Riding the Storm Read online

  “You aren’t sure?” Her cool blue eyes twinkled at him and seemed to warm a few degrees, and he thought again of all the ways he could go about warming her.

  Again though, instead of aiming the conversation towards getting her into his bed, he told her, “Some people assume I don’t value life, and have a death wish, but the opposite is true. I value life enough to fully live it, and now I find myself wondering which is the case with you. Something tells me you’re the same as me, and you value life enough to truly live it, but I just met you, and before I take you on a night flight I’d like to be sure of your reasoning.”

  * * * *

  Kendra hadn’t intended to feed from anyone tonight. She wanted to form an attachment first, or it was only marginally better than bagged blood. But this man was so alive. She was tempted to get a taste of him as soon as she had him alone, but she didn’t want to have to make him forget anything, which also meant she couldn’t actually tell him there was no danger hang gliding at night — since Kendra could fly, they’d just be doing it for the rush, for the feel of the night whooshing by them as they soared like birds on the wind.

  When she took to the skies it was magical, metaphysical — wind wasn’t necessary. Since she couldn’t assure him there’d be no danger, she said, “All I can do is tell you I don’t have a death wish. There isn’t a way for me to prove it. I can tell you I’d love to feel the rush of the wind on my face, the experience of soaring through the night sky, but there’s no way for you to know I’m speaking truth.”

  He studied her eyes a few seconds before asking, “You work here?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Not exactly. There are a dozen or so clubs and restaurants in town I help manage, as a group.”

  “And I just happened to catch your eye?”

  He said it as if he had no idea how he appeared to others — light brown hair with streaks of golden highlights Kendra had a feeling weren’t put there with a bottle, but by time in the sun. He had beautiful blue eyes, a perfect nose, and abs that made her want to trace them with her tongue. The body of an Abercrombie model with the hair and grooming habits of a GQ model. Did it get any better?

  “Yeah. You’re… I don’t know. Alive. Comfortable in your skin. I could feel your energy from across the room.” He was so full of life, so perfect. She wanted to get him alone. She wanted to spend time with that soothing voice, those beautiful eyes, and the scent of sunshine and self-assurance and raw male mingling in a blissful, happy swirl around him.

  He was quiet again, considering, then seemed to make up his mind. “All right, Kendra. I’ll take you on a night flight, but not tonight. I have rappelling gear for two in my car, if you want an adrenaline rush tonight, you’ll have to live with doing it in a harness hanging off the side of a mountain.”

  Her stomach did a little flip-flop, which was ridiculous, but she didn’t argue with it. “Deal. Let me grab my purse from the office, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  As she stood beside him, she noted he was a good six or seven inches taller than her. He was well proportioned and so comfortable in his skin, her mouth watered just thinking of how he might taste.

  They’d spoken a good ten minutes though, and not once had he fed her a line of bullshit. She hadn’t smelled the stench of a lie a single time, which was practically unheard of when meeting someone for the first time these days. People told white lies and fibs all the time as they gave the answer they thought most likely to get them what they wanted, but Eric had told her the unvarnished truth. He’d left something out once, but he hadn’t lied.

  She vowed to give him the same, as much as she could. She couldn’t tell him she was a vampire, or admit to her abilities, but she’d do her best to sidestep telling an actual lie.

  Chapter Two

  Kendra called home from her car to warn the other vampires she was bringing a human home long enough for her to change clothes, and threatened them to be nice. Lucky for her, everyone currently at the house except Gavin — Abbott’s second in command — had to listen to her, and Gavin would be nice because it wouldn’t benefit him to be an ass.

  When they arrived, only Gavin and Fawne were on the main level. She guessed Gavin had ran them all away from the main floor until her guest was gone, so she wouldn’t have to answer so many questions about why so many people lived there. Kendra made introductions and ran downstairs to change, as she wasn’t prepared to explain why she had to pass through three locked doors to get to her rooms. Needless to say, vampires are pretty cautious about their daytime resting spot.

