Love Bites

Enjoying. What a hateful word.

He gripped her ankles and rocked against her, swiveling to reach every hidden spot. Her inner walls cupped him, contracting with each of his massaging strokes. When she whimpered, he changed the angle and ground the base of his shaft against her still-sensitive clit.

“Gonna come for me again?” He panted the question against her glistening red lips. Lips that had devoured his blood and his come in equal measure, so that each kiss burned with his own flavor.

She didn’t answer.

He moved faster. Harder. Pressed her for everything she had to give. Finall

y she imploded, showering him with her wetness as she threw her head back and moaned loud enough to shatter the windows. He followed right behind her, half-expecting his spine to snap from the violent force of his plunges.

Once the haze lifted, he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. That Sydney still breathed like a marathon runner beside him gratified him somewhat, but not much.

Only two thoughts resided in his mind. She didn’t love him. And she didn’t seem to care that he loved her.

He waited for her to say something, or to give him that look under her lashes that made his stomach clench with longing. Instead she adjusted her nightgown, hiding her breasts from him and lowering the hem to her thighs. Then she got up and walked out of the room.

“Goddammit.” He punched the pillow still indented with the imprint of her head.

Now what?

Chapter Nine

Baby, I love you. More every minute.

Sydney pulled at her hair and stared at her dazed eyes in the bathroom mirror. She looked like a woman who had been thoroughly plundered. Plundered and used and she’d loved every goddamn minute of it.

But that didn’t mean she loved him. It was too soon. She’d been locked up in this place for two weeks, barely waking long enough to talk to him while she sucked down her supper. They’d talked more at Pastry ’n’ Joe, for pity’s sake. She cared for him, of course, and she definitely wanted him—

“God!” She closed her eyes and shook her head. What the hell was wrong with her? For the first time since she’d picked him and Lucas up on the side of the road, she felt more like herself. More…normal. And now that she did, how could she even be considering having feelings for a vampire?

A goddamned vampire. The man she drank from as if he were her own personal sippy cup.

She braced her hands on the sink and leaned close to the mirror to examine her eyes. Not even a speck of red remained in the green. Maybe it was an aberration. Some horrible mistake. She’d just fallen in with a bad crowd. Somehow they’d used delicious, dirty sex to influence her into thinking she needed blood to survive.

She wasn’t a vampire, latent or otherwise. She wasn’t. Sydney Louise Langdon was a barista and a chakra and palm reader. That’s all.

And she was very much single.

The last thought roused her enough to smile. If tiny, gleaming white fangs hadn’t marred her expression, she might’ve actually felt better.

Okay, so the fangs were a little harder to explain.

On the verge of tears, she lowered onto the toilet and stared down at her flat belly. She felt stirring deep inside her, a shifting almost. Her hands trembled as she cupped her stomach. Could life grow there? Could it really be possible?

But when the cramps strengthened, she knew. Knew even before the white tissue came up streaked with red. As her cries finally broke free from her chest in shuddering sobs, she saw the tidy line of pregnancy tests on the counter.

When Lucas returned with his bookworm, Kellan was staring at the closed bathroom door. Sydney had been in there for over an hour, and he’d had to quell the urge to summon her out more times than he could count. Then again, maybe she’d fainted. He’d pounded into her awfully hard, especially since she’d only recently arisen from the transformation.

He clenched his fists. Had he hurt her? Then Luke and Emily arrived and he clenched his fists for a new reason altogether.

“Where is your fledgling?” Emily eyed the strewn bedsheets distastefully before perching on the leather armchair in the seating area. “Is she still capable of movement?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Kellan snapped.

He held up a finger when she again attempted to speak. “Let me warn you right now. I’m not in the mood to deal with any of your simpering questions. If you’re so bloody infatuated with the idea of vampires, why don’t you ask your—”

“Drink?” Luke questioned smoothly, nudging Emily’s shoulder. “We have Perrier or ginger ale, or if you’d prefer, a crisp Sauvignon Blanc. I picked it up on my travels to California last spring. The flavor’s robust, but subtle enough to—”