The Warlord Wants Forever (3 page)

He couldn’t see her but knew she was twining two fingers together.

Once she’d foisted her laundry, she closed the door by dramaticaly leaning back against it—as if to say he couldn’t get away from her now—then glided over to him. As a rule, he observed, he calculated and he waited, but he’d never quite enjoyed sitting back and watching events unfurl as much as with her. Unpredictable didn’t begin to describe—

She clutched his shoulders and straddled him.

Nothing between them but his pants and a few inches. He could even feel her heat as she knelt over him. She was definitely not his Bride or he would’ve ripped through his zipper to get inside her. His heart would beat, he would take his first breath in three hundred years, and in the space of one of those breaths he would be buried so deep in her tightness, wrenching her down on him…. But nothing approaching that happened.

“Now, Wroth, we need to work some logistics out. When I’m kept as a pet, my care is very involved.”

His brows drew together. “I have no wish to keep you as a pet.”

“You hold me prisoner. You think to order me. How does this differ?”

“You’re not a pet,” he insisted. He couldn’t think—her eyes were mesmerizing, her sex was inches away from his, and her pleasing accent was luling.

She leaned in by his ear and murmured, “What if I want to be your pet? Would you like that, vampire?” Her fingers brushed their way over his chest, unbuttoning his shirt.

She picked up his hands one at a time and set them on the armrests, giving each a squeeze as if to let him know she wanted them to stay that way.

With raised eyebrows, he let her. He wasn’t about to move, and couldn’t imagine what she would do next.

“If I was your pet, you could keep me for your pleasure, and I would serve you in every way you desire.” She puled his shirt open, clearly admiring his chest. “Hard.” Her voice was breathy. “Scars.” She moistened her lips. “I’d endeavor to blood you so you could wake at sunset with my mouth greedy on you while you clutched my thighs to drink from. You would go to sleep at sunrise stil deep inside my body.” Her hand was trailing down, her eyes raptly folowing the jagged scar that had been his deathblow. “I am here for the taking and ache for your touch.”

She reached down and cupped him beneath her before he could grip her wrist. In an instant her seductive look vanished, though she showed no surprise that he wasn’t hard. She felt around his cock, then arched an eyebrow to say, “Wel, my word, Wroth. If you were hard, I wouldn’t know whether to be tantalized or terrified.”

Then with blurring speed she was off him, and in the bed, lying on her stomach, chin propped on her hands. She was utterly unaffected by what had just occurred, while he was angered and…shamed that she’d felt him like this. He wanted to show her hard….

“How do you plan to keep me here during the day? An unblooded Forbearer shouldn’t be so hard to vanquish.”

Vanquished by her? Amusing. “I’l send you back to the cel. You want to be my pet? I’l take you out and put you back in your cage at my pleasure.”

She blinked at him. “You don’t want to send me back. Who wil entertain you? I can deal poker and make shadow animals.”

He shook himself. This was just another instance of the Lore playing with them. She was not normal. He knew that anything he’d learned about females was inapplicable with her.

If she could be unaffected, he could pretend it. “I need you to answer some questions. I need to know what you are and what your name is.”

“I’l answer your questions if you answer mine.”

“Done,” he said quickly. “Ask.”

“Were you afraid when Kristoff stood over you?”

“I was…tired.” Strange question.

“Most mortals would have been terrified to see the Gravewalker.”

“Is that what he’s caled?” Kristoff would find that amusing. At her nod, he said, “Wel, I’d seen a lot by that time.”

“What’s his agenda? Does he want to replace Demestriu?”

Wroth hesitated, then answered honestly, hoping that she would do the same. “He wants his crown back, but he doesn’t want to rule over any faction but our own.”

“Uh-huh.” She raised an eyebrow as if she didn’t believe him, then asked, “That was your brother in the dungeon?”

“Murdoch, yes.”

“Turned vampires don’t usualy have family within the Horde.”

“Murdoch died in the same battle. I’ve two other brothers turned later as wel.”

“You’re young. Yet you’re a general. How’d you swing that?”

He was over three hundred years old. Young compared to her? “I refused the dark gift if certain conditions weren’t met.”

