Daysider

But the mild shivers he had noted earlier had become so violent that she’d shaken off most of the leaves and branches heaped around her body. He dropped to his knees beside her and felt her forehead. It was no longer hot, but icy cold and clammy to the touch.

“Alexia,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”

She thrashed her head from side to side, muttering words he could barely understand.

“Garret,” she cried. “No. Don’t…” Her teeth began to chatter. “I won’t let them take you.”

Damon leaned closer, his lips nearly brushing her cheek. “Who is Garret, Alexia?”

Tears broke from beneath her lids and slid across her temples. “I can’t…I can’t stop them.” Abruptly her eyes opened, and for a moment they fixed on Damon’s so directly that he was certain she was fully aware again. “You’ll save him, won’t you?” she said. “You’re the only one who can.”

He stroked her auburn hair away from her forehead. “Save whom?” he asked softly.

“He didn’t deserve it. You must see that.”

“What did he do, Alexia?”

Without warning she flung off the blanket and reached for him, locking surprisingly strong arms around his neck and pulling him down to her. Her lips brushed his, her tongue feathering over his mouth like moth’s wings.

Then she kissed him. There was no doubting her intent, or her will. It wasn’t sickness he smelled now on her skin and in her breath, but Alexia’s living blood, relentlessly tugging at him like a full moon at the tide.

The blood of a dhampir.

Damon pulled back, clinging to his rapidly fragmenting thoughts. Alexia was no human serf, or a Bloodmistress who deigned to let him taste the nectar that flowed through her veins.

Alexia was his peer. His equal, as much as anyone from the Enclave could be, though they were enemies and kept themselves alive by different means. He’d said he would never take her blood, and he had meant it.

But now it was as if he were falling under the influence of an addiction, one that had once ruled his life and been forgotten until this moment.

And Alexia was the drug.

He stared down into her half-open eyes. He saw hunger in them—physical lust and the craving for pleasure, almost as if she, too, were experiencing the euphoric effects of some unknown narcotic agent.

She wasn’t herself. He knew it, and he was ashamed of his own forbidden thoughts, his own struggle to maintain discipline and self-control that should have been second nature to him…and had been, until now. But Alexia held him there, demanding, refusing to let him go, and he forgot she was ill—forgot he could feel nothing for her—forgot his mission.

He worked her mouth open with his and slipped his tongue inside. She sucked him in eagerly, grinding her hips into his pelvis, stabbing her fingers into his hair. Her small incisors grazed the inside of his lower lip, and he felt a brief stab of pain.

She’d bitten him. He jerked back, probing the tiny wound with his tongue. He knew that dhampires were forbidden to take blood of any kind. That they were taught to loathe the very taste of it, even though it could sustain them as well as it could any Opir or Darketan.

Yet she had bitten him. Had she forgotten who and what she was? Was she reverting, becoming something a lifetime among humans had suppressed?

She pulled him down again, putting a quick and decisive end to Damon’s speculation. This time she used her own tongue to tease his into her mouth. He felt the sensation of it all the way down into his belly, and his cock swelled until the ache exceeded anything he’d suffered in the hollow when he was fighting to survive.

Alexia couldn’t have missed the pressure of his groin in the cradle of her thighs, but she didn’t stop. She lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist, rocking and thrusting as if they were both naked and she was begging him to enter her.

Damon groaned. This couldn’t be happening. Nothing about this was sane, or right. But the more desperate his need, the less rational he became.

It was instinct, pure and simple. This couldn’t end until he was inside her, thrusting deep, hearing her gasps and moans of pleasure. And surrender.

As if her own thoughts had merged with his, Alexia began to tear at his shirt. She managed to unbutton it without ripping it to shreds and clawed at his undershirt, seeking flesh. Her fingers brushed his chest, scraping him with her nails as if she wanted his heart, as well.

Damon took more care with her shirt, some remnant of sense guiding his hands, but Alexia wouldn’t allow it. She tore it open herself and ripped her close-fitting tank from neckline to hem, baring her breasts.

They were perfect, like the rest of her, but Damon was too hungry to admire them for long. He bent to take one nipple into his mouth. Alexia arched upward, letting her head fall back, gasping as he suckled her, hard and fast, with no attempt at gentleness. His teeth grazed her tender flesh, accidentally drawing her blood as she had drawn his.

It was sweet. Incredibly sweet, like the taste of her mouth or the way he imagined the rest of her would be.

But he had not forgotten his vow never to take her blood. A vow that seemed increasingly impossible to keep. For it was as if, somehow, a part of his blood already flowed through her veins.

No, not his blood. He had never taken dhampir blood before, and it was to be expected that its signature would be utterly different from anything with which he was familiar. But this was much more subtle than the unique amalgamation of strains that came of her mixed heritage. It was so muted that he couldn’t identify it, but it had the effect of releasing the last, pitiful scraps of his reason.

He moved to her other breast, licking and nipping, raising himself high enough to work his hand under her waistband. He found her undergarment, damp with perspiration, and reached beneath.

She was wet and hot and ready, pushing up against him with an uninhibited boldness that took his breath away in spite of all she’d already done to him. He stroked her, distantly aware of her moans of pleasure as she found his cock and rubbed it through his pants, tracing its contours and molding it with her fingers. He closed his eyes and groaned when she began to unzip him. Only moments now. A few quick movements to free themselves of their clothes, and then—

The muzzle of a gun barrel came up hard against the side of Damon’s head.

“Get off her,” Michael snarled, “before I blow your frickin’ bloodsucker brains out.”

Chapter 5

Alexia heard her partner’s voice as if through muffling layers of gauze that seemed to fill her head and keep her thoughts from comprehending what was truly happening. Her body throbbed—not with pain, but pleasure—and her breasts ached as if she had scratched them on the sharp little branches of the manzanitas growing nearby.

She opened her eyes. It took her a moment to recognize what she was seeing: two faces, both male and as pitiless as the Court that had condemned Garret to a lifetime of servitude.

“Cover her up,” one of the men said—Michael, his blond hair mussed and his face smudged with dirt. The other man, the one whose scent still bathed her skin, laid something on top of her…his jacket, still warm from the heat of his body.

“Alexia,” Michael said, staring down at her. “Are you all right?”

No. Not all right. The pleasure was beginning to fade, replaced by a sense of something profoundly wrong with her body. She began to remember what had happened since Damon—yes, that was the other man—had left her alone, hot and shivering and barely aware that he had gone away.

Then there had been brief moments of lucidity between much longer spans of darkness, the consequences of the illness raging inside her body. When Damon had come back for her, she had been half out of her mind. More than half. She had known she needed something, something important, that only Damon could give her.

Garret. She had said something about Garret. And then she’d forgotten about her half brother, forgotten everything, and…

She felt frantically under the borrowed jacket. Her uniform shirt and undershirt were torn wide open. The bandage was gone, and her shoulder wound was nothing but a patch of puckered skin, cool to the touch. She brushed her lips with her fingers. They were bruised and sore.

God. What had she done? What had he done?

“I can kill him now if you want me to,” Michael said, his voice ringing with hatred. He held the muzzle of his gun to Damon’s temple, just as when they’d first met. Damon looked steadily at Alexia.

She tried to sit up, but a surging tide of dizziness forced her back down. The borrowed jacket slipped to the ground, and she pulled her own jacket closed over her breasts as she fought to clear her mind.

“No,” she said, as steadily as she could. “It wasn’t what you thought, Michael.”

“Then what was it? It looked to me like he was about ready to tear your chest open.”

Was that what he’d seen? Which would be worse—his believing that Damon meant to take her blood or that they were having sex in the middle of a dangerous mission?