Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (7 page)

His thrusts were becoming more erratic and he could feel the tingling beginning in his furthest extremities and moving rapidly inward.  He moved one hand down from her ankles and to her clit, his thumb working over it until he could feel her body begin to shake.

“God, oh my God!  I can’t!”

And then she was coming and he was coming with her, the two of them perfectly in tune with each other and locked in a dance of orgasm he hoped would never come to an end.  When it did come to an end, as all good things ultimately must, he held her.  He had never held a woman before but he thought it was something he might be able to grow to like.  He held her, watched as she drifted off to sleep, and thought that it really might be.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Well, what are we going to
do
about it, Mr. Smith?  Just what in the hell are we going to do about it?”

“We?  I’m sorry, Mr. Lockland, when did this become a joint endeavor?”

Philip Smith’s heart, if it could truly be said that he had one of those, was not in this conversation.  Not at all.  His mind was on other things, things much more tasty than a disgruntled middle aged business man well on his way to massive coronary.  Philip could hear it clearly in his voice and shook his head with some combination of annoyance and pity.

Men like this were so small minded.  They couldn’t see past their own petty needs and subsequently spent a significant portion of their lives stamping their feet and demanding changes that wouldn’t actually make much of a difference.  They focused on the wrong thing, expended all of their energy doing so, and it was only upon death (and that was assuming their manner of death allowed them any time) that they realized their lives hadn’t amounted to much of anything. 

Hardly anything at all.  If Philip could have done so without giving himself away as something other than an ordinary human being, Philip would have issued this man a warning.  He would have told him what an awful waste he was making of his life and that he really ought to focus his energy on something that made him feel better than this. 

After all, he was going to die someday, and probably some day much sooner than in his pompous head he had allowed himself to believe.  Call him sentimental.  Philip Smith had begun this conversation feeling far more sympathetic and inclined to peacefulness than was usual for his character.

That had been in the beginning. That sentimental set of feelings was now decidedly past tense and past tense
only
.  The way this little prick shouted at him into the phone, as if he were the boss and Philip one of his unfortunate minions, had an astonishing ability to harden Philip right back up again.  Men like this one always seemed to have the ability to do things like that, the same way that they, without fail, could make a young girl in a bar snort with disdain when they offered to buy her a drink.

“I- well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t, Mr. Smith.  Not at all.”

Philip rolled his eyes.  There was nobody in the room to see the gesture and commiserate, but it made him feel better all the same.  This man, this awful Mr. Lockland, was doing his best to maintain that indignant, windbag tone of his and it might have even worked on a lesser man.

Or a man who was actually a man to begin with and not something more than human and also less natural.  For Philip, it had very much the opposite effect, if it had any effect at all.  Any empathy that he might have felt, something that hadn’t come naturally to him when he was alive and was even less of a strength after his turning, evaporated.

His face turned dark and ominous and his incisors snapped out and to attention.  If Mr. Lockland had been able to see those things happen, there was a good chance that he would have shut the hell up and snapped to attention, but he couldn’t see it and so he went right on digging himself a hole he would very likely never be able to climb back out of again.

“Mr. Smith?  Did you hear me?  I said I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I do know that I’m not sure I appreciate your tone.  You aren’t the only one with business savvy, see?  I’ve heard the stories, don’t think I haven’t.  The mysterious Mr. Philip Smith, business hotshot whiz kid extraordinaire.

“If you think that frightens me you’re out of your goddamned mind.  I’ve seen a thing or two, OK?  Been around the block, as they like to say.  I’ve been doing this shit since you were still in diapers and I think you’d do very well to remember that.  You got me?”

“Do I ‘get’ you?  Oh yes.  Oh yes, Mr. Lockland, I believe I do.  I believe the real question should be do you
get
me?”

The words he spoke, although relatively benign, shut Mr. Lockland right up.  Good.  That was good.  Philip had done his best to maintain an even tone but he had no doubt that there remained an underlying current of danger, a threat unarticulated but nevertheless understood.

That tone told Mr. Lockland that Philip was done playing babysitter.  It said that they both knew that Philip was no ordinary man and if Mr. Lockland insisted on continuing to bluster and preen, Philip would show him just how far from ordinary he really was. 

He would, too.  He would show him and by the time things got to that point, it would be too late for Mr. Lockland to take it all back, to say “Oh, never mind, I didn’t mean it, and didn’t you realize it was all a big joke?”  There was a point of no return when it came to Philip’s relationships with people, either business or otherwise, and this one was rapidly approaching. It was up to Mr. Lockland whether he would choose to stop or move full speed ahead despite his multiple warnings.  Fortunately for him, it sounded like he was leaning towards the former.

“Right, right.  You’re right.  I overstepped.  I believe we understand each other.”

“Good.  I’m glad to hear it.  And what does that mean for our working with each other?  Moving into the future?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Mr. Lockland replied just as quickly as humanly possible. “I’ll take care of it and get back to you when it’s all sorted out.  Sound good?”

His tone had moved from that original pomposity to downright graveling, a sick kind of puppy dog sound.  That tone said how glad he was to be almost out of this conversation, that he felt that he really might make it out alive.  He had forgotten for a moment who he was talking to and forgetting a thing like that could be dangerous.  He would have to be more careful, that tone said.  He really would or else he would need to take a step back and assess if this was something he was really cut out for.

