Dark Promises(31)

Then he took over. Completely. Sweeping her away to another dimension. His kisses did that to her. He drove out every thought. Good or bad. Every other person until there was only Aleksei. Only the man holding her to him. Kissing the breath from her body. Starting fires with just his mouth alone.

Her body moved restlessly against his. His cock was suddenly hard and hot and resting against her thigh. Without thinking, she dropped one hand down to cover him, feeling him jerk beneath her. He felt like velvet over steel. Thick. So thick. So long. How could that fit inside of her? But it did and felt so good.

“Wrap your fist around my cock, Gabrielle.”

He whispered the command against her mouth and then he was kissing her again. Long. Wet. Hard. So delicious. His mouth growing rougher. She couldn’t resist the temptation and she wrapped her fingers around the heavy girth. He pulsed in her palm. So hot. Velvet soft. Iron hard. She didn’t stop herself from exploring. From running her palm up the shaft and sliding up and over the broad crown.

“Yours,” he said softly. “All yours.”

One arm went to her back, the other beneath her knees. “Dawn is creeping upon us. We will go to ground and continue this next rising. And, kessake.” He licked just behind her ear and then bit gently down on the skin between her shoulder and neck, sending a thousand flames dancing over her skin. “You did not think about him once, did you? I told you to trust me. I can help you. When you need help, you ask.”

His eyes stayed on hers and she nodded slowly, her breath still caught in her lungs. He opened the earth, and she closed her eyes. “I’ve never gone to ground unless I was already asleep,” she confided.

“You will lay with me, the ground open until we have to close it, and I will tell you how to do this. I can help you. And always know, you are safe with me. If you can conquer your fear, tell me and I will help you.”

“I am not cleaned up yet.”

“I want you to go to ground with me inside you. When you wake next rising, I promise you will be clean.”

She wasn’t certain what to think about that, but she did know one thing—she knew exactly why he wanted her to kiss him. Gary was gone from her mind just as he’d been when Aleksei had taken her body the first two times. Kissing Aleksei did that and she didn’t want to think too much about what that said about her.

8

Trixie Joanes was in trouble. Not a little bit of trouble, but a lot. The kind of trouble that could get one dead very fast if they didn’t make smart decisions. She was fairly certain the mountains were probably hiding like a million vampires, but her vampire-hunting kit—the one she’d gotten off the Internet—was really difficult to lug around.

The entire box was large and weighed a ton. It was awkward and when hiking up in the mountains—which was tough enough—impossible to carry. So really, what good was it? A big wooden box, with all kinds of content, that when sitting at home in her living room looked really cool, but when she was trying to haul it around with her, hiking up a seriously high mountain, well, whupping vampire ass was out.

She’d been hiking for hours, running when she could, which, truthfully, wasn’t very often. She was going uphill. She wasn’t built for speed. She was a woman with a woman’s body. In shape, but still, she had curves. Real womanly curves, not some stick figure that was all the rage.

“Seriously.” She muttered the word under her breath as she avoided a field full of rocks and tried to find a place that was safe to sit down and rest. She really needed to rest. She’d gone up the mountain instead of down for a variety of reasons, none of which, at that particular moment when she was sucking in air to try to give her burning lungs a break, seemed logical.

She spotted a smallish boulder back in the shadow of the mountain that rose behind it like a specter. She could just sit there for a few minutes. She didn’t want to be out in the open where her traveling companions might spot her. They would have found her missing the moment they got up. She could only hope they thought she’d gone back to the village instead of up the mountain, but she was fairly certain Denny Jashari could track anything in the mountains.

Trixie had no business in a foreign country running with a pack of hyenas pretending to be good people when they clearly weren’t. If any of her girls had made such poor decisions she would have boxed their ears and brought them home for a good ass whuppin.

She sank down on the rock and dropped her back to the ground, considering for the millionth time whether or not to dump her vampire-hunting kit. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in vampires anymore—she’d been convinced that monsters actually existed—she knew she wasn’t two steps away from the loony bin—but quite frankly, she just couldn’t conjure up enough energy to care. She didn’t have to worry about monsters there on the mountain, she had to worry about them maniacs.

