Present Tense: Pleasure Times Four (Out of the Fire Book 3) Read online

  “I don’t want to shoot one.”

  He did a doubletake at her and then focused back on the road. “I’m surprised Aaron agreed to bend the rules for you.”

  “What rules?”

  “The employment contract states you have to spend time in the range, and have to carry a weapon. It’s all spelled out to make sure everyone can handle a firearm, and to keep their skills up to date. Even office people. Everyone who works for us knows secrets the bad guys want. No one can afford to make themselves easy prey. You must have vampire powers that weren’t in your packet.”

  Kelsey’s nausea came back. Her heart raced in her chest, when vampires’ hearts don’t have to beat at all if they don’t want them to, but she couldn’t do anything to slow hers. She’d read that part of the contract, but assumed it was talking about the security people. She had no idea it would apply to her. Stupid.

  And she’d spent every last penny, and then some, to get an American identity and make it this far. She was trapped here, but she couldn’t imagine holding a gun and using it.

  2

  Her terror filled the SUV, and Collosa rolled his window down. He’d specifically been told not to aggravate her anxiety levels, and now he’d scared the fuck out of her.

  “I’m sorry. You’re terrified, and I’m doing a horrible job of welcoming you. I’m sure Aaron will give you some time. We’ll ease into it, okay? Paintball guns first. They shoot with compressed air. We can move up from there as you’re comfortable.

  Maybe. Collosa was careful not to make promises — Aaron isn’t an unfeeling ogre, but he’s also serious about his employees’ safety, and that would mean getting her a concealed carry license as soon as possible, so she could defend herself if someone decided to kidnap her when she was off by herself.

  Though, realistically, that wasn’t likely to happen often.

  He struggled for something to say, another subject, something to make her not smell so terrified. He remembered her shirt — he’d recognized it when she got off the plane, though he didn’t have a clue what it meant.

  “What’s that on your shirt? The Prancing Pony? One of my, well, our roommates has one just like it.”

  “You don’t know what the Prancing Pony is?”

  He smiled. She’d forgotten her fear and now seemed incredulous.

  “Should I?”

  “Well. At least one of my housemates will know.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  She eyed the clock. “We still have more than six hours. I suppose I could explain it in that much time.”

  Collosa changed lanes to go around a line of slower cars, and then slid back to the right-hand lane. He enjoyed driving at night. “Is there a short version? Three sentences or less?”

  “It’s from a series of books that was later made into a movie.”

  “And the name of the books? Or movie?”

  “The series is The Lord of the Rings.”

  He frowned. “I’ve seen the movies.”

  “The Prancing Pony is the Inn they go to between the Shire and Rivendell.”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t paid that much attention to place names. He searched for something else to talk about. “I’m thirty-five, so you’re two years older than me, even if you look twenty. Fabio just turned thirty-three, and Eunice is thirty-two.”

  “I was twenty-five when I was turned, though I’m told I look younger. You’re okay with a vampire living in your house?”

  “You know it’s my house?”

  “Yes.”

  Not many people knew that. He’d bought it outright, and the other two men paid rent. However, the three of them made most decisions together. They’d gone in together to buy the hot tub and make the deck bigger. Collosa had bought the new appliances, cabinets, and countertops when they’d torn the kitchen out and completely remodeled it, but the other two had helped with expenses for the wall and floor tile, and they’d all put a ton of man hours into it.

  “What else did your hacking skills tell you about us?”

  “Fabio and Eunice are ex-military, but you aren’t. Both were special forces and it looks like they weren’t on the same teams but they were on some of the same missions, so they likely knew each other before they came to work for Drake.”

  True on the surface, but there was more, if one went deeper. They’d been tortured by the enemy together, and then they’d escaped together and killed the men who’d tortured them — and everyone else in the encampment while they were at it. It was one of those cases where they were awarded medals they couldn’t keep, because it was all top secret.

  Fabio is a black leopard, and Eunice is a mongoose. Not even a grizzly bear would want to go up against both of them together, and they’d been captured by humans.

  “I need to amend an answer I gave you earlier,” he told her.

  “Amend? You mean change?”

  “Set parameters. Qualifications.” Okay, yeah, change, but only because she’d gotten so damned scared.

  “When it comes to pets, I’d rather deal with an aggressive German Shepherd than one who’s normally affectionate but afraid of his own shadow. It’s possible to train the aggression out of most animals and people, but a fear response...” he sighed. “People and animals are at their most dangerous when they are terrified and feel cornered.”

  “And you just realized the new pet vampire has a scary fear response?” Her Australian accent was back full force, and she sounded pissed, but that was more than okay. He could work with anger a helluva lot better than he could handle terror.

  “Pet? That’s cute. You’re a baby vampire who barely pings my radar as a vampire.”

  “That’s because my former Master withdrew his power before I left, and my new Master hasn’t accepted me in the flesh yet. There’s only so much he can do over a bloody video call.”

  “Even when you’re mad, you need to try to speak American instead of Australian, and I hadn’t realized the problem with moving like this between Masters. How weak are you?”

