Love Bites

Praise for Angela Knight and her novels

“If you like alpha heroes, wild rides, and pages that sizzle in your hand, you’re going to love [Angela Knight]!”

—J. R. Ward, #1
New York Times
bestselling author

“Chills, thrills, and a super hero and heroine will have readers racing through this sexy tale. Take note, time-travel fans, the future belongs to Knight!”

—Emma Holly,
USA Today
bestselling author

“Sexy and unique.”

—
Romance Reader at Heart

“A wonderful science fiction romantic suspense.”

—
Genre Go Round Reviews

“The character chemistry is gorgeous; the sex is searing hot; the world fascinating and a joy to explore. All in all, a great book!”

—
Errant Dreams Reviews

“Solid writing . . . sexy love scenes, and likable characters. I look forward to [Knight’s] next book.”

—
All About Romance

“Nicely written, quickly paced, and definitely on the erotic side.”

—
Library Journal

“The sex scenes were explosive and should have come with a warning for the reader to have a fire extinguisher handy during reading.”

—
Euro-Reviews

“Delicious . . . Wonderfully crafted . . . Angela Knight brings such life to her characters.”

—
Romance Reviews Today

Titles by Angela Knight

Mageverse Series

MASTER OF THE NIGHT

MASTER OF
THE MOON

MASTER OF W
OLVES

MASTER OF SWOR
DS

MASTER OF DRAGONS

MASTER OF FIRE

MAST
ER OF SMOKE

MASTER O
F SHADOWS

MASTER OF
DARKNESS

The Time Hunters Series

JANE’S WAR
LORD

WARRIOR

GUARDIA
N

CAPTIVE DREAMS

(with Diane Whiteside)

M
ERCENARIES

WICKED GA
MES

LOVE BITES

Specials

MOON
DANCE

Anthologies

HOT BLOODED

(with Christine Feehan, Maggie Shayne, and Emma Holly)

BITE

(with Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, and Vickie Taylor)

KICK ASS

(with Maggie Shayne, MaryJanice Davidson, and Jacey Ford)

OVER THE MOON

(with MaryJanice Davidson, Virginia Kantra, and Sunny)

BEYOND THE DARK

(with Emma Holly, Lora Leigh, and Diane Whiteside)

SHI
FTER

(with Lora Leigh, Alyssa Day, and Virginia Kantra)

HOT FOR THE HO
LIDAYS

(with Lora Leigh, Anya Bast, and Allyson James)

BURNING UP

(with Nalini Singh, Virginia Kantra, and Meljean Brook)

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2014 by Julie Woodcock.

Excerpt © 2014 by Julie Woodcock.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-16869-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Knight, Angela.

Love bites / Angela Knight.—Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-25491-2

1. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3611.N557L68 2014

813'.6—dc23

2014020314

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / September 2014

Cover photo © coka/Shutterstock Images.

Cover design by Rita Frangie.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I’m very fortunate to have wonderful beta readers and critique partners willing to read my work and give me comments with heroic speed in order to accommodate my deadlines.

My newest crit partner, Joey W. Hill, writes truly delicious erotic romance. As with Arthur and Gwen’s story, “The Once and Future Lover,” in
Wicked Games
, Joey’s invaluable suggestions helped me deepen the romance in “Oath of Service.”

For years now, a group of terrific writers has been reading my books and giving me pointers about improving them. If you’d like to read something hot enough to singe your eyebrows off, look no further than the work of my good friends Shelby Morgen, Kate Douglas, Diane Whiteside, Camille Anthony, and Marteeka Karland.

Virginia Ettel, aka Bookdragon, is not a writer, but I trust and value her unflinching honesty and perception. Virginia, with Diane, also moderates my Yahoo loop, which I deeply appreciate. Like Diane, Shelby, Kate, Camille, Marteeka, and Joey, she’s a dear friend I’m lucky to have.

And as always, I want to thank my endlessly patient editor, Cindy Hwang; her assistant, Kristine Swartz; and Berkley’s production team.

B
e warned:
this anthology is quite a bit hotter than my other Mageverse books. All three stories in
Love Bites
deal with themes of domination and submission, featuring bondage, spanking, and kinky sex. If you don’t like those things, you probably won’t like this book.

