Forbidden Blood (Vampire Venators Romance Series) (34 page)

Amber gasped. Kearn frowned at his brother, unimpressed by his attempt to frighten her.

“Consensual biting only for our boy.” Kyran slumped further down the armchair with a long sigh. “Of course, there are vampires who still kill people, and those bloody Commoners can bite all they fancy.”

“Because they can’t turn people without giving them blood too,” Amber said.

His brother raised a single dark eyebrow at her. “Kearn has been telling you all about our sordid little world, hasn’t he?”

Kyran seemed disappointed. Had he wanted to upset Amber and cause a rift between them? Kearn had told her enough that she would be prepared in his world and would know what awaited her when he brought her over.

Amber looked at him. “Have you ever drunk from someone?”

Each of those words fell like lead on his chest and before he could even look at Kyran to tell him not to say a word, he was on his feet and speaking.

“Only another vampire, eh, brother?”

Kearn scowled.

“She was a feisty little thing too… went after you with a vengeance. A real firecracker and one hell of an introduction to the pleasures of mating. What a fiancée to have!”

Amber’s face dropped.

A moment later, her expression was flat but she couldn’t hide the hurt from Kearn. She smiled, shrugged, and looked as though she might laugh. It didn’t lessen her pain. It radiated through him, her blood cursing him, and then the connection between them severed, leaving him cold and alone.

Had she done it?

He tried to speak to her blood again but felt nothing.

Kyran’s eyebrows rose. “Have I said something wrong?”

“I need to sleep.” Amber hurried past both him and his brother, heading for the kitchen door, her fingertips grazing the bandage around her throat.

Kearn punched Kyran as hard as he could manage, knocking his head to one side and toppling him. He wanted to knock it off.

Kyran rubbed his jaw, picked himself up and glared at him. “What was that for?”

“You know damn well what it was for.” Kearn looked up at the ceiling. He could only sense Amber as a human in the building. He could feel nothing from her. He growled at Kyran.

Kyran smiled, dark and vicious. Victorious. “Oops.”

There was another knock at the door.

Kyran passed him and went through the entranceway to the front door. He opened it and pushed past the man standing there. The man looked at Kearn.

His brother really had ordered food for Amber.

Kearn dug his wallet out of his pocket. The pizza delivery man took the money and handed him the flat white box. The smell of it turned Kearn’s stomach, worsening the ache there.

There was so much pain in his heart that it felt as though it was going to stop. There was so much sorrow. It wasn’t only his this time. Amber’s feelings were beginning to trickle through to him again and he didn’t think he would be able to bear the weight of her emotions if the connection fully reopened.

He dropped the pizza box beside the blood pack on the coffee table and went upstairs to the bedroom where they had slept together. The door was closed. He tried the handle. Locked. He knocked but she didn’t answer.

Kearn spread his hand out against the door, feeling her on the other side. He could open the door if he wanted to, but it wasn’t his decision to make. She had to allow him back inside, into her life again. In order for that to happen, he had to be honest with her and tell her about his past.

He turned and sat on the dusty wooden floor, his back against the wall, and rested his left elbow on his bent knee and stretched his right leg out. He pressed his foot against the other side of the low-lit hall and sighed.

It would hurt to dredge up memories he wanted to forget but he would bear the pain so she would see that what had happened was far in the past and there was no need for her to be upset.

“Will you listen to me?” He felt foolish for talking to the wall opposite. His senses locked on her, giving him a point of focus, and he felt her move. She didn’t come closer. She remained at a distance.

It seemed she wasn’t going to speak to him.

He would speak to her then, confess all his sins and hope she would return to him.

“I was young and stupid. My family arranged our engagement at birth. A prosperous marriage to improve relations between two bloodlines. It was all I had been good for back then.”

Silence.

He picked at the knee of his trousers and tried to feel her. She was closing to him again.