  Changing clothes didn’t take long with her super vampire speed, so she was back upstairs in jeans, fashionable micro-fleece top, athletic shoes, and her long hair pulled into a ponytail in less than five minutes. She could’ve been faster, but managing the change too fast would arouse questions.

  When she returned, Eric looked impressed. “That was quick. I barely had a chance to talk to your friends.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, that was kind of the idea.”

  “You’ll be back tonight?” Gavin asked.

  “Yes. If I’m not back by dawn, send a search party.”

  This was an inside joke, since vampires pretty much died at dawn whether they wanted to or not, and there’d be no one awake to search after the sun rose. However, it let him know she intended to come home tonight. More importantly, it would also give her an excuse if Eric wanted her to stay with him longer than she could. Sometimes she felt like Cinderella, needing to be home before sunrise not because her coach would turn into a pumpkin, but because she would turn into a corpse.

  Once Kendra and Eric were in his Range Rover, he said, “You live in a beautiful house. Well, a mansion, really, and you must’ve made some interior decorator somewhere quite wealthy. Who do you live there with?”

  “It’s kind of complicated. They’re like family to me, I guess. There’s no kinky sexual arrangements going on between my house mates and I, if that’s what you’re wondering. Tell me, why has an adrenaline junkie chosen to live in Chattanooga?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m an hour from the Ocoee River, one of the best places to kayak in the country. I’m also an hour from the Lookout Mountain hang gliding launch, one of the best places in the world to hang glide. There are literally hundreds of places to rappel within an hour of the city, and I can make it to a dozen different backcountry wilderness areas from here within three or four hours if I want to hike. The geography makes this area a caver’s paradise. There are enough mountains to climb in eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, northern Alabama, and western North Carolina to last me the next fifteen years. And, to top it all off, the Tennessee River runs right through the center of town. This is an adrenaline junkie’s dream come true.”

  God, so full of life, even talking about having fun, she could see, smell, and hear his excitement and joy. “What do you do for a living to support your adrenaline habit?”

  He laughed, so carefree, so casual. How long since she’d laughed for no particular reason, other than to show joy and happiness in a conversation? She couldn’t remember.

  “I create video games for couch potato adrenaline junkies. I don’t need to go into an office for that, I can work from anywhere in the world.”

  “Where do you live? What part of town?”

  “Not too far from you, at the moment. I live in a yacht currently parked at the marina just down the road from here.”

  She grinned. “Why am I not surprised?”

  They talked easily as they drove up one of the mountains surrounding the city. Eric was twenty-five years old, and she avoided telling him how old she was by changing the subject when he asked. She’d been twenty-three when she was turned, but she’d lived a hard life as a human, and looked more like twenty-eight than twenty-three.

  When he stopped to get snacks, she said she’d eaten shortly before she talked to him at the club, so she just wanted bottled water. Again, not a lie — she’d had some blood before leaving for TBC.

>   They finally reached the top of the mountain, and Eric drove for a bit and turned onto a dirt road. She looked at him quizzically and he said, “We can’t do this on easily accessible public lands because they have rules against rappelling at night. If you’re nervous about going into the woods with a stranger, though, I’ll understand, and we can do something else.”

  She smiled. “I think you’re safe enough. Plus, you met my friends, and they know your name and what you drive. If you wanted to take someone into the woods to do bad things to them, I don’t think you’d want to meet their housemates first. You’d have said what I was wearing was fine.” Also, she was a vampire, he couldn’t hurt her.

  When they reached the top of the cliffs, he turned the engine and headlights off, and asked, “Do you want me to light the area?”

  “I’d rather do it by the light of the moon. It should be plenty light, once our eyes are used to the dark.”

  His smile told her he approved, and they got out.

