Claimed by the Immortal

mistake possible: he’d jumped away too fast.

God, where had his mind gone? Of course, he knew. It had gone to that sweetest and most demanding of places where the object of his Hunger had overruled him. He had been near the brink of madness with desire.

But after all these centuries it was embarrassing to have to question himself. Had Hunger truly pushed him into the stupidest thing he could have done?

Evidently so. And now he had to think fast because she was asking a question he should not truthfully answer, and because he’d embarrassed Jude. If this woman talked to her detective friend about this, Jude would be furious and have a lot of explaining to do.

It was not very courteous of him as a guest to have put Jude in this position. He had to fix this and fix it fast so that Jude wouldn’t have to leave town to protect his identity, so that his wife, Terri, who was a medical examiner, wouldn’t be forced to give up her job....

The import of what he had just done crashed through him like a tsunami, to be followed by waves of desperation nearly as strong. The Hunger and lust that had driven him now took a definite backseat to damage control.

He straightened, clearing his throat, and tried to evade the question as his mind raced over how to handle this. Unfortunately, after what had just happened, he didn’t think he was going to be able to make her forget it.

But he tried anyway because there was no mistaking that, for at least a very brief time, she’d responded to his control. “Forget,” he said in the Voice that most humans had to obey. “Forget this happened.”

“I’m not about to forget this,” she retorted hotly. “Just who do you think you are? You’re supposed to be a private detective, you pervert!”

Pervert? That was entirely possible, and he didn’t exactly object to the word either. Perversion was, after all, largely in the eye of the beholder. He wouldn’t mind binding her with silken ropes and getting her to admit she wanted him, too. And she did. He had smelled her arousal around her as clearly as he could see her right now.

However, this was not solving the problem either. She was mad and needed to be soothed, the quicker the better.

“I was overcome by your charms,” he said, which at least was true. She, however, astonished him by not believing it.

“Yeah. Really. As if you’re a sixteen-year-old who thinks with your groin. You were out of line. Way out of line.”

“I apologize.”

But clearly that wasn’t going to satisfy her either. Concern for Jude hung over him like a dark cloud.

He wasn’t at all concerned for himself. Staring down the barrel of her gun might make her feel better, but for him it meant nothing. He was certain that, like most cops, she was trained to shoot at center mass. Any wound she could give him would not kill him unless she hit him in the head, the last place a cop was trained to aim for.

Regardless, he could move so fast the instant he saw her trigger finger tighten that she didn’t have a hope of hitting him anywhere at all.

But of course he was not going to illuminate her. He’d already illuminated her far too much.

Amusement might have gripped him except for his concern about Jude. Never, not once in Damien’s countless years, had a woman ever denied him. Now that one had, he realized he was in quicksand of his own making. How maddening. But for himself he didn’t care. He could be gone faster than she would be able to see. No, other concerns pinned his feet to the floor, forcing him to battle his natural urges and ignore his own abilities.

He could almost see her thinking rapidly, and he suspected that was going to bode ill for his secrets, too. She had asked the one question that was most important, and he didn’t think she’d forgotten it.

He wondered if Jude would see the humor in it when he explained that he couldn’t tell a lie because of a vow he had made centuries ago. Not likely.

His only hope now, he supposed, was that Caro would disbelieve his answer and throw him out. Then he could let Jude tell him he was no longer welcome and could head back to Cologne. Surely that would appease all the parties who were going to be annoyed with him, from this woman to Jude to Pat Matthews. However, he had promised to hang around for a while just in case any more of those rogue vampires arrived to stir up things for Jude again by attacking innocents and trying to create a vampire-ruled world. Tell a lie or break a promise? The horns of a dilemma indeed.

His mouth lifted in half a grim smile as he contemplated the sword he was about to fall on.

But she didn’t make him fall on it; she pierced him with it. All of a sudden her eyes widened, and she drew a sharp breath and said, “You don’t exist!”

Unfortunately, he did. Of that much he was sure. Dead, undead, vampire or not, he most certainly existed. Now more than a little perplexed, he moved a little farther away, trying to give her space to feel safe and calm down.

He’d been an idiot and was willing to admit it. The question was how to get her not to make a big deal out of it.

Her eyes followed him, narrowing as they did so. “Your aura,” she said.

“What about it?”

“It’s not human.”

That didn’t exactly shock him. What shocked him was that she could see it. “Really?” He wondered if he should buy time by going on the attack. After all, not that many humans admitted to seeing auras. Maybe he could use that against her.

But as soon as he had the thought, he despised himself. While he might have slightly different rules of conduct because of his state of existence, that didn’t excuse him from the important rules that governed the behavior of most intelligent beings, such as not attacking people based on who or what they were.

“Your aura,” she said again. “It’s not normal. It’s all one color and too close to your body. Wine-red.”

He looked down, but seeing auras was not among his gifts, sadly. While he could tell much from the ebb and flow of heat in a human body, that was not the same as an aura. “Really. I had no idea.”

“But you still haven’t answered my question, have you, vampire?”

In an instant the entire thing went from bad to worse. It was one thing for her to consider him a pervert but to know he was a vampire by his aura—a fact that would certainly give away Jude—was a disaster of epic proportions.

He cursed the urges and stupidity that had led him to dig this hole. Not since he was a newborn had he found self-control beyond his ability. Of course, he’d never met anyone who attracted him the way Caro did either, but that was no excuse for his biggest mistake: assuming his abilities would allow him to seduce her. He’d lived long enough to know that the Voice didn’t work with everyone, long enough to know that getting his way was sometimes chancy.

Hell.

“You don’t believe in vampires,” Damien answered, which was certainly true but also an intentional misdirection on his part. He hoped it would work. It was certainly his last chance for a clean getaway that would harm no one.

But before he could be sure, she took a wholly confusing tack.

“I wish,” she groaned, “that I had listened to my grandmother.” Then she lowered her pistol, sank onto a nearby chair and looked at him as if she wanted him to vanish.

Well, he could vanish, and quickly, too, he thought with bitter amusement, but that wouldn’t make things better for Jude. “Your grandmother?”

“Yes, my grandmother. She used to tell me about things, things from fairy tales. At least, I wanted to believe they were fairy tales.”

“I’ll gladly be a fairy tale for you.”

Her head snapped up a bit. “Oh, no, you don’t. You sit right over there,” she said, pointing to another chair with her gun. “I want some answers.”