Hard Days Night (The Firsts Book 8) (39 page)

Could there be anything more beautiful in her life than watching the father of her child kiss his daughter for the first time?   Especially when she’d thought he could never even know she existed.

Swiping the moisture from her eyes and cheeks, Mal tried to look stern.  “So how did you find us?”

“Magics.
  An empath felt this little girl reaching for me.  So did I, but I didn’t know what it meant.  The messages weren’t exactly words, you know.  All I could determine was that something important was happening.  Now, of course, I know it was this little lady.”

He lifted his eyes from his daughter and locked gazes with Mal.

Suddenly, Erin was beside him.

“You can visit with your daughter later.  You two have unfinished business.  Mal, take him down the beach so you two can have privacy.”

Erin disappeared with Brigitte, leaving Mal nervously plucking at the ties of her dress, until she realized that the neckline was still too low and pulled the ties together to cover herself.

“If you would like to follow me.”

She walked off of the deck and went left, slowly pushing through the generous sands, her toes wiggling into it as she walked along, because she liked the sensation and because she wasn’t sure what to expect from this big man who she really did
not
know that well.

They were beyond the view of the house, the next one still half a mile down the beach, so she stopped, Ahmose just steps behind her.  The moon looked at the two figures so close and illuminated their features as they once again just watched each other.

Ahmose moved forward without warning, slowly, and picked Mal up in his arms.  He held her close, buried his nose under her hair, his mouth against her neck, and just breathed her in.  When he felt her arms go around him and then tighten, he burrowed deeper and held her closer yet.

“I missed you,” he whispered.

Mal could barely hear him, she held him so tight to her, wanted, more than anything right now, to stay there, his warmth, his scent, his shape beneath her hands, his breath on her neck. 
What had she expected?
  Not this, not his attraction to her as well. 
He missed her?

Abruptly, she pulled back, and although she wanted to bury herself against him again, she needed to ask.

“How did you know that I had died?  No one knew that.  After I died, and apparently came alive again, I left California immediately. How could you know that, Ahmose?  Weren’t you back home in Africa by then anyway?”

Ahmose
looked around, then carried her up from the sand to a bank of rocks.  He sat down, leaning against them and pulled her to him, her back against his chest, his hands splayed below her breasts and on her belly.

“I
was
home.  Even there, I could not get you off my mind, so I had already planned to come back to find you.”

Mal twisted in his arms, her eyes seeking his, now only a shiny glow from the moonlight.

“You were coming back for me?  A one-night stand?”

“Mal, you were hardly that. I needed you
the night we met, yes, for the blood, but our connection was real, was special.  Did you not feel that?”

“I
think so, yeah.  But it was still a one-night stand.  We still had no expectation that we would ever see each other again.”

“And yet I could not forget you.  Not even
once I thought that you were dead.  The fact that you carried my child, the fact that we’re here again, at this moment…Mal, I’ve come to know over the past two years that sometimes destiny has a plan.  I believe we are completing the plan.”

“Ahmose, I thought about you as well. 
I mean, the sex was incredible.  In spite of the fact that I thought you were a little insane, I knew you were a good man.  But we couldn’t know anything real about each other.  I thought I was just projecting my feelings for you because I found out I was pregnant.  Do we
really
have feelings for each other?”

Stepping forward, Ahmose took her face in his hands.  He
scanned her face, her tremulous smile, the uncertainty in her eyes.

“We will be together.  You will believe.”

“You don’t love me.  You don’t
know
me.”

“I know enough about you to know that I will.  Although I believe you might be wrong.  What I feel, it’s deeper than anything I’ve felt for a woman ever before in my long life. 
It’s why I couldn’t forget you. It’s why I cannot even begin to make you understand what it meant to me to find out that you were alive.”

His eyes shined, and Mal knew he really had been devastated to have lost her.  Everything she had just said to him seemed irrelevant right now.

Surging forward, Mal faced him and slid onto his lap, arms tight around his neck, and held on, her face buried into his neck like his was earlier against hers.

“Thank the spirits, the u
niverse, God, every possibility that might have let me find you again with our child.”

He just held her for moments, for minutes,
silently, before Mal spoke.

“I don’t know where we go from here.”

“We will find our path.”

Mal suddenly pushed off his lap, ignoring the fullness she’d felt in his crotch area.

“I…um.  I have to go back to the house.  Erin and Jack will be worried about me.”

“I won’t leave. If you want me, if you need me, I will be here on this island.”

“I need time, Ahmose.”

He smiled.  “We have all the time in the world now.”

“We’ll see.”  Mal paused.  “Ahmose, how is Luka?  Is he doing okay?”

“Yes.  He will be, anyway.  It’s still a challenge, but he’s slowly adjusting.  I put him with one of my best aids to guide him these past months.  She’s an angel with him and he seems to have taken to her. Still, even with her, he’s surly.”

Her eyes misted again, but she smiled.  “That’s Luka, all right.  Goodnight,  Ahmose.”

With one last long lingering look at him, Mal turned and walked back to the house, up the stairs, and opened the door.  Erin waited with Brigitte in her arms.

“He’s magnificent,” Erin said quietly.

Mal took her daughter and held her close to draw in her scent.  Was she trying to purge that of her father’s?

“God, he is.”

“I sent Jack home.”

“Thank you.  I need to sleep.”

“You’re overwhelmed. Go
ahead, I’ll take Brigitte below with me in case you need to have some time to think.”

