Chapter 6
6
V anessa exhaled a long breath, her entire body still humming with pleasure. It took her a few moments to come down from her high and the feverish daze she’d been in before Cole had made her climax, but now she was fully aware of everything around her. Or everything that wasn’t there: Cole. He’d practically stormed into the bathroom as if a swarm of hornets were chasing him. What had happened? One moment he’d kissed her and pleasured her with his talented fingers, the next he’d swatted her hands away when she’d tried to unzip his pants, and peeled himself out of her arms.
Why hadn’t he fucked her? She knew he would have been perfectly capable of it. After all, the package in his pants had been hard to overlook. She knew he’d been aroused, and in the brief second she’d felt his erection rub against her, she’d noticed just how big he was.
Vanessa sat up and looked toward the closed door of the ensuite bathroom, her ears perking up. She could hear what he was doing in there. Her sensitive vampire senses confirmed it: Cole was masturbating. It felt like a slap in the face. She’d offered herself more than willingly, hell, she’d begged him for his cock. He’d paid for it, and dearly she imagined, knowing that nothing at Vera’s was cheap. Was that perhaps the problem? Because he thought her to be a sex worker? But that made no sense either. He’d pleasured her like she was a goddess.
Everything in her mind began to spin. Had she done something wrong? The thought made her shiver. Had the fact that she’d wanted to feel his teeth in her breasts disgusted him? She’d never had anyone do that to her. But when Cole had sucked her with such passion, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from demanding he bite her. She felt cold all of a sudden and pulled the negligee around her to cover her nakedness, though it did nothing to warm her.
The faucet was running in the ensuite bathroom, and when the sound stopped, the door opened, and Cole came back into the room, now fully dressed except for his jacket. Her gaze dropped to his pants, and she noticed that his erection was gone. He’d found release at his own hand.
Vanessa opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find the right words to ask him why he didn’t want to fuck her. It would make her sound needy.
Cole approached and sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning closer. He put his hand under her chin and looked into her eyes. “I want to see you again.”
His request stunned her. For a second, she remained silent, then she collected all her courage, and said, “But you didn’t even f—”
He put a finger over her lips to stop her. “I like to take things slowly… to prolong the pleasure.” He leaned closer and brushed his lips over hers, giving her a featherlight kiss. “You know how to make a man feel wanted. It feels good to be with you.”
“But I was the one who had all the pleasure…”
He drowned out her words with another kiss, this time a deeper one, while he placed his hand on her breast, caressing her nipple. When he severed the kiss, he pressed his forehead to hers.
“Don’t you have a wife or a girlfriend? Somebody who looks like you must have all kinds of women vying for your attention. And once they find out what a skillful lover you are…”
“Wives and girlfriends are complicated. I’d rather be with somebody like you. With somebody who knows what a man wants, and doesn’t play games.”
“Oh.” Did this mean that he wouldn’t have touched her if he knew that she wasn’t a sex worker? That was odd to say the least. And confusing as hell.
“Now, tell me, Vanessa, shall we repeat this another night?”
Vanessa lifted her head and gazed into his eyes. There was something intriguing about this man. She couldn’t figure out what it was. All she knew was that she wanted to be with him. He’d appeased her senses when she’d gone into heat, satisfying the satyr in her, and at the same time, he’d made her feel cherished, precious even.
“Yes. I’d like that. But you should call me directly. I’m happy to come to your place.” Because she didn’t want to cheapen their next rendezvous by it taking place in a brothel. And she couldn’t take him to her home, where her parents and her brother might hear them.
“You don’t want to go through Vera’s?”
“No.”
“That’s fine by me. I can pay you in cash, if you prefer that.”
She sighed. She should tell him right now that she wasn’t a sex worker, but maybe it would be best to discuss this the next time they met and find out why he didn’t want a girlfriend or wife. Maybe there was a simple reason, and she could alleviate his concerns when she knew more about him. But for now, she had to continue to pretend she was a sex worker.
“Let’s not talk about money.”
Vanessa leaned in and kissed him, pulling him closer so her breasts touched his chest. Another flame of desire shot through her, but the knowledge that she would see Cole again helped her tamp down her need for now.
“Let me give you my number,” she murmured.
He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and unlocked it. She watched him as he scrolled to his address book and handed it to her. “Here, program it in.”
She typed in her cell number and handed him the phone back.
He tapped on the number, and her cell phone rang from inside the closet where she’d put her own clothes.
“Now you have my number too,” he said with a smile.
“Aren’t you worried that I could stalk you?”
He grinned, and it made him look younger and carefree. “I should be so lucky.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead and rose.
