Vampire Lover (6 page)

Hayden’s attention was riveted. He couldn’t take his eyes from the woman he’d been inside of.

"Yes, I wanted this closeness," she admitted.

"Why?"

"You tell me. Isn’t it a strange time to come to your senses?"

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"Better late than never, is the saying," Connor responded soberly. "But then, it doesn’t take into account the lapse that occurred in the first place."

Truly perplexed, Hayden grinned ruefully. "You are good, Connor. Very good. You had me going. I wonder for what purpose?"

She contemplated his question, looking as though she truly had no idea what he was asking. If this sudden onset of innocence was some sort of taunt-the-vampire routine, he should applaud her performance.

She had, in fact, gotten him good. So good that his body continued to be racked with quakes.

"The woman kissed me back," he said. "What will the Slayer do?"

"Walk away."

That was the thing he wanted the least, and the answer that surprised him the most. He was riled up, overflowing with need. After an intimate affair with this woman, whatever else she might be, could he just let her go? Would he?

"I’m way too attracted to you," she said. "Your pull on me is too strong, unnerving. It’s obvious I can’t trust myself."

She hadn’t blamed him. Connor, Hayden decided, was becoming more interesting by the minute. After that confession, even her hand on those filmy panties came in a lagging second place to the sheer wonderment of what she might do or say next.

Although his hunger continued to rage, he was also curious.

"Another time," she said. "We can set a date, meet again."

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Hayden knew he could be on her before her hand stopped fluttering, if he chose, Slayer or not. He’d been a vampire for a long time. Fifteen years ago he’d been handed his fangs and the thirst that came with them. He had passed through the fire of loss, losing his family in the flames of their final death. He was the last of his kind. The last of the Flynns. And he hated the curse that ensnared him.

He hated that this Slayer’s mother had killed his father.

This Slayer he had just…

"Date?" he repeated. Now that they had been as close as any two beings could be, would it be back to fighting? Sex as foreplay?

"Dinner first, perhaps?" he suggested.

"In the manner of a last supper, you mean? I’ll pass," she replied.

"More’s the pity. It would have given us time to get to know each other even better." The words tasted bitter, and rang with unintended sarcasm. Hayden wanted a repeat engagement, her naked body hot against his and smelling of desire. His sense was that she wanted the same thing and would ignore it—for what? Taking care of business?

"Funny how things change," Connor said in a steadier voice. "An hour ago, all I needed was a story to further my career. Now I need the skills necessary to deal with a vampire, so that I can continue with a career of any kind." She paused, then added, "Do you want to kill me, Flynn, whether or not I am what you think I am?"

Hayden found her question absurd, having had his 50

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tongue in her mouth and her legs spread apart.

"You said you were supposed to," she pointed out.

"I have never harmed anyone," he confessed, knowing his answer might allow this Slayer an edge.

"I’m not what I am by choice, Connor. I’ve never had an urge for violence. Taking out a Slayer might make me worthy of my name, but I have no desire for that.

What about you? Do you want to remove me from the world?"

"No."

"What do you think of when you look at me?"

"Sex," she said.

Unable to help himself, Hayden laughed at her answer. It was the second time he’d laughed in an hour, and it made him feel lighter, somehow.

"Is that a compliment?" he asked.

"Yes. And very un-Slayerlike, I’m sure. Also, though, part of me wants to break your teeth and string them on a necklace. That feeling is new."

Her eyes shone with interest. Her creamy skin gave off an almost supernatural glow, reflecting the dappled moonlight streaming through the palm fronds overhead. Hayden didn’t know what to think.

Indecision kept him silent.

"So," she said, rolling her skirt over her hips. "I need to find out what this means. What that name you called me entails. Can you give me time?"

He nodded.
Now what are you up to?

"Meet me a week from tonight. At the castle on the cliffs of Clare," she proposed.

When she turned from him, Hayden felt a stab of regret so painful, he winced. He saw also that Connor Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

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moved slowly, and perhaps with some discomfort.

