Blood Kiss - Ward J. R. (книги онлайн полностью txt) 📗

Would Craeg even be comfortable here?

Probably not.

“Father?”

“Forgive me.” He looked down at the papers on his desk. “But of course, I understand you must needs be gone. Do know you are missed, however. Also know that the Brothers do not tell me much, yet what they have shared … makes me very, very proud of you.”

That now-familiar pain in her chest, the one that came from her lying, lit off again as she thought that actually, he would not be very proud of her at all.

She intended to lose her virginity tonight to a male he would never approve of.

The trouble was, the Brothers had given no indication of how long this training program would last or what the long-term prospects for the class sticking together were. And her need for Craeg’s body was making her desperate—and very conscious that time was passing with alacrity.

She wasn’t going to miss her chance. And she had the sense that the more they were together, the more Craeg’s priorities were changing, too. He was becoming attached to her.

Paradise could feel it.

If it weren’t for the omissions with her father, she would be on cloud nine.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night after class,” she said in a rough voice.

“I’ll be here. Do take care of yourself.”

“I will.” She nodded to him. “I promise, Father.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

Craeg couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone out with “friends.” In fact, he might never have done it before.

As he pulled on his jeans and cursed the holes, he told himself to get over it. He’d never been into “fashion”—one, he couldn’t have afforded it even if he had given a shit, and two, worrying about what you put on your body had always struck him as a criminal waste of brainpower.

“You look so incredibly average.”

Rolling his eyes, he turned around to Axe and—

“What the fuck are you wearing, asshole?”

The male looked like he’d been hit with the freak bat harder than usual, his big body wearing a shiny black skin suit that smelled like chemicals and made a strange creaking sound as he walked. Black piercings were in his ears and his face, a chain running from one lobe to his fucking nose, for crissakes.

He didn’t look like a pussy, though—Craeg had to give him that. Something about the bastard radiated aggression, power, strength. Sex.

Kinky sex, that was.

Axe shrugged like he was in nothing more unusual than a granhmen’s housecoat. “I’m going to hang out with my kind. If I don’t get laid my way soon, I’m going to kill myself—hell, much more of you vanilla types and I’m going to need Cialis to get it up. You’re killing my burn.”

“Well, no offense, but an open flame is not what you need around that getup.”

And out came the mask. It was black, of course, but like he’d expected something pink and green? And it fit over Axe’s features like a glove, changing his not-bad-looking-at-all face into something downright hideous—a morphing that was no longer vampire, but another species.

Alien.

“To think I assumed you were fugly before,” Craeg remarked.

“Again I say, you normals are killing me.”

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd that was how he and a whatever-the-hell-it-was ended up riding out of the training center together.

As the bus went along, pausing at all those gates, they were both quiet, but he was damn sure they had the same things on their minds: Axe was clearly looking to get his freak all over some Goth variety of a heart-n’-a-hole, while Craeg was trying desperately to convince himself he could keep from losing control with Paradise.

Ostensibly, this whole meet-up-with-the-class thing shouldn’t have been a big deal—they were just going to a regular club, with music and booze. Nothing close to where Axe was heading, for sure.

But sex was going to be front and center, at least for him.

Shit, Paradise was killing him—and he’d identified the essential problem. Since the first night of the program, he’d set up barrier after barrier to keep her away, and each one of them had crumbled. It was like he was a mountain climber and had taken a fall—and every tethering of the rope that was there to save his life had popped, one after the other.

“You know, you look like shit, and not just because you’re wearing that ridiculous getup,” Axe muttered.

Craeg looked across the aisle. “I look ridiculous? Have you checked in the mirror? I didn’t know that crank case oil was a fashion statement.”

“Stop avoiding. What’s up, my man.”

As they trundled along, heading for the dematerialization spot, he found himself talking. “I can’t … You know, it’s not right.”

“What isn’t.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Still waiting for a noun. I know you’re a redneck, but you do have a vocabulary, if rumor serves.”

Craeg just shook his head. There was no way he was going to disrespect Paradise by laying their private business out—even to a guy like Axe, who seemed, if only because he was, in his own words, a committed narcissist, likely to keep shit tight.

“I don’t know,” Axe said as he stretched his legs out across the seats and leaned against the bus’s darkened windows. “She seems different from her kind. I don’t think you have to worry.”

Yeah, females were totally opposite from males, weren’t they.

And in this case, he was the one being a pussy. She was not. She was ready for their next level—and he suspected he might just be hiding behind her virtue: Once again, he was protecting himself. And when he thought about how she made him feel?

Still seemed like a smart … if perhaps unsustainable … plan.

Christ, they were going to end up alone at some point tonight. It was fucking inevitable. And after two phone sex seshes with her, he was more desperate than ever, a panting, starved, crazy male with an ever-ready cock, and enough orgasms on backup to dehydrate him to the point of needing Gatorade through a vein.

He wanted to believe he could keep to his resolution, he really did.

The trouble was, nothing made him more shortsighted than his name leaving her lips on a gasp.

One syllable and nothing fancy, his was not a regal name. But all she had to do was say it and he was gone, gone, gone. Putty in her hands. Blank of any intention other than getting inside of her and staying there.

Oh, man, he was in such trouble here.

As Paradise entered the human club, shAdoWs, she looked around and thought … yeah, no. Loud music was thumping to the point where she heard it in her skull. Dark purple and red laser beams shot this way and that through air that was thick with human smells. And the overwhelming attention she got was not anything she was interested in.

Having no idea where Craeg, Boone, and Novo were, she walked through the gyrating crowd, and as she went along, human men watched her, assessed her, hoped to catch her eye. She supposed some of them might have been considered attractive, but it was more along the lines of her wandering through someone’s room and noticing a chair with a good slipcover.

The fabric might be nice, but she’d never take it home.

Or in this case, sit on the damn thing.

The building that housed the club had been a warehouse, it looked like, and there was something incongruous about its three-story-high open space nonetheless feeling claustrophobic. Then again, there were just too many people crammed into the center. Where did you just hang out, she wondered. And how did all of them know each other? Everybody seemed to be touching … everybody that was around them.

Working her way across the floor space, she discovered there were booths along the perimeter of all that writhing. Maybe her people were there? Jeez, did she even have the right club—

“Hey, baby, come with me.”

A rough hand grabbed her waist and hauled her up against a sweaty body. Glaring at the human man, she tried to push him away, but he latched hold on her wrists, yanking her in close.