“Black is fine, thanks.” Ignoring her desire for a little milk in the coffee, she held the cup in her hands and sipped. “You keep your apartment cold,” she remarked. The contrast between her cold hands and the hot cup caused her to notice.
“Oh. I forgot to turn the heat on.” He at once went to the wall and adjusted the thermostat. “Sorry, I don’t notice the chill much. You should have said something sooner.”
“I just noticed.”
Which was true. But at the same time she found herself wondering what other oddities he had. Most people by this time in the autumn left their heat on all the time.
He was a strange bird indeed, she thought staring down into her cup. Handsome and strange, and the combination intrigued her. Drew her.
She’d never felt particularly drawn to ordinary people. People with quirks, however, were a different matter, and the quirkier the better. That tendency occasionally caused her trouble but she never seemed to learn her lesson.
“You must hate the summer,” she blurted. Stealing a look at him, she saw he had raised one eyebrow.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because the days are longer.”
“Ah. Well, yes, it means my nights are shorter.”
“Does it ever make you crazy, not being able to tolerate the light?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Once it did. One adapts, you know. There’s quite a bit of beauty in the night.”
“I’m a bit of a night owl, myself. But I do like a daily dose of sun.” She wondered if the wife and daughters he had mentioned had left him because of his illness, but caught herself before incaution released the question. None of her business. Sheesh, sometimes she forgot how to interact with people because she chose to spend so much time alone in her own little world.
Although he had not in any way indicated it, Yvonne felt she had intruded too much into his life. First by needing to sleep in his living room, and then by engaging him in a conversation when, regardless of what he said, he had clearly intended to work.
She put her cup on the tray. “Thanks for the coffee. I guess I’m getting sleepy after all.”
He rose when she did, a gentlemanly courtesy she had thought long dead. As soon as she slipped between the covers on the sofa, she heard him return to his desk. Moments later the quiet tapping of keys filled the room.
She forced herself to close her eyes and pretend to sleep. To avoid thinking about that awful feeling in her apartment.
And the easiest device for avoiding the awful was to think about an intriguing topic: Creed Preston. She had thought her initial attraction to Tommy was strong, but what she was feeling now was even stronger. Strong enough to be almost jolting. When she glanced his way, the very air seemed to thicken, and her body hummed with a yearning she hadn’t felt in a long time.
But of course, she told herself, that was simply because he was new to her. An unknown. Her fright was probably feeding into it. Adrenaline, she knew, could do odd things to a person.
There was really no point in avoiding it. No one would ever know about the heaviness that settled between her legs when she thought about Creed. It was a secret she could easily keep, and she might as well enjoy it because she had begun to think Tommy had killed that part of her forever.
A short time later, the throbbing heaviness seemed to fill her, and it turned to a drowsiness that captured her and carried her away into a weird dream of Creed Preston. In her dream, every time she stepped toward him he seemed to melt away into shadow.
Creed sat facing his computer, tapping impossibly slowly at the keys in close approximation of a human’s typing rate, until he heard both Yvonne’s heart and breathing slip into the rhythm of sleep. She, of course, would have no idea that she couldn’t pretend to sleep around him, that he could smell the sleep hormones, and even the scent of her earlier desire, quieted now in sleep. Her heartbeat reached him more clearly than his own. He could read her moods and sometimes thoughts from her heart rate and her scents. In an emotional sense, she was nearly an open book, even though he couldn’t read her mind.
When he was sure she had found deep and restful sleep, he deleted the nonsense he’d been typing and shut down his computer. He couldn’t work with her maddening scent in the room. No way. And it was even harder now that he had smelled her sexual response to him.
Locked in an eternal internal struggle between his killer instincts and his determination not to give in to them, he scarcely had room left for complex thought at the moment.
No, he would have liked to launch himself across the room, bite Yvonne before she even awoke, and take her to that heaven known only to vampires and their victims, the place where near-death and sex combined to make a mortal and an immortal one in a way that could never be explained, only experienced.
And once he did, she would always want more.
That was a burden he wouldn’t wish on anyone. Sometimes he saw them, mortals who belonged to vampire cults, who might think that every “vampire” who drank from them was merely playing a game, but who had been drunk from by a real vampire, drunk from sufficiently that the craving to repeat the experience gripped them as surely as cocaine addiction. And as devastatingly.
It was possible to drink only a small amount, to briefly sate the insatiable craving for warm living blood, and leave a mortal pleased but intact, without a perpetual craving for more. But some vampires didn’t bother, and Creed had seen the results in haunted faces in the nightclubs that catered to their fetish, giving themselves too freely and too quickly to strangers in hopes they would again find that rush.
He wouldn’t do that to anyone.
And he certainly wouldn’t do it to a woman who had turned to him for protection. Nor would he appreciate being wanted in that way. After all, he remembered the real love of a real woman, the joys of having a family. Pure lust and addiction would never measure up.
But the craving was so deeply rooted in his nature he could be free of it only in death.
So he sat staring out over the sleeping city and the incredible colors the night held for him, listening to a woman’s heartbeat, and wondering how he had been chosen for this fate.
Because he didn’t believe in accidents. He hadn’t been chosen at random by some hungry vampire. No, he’d been chosen by a woman who knew him, knew he had a family, and had taken him away from them anyway to fulfill her own desires.
No accident that. She could have chosen anyone, but she had wanted him. The irony, of course, was that she had never really gotten him. What she had gotten was a furious newborn vampire who had wanted to kill her when he found out what he had become. A vampire who had never forgiven her for depriving him of every single thing he cared about.
That memory, that fury, had eventually schooled him to contain his needs, desires and drives. And he’d be damned if he would do that to Yvonne, no matter how much he craved her.
But God, he craved her more than he’d ever craved anything since his change.
If this was a test, he teetered on the edge of failing it miserably.
Finally, in desperation, he went into his bedroom and locked himself safely within. In here her smell would dissipate. In here he could no longer hear her heartbeat.
Rarely did he retire before dawn, but this night he could do nothing else. He picked up a novel he had started reading a few weeks ago, and settled in a chair to wait for the prickling on the back of his neck that would warn him of the approach of the sleep of death.
Until then, he could not afford to think about the delicious morsel