His hand traveled leisurely up and down her body, keeping the ashes of pleasure stirred to life within her. She knew he was the voracious type. Once was never enough. However, beyond that, he would and could walk away. But how many times? When would he go?
Probably whenever they got out of there. They would go their separate ways and she would never hear from him again. Hell, she probably wouldn’t even remember him. He would probably wipe her mind of all these moments of pleasure and connection.
She wouldn’t let him. She would find a way. She would promise to never ever utter a single word about vampires to anyone. She would do whatever it took to convince this committee of her sincerity. Anything. Anything so long as she could keep these memories alive.
He petted her down the length of her hair, drew fingertips over the rise of her cheek and along her jaw. He trailed his touch down her throat and along her collarbone. She closed her eyes and simply basked in it. Again, storing memories. His tenderness was a beautiful thing. He did not just use her and roll away and disconnect. He stayed with her. Made her feel well loved. Made her feel a connection that wasn’t supposed to be there.
She caught his hand in hers and met his eyes.
“I’m tired. I’m going to nap,” she said.
He frowned at her obvious withdrawal but he didn’t protest. He simply resituated their bodies so she could have as much of his body heat as she needed while resting her head on his chest and remaining curled to his side. She basked in it. She took what she could get. Again his hand began to trace lightly over her skin…as if he couldn’t resist touching her. She decided not to stop him again. She would simply bask in the tenderness…take it for what it was.
Felice slowly let her eyes slide closed and eventually fell asleep.
Chapter 12
Halo did not sleep. He stayed aware of his surroundings as best he could with a tempting woman lying in his arms. He wanted her again, with a surprising hunger. What was more, he wanted to feed from her. Poisoned or not, all he could think about was gobbling her up like a sensual, tasty treat. Considering how wildly arousing and satisfying their sexual encounter had been, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to do it again while feeding from her. The thought made him hard and left him wanting.
He let her sleep though. She had been sleeping often, he noted. Probably from the exhaustion of fretting over their situation or perhaps to escape the situation entirely. Perhaps even to escape him. He felt her pulling away at the end, just before she had drifted off. That was what he wanted…wasn’t it? He wanted her to keep distance between her physical desires and her emotional ones.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy each other fully in the moment though. She should take the time to indulge like he was. He was filling his senses and his memory with all the sweet and luscious things about her. He knew he would savor them for a lot longer than he usually savored a woman. She was indeed special, worthy of more consideration than a passing fancy.
Halo stayed in bed even though his instinct was to prowl about the room, staying alert and ready. It was better to remain relaxed. He burned less energy this way. Then again, he had just burned a copious amount of energy. Probably not the smartest thing he’d ever done.
He hadn’t been smart about a lot of things. Suddenly, he was questioning his judgment on many aspects of his life. This situation was forcing him to take stock, to examine it fully and see where it was flawed and weak. He had devoted so much time to hunting and playing that he had not developed any true connections, as Felice had pointed out. But that was the way he wanted it, wasn’t it? Connections were difficult. They took up a lot of energy and often came with a lot of drama. He didn’t need any of that in his life.
However, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was lacking. He hadn’t felt it before…before being held captive with Felice…
Damn it, no. He wasn’t going to give in to sentimentality. If this capture and imprisonment had taught him anything, it was that he needed to become even more isolated. Even more on guard. He couldn’t waste his attention on the feelings and needs of others. He had to become a sharper tool, an ultimate weapon. He had thought that was what he was, but it hadn’t been true. If it had been true he would never have been captured. He would have seen it coming.
He examined their situation for the hundredth time that evening. Not their sexual situation—that stood on its own. However, he did examine their captivity, trying to anticipate their captors’ next move.
Without cameras to see into the room, it would be driving them crazy not to watch how their little experiment was going. They were probably working frantically to restore them. If the charge he had sent through the system had been anything, it had been powerful. It might’ve been far-reaching enough to have fried those cameras so completely that they would need to come into the room to replace them. That would be ideal. As would the idea of them coming in to feed them. The more often they risked coming into the room, the more possible it was for him to hatch an escape. And whatever escape plan he did hatch, he had to keep Felice as far from it as possible.
Restlessness settled over him. He had enjoyed his postorgasmic lassitude, had wallowed in the feeling of pleasure and the tenderness of watching her fall asleep. He wished he could join her in her trusting, carefree actions of the moment. He didn’t have that luxury. He must keep aware. He must.
Halo grew quickly bored, however. He was a man of action. He needed to be on the hunt. True, he was very patient and often played the waiting game—waiting for a mark to show up or slip up was all part of the hunt, part of the game. This was different, however. He was the hunted, he was the one who was vulnerable, he did not have the advantage. True, he had more advantage now than he had a mere hour ago, but was it enough?
It had to be. He was out of ideas. He probably shouldn’t have started this flirtation with Felice. It complicated things. He believed she would not try to sink her hooks into him. She would not try to force him into her mold of what a man ought to be. She would not expect more of him than he was able to give. He respected her for that. Respected her for knowing her own mind and coming to terms with the nature of what their relationship was going to be.