Besides kink, the stories all involve vampires, though they’re set in different universes with different rules. The first of them, “Oath of Service” is a novella of the Mageverse, in which the Knights of the Round Table are vamps—or Magi—and their ladies are witches called Majae. I’ve published nine previous books and several novellas set in the Mageverse; you can learn more about them at my website, angelasknights.com. But even if you’ve never read any of the rest of the series, “Oath of Service” is written to be a stand-alone story.

“Oath” is a novel-length present-day tale about the romance between the witch Morgana le Fay and Sir Percival, dominant and Knight of the Round Table. Morgana often drives the action in my Mageverse novels with her cool manipulation. She finally meets her match in Percival, who doms her ruthlessly with a little help from his partner knights, Cador and Marrok.

The following short, “Be Careful What You Wish For,” was penned for the entertainment of my Yahoo group some years ago. Previously unpublished, it features Amanda Carlton, Beau Gabriel, and Jim Decker, a trio of vampires who appeared in several unpublished stories. In the Mageverse, women become witches rather than vampires, but that’s not the case in Amanda’s universe. When she and her male companions clash with an evil wizard, things get extremely kinky.

The third short, “The Bloodslave,” is a futuristic story about three vampire mercenaries who capture a pretty virgin warrior they consider the answer to their kinky prayers. Previously published in an e-book called
Bodice Rippers
in 2001, it’s always been a favorite of mine, so I’m offering it here.

Finally, I’m including a sample chapter of my next book, a romantic suspense. Cops Frank Murphy and Alex Rogers attempt to balance their mutual taste for BDSM with the demands of being sheriff’s deputies in a conservative Southern town. To make their lives even more complicated, they find themselves the target of a cop killer who doesn’t approve of their kinky love affair.

If you have a taste for fanged dominants and the ladies who love them, I hope you’ll enjoy my
Love Bites.

T
he bald leather-clad man hauled the plump, pretty blonde across his lap and flipped up her short PVC skirt to reveal lacy stockings, a garter belt, and no panties at all. Growling, he gave her a dozen ruthless swats that made her yelp and buck. When he finished, the blonde collapsed over his thighs with a moaning sigh that sounded far more like pleasure than pain.

A flare of longing flashed through Morgana le Fay, and she looked hastily away from the sated sub. It was far too easy to imagine herself draped across a man’s lap. Not the bald dominant’s, but
his
.

Keep your mind on the job, witch,
she told herself firmly, forcing her thoughts away from the knight who’d been an obsession for too long
. Somebody’s murdering these people, and using magic to do it. You don’t have time for kinky fantasies if you want to stop the killer.

And it would be far too easy to get distracted in a place like Club Penitent, which seemed designed to rouse the forbidden needs she fought so desperately to ignore.

Especially tonight, on a day her ghosts paced and moaned, tormenting her until she had no business going out on any mission at all.

The only thing more unacceptable was to allow her team to go into battle without her. No other witch could protect them as well as she could, because no other witch had her raw power.

Just keep your mind on the job, Morgana. Stop the bastard. Concentrate on that. Forget everything else. Ignore everything else. All the ghosts. All the need. None of it matters but the team and the killer’s victims.

She swept another glance over her surroundings. Club Penitent was one of New York’s most exclusive nightclubs, whether devoted to Bondage, Domination and Sadomasochism—the erotic lifestyle called BDSM—or to more vanilla activities. The membership leaned toward upwardly mobile, if kinky, professionals: doctors, lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, even a celebrity or two.

The place accordingly had an air of expensive seduction, between the long, massive bar and the surrounding tables and chairs, all of them dark walnut carved with gothic crosses to go with the club’s Spanish Inquisition theme. The bar area was surrounded by a ring of smaller “dungeon” rooms equipped with St. Andrew’s Crosses, spanking benches, and other assorted gear designed for tying people up and doing painfully erotic things to them. The overall result was an air of sensual menace, rather as if the fifteenth-century Grand Inquisitor Torquemada had decided to run a bordello between torturing alleged witches.

Gregorian chants filled the air with deep masculine voices instead of the usual deafening rock du jour of other clubs. Given Morgana’s sensitive Maja ears, she approved, though the reminder of the Church’s witch-torturing history made her twitch.

She’d come entirely too close to getting hanged by a fanatical priest once. It hadn’t been erotic at all.

Though if Percival was doing the torturing . . .
Stop that.

