smirk made her want to dump ice water down her panties. Then his smile
faded. “It wouldn’t be my priority to change protocol, not for humans.”

Of course he would feel that way, and she understood, but now that she knew about
the felons, she could change that for him. “You’ve only ever seen the worst humans.
I understand now why you don’t like us, but you haven’t seen the good ones yet.”

He slid both of his arms behind her and tightened his grip around her waist, aligning
his body with hers. “I see you.”

The low-lidded, sensual look on his face made her body hum. She pressed her thighs
together to sooth the insistent, pounding need between them. Now was the time to move
away before the intent in his expression became reality, but when he lowered his head
toward her, her lids dropped slowly of their own volition. The soft brush of his lips
over hers was a shot of wine to her veins. It went straight to her head, and everything
resembling logical thought went fuzzy. She clutched his shoulders, the fabric of his
shirt bunching beneath her palms.

He slicked his tongue over her bottom lip, and she opened for him. The second he entered
her mouth, he lit off like an explosive. The heat in his skin beneath her fingers
ramped up to a feverish level. His hips moved against her as if he couldn’t control
himself, and every thrust added to the searing pulses of pleasure in her core.

A tortured moan pushed from his throat. “Val,” he said. “Leave now or I can’t stop.
I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

But she couldn’t leave, not with his hot mouth on hers, and his hard shaft against
her belly, and her right brain shorted out by his kiss. She lifted up on her tiptoes
and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. Good Lord, he was sexy. Her body trembled
at each touch and each satisfying sound rumbling from deep in his chest.

“Kade,” she whispered. He cupped her rear with one hand, keeping her tight against
him while his other hand traced a line between her breasts. He covered her hardened
nipple with his mouth, dampening her blouse. She whimpered when the suction and scrape
of his teeth pulled a streak of delicious, nerve-tingling pleasure to the needy, swollen
place where his shaft stroked. As if his tongue was there, too. And then he reached
under her skirt from behind, and his fingers were there, caressing her through her
silk panties. He slipped beneath the silk and spreading her wet response around her
entrance and right up to the place she needed it. Her breath panted out in shallow
gasps. She’d never been so on fire for a man.

She tugged at his T-shirt, pushing it up his chest, shoving him away from her breast
only long enough to lift the shirt over his head. Her fingertips smoothed his thick
biceps and the muscles of his pecs, and down the ridges of his abs. Even his chest
hair was magnificently trim with a light sprinkle over his pecs and above his small,
dark brown nipples. Lower still, she traced the V at his hips that disappeared into
his jeans along with the trail of soft hair below his navel.

“I might finish just looking at you,” she said.

At the sound of her voice, he jerked away. After a moment of shock, the sudden cold
distance between them forced her wits to return. Probably a good thing, considering
her flesh was quivering, suffering from pleasure withdrawals.

“Fuck.” He wore a scowl and glared at her. As if this temporary insanity had been
all her fault. Hadn’t he been the one to make the first move?

But she’d lost her head as much as he had. He was a vampire, the creature she had
sworn should be wiped from existence. Humans were nothing more than food or entertainment
to them. Still, she ached to stuff those thoughts into a dark hole and bury them.

Had she really thought his cruelty okay because those subjugates had been bad men?
She wanted to tell herself it was justified, and maybe it was, but that didn’t mean
he had the right to punish men who had already served their time. The rationalization
had knocked down the walls of her self-preservation so darn easily, as if the subjugates’
treatment had been her only reason for not jumping Kade sooner.

“Mind if we forget this ever happened?” His voice ground out as rough as her emotions.

His words struck a sharp ache in her chest that made her breath hitch. Then a welcome
numbness crept over her. She reminded herself that she hadn’t wanted what had started
between them either. “Forget
what
ever happened?” She tried to keep self-recrimination from her voice but doubted she’d
succeeded.

He nodded sharply and headed toward the living room, grabbing his shirt from the floor
and pulling it back over his head. “I’m aware not all humans are like those I transform.”

“Then why—”

“Have you ever met a vampire you liked?”

“A few times, but—”

“But not enough to change how you feel about us, right?” He didn’t bother waiting
for an answer as he took a seat with the balcony at his back. “Damn straight.”

