Page 41 of Hot Blooded

She made her way through increasingly narrow, less-trafficked, dimly-lit residential blocks, her pulse beginning to accelerate. Her instincts were screaming at her not to be stupid, to go back to the well-lit main streets—or better yet, back to the safety of her home.

But she didn’t listen.

As she picked her way down a narrow alley behind a row of dilapidated tenements, boots scuffing through several inches of gray, half-melted slush, a shadow passed overhead. She froze for a second, listening. There was nothing to hear, except the distant rumble of an oncoming train and the general city clamor of car horns and sirens and a couple having a screaming fight in one of the apartments nearby. You stopped hearing those things when you lived around them all the time, to the point that any out-of-place noise, even a very quiet one, stood out like a thunderclap.

Tessa started walking again. She had nearly reached the end of the alley when a soft dragging sound came from behind her. It was the proverbial thunderclap. She spun around to face the noise. But the alley was empty. Silent. Tessa could see the trail of her footsteps in the slush, illuminated by weak orange security lights. Ten feet away, a second pair of larger footprints joined hers, seemingly out of nowhere. They dogged her steps all the way up to where she currently stood.

She instinctively looked up. The air above her was crisscrossed with power lines that bobbed as the passing train rumbled by. Beyond them, the tenement roofs were crowded with satellite dishes and antennas. Tessa scanned along the roofline, seeking a shadowed figure, but there was nothing.

The train passed, and the ensuing silence felt wooly and thick. Tessa turned back around—

Her scream was immediately stifled by a big hand pressed over her mouth. He moved so fast, she had no time to react. One second she was staring into the dark eyes of a stalking predator, and the next her back was pressed flat against icy cold bricks. His broad body pinned her there, his hand still pressed over her mouth.

For a second, she was so stunned, it didn’t even occur to her to struggle. But then the anticipation and adrenaline and excitement hit her all at once and she surged against him like an enraged wolverine. She fought like her life was at stake. She fought with all the bottled rage that had been simmering at a near-boil for years.

But no matter how hard she fought, there was no escaping his strength and his speed. He caught her wrists and pinned them together above her head. The hand that covered her mouth gripped the entire lower half of her face. He tipped her head to the side, baring her neck. His lips brushed her ear, a sinister chuckle overlaying the sound of her labored breaths.

“Keep fighting,” he taunted. “It only gets me harder.”

Tessa hauled in a sharp breath, her whole body going taut with a lightning bolt of arousal. But even as she was overwhelmed with the urge to fuck, she kept playing at resistance. She twisted helplessly in his unbreakable hold, making angry, objecting noises behind the muzzle formed by his big hand, putting all her strength into trying to break away from him.

“Don’t want to play nice?” His voice dipped into a growl. He laughed ominously. “Then I’ll give you something to scream about.”

He sank his fangs into her neck with savage speed. At the first hard suck, her knees went weak, her objections dying on a strangled gasp. She tried to keep fighting, but the movements became weak and clumsy. His venom spread, warming her with tingling pleasure that condensed and exploded outward into a relentless, never-ending, mind-obliterating orgasm. Powerful, drugging euphoria washed over her. She forgot the cold bricks at her back and the gray slush freezing her feet and the noise of the city and all of her stress and anxiety and frustration. There was only Amos, his strength and his will and the incomparable pleasure that came from surrendering to him.

When the pleasure receded and the surrounding world bled back in, she was clutched in Amos’s arms, trembling and gasping. The orgasm she’d just had would have been enough to knock out a reasonable woman. But Tessa wasn’t feeling anything close to reasonable. Her blood thrummed through her veins with the steady beat of a war drum. She looked up at Amos, meeting his black gaze, both of them still hot with blood lust.

She grabbed his face and pulled him in for a desperate, vicious kiss. “Take me home,” she breathed before capturing his mouth again.

Chapter 11

Amos had no memory of taking her home. The high of hunting for the first time in nearly a century, culminating in prey who surrendered so intensely, who came so beautifully as he drank from her, had him half out of his mind. He was vaguely aware of running through dark streets, Tessa cradled in his arms.

The next thing he knew, he was kicking his door shut and Tessa’s mouth was on his, her thighs wrapped round his hips, her arms clinging to his neck.

“Please,” she gasped between hungry, hot kisses. “Please, Amos. Give me more.”

His cock was desperate to answer that call, but her demand was too vague for him to make that leap. She wanted more pleasure, he knew that much. But he’d drunk more deeply from her than he’d so far dared. He couldn’t drink from her again tonight. But there were other ways of giving pleasure—ways he hadn’t had the chance to entertain in a very, very long time.

Drunk on blood and high on lust, he carried her to the living room and lowered her onto the couch before dropping to his knees in front of her. He tugged her boots down her calves, off her feet, and flung them away, leaving her with the black thigh-high stockings. The sight of those stockings tugged at foggy remembrances of women in decades past who wore them every day as a matter of course. On Tessa, though, they were a revelation. He froze for a split-second, arrested by the way the tops of the stockings bit into her plump thighs, tempting him to bite in as well.

But no. He’d taken enough. Now he wanted to give. He pushed those thighs wide, making her gasp. Her delectable fragrance was stronger here, rich with arousal. The gusset of her tiny little drawers was already soaked through, begging him to taste. He hooked his fingers in the waistband and pulled, intending to drag them beneath her lush bottom and down her legs. In his excitement, though, they tore like tissue paper. He flung them away, a very small part of his mind conscious that he’d have to apologize later.

“Amos…” Tessa breathed, hips rocking up, baring her slick, swollen pussy to him.

He slung her thighs over his shoulders and leaned in, inhaling her fragrance before putting his whole mouth over as much of her as he could cover. His tongue swept out, parting her folds, dragging through her slick softness, savoring the taste of her. The same unique top notes as he tasted in her blood sang across his senses now, mingling with the blatantly erotic flavors of sex and female musk.

“Oh, god, Amos!” One of Tessa’s hands settled on his head, fingers threading through his hair and tugging. He glanced up and was rewarded with the sight of her other hand curled against her mouth, eyes squeezed shut as her teeth closed around her own fingers. Amos growled his pleasure, sending low vibrations through her slick, swollen flesh. She cried out, fingers tightening in his hair.

It’d been a long, long time since he’d pleasured a woman this way, but he was relearning the ropes quickly. His exploring tongue found the stiff peak of her clitoris, circling and teasing and closing his lips around it and sucking. Tessa nearly arched right off the couch on that last one, and nearly ripped his hair from his scalp in the process.

“Too much?” Amos asked breathlessly, lips ghosting over her mound as he spoke.

“No, no, please, don’t stop, please—ohhhhh!”

With his mouth back on her clit, he slid one hand up her thigh, seeking the molten hot core of her, where he slid two fingers deep inside.

“Ah, Amos! Holy Mother, Jesus Christ, fucking—ah! God!” Tessa twisted and writhed, nearly dislodging him three times, forcing him to press his forearm over her hips, pinning her in place as he ate.

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