“Kyran had been due to receive the duty of Venator from our father. I was only required to produce sons that could possibly inherit the duty.” It pained him to think of how his life had been. He longed for the past but had never once desired to return to a world where he was married off and expected only to procreate and continue the ruling line. “It was nothing but a marriage of convenience to a house beneath my own… politics and money… more about power than anything else.”

He sighed again and pressed the back of his head into the wall behind him. Telling her this made him realise just what an idiot he had been as a youth. He had blindly followed his parents’ wishes. He hadn’t thought to question them or persuade them to let him live his own life and find his own love, and then it had been too late.

“It was all I was good for and I went along with it.”

“What happened?” Amber whispered and he smiled at the sound of her voice and the comfort it gave him.

She sat on the other side of the wall, her back against his, and he liked the feel of her close to him.

“My fiancée was sleeping with Kyran too. I realised that it was not love I had found but lust—a shallow craving for her brought about by her tainted blood. She had made me drink from her the first time we met and every day after that. I had thought the way I had felt was the giddiness of love, but she had been feeding on Source Blood.”

Kearn stared at the wall. He still felt betrayed and broken. The countess had sought to enslave him using her blood, keeping him doped enough that he would go along with anything. She had been as beautiful as any of his kind, but only on the outside. Inside she had been wretched, rotten with her desire for power and standing, and willing to bed anyone to achieve it.

Even his own brother.

“How did you know about Kyran?”

He clenched his fists at the memory and took a deep breath.

“I caught them together in the orchard one night, Kyran with her pinned to the largest apple tree and her legs wrapped around him. The sounds of their moans haunted me that night and I soon discovered from some of the servants that it had been happening since her arrival at the house.”

“That’s terrible,” Amber whispered and her blood opened to him again. Only sorrow came through their connection.

“I cannot blame my brother for what happened. It took only a little research to discover that the countess had a reputation amongst servants, and not only those of my bloodline, for scandalous behaviour. She would bed anyone who might give her power... seducing them for it. She had been acting the wanton whore for many years in Europe before her family forced her to uphold her part in our engagement and come to me.”

Something in Amber’s blood spoke to him, relaying the things that she couldn’t say. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t bring himself to blame his brother for his part in what happened. It was the one area where Kearn was stronger than his brother was. Kyran had a weakness for women. The slightest smile from a beauty and he would pursue them with the intent of bedding them. It was his Achilles' heel and the countess had used her knowledge of it well in her quest for power. Kearn still wasn’t sure whether she had intended to marry him and continue sleeping with his brother, or whether she had intended to swap them and marry Kyran instead. There was more honour in marrying a Venator, and more power came from it. It made sense that she had planned to marry Kyran and had only remained engaged to him as a fall back in case things didn’t work out.

“What did you do?” Amber moved on the other side of the wall, turning towards him.

“I was a mess. I wandered into the woods one night looking for something… pain, something to kill, some way of undoing what had happened, an end perhaps… what I found was a new beginning.” Kearn turned his head to one side, trying to get closer to Amber. He wanted to feel her arms around him and hear her say that they were going to be alright. He wanted her to love him. “The Sovereignty took me. They told me to have my vengeance by their decree.”

“And you did?”

“And I did.” He sighed. At the time, he hadn’t realised that they had been testing him. “I came back to the house and I used the power they had given me to kill her. It was terrifying to feel the hideous power of the Sovereignty flowing through me and into her, sucking the life out of her and taking her soul to the eternal darkness. I could feel everything that she did... I was connected to her through the power... and I realised that she had been with child.”

“Was it yours?”

Her blood demanded an answer.

“No.”

“Kyran’s.”

“Yes.” He paused. “I never told him. The Sovereignty brought me back to their world and announced that Kyran had committed unforgivable sin and would not become a Venator. He was forfeit and his blood impure. I tried to argue. I’d had my revenge and wanted nothing else. I was sick to my stomach from experiencing killing with the power and in no fit state to do what they were asking of me. I wanted nothing more to do with them. It made no difference.”