“As simple as that? You’d base your judgment about an entire race on those men?”

He pinned her with stony, crimson eyes. “You are the last person who should criticize,
Val. The very last person.”

She sank onto the couch across from him. Admitting he was likely right felt akin to
swallowing acid, so she kept her silence.

No matter what, she had to put an end to the criminals obtaining legal transformation
approvals. Because Kade wouldn’t stop. She may not see him in the same negative light
as at their first meeting, but he was the same man he’d been when she’d met him. Less
than
four days ago
, which brought her back to her first thought: what the hell was she doing?

Chapter Eleven

“Stop it.” Kade could tell Val’s wheels were turning by her expressive face.

“Stop what?”

“Stop thinking so much. Sometimes you have to live the moment you’re in or you’ll
miss everything.”

Her lips tightened, but he couldn’t tell if it was from displeasure or from trying
not to smile. “Profound. How’d you get so wise?”

“I’m older than I look.” He laughed despite his own dismal mood. He wanted so strongly
to caress her face that he fidgeted with the seam of his jeans to quell the urge.
He never fidgeted, but it had felt too damned good to touch Val’s skin, like touching
a velvet cloud.

The fact that he’d touched her at all was all kinds of fucked up. Her humanity put
her so far out of his reach in more ways than one, and he had no business engaging
his desires beyond fantasizing about them. Even that pushed his limits. He’d never
gotten along well with humans. After all he’d seen and experienced, they might as
well be domesticated animals at his feet.

Val tapped her plump, freshly kissed lower lip thoughtfully. “So what you do you want
to do now?”

“Nail you against the wall with my cock.” He’d meant to tease her to see that beautiful,
rosy flush heighten in her cheeks, but most of him was onboard with nailing her, no
matter how bad that idea.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “How romantic. You never quit, do you?”

He gave her his most lecherous grin. “I told you—two hundred years. If I can’t do
it in that much time, it’s not mean to be.” His smile disappeared. “And it is romantic.
I don’t touch humans without the intent to harm.”

“Kade, I have to show you that what you’ve known of humans until now is all wrong.”
A sweet, keen urgency radiated from her voice and her eyes. If a bomb had landed on
his head, it wouldn’t have hit him harder. How he felt about her, about humans, truly
mattered to her. “Those men weren’t normal people. They were more like the deranged.
I’m getting a work group together. They’ll screen the applications to make sure no
more of them get approved. You won’t have to punish them anymore.”

“Punish them?” He couldn’t have been more surprised by her assumption. “Is that what
you think I do?”

“Is there another reason?” She leaned forward and clasped her hands together tightly.
A glimmer of hope shone in her expression. Several beats of his heart passed before
he could get past how fucking beautiful she looked right then.

He shook enough sense back into his head to respond. “Their disfigurement isn’t a
punishment. It’s insurance.”

She frowned. “Insurance?”

“Val, transformation doesn’t change anything. Humans come out of it the same as when
they went in, their dark desires, their vices, their weaknesses. Take what you know
of those men and add supernatural strength and speed topped with a hunger for blood
that’s nearly impossible for a new vampire to control. How safe is it to unleash that
on the world?”

“You said the
Immortalis
don’t break protocol.”

He crossed the distance between them to sit beside her. “Not all newly turned make
it far enough to truly become
Immortalis
. The first year is brutal, tenuous. They’re watched closely by an adjuvant until
the risk of them going rogue has passed. It’s in the interim when those men get dangerous.
I have no power when they assign a subjugate. I have to turn the goddamned subjugate.
But I damned well make sure what’s inside the motherfucker will show on the outside.
So every man, woman, and child will turn and run at the sight of him.”

Her gaze softened, and her luscious mouth pulled up into the sweet hint of a smile.
She should have thought him the worst kind of beast, an unfeeling, sociopathic barbarian.
It’s what he believed of himself. Instead, she looked at him as if he rescued orphans
for a living.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he grumbled. “I do it for selfish reasons. I enjoy what
I do to them. My true nature comes out.”

“You only say that because you think all humans are brutal. Kade, you protected humanity
from the evil those men could have done. You did it in a more violent manner than
I would have chosen, but your intent was noble.”

