with passion, her lips full, not that he would kiss her. He never kissed any of his conquests on the mouth.
Instead he grasped her hips and urged her forward. He nuzzled the curls with his nose and then slipped his hand around and parted her, eased one finger and then another into her while he licked the nub between her legs.
She gasped in delight and grabbed hold of his shoulders. Her soft moans drove him on, until he could wait no longer. Surging to his feet, he raised her off the floor and drove into her before walking them to the far wall of the room.
With her back against the rough plaster, she shifted her hips, moving on him, and he hammered into her again and again until she nearly screamed from the force of his thrusts and the pleasure they wrought in her.
The pulse at her neck beat rapidly. Violently. Blood called him to fulfill another need.
Diego bent his head and placed his lips there. He licked her skin, finding it slightly salty from the sweat of their lovemaking. Sweet beneath the sweat.
She shot him a look from the corner of her eye, and he whispered against the side of her face, “You know what I want.”
At her nod, he surged upward into her one last time, liberating a climax that made her scream.
Then he finally freed the demon. His eyes bled out and fangs erupted from his mouth. Fangs that he drove deep into the skin at her neck.
Her body tightened around him, held him closer as the vampire’s kiss created a different kind of hunger within her. Within him.
He sucked, savoring her blood, singing with the passion from their sex. He felt filled with youthful energy. Her blood charged every inch of his vampire body with renewed strength.
He could have kept on feeding, as many did, until there was no choice but to turn the human or let her die. Instead, he took only enough to sate the night’s hunger, knowing that tomorrow there would be another willing human or a delicious libation at the Blood Bank.
Rearing back, he carried the nearly unconscious young woman to the bed. His hands trembled with the energy zipping through his veins from his feeding, but somehow he managed to rearrange her clothing and his.
As he gazed down at her, she seemed to be peacefully asleep. The bite marks on her neck were already healing. When she woke, she would feel as if she merely had a bad hangover, and remember little of their encounter.
And what will you feel when you wake? the voice inside his head asked. But Diego knew there was no waking from this eternal nightmare. From the endless days filled with only one certain thing. Death. No end to the loneliness that had returned with Esperanza’s death. Especially not with a human, he reminded himself. With a last look at the woman, he fled the Blood Bank. Though hunger was abated, the encounter had left him unsatisfied. He dived into the night to find a different kind of delight.
With the energy of the young woman’s blood rushing through his veins, Diego leaped up to the rooftop of the adjacent building. A harvest moon filled the night sky, illuminating the city below, lighting the night for him, as if knowing of his intent.
A burst of vamp speed had him nearly flying over the rooftops, vaulting from one building to another in his haste to reach his destination. The air rushed against his body, but barely cooled the heat of the demon driving him. With one last, almost desperate jump, he was on the ledge of Ramona’s building, an old converted warehouse in a part of town that had yet to be gentrified. It was probably why she could afford to have the uppermost loft. It boasted skylights at various locations that flooded the space with light so she could paint.
He imagined her down below, standing before one of her canvases, as he neared one skylight. Imagined her stroking the brush across the surface, and immediately the paintings she had completed came to mind, reawakening his earlier desire. A desire that taking the young woman hadn’t satisfied.
He suspected only one woman could slake his need tonight.
Slowly he crept to the skylight and glanced downward. The paintings were there, but that wasn’t what he wanted to see.
He shifted to the next skylight—smaller than the first, but still generous enough to provide a view.
She was there, below the glass, lying in bed, the sheets in disarray around her naked body.
Diego groaned and reared back from the sight, knowing how wrong it was, and yet unable to deny himself this. This was all he could allow himself with her—this distant passion. Anything else would be wrong on so many levels.
She was human.
He wasn’t.
She would die.
He wouldn’t.
He couldn’t keep her with him. He wouldn’t turn her and see her change. See all that he admired about her become twisted by the grief that would inevitably follow as the years passed and life went on around them. As loved ones and familiar things were lost.
He had seen how it had affected Esperanza. How it had touched the lives of Ryder and all his other friends. He had encountered one too many vampires whose hearts had grown cold, or who had gone nearly insane from the loss of those for whom they cared, and all they held dear.
He wouldn’t visit that kind of distress on anyone else. But he wouldn’t deny himself satisfaction this night, he decided, as he inched back to the edge of the glass and peered down.
Her breasts were full and as beautiful as he had imagined, with dark coral nipples he hungered to taste. The sheet draped across her body just beneath her breasts, the dark maroon color highlighting the paleness of her skin and accenting the chestnut highlights in her hair.
She shifted in bed and her long dark hair fell against her breast. She brushed the errant lock away, but then paused, her hand lingering there.
Diego swallowed back a groan as she touched herself, cupping her breast and fingering her nipple until it peaked to a hard point.
She was awake.
With his vamp senses he could detect the rhythm of her heartbeat and breathing, which said she was conscious of what she was doing. He could hear the beat grow faster and see the pulse in her neck jump as she played with the tip, rotating it between thumb and forefinger. Pulling and pinching it as a lover might.
After their brief interlude earlier that night, was she imagining that it was him?
At the thought, his erection swelled painfully against his jeans, human desire overriding the demon. As wrong as he knew it was, he couldn’t pull away from the sight of her, couldn’t stop himself from reaching down and imagining it was her palm on him.
His mouth watered as she moved her other hand downward, past the rounded curve of her hip visible above the sheet. He stroked harder as her fingers found her center beneath the sheets, and the beat of her heart surged in response.
When her hips raised off the bed, he groaned and closed his eyes, imagining how he might grasp those hips and drive into her. How he might stroke her to a release the way he now pulled at himself, harder and faster as his vamp senses picked up the erratic breaths spilling from her lips. He heard the soft moan of desire followed by a sharp gasp as fulfillment chased through her body.
He came then, violently and so swiftly he grew light-headed from the force of it.
Dropping away from the skylight, he sat at the edge, spent. Humiliated at how little control he had exhibited. Only it had been so long since he had felt such need. And it wasn’t just since Esperanza’s death nearly eighteen months earlier. Diego realized that it had been too long since life and passion had filled his being. Since he had truly lived.
At that, he bent his legs and buried his head in his knees, tears threatening as he realized the emptiness of his life. Of all that had been his existence for five hundred years.
Just because one woman’s passion had roused him as never before. A woman he could never have.
With a rough breath,