Phantom Desires

Brotherhood of Blood, Book 3

Computer expert Carly is tired, burned out and ready to downgrade her hectic lifestyle to something simpler. Her solution—pull up stakes and move to an old farm house in the middle of Wyoming. Her new house is full of old-time charm, and it comes with an unexpected surprise. Dmitri Belakov.

Dmitri, a Master Vampire, had an agreement with the former owners of the house to let him live peacefully beneath it in his hidden lair. Now there’s a new owner, and he may have to risk revealing his presence to negotiate a new contract. He moves cautiously because if she won’t deal, he’ll have to kill her once she knows his secret. Carly’s mind is unusually hard to influence, but he makes inroads when she is asleep.

Their shared dreams are more erotic than he ever expected, firing a hunger within him to know her feel and taste in the flesh. But doing so risks far too much. Even if Carly can’t deny the attraction arcing between them, loving him will force her to make a choice. An eternity in darkness with him—or life in the sun without him.

This book has been previously published and has been substantially revised and expanded from its original release.

Warning: This book contains graphic language, explicit sex, very naughty dreamwalking and passionate neck biting.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520

Macon GA 31201

Phantom Desires

Copyright © 2009 by Bianca D’Arc

ISBN: 978-1-60504-485-9

Edited by Bethany Morgan

Cover by Angela Waters

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: April 2009

www.samhainpublishing.com

Phantom Desires

Bianca D’Arc

To the folks on my chat group who make each day so much fun.

To my family, who support me no matter what crazy thing I choose to do.

And to my editor, Beth, for her help and persistent good humor.

She woke, bleary-eyed, in that state where the mind is half-conscious but the body still believes it is asleep. She blinked several times, but sleep was winning. In the darkness, she thought she saw a man sitting in the antique chair at the side of her bed, watching her. He was utterly relaxed, and something about his stillness was confident and supremely masculine. Those impressions lasted even as her body won the fight with her semi-conscious brain, and she dropped back to sleep.

The next morning, the image of the man’s shape stayed with her. A dark outline of a man that frightened her almost beyond reason. It had seemed so real. Not like a dream image at all.

She was a capable, steady career woman not given to fits of imagination. Yet, she could have sworn she’d seen a man sitting in her bedroom, watching her sleep in the dark of the night. Was he a phantom? Some sort of spirit left by the former owners of the old Wyoming farmhouse into which she had just moved? Or merely a stray figment of her imagination?

Carly shook her head and tried to ignore the shivers coursing down her spine at the memory of the slightly sinister apparition. The house needed a lot of work, and there was only her to do it. She pushed back the strange memory in the cool light of day and went to work unpacking, moving furniture into place and cleaning house.

The phone rang unexpectedly on Wednesday afternoon while she was polishing the wood in the foyer of the old house. Carly usually worked nights and spent part of the days working on her fixer-upper house. Her friends knew her schedule and knew when to call, so most likely it was one of them. She picked up the receiver and smiled when she heard the voice on the other end of the line. It was Jena.

“Are you ready to come home yet?” her friend asked only half jokingly.

“Not yet, Jen. I’m actually really enjoying myself. This old house has character and the town is kind of nice. It’s good to get away from the hustle and bustle of California.”

Jena sighed. “Well, I guess you did need less stress in your life, but I hate that you’re so far away. We miss you at our monthly get-togethers.”

Jena was a doctor and the mother hen of their group. She worried about all of them—the old college study group that had evolved into lifelong friends. Three of them were married now. The others had chosen various careers to which they were devoted. Jena was a physician, Sally a detective and Carly had her own software business.

“Oh, come on. Christy hardly ever shows up at our dinners anymore and Lissa and Kelly only come for drinks now that they’ve got hunky husbands to get back to.”

“Exactly! Which is why we single girls can’t afford to lose touch.”

“I promise we won’t lose touch, Jen. Besides, you know you have an open invitation to come here and see my new place. There’s plenty of room and the local guys—from what I’ve seen—all fall into the big, brawny stereotype. Lots of ranchers out this way and real live cowboys.”

“Be still my fluttering heart.” Jena could be the queen of sarcasm at times, but Carly loved her all the same. “What about you coming home to visit us once in a while?”

“Jena, I’ve been gone less than a week!”

They both had a good laugh and caught up on the doings of their mutual friends before Jena got paged—which happened too often to Carly’s way of thinking. The stresses of city life had truly gotten to Carly, which was why she’d sought this radical change in lifestyle and pace. So far it was working. Her stress level was lower, as was her blood pressure. She hadn’t even told Jena about the new medication her doctor in town had prescribed. Jena would have had a cow. But the change in lifestyle was already making a dent, and she had a new doctor monitoring her health, which was already looking better.

She hung up the phone and started in on more restoration work. She could’ve hired a crew to do it, but she preferred to do it herself. She had wanted a hands-on project—which pretty much described the entire house—to give her something to do that was both relaxing and rewarding.

She’d cleaned most of the house and was now working from front to back, restoring what she could along the way. If she found anything beyond her skill level, she’d call in an expert, but for now she was content to do what she could on her own.

