Page 30 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
And it would be for his investigation, after all. Not just to see a piece of his deepest desires played out in front of him. It didn’t make him a monster—not if his little swan agreed to everything.
Still, when he wrote a note to slip under Shane’s door, he could not seem to find an explanation that didn’t tug every inch of his gastrointestinal tract into knots. So he kept it vague. Vague and demanding.
Be outside tonight an hour after dusk.
We’re going shopping.
~ Your vampire
(PS: I found Tara.)
13
SHANE
Shane’s vampire still wore his mask, only the fine edge of his jaw and the elegant line of his lips visible below it. He smiled as Shane slipped into his passenger seat. His fangs gleamed in the low light.
He had on a long leather jacket over a lacey red button-up that showed off the lines of his musculature beneath, and Shane fought very hard not to admire himtoomuch in it. It looked custom-made for him, the same exquisite mix of feminine and masculine, the red and black matching the polish of his nails and the dark liner around his eyes. He was, undeniably, far too beautiful for his own good—and his own good seemed to be other people’s morally ambiguous.
Yet Shane couldn’t dislike him for it.
If anything, his possessiveness was thrilling. The desire and the sensuality of it left Shane’s heart pounding and his knees weak and a deep, unconquerable ache between his legs that no vibrator could sate for long. Thatthiswas apparently what his sex life had been lacking all these years should have left him far more uncomfortable than it did.
The fifteen-minute-old unanswered text from Andres felt more shameful by far. Shane should have been running headlong after his new friend. They were the safe crush: a simple, kind human, a little tired and lonely but genuine andlovely. They were the option Shane should have been letting himself fall head over heels for, would have been flirting with far more were he not still feeling the brush of his vampire’s lips from months past.
As warm and giddy as new messages from Andres always left Shane, even the most sensual imagining of them—their appearance now a blur of tear-stained make up and dark lashes in Shane’s memory—couldn’t stoke the kind of yearning that Shane’s body seemed determined to build for a vampire whose face he’d never seen at all; who pressed up against Shane’s boundaries and so possessively demanded his skin and blood and submission. And for all that he should have been battling those feelings down, instead Shane was beginning to hope that his vampire might take even more… might take his mouth, as gentle and forceful as he’d taken over Shane’s life.
He pushed back the intrusive vision and tried to focus on where they were and whatever the hell they were here for.Shopping, his vampire had said. Well, this did not look like any kind of shopping he’d ever experienced.
As they drove toward the edge of the city, the tight blocks of the artsy districts turned to hilly suburbs where each house looked as if it were built in a different era. They pulled up at a picturesque single-story home with no fence around it, a hedge separating it from the next lot on one side and a patch of forest on the other. It looked familiar.
“This way,” his vampire said, leading him around the back.
“Please tell me we’re invading someone’s private property for a reason.” Shane grumbled the words under his breath, feeling self-conscious at the light on in the kitchen window, spotlighting a young teenager obliviously doing her homework. At leasthis vampirehad a mask on.
“We’re not invading. We have an appointment.” The path around the back split toward a patio overlooking a scrubby grasslawn, but his vampire continued walking deeper into the yard, past a line of trees and toward another tall, barnlike building. He paused at the wide rolling door and knocked.
“Now will you tell me what we’re here for?” Shane leaned closer, trying, just a little, to get in the way.
His vampire had the gall to shush him, and his hands were somehow shifting Shane back, moving him with barely a touch. He knocked again to no answer.
“Hello?” He gripped the handle on the sliding door, starting to drag it open.
“Careful!” came a shout from behind them. A broad middle-aged man with brown skin jogged through the tree line, waving. “I’d closed up for the night before you called. Don’t want to set anything off,” he explained, as he typed something into his phone. A faint buzz sounded. He put the device away. “That should be better. Now, where were we?”
Shane’s vampire slid an arm around his shoulder, a light touch that never quite settled. “This is my—this is the human I mentioned.” He twirled a lock of Shane’s hair between his fingers in a way that felt just a little bit possessive, tipping his face toward Shane’s ear to add, breath hot and voice husky, “Mercer occasionally works with vampires on special projects. Like what we’ll need for Tara’s work access, and… other things.”
So they needed something from him to reach Tara—a lock picking tool or a faked ID badge, perhaps, if the issue was access—but why he had Shane here for it was unclear. Unless Shane wasn’t here forthat.
“Andother things,”his vampire had said. But what kind of other things…
Mercer didn’t look the least bit fazed by any of this—not even the mask Shane’s vampire was still adamant about wearing. He held out a hand, and in the small porchlight above the shed, Shane finally recognized him as the person who’d ordered himoff this very property in the daylight after refusing to answer questions about his vampiric customers.
Mercer seemed to register it at the same time. “You’re the journalist who came poking around here a couple months ago.”
“That wasn’t my finest moment,” Shane admitted, thoughtechnically, he still didn’t regret it. He moved through the motions, taking Mercer’s hand and trying not to cringe.
Mercer shook with a firm grip, calluses spread across his strong fingers. “Seems you found yourself a vampire without my help.”