Her eyes grew bright with new interest, and she patted the bed for him to come sit with her. He felt he was on the verge of learning something, so he complied, resting against the headboard to face her, stretching his legs out. He almost laughed. The first time he’d been in bed with a woman in centuries, and she was easily the most beautiful of any before—and he could do nothing with her. He couldn’t even drink her, though his fangs ached to pierce the pale column of her neck. Thank God he’d fed before she’d been brought up.

“Wroth, you countered with Kristoff as you lay dying?”

When she put it like that it sounded more reckless than it had been. As Wroth had lain in his own cooling blood, nearly freed of the constant struggle, the ongoing war and famine and plague, he’d told Kristoff, “You need me more than I need to live.”

Kristoff had seen him in many battles and agreed. “I did counter. I was used to giving orders and would take them from no one but a powerful king. I wanted my brother turned if he was dying, and trusted compatriots as wel. Kristoff complied.” That wasn’t al. Wroth had asked for sixty years so he and Murdoch could watch over the rest of their living family—their father, four sisters and two other brothers.

They’d needed only three months.

“You know, I’d heard of you when you were a human. Weren’t you caled the Overlord?”

This surprised him. “On kinder tongues. How could you have heard of me? Your accent isn’t from the northlands.”

She sighed. “Not anymore. I’d heard of you because I’m interested in al things martial. You were quite the vicious leader.”

He felt his expression grow cold. “We were defending. I was anything I needed to be to see it done.” He could tel by her reaction that she liked his answer. Her lips parted as she tilted her head at him. Then she sidled closer to him on the bed as if she couldn’t help herself.

Her voice more gentle, she said, “But in the end you lost.”

He stared past her. “Everything.” The battle had only been like the final blow on a dying man. Prior to that, the enemy had scorched and salted their lands. Famine folowed and there’d been no defending when plague erupted.

“Wroth,” she said softly. He turned his gaze to her. Her eyes were so captivating in her elven-like face, so clear and lucid at this moment. “Let’s make a pact, you and I.”

She eased open his legs to kneel between them. “Let’s vow that we won’t harm the other in this room.” She pressed him back until he lay fuly on the roled pilow. What would she do next?

When he gave her one quick nod, she flashed him a warm smile that made him feel praised in some way. Her damp hair was spiling down over his legs, and with the back of her hand, she swung it to one side, baring her tantalizing neck. A rush of the innate scent of her hair swept him up, like a drug. Sweet and subtle, just like her skin. If she smeled like this, he couldn’t imagine what she would taste like. He wished she’d bared her flesh in offer to him.

“Wroth, this is embarrassing,” she murmured in a sensual voice, “but I think I’ve caught you staring at my neck.”

“You did,” he admitted, oddly feeling no shame to be contemplating his order’s most reviled crime.

She brushed her fingertips over her skin. “Are you tempted to take a drink from me?”

In the worst way.

He wondered how many times Ivo had taken her and felt a spike of some unfamiliar feeling claw in his gut. “We don’t drink from living beings. It’s how we got our name.”

It was this order’s pledge, their pact. Wroth had never tasted flesh as he drank. But then he’d never felt the smalest stir of temptation to before her.

“Why?”

“So we are never tempted to kil,” he said, giving her the official line, which was true, but the whole truth was more complicated, and they kept the details they’d managed to learn secret. Living blood, blood not separated from its source, brought side effects with it. A vampire would suffer torments from it, such as his victim’s memories. Kristoff believed these memories were what drove natural born vampires insane and made their eyes turn permanently red. As far as they could determine, the only way not to harvest them was to drink blood that had died, avoiding the evils—and the benefits.

“What if you drank from an immortal that couldn’t be kiled from that?” she asked, her words luling again. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from hers.

A tricky question to answer without saying that the immortal would have far too many plaguing memories, multiple in number to a mortal. He answered her question with one of his own. “Do you want me to take your flesh, creature?” The mere idea of it made his words rough, his fangs ache.

At her titilated look, he feared she’d say yes, caling his bluff. What would he do then?

