Czytaj książkę: «Claimed by a Vampire»

God, he craved her more than he’d ever craved anyone.

Creed would have liked to launch himself across the room, and take Yvonne to that heaven known only to vampires and their victims. But he certainly wouldn’t do it to a woman who had turned to him for protection.

If this was a test, he teetered on the edge of failing it miserably.

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 could not afford to think about the delicious morsel lying on his couch.

Trusting him.

Dear Reader,

Another journey into THE CLAIMING was irresistible to me. The notion that vampires themselves can become so enthralled that it’s a matter of life and death for them gave rise to some of the events in this book.

Vampires have a lot of powers, and few weaknesses other than the sun. I skipped the part about the stake to the heart because that’s never appealed to me, but I felt there should be another weakness vampires are prey to, and thus The Claiming.

As you will find in these pages, The Claiming is love raised to the nth degree. No vampire wants it to happen, knowing full well its risks.

In Claimed by a Vampire, I also got to deal with a vampire who once had a wife and children but had to give them up because he had become a threat to them. He never wanted to love again because he had lost so much. Instead he finds himself drawn to a woman, a novelist, who needs his protection and who is also reluctant to become involved.

Each is wounded, one by love too good, and one by love too bad. And the bad love is the one that comes back to haunt them.

Enjoy!

Rachel

About the Author

RACHEL LEE was hooked on writing by the age of twelve, and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.

Claimed by
a Vampire
Rachel Lee

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter 1

Creed Preston sat in the outer office of Messenger Investigations, amusing himself by watching the swirl and flow around him. Jude Messenger had been his friend for years, but only recently had he become comfortable enough to spend a lot of time in Jude’s office, surrounded by mortals like Terri, Chloe and Garner.

It was a vampire thing. He and Jude had cemented a friendship that crossed the final barriers of territoriality that most of their kind felt, often to an extreme degree, when Jude had risked his life to eliminate the evil that had nearly killed Creed’s great-granddaughter.

But spending much time in the company of mortals could still be painful, because they smelled so damned tempting. As the years passed, however, his self-control became easier, and over the past months since Jude had mated with a mortal, Terri, he’d learned he could enjoy their company and control his hunger well enough.

Terri was absent this evening. As an assistant medical examiner, she often had to go out at night to crime scenes. Chloe sat at her desk, wearing her signature punk-cum-stripper getup, her hair dyed black and worn in spikes. She topped the whole image off with enough black eye makeup to keep a cosmetics company in business, and bright red lipstick.

Across from her sat Garner, a gifted demon hunter of about twenty-five, blond and blue-eyed, and casually elegant in a scruffy sort of way. The two of them often argued like siblings.

Creed enjoyed listening to their spats. Once, long ago, he’d had children, and he’d been forced to watch from a distance as they grew old and died. When Chloe and Garner got going, he inevitably grinned and watched the show.

Jude, however, had no such background with kids, and had a great deal less patience.

“Will you two cut it out?” he called from his inner office. “I’m trying to think.”

Both Chloe and Garner fell silent, but continued to shoot fiery looks at one another.

Sitting here, Creed felt more “normal” than he had since his change. Which was probably why he was spending more and more time in this office, as his own job allowed.

He put a hand over his mouth to hide a smile and continued to watch the dagger-staring contest. As usual, Garner wanted to plunge headlong into something dangerous without even grasping how dangerous it was, and Chloe displayed enough common sense to be twice her twenty-five years. And keeping quiet was obviously stressing their self-control.

Jude, his fellow vampire, appeared in the door of his office. As always, he was dressed in a perfectly tailored black silk shirt and slacks. Most vampires preferred black because it helped them blend with the shadows. Creed himself wore black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. He didn’t share Jude’s taste for finer clothes.

Jude was slightly above average height, three inches shorter than Creed, and right now his eyes, golden from recent feeding, were not quite golden enough. He was irritated or disturbed.

Jude looked at Chloe and Garner. “Have you two concocted a plan for how we’re going to deal with this?”

Neither answered him.

“I thought not,” Jude said, sarcasm edging his tone. “All that arguing and no plan. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Because you know us,” Chloe said with a toss of her head. “Look, boss, you ought to just let Garner go do what he wants. Then we won’t have to deal with him anymore.”

“Hey!” said Garner. “How do you know I’m not right?”

“Because you suggested it?” Chloe arched one brow.

Garner glared.

“Enough,” Jude said quietly. That one word quelled them both.

Jude looked at Creed. “I need to go keep an eye on Terri. You want to come?”

“Because of this thing?”

Jude nodded. “She was a doorway last time. She might still be. I don’t know.”

Creed understood. Jude had offered to die permanently to save them all from the thing that had nearly killed Creed’s great-granddaughter, that had attacked Terri, as well. He also understood that no matter how many cops surrounded Terri, none of them would be able to protect her from that kind of threat.

