Eleven
She didn’t know what had come over her, but when he stepped out of that bar smelling like another woman, or several other women, rather, Gracie wanted to bleed the entire population of Belnedge dry.
“Yeah, I’m here,” she said, clipping her words.
Pissed. She was madder than a wet hen, as Clive would have said.
“What’s wrong?” He came down the porch and stopped in front of her.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said.
“Lie. I can’t smell a lie on a vampire, but I definitely know you’re lying, woman. Why don’t you tell me what you’re really thinking?”
“Fine, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking you’re ridiculous. A charmer, apparently. I hadn’t thought that before of you, but now I know better.”
“Aw, really? You think enough people would want to talk to me?”
“You smell like you came out of a whorehouse.”
“Ohhhh.” Now he seemed to get it, the cheating bastard.
Gracie stopped her thoughts there. Cheating? Like he belonged to her? Oh no, he certainly didn’t.
“I came here to see you,” she said, “although I don’t know why, especially not if you’re just here to see a bunch of other people.”
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m sure it’s not,” Gracie said. “Anyway, forget it. You can get back to your party.” She turned and tried not to stomp away like a little kid, but in her mind she was throwing a grand tantrum.
“I came here for you.” Suddenly he was in front of her, his bearded face looking at her in concern.
“What?”
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you, Gracie, but I don’t have your phone number or anything. I don’t even know if vampires carry cell phones.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course we do. We’re in the twenty-first century. We adapt to the times.”
“Well, good, then,” he said. “Can I have your phone number?”
She remembered back to long ago, when a boy who liked you would come over, ask your pa for permission to court you, and then the two of you would meet in town to attend church and go on a family picnic. It would progress somewhat slowly, and the boy might come over for dinner.
At least, that’s what Gracie had been told. Her home situation had been a bit different, with her mean uncle. And no boys had been interested in her because she was always small and trying to hide beneath her bonnet.
Until Clive and Bo came.
Fraze was watching her expectantly, so she rattled off her phone number while he punched it into his phone. Suddenly, the phone in her pocket buzzed. “That’s me,” he said. “Now you have my number, too.”
She nodded. This was weird. Courting a shifter.
“Wanna go for a drive?” he asked.
She looked at him. Licked her lips. She was thirsty—there was no denying it. She wondered if the memory trick worked on shifters, but she’d never try it on him. Go for a drive, or go hunting?
She chose Fraze, and she had a feeling she’d choose Fraze every time.
“Sure, let’s go,” she said.
He led her to an old Mustang, and helped her into the passenger’s seat. A gentleman. She’d heard so many of these courtesies had gone by the wayside. Once she was safely inside, he came around and got in behind the wheel.
“Where to?” he asked.
“I don’t know this area very well anymore,” Gracie said.
“I know a place,” Fraze said. “Gorgeous view, especially if you have good night vision like I’ve got. I’m assuming you—”
“Yes,” Gracie said, giving a little laugh. “I can see great in the dark.”
He pulled out of the parking spot and soon they were turning off Alpine and onto Pine Ridge Road.
A gorgeous view. Gracie’s stomach started doing little loops, because she was thinking about…no, it couldn’t be the same place. Surely the cliff where Clive died had been packed full of houses and developed for rich people who wanted big luxury “cabins” in the mountains. Surely the place of Clive’s death was covered up, long forgotten.
She’d avoided it since returning to the Corona Mountains, to Bo’s annoyance. But she was tired of clinging to the past. Bo wanted to go back in time, it seemed. Gracie wanted to go back in time and make different choices, but she didn’t want to dwell on it like Bo seemed to.
Fraze cleared his throat. “So. What do you…do at night, usually?”
“I hunt,” she said simply. “Sometimes there are meetings with the court. Sometimes I stay inside and do what you’d think of as normal, probably. Read, listen to music, play cards. I’m a sucker for Spider solitaire and will play it for hours.” She’d whiled away many a daytime with Spider.
“It’s weird to think about vampires being around,” Fraze said. “I never talked to any.”
“Well, we maybe shouldn’t have come,” Gracie said, “but our old leader, Maslin, was tired of living under the thumb of the Nocturne Court. He thought we could come back here, maybe make a place for ourselves.”
“Wait,” Fraze said. “Come back here?”
She nodded. “You didn’t know? Vampires used to live in the Corona Mountains. Way, way long ago, back in the eighteen hundreds. Maybe even before these were named the Coronas, after your alpha’s ancestors.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Few of you would have reason to.”
He cleared his throat again. “You think…there’s something weird about us?”
“You and me, you mean?” Gracie held her breath. She hadn’t expected him to be so forward about it.
“Yeah. We’re not even…I mean, we’re not a normal couple at all. But Gracie, I like being with you.”
She looked over at his profile as he drove. His beard, so manly, covering up his chin and cheeks. The smile she knew was hidden beneath it. His round nose, and the pronounced brow ridge. He wasn’t classically handsome by any means, but his was a face she had already grown to love, despite herself.