“Rain check,” she answered brightly. Then, to his shock, she curled up between his legs, face nuzzling against his uncovered torso, and wrapped her pale, delicate arms and hands around his thigh.

“I never asked my questions,” he said, staring at the ceiling, trying to sound casual about what was occurring. He’d seen a great many things in his life, but this female was throwing him.

“We have al the time in the world for that, do we not?”

He thought she kissed the scar on his lower stomach with her lips—and a slow little lick. He lay tensed, rasping, “At least tel me your name, creature.”

“Myst,” she whispered, then she fel asleep.

Myst. How fitting that she was named after something intangible and capricious.

Long after, he was stil roiling. In sleep, his little pagan clutched his leg with her pink claws. And they were claws, sharp and curling, though somehow elegant. He ignored the pain, for it was little compared to the odd satisfaction of thinking that she clutched him for comfort.

He savored simply resting with her, doing nothing but watching as her hair dried into big, glossy red curls that spread out over his chest. For centuries their army had been constantly on the move, hiding in the shadows of the northlands in often grueling conditions, keeping their growing numbers secret. Everything had been about the war, al adding up to this attack, to furthering their cause.

He brought a curl up to his face to brush it over his lips. So soft, like her flawless skin. Tomorrow night, if she hadn’t given him information—and he somehow knew she wouldn’t voluntarily—could he lash her skin to get at her secrets? After Myst had cleaved to him so trustingly? Could he break any of her delicate bones and have her gaze at him with pain in those green eyes? If she’d been his Bride he wouldn’t have to hurt her, would be forbidden from ever harming her—his life given over to protecting her.

He ran the backs of his fingers down her silken cheek, feeling her light, quick breaths warm on his stomach. He’d never truly felt the sting of envy in his life, had never envied other men except those who enjoyed peace in their land. He’d been born affluent, his family aristocratic, and fortune had folowed him until the latter years of his mortality. To envy was to lack.

So why did he want to destroy any vampire who might be blooded by her?

W here the hel is my freaking warlord?

Myst jerked upright, waking from the first real sleep she’d enjoyed since she’d been taken by the Horde four nights ago. She was alone in his bed, her clothes washed and folded at the foot. She smiled to realize he’d drawn a blanket over her.

She needed to keep up with Wroth until her sisters broke her out of this pokey. She swore again that this was the last time she would be bait—and this time she meant it.

Rumor was rife in the Lore, but tales of Ivo the Cruel making dark aliances proved worrisome enough for them to “reconnoiter,” or undertake Operation: Myst Gets Nabbed.

Yet she’d learned little about Ivo for her troubles—the acting, the getting too close and then letting herself get caught, etc.—only that he was definitely planning something major.

She chuckled—that is, until General Wroth punked his ass out of a castle.

No, she hadn’t learned much about Ivo, but this Kristoff and the general would make good dish. What if this king realy wanted to kil Demestriu and stop vampires from terrorizing everyone else? Was it possible that not al vampires had a predisposition toward sociopathic evil? What if the Valkyrie didn’t have to war with these Forbearers?

However, it was doubtful. Her sisters wouldn’t discriminate between the two vampire factions. Kil first and then say, “Gosh, were you actualy good? My duh!” Vampires as a species were simply too powerful to go unchecked.

Demestriu and his vampire Horde had been brutal to al the Lore, but especialy the Valkyrie. Fifty years ago, Furie, their queen, the strongest and fiercest of them al, had tried to assassinate him. She had never returned. Tales abounded that he’d chained Furie to the bottom of the sea to drown again and again only to have her dogged immortality surge her to life for more torment. When the covens finaly found her and freed her, Furie would be as none other on earth, awash in rage. She wouldn’t check for vampire affiliation before she slaughtered and would expect her covens to folow her example.

So, until Myst’s covens decided on their plan of action with this new power, she’d go about business as usual, which meant she needed to find Wroth. Before he’d come, Myst had been powerless here. She could handle weapons as wel as most in the coven, though a sword and bow were not her strengths.

Her preferred weapon was men. And now she had one—a big, scarred one with gorgeous eyes, and with skin that she wanted to lick until her tongue got tired—in her clutches.