Vampire in Atlantis

don’t want to stare at your bizarre hair, or your curvy little body, or the silky way your skin shines even in this hideous light. I didn’t want to have to restrain myself from tearing your clothes from you last night while you slept, and plunging into your hot, wet, tight—”
    “I get it,” she said, gasping. “Got it. Totally. You don’t want to want me. Check. You can let me go now.”
    He lowered her slowly down the length of his body until she was standing on her own two, rather unsteady legs, but he didn’t release her arms.
    “No,” he said, tilting his head. “I don’t think I can let you go right now.”
    He bent his head to hers and she saw it coming, even had time to escape, because he’d relaxed his grip on her arms, but she didn’t want to escape. Didn’t want to be let go. She put her arms around his neck and grinned up at him.
    “This is going to be trouble,” she whispered.
    “You already are,” he said, and then he kissed her, and oh, holy Linux squared but the man could kiss. She melted against him shamelessly, every nerve cell in her body dancing a tango—or at least a wild drunken chicken dance—at the feel of his mouth on hers.
    Then he put those big hands of his on her butt and lifted her up and into him, against that extremely large, hard erection, and she quit thinking of anything at all except to thank her lucky stars that she’d already disconnected all the cameras in the vault for the entire night.
    That decryption was going to take an awfully long time after all.
    When her back hit the wall of safe-deposit boxes, and his mouth closed over her breast right through her top, she leaned her head back and moaned as loudly as she wanted. It was a soundproof vault, and nobody was in the bank but them. Nobody was coming, either. Reisen shoved her top and bra out of his way and sucked her nipple into his mouth and she revised that thought.
    She fervently hoped at least the two of them would be coming. Soon.

Chapter 17
     

     

Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness area
     
    Daniel finally allowed Serai to stand up when he hadn’t heard anything but the sounds of nature for at least fifteen minutes.
    “Are they gone?” she whispered, brushing dirt off her hiking clothes. “Also, what was it? More vampires?”
    “Yes. I thought a few shifters were with them, at first, but flying shifters would have been birds, silent or chirping or something, not talking. They were vampires, and they were clumsy amateurs. Loud and arrogant, without a clue somebody might have been here to hear them.”
    “Lucky for us, surely?”
    He touched her cheek and smiled at her, trying to shove the knot of fear and rage for her—for what might happen to her if they didn’t succeed—deeper in his gut. She didn’t need to know he had the slightest doubt.
    “Everything is lucky for us. When we’re done with this little errand, we’ll go to Vegas.”
    She laughed. “Isn’t that in the desert? With the places humans go to shove money in machines and listen to the little bell sounds?”
    He shook his head. “I think that was one strange filter the Emperor put your knowledge of the world through.”
    “Yes, I would agree,” she said seriously. “Who is Justin Bieber, and why is his hair poisonous to small girls?”
    It was a long time before he could stop laughing hard enough to answer her.
    They made good time, considering, and had hiked nearly three miles when she admitted to needing a break. She drank water and ate some bread and nuts from her pack, while he stared at her and tried not to think about how sweet her blood might taste.
    It was a very unsatisfying rest break, which only got worse when she pinned him with that sapphire gaze and asked the one question he’d been praying she’d never get around to asking.
    “What happened to you after you became a nightwalker? What have you been up to for the past eleven millennia?”
    He stood up so fast he knocked over the rock he’d been using for a seat. “We need to get going. Definitely no time to discuss boring details of the past several thousand years.”
    She put her things away in her backpack and didn’t answer him, but he could feel the weight of her disappointment—or disapproval—in her silence.
    “It’s not a pretty story,” he finally said, not looking at her. Not wanting to see her face.
    “I don’t want pretty. I want the truth. All I’ve ever wanted. Your history is a part of you, and I love . . . I love to