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She felt an unreasoning chill again. “Why night?”
“He suffers from the same problem that I do. So he works only at night.”
“Are you related?”
He shook his head. “Friends. Drawn together by a common experience.”
That made sense, so she let it go. “I’m sorry, I’m interrupting your work. I should just try to sleep.”
“I have surprisingly little interest in work tonight.” He smiled. “Events can be distracting.”
“I’ve gotten very little writing done this week,” she admitted. “It’s hard to work when you feel someone is looking over your shoulder.”
Which, she realized with sudden embarrassment, was exactly what she was doing to him. Basically looking over his shoulder. But as she tried to find a believable reason to go lie on the couch and pretend to sleep when she felt wound as tightly as a spring, he rose.
“Would you like coffee or tea?” he asked. “Or something to eat? I must have something lying around.”
“I’d love coffee if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind in the least.” He walked into the kitchen and pulled a coffeepot out of the cupboard.
He kept his coffeepot in the cupboard? Then he must not drink it often. Everyone she knew kept it in easy reach on the counter. So maybe he was a tea kind of guy.
But he made no tea, and when he returned to the living room, he did so with a coffee service that held only one cup. He politely poured her coffee then let her add what she wanted. “I’m sorry, I have no cream or milk, but I do have sugar.”
“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 lying on his couch.
Trusting him.
He had to remember that: she trusted him.
He could not, would not, betray her.
Chapter 3
Yvonne leaned back from her laptop as dusk began to settle over the city, and she realized she was growing increasingly edgy. Edgy at being alone all day in a virtual stranger’s apartment. Edgy that the night might bring some answers to her when Jude arrived. Edgy that she couldn’t just go home and be safe.
Indeed, whatever it was, it had deprived her of that most basic human need: a home.
And Creed, much as he attracted her, was an odd bird indeed. Not just his illness—a quick online search had even given her the name for it—but odd in that while he had food in his fridge, a fridge too clean to be believed, and food in his cupboards, none of it was opened or used. Despite his invitation, she had hesitated to open those packages until hunger drove her to it.
Of course, she might be making too much of it. He might have just had it all delivered, but it did seem odd that not one thing was open except the coffee, and he’d opened that bag last night.
She didn’t know anybody who finished everything in the cupboard before restocking. There was always an open box of cereal, or crackers or something in the cupboard or fridge. Always.
He must be the ultimate clean freak. Or maybe he ate out, and just kept food on hand in case.
She sighed and stretched widely, loosening muscles that had tensed from hours bent over her computer. At least her writing had gone well. Very well.
But with only the sounds of the city to keep her company all day, even though she was not alone, another kind of tension seemed to have crept in. Nothing like the feeling in her condo of course, but tension nonetheless.
A bad feeling loomed over her, and she hated it, especially when all she had to point to was that unnerving sense of not being alone in her condo. Was she losing her mind?
No, she reminded herself. Creed had sensed it, too. And then insisted that pewter plate had been thrown at him. Much as she wanted to dismiss it, she couldn’t. That plate was too heavy to move on its own, nor had it been set in such a way that it could just fall. But every time she told herself he must have been kidding, she remembered the look on his face. He believed it had been thrown. So either he was totally crazy or it was true. Believing him crazy would have been easy except for what she had already experienced herself, especially last night.
Of course, he was beginning to seem a little less like a paragon of sanity, given the state of his fridge. The darn things never looked that clean and his looked as if it had never really been used.
A quiet little laugh escaped her at her own ridiculous thoughts, just as she heard the door behind her open. She swiveled immediately and saw Creed emerge from his bedroom. It was just now dusk, she hadn’t yet turned on any lights, and he appeared like a mysterious figure, almost otherworldly.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Did your day go well?” He asked the question as he bent to turn on a lamp. Now that he no longer appeared quite so mysterious, she noted that he apparently awoke looking every bit as awake and put together as he had the night before. No sleep-puffed eyes, no helter-skelter hair.
“Fine,” she answered, summoning a smile. “I was just calling it a day on my work.”
“I hope you found enough to eat.”
Which led her to the question that had bothered her all day. “Don’t you ever eat at home? I couldn’t find anything open.”
He paused. “Well, actually, I mostly keep food on hand for guests. I’m no cook and when I want something I just order it. I hope you didn’t hesitate to open things so you could eat.”
“Well, not for long. I got too hungry.”
“Good.”
Suddenly realizing she was being rude, she hopped up from her chair. “You must want your desk back.”
“Not yet. Relax. Jude will probably be here shortly, and I hate to get involved in something and then have to stop.”
She nodded, understanding that feeling well.
He came farther into the living area—almost cautiously, she thought—and settled on an armchair. Was he afraid of frightening her? If anything about him frightened her, it was her attraction to him. It seemed to be growing, and she wished she knew of some way to bridge the distance between them. Of course, that assumed he found her attractive, too. Maybe he didn’t, despite what he had said last night as they were leaving the elevator. He wouldn’t be the first guy to feel that way.
She sighed.
“Something wrong?”
“Other than that I can’t go home? Not a thing.” And not entirely true.
“If anyone can take care of your problem, it’s Jude,” he said firmly.
She wandered closer and sat on the couch, still made up as a bed because she hadn’t been sure whether to fold things up. Folding them up would make more work for Creed if she needed to stay here another night. “You have a lot of confidence in Jude.”
“I’ve seen what he can do. And what it costs him. I have every confidence in him.”
“What does it cost him?”
“What does it cost a homicide detective? Or in Terri’s case, a medical examiner? Some jobs just leave scars.”
She nodded, not knowing how to respond. “I hope I meet Terri eventually.”
“I’m sure you will. She’s a very likable lady. You mentioned writing. What kind do you do?”
“I’m a novelist. I write fantasy, usually.”
“So you create worlds?”
“One mostly. I write a series.”
“Six-legged blue cows?”
She had to laugh. “I try not to jar my readers that way. The trick is making the world seem close enough to the one we live in so that it seems familiar, yet different enough to establish that it is another world.”
“That would be an interesting challenge. Tolkien did it incredibly well.”
“Something to aspire to, certainly. But most of us don’t have the luxury of spending the better part of a lifetime creating one world.”
“His command of the language was impressive, especially. A true storyteller’s voice. I can pick up any of those books, start reading at any point, and become totally absorbed again. Some day you’ll have to tell me one of your titles.”
