Lover Unbound

'About what?'

Shit, he so shouldn't be doing this. 'If you're keeping something from Z, anything… you need to tell him.'

Her eyes narrowed, then slid away, as she changed her stance, her weight shifting from one foot to the other, her arms crossing over her chest. 'I… ah, I won't ask how you know, but I can assume it's because he does. Oh… damn it. I was going to talk to him after I see Havers tonight. I made an appointment.'

'How bad is it? The bleeding?'

'Not bad. That's why I wasn't going to say anything until I went to Havers. God, Phury, you know Z. He's nervous as hell about me already, so preoccupied I'm terrified he'll be distracted in the field and get himself hurt.'

'Yeah, but see, it's worse now, because he doesn't know what's going on. Talk to him. You have to. He'll be tight. For you he'll stay tight.'

'Was he angry?'

'Maybe a little. But more than that he's just worried. He's not stupid. He knows why you wouldn't want to tell him anything was wrong. Look, take him with you tonight, okay? Let him be there.'

Her eyes watered a little. 'You're right. I know you're right. I just want to protect him.'

'Which is exactly the way he feels about you. Take him with you.'

In the silence that followed, he knew the indecision in her eyes was hers to contend with. He'd said his piece.

'Be well, Bella.'

As he turned away, she grabbed his hand. 'Thank you. For not being upset with me.'

For a moment he pretended that it was his young inside of her and that he could gather her close and go with her to the doctor's and hold her afterward.

Phury gently took her wrist and pulled her free of him, her hand slipping off his skin on a soft brush that stung like barbs. 'You are my twin's beloved. I could never be angry at you.'

As he walked out through the vestibule and into the cold, windy night, he thought how true it was that he could never be pissed with her. Himself, on the other hand? Not a problem.

Dematerializing downtown, he knew that he was heading for a collision of some kind. He didn't know where the wall was or what it was made of or whether he was going to drive himself into it or get thrown at it by someone or something else.

But the wall was waiting in the bitter darkness. And part of him wondered whether there wasn't a big, fat H painted on it.

Chapter Seventeen

V watched Jane go into the bathroom. As she pivoted to put her change of clothes down on the counter, the profile of her body was an elegant S curve that he needed to get his hands on. His mouth over. His body into.

The door shut and the shower started and he cursed. God… her hand had felt so good, taken him higher than any full-on sex had lately. But it had been onesided. There had been no scent of arousal from her at all. To her it had been a biological function to explore. Nothing more.

If he was honest with himself, he'd thought that maybe seeing him orgasm would turn her on-which was nuts, given what was doing below his waist. No one in their right mind would think, Oh, yeah, check out the one-balled wonder. Yum.

Which was why he always kept his pants on when he had sex.

As he listened to the shower run, his arousal softened and his fangs retracted back up into his jaw. Funny, when she'd been handling him, he'd surprised himself. He'd wanted to bite her-not to feed because he was hungry, but because he wanted her taste in his mouth and the mark of his teeth on her neck. Which was pretty fucking out of character. Typically he bit females only because he had to, and when he did, he never particularly liked it.

With her? He couldn't wait to pierce a vein and suck what ran through her heart right down into his gut.

When the shower stopped, all he could think about was being in that bathroom with her. He could just imagine her all naked and wet and pink from the heat. Man, he wanted to know what the back of her neck looked like. And the stretch of skin between her shoulder blades. And the hollow at the base of her spine. He wanted to run his mouth from her collarbone to her navel… then have a go between her thighs.

Shit, he was getting hard again. And that was pretty damn useless. She'd satisfied her curiosity with his body, so she wouldn't be up for throwing him a bone and relieving him again. And even if she was attracted to him, she already had someone, didn't she. With a nasty growl he pictured that dark-haired doctor type who was waiting for her back in her real life. The guy was of her kind and no doubt wholly masculine as well.

The very idea of that bastard treating her right, not just during the day but between the sheets at night, made his chest sting.

Shit.

V put his arm over his eyes and wondered exactly when he'd had a personality transplant. Theoretically Jane had operated on his heart, not his head, but he hadn't been right since he'd been on her table. Thing was, he just couldn't help but want her to see him as a mate-although that was an impossibility for a whole host of reasons: He was a vampire who was a freak… and he was going to become the Primale in a matter of days.

He thought about what was waiting for him on the Other Side, and even though he didn't want to go into the past, he couldn't stop himself. He went back to what had been done to him, recalling what had set the wheels in motion for the mauling that had left him half a male.

It was perhaps a week after his father burned his books that Vishous was caught coming out from behind the screen that hid the cave paintings. His undoing was the diary of the warrior Darius. He'd avoided his precious possession for days and days, but eventually he'd given in. His hands had craved the weight of the binding, his eyes the sight of the words, his mind the images it gave him, his heart the connection he found with the writer.

He was too alone to resist.

It was a kitchen whore who saw him, and they both froze when she did. He didn't know her name, but she had the same face that all females had in the camp: hard eyes, lined skin, and a slash of a mouth. There were bite marks layered on her neck from males feeding from her, and her shift was dirty and frayed at the hem. In one hand she had a rough-hewn shovel, and behind her she was dragging a wheelbarrow with a broken wheel. She'd obviously drawn the short straw and been forced to tend to the privy pits.

Her eyes shifted down to V's hand as if she were measuring a weapon.

V deliberately made a fist with the thing. ' 'Twould be a shame should you say a thing, would it not.'

She paled and scurried off, dropping the shovel as she ran.

News of what had happened between him and the other pretrans had been all around the camp, and if it made them fear him, that was all to the good. To protect his only book he wasn't above threatening anyone, even females, and he was unashamed by this. His father's law held that no one was safe in the camp: V was quite confident that female would use what she'd seen to her own benefit if she could. That was the way.

Vishous left the cave through one of the tunnels that had been bored out of the mountain, and emerged in a thicket of brambles. The winter was coming upon them all fast, the cold making the air dense as bone. Up ahead he heard the stream rushing and wanted a drink, but he stayed hidden as he scrambled up the pine covered incline. He always kept away from the water for a distance after he came out, not just because it was what he'd been taught to do upon penalty of punishment, but because in his pretrans state he was no match for what might come at him, be it vampire, human, or animal.

At the beginning of every night, the pretrans tried to fill their empty bellies at the stream, and his ears picked up the sounds of the other pretrans who were fishing. The boys had longregated at the wide section of the stream, where the water formed a still pool off to one side. He avoided them, choosing a spot farther