  “I’ll be fine. He’s supposed to be at your house when we arrive. Normally, I’d have to go to the coterie house upon arrival, but the old Master Vampire hasn’t fully given the city up yet. The new one, Marco, is taking me on as one of his because he’ll be in charge soon enough, and the old one, Kendra, is trying to make the transition as easy as possible on everyone.”

  “Marco is still Master of New York, right? So he’ll be strong enough to power you?”

  Baby vampires need either their maker or a new Master to help them maintain. Collosa had known this, but hadn’t realized how it worked when a baby vamp had to travel halfway around the damned planet.

  “Yes. Look, I’ll be fine, and you’re right, I’m not powerful, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

  “Right. Supposedly, you can hack brains like you do a computer, but no one’s been able to get into my mind without drinking my blood since I was a teen.”

  “And only Fabio has agreed to feed me.” When he didn’t respond, she told him, “I won’t try to get into your head because it’s important you trust me, but I’ve never had trouble getting past the shield of any bear, cat, wolf... any mammal, actually. If I wanted in, I’d get in.”

  And if she could, he needed to know. He sighed, cussed inwardly, and made sure his shields were strong.

  “Fine, then try. If you can, we need to know. If you can get in unseen, Aaron will probably give you a raise to do it to visitors to his office, to let him know what’s going on in their heads.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  He sighed. “Look, you living with us isn’t a done deal. If it doesn’t work out, there are guestrooms in the basement of Drake Security. I’m not going to kick you out if you can get in, or if you can’t, but I might if you refuse to even try. You can’t promise someone you can get into their head and then refuse to do it. Not cool.”

  Her paperwork said she’d been spanked, whipped, and caned — at a minimum — in the Sydney
coterie when she didn’t follow minor orders. She’d been locked away without food for severe infractions. Eunice was supposed to be primarily responsible for her discipline, but Collosa would do it himself before he sent her to live in the loneliness of those guest rooms.

  “Look, I don’t want to kick you out, okay? Talk to me. Don’t just refuse an order. Ever. Tell me why you can’t, or why you don’t want to, but never just outright refuse.”

  “Or you’ll kick me out?”

  “We’ll start out with a spanking, and go from there.” He blew out a breath. “Or caning, knowing Eunice. Specific consequences will be up to him, in most cases.”

  She was silent a good two minutes, and he focused on keeping his shields strong and paying attention to the road. Her scent told him threatening to spank her hadn’t scared her. Instead, he scented both arousal and embarrassment. He figured the embarrassment was because she couldn’t hide the scent of how horny she was, and she knew he’d smell it.

  “For breakfast, you had three huge steaks, your share of two pounds of bacon, a fuckload of scrambled eggs, biscuits, and enough honey to make a human diabetic.”

  It felt as if she’d shoved an icepick into his chest, and he had to act fast to keep his fear response from making it to his autonomous system and stinking up the car.

  “You got into my head.” It wasn’t a question. She had. It was the only way she’d know what he ate for breakfast.

  “And I looked at recent meals, nothing else. Whatever is in your head is none of my business.”

  “Can you show me how to keep you out?”

  “Practical bear. I think I’m going to like you. I can show you how I’m getting in, but I don’t know if it’ll show you how to keep me out.”

  “It’s a starting point.” The week before, an old-one with enough power to turn his body to mist couldn’t get into Collosa’s head, and today a baby vampire had?

  This might solve a problem the trio had come up against, though. “How good are you at placing suggestions in a human’s mind?”

  “It’s child’s play for about ninety-nine percent of humans. Why?”

  “We had a house manager a few years ago, but she saw some notes we’d written about how to handle an op, told her husband, who told...” He blew out a breath. “The details aren’t important. We fired her and haven’t hired anyone since, which means we have to split up the household chores, and we have to do the grocery shopping and cooking. If you can make it so a house manager wouldn’t notice anything about our work, or will forget it as soon as she sees it, we can hire someone to handle all of that again.”

  “Sure. I’ll need to be in on the interview and selection process to make sure she falls into the ninety-nine percent, and she’ll need to be there at least twice a week when I’m awake for the first month. I prefer to give suggestions slowly, build them up in layers, rather than all at once. You’ll want to be careful what she stumbles across the first three weeks, but it should be safe after. Maybe two weeks. I can let you know when it is.”

  “Sounds workable. Now, show me how you got in my head.”

  “You can’t ever tell anyone, especially another vampire, how I’m doing it.”

  He glanced at her and looked back to the road. “You’re using your computer hacking to do it, and if you explain it to them, they’ll be able to do it as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, other than telling our housemates, your secret is safe with me.”

  “Let me tell them, please.”

  “Okay, but if you don’t, I will.”

  He saw her nod with his peripheral vision, but it took her a few moments to begin.