He could still see the grey stone hall and everything that had happened that night. He had returned to the Sovereignty, bloodied from his first kill, pained by what he had done to the woman and what she had done to him. He had expected them to take away the markings on his arm and they had refused. He had argued so violently, threatened them, tried to hurt them, but nothing he had done had changed their minds.

“They made the marks on my arm permanent, changed my appearance so I would be recognised as a hunter of theirs, and pronounced me Venator of house Savernake. I returned to my family to find them gathered in the grand reception room. Kyran, mother and my father were there.” He could picture it clearly—the door ajar, his father’s proud expression as he addressed Kyran, and his mother’s smile. He had shattered the happy scene. “My father told Kyran that his duties had ended. I walked in at that moment, wanting to explain.”

Shock had rippled across their faces and they had stared at him, Kyran most of all. The pain had been clear in both his eyes and his blood. That night Kearn had cursed the strength of their familial bond. He hadn’t wanted to see the pain he had caused let alone feel it. He had been desperate tell Kyran that he would fix everything with the Sovereignty. Kyran had only ever spoken of becoming a Venator. It had been his dream.

“Kearn?” Amber’s soft voice drifted through the wall, through his blood, her concern overwhelming.

“Kyran tried to kill me before I could utter a word. Our father separated us and when I explained what had happened, Kyran was cast out, disgraced.”

“But he’s back now.”

“Since I killed my aunt… Kyran has become mother’s favourite… welcomed back to stop my mother from descending into madness. She begged my father.”

“And instead you took his place.” Amber opened the door and he looked at her. She knelt in front of him, her hazel eyes reflecting the worry and sorrow that he could feel in her blood. What a beautiful creature she was to look at him like that after everything he had done. She cast her gaze downwards to her knees. “Did you love her?”

Kearn reached over and stroked her cheek, bringing his fingers slowly down to her chin. He tilted it up so she would see the truth in his eyes and feel it in his blood.

“Not love,” he whispered, fascinated by the shyness in her eyes. “Not like I feel for you.”

Amber’s arms were around him in an instant, her lips against his. She kissed him softly enough that his heart expanded and beat harder, filled with warmth and happiness. He rose with her and gathered her into his arms, his mouth moving against hers, taking all of her into him. He wanted to devour her. He wanted all of her forever.

She moaned quietly, driving him on, and he parted her lips with his tongue. Hers came to meet it, tangling gently and stirring his blood until his need for her filled every inch of him, every cell in his body screaming out for her. A soft gasp escaped her when he scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom. His body hardened at the sound and the thought of being inside her again. He would be gentler with her this time. His desperation had passed and her consent to be his had assuaged his hunger to bite her.

Now he could control himself and make love to her as he had wanted to their first time.

CHAPTER 24

A
mber was beautiful beneath him, stripped bare and laying on the bed with her long dark hair fanned out across the pillow. Kearn ran his fingers lazily down her side, considering where to start. The bottom up. He wanted to be starving for her kiss by the time he reached her mouth.

He moved to her feet and stroked the arch of her left foot. Her soft laugh was music to his ears. He smiled, raised her foot and kissed it and then her ankle. He slid his hands up her leg to her calf and glanced down at the apex of her thighs. Dark curls hid heaven from view. Just the memory of how hot and tight she had been had his hard length bobbing for more. He groaned and dragged his eyes away. He would never reach her lips if he kept looking there.

Amber sighed when he kissed along her slender calf and then her thigh, careful to feel and taste every inch of her. She had strong legs. He grimaced at the recollection of their first meeting and how his groin had been on the receiving end of her knee. He kissed the knee in question and continued upwards, playfully nipping her hip with his blunt teeth.

Hunger surged through him and he did it again, harder this time. Amber’s low moan sent a shiver through him and his eyes switched to crimson, his senses and vision sharpening. He pulled away the moment his fangs extended, kneeling between her spread thighs and breathing hard to regain control.