Involuntarily, her gaze flashed across the bar to the rear booth where her team sat. The three men looked ready for battle at a moment’s notice, between their holstered 9mm SIGs and the long swords they wore diagonally across their backs. Illegal weapons, of course, but also invisible to mortal eyes, thanks to the spells Morgana had cast.

While the club’s Masters wore everything from monk’s robes to biker leathers, her teammates needed no special regalia to look like dominants. Instead they’d chosen clothing that would allow them to blend without hampering their ability to fight: leather vests over bare chests, faded jeans and tooled leather boots, perfectly broken in.

Looking at them lounging in their booth like a trio of lions on the veldt, Morgana couldn’t deny their effect on her. But then, if a woman didn’t feel a tingle at the sight of Percival, Cador, and Marrok looking ready to break all Ten Commandments, she needed to check her pulse.

Someone who didn’t know them would probably register Marrok first. He appeared the most menacing of the three, being six-five and brawny as a bull, with a lantern jaw, deep-set brown eyes, and a lazily sensual mouth. His crooked nose had been repeatedly broken during childhood by his abusive prick of a father. Despite the air of brutishness, he was a laughing, genial soul who often played peacemaker between his hot-tempered teammates.

Which made what happened if you managed to truly anger him all the more shocking. His berserker rages could make even King Arthur Pendragon step softly. He’d been known to cut through enemy forces like a plow through a wheat field, leaving broken bodies and barren earth in his wake.

Then there was Cador. At six feet, he was shorter than the others, but that only made him look more like a muscular male wall. Which was something of a natural result given that all three spent hours a day swinging battle-axes and broadswords.

In contrast to Marrok’s short dark hair, Cador wore his long, braided tightly for combat. At the moment, though, it tumbled past his shoulders in a curling mane. The eye-catching effect was intensified by its color, a rich, dark auburn, glossy as a fox’s pelt.

His features looked as if God had calculated every angle for maximum impact on anyone with estrogen in her veins. Thick auburn brows dipped over laughing eyes the striking turquoise blue of the Caribbean. His nose was straight and knife-blade narrow, while his wide, mobile mouth was prone toward deceptively charming smiles.

Deceptive, because Cador had a sadistic streak as broad as the Thames. He was not the kind of man you wanted to meet in combat, particularly if you’d done something to piss him off. He and Morgana often locked horns; he had a cutting, cynical sense of humor she found irritating. For his part, he called Morgana arrogant, though she preferred to think of it as natural self-confidence.

All right, she supposed she was a little arrogant.

Last—but hardly least, since he was the trio’s leader—there was Percival. At six-three, he was a bit leaner than the others, with all the muscular power, explosive speed, and hypnotic grace of a puma. His broad-shouldered, elegant body was marked here and there by scars from spears, arrows, and swords—reminders of his mortal life fighting King Arthur’s wars.

As if to emphasize all that stark masculinity, Percival had the kind of face that called ancient gladiators to mind: angular, square-jawed, with a flaring swoop of a nose that just missed being too long, and a pugnacious cleft chin. The overall effect was softened by a wide, lush mouth that Morgana had hungered to kiss for a very long time. His deep-set gray eyes were cool and watchful, heated by flashes of erotic cruelty she wished she didn’t find so intriguing. One of his blond brows was bisected by a thin scar, a reminder of a wound that had almost cost him his right eye. He wore his thick, honey-gold hair just barely long enough to curl. Morgana longed to run her fingers through it, but it wasn’t a good idea to give into temptation where Percival was concerned. He’d take ruthless advantage of any weakness she handed him.

Percival wanted her. Had wanted her for years—centuries—though she doubted the desire he felt was anything more than physical. If she wasn’t damned careful, Morgana knew she’d end up the latest in his parade of hapless submissives. The really galling thing was that she’d probably love every minute of her subjugation—until he moved on to the next sub, leaving her heart in ruins. Dangerous ruins.

The kind with nuclear land mines.

Yet sometimes when she gazed into those demanding gray eyes, Morgana wanted to confess all the secrets she’d kept so long. She knew better, though. She didn’t dare let Percival discover that she teetered on the edge—or how far she had to fall.

She’d been skating along that precipice for fifteen hundred years, since becoming one of the immortals tasked with protecting mankind. That was when the wizard Merlin and his enchantress lover Nimue had appeared at King Arthur’s Camelot court, where Morgana had been a Druid healer.

Merlin had told the king those who drank from his enchanted Grail would gain immortality and vast power—
if
they could pass the couple’s tests. For the knights, that meant duels to prove their strength and courage.