However, he had this strange sensation in his belly. This odd desire to stay connected to her even after all of this was over. He tried to tell himself it was because he didn’t know the nature of the danger she was in—and that was part of it—but there was more. An elusive more. A more he wasn’t equipped to understand at that moment. All he did know was that he needed to protect her. She was innocent. She was blameless in all of this. And she was compelling. More so than any woman he had known before, and given the extent of his life, that was saying something. She made him think. Made him question his life and his existence. That ought to piss him off. And in a way it did. He wanted to argue that his life was fine just the way it was. However, he was more enlightened than that. He had already admitted there were flaws to the way he lived his life. He just wasn’t sure his lack of interpersonal relationships was one of those flaws.
He was thinking in circles. So much so it was making him dizzy. He had already gone over all of this in his mind. Why did he keep returning to it? He had to get out of there. He couldn’t take any more of this. He had to get out!
As if sensing his distress on some subconscious level, her eyes flew open and she reached to place a hand over his pounding heart.
“What is it?” she asked as she tried to blink the sleep from her eyes.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
“No. It’s something. I can feel the tension in your body and your heart is pounding like a jackhammer,” she said stubbornly. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”
“This whole situation is wrong, if you hadn’t noticed,” he growled meanly. “And I don’t have the luxury of sleeping through it.”
“You can’t possibly…you aren’t thinking of staying awake for the entire time we are in here! It could be
days! I know vampires need to sleep as much as humans do.”
“You know that, eh? Suddenly you’re an expert on vampires? For your information at peak efficiency, I can stay awake for days. A week if I had to.”
“At peak efficiency. As long as you kept your energy up,” she lobbed back at him. “You are far from being at peak efficiency. You’ve been captured and poisoned by gas, which you said yourself takes a lot of energy to process. You’ve been starved and offered only one source of food…me. Just the act of resisting the temptation must burn energy.”
“Who says I’m tempted? You’re poison. There’s nothing attractive about that.”
She frowned, looked hurt, and he immediately felt like the ass he was. He jumped to take back his words, to clarify his meaning.
“I mean…if you were clean it would be a far more irresistible temptation. I know being poisoned isn’t your fault. And you should know there is a huge difference between being tempted to dine on you and wanting to nibble and lick you and devour you in other ways. Now those ways I do find irresistible.”
“Thank you, but don’t feel you have to say that to spare my feelings.”
“I’m not. I mean that sincerely.”
“Yet you still call me poison.”
“I can’t help the facts.”
“I know. It just sickens me that I’m tainted like this. I wish I could be clean for you.”
“You want me to feed on you?” he asked, surprised. He had never known anyone who had voluntarily offered to feed a vampire of their own free will. Oh, he knew they were out there, he had just never come across them. Had never needed them. Those humans were cultivated to be a perfect source of energy, and they were used to feed the sick or the infirm. Of course, there weren’t many sick or infirm vampires, and usually if there were they didn’t stay that way for long. But energy was essential to the rapidity of their healing process, so if the vampire was too injured to find energy, then energy was brought to them. The purest and most powerful energy they could find—a cultivated human—was offered up to the sick vampire.
“Yes.” She answered strongly, showing him she knew her own mind in this matter. “I want you to feed on me. I want to know what it feels like. I want to share that with you.”
There was a certain amount of intimacy that came with a feeding. It was what had helped him become a considerate and affectionate lover instead of the selfish one he might have been otherwise. Sure, there was a selfish aspect to the way he managed his women, but for the short time he had them he treated them like queens.
He would do no less for her. He only wished he could feed on her, without care or worry or poison standing in the way. It frustrated him in a way he wasn’t used to.
He reached out and stroked the line of her jaw with gentle fingertips, tracing it, drawing a circle on her chin before drifting his touch beneath her jaw and down the length of her throat. The touch created intimacy between them almost instantly. He dipped his head and kissed her lips softly. She reached for him with a lift of her chin and kissed him again.
That was when his keen vampire hearing detected something. He was out of the bed in a flash, sprinting across the room and flattening himself against the wall by the door as he waited to spring into action.
Felice scrambled to get out of bed across the room and he halted her with a sharp hand gesture. To his relief she stepped back as far as she could go on that side of the room without getting on the bed and huddling in the corner.
There was a clang of sound, of metal being worked against.
The door opened.
A cadre of soldiers rushed into the room. Dressed in black and armed with weapons, their faces covered, they were in the room in an instant.
Halo reacted immediately. Disregarding the fact that he was outnumbered five to one, he grabbed the first soldier by the muzzle of his weapon, hearing it go off with a rat-a-tat of rapid automatic gunfire. Immediately he saw the danger. He had to keep all five of them occupied in order to keep them from taking aim at Felice. That was nearly an impossible task, but he was damn well going to attempt it.
He shoved the first soldier bodily into the group of soldiers behind him, bowling them all over and off their feet.
He kicked the first soldier in the face, stunning him, sweeping his leg around to knock back three of them at once, continuing to keep them occupied on the floor. He moved smoothly, fluidly for someone so big and powerful. He bent into a strike that caught the soldier in the throat. He gagged, unable to breathe, and clawed at his crushed larynx. One down, four to go.
