Half in Love [Willie Krenshaw] (Siren Publishing Classic) (6 page)

Her hands threaded through his hair pulling his mouth to hers. She licked along his lips until he opened his lips, inviting her inside the warm depths of his mouth. Their tongues twined together and slid along each other. One of his hands caressed her back and pulled her closer. The other traveled over her ass and pushed the seam of her jeans against her slit, adding more pressure and friction to their grinding. She moaned her need into his mouth. Her orgasm was so close, and they hadn’t even gotten skin to skin yet. She ground against him faster, harder, trying to get to the top of the climax climb. She wanted to fall over the edge, feel the release of the tension and lust crawling over her skin.

She pulled her lips from his with a groan and slid her lips down his neck, laving the skin with wet kisses and licks. Instinct had her flexing her jaw muscles, enticing her canines to descend. She nipped the muscle at the base of his neck and reveled in the dark growl that vibrated against her chest in response.

A niggling thought crept through the heat of the moment. As her cougar pushed at her mind and wanted to taste his blood with wanton bloodlust a flash of reality flickered through her mind.
Oh, God.
She couldn’t bite him without claiming him. She whipped her head back and slammed it against the wall, hoping the pain would bring some sort of semblance of control back to her. A tremor of fear skated down her spine.

“Please don’t let me bite you.” Her whispered plea jerked both of them from the passionate fever igniting their bodies.

Nick reared back like she touched him with a lit match. His eyes glowed an unearthly red, irises still flooded with blood. Passion pinched his beautiful face, but control slowly bled into his features. Their breathing, harsh and shallow, echoed through the cavernous room. Panic and regret crossed his face before he closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do this to you. Just give me a minute. The rage is riding me hard, and you smell so good. Stand there for a moment, please,” he croaked. His body trembled against hers. He leaned against her almost as if she was holding him up. He sucked deep, shaky breaths in. She could see him struggling for control. After a few moments his breathing slowed, and she could feel his strength returning. She wanted to rub his back, stroke his skin to try and comfort him. She was afraid to move, though, and reignite the lust between them.

Once he seemed to be in control, he turned to face her and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize. Come on. I’ll drive us home and you can stay with me tonight. It’s too close to dawn to stay here, especially with the way your home looks. I have a safe room in the basement that you can rest in.” Willie quietly touched his shoulder and tried to keep her fear in check. Her body was still trembling from the near orgasm. Her panties were sopping wet and she was sure her jeans were soaked through. Having him in her house was probably the dumbest thing she could do, but she felt sorry for him and really didn’t want to hold the whole “being taken against the wall thing” against him. Stupid mating instincts.

Surprise flickered across his face before he nodded and walked through the house to the garage. She followed a few steps behind him, glancing around at the destruction as she walked. There were words and threats spray painted on the cream walls, piles of debris strewn across the cool marble floors, and everywhere the stench of multiple vampires.

Once in the garage he silently found keys and handed them to her. He climbed into the passenger seat of a glassy black Hummer. She walked around to the driver’s side and hoped she wasn’t making a huge mistake by taking this man, this vampire, home with her.

“Willie,” she said after about fifteen minutes of silence. She’d carefully backed out of Nick’s garage and headed home. She’d given him time to get a better handle on his emotions and given her the time to think through all the reasons she shouldn’t be taking some strange vampire back home with her. She played the whole almost sex scene through her mind and almost moaned with the memory. Her lust was still strong and hovering just under her skin. It would take only a touch of his skin to hers for her to be ready to take him into her body.
How pathetic, Willie, really.
She sighed and turned quickly to look at her passenger. “My name is Willie, well, Willimena, but I hate that name. Willie Krenshaw at your service.”

“Thank you, Willie. For everything. For staying even though the rage was so close to claiming me. For giving me the honor of knowing your name. For stopping and trying to help me. I’m indebted to you and am so sorry for my behavior.” Nick’s voice was back to normal, but he sounded tired. He’d sat and stared out the passenger window for the entire trip, barely moving to breathe.