Goddamn. Every time he turned around, she surprised the hell out of him again. Would
any other human have understood him so well? He swept a lock of hair from her forehead,
twirling it his fingers. “I don’t think all humans are brutal.”

She went on as if he hadn’t tried to divert the subject. “What about Ezra? You said
he loves everything human. Didn’t you think it strange he’d love people as evil as
the ones you turned?”

He gave her a flat stare. “Ezra also likes to kill his food.”

Val nearly choked. “I don’t believe you. I met him in person today.”

“Don’t be deceived by his Jolly Joe act. He’s all legal and everything, but he’ll
love a human to death, literally.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should it?”

“Kade!”

He shifted away from her and sank back against the couch. He’d grown so used to living
within his horrific reputation. Cruelty was expected of him. But not by Val. She saw
something in him that even he didn’t. Her stubborn notion of his intrinsic sense of
honor flustered him. “Fucking hell, Val. I told you I do what I do for selfish reasons.”

She followed his movement, bracing her elbow next to him with her long, golden hair
brushing his shoulder. He immediately began toying with a thick, curly lock again.
His body must have developed a mind of its own.

“Tell me,” she whispered. He didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the view of the Sound.
If he looked at her, he’d be lost. “Please, Kade. I want to understand.”

The warm, syrupy emotion in her plea won the battle raging inside of him. He’d spent
the equivalent of several human lifetimes living silently with the weight of the atrocities
he’d endured and committed, and for some godforsaken reason, he wanted her, of all
people, to understand. He wanted—
needed
—to dredge the deep lake of his pain.

He gathered his balls of steel, brought his gaze to meet hers, and cleared his throat
before mentally leaping over the edge of a cliff. “My surrogate was a subjugate. My
nannies, my tutors, the cooks, the drivers, and the house staff were all subjugates.
I was raised by subjugates. I rarely saw Olen and Evangeline, at least for the first
dozen years of my life.”

He took a deep breath. Tension bunched in his muscles to an aching pitch. “The subjugates
hated me, Val.
Hated me
. From my earliest memory, every one of them did all they could to bring on the agony.
They chained me, beat me, whipped me, cut me, broke me, starved me, burned me. They
left me in the elements when I’d just learned to walk. They ripped out hair and fingernails.”

“Did they…?” She didn’t say the word
rape
aloud, but her meaning was clear enough to him.

He shook his head. “One small mercy.”

“Your parents never found out? You never told them?”

“It was what I knew. It was how life was. I had no idea things should be different,
and it was either a blessing or a curse that I healed before the Ancients could see
the evidence.”

“How long?”

“Twelve years. Until I was old enough and strong enough to fight back.” He closed
his eyes, his mind taking him back to a barbaric moment in time, a time he didn’t
want her to see reflected in his expression. “That first day was a bloody massacre.
I bathed in it. I fed better than I had my entire life, even until now. That day I
learned the truth of things, that I am the predator and they, the prey. The Ancients
found out and had the others executed, the ones I hadn’t yet slain.”

Her gorgeous emerald eyes grew damp. “Kade.” She didn’t say anything more. Perhaps
he should have been offended—he was the wrong sort of vampire to find tolerance for
pity—but it wasn’t really pity he saw in her. It was heartache over what he’d endured.
She felt for him in a way no person, vampire or human, had ever shown him. Before
he realized what he was about, he swept his thumb along her lower lashes.

“Are those for me?” he murmured. Her empathy shocked him and then settled over him
like the warmth that had been denied him as a child. “You’re crying for me?”

She captured his wrist before he could pull away. “For the boy you were.”

Aw, hell. She always had a way of dragging a smile to his lips. “He’s still in here,
Val. Where do you think my foul mouth comes from?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t get rid of that then,” she said with a wobbly grin.
She brushed tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. The innocence of the
gesture hooked its barbs into what little tender bits of his heart existed.

Again she pinned him with that hung-the-stars look. A sharp twinge of longing lanced
through him. She made him want to be the man she imagined him to be. If only he could
be that man, but she couldn’t be more wrong. He’d done terrible, fucked-up things
to humans in his long life. He was still doing terrible, fucked-up things, the kinds
of things that would destroy any warmth she had for him.