On Friday night, after sleeping undisturbed for a week, a vivid dream once again assailed her. She was in a bedroom filled with lit candles, the spicy aroma of scented wax wafting sensually throughout the room. A strange man leaned over her naked body, caressing her with his eyes, followed by his strong, masculine hands.

“
Bella
, your skin is like warm satin.” His words whispered over her, thick with an accent she couldn’t place.

The stranger was handsome. Perhaps the most handsome man she had ever seen, but she knew this more from impressions than any real vision of his face. It was nighttime in the dream and shadows from the tiny flickering flames played about his angular features like a lover’s touch.

He had a foreign air about him, from the cut of his shadowy hair to the thickness of his accented whisper. He watched her with a fiery hunger, and he was one with the darkness. Strangely, he seemed to know her, though she’d never seen him before in her life. She would have remembered him. Of that she was sure.

“Carmelita Valandro, you are a siren sent to tempt me.” His whispers worked their way down her spine as his breath licked over her skin. He knew her full name. Nobody called her that anymore. How did he know?

“Your body is ripe and womanly, made to take mine.” He praised her as his fingers delved between her legs, touching, torturing with pleasure.

His lips moved down her body with leisurely deliberation, his teeth dragging at her skin, making her shiver with excitement. Slowly he repositioned her limbs, settling like a master between her legs, gazing his fill at her swollen folds as his hands drew nearer to her core, spreading her open for his touch.

His fingers were blunt tipped, long and thick. One speared into her, drawing a cry from her lips in the dream. She was ready for him and the feeling of his possession was like nothing she’d ever felt before. He knew her body and just how to play it. Like a master violinist with a Stradivarius.

He added another finger, twisting his hand like a corkscrew, using the blunt tips to arouse places within her she hadn’t known existed. She whimpered in the dream, wanting more. He chuckled—a dark sound in the haze of the dreamplane.

“So responsive.” His voice dripped with approval and made her even hotter. “I’m going to enjoy fucking you, Carmelita.”

His harsh words made her jump. Dirty talk had never been this exciting, but this stranger made her want…so much.

“I will fuck you until you scream, little one. Then I will drink of you and fill you with my seed.”

She could picture it as his fingers danced within her, stoking an intense fire in her body. She wanted it. She wanted to be possessed—fucked, as he so crudely put it—by this man, this shadow in the night.

“But first I want to taste you. I bet you’re as sweet as cream and twice as addictive.” His face loomed closer out of the darkness. A devilish smile graced his masculine lips and a sparkle twinkled in his dark eyes as he removed his fingers. She wanted to protest, but he moved closer, stilling her with his strong hands.

Leaning forward into the V of her legs, he gave her the most intimate kiss of all. His hot tongue slid inside her, a warm, wet invasion. Nothing had ever felt so good before. She convulsed in the dream and in reality with a gasping cry.

Shocked to wakefulness by a burst of pleasure so intense she’d never experienced anything like it in real life, Carly remembered the moment his tongue had touched her. The shock of it still coursed through her. It was familiar, yet as foreign as he was.

The feel of that unprecedented dream haunted her all day as she went about her chores, shopping, cleaning and putting the old farmhouse to rights. It puzzled her, excited her and heated her blood. But it made no sense.

Carly had been fondled by men before. She’d dated more than a few men in her life, but she had never once felt the instant flame of response her dream man had elicited. The echoes of the dream made her feel empty and that bothered her. Those few moments of dreamtime made her ache with longing for something she doubted she would ever find in the real world.

And it was just pitiful that the most exciting her love life had been lately were some vivid dreams. She was fast approaching spinsterhood, with no social life to speak of, but a very healthy bank balance due to her own hard work. She’d needed a change and moving out here to the middle of nowhere was the first step.

She could write the custom code for her computer software anywhere, so why not the wilds of Wyoming? She had a contract with one of the colleges near Laramie and a sturdy SUV to get her there when it snowed. She’d bought the old farmhouse on a whim, but it suited her.

She had her work and lots of quiet and open spaces in which to do it. She had her friends too. Earlier this year, she’d gone to Lissa’s wedding in California. Her old college friend had found a hunk of a man who owned a vineyard and together they seemed happier than anyone had a right to be. The old study group had stayed close all these years and she spoke on the phone with Kelly and Lissa often, now that Kelly had gone to work for Lissa and her new husband at their vineyard.

Work kept Carly busy, even on this isolated job. Once a week or so, she would meet with staff at the college. She also had to go down to the campus more frequently to test, observe and fix any glitches that came up. It was a challenging job and one she enjoyed.

Up until a few months ago, she would have been overseeing several of these installations at once. Now she was delegating the other installations and overseeing just this one, which was the most complex her little company had on the table.

Professor Dmitri Belakov watched the small woman race from her car. The sky had darkened sufficiently but still held that just-after-sunset glow he loved. Dmitri had checked the installation schedule and knew tonight the young computer programmer would be performing a key part of the installation process that would take her most of the night. It was his perfect opportunity.

First, he would teach his evening course in history, then casually drop by the administration building where his office was located. It was also where the sexy woman would be working, probably until dawn. He would meet her then.