Her Dark Lord Read Free

A diet including a penchant for red meat had sustained her for a little over seventeen years. Only when she’d reached sexual maturity—and satisfied that need—had she began to crave another. She’d hungered for blood with a ferocity that had left her weak and shaky.
    Her mother might not have any vampire blood running through her veins—might even have utterly despised the race—but she’d understood Kia’s fundamental urges. She’d scrimped and saved to buy a small house set amongst the privacy of vineyards. To protect the daughter she could never turn her back on, no matter her origins.
    It was here that she met her first lover, a handsome, strapping young man. He’d been the perfect candidate to satisfy Kia’s awakened vampire needs: hunger and sex…
    Kia wrenched her mind back to the present. She had a feeling she’d need all her wits about her this night.
    “This way,” he murmured. He steered her around the dance floor as techno music thumped, heat pulsing from the press of bodies writhing in time to its beat. He drew her toward the crowded bar, where a barmaid immediately took their orders.
    Drinks in hand, they found a private booth where the music was a few decibels gentler. In a padded seat, she took a sip of her bourbon and coke, taking a look around.
    She stuck to her human senses, enjoying the more muted effect. Noting vampires in the crowd, she wondered how they coped with their enhanced sensitivities; how they tolerated the din, the bright strobe lights and stale body odor.
    The purebreds wouldn’t understand how much of an advantage she had over them at times like this. Nonstop superior sight, smell and hearing were all well and good as a rule, but overtax all three senses and a vampire’s logic and judgment became fuzzy and distorted.
    But in human mode she was drawn to other vampires. They exuded a force field that was hard to resist—little wonder mortals became so helpless and transfixed within their radius.
    Perhaps it was best a human didn’t recall willingly offering a nightwalker their throat. The saliva in a vamp’s bite triggered a chemical reaction in the victim’s blood, numbing their brain and clouding memory. If they happened to become a little groggy and weak afterward, then all the better.
    That same saliva could affect an unborn fetus if the bitten woman was in the earliest stage of pregnancy. The more a vampire drank from a pregnant woman, the more saliva he transmitted, and the greater the odds were the baby’s genetics would cross over and mutate to vampire.
    Kia would have been born mortal if her mother hadn’t been brutally attacked by a vampire in the early stages of her pregnancy.
    Chantal hadn’t known she was pregnant when she’d celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday at a nightclub with some girlfriends. Suddenly nauseous, she’d rung her husband—Kia’s father, to come get her. And making her excuses to her friends, she’d stumbled outside.
    Chantal’s husband, Jackson, found her in the car park some thirty minutes later. Raped, beaten and drained of almost all her blood, she’d barely clung to life. But with a hospital only a block away, the medics had been able to act quickly. A massive blood transfusion had saved her and Kia’s life.
    Four years later, without any explanation or apparent reason, Jackson had walked away from his responsibilities as husband and father. He was never seen or heard from again.
    “My name is Ronan,” the man by her side revealed abruptly, bringing her attention back to him.
    Kia jumped, startled by the liquid-honey voice so near to her ear. He’d leaned close and she felt the brush of his knee a moment before his hand covered hers.
    “Ronan.” She tested his name, enjoying the sound like a connoisseur would a fine wine. She inclined her head a little. “I’m pleased to know you.”
    Oh, hell. Was she really? He’d been her lover for one night…a nameless man who’d brought her great pleasure. And now he was what