The Secret Vampire Society Read online

  She’d done her best, with stage makeup, to make herself look like death. Over the past fifty years, she’d gotten adept at disguising herself. She raised her hands and tugged the pale blond wig from her head; it was the disguise, a prop, as it had been fifty years ago. Red was her natural color…along with the unusual amber hue of her eyes. The green had been contacts that had been too thin to completely hide the irises.

  “I can’t believe you’re alive,” he murmured as he continued to stroke her skin.

  She shivered. “You thought you’d killed me.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, as he released a ragged sigh.

  She reached for the stake again, closing her fingers around the wood. He might not have a heart, but the stake would stop him long enough for her to escape this time. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Disappoint?”

  “You must be disappointed,” she persisted, “that you failed.”

  “Failed?” His blond brows arched as his forehead furrowed with confusion. “Failed at what? I don’t understand….”

  “And I thought I was a good actor,” she mused with another chuckle. She had been wrong about that, too, she’d realized when she’d watched her old movies. She hadn’t experienced enough emotion, until after Conner had destroyed her career, to portray her characters with any accuracy or depth.

  “You are a good actress,” he assured her, “Brandi.”

  Amused that he would continue trying to charm her, she smiled. “Now. It took me a while to learn, but you gave me plenty of motivation to get better.”

  He shook his head. “You were always a great actress. In fact you should have won an Oscar for that death scene fifty years ago.”

  “Scene?” she asked, repeating just one word of what he’d said—as he had with her.

  “Obviously it was all an act—playing dead.” He pushed a slightly shaking hand through his hair.

  “Playing?” she repeated, her voice cracking with emotion. “You thought I was playing?”

  “Yes,” he said, gesturing at her. “You had to have been acting because you’re very much alive.”

  “No thanks to you.” She lifted the stake and pressed the point against his chest again. “You drank my blood and left me for dead.”

  He shook his head. “No…”

  Miranda applied more pressure to the stake. “You murdered me.”

  “You’re not dead,” he said again. Relief filled Conner. He cupped her cheek in his palm, stroking his thumb over the delicate bone beneath the silky skin. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you.”

  But he’d spent the past fifty years seeing Miranda in every woman he saw. So, in an effort to maintain his sanity, he’d blinded himself to any resemblances. “It was you the other night, too,” he realized, “the girl with her heel stuck in the sewer grate.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t take her home,” she pointed out as if she’d been disappointed. “You must have lost your appetite for sweet, innocent young things.”

  He laughed now. “You might have been young, Miranda Hamilton, but you were never innocent. Or sweet…” The only sweet thing about her had been her blood.

  Her face flushed with color beneath the nearly opaque layer of what must have been stage makeup. Heedless of the stake pressing against his heart, he lifted the damp washcloth he held and wiped it across her face. After washing away the deathly pallor, he eased the cloth from her face down her throat and removed the blood. Only some of that was makeup; the rest oozed from the fang marks in her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Her bright eyes hardened with anger and hatred. “For trying to kill me?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” he insisted, “then or now.” But he had. He dropped the washcloth onto the floor and lifted his fingertips to the wound on her throat.

  She tensed and jerked away from his touch, and fear added to all those turbulent emotions in her unusually colored eyes. She’d made love with him, but she was afraid of him?

  “You came here to kill me,” he realized, his heart clenching—not with fear, but regret. “And you thought you could do it.” That was why she hadn’t been scared to make love with him; she’d had the stake for protection…and his murder.

  “I can do it,” she insisted. But the stake shook as her hands trembled.

  Conner wrapped his hands around hers and pulled them back until her crude weapon dropped from her grasp. While the jagged wooden point had scraped his skin, it hadn’t drawn blood.

  “You’re not a killer,” he told her again. “And you have no reason to kill me.”

  Her chin jerked up and down in a vehement nod. “You know that I do. You tried to kill me. You thought you had.”

  “I did think you were dead,” he admitted, his heart clenching with all that anguish and loss. “And I suffered guilt over your death for the past fifty years.”

  “You suffered?” Her voice cracked with outrage. “You suffered? You stole my life from me. You stole my humanity and made me into…into a monster.”

  Hell, he had deserved the guilt and still did. He had done all those things to her but one. “I did not try to kill you.”

  “So biting me, stealing my blood—it was all an accident?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief. Her red hair tumbled around her bare shoulders.

  “No,” he admitted with an unsteady sigh. “I lost control. I never wanted anyone the way I wanted you.”

  She snorted. “Lucky me…”

  “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t apologize enough for what he’d done to her, for what he’d made her. “I shouldn’t have…but I didn’t want to lose you. I wanted us to be together—always. That was why I tried to turn you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t believe anything you say.” But yet her gaze held his, as if she searched his eyes for the truth.

  “I don’t blame you for not trusting me,” he said. He barely trusted himself around her. Because even now, even knowing how much she hated him, how she wanted him dead, he could barely resist the urge to push her back onto the bed and bury himself inside her again. “I can’t believe it’s really you….”