She watched him take his jacket and leave the room. Vanessa dropped back into the sheets, and stared up at the ceiling. What had just happened? Had she dreamed all this in her feverish state? Because men who came to a brothel to pleasure a woman they thought to be a sex worker without fucking her didn’t exist. Nor did they give out their cell phone numbers willingly. What was Cole’s game? And more importantly: was she willing to play along?
An hour later, the Scanguards-owned ambulance drove into the parking garage at Scanguards HQ, and stopped in front of the elevators.
“Thanks, Nicholas,” Vanessa said to the driver, and opened up the double doors in the back.
“I’ll help you,” Nicholas offered and killed the engine.
Vanessa jumped out of the back, and with Nicholas’s help she lifted the gurney with Ginger out of it. Nicholas closed the ambulance doors, while Vanessa rolled the gurney toward the elevator. The doors opened before she could press the button and Maya, her mother, dressed in a white doctor’s coat appeared. There was blood all over her scrubs.
“Hey, Nessie, how is she doing?” Maya looked at Ginger, checking her pupils and her pulse while Vanessa rolled her into the elevator.
“She’s getting stronger. I gave her as much blood as I could,” Vanessa replied.
Nicholas approached, ready to join them.
“Nicholas?” Maya said, lifting her hand.
“Yeah?”
“We just had another emergency call come in. You’ll have to head out again right away,” Maya said.
A ping came from Nicholas’s pocket.
“That’ll be the location,” Maya said, before she pressed the button of the medical floor, and Nicholas turned on his heel and headed back to the ambulance.
There was a moment of silence, when the elevator doors closed. Vanessa gestured to the blood on her mother’s clothes. “What happened?”
“The attack on Ginger wasn’t the only one tonight. We got another human downstairs, a tourist. She was attacked near the baseball stadium. Sebastian and Adam brought her in.”
“Damn it! I shouldn’t have let him get away.” Guilt surged through her.
Maya put her hand on Vanessa’s arm. “Don’t. We don’t think—” She stopped herself and then looked straight at her. A concerned look crossed her mother’s face. “Are you okay? You feel feverish. Are you going into heat?”
“I’m all right, Mom. It’s already over. I took care of it.”
Her forehead furrowed. “But it shouldn’t be your time.”
Vanessa shrugged. “I know. It just suddenly happened when I brought Ginger to Vera’s to administer first aid.”
“That’s odd.”
“Don’t worry, Mom, I’m fine. What were you gonna say about the other attack?”
“Oh, we don’t think it was the same guy. The timeline doesn’t fit.”
“You’re saying there is more than one rogue in the city?”
Maya nodded. “Benjamin thinks so.”
The elevator doors opened, and they rolled the gurney along the hallway and through the next double doors into Scanguards’ mini medical center. The large room with the nurses’ station in the middle and treatment cubicles around its perimeter was as well-equipped as a trauma center in any major hospital.
Buffy, the young black human woman, whose stepfather was a vampire, was already expecting them. She’d been training with Maya for several years now and was well-versed in emergency medicine when it came to vampire-inflicted injuries.
“Over here,” Buffy said and pointed to one of the treatment areas she’d prepared.
“Nessie, go see Benjamin. He needs more info on the rogue you encountered,” Maya said.
Vanessa glanced at Ginger. Her neck injury still looked bad, but she and Vera had managed to stop the bleeding. Now it was simply a matter of time until she healed.
“Don’t wipe her memory yet. Maybe she can describe her attacker better than I can, and give us information as to where he picked her up,” she said. “Just keep her calm when she comes to.”
“Don’t worry, Nessie, we’ll take good care of her.”
With a nod at her mother and Buffy, Vanessa pivoted and left the medical center.
She almost collided with Rose, a full-blooded vampire like her mother, who looked barely over twenty, even though she was over two-hundred years old.
“Hey, Nessie,” she said. “I figured I’d help your mother with the injured victims.”
“She’ll appreciate it, I’m sure.” Vanessa gave her a quick smile, then hurried to the elevators.
When she entered the command center on the ground floor of the building, Vanessa was surprised to find it teeming with her colleagues. Even her father, Gabriel, was present, as was Samson, the owner of the company. Everybody was talking loudly over each other, and she heard bits of conversations she realized were all centered around several vampire attacks on civilians.
She spotted Benjamin near the command desk, and he waved for her to approach.
“Hey,” Vanessa greeted him. “Sorry it took a while to come back here. I had to make sure that Ginger was stable first.” The fact that this wasn’t the only reason why she hadn’t rushed back to HQ immediately after the attack, she kept to herself. There was no need to go into detail.