“I understand the rage and instincts, I really do, so please don’t worry about it. Look, you can stay the day in my basement. Tomorrow night we can get you a hotel room downtown or closer to your house until you can get it cleaned up.” She glanced at his profile, lit by the clock within the truck. “I’m sorry that your home got trashed.”

He sighed and turned to look at her. His eyes still held a light shimmer of crimson, but the rage was gone. Instead, his eyes held pain and bewilderment. He nodded once in her direction and then turned to look out the window again, drowning in his own thoughts.

She kept silent the couple of minutes to her house. Her street was quiet when they stepped out of the truck. She’d bought a small row house on a side street a few years prior. It had a miniscule lot that she kept mowed and a single car garage that now housed her little Toyota. She was afraid to leave the Hummer in her driveway, but was too tired to move vehicles around. With a quick glance up and down the street, she ushered her stoic guest toward her front door.

Just as they both stepped foot on the top step a slight breeze brought the scent of death to their noses. Willie whipped her head around and sniffed into the wind. Shit. That was dead human stench. She groaned her thought, “Will this night never end?”

“We could leave it alone. Someone will stumble across it when the sun comes up,” Nick suggested. He sounded tired, and his words held no enthusiasm at all. She grinned.

“Come on. What if it’s a kid that finds the body? We can at least call the police anonymously once we find it.” She jumped down the steps and turned her face into the breeze, slowly walking down the sidewalk toward an unknown human carcass.
Nothing like a dead body to round out my night
. She snickered under her breath.

“What’re you laughing for? This isn’t funny,” he responded, surly and bitter. If he wasn’t so strong, she’d think he was whining. “I don’t find anything about this situation laughable.”

“Well, sorry. I was just thinking that there wasn’t a better way to round out this evening than wandering the streets with a full-blooded vamp looking for a body that neither of us created. Sorry if my sense of humor irritates you.” She snorted at the look of consternation that crossed his face. “You do realize that you’re the first vampire I’ve ever met that hasn’t tried to kill me, right? I mean, that in and of itself is surreal. But, figure in the fact that you were drugged, you tricked me into going to your house, which was trashed by unknown vamps, and then came to
my
house, where we sniff out a dead body? You don’t find that funny?”

“Well, I guess if you look at it that way, it is sort of morbidly funny or at least interesting,” he grumbled. “I would still rather leave the deader and go to ground. I’ve had a full enough evening already and am not looking forward to any more excitement.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch… Come on, the smell is getting stronger. I bet it’s around the corner in the big dumpsters.” She took off running down the sidewalk and rounded the corner into an alley that had seen its share of bodies dumped in it over the ages. When Willie did research on the home she purchased, she found out that the alley and the store front it resided behind had been involved in multiple deaths due to drugs, territorial fights with gangs, and more of the same. She figured that it would give her plenty of donors to feed from when the need struck her.

He huffed something about not bitching, just discussing, but she ignored him. His attitude had finally started to change, so his grumbling came out with a smile. She breathed a sigh of relief. Grumpy vampires are not good company and definitely would make her day irritating if she had to deal with him that way.

Ahead she could see a slumped body in the alleyway and figured that they had found the source of the smell. It still wasn’t strong enough that a normal human would be able to detect it, but her senses were much better than a normal human’s. She walked slowly up to the immobile body and pulled her blade from its sheath.

“Hey, buddy. You okay?” she asked quietly, nudging the person’s foot with hers. She waited for a response and listened for any sign of life, a heartbeat, breathing, anything. The lump was silent as well as the dead. She bent forward and nudged the body’s shoulder and watched in morbid fascination as the body slumped over with a thud. Rigor mortis must have set in.