She didn’t like to travel and yet she found herself in the Carpathian Mountains, somewhere near Poland, or the Ukraine, or one of those countries where she didn’t understand a word anyone said. The only reason she would leave her home and her own neighborhood was her beloved granddaughter—Teagan.

Teagan did like to travel and she was always getting herself into scrapes. Mostly, she got out of them because she was extremely smart, but this time . . . Well, she needed her grandmother whether she thought so or not. Teagan was in love. With a foreigner. Trixie knew all about the human trafficking and sex trade going on with young, beautiful, susceptible girls like Teagan. She had to stop her from making a terrible mistake. Well, now, her first priority was to save herself and if she did, it would take a lot of luck. She should have known better than to get mixed up with a bunch of fanatics.

Trixie looked cautiously around her, trying to get her bearings. She’d snuck out of the camping area on the pretext of gathering wood for a fire. She’d just kept going. Her traveling companions were totally whacked. Bonkers. As in insane. They might as well have been bible thumpers who spouted everything but the bible. Seriously whacked.

Teagan was Trixie’s. Her special girl. Her sun in the morning and stars at night. No one was going to harm Teagan. Not some horrible stranger who charmed a young, inexperienced girl and probably was trying to marry her to get into the United States, and not the whacked-out vampire hunters who didn’t know the difference between a vampire and a human being.

Totally bloodthirsty. Trixie didn’t mind whupping ass when it was warranted, but she was discerning. Her traveling companions were not discerning. She scrubbed her hand down her face, trying to fight exhaustion. She’d been hiking most of the day and the sun was about to set. She’d gone up the mountain, not down, because something compelled her to go toward the highest peak and the mist, rather than go back down.

The mist coiled just above her, thick and dense. Things seemed to move in the mist, and she could hear dark voices on the wind. Was Teagan up there? In that? If so, she needed rescuing, and Trixie was there to do just that. She could hear the music of the night. The wind, the trees shifting subtly, the rocks, some gently trickling down the mountainside, even the wolves, all blended together in harmony to make beautiful, breathtaking notes.

She heard music in people. Sometimes soft. Sometimes loud. Joyous. Sad. The music was always there, from the time she could remember as a young child. A part of her. As she’d gotten older she began to discern that the musical notes in people tipped her off to the type of person they were. Meeting her traveling companions at the bottom of the mountain convinced her she was in deep trouble. The notes she heard coming off them as they hiked the trail, as well as the conversations about staking people, made her physically ill.

She looked up at the fog again. Swirling into patterns. Unnatural. She didn’t know how she knew it was unnatural, because the music it made was part of the night’s song, the notes in the dense veil of gray not jangling, or jarring, but still, the swirling mass of gray vapor was definitely not normal.

Again she felt anxiety pulling at her center. Her feet wanted to follow the path right into the fog and go higher still. She hoped she was tuned to Teagan. She’d always known where her girls were because she felt their music. The path she took held faint notes that were Teagan’s but they seemed just out of reach, as if she couldn’t quite catch up with her. And what was Teagan doing running around the mountains at night in a foreign country? The moment there was trouble, she should have been on a plane back to the States. And she was in trouble all right. Huge trouble this time. That girl was going to experience a little whup-ass herself.

Trixie was in good shape. She still had her figure. She had curves and none of them were sagging. She looked fine in her really sweet ass-hugging cargo pants that shaped her booty and tucked nicely into her hiking boots. She still had the little tucked-in waist she’d been given from heaven and her hair was as full and as shiny as ever. She liked it long, with tons of braids so she could fix it in intricate do’s that made her feel like a woman, not a robot.

Secretly, she had a thing for really nice—and sexy—underwear; of course no one knew about that little vice and she wasn’t going to let her traveling companions find out her secret, either. They would if they killed her, and she had the feeling they would kill her when they caught up with her. If you weren’t with them, then you were against them. They sounded like bigots—racists—and being black, she’d had enough of that to last more than one lifetime.