He rose. “Sure.”

He didn’t have to ask Jude how they would find her. Jude and Terri’s relationship was more than a simple mating; it was a claiming. No matter where Terri went now, Jude would be able to find her. And if anything happened to Terri, Jude would probably tear the planet apart before he killed himself.

It was the way of vampires. And the reason most of them tried to avoid a claiming at all costs: inevitably, if something went wrong, death and destruction would result.

But apparently, to judge by the way Jude had claimed Terri despite all the warnings he’d given Creed about it over the years, claiming wasn’t always a choice.

They left the car because they had no need for it. Jude carried the tools of his trade in the pockets of a long leather coat: crucifix, the ritual for exorcism and plenty of holy water. Creed felt a bit uncomfortable with that, but some of his perspectives were undergoing radical changes because of his association with Jude.

They slipped from shadow to shadow too fast for human eyes to see. The most any mortal could have noticed would have been the breeze of their passage.

The city was quieting down though, falling into its late slumber at last, so they didn’t encounter many people.

Each one, though, had a particular, tempting aroma. It was, Creed sometimes thought wryly, like slipping through an aromatic deli but never tasting a single, delicious morsel. With time it got easier, though never easy.

He had vowed a long time ago never to become again that ravenous monster he’d been during the weeks and months after his change. If he ever felt weak, his conscience summoned up a whole banquet of ugly images to remind him of what he had done.

Though sometimes he wondered why he bothered. Humans were so good at doing themselves in, it often felt pointless for him to suppress his own urges, his own hunger.

Jude took them directly to the crime scene. His instincts had guided him to Terri as surely as a homing beacon. Together they mounted a nearby building and watched from the roof. Periodically, Jude lifted his head and sniffed the air to make sure there was nothing unusual about.

From above, both preternatural sight and preternatural hearing allowed Creed to know everything that was going on. Most of it was dull, detail work, and he hardly paid attention. He didn’t really care about the ordinary details of an ordinary murder. Finally, bored, he tuned it out and looked up at the stars.

Despite the city lights, he could see thousands of them, if not millions, thanks to his vision. Sparkling in all the colors of the rainbow and more, they seemed to set the sky ablaze. He loved moonless nights because he could see so many more stars.

For him the night was not leached of color, but instead flooded with it. Things he had never been able to see as a human now filled his eyes with pleasure. Sounds and scents brought him stories of the night that he would never have noticed before.

No, it was not all bad.

“Creed?”

He dragged his gaze from the heavens to look at Jude. “What?”

“Do you smell it?”

Creed drew the night into his lungs, smelling it and tasting it. He paused, then exhaled slowly. “There’s something faint. Something off.”

“It was here. Gone now, but it was here.”

At once Creed’s interest in the goings-on below him returned. He focused on the little hive of human activity, listening and watching.

“Do you think it caused this?” he asked Jude.

“I don’t know. I’ll find out more from Terri. For now though, it’s enough to know it was here.”

“And good reason to stick around Terri until she’s home.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Creed.”

“I don’t know how much good I’ll be if needed.” Then Creed paused. “So, okay, maybe you need to teach me how to deal with this stuff.”

“It would be helpful.”

Creed had never wanted to enter the world where Jude existed, fighting demons and other unseen threats. It had always seemed to him to be a dangerous path full of hidden pitfalls, and he was at heart still the Harvard professor he’d been before his own change. But after what had happened to his great-granddaughter, his opinion had rapidly shifted. Now he’d just offered to jump in with both feet.

Surprising himself, he grinned into the night. Apparently he’d made the decision without realizing it.

He drew another lungful of the night. The abnormal scent was already cataloged in a part of his brain that would never forget it. He would know it again the instant he encountered it anywhere. So he sniffed, checking for it, making sure it didn’t strengthen. For now that was all he could do.

“It doesn’t seem to be coming back,” Jude remarked presently, as the team below them began to pack up, as the body was loaded into a morgue van. “Why don’t you run back to the office, or home if you prefer. I’ll just follow Terri to the morgue to make sure it’s not in the vicinity. Then I’ll get back to the office.”

“What if you find it? I should come, too.”

Jude smiled without humor. “I don’t want to challenge it tonight unless I have no choice. I’m just keeping an eye out.”

“Call me if you need me.” Then Creed straightened and blended away into the night like a shadow.

Being a vampire did have its advantages.

Since it was still several hours before dawn, Creed chose to head back to Jude’s office. He didn’t feel like working tonight, and Chloe and Garner often provided amusement.

He now had his own key card and code to enter, so he got no warning at all when he walked down the darkened hallway and opened the door to Jude’s office. Inside were not only Chloe and Garner, but another young woman, maybe thirty.