“Thank you, Erin.”

Mal went into her room and dropped onto her bed, and although she closed her eyes, she knew she wouldn’t sleep.

An hour later, rolling around for most of it, Mal sat up in the darkness.  He was out there, she knew it.  This was his day, and he would have no place else to go here.

But that wasn’t it.  She knew he was out there because she could feel him. 
Why the hell did she feel him?

The nightgown Mal wore was nearly sheer,
a fabric with a loose weave for the warm nights.  She should have dressed, she knew that. She also knew why she
hadn’t
.

Barefoot again, she so rarely wore shoes here, Mal w
alked down the stairs towards the beach.  The moon had moved from one side of the sea to the other, but still lit the sands with its glow.

It also illuminated the tall man who sat on the sand some distance from the house.

It took a few moments to walk to him, but Mal refused to hurry.  She didn’t want to send the wrong message.

As she approached, Ahmose looked up and smiled.

“You should be sleeping.”

“No. I usually live a vampire’s hours. 
Because of Erin.”

“Ah.  She’s taken good care of you.”

“She’s been wonderful.”

Mal dropped down across from
Ahmose, her legs crossed and looked into his eyes.  “We’re new now.  We don’t have a relationship. What we were before, was exactly as I said, a spectacular hook-up.  I meant it when I told you that I don’t know what to expect here, and I don’t know where to go. I don’t believe we have a mystical destiny.  Erin told me you’re from a powerful, noble race. I don’t belong with you then.”

“If you think that I am from this
powerful race, then why don’t you trust what I tell you?”

“You’re
just mistaken.  I don’t believe in fairytales and picture-perfect movie endings.  We are not destined.” 

A
hmose smiled, his perfect white teeth almost electric in the moonlight.  “You’ve challenged me.”

“What?  No, I just…”

“You’ve challenged me, and I will rise to the challenge.  You don’t know if what we had together has any chance of being real.  You don’t know if I’m insane, or if destiny really does have a plan for us, for our little family that we’ve created unexpectedly.  I believe that we do.  So, I accept the challenge.  I will prove that we are a great deal more than a one-night-stand.  Prepare to be persuaded.”

She felt one of his hands around each of her ankles as he slid her down to the ground, splayed like a snow angel in the sand.

“I always meet a challenge,” he whispered, and came up along Mal’s side to pull back the loose fitting top of her nightgown to expose a breast.

“Now, I think this is a good
place to start.  One must be methodical in proving a theory.”

Mal did not move a muscle as he leaned in and pulled the exposed nipple into his mouth, kept it there, and used his vampire skills to excite it to hardness.  Still, she didn’t move.

“You need more convincing, I see.  In the second part of my exploration, I think I must move deeper into my subject.”

When he heard
Mal’s moan and felt her move her legs apart, just slightly, he knew he had her, he knew she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her.

“You won’t have to worry about losing your baby…
you’re coming home with me,” Ahmose whispered.

“No,” Mal whispered back, but her hands curled into his hair before he lowered himself out of reach and lifted her buttocks.  She’d been wearing panties, but they were gone.  “Ahmose, it’s too soon, I just gave birth.”

“You’re completely healed, baby.  Shoazan’s heal even quicker than vampires.  Let me prove it.”

The first touch of his tongue moving back and forth quickly between her legs
, the sensual buildup when he licked along the thighs and just short of reaching where she wanted him to be, was beyond her ability to accept.  She’d been sexually aroused almost as soon as she saw him tonight, and she thought part of that was because her body recognized the father of the child she’d carried for months.  It was the simplest thing on earth, she wanted him, on her, in her, under her, every way she could get him.

Mal st
illed his movement with one hand on the top of his head, and he looked up.

Even in the darkness, Ahmose’s eyes held a glow typical of arousal for a first blood, and
Mal’s eyes still glowed as Shoazan, so they locked onto each other, his questioningly, hers demanding.

“Stop.
  If we’re going to do this, if we’re going to be together, I want to feel you inside of me again. The last few days, since our child was born, I’ve felt an emptiness.  You are what I need to fill it, I knew that the first night.”

He’d thought to woo her back to him slowly, with patience and skill.

This would do!

Up on her elbows, Mal watched as Ahmose stood, and moving
too slowly, like humans, he pulled his tee shirt over his head.   Her eyes roamed the massive chest and tight, well-defined muscles of his shoulders, chest, and carved abdominals.  He undressed slowly, and while she wanted him inside of her worse than anything, she knew that would come shortly.  But this, unveiling his body to her appreciative eyes, painstakingly revealing his perfection, she immersed herself in the experience.  Her eyes moved across thick, curved biceps to powerful forearms, and from there to his fingers as they unsnapped his jeans and slid them down.

He sprung free of the tight fabric,
his cock long, hard, precisely what she wanted right at this moment she had never believed would come.

Mal pulled her gown over her head and discarded it carelessly.
“Now.”

It was
a demand.  Anyone who knew Ahmose would have expected him to be the last person to accept a demand gracefully.

“At your pleasure,” he said as he lowered the body that she’d just watched
, revealed to hungry eyes, drop down to cover hers.  He stretched his full length alongside her, skin to skin, everywhere they touched, a spark of energy sizzled.  Ahmose threaded the fingers of each hand through each of hers, and lowered his head to nip at her neck, just blunt nips, followed by his tongue to tease and taste.

“Can you feel that? 
The electricity?  Our bodies know each other and know we were meant to be together.”