  She shook her head. “It’s not. I’m not the same woman I once was…because of you.”

  He hadn’t killed her, as he’d agonized over the past fifty years, but he had taken her life from her. “I was selfish.” So selfish. “But I thought I loved you. I thought I couldn’t live without you.”

  She laughed, but the laughter resonated with bitterness not amusement. “Yet somehow you managed. I guess all your sexual conquests helped you forget all about me.”

  “I hoped they would,” he confessed. “I tried…to forget about you. But you were always here.” He pressed his fist against his heart, where she had pressed the stake moments ago. “You were always here.”

  She shook her head, the fear back in her eyes. Maybe she was afraid that he was telling the truth. “I should know better,” she said, her voice thick with self-disgust. “I should know what a charmer you are.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” he insisted. “Since you can’t believe what I say, maybe you’ll believe what I do….” Kneeling on the mattress, he joined her on the bed.

  She didn’t cower away from him, but her body tensed and her eyes widened. “I know what you can do,” she said. “I know that you’re good at what you do.”

  “Is that why you made love with me?” he wondered, unable to stop a grin from lifting his lips. “Because I’m good?”

  She shook her head. “You’re bad.”

  “And you intended to punish me,” he reminded her. With a wooden stake through the heart? The endangered organ slammed against his ribs, but with dread, not fear, again. She hated him so much…and she had every reason to hate him.

  Could he make her love him? Could he make up for what he’d taken from her with what he could give her? His love…

  He touched her, skimming his palms across her slender shoulders and down t
he length of her bare back. A shiver rippled through her, and her breath escaped in a gasp. He clenched her hips and pulled her forward, so that his cock pressed against her flat stomach. The hard length of it throbbed against her navel. He wanted to bury himself inside her, to forever join their bodies.

  But he restrained his own desires to focus on hers. He lowered his head to brush his lips across first the bridge of her nose, then the curve of her cheek. Before he had the chance to kiss her lips, she moved…and her mouth pressed against his, a moan emanating from her throat.

  He swallowed her moan, as he parted her lips and slid his tongue inside the moist sweetness of her mouth. She tasted of blood, his blood. And hers.

  She pressed her hands against his chest, pushing him back even as her hips arched against his erection. Tearing her mouth from his, she cursed him, “Damn you. Damn you…”

  Her nails nipped into his skin as she clutched his shoulders and pulled him against her again. A smile curved his lips at her urgency, her passion just as intense as his. Maybe she didn’t hate him as much as she wanted to….

  But would she ever be able to love him…after what he’d done to her, what he’d taken from her? Her lips touched his again, and he shut off his mind. He didn’t want to think; he wanted only to feel and touch and taste…every inch of her. His chest tight against her breasts, he pressed her back until she lay on the bed. Her legs parted, her knees lifted, so that her thighs cradled his hips. She arched, rubbing her mound of reddish blond curls against his erection.

  His body shaking with the urge to bury his cock inside her wet heat, he pulled back…and focused again on her. He concentrated on her silky skin, running his fingertips over every curve and dip of her exquisite figure. She murmured and shifted on the tangled sheets, arching against his caress. He kissed her again, drinking the sweetness of her mouth…sliding his tongue across hers.

  She ran her nails down his back, pressing him against her…rubbing the nub of her desire up and down the length of his straining erection. But still he held back, even as his body shuddered with the need for release. Instead of sliding his cock inside her, he slid his fingers…stroking them in and out of her slick canal as his tongue stroked between her lips. He pressed his thumb against her clit, rubbing it gently as she squirmed and writhed beneath him. He pulled his mouth from hers, letting moans and whimpers spill from her lips as she struggled toward her own release. While he trailed his mouth down her throat, he resisted the urge to taste her again, to drink her essence.

  He continued down her neck, over her collarbone and the slope of her breasts, leaving only kisses as he skimmed his mouth along her body. He stopped at the dark peach tips of her breasts, tugging a nipple between his lips. As his fang brushed the sensitive point, her body jerked then convulsed beneath him as an orgasm gripped her.

  She cried out and clutched at his shoulders and back. But he slipped farther down her body and tasted the sweetness of her passion. He teased her with his tongue, stoking her desire again until hot juice spilled from her. Her hands tangled in his hair, pulling him back. “You—I need you,” she admitted, her voice cracking with the admission. “I need you to fill me….”

  Her desperate words threatened his control, but then he realized he was giving her what she wanted. Him. And he guided his cock into her slick heat. Her muscles gripped him as she arched, pulling him deeper inside her.

  He groaned, his body shaking with the need to thrust wildly until he satisfied his own desperate need for release. But he slowed his rhythm—even as she dug her nails into his butt and urged him faster. He took his time, fighting for control, as he prolonged the orgasm that gripped her.

  She cried out and sobbed, tears spilling from her closed eyes. He kissed away the salty moisture. Then he kissed her lips, swallowing those cries of release. He skimmed his palms down her body, closing his hands around her full breasts and stroking his thumbs across her nipples.

  She arched and thrust her hips against him. Then she reached between them and stroked the base of his shaft.