And the minute he stepped through the door, her scent hit him like a speeding train. Instant hunger, almost overwhelming, slammed him, followed by a near-intoxication. He froze, never having experienced such a strong reaction before, and fought for his self-control. No morsel had ever smelled so good to him.

“Hi, Creed,” Chloe said.

He couldn’t even answer her. Instead he stared at the young woman who sat beside Chloe’s desk. Blonde, her hair falling loose from a chignon as if the wind had ripped at her. Wearing a white wool dress that hinted at a lovely figure. Her face might have been painted by an artist trying to capture the beauty of an angel, her eyes a green so bright they almost seemed to glow.

But it was her scent that punched him, held him rigid in the hell between hunger and self-control.

“Creed?” Chloe said.

With an extreme effort, he dragged his gaze from the woman and looked at Chloe. “Hi,” he managed.

“This is Yvonne Depuis. She’s here to see Jude. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I’m not sure. He wanted to make sure Terri made it safely back to the morgue.”

“Morgue?” Yvonne Depuis’s eyes widened.

“Terri is a medical examiner,” Chloe said swiftly. “She’s been out at a crime scene.”

“Who is Terri?”

“Jude’s … wife,” Chloe answered, shading the truth a bit.

“Oh.” Yvonne tried a smile. The way the corners of her mouth trembled called to Creed. He had to force himself to cross the room and sit on the couch as if nothing at all was happening, certainly not the momentous response inside himself.

“This is silly,” Yvonne said to Chloe. “Everyone’s going to laugh at me.”

“Honey,” Chloe said, “around here we don’t laugh at anything except Garner.”

From his corner of the room, Garner snorted.

“Okay, then you’ll think I’m nuts.”

“We don’t do that, either,” Chloe said, sending a significant look to Creed. Just as he wondered what she meant, she added, “Do we, Creed?”

“Um, no.” From Chloe’s look he could tell he was required to elaborate, so he said, “At least not since my … relative was attacked by a demon, I certainly don’t laugh.”

Yvonne turned in her chair and looked at him. “Really?”

“Really,” he answered grimly, and wished she’d look away because, well, he was getting perilously close to losing the battle with his natural instincts.

What the hell was wrong with him? Maybe he should just bail now and go home to work. It would be the safer alternative. But as he stared at the blonde something else struck him.

“Do I know you?”

He was horrified to see her blush faintly, because that rising blood in her cheeks called to him like water in a desert.

“I, uh, I saw you once,” she admitted. “You were on your way out of the building as I was walking up. I think that was when I was thinking about buying the condo there.”

Now he remembered. The briefest moments in passing as he left his building, moving as fast as possible while pretending to be human, to avoid noticing anyone, to avoid the kind of neighborly contact that could create problems. He could easily have missed her scent, if the wind was right and he was going the other way. “Did you buy it?”

“Yes.” She furrowed her brow a bit. “Don’t you own one of the penthouses?”

Something in him stilled. She had troubled to find out where he lived, which meant her interest was more than passing. He needed to keep an eye on her. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “The topmost.”

She nodded. “Nice to meet you, neighbor.” Then she turned back to Chloe.

He wasn’t sure this was nice at all, not when he considered how hard he worked to make certain his neighbors just plain didn’t notice him.

He had put out the cover story that he was a reclusive intellectual with a medical problem who worked odd hours on papers for an international relations think tank, all of which was true except for the recluse part. Of course, being a vampire could be considered a medical problem.

He made sure to be seen leaving by way of the lobby once in a while, and coming back the same way so questions wouldn’t be asked, he had food delivered which he then carted out in smaller quantities to a food bank, and his blood deliveries sailed in safely under the banner of his “medical problem.”

But why had she asked about him, based on one small glimpse of him leaving the building?

He stared at her back and wished Jude would hurry up. He had questions now about this woman, and they were questions he could not ask. But Jude could, without making her suspicious.

The phone rang and Chloe answered. “Hi, Jude! When will you be back? You’ve got a client waiting. Okay. I’ll tell her.”

Chloe hung up and smiled at Yvonne. “He says fifteen minutes, max.”

Creed wished he could see more than the back of Yvonne’s head. Could feel more than uneasiness and a strong desire to pounce. Her aroma kept wafting his way, and only curiosity kept him from going home now to get out of the range of temptation.

And only self-restraint kept him glued to the couch. Finally, desperate, he announced, “I need some air,” and walked out. He waited outside on the quieting night street in the cold autumn air, impervious to the temperature.

And then Jude emerged from the shadows. Creed had heard his approach, though no mortal ever would have.

“What’s up?” Jude asked.

“Your new client.”

Jude came to stand beside him. “What?”

“She lives in my building, just moved there.”