For Camelot’s ladies, the challenge was mental rather than physical. Nimue’s psychic spells forced each woman to confront her worst fears, while giving her the illusion of vast magical powers. The enchantress then evaluated her response to determine whether she could be trusted with real magic.

But when it was Morgana’s turn, even Nimue was astonished at the results . . .

*   *   *

M
organa balanced on a stool on the tips of her toes, her rope-burned, bloodless wrists bound in front of her, dark spots dancing before her eyes. She couldn’t draw breath for the pressure of the noose around her neck, its taut rope looped over the hook in the cottage’s ceiling.

A little boy screamed, his voice ringing high with terror. Morgana’s blood chilled as a man in a priest’s robes dragged the struggling dark-haired child into the room. “Mamma!” the boy shrieked. “Mamma, help me!”

“I can give you the power to save your son—and yourself,”
a bodiless voice whispered in her mind.
“Will you accept?”

Desperately fighting to suck in a breath past the strangling noose, Morgana wheezed, “Yes. Horned God, yes!”

Energy poured into her, a flaming wave of it that seared its way up her spine. Magic such as she’d never known, effortless and blazing. It made the power she was used to wielding feel like a feeble trickle.

She sent that blaze shooting down to her bound wrists and up to the noose around her neck. When her new power hit the loops of rope, it burned them instantly to floating flecks of ash. Sucking down a relieved whoop of air, Morgana fell off her tiptoes, rocking back down onto her heels so suddenly she almost toppled off the stool.

As the sensation of suffocation lifted, she looked down at the priest who’d just forced her shrieking son to the floor. Rage flooded her with the blind need to kill. Her hands began to burn, casting a furious yellow light over the dark, dirty little cottage with its stink of piss and terror. “Now, you bastard,” she hissed. “Now you’ll pay.”

The priest stared up at her, his eyes widening at the sight of her blazing hands.

She stepped off the stool. Bennett leaped to his feet and backed away, his watery blue eyes darting beneath his balding pate, his thin lips peeled back from yellowed, crooked teeth. “Witch! Damned creature, you will not touch me, or you’ll know God’s justice!”

“I’ll do more than touch you.” Morgana’s hands shot out, seized the sides of his face and jerked him close. “And if anyone should know divine justice, it’s you.”

The old man jerked against her grip, fighting like a rabid fox in a wolf trap, yelping in terror.

“Enough!” she snapped. “Be still!” Her will blasted him, paralyzing him where he stood and locking his terrorized mind in winter ice. The need to kill lashed within her like a flaming snake. He deserved it for what he’d done to her, to Mordred.

And yet . . . killing left a stain on the soul. He’d taught her that. Better to leave the bastard alive—but make damned sure he never did to anyone else what he’d done to them.

But more, he needed to suffer for his crimes, share the pain and terror of his victims, feel the weight of his betrayal of his God and his flock.

Morgana’s will slashed Bennett like a steel-tipped flail, forcing him to experience the full horror of his sins. By the time she was done with him, she knew he’d never harm another innocent as long as he drew breath.

*   *   *

Y
ou are not like the others.”

Morgana opened her eyes to find Merlin’s witch lover studying her, a frown on her too-young face. Nimue looked fifteen at most—a delicate nymph with waist-length blonde hair and eyes as black as a night sky. Eyes too ancient and wise to belong to any mortal, much less a fifteen-year-old child.

“You don’t seem to have the magical limitations the others do,” Nimue told her thoughtfully. “That could be dangerous; the human mind is not equipped to deal with power without limit. And yet . . .” Her gaze flicked as if studying something in the distance, and she paused, appeared to debate herself.

At last the enchantress shrugged. “But your power is needed, despite the risk. You will simply have to take care.”

The girl gestured, and the Grail appeared, a delicate filigreed silver cup. The potion it held glowed and bubbled gently, misted by shimmering tendrils of blue smoke. “Will you drink from the Grail and become an immortal witch? Will you use your skills to safeguard humanity, even from itself?”

“Yes,” Morgana said.

Accepting the cup, she swallowed liquid fire.

*   *   *

I
t had been fifteen centuries since that night. Morgana had never told anyone of the potential she had for power greater than what any other witch could claim.

And yet . . . when Percival looked at her in that way he sometimes had, her heart insisted,
You could give him control. You could trust him. He would never betray you.