Surrendering: A Regent Vampire Lords Novel, Book #1

Surrendering

A Regent Vampire Lords Novel

K.L. Kreig

Surrendering

Copyright
 
© 2014 by K.L. Kreig

Cover Art by Yocla Designs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Dedication

To my husband. My life would be incomplete without you. I love you so very much.

P
rologue

Kate

Rough hands gently roam her fevered body as a hot tongue leaves a blaze of fire in its wake. His burning gaze is fierce, but his hands touch her skin with a reverence she’s not experienced. Soft lips and sharp teeth nip down her midsection, pausing only briefly before continuing lower to a place she so desperately needed them to worship. When his tongue pierced her sex, she gasped, her hips bucked but he held her tightly to the mattress, devouring her, driving her higher toward madness.

“Come,” he darkly commanded, and her body obeys as an unexpected climax takes her crashing over the edge into thick, hazy, fog-filled bliss. Forcing her tightly clenched eyes open, she watched in sated fascination as he wraps her hips around his waist and thrusts into her wet, aching sheath, setting off an orgasm as equally intense as the first. Hips thrust, sweat poured and breaths were choppy. Every time was the same…unbridled passion and fervent coupling. Complete and utter perfection.

He plays her with expert precision, wringing another wave of pleasure from her well replete body before finally seeking his own pained release. They lay together, slick bodies quickly cooling as he worships her mouth in the same reverent manner.

“I—”

A car horn stopped short the words falling from her lover’s lips, evaporating them into the atmosphere like a fine mist.

She blinked her eyes open in both confusion and frustration.

Not again
.

Dreams of
him
always ended like this.
Without
fail. They had mind-blowing sex so real she could feel her pussy ache when she awoke. But instead of satisfaction, it ached with emptiness. Emptiness she often had to remedy herself or suffer so greatly throughout the day she couldn’t function.

It was the same exact dream, with the same exact ungodly gorgeous man and something always woke her at
exactly
the same point. He was getting ready to say something profound, but the words never came. She daydreamed constantly on what followed the word “I—”

Perhaps it was
“I…want to spend the night,”
(only if you cuddle) or,
“I…want you on your hands and knees next,”
(uh…no need to ask twice) or perhaps even foolishly
“I…love you.”
(yes,
that
was foolish, Kate).

She may never know. Maybe she should be content with the erotic dream and the unwelcome feeling of surrendering herself to a man again, even if he wasn’t real. God knows she couldn’t do that when she was awake.

Never again.

She had been naïve. Well…not anymore. Getting your love callously thrown out by guy after guy like a waded up fast food wrapper tended to turn you into a cynical, heartless bitch who would end up in a sad nursing home, old and alone. The nursing staff that drew the short straw would have to take her wing for the day and listen to her pitiful tales of woe. Tales they’d hear until the day she died. The only thing that would keep her company in the years in between life and death would be her twenty-two cats, knitting hats for the homeless and her trusty binoculars, which she’d use to spy on the neighbors.

She’d surrendered her love too easily and too often, but this last time…well, it was like an adage her father always used to say.
“Death by a thousand paper cuts.”
You can make it through the nine hundred ninety ninth one intact, but that thousandth one, that’s the one that ends you. And John was her thousandth and most regretful paper cut. More like a goddamned ten-inch knife shredding flesh and bone, fatally piercing that small fragile organ held in the center of your chest.

Turning her head, the bright red digital numerals read five fifteen.
A.M
. An involuntary sigh escaped her lips. She’d gotten approximately three hours of sleep and that would be it. Falling back into her dreams could be a godsend, like tonight, or a curse like most. And although she didn’t need to be at work for five hours yet, she wasn’t willing to take a chance on the torment she might endure should she nod off. Today, of all days, she just could
not
stomach starting the day badly, waking from the throes of a nightmare which she wouldn’t be able to shake.

Try as she might to fight against it, her thoughts involuntarily drifted to John and the night one year ago today she’d found him with his secretary in his office. She’d been so cliché. Showing up in garters, heels and nothing else sans a tan, tightly belted trench coat. In the good old heart of god’s country, it had been minus twelve degrees that day and she had literally been freezing her tits off under the thin material. The phrase ‘colder than a witch’s tit in January’ surely originated from Wisconsin.

But she’d wanted to do something nice for her fiancée. As a marketing consultant, he’d landed a big new client and had been putting in long, hard hours to meet an unrealistic deadline. Most nights he wouldn’t get home until ten or eleven and he’d been too exhausted lately to keep up on their once active sex life.
Cue Simple Plan’s Your Love is a Lie.

With a bottle of champagne and two cheap plastic flutes in hand, she took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor of John’s downtown Milwaukee office building. It was after nine and he’d said he had two more hours of work ahead of him before coming home, but it’d been more than two weeks since they’d been intimate and that just wouldn’t do.

She made her way toward his office on the east end of the floor, one lone light reflecting faintly through the fogged glass. The rest of space was dim with only soft night lighting and as she’d made her way down the hallway, lined with offices to her left and cubicles to her right, she had been surprised to see his door shut.