“Okay.”

“And she knows where I live even though she claims to have seen me only once.”

“That made you suspicious.”

It wasn’t a question, which Creed appreciated. “You know the profile I keep. Of course it made me suspicious. She shouldn’t have noticed me enough to be curious. All I did was pass her quickly on my way out one night.”

“Well, some humans do feel an instinctive fascination.”

“Maybe. But then she turns up at your office.”

Jude nodded. “Consider me on guard. Maybe you should go home.”

“I’m curious. But her scent …”

Jude suddenly laughed. “Okay. I understand that one. Terri’s scent about drove me nuts. Can you handle it long enough to satisfy your curiosity?”

“I’ll have to. If you see her in confidence, you can’t tell me a damn thing.”

“Then come on. Let’s go get our answers.”

“But not for long. Crap. Now I’m blowing my cover as a medically troubled recluse.”

“We can take care of that, too. But first let’s find out what’s going on.”

Creed followed him inside, his step heavier than usual.

Inside, Jude shook hands with Yvonne Depuis and invited her into his inner office. Sometimes Creed thought Jude had been born suave, but he’d also seen Jude’s other side—impatient and occasionally cranky. On leaden feet, he went into Jude’s office with them, and took a chair as far away from Yvonne as space allowed.

“Mr. Preston,” Jude explained to Yvonne, “consults with me as his health allows, so I’m sure you don’t mind if he stays with us while we discuss your problem.”

Good going, Jude, Creed thought.

Yvonne shot another glance at Creed and again colored. “No, of course not. Might as well have the entire world think I’m crazy.”

“We don’t often think that around here,” Jude said soothingly. He pulled a piece of paper in front of him and picked up a pen. “What brought you to Messenger Investigations?”

“A friend of mine is on the police force. She said you have a reputation for dealing with weird stuff.”

Jude smiled. “So we do. Who recommended us? I like to thank people for referrals.”

“Detective Matthews.”

“Ah, Pat. A very nice lady.”

“She taught a criminology course I took a number of years ago and we became friends.”

“You’re in the police, too?”

Yvonne shook her head. “Not my cup of tea. I was just curious about law enforcement. I’m a writer. I’m curious about a lot of things.”

Jude nodded, scribbling something. “And the problem that brought you to us?”

Yvonne bit her lower lip. Creed inevitably thought about how he’d like to bite it for her. He had to close his eyes for a moment.

“It’s so hard to explain.”

“But you managed to tell Pat about it.”

A tremulous sigh escaped her and she managed another nod. “Okay. I moved into my condo about a week ago. And since I did, well, it’s hard to explain. I’ve never felt like this before. But I feel continually watched. Never alone. Every single minute I’m there. And then some things got moved around and I know I didn’t move them.”

“So you think someone may be getting in?”

“I don’t know. I mean that feeling of being watched … If someone was there, I’d know it. The condo’s not big enough for someone to really hide for long. But no one’s ever there. Frankly, I don’t even want to be alone in my own home, and it’s only been a week. The feeling is getting stronger. At first I thought it was just being in a new place, but if that was the case, it would be wearing off, wouldn’t it? And things being moved …” She shook her head and released a heavy sigh. “I can’t afford to move out now. I just bought the place. So I have to find out what’s wrong.”

“I agree,” Jude said. “Whatever it is that’s making you feel this way, we need to get to the bottom of it.”

“So you don’t think I’m just crazy?”

“Not likely. I think Creed will concur, when one feels watched, there’s usually someone watching.”

Creed cleared his throat. “Studies would seem to bear that out.”

“God.” Yvonne shuddered. “How could that be?” Then she appeared to have a thought. “Maybe it’s that creep of an ex-boyfriend of mine. Maybe he did something to my computer. He could be watching me day and night.” She scowled. “I wouldn’t put it past him, considering all the weird things he seems to get into. Stalking me? Yes, he’d be capable of it.”

“We’ll check it out along with other possibilities,” Jude said. “I want to examine your apartment very closely. I’ll need to gather some equipment first, though. When would be a good time?”

“Any time,” she said vehemently. “Now, tomorrow, I don’t care when. I work at home. Or I do when I’m not creeped out. Just tell me when.”

“Tomorrow night,” Jude said. “And I’m going to have Creed here accompany you home and check out your apartment before he goes to his own.”

Creed found it almost impossible to maintain a straight face. Alone with that woman in her apartment? Had Jude just lost his mind? But Jude’s expression revealed nothing. Talk about the ultimate test of self-control.

“Thank you,” Yvonne said, looking at him. “I’d be so grateful.”

Like hell she would, he thought grimly. Whatever or whoever might be watching her, it probably wasn’t nearly as big a threat to her as a vampire who craved her blood.

Namely Creed.