  Kendra watched him pull several things out of the back of the Range Rover, and then wrapped what looked like carpet samples around the trees. He layered some sort of webbing around the carpet samples, and then attached the rope to the webbing. When he was done, each rope was attached to two trees, not one.

  “What’s with the carpet?”

  “Ropes can dig into the bark and hurt the trees. Most people just use rope around something protective, but I don’t like to depend on one tree, and the webbing is easier to work with when you’re using multiple anchors. The way I have everything connected with the ‘biners, the rope is pulling equally on both trees, so if one fails, we’ll still have the other holding us. Also, with two trees sharing the weight, they’re less likely to fail.”

  Kendra hadn’t thought about the rope hurting the trees, but if this was a popular spot for rappelling, she guessed they’d eventually take enough damage to their bark to be compromised. Damn, this man was just doing more and more things to make her like him.

  Once he had the ropes ready to throw over the edge of the cliff, he retrieved a shorter rope from the Range Rover and attached it to a big hook already wedged into the top of a large boulder, and then he held a bundle of straps out as he motioned her towards him.

  The bundle turned out to be a harness, and helping her into it involved a great deal of touching.

  The more he touched her, the more she wanted him, but Kendra was pretty sure she managed not to show it. There was no smell of arousal on him while he worked — he seemed focused on getting the harness right, more intent on safety than flirting.

  She was both impressed and a little disappointed.

  With her harness securely arranged, and with some instruction about how the rope system worked, he talked her through a trip down the boulder. One side of the huge rock was slanted with lots of stepping places so it was easy to go up, the other side was an almost vertical twelve-foot drop, so it made a nice place to get the hang of using the equipment. She loved the patient and self-assured way he showed her how to maneuver the ropes, and how to use her arms, legs, and body to control her descent. He made her come down the boulder twice by herself, and when he saw she’d figured it out, he walked her to the edge of the mountain, made sure she was hooked up correctly, and then asked if she was sure.

  “Of course I’m sure. You first, or me?”

  Once they were over the cliff and hanging there, side-by-side, Eric seemed surprised she’d gone over without really thinking about it. “Are you sure you haven’t done this before? You don’t seem comfortable with the ropes, but you aren’t afraid. There was no hesitation about dropping down and trusting the equipment, which is pretty unusual. Even hard core adrenaline junkies are hesitant their first time, even if only a few seconds.”

  “I’ve watched you making all the preparations, doing something and then double-checking it, even making me wear this silly hat. You seem to know what you’re doing and you’re taking safety seriously. I got an idea of what we’re doing on the boulder, and it all seems safe enough. There’s this big strong rope and this harness that I can’t come out of, and it’s kind of exhilarating to be here hanging off the side of the mountain with the view of the city in the distance. I like this, now watch me a second and make sure I have the ropes where they’re supposed to be so I can let myself down.”

  She wished she could just say, “I’m a vampire, if the rope breaks I’ll just fly back up.”

  They rappelled down a good sixty to eighty yards before landing on a natural shelf area, and Eric said, “You did great for your first time. Let’s get out of the harnesses and hike back up. This shelf joins up with a hiking trail that winds its way back to the top.”

  “I figured we’d climb back up the way we came. I was kind of looking forward to it, actually.”

  He looked doubtful. “It’s possible, but that’s more for an experienced climber. It’s harder to look for hand and foot holds while dealing with the rope. This is your first time, and you did great, but it might be pushing it to try a climb tonight.”

  “I’d really like to try. I’ve done the climbing walls, where you don’t have to deal with the rope, someone else does it for you. I was thinking it’d be fun to climb a real cliff instead of an artificial climbing wall.”

  He sighed. “Okay, we’ll go up about five or ten yards and if I think you can handle it we’ll keep going, otherwise we come back down and hike up. Deal?”

  “Deal. Thanks Eric.”