“You’re here now. I’ve arranged for a sketch artist,” Benjamin said. “But first, everybody needs to be brought up to speed.” A phone rang at the command desk, and Benjamin tapped on it to reply. Simultaneously, the monitor on the wall above the computer console showed a familiar face.
“Quiet everybody. Patrick is checking in,” Benjamin announced.
The room quieted down, and Patrick, Samson’s youngest son, spoke to them via video link. Behind him was a dark street. “Hey, no sign of the rogue. He got away,” Patrick said, his face and shirt full of blood.
“And the human?” Samson asked, walking closer to the console.
“I managed to stem the bleeding for now, but she’s in bad shape. How far out is the ambulance?”
Benjamin looked at a smaller monitor on the console. “Ninety seconds.”
“Good,” Patrick said. “Send a few people to the Inner Sunset. Maybe we can pick up his scent. I think he headed toward Golden Gate Park.”
“Can you tell us anything about him? Looks? Height? Clothing?” Samson asked.
“All I could see was that he’s blond and average height.”
Vanessa leaned closer to the microphone. “The one I intercepted had brown hair. And he was at the edge of Chinatown. He looked confused when he saw me.”
Samson turned to her. “What do you mean by confused?”
Vanessa contemplated her next words for a second. “As if he didn’t know that I was a vampire hybrid. It seemed to take a moment until it sank in.”
Samson exchanged a look with Gabriel, who was now standing next to him. “Newly turned?”
Gabriel grimaced. “Possibly.”
Vanessa put a hand on her father’s forearm. “That might explain why his bite wasn’t clean. He made several attempts at Ginger’s neck, until he finally latched on to feed from her. And when he heard me coming, he ripped her flesh savagely.”
“Fuck!” Samson cursed, and the others in the room let out similar curses.
Then he looked back at his son on the monitor. “Patrick, stay put until Nicholas arrives with the ambulance. I’ll have three guys meet you out there to look for the rogue.” He turned to Benjamin. “Send Zane, Adam, and Damian to Patrick’s location. Vanessa, once you’ve sat down with the sketch artist, take Quinn, Lydia, and Sebastian to the location where the sex worker was attacked.” Then he looked at Gabriel. “Where was the third attack of the woman who’s already down in the med center?”
“Near the baseball park. I’ll go there.” Gabriel turned around to the others in the room and pointed at several of them. “Blake, Oliver, you guys are with me.”
Samson nodded, then pushed a button on the console. Thomas’s face appeared on the screen next to Patrick’s live stream. “Thomas, you and Eddie work on getting drones in the air. Top priorities are the three attack areas: Chinatown, Inner Sunset, and the ballpark. Once they’re up, have your team control the drones and survey the areas. In the meantime, you and Eddie need to check every CCTV camera in the city. We need to know where those bastards came from and where they disappeared to. Questions anybody?”
There were no questions.
“I’ll be in a roaming unit with Ryder and Ethan. We’ll be covering the northern part of the city. Amaury will take John and Cooper and cover the southern part of town. Deirdre, Brandon, and Yvette will be on standby at HQ.” He turned to Benjamin. “Where are Luther, Haven, and Roxanne?”
“At the prison in Grass Valley. For a security upgrade,” Benjamin replied.
“Call them, and ask them to come back tonight. We’ll need every man and woman. And make sure that Charles and Wesley are ready to jump in if we need witchcraft.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Okay, everybody. Let’s roll out.”
As people cleared the command center, Gabriel took Vanessa’s arm and leaned in. “Your mother said you went into heat.”
Vanessa let out a sigh. “Of course she did. Sometimes that telepathic bond between blood-bonded mates can be downright annoying.”
“She’s just concerned about you because it’s not your time.”
“I know that, but I’m fine.”
“Are you sure you wanna go back out there tonight? The others can cover for you.”
“The sex workers are my responsibility. I can do this, Dad, really. I’m totally fine.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
He cleared his throat. “So you, uhm, took care of it?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. End of discussion.” She brushed past him and headed for the door.
There were moments when she wished that nobody knew what she was going through when she went into heat. But there were very few things she could keep from her parents or anybody else at Scanguards. It was truly a big family where everybody knew everybody else’s business. Keeping things a secret was difficult.
But just this once she wanted to keep her experience with Cole a secret. She didn’t want to share any of it with anybody. Because what she’d felt when she’d been in his arms was different from any of her other sexual encounters, and not just because he hadn’t even fucked her. She’d felt cherished and adored. Cradled by his big body, everything in her world had suddenly felt right. As if everything in her life was finally falling into place. With Cole in the center of it all.