Night's Kiss (Children of The Night 1)

Damn! Didn't she realize the effect she was having on him? He murmured her name, a wealth of longing in his voice, in the depths of his eyes.

She made a soft sound low in her throat.

"Brenna, this isn't a good idea."

She looked up at him, mute.

"Your first time," Roshan said, his voice thick. "It should be with your husband."

He had lived in the modern world long enough to know how archaic and trite those words sounded. In tins day and age, men and women lived together, openly and shamelessly, without the blessing of the church, yet he was still a product of his upbringing, taught since childhood that a man respected a woman, and that intimacy before marriage was a sin. In the years since he had been a vampire, it was not advice to which he had always adhered. He was a vampire, not a monk, but to his credit he had never considered bedding a virgin. On those occasions when he had sought out female companionship, he had made sure the woman knew the score, and then he had made certain she would remember nothing of what passed between them.

"I want no husband," Brenna retorted.

"No?"

She shook her head. "Marriage has brought nothing but misery to the women in my family."

He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

With a sigh, she sat down on the sofa. "My great-grandfather betrayed my great-grandmother. She was burned at the stake. My grandfather vowed to love my grandmother as long as he lived, but after ten years of marriage, he left her, claiming she was in league with the devil. It was nonsense, of course. None of the women in my family has ever practiced black magick or invoked any of the dark arts. My own father abandoned my mother and me when he discovered that his daughter was a witch."

Roshan sat down at the other end of the sofa. "I take it there are no male witches in your family?"

"No. It passes from mother to daughter."

"So," he said slowly, "you don't want a husband, but you want me to make love to you?"

"Yes."

"I guess you're not as old-fashioned as I thought," he muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"I may not want a husband," she said candidly. "But I do want a child. Your child."

Few things had taken him by surprise since the night Zerena had bestowed the Dark Gift upon him, but Brenna's words had caught him totally unprepared. For a moment, he pictured Atiyana in his mind's eye, her face pale, her eyes empty of life, the sheet beneath her stained with blood. He recalled picking up the tiny infant she had expelled from her womb moments before she died.

"I'm afraid that's impossible." He held up his hand, stilling the questions he saw rising in her eyes. "I can't create life, Brenna. I can only sustain my own, such as it is."

"I am sorry," she said quietly. "I did not know."

For a moment, he regretted telling her the truth. Had he been a less honorable man, he could have taken her to his bed, made sweet love to her night after night, let her believe that he could give her the child she yearned for.

"I'm sorry, too," he replied. There was hardly a day that went by that he didn't think of his son. Even after all these years, the memory of the infant's death was still painful. His son. Such a tiny scrap of humanity, dead before it had been born, and all Roshan's hopes and dreams with him.

He shook the memory from his mind.

Once again, tension flowed between them.

Brenna turned to stare at the television, all too aware that he was watching her. She tried to forget the taste of his kiss, the pleasure that flooded her whole being when his lips touched hers. She had heard that vampires possessed an aura, a charm that mortals found irresistible. Was that all it was? Or was her attraction to him real?

She glanced at him surreptitiously, trying to see his aura. Granny O'Connell's aura had been green, which was associated with nurturing. John Linder's had been a dingy orange. Brenna's own aura was blue, an indication of psychic energy.

Roshan DeLongpre's aura was gray. She frowned, trying to remember what that represented. Gray… ah, of course, it implied a closeness to otherworldly things and the ability to influence the wind and the rain.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"No. I was just wondering… can you make it storm when you wish?"

He nodded. "Why?"

"I was studying your aura."

"Indeed?"

"It's gray. A rather dark gray."

"I always thought that was a lot of hocus-pocus."

"Oh, no. My mother's was pink."

"And that means… what?"

"Those with pink auras are very loving and affectionate," Brenna said wistfully. "As was my mother. There was no kinder woman in all our village. Everyone loved her."

"What happened when your father left?"

"My mother never got over it. She died a year later. Granny O'Connell raised me."

"How old were you when your mother died?"

"Eleven."

"And how old are you now?"

"Nineteen."

He muttered an oath. Nineteen! "Did you ever see your father again?"

"No." She crossed her arms over her br**sts, the gesture blatantly defensive. "I do not want to talk about it anymore."

He glanced at the window. It was late, after midnight. He shifted restlessly as the hunger stirred within him, reminding him that he had not yet fed.

Brenna followed his gaze to the window, then looked back at him. "I guess you will be going out soon." It wasn't a question.

He nodded curtly, the beating of countless hearts calling to him like distant thunder.

Brenna lifted a hand to her throat. He had bitten her once, tasted her blood. What would it be like if he did it again, while she was awake? Would it hurt? She shook her head, stunned by the turn of her thoughts yet unable to put it from her mind.

He was watching her, his eyes narrowed. It reminded her of the way Morgana sometimes watched a mouse before she pounced on it. Morgana was a fearsome predator, but sometimes the mouse got lucky and escaped the cat's claws and teeth.

Roshan was a far more fearsome predator than Morgana, Brenna mused. If she lingered here, in the lion's den, how long would she be safe from his bite?

CHAPTER 10

Searching for prey, Roshan had moved swiftly through the darkness, enjoying the feel of the night's cool breath against his skin, the whisper of an errant breeze in his hair. He had fed quickly, savoring the rush of energy that flowed over his tongue and slid down this throat like the sweetest nectar.