He snatched away the first soldier’s automatic weapon just as one of the soldiers grabbed him by his foot and tried to yank him down onto the ground with them. He knew immediately by the strength of the pull that this was a phant. It took a bit of fancy footwork for Halo to kick away the grasping hand while maintaining his balance. He fired the rifle into the chest of the first phant and a second one as well, incapacitating them if not killing them. One of the three remaining guns came up and fired at him in the chest. He felt the bullets ripping into his flesh and the power of the strikes made him step back twice.
Halo heard Felice cry out right before one of the soldiers held up both hands and ejected a pulse of energy that also beat him back. But there was the invigorating aspect of being dosed with so much energy. The trouble was, it was painful and disorienting. Something he hadn’t shared with Felice. Had he been less disciplined, he would have given in to the pain ripping through his nervous system.
Halo took what little energy he could from the pulse, the acrid taste of the taint of the sycophant’s energy like rotten eggs against his palate and senses, and immediately sent it back toward the pile of soldiers. The pulse sent bright blue and yellow light jolting into the open air of the room. The phants on the ground cried out as he hit them with as wide a dispersal as he could while maintaining the power of the pulse.
It was clear these men were not as disciplined as he was when it came to riding out the pain of the pulse. They spent precious moments writhing on the floor. Moments Halo used to grab up another weapon and bend the muzzle, rendering it useless so it couldn’t be used against him. He kicked the third armed man in the head, snapping his head back on his neck with a loud crack of sound. Halo figured he had broken his neck cleanly with the action because the man fell back in a lifeless heap. Halo saw the knife at his waist and drew it sharply from its sheath then; discarding his rifle after rendering it useless as well, he took the soldier’s backup weapon, a 9mm handgun, strapped to his thigh, and checked to see if it was ready for action. This weapon Halo took and put to use. He shot the man in the throat, effectively severing his brain from his spine in the single clean shot…just to make sure he was dead.
Then, suddenly, Halo was struck with energy pulses from two of the remaining men at once. The force threw him back, sent him crashing into the table, the dishes from their dinner falling to the floor. But he held on to the knife and the gun, even as unimaginable pain tore through every last nerve in his body. He used it, took what energy from it that he could.
There was the sound of gunfire as one of the men fired in Felice’s direction. A warning shot.
“Stop or I’ll kill her!” he barked.
Oh, like hell he would. Halo knew this was his only chance. He couldn’t waste it. He expended precious energy sending another burst of pain-searing energy at the two beginning to struggle to their feet. He rammed into them again as he did this, like bowling for bad guys. Only this time it was more calculated. As they writhed with the pain from his pulse, Halo kicked over the one who had dared to aim and fire at Felice and stabbed him in the back of the neck with a savage thrust that buried the blade to the hilt just beneath his skull. So deep he couldn’t take the time to withdraw it as that would be too difficult a task. Instead he disarmed his latest victim of his knife and shot the remaining rifle owner in the face with his handgun. It wasn’t a neck shot, it wasn’t enough to kill him, but it was enough to keep h
im from being able to see and aim.
Finally the two soldiers he had shot in the chest managed to get to their feet. A somewhat worthy pair of opponents, Halo thought in passing, pretty impressed that they’d been able to do it. Having lost his primary weapon, the one on the right withdrew a handgun from a holster and fired at Halo. As a moving target, the best the man could hope for was striking Halo on the side of his neck and his left shoulder. The neck shot severed Halo’s carotid artery and blood began to pump from the wound, making him a bloody, slick mess. Just as Halo shot the second man through the throat, dropping him instantly, the first connected with him. But as the two men clashed, the slickness of his blood-covered skin gave Halo an advantage. Naked and wet made it nearly impossible for the man to grapple with him.
Of course, the more Halo was injured, the more energy he burned. He was growing weaker. He could feel it. He needed this fight to be over now.
In three succinct moves, Halo disarmed the man, elbowed him in the throat, effectively choking him again as his windpipe was crushed further, then yanking his head forward, he found the spot at the base of his skull and fired his weapon.
Felice, in fear of being struck by stray gunfire, had hurried to the farthest corner of the room. She’d listened to his instructions about keeping as far from the action as possible. He was infinitely proud of her in that moment and it invigorated him.
The last living phant, the one he had shot in the face, had managed to get to his feet. He staggered into Halo, grabbing him close and sending a pulse into him that seared his weak nerves. Halo grappled with the man as his head rang and his nerves burned. He gathered the last of his energy and sent a pulse into the remaining phant. He used the last of his energy reserves with that final pulse, but the pulse clearly wasn’t as strong as the others had been because it didn’t knock the man off his feet. Still, it occupied him long enough to allow Halo to use martial arts to stun him the rest of the way. He was well trained in all kinds of styles, having devoted nearly a decade to the learning process, a time when he had done nothing but immerse himself in the arts. He had even trained in the classes of the late and great Bruce Lee. He called on his knowledge of those classes now.