Their intimacy hadn’t been gentle. He regretted that.

She spoke over her shoulder, as if knowing he was thinking about her, and sensing that he would let her go, for the time being.

"One week from tonight," she repeated, then walked off into the red-tinted moonlight like the ghost of Hayden’s own botched bloodlust.

CHAPTER SIX

It took five hours of driving to get from the airport at Shannon to her grandmother’s cottage. Tired, wet from the rain shower, Kelsie found herself heartily welcomed into her grandmother’s fragile arms, and wanting to cry. Homesickness hit her hard. Familiarity was all around. But this was the same grandmother who might have kept things from her. Important things. She looked at Gran with new eyes, loving, and also silently accusing.

The weathered, feisty eighty-five-year-old, with her gray hair braided in two thick coils, had once possessed a strong, capable body, now softened with age. Cliff Cottage, with its view of castle ruins and the sea, had been her grandmother’s home, and the home of scores of Connors before her, for as long as anyone could recall. Was it now also a house of secrets?

"Gran, I’ve come home to ask you a question,"

Kelsie said.

Seated in her chair by the window, her grandmother gazed at her quizzically, as if she might have perfected the trick of reading minds and body language. Connor green eyes, a slightly watered down version of Kelsie’s own, examined Kelsie’s face as she sat on a stool at her feet.

"Isn’t it a fine welcome, then," Gran said. "You’ve not come to see an old woman, but to pump her for Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

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information."

Kelsie found the straight-to-the-point dialogue both uncomfortable an necessary. Nevertheless, if she was going to meet a vampire on his own soil, she’d need all the help she could get. The basics would be a good place to start.

"Gran, I’m wondering if you have withheld important information from me."

"Why would you think that, child?"

"I’ve been called a name I’m unfamiliar with."

"And that name might be?"

"Slayer."

Her grandmother’s face seemed to age further in an instant. The intelligent, gray-green eyes narrowed, and Gran’s lips twitched, as if there were things she wanted to say, but didn’t know where to begin.

"Ah," Gran said, visibly disturbed. "I see. So it’s true, then."

Feeling sick to her stomach and desperate, Kelsie said, "What’s true?"

"You were sent away to someplace safe, in case this happened," Gran said, with maddening disregard for answering a question directly.

"Evidently not safe enough," Kelsie said. "Does the name Flynn ring a bell?"

Her grandmother looked up. "There are none left with that name."

"There’s one," Kelsie corrected. "He will be here in a few days to meet a woman he called ‘Slayer.’"

In the quiet following her statement, Kelsie heard the ticking of the mantel clock. Had time, she wondered, become as much of an enemy as the 54

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vampire? What did her grandmother know about all this? Were these few days all Kelsie had left?

She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Flynn, and what they had done. To her shame, not a minute went by that she didn’t want to do it again. She had to get to the bottom of this, so that she could either call his bluff or…not.

"The beginning, Gran," Kelsie said. "What is a Slayer?"

"A Slayer is a vampire hunter," Gran said reluctantly. "With the sole purpose of hunting them down."

"Where do Slayers come from?"

"Only a few people are chosen for such a path. The ability comes through females most often, and is unavoidable once it settles in."

"Damn it, Gran." Kelsie had to work hard to keep from shouting. "Do these abilities run through me? Do I have them?"

"Did this Flynn recognize you?" her grandmother asked.

"Yes."

"He called you by that name?"

"Yes. He knew I’m a Connor."

The fact that her grandmother nodded was like a spear to Kelsie’s heart. "Then it’s true, child,” Gran said. "And I’m so very sorry."

Sorry? Kelsie had to get this straight, wrap her mind around what seemed so ludicrous. "How, Gran?

How can I be one?"

"I don’t know," she replied simply. "It’s an ability that’s rarely passed down."

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"Passed down? What do you mean?"

Gran’s expression flattened further. "If you are a Slayer, one of the chosen few, it’s because you are like your mother."

The sickness in the pit of Kelsie’s stomach threatened to erupt.
Like your mother?