  “It didn’t take a genius to realize you were irritated with me. I know the portion of the brain where irritation stems. It was just a matter of sliding in where the emotion slid out. With a computer, you merely need to know which ports are open, or at least susceptible. With a brain, it’s enough to elicit an emotion and then come in where it goes out, but you have to know precisely where the emotion comes out. For some shapeshifters, you have to build up whatever emotion it is, layer it with others, kind of like a DDoS attack to get into a computer. You had some fear and some anger, so it was enough for me to come in.”

  “When I’m not driving, I’d like you to show me. Come in when I’m conscious of you doing it.”

  “I’ll do my best, but if you aren’t conscious of when you’re irritated, it may be impossible for me to do it so you can see.”

  “What emotions can you ride in?”

  “Grief, terror, and anger are the easiest. I’m getting better at the lesser versions — sadness, fear, and irritation. I’m pretty good with jealousy if it’s strong, and I can sometimes manage with guilt over something big. I can usually get in through extreme joy, but that’s the only positive emotion I’ve been able to use, and it has to be someone who’s so happy it’s the only thing that exists for them in that moment.”

  He’d refused to feed her because he hadn’t wanted her in his head. If he couldn’t keep her out, he may as well agree to helping keep her fed, especially if that meant sex. Vampire or not, she was pretty much his exact body type — curvy and stacked and cute as a button.

  Just to make sure she wasn’t still in his head, he let himself think about what she’d look like without her jeans and t-shirt, how she’d look under him, writhing in the grip of an orgasm.

  When he got nothing from her, and her scent stayed steady, he decided to test the waters another way.

  “Kendra only stepped in enough to make sure we don’t take advantage of you.”

  “I’m aware. You can punish me if I don’t follow the house rules, but you can’t have sex with me unless I verbally consent, or unless I agree to a power exchange situation. I’m also constrained against using mind tricks or venom to make you have sex with me, though the latter is acceptable if you consent to it first.”

  “Do you have control over your venom?”

  “Not as good as my former Master, but better than some of his flunkies. I’m still careful with the actual bite. It’s best if the person I’m feeding from stays reasonably still.” She turned to him with her entire upper body. “I excel at two things: computers and sex. I suck at nearly everything else. I’m horrible with social interactions outside of sex. I can’t do any kind of sport, other than sex. I’ve learned to speak casually since becoming a vampire, but before that, I’m told my grammar was too perfect, so I sounded like a computer, at times. It’s still something I work towards.” She was silent a few moments. “I guess I’m good at fashion and makeup, too, but to me, that’s part of sex. Foreplay.”

  “You had no choice about who you had sex with for a few years before and after you were turned, right?”

  “Incorrect. It was much longer than a few years. My former Master promised he’d turn me if I was his human sex slave for five years, and then his vampire sex slave until he tired of me. It seemed a reasonable payment for long life, and I didn’t hate my time with him. I don’t want to experience some of the humiliation he put me through, and I’ll never again agree to give myself completely to someone if I have a choice in the matter, but I wouldn’t mind some form of modified power exchange agreement, with the right person.”

  If he didn’t need to make sure they were home before sunrise, he’d have pulled over to have this conversation with her. He wanted to see her face, her expression. He wanted to hold her gaze and dare her to look away.

  But that wasn’t possible at the moment, and he also wanted to have this conversation between the two of them, before his housemates got involved. So they’d have it now, while he drove.

  “Fabio agreed to feed you, with the understanding there’d be sex when you feed from him. I’ll make the same offer, but there will be caveats.”

  3

  If Kelsey had been human, her heart would’ve been running away in her chest. Since she was no longer human, she dug for control and forced it to beat slowly.

  What
would it be like to submit to this huge, beautiful man with eyes so blue it took her breath away?

  But if she’d learned anything since becoming a vampire, it was how to keep from being made into a pawn. She wouldn’t have power in this house because it was important new vampires were at the bottom of the hierarchy until they’d powered up enough to rise above it. She wasn’t going to give them even more power over her without making sure she got something in return.

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat. “Caveats? You do like to use fancy words when the everyday ones would reveal too much about your purpose, don’t you?” She suppressed an aggravated growl. “Here let me break it down for you. You’ll let me feed from you, but only if doing so gives you even more power over me.”

  “You just told me you weren’t opposed to a power exchange relationship so long as you got to help set it up.”

  She wanted to argue with him, except he was exactly right.

  “Tell me your caveats, James.”

  She knew all of their real names, and she preferred James to Collosa. Using it just reinforced his size every time it was said. He was huge — it wasn’t like he needed to be constantly reminded.

  He glanced at her before focusing on the road again, but he didn’t protest the use of his given name.

  “I don’t know the caveats, and I doubt you do, either. I weigh more than twice what you do, probably approaching three times your weight. Everything about me is big. Even if I don’t mean to hurt you, odds are I will.” He blew out a breath, and she scented a hint of arousal from him — though it was hard because mostly she smelled her own. She badly needed to learn to control her scents. It was one of the things she’d completely failed at, and it bugged her, but she couldn’t help it.

  “I’ve been hurt before. I’ll survive.” She’d been fucked in every hole by a damned horse shifter, merely because it amused her Master. She could handle a grizzly.