  He finagled with her ropes a minute, instructing her how to manage them going back up, and then patiently talked her through it as he stayed by her side while they rose back up the vertical cliff face. At ten feet she was figuring out the ropes okay. Climbing was no problem for her, but he insisted she keep working the rope so if she fell, it would catch her, and that part was tricky.

  The cliff face was inverted near the top, and they were forced to pull themselves up by just the rope. He talked her through it at first, but then once she had the hang of it, Kendra’s stomach leapt into her throat as he pulled her to him, caressed her cheek, and then brought his lips to hers as his hand slid to her nape, controlling her head as he controlled the kiss.

  This wasn’t a normal first kiss, and there was no doubt he was in command and she was merely along for the ride. His hands held her in place, his mouth ravished her, and she forgot she was hanging in mid-air, suspended. Kendra hadn’t been kissed like this in so long she couldn’t remember — as a powerful vampire, she was always the one in control, and yet this human took her over so easily, so naturally. Kendra didn’t even consider taking charge, she let him kiss her, let him overwhelm her.

  When he finally let her go, he looked at her a few seconds as if analyzing her reaction and current state of mind, and then gently rearranged her ropes, reminded her where she’d left off, and watched as she once again pulled herself up.

  It took her a couple of attempts to get coordinated again, and when she did, her first thought was that he’d kissed her like a natural Dom. Hanging in her harness and being kissed by him, dominated by him, had practically melted her, but she told herself it was only because he was in teacher mode and she was in student mode.

  It would never work for a human companion to be Dominant. Never. She’d need to give him a kiss when they reached the top, to balance the scales.

  But it didn’t happen. As he helped her out of her harness and they pulled the rope up the side of the mountain, she found herself following instructions, her body reacting to his gentle but quietly commanding voice.

  She’d never submitted to a human, and hadn’t submitted even to a vampire in well over a thousand years. Vampire society is all about the hierarchy, about how powerful you are, and vampire sex is full of adventure. If you live thousands of years, you have to find ways to make it interesting, or even sex becomes boring.

  However, a strong vampire could never submit to a weaker vampire. The two might have vanilla sex, but it isn’t possible for a weaker vampire to exert any ki
nd of power over a stronger, more powerful vampire — not even for role play, or a negotiated power exchange. Strength has more to do with metaphysical power than physical strength for her kind, and Kendra was incredibly powerful both physically and metaphysically. She could have her own territory if she wanted, but was happy staying with Abbott and helping him keep his power base intact. If she wasn’t under a Master Vampire who led in a way she could respect, then she’d have taken on her own territory centuries ago.

  So why in hell was she feeling like following this human’s instructions? Why was she getting turned on by it? Time to take control.

  Kendra quickly stepped closer to Eric, and swiftly but carefully picked him up and then laid him down, slow just before he touched the ground so he went down gently. She did it at full vampire speed, so he’d just sense standing there one moment and then lying on his back the next, without it hurting. She sat on his legs, leaned forward, cradled his cheeks in her hands, and kissed him — and kept kissing him, with no doubt as to who was controlling things this time. When he reached up with his hands to put them around her, she gently but firmly grasped them and put them on the ground beside his head, and held them there. About ten seconds later, when she felt him start to resist, she smoothly stood, and reached her hand down to help him stand.

  He gave her a wary eye, rolled his body up, and stood all in one motion, deliberately not accepting her hand. Once he was up, he quietly asked, “You were trying to make a point with that?”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  He closed his eyes for a second or two and opened them, shaking his head and talking in a nice, conversational style, still not upset or flustered in any way. “Oh, this is rich. I begin to wonder if maybe I’ve met someone I might want to have a relationship with, and it turns out she’s a Domme. Is that it?”

  “You’re telling me you’re a Dom?”

  He turned away from her to walk towards the trees. “Yeah, and you seemed to be responding like a natural submissive right up until I found myself flat on my back.” He stopped at the first tree with the rope attached, and turned to give her a lopsided smile. “You sure you aren’t a switch?”