Page 7 of Hot Blooded

She shook her head, turning to face him. The motion made her head reel, and she clutched the arm of the couch unsteadily. Amos reached for her, bracing her up.

“Here.” He took the energy bar from her and unwrapped it before pressing it back into her hand. “Eat.”

“I wasn’t this dizzy last time,” she said, pressing her hand against her temple.

“It was probably adrenaline. You’re not as frightened this time.” His lips flattened into a thin line. “Or, you weren’t.”

She took a bite of the energy bar. It was delicious, though she had no idea what was in it. Rich people ingredients, probably. Ancient grains she’d never heard of, nuts that cost more than gold, and a superfruit that could only be found on a single mountaintop in Tibet. She chewed slowly, thinking, wondering why she wasn’t as scared as she probably should be.

“So, you went for over a century without live blood. What made you stop hunting people?”

“As I aged, I mellowed. I was able to resist blood cravings for longer, to think more long-term about how I hunted and what the impacts were. Even with those changes, I would have probably had to continue hunting to survive. In an ideal world, I would have found a bloodmate, but it just… never happened for me. Instead, in the late nineteen-thirties, blood storage was invented, and blood banking became a normal feature of hospitals. I didn’t have to hunt anymore.”

“Oh.” So he hadn’t had much of a choice in the first place, but when he was given a choice, he went with the less harmful one. “What’s a bloodmate?”

“Ah. Well.” He was sitting with his elbows braced on his knees, and his gaze went to his linked hands, his cheeks tinged slightly pink. “A bloodmate is usually a… a loved one, who provides a regular source of live blood to their vampire.”

“By ‘loved one,’ I assume you don’t mean family?”

“No.” His flush deepened. “I mean a lover.”

Tessa glanced away, feeling a wave of sympathy. Amos had spent more than a century hoping to find a lover he could feed intimately from. And instead, he was stuck with a choice between cold, bagged blood or paying a stranger to give him a hollow semblance of what he really wanted. Her gaze strayed to his crotch. He’d tucked his erection down one pant leg, the outline visible beneath his jeans. After a moment, she realized she was just blatantly ogling and jerked her gaze away. Luckily, Amos was oblivious, still staring at his linked hands.

“Do vampires…” Her mouth went dry. She swallowed, licked her lips. “Do vampires have sex when they feed?”

He slanted a dark glance at her. “Are you asking if I’m a rapist?”

Tessa nearly choked on the energy bar. “What? No!” She hadn’t been thinking about his pre-blood-bank, hunting days. She’d been thinking about, well, herself. And how interesting it might be to have sex while he was feeding on her. “But, uh… now that you bring it up…”

He laughed, a sound as dark as the shadows in his eyes. “No, I’ve never done anything more than feed on my prey. I have no doubt that there are monsters who do such things to their victims. But for most of us, that intimacy is only fulfilling with a bloodmate.” He sighed. “But, finding a long-term bloodmate is difficult and dangerous. Not all vampires can manage to do so.”

Tessa finished the energy bar and when she didn’t reach for anything else, Amos opened a bottle of pomegranate juice and pushed it on her.

“What’s so dangerous about finding a bloodmate?” It seemed like the danger would be all on the human side.

“Exposure, primarily. For a very long time, revealing yourself to someone could’ve meant villagers with torches and pitchforks coming after you. Now the danger is government scientists and private laboratories.”

She frowned. “But you revealed yourself to me, and I’m a stranger.”

“Yes, but the agency has measures in place for selecting safe donors. And once you’re accepted, they take other measures to ensure your silence.”

That was true. It had taken a referral from an existing donor, a very thorough background check, several rounds of interviews, and a psych evaluation before she had been approved as a donor. After that, she’d signed an extremely thick NDA, and had had the less official consequences of running her mouth laid out for her—which mostly relied on a scheme of ruining her life through total and utter financial destruction in addition to having her involuntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.

But she’d needed the money. So she’d signed the NDA and promised not to do anything that would force their hand against her. The sign-on bonus alone had been enough to get Ma out of arrears on the mortgage, and when the first week’s payment came through, she’d be able to get one of the credit cards caught up. She’d moved out of her own apartment and back in with Ma so that the money she would’ve spent on rent and utilities could be put towards the debts Ma had been saddled with after Dad’s death. If everything went well, between her day job—if you could call it that when you worked third shift—and the payments for blood “donation,” she could get Ma back on stable footing in a year. And until she was sure Ma would be alright, she wouldn’t be able to get on with her own life.

At thirty-three years old, she was more than overdue. She hadn’t had a real vacation in over two years, not since Dad got sick. She hadn’t seen much of her friends, too consumed by the needs of her parents, while her friends were all busy starting their own families. And that was probably what ate at Tessa the most—she hadn’t been in a relationship in several years. And she certainly couldn’t start one now—not when she was living with her mother and working third shift and spending three nights a week having bloody orgasms with an undead stranger.

She liked to think of herself as a Strong Independent Woman who Didn’t Need No Man, but the fact was, she was lonely. She missed the emotional connection of being in a relationship. She missed the comfort of knowing somebody was there for her. And then there was sex. God, she missed sex. Furtive masturbation in her childhood bedroom really wasn’t getting it done.

But relentless, venom-induced orgasms while being clutched in the arms of a strapping, undead farm boy? Would it be absurd if she asked him to cuddle afterwards?

Probably. Her gaze slid to the outline of his still-hard cock beneath his jeans. Yeah, no asking for cuddles.

“Feeling better?” Amos asked.

She jerked her gaze up, mortified. But Amos hadn’t caught her scoping out his dick. His attention was on the energy bar wrapper, which he was neatly folding into a precise square.

“Were you a farmer?” Tessa blurted.

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