He’d never see that look on her face again if she knew what he hid from her. The thought
of caring about a human’s perception of him should make his skin crawl. Nevertheless,
the image of her repulsion and her disappointment was a jagged, rusty spike shoved
right up into no man’s land.

Dangerous emotions. May as well roll over and expose his belly to a pack of starving
wolves. Humans were vulnerable, short-lived, and fundamentally different when it came
to ethics and morality. No upside existed in dealing with them, and caring for one
invited pain and conflict through the front door. There was a reason he never learned
the names of his subjugates before they were turned, no matter how well they served
him. A vamp never knew how long a human would last in the life.

He’d already made a mistake by opening up to her with his past. Goddamn. He had to
stop. She could get him killed. Fuck’s sake, she could get herself killed. If he had
to stifle his crushing need to touch her and tie her to his side in order to keep
them both safe, then he’d eat the bullet and do whatever was necessary. He would keep
on lying to her despite the backlash of his regret.

…

When Kade’s gentle touch dropped from her face, Val mourned the loss. Only days ago
being close and nearly intimate with a vampire would have been a nightmare to her.
But Kade wasn’t just a vampire. He was a whole person. He had a dark past and feelings
and opinions and a keen intellect. She wanted to know his dreams. She wanted to heal
his soul the way he’d tried to heal hers. At the moment, though, time was ticking,
the night wasting, and they had work to do.

“You’re thinking about getting to work, aren’t you?” he asked. Psychic.

She let her hand trail down his chest. “Uh-hmm.
Thinking
about it.” His chest moved with laughter beneath her palm, and then he groaned.

“I feel something, Val, right under your hand. It kinda hurts. Think I might have
caught something.”

She tipped her head back to look at him and lost her breath. Raw emotion and the velvety-red
glow of his gaze softened his features. He cupped her cheek and brought his lips to
hers. His kiss brought tears to her eyes. He lingered, his touch soft and tender,
and firing off her nerve endings. She could spend all night basking in kisses like
this and it would never be enough. His eyes were still closed when he pulled back.
She ran her fingers through his hair, loving the satiny texture against her skin.

“Thank you,” he said. He opened his eyes and winked. “See? I’m learning.”

“Don’t look so happy with yourself. You’re far from housebroken.”

With a grin, he headed toward the bathroom, tugging her off the sofa as he went. They
freshened up their disheveled appearances, using separate bathrooms in spite of his
efforts to talk her into sharing. They wouldn’t get any interviews done if they kept
that up. It was entirely too easy to lose her head with him.

Shortly, they were on their way to a suburban residence of a Legion vampire named
Wallace Dannon. The vampire had witnessed the aftermath of a more recent blooding
near Lake Washington.

This blooding, along with the one at Gas Works Park, were body dumps—the crime had
been committed at some other unknown site. Unease rippled through her. Deranged weren’t
known to cover up their crimes. They were too far beyond logical reasoning. Maybe
she’d catch a break, and they’d have as much luck with this Legion as they’d had with
Ptolomy and Selene.

“Ready for this?” He flashed her a smile with a shot of fang.

She huffed. “You are dying to light into someone, aren’t you?”

A wicked laugh was his answer. He laced his fingers with hers and led her up the walkway.
A demure young female subjugate, greeting him properly, allowed them entry and guided
them to an office to await the Legion.

Val admired Kade’s profile as he watched out the window. The night was loving toward
him, the moonlight highlighting the dip and swell of his muscles, sharpening the angles
of his face. Even from halfway across the room, the faint, spicy scent of him sent
a kaleidoscope of images through her mind. His touch, his kiss, that terrible, sexy
mouth, the way his hips fit perfectly between her legs. She pressed her hands to her
cheeks, trying to cool them. She was behaving like a teen in the throes of her first
crush.

Wallace broke her train of thought with a noisy entrance. After tripping over obstacles
in his office, the clumsy, robust man addressed them.

“Ahem. How may I serve, my lord?”

Kade turned from the window, a smile hinted at the corners of his lips, but then it
was gone. His eyes widened and then narrowed. “You!”

Wallace collapsed to his knees, his hands over his head. “Mercy! I beg you, my lord.”