Claimed by the Immortal

“Witnessing. I hope.”

At once she pushed up higher against the pillows. “What?”

“You did something. That thing focused on you again.”

“Crap.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand. “I broke the circle. I went to get a book, and I crossed it.”

He walked around her bed, scanning the carpeted floor. “It’s scuffed,” he agreed. “Salt?”

She pointed to the box of kosher salt on top of her dresser. He crossed the room to get it and sprinkled it all around her bed again.

Then he waited, his senses on high alert. The energy did not pull back.

“So much for salt,” he said, and replaced the box. “Can you feel it?”

She closed her eyes briefly and nodded slowly. “What now?”

“We wait. With any luck, it doesn’t want a witness.”

He settled in a small chair in the far corner, aware that she was regarding him unhappily. But what could he do about it? He couldn’t risk her life. Apart from his own feelings about such things, Jude had practically assigned him to protection detail. If that meant sitting here and stomping down on his own needs—as well as hers, to judge by some of the pheromones emanating from her direction—then he would do it. Duty was seldom an easy thing. If it were, it wouldn’t be called “duty.”

“What are you reading?” he asked, striving for distraction from the fact that he might be almost as much of a threat to her as that clinging force.

“My grandmother’s diary. Well, it’s not exactly a diary. It’s all the things she wanted me to understand that I never wanted to listen to.”

“Anything useful?”

“Not yet.” She lifted a ribbon marker and placed it between the pages. “I may have heard her better than I thought, considering how much I resisted what she tried to tell me.”

“How so?” He tried to look attentive, but the truth was that between her delicious aromas filling this room and the hovering threat, he was having a hard time paying attention to anything she said.

Instead, he noticed how her lips moved, how plump and juicy they looked. He’d love to nibble on them. His eyes trailed over the beautiful pink of her cheeks, flush with life. He saw the pulse beating steadily in her throat, heard its rhythm and inevitably thought of how she would taste.

“Every woman is different,” he heard himself say. As soon as the thought escaped him, he felt like an idiot. Had he lost every bit of his self-control? How did she do that to him?

But she shocked him. She didn’t get angry. Instead, she looked curious. “How so?”

“You humans walk around missing some of the things that set you apart from each other. It’s not that you each look different. You each smell different. You have your own unique scents. Even your blood is not the same, person to person.”

“You’d know,” she said a little sarcastically. But then her sarcasm melted away. “There is nothing,” she said flatly, “that makes me any different. You just want me because I’m a human female.”

He shook his head. “I wish it were so.” Oh, how he wished it were that easy.

A faint frown knit her brows. “Why?”

“Because then I could walk out of here and get what I want. Unfortunately, because you’re different, I could get what I need and not at all what I want.”

She flushed faintly. Other eyes might have missed it in the dim golden light, but not his. He felt his pulse pound harder and had to force himself to remain in his seat.

“You want me, too,” he said softly.

Anger flared from her eyes, so strong he almost felt the sparks. “So? What does that matter? It would only make a messy situation messier.”

He couldn’t really argue with that. Not with that energy hovering around. “That’s possible,” he agreed. “Or it might clear the air considerably.”

“Sex never clears the air. It always adds complications.”

“That’s a sad thing to say.”

“Well, it’s true,” she argued, sitting up higher and clearly still angry. “It’s messy. Maybe men can just have sex and forget about it, but women are different. For us it’s always an emotional experience.”

“For me, too, but perhaps in a different way.” He could, however, think of plenty of women who, over the centuries, had been happy to dally with him a time or two and then move on.

“I’m sure it’s very different. Let’s talk about something else. You’re making me feel like I’m being stalked by a predator.”

“I am a predator,” he said, his voice turning hard. “That’s what I am. The difference is that I never take anyone who is unwilling.”

“Why should I believe that?”

“Because I haven’t taken you.”

He smelled it: the best aphrodisiac in the world. The room almost flooded with her response to his words, charging the air with sexuality and that delightful hint of fear. “You wanted to talk about something different,” he reminded her as she tried to glare at him.

“Maybe you should just leave,” she snapped.

“Not until I can’t stay any longer. Not while that thing is still around.”

Her frown deepened, but her scent didn’t change. Ah, this one was going to be interesting. Supremely interesting after so many easy conquests. She was willing to fight herself as well as him. He liked it.

“How old are you?” she finally demanded once again, clearly determined to divert him because she couldn’t get rid of him. She didn’t want him to leave her alone with that dark energy, so she was going to tolerate him.

That amused him. No trouble accepting that he was a vampire but plenty of trouble accepting that he wanted her. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I stopped counting years a long time ago. What was the point? They just keep adding up.”

“Do you really live forever?”

“We age. Slowly. Some faster than others. I seem to have aged very little.”

Her lips puckered a bit, nearly driving him insane. “Could that be because you’re a magus?”

At once he stilled and forgot all about his hungers and needs. An intriguing question. “I hadn’t considered it. What made you think of that?”

“My grandmother. Until the day she died, no one thought she was much older than thirty-five or forty. She always said dealing with powers kept her young. But you said you were rusty? Or something like that.”

“I’ve forgotten a lot because I haven’t needed it. It’s been a long time since I practiced my arts as a priest.”

“Because you’re a vampire?”

He shook his head, smiling slowly. “There was a time when that was considered an advantage for my work. That time passed.”

“So everyone knew?”

“No, of course not. It was one of our temple secrets. Much better that way. Much more useful. We also severely limited our numbers.”

Her brow knit momentarily. “Well, when you live forever, it would hardly make sense to have many of you.”

“Exactly. Our numbers could make it very difficult to keep the secret, so we remained a small handful.”

She gave a small shake of her head. “I can’t imagine the things you must have seen.”

“Someday, when we’re past this, I’ll tell you some of those things if you want.”

It wasn’t the time, he thought. Not now. Not when his neck was prickling with awareness of that energy, not when he could feel its heaviness in the very air. He changed tacks sharply.

“We’ve got to think of what to do with you come morning.”

“I thought you said it weakened in daylight.”

“Most of these things do. But that doesn’t mean they’re entirely gone. Read your grandmother’s diary. Maybe it will jog something important in your memory. And I need to search mine. I’m sure there’s something there. I feel it.”