Willie turned to say something to Nick and noticed the anger etched across his strong face. The blood hadn’t completely drained from his irises from his earlier brush with the rage, so his face looked terrifying with an unnatural blood-tinged glow to his eyes and the grim set to his mouth. She turned to see what would’ve caused him to be angry and noticed the puncture marks on the stiff’s neck. Well, just craptastic. The body had been drained by a vamp, and it hadn’t been either of them. She whipped her head around trying to scent or see the culprit, praying they hadn’t caught wind of her and knew that she lived nearby. She scanned the rooftops and the surrounding doorways, almost willing the vamp to show so she could kill it. She didn’t like anyone hunting on her territory, and especially not killing in her neighborhood.

“Nick, we have to go. I’ll call this in from a payphone around the corner, but we need to get out of here. I can’t lead a vamp to my house,” she whispered. She turned to grab his coat and would bodily pull him to her house if needed.

“Okay, let me just sniff the neck. Maybe I know the son of a bitch that sucked him dry.” He stepped to the body and leaned in close, inhaling deeply near the wound. Willie gagged at the image playing out in front of her. A handsome, scary-as-hell vampire bent over a corpse sniffing at the gaping wound in the stiff’s neck. She knew how strong the stench would be from the body at that close range. She turned away and waited for him with her back to the body. She might be half vampire, but that little stunt was beyond anything she would be willing to do. She would rather pack up and leave her home than get that close to a decaying body.
Yuck.

“It isn’t anyone I know,” Nick said from beside her. “But, one of the scents on the body was similar to one at my house. I’d hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I think this deader and the demolition of my house could be connected or at least involve the same vampires.”

“Great. Well, Shaggy, now that we’ve a mystery on our hands, let’s go feed Scooby and take a nap, shall we?” she said with a levity that she wasn’t sure was sarcastic or not. She was exhausted and needed to shut down her brain for a few hours to digest everything that had happened over the evening. She also needed to figure out what she was going to do with Mr. Hunky-Pants who supposedly was her mate. Freaking vampires.

“You have a dog?” Willie turned to find the first true laughter in his eyes since they opened the door to his home. “You don’t strike me as the pet type.”

“I was being sarcastic. Ass.” She grinned and strode toward the pay phone. She’d used this same phone a few times to call the police to report other crimes. An anonymous tip from this phone wasn’t anything new for the police force. “I’m calling this in, and then we’re going home. I need a snack and then a shower.”

She quickly contacted the emergency dispatch and filled in the overworked woman that answered the phone. With her Good Samaritan act finished for the night, she turned slowly and sighed heavily.

“Let’s go. We need to get you in my basement before the sun rises and me into my bed.” She turned and started trudging toward her home when she sensed his approach. She only twitched slightly when he grabbed her hand and wound it around his arm in an old-fashioned gesture of chivalry. She glanced sideways to see Nick grinning mischievously at her. She scowled at the impish smile. “And,
no
, I’m not sharing the bed with you.”

Nick chuckled at her and turned his attention away as they ambled down the sidewalk. She took a deep breath and let the mixture of his scent and the night air sooth her nerves. He’d soon be absconded away in her basement, safe from the daylight. That would leave her to be tortured by the scent of this gorgeous creature until nightfall. She wanted to at least enjoy the few feet they had left to walk. The memory of her wrapped around his body grinding herself against his cock brought heat and need back to her body. Everything inside her wanted to continue their exploration of each other. Fate was laughing her lovely head off at their plight.

“We have company,” he breathed into her ear.

“Shit.” She glanced around without really moving her head and noticed at least two guys watching them. Well, to Hell in a hand basket. She hadn’t even sensed them.
Too much time woolgathering instead of paying attention to your surroundings
. Her mind raced through possibilities, but nothing came to mind to get them out of this if the observing vamps wanted to take action. She wasn’t fast enough to escape, wasn’t strong enough to take on two of them, not after the night she’d already endured. She was just too tired to talk her way out of anything so a diplomatic solution was out of the question. As she tensed to run, she felt a warm hand slip around her waist. She shivered at the heat the simple touch sent through her body.