Blackness opened up in the part of her mind containing memories. Her sweet-scented mother had died on Kelsie’s tenth birthday. A car accident while on an errand, or so she had been told. Was that a lie?

Maybe not an accident?
Kelsie thought with a frightening snap of perception. God. Had her mother been a Slayer, and died in some other way? Perhaps at the hand of a vampire?

Kelsie couldn’t make herself ask the question. Her hands were visibly shaking. Her face felt numb. If her mother had been a Slayer…and if her mother had met her death at the hand of a vampire…had that vampire been a Flynn?

Like mother, like daughter.
The phrase rang in her ears.

"She…she was one?"

Gran nodded, keeping her focus on Kelsie.

"You encouraged me to go away," Kelsie said, recovering enough to speak. "Was that to protect me?"

Her grandmother nodded again.

"So," Kelsie began, almost inaudibly, "Connors have a blood feud with the Flynns? That’s real? If there are vampires and werewolves in the world…" her tone sounded slightly hysterical "…why not Slayers?"

She wished with all her heart that her grandmother would admit that none of it was true, and nothing more 56

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than a good bit of Blarney. No such luck was to be had, though. The seriousness of her grandmother’s expression struck terror into Kelsie’s soul.

"My mother hunted them? Is it what the title has to mean? Fighting and killing? The Flynn I met seemed so sure."

Her grandmother spoke at last. "I hoped, since the Flynns were gone, that you would never need to know about your family’s history. How was I to know what you might become, or that the remaining Flynn had left for far-off shores that would turn out to be the same as yours? I perceived no danger for you if you left here, Kelsie. Please forgive me for not explaining sooner. I’d thought to save you from this. Keep you from this." Gran’s voice rang with heartfelt emotion.

"How did you find him?"

Her grandmother had said
him,
not
it.
She knew this Flynn wasn’t one of the undead, that he was a living vampire. The distinction was clear. Kelsie held the sickness down, her energy draining with the effort.

"In a nightclub," she said.

Her grandmother’s eyes went to Kelsie’s neck.

"Lord. He didn’t—?"

"No." She knew what Gran was asking, and also that she could not mention how their physicality had gone way beyond a damned bite. Or that now she dreamed of him inside of her. How his closeness remained a nagging heat despite the distance and the terrible information she’d just gleaned.

"The ability isn’t handed down?" she asked, at length.

"No. Connor men have sought women through the Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

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ages with this special ability."

"Why?"

"I’ve come to imagine it was to keep the damage local. To keep Ireland from being torn apart by creatures unlike ourselves by marrying women who could face the creatures down."

After that, her grandmother sat silently for a while, her gaze on the window, her only movement the tap of arthritic fingers on the arm of her chair. It was several minutes before she spoke again.

"Will this Flynn come home to destroy the last young Connor, is the question in need of answering,"

she finally said.

"If I’m a Slayer, am I his enemy, Gran?"

"Yes."

"Do I have to be?" She was afraid to meet her grandmother’s gaze, fearing her grandmother would see other things—such as how Kelsie had run her hands over the vampire’s body, and opened herself to him.

Instead of addressing or answering her last question, though, the old woman got up from her chair.

Taking a cane from against the wall, she said, "I don’t want to be the only Clare Connor left on God’s green earth. Come on then, child. We have work to do before he arrives."

But as Kelsie got to her feet, she couldn’t dislodge the lump in her throat or the tears flooding her eyes when she imagined the fate that might have actually overtaken her mother.

Like mother, like daughter.

Katherine Connor had been a Slayer, and there was 58

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little comfort to be had from that fact.

Hayden disembarked from his private plane and paused to look around the tiny airfield. The one useful thing about inheriting family money carefully gathered over the centuries was the protection it afforded him.

He could come and go as he pleased. A car waited to pick him up.

As the scents of home hit him square in the face, he took in a deep, overdue breath. He’d forgotten how much a part of him this land was, but still approached the car with reluctance. He was home because of Kelsie Connor, and returning to Ireland was dangerous for them both.