Vacation with a Vampire & Other Immortals Read Free Page B

are here. The sin would be to do anything less. I promise you that.
    “Are you an angel?”
    He smiled at her question. Follow your heart, he told her. It is the guidance you’ve been given all your life. It shows your true north. It leads you true—always.
    It was a philosophy he believed in. Admittedly, doing so had earned him the worst hurt of his existence, but it had also led him to paradise. The life he led now was blissful, if lonely. And he wouldn’t have found it without the heartbreak that came before.
    He felt her mind gently sliding into agreement, felt peace settling over her like a soft, warm blanket. Like the velvet night itself. He felt her nodding, and even sensed relief floating into her soul.
    He had helped her. And now, he told himself, it was time to walk away.
    He started to go, but she caught his shoulders in her small, gentle hands, somehow compelling him to look down into her eyes one more time. And then she rose on tiptoe, her lips moving close to his.
    So close he felt her breath.
    He whispered, “What are you doing, Anna?”
    “What my heart tells me, like you said,” she whispered back. And then she kissed him.
    The power of it was beyond imagining. He was as engulfed in the kiss—in the woman—as a lifeboat would be by a hurricane. He felt her heart, soft, and loving and pure. He smelled her scents, and heard her heartbeat inside his own chest. He tasted her kiss, and it was beyond anything he’d ever dreamed off. He wrapped his arms around her and held her to him, and they kissed and kissed and kissed.
    And then, finally, he gave heed to the sense of self-preservation he’d built upon a foundation of pain and betrayal. He’d thought Cassandra’s heart was pure, too. And he’d been wrong.
    Sleep, he commanded. Sleep, and remember me as but a pleasant dream. Sleep, Anna. And when you wake, follow your heart’s desire, no matter what. I’ll find you again before you die. And you will be offered a choice. I promise you that. But for now, sleep. Sleep, Anna. Sleep.
    Anna slept. He held her against him as her legs went weak, and he scooped her up into his arms and then sped through the night, carrying her at speeds far too fast for mortal eyes to observe him. He probed her mind to find where she lived, and he took her there. An attractive, one-story house with flower boxes in the windows. Yellow. It would sell easily.
    He unlocked the doors with the power of his mind and laid her gently on her bed, and then he turned and forced himself to go away. It was, for some reason, far more difficult than it should have been.
    An hour later he sank his teeth into the throat of a drunken pedophile in a stinking alley outside the bar the man had been visiting.
    But as the rush of the blood hit him, carrying with it the pleasant burn of rum, his mind went back to the woman he’d kissed beneath the lighthouse. He saw her eyes, her face, her hair. He heard her voice, rough with tears. He tasted her mouth, felt her hands on him. He closed his eyes and for just a moment gave in to the fantasy that it was her blood he was drinking now. Her blood, rushing into his throat, warming his flesh, sizzling in his soul, filling him with power, with strength, with vigor and, God help him, with desire—for her.
    A surge of ecstasy rose in him even as he released his victim. The man’s body fell to the alley floor, and Diego tipped his head back and, in spite of himself, released a growling roar to the night. In that moment, pure primal power and unleashed lust washed through him, and he had no control.
    As he brought his head level again, he heard voices, human ones.
    “What the hell? Was that a freaking lion?”
    “I never heard anything like that in my—”
    “A bear? Here? ”
    “C’mon.”
    Crouching low, Diego pushed off with his powerful legs and shot upward, rocketlike, landing easily on the roof above even as the curious mortals arrived at the mouth of the alley and saw the dead man lying