  A groan tore from his throat as his control snapped. He grabbed her hips in his hands, lifting her against him as he pounded his cock inside her. She came again and again, her muscles gripping him so tightly that he exploded inside her. He lifted her and turned, so that he collapsed onto his back but she was still joined to him, still part of him. Just as she had been these past fifty years even though he had believed her dead.

  But she was alive. And he had the chance to tell her what he’d rued never sharing with her. “I love you.”

  His words struck her with all the force of a stake through her heart. “No,” she said, denying his declaration and her own instinctive reaction to it, to reciprocate it. She could not love a man she’d spent the past fifty years hating. “No…”

  Her hand on his chest, she pushed herself away from him, breaking the hold of his arms around her. If only she could break the sexual hold he had on her…

  As she moved, he hardened inside her, spiking her desire for him, making her want him all over again…no matter the mind-blowing pleasure he’d just given her. Selflessly…as if he really meant the words he spoke, the words that warmed his glittering blue eyes….

  “No…”

  “I love you,” he insisted as he shifted beneath her, his cock hardening and moving inside her. “I loved you then, and I love you now.”

  She gasped…over the sensations rippling through her with orgasmic aftershocks. But she shook her head, unwilling to believe him. “You didn’t even know me then…/” They’d had only that one night together—that one endless night.

  “I knew you,” he claimed, as he closed his hands around her hips and shifted her against him, burying his cock deeper inside her. “I knew who you were before I ever met you. Lost. Scared. Alone. I wanted to be there for you. Forever.”

  She shook her head again even as she moved, arching to take him deeper inside her body—to the place only he could touch. “No. If I believe you, that you were only trying to turn me and not kill me—” as she’d been told “—then you cared only about yourself, about what you wanted. You wanted me to be available to you. Forever.”

  Just as she had made herself available to him now. She needed to pull away from him, to break the connection of their bodies before another connection formed—one between their hearts and souls. She couldn’t accept what he claimed; she couldn’t trust his love.

  But even as she fought those emotions, passion burned inside her…and the ripples of pleasure intensified until she shuddered with another orgasm.

  He groaned and tensed beneath her, thrusting deep—once, twice and then he came on the third thrust. The warmth of his release poured inside her, as the warmth of his gaze poured over her face, his eyes aglow with love.

  She wanted to believe he cared about her, but she’d already been a fool once for this man. She pulled away from him, separating their bodies. “You don’t love me,” she insisted. “If you loved me, you would have let it be my decision. You would have given me the choice of spending eternity with you.”

  “I was selfish and stupid,” he admitted with a shaky sigh. “But having believed that I lost you, that I killed you, changed me. I know that what I did was wrong—that I should have cared more about what you wanted than what I wanted. Can you ever forgive me?”

  “No.”

  Chapter Four

  No. The word impaled his heart more effectively than the stake ever would have. She shoved the stake back inside her purse. Then she stepped into her dress and yanked up the zipper.

  “You can’t leave,” he told her.

  “Are you going to try to stop me like you did last time?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but it’ll be daybreak soon. You can’t be out in the light.”

  “I know all the rules of this eternal life,” she informed him, her voice sharp with bitterness. “I spent the past fifty years learning them the hard way.”

  “I’m sorry….” He coul
dn’t say the words enough, but she refused to accept his apology. Or his love. But he couldn’t blame her. If their roles had been reversed, he doubted he could have forgiven her, either. So he didn’t try to stop her as she unlocked the door and left him.

  He’d thought her gone forever once, and he’d been wrong. Somehow he doubted he’d get that lucky again. She wouldn’t be back. But at least she was alive.

  How was she alive? He left the bed, rumpled from their lovemaking, and pulled on some clothes. Then he rushed out of the basement apartment. She was gone already. The streets deserted. The night was too late for mortals, dawn too close for immortals.

  With time slipping away from him, he vaulted into the sky—flying through what was left of the night. Moments later he reached his destination and descended the cement steps leading down to Club Underground. The door was unlocked, and he walked into the empty bar. He glanced toward the dance floor, where he’d held Miranda—Brandi—in his arms. But he didn’t linger in the bar, passing through it to the hall that led to another unlocked door. The studded steel creaked on rusty hinges as he opened the door onto a room that was cold and dark and smelled of spilled blood and death.

  A switch snapped and artificial light flickered then flooded the stark basement room. The doctor stood next to the metal table where he operated or dissected. “I’ve been expecting you,” the gray-haired man admitted.

  He wasn’t mortal, not anymore, but he’d been old when he’d joined the secret society. Old and bitter.

  “Why?” Conner asked. “Why tell me that she was dead?” He’d brought Miranda here, all those years ago, when she’d been unresponsive. She’d lost so much blood that he’d been afraid he’d killed instead of turned her. And this man had confirmed that fear.

  The doctor sighed. “Because she needed to die. How in the hell had you believed you could have a happily ever after with her?”

  Because for the first time in his infinite life, Conner West had fallen in love, and that heady rush of emotion had clouded his judgment and his common sense.