“Good,” Philip said in the same bland tone he had maintained throughout the duration of the rather short and yet somehow incredibly taxing conversation, “glad to hear it.  Hopefully, we won’t need to speak again anytime soon, yes?”

“Yes!  Yes, I’ll make sure of it.  I’ll take on the whole fucking project if I have to.”

“I believe you.”

With that, Philip hung up the phone.  He did believe him, he really did.  It was pretty obvious that Mr. Lockland didn’t love the idea of any further contact with Philip, which was how he liked things between him and the people he did business with. 

He wanted as few complications as possible so that he did not have to step in.  Because when Philip stepped in, he was ruthless.  That kind of ruthlessness could be messy and he wasn’t looking for messy at the moment. 

Messy often led to an unscheduled move, and this was not a time when it suited him to leave town.  Not when things were just starting to get interesting for the first time for a very long time.

“Christ, Philip, is that still the way you do things?  You never really do change, do you?  Not really, not hardly at all.”

Philip, who had been seated in a desk chair facing the vast wall of floor to ceiling windows behind his desk and staring out at the blanket of stars peppering the sky, shut his eyes briefly and steepled his fingers together.  If the moment before he had felt like a master of sorts looking over his bustling kingdom, now he felt like a child.  A bad child who had been caught in the process of doing something he knew he should not, who had been told before on more than one occasion. 

He didn’t turn around to view the owner of his chastisement, not yet.  He didn’t need to.  He would have known that voice anywhere.

“Caroline.  To what do I owe the pleasure?  Did you decide the phone call just wasn’t going to cut it?”

“What do you think, Brother?  And turn around when you talk to me.  I’m not one of your little worker bees who you push around so well.”

God, that phone call.  It was ringing through his head the way a headache would, if he still got those.  He could hear the disappointment in her voice when she prodded him for depth of character he simply didn’t have.  He could hear her calling him a brat all over again.  Her voice with that word echoed throughout his brain like a lonely call bouncing off of the walls of an empty cave. 

Still, he turned as she had asked, turned to greet his sister.  Caroline Wells, not a sister by birth but a sister of second birth, a blood sister.  She had been made before him, several years before, and because of that she thought of herself as a big sister, a sister who had the right to give him as much unsolicited advice as she wished.  Sometimes it was advice he heeded and sometimes it was advice he would just as soon ignore, but the advice kept rolling in all the same, just as it had for a century. 

“What’s the matter, Philip?  Not happy to see me?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Well, that’s no way to treat family.  I would have expected something more polite from such a cultured boy as yourself.”

She spoke in the playful poutiness that always drove him nuts and he found that he was grinding his back teeth together, chewing on the insides of his cheek in the same spots he had chewed since he was a little boy (there were even permanent little swollen parts to serve as evidence).  He was doing anything he could to keep himself from reacting to her presence.

He didn’t want to be goaded into a fight and although his tactics for avoiding them had rarely proved successful, he was willing to give it a shot.  This had started off as such a nice evening, turned into a fucking fantastic evening, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Caroline sweeping in and ruining it all.

Although, by the looks of it, that was exactly what she intended to do.  Caroline was stubborn like a pit bull and once she got it into her head to accomplish a thing, it was pretty tough to get her off of it.  At the moment, for better or worse (and as far as he was concerned it was going to be for the worse), the thing she had in her head was him; his life and the way he was leading it.  He studied her face, wondering how long she would wait before diving into the matter, and she raised her eyebrows at him, giving him a little wink for good measure.

“What do you think, little brother?  How do I look?”

She did a full spin, a delicate little pirouette in the middle of his office floor, and then came to a perfectly timed stop.  Philip rolled his eyes again.  That was not a question he was about to answer.  The thing was, she was beautiful.  No, she was more than that.  She had been beautiful before she had been turned.  The turning had made her otherworldly.  She had long platinum blonde hair and icy blue eyes, a lean body that reminded Philip of one of the sleek big cats caged up in the zoo.  She was lovely, formidable, even. 

The only woman Philip had ever seen who was as beautiful as Caroline was Megan, which was made all the more rare by the fact that Megan was only a human.  Just thinking about her, about the way her skin had given way beneath his cold fingertips, the way her hot breath had felt against his ear, made him shiver.  She was the kind of girl who could easily consume a man’s thoughts.  She was the kind of girl who could easily consume everything around her.  

“Well?  What’s the matter, Brother?  Cat got your tongue?”

“You look fine, Caroline.”

“Fine?” That simulated poutiness again. “Is that all?  Not the best kind of compliment.”

“Gorgeous, OK?  Is that what you want to hear?  You don’t need me to tell you.  You know you look good.  You’ve been told more times than you could possibly count.”

Caroline laughed, delighted by his easy irritability, and slunk across the room, plopping herself into a chair and lighting a slim little clove cigarette.  Philip watched her do it and then wrinkled his nose.

“Oh, come off it, Philip, still?” she chided, a look of condescending amusement on her face. 

The topic of her smoking was only one of many the two of them had fought about on and off throughout the years.  It was one of many because the two of them could have fought about anything.  If Philip said the sky was blue, Caroline would have sworn it was pink. 

They could have argued about gravity, about whether or not the sun would come up the next morning.  They would argue about any and everything so it was no great surprise that the topic of smoking had come up from time to time.