In retrospect, she knew what would be found behind a closed, but foolishly unlocked, office door at nine o’clock in the evening. She knew as she closed the short distance between her faltering footsteps and that offending piece of wood, that opening it would ultimately shatter her dreams and harden her heart.

Time slowed as she turned the knob and discovered her boyfriend of two years, fiancé of nine months, husband-to-be in six, fucking his beautiful red headed assistant over the edge of his desk. And since their backs were to the office door, she had the distinct pleasure of hearing the endearments he’d so freely lavished upon Scarlett. Yes, her name was
Scarlett
. She used to love
Gone with the Wind
. Now she’d never watch it again. They’d ruined her relationship
and
one of her favorite movies all in a matter of seconds.

Her only regret as she’d turned and fled while screaming at him never to show his cheating face at their house again, was that the flutes she’d hurled in their direction weren’t real glass so they would actually do some serious damage. If either had gotten a shattered sliver of
adulterer
embedded in oh, say in their corneas, well…that would have been called
karma,
bitches.

Curse her luck.

C
hapter 1

Kate

“Come on, just one more drink, Katie pie. Pretty please,” Erin whined. Why, oh why had she agreed to come out with Erin this evening?

“Begging doesn’t become you, sweetcakes.”

“It most certainly does…in the right circumstances.”

Ugh. She did not need to hear about Erin’s vigorous and adventurous sex life. She’d been on such a drought her vagina was crumbling to dust. Admittedly, the drought was self-imposed, but self-preservation required it. She’d met too many seemingly nice men over the last several years that turned out to be douche bags. Hell, she’d been engaged to the biggest d-bag of them all. So, no. Definitely time to take her sorry ass home. That, and she
was
dead-dog-tired.

“Sorry, but I need to go. I have an early class to teach in the morning.” It wasn’t that early, but with Erin, she always needed a good excuse.

“You act like an old maid, Kate. Not a twenty-seven-year-old single, available woman. It’s okay to have fun once in a while. It’s even okay to bump uglies occasionally.”

Sigh. She heard this speech from Erin nearly every time they went out lately, which was why she usually spent the evening in, drinking a nice glass of wine alone and watching mind-numbing TV. Yes, she fully admitted she was pathetic.

So what if she preferred the quiet of her office to the loudness of a club? So what if she preferred her own company to that of a bunch of sweaty men and small dicks grinding into her on the dance floor? So what if she preferred her research to that of a boring, meaningless conversation about the bond market or the latest tweet on Kim Kardashian’s ass?

“Don’t start, Erin.” Kate was a fiercely private person, letting very few people into her inner circle.

She’d met her one good friend, Erin, during undergrad at Marquette University. Erin had been her rock after her failed engagement. Kate had been convinced John was different from the rest of the men she met, but had been proven wrong. So very wrong. The sound of him pounding on their front door begging for forgiveness, that it’d been a one-time mistake—
blah, blah, blah
—still rang in her ears a year later. But Kate was a fool me once kind of girl. And he’d fooled her damn good.

Erin hugged her. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m just worried about you. You’re better off without him and his whoring ways. It’s been over a year now. It’s time to move on. Your Prince Charming is out there, and you won’t find him with your nose stuck behind a computer screen or in a ream of copy paper.”

Kate smiled inwardly. She’d already found her Prince Charming. So what if he was a figment of her imagination? He felt real enough when starring in her erotic dreams.

“I know, Erin. I’m just not quite ready yet. I’m getting there.” She wasn’t
ever
going to get there. She couldn’t allow another man to shatter her heart into a million pieces the way John had.

“Great! How about we go to this new club downtown on Saturday night? It’s called Dragonfly and it’s supposed to be the shits. I know one of the bartenders. He said he could get us in.”

Kate groaned. The last thing she wanted to do on Saturday night was go to a new bar, packed wall-to-wall with young singles trying to hook up. It would smell like sex, sweat, and a nauseating combination of perfumes and cologne. By the end of the night, her shoes would stick to the floor where too many drinks had been spilled and she’d have to fend off the inevitable wandering hands as she refilled hers at the bar because the slutty waitress was too busy with the table of hot, young up-and-comers to check on her.

So she said the only thing she could to get Erin off her back. “Sure, sounds great.”

Erin’s squeal nearly broke her eardrum. “Oh my God, Katie pie! It will be so much fun. I can’t wait.”

Yeah, neither could she. Eye roll. She said her goodbyes and drove the short distance to her house. With only two glasses of wine, she felt safe enough to drive.

It was already nearly ten o’clock when she got home and readied herself for bed, turning off the light. She lay there; eyes wide open, dreading the night to come. Because of the often dark nature of her dreams, she didn’t slept well, but the last couple of weeks had been particularly difficult, and walking zombie would accurately describe her.

Wanting to come home after her classes today, Erin convinced her to go for a drink instead. She knew her friend meant well. Kate wished she could share her secret with Erin, but she didn’t dare. If Erin looked at her the way her parents did, she wasn’t sure she could handle it.