Things were murky after that. He remembered everything being slow and dark and red, of pain and agony with every movement, the world tilting and spinning. There were times of running, stumbling along as if forever and ever…up some stairs….
Here. Into this chamber.
There things turned darker and hotter, and memory confused with dreams and nightmares. He closed his eyes and saw an image of Narcise, rising naked and glistening from a bath…there, in the corner…of her with eyes red-gold and hot, her fangs long and white and lethal…blood…there was blood and pain, and he had an image of her on top of someone, tearing into him….
Narcise stirred next to him and then she opened her eyes.
When she saw that he was awake, she sat up abruptly. “You’re alive.” Her eyes were wide with shock and happiness, making her even more beautiful with her dark hair swirling about her shoulders against a thin white shift.
Chas felt another loosening inside his belly, deep and fluttery. She was right there, she was lovely and sensual, and they were alone. He wasn’t so weak that he couldn’t reach over, pull her to him?—
He closed his mind to the temptation. She was avampir. She’d coerce, coax, lull…seduce him….drag him into the Devil’s dark world.
“I don’t remember much,” he said.
“You nearly died,” she said. “From an infection. The doctor came, more than once, but he wasn’t certain if you’d live.”
Chas sank down onto his back, remembering even more. The screaming pain on his side, the cool, quick hands administering to his wounds, the haze of heat and confusion that followed, Narcise….He stopped his thoughts, afraid of where they were about to lead. It was impossible not to be attracted to her.
He tightened his lips. That was Lucifer’s game, wasn’t it? She was irresistible for a reason.
“What day is it? How long have I—we—been here?” he asked instead.
“Nearly a week,” she told him.
“A week?” Shock and concern almost had him sitting up again. “It’s been a week since we left your brother?”
Narcise nodded.
Good Christ, Corvindale was going to be furious. Surely by now Maia had followed instructions—reluctantly of course—and contacted him about Chas’s disappearance.
He turned his gaze back to hers. “You stayed here with me?” he asked.
“Of course. I wasn’t going to let you die.” She frowned irritably. “I’m not my brother.”
An image of Narcise, bending over him, her slender hands on his skin, flashed into his mind with sudden clarity. Bending over him, near his?—
Despite his lingering weakness and the raw pounding in his head, he sat up abruptly, yanking the coverings away from his right hip, knowing what he would find….
“What have you done to me?” he demanded, staring at the four neat little marks on his flesh. Repugnance and fury rushed over him as his belly tightened and fluttered. He stared at her, not trying to hide his revulsion. “Youdared?”
Her eyes had widened again, then returned to normal. She tightened her full lips and lifted her chin defiantly. “The infected wound wasn’t healing, and the doctor could do nothing more for you. There is something in the saliva of a Dracule that promotes healing, and so I thought to help you by applying it.”
Chas heard what she was saying, but it took a moment for her meaning to penetrate the fury.
“There are bitemarks,” he said, still angry…feeling violated and unsettled, particularly by the sordid image that went along with the knowledge. Narcise, bending to him…her sensual lips closing intimately over his skin, the pain of penetration, but the release from swollen veins…nausea mixed with that shiver of lust, deep in his belly, and Chas swallowed hard.
This is what they do. They enthrall. And lure.
“I hoped that drawing out the poison, whatever was infecting you, removing it from your body, would help, along with my saliva. Whatever it was, it worked to keep you alive.”
He looked away, his heart beating too hard, his fingers curling into the blanket. “I’m finding it difficult to be grateful,” he managed to say. “But I suppose I must be.”
She’d withdrawn from the bed in the face of his blatant anger, and now she looked at him from where she stood on the other side. “At least you’re honest,” she replied, and turned her back to him.
As he watched, at once struck by the intimacy of sharing this space with a woman he mistrusted, reviled and yet desired, she began to braid her the inky waterfall of her hair.
“Did you enthrall me?” he asked, lifting his head, still on edge and furious as he watched her slender shoulders and the delicate edge of her shoulder blades through the thin chemise. She had sleek and elegantly muscled arms, unlike any he’d ever seen on a woman, and he could see the roundness of her buttocks, the curve of her hips. He hated that he wanted her, that his body was changing and responding to her mere presence.