“I like being with you, too,” she whispered. It defied all logic, and they’d barely had a chance to talk, but she could feel in her body and heart that not being with him simply wasn’t an option.
But what about the court, and Bo, and revenge? What about avenging Clive’s death?
“Maybe we could make something work, then,” he said.
She kept her other thoughts to herself. She wanted this man, Fraze—not as the descendant of Sheriff Rhees, but as his own person. As someone she could hold onto. Someone, maybe, that she could love. Tonight, she’d let herself believe it might be possible. “Maybe.”
She’d been distracted by the talk while he drove, but her stomach took a dive when he pulled off a turn in the road onto a viewpoint.
“Burglar’s Bluff,” Fraze announced.
Gracie’s gut felt hollow and cold, and she held her hands together, tight, like if she didn’t hang on to herself she might turn inside out with her pent-up sorrow. Last time she’d been out here, there’d been more trees, no road. It had just been a big hill that she’d struggled to run up, Clive helping her over fallen logs, Bo carrying the bag of gold they’d been trying to put in their stash.
And Sheriff Rhees on their trail, his crooked deputies right alongside him.
Fraze looked at her. “You wanna get out of the car, look around?”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Gracie, what’s wrong?” His forehead was wrinkled in concern.
“I can’t—it’s—I’ve been here before, don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t.” He reached forward and touched her cheek. “What is it, sweetheart?”
“This is where it all happened.”
Eyes widening, he said, “This is where you were turned into a vampire?”
“Not here exactly, but it’s how it all began.”
She knew she was acting odd—that her behavior wasn’t normal by human, shifter, or vampire standards. But hell and damn, she missed Clive. She should’ve come out here already and paid her respects.
“You said this place is called Burglar’s Bluff?” she asked.
“Old legend,” Fraze said, those gray eyes of his looking at her intently. “A trio of crooks got cornered here with a bunch of gold. Rather than be caught in the sheriff’s gunfire, all three of them jumped.”
“The legend’s not quite true,” Gracie said.
“How do you know?”
She waited. Could she tell him? Should she? Finally, she said, “I was one of those so-called ‘crooks.’”
He sat back. “You were one of them?”
“We didn’t jump. It didn’t go like that at all. We surrendered and died because of it.” She couldn’t keep the anger, the bitterness, from her voice. “We were fools. We knew not to trust the sheriff, but we didn’t have a choice. Jumping would’ve been better.”
“But then—” he looked stricken. “Then you wouldn’t be here, now.”
But she would have died a human. Along with Clive. Never knowing the darkness and what hid within it.
“My man died here,” she said. “He was shot and killed by that crooked sheriff.” A crooked sheriff who looked like you, she wanted to add. Would she ever be able to tell Fraze that the man she’d spent over a hundred years hating was his great-great-great-great-grandfather?
She had to. He should know—it was only fair. “That sheriff was your ancestor,” she whispered. “You look just like him.”
“I—what?”
“When I first saw you,” she said, “I thought you were him.” Now that she was talking, she couldn’t seem to get herself to shut up. “I wanted to hurt you for what he did to Clive, but then—then I saw your eyes. They’re kind. You couldn’t have done what he did. You wouldn’t ever shoot someone in cold blood.”
“Some ancestor of mine murdered your…your man?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry he did that,” Fraze said, touching her shoulder. “And you watched it happen. I’m so sorry.”
His presence was comforting. His apology, necessary as air. But he wasn’t Sheriff Rhees—he was Fraze Rhees—and she loved him, just like she had loved Clive. These emotions were too strong, too confusing.
“I need to get out of the car,” she said, tugging on the door handle. “I need to get out now.”
“Do you want company?”
“No, no.” She took deep breaths, trying to calm her heart. “No, I want to do this alone.”
He waited in the car, a troubled expression on his face, as she got out and stood at the edge of the cliff. She’d been here, Bo and Clive at her side, and they’d faced off with Sheriff Rhees. Right in this spot, Clive had taken a bullet to the forehead and died. She’d barely reached him before the light was gone from his eyes.
She knelt in the gravel of the vista parking area. The rocks bit into her knees through her jeans, but she didn’t care. She knelt and she put her face in her hands and she cried.
A few minutes later, she heard the car door open and Fraze walked quietly over to her side. He rubbed her shoulders.
She looked up at him. “Thanks for bringing me out here,” she said. “I didn’t want to come, but once I was here…thank you.”
“Of course.” He paused and looked out over the valley below the cliff. “Do you want to go somewhere else now?”
“Oh yes, definitely.” She stood on shaky legs, and he steadied her.
He walked her back to the car, but instead of opening her door and helping her in, he opened his own door and brought her down to his lap. There, he rubbed little circles on her back and shoulders, and rested his chin on her crown.
Gracie sighed and melted into the strong protection of his arms. “How did you know this was exactly what I needed?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured into her hair. “I don’t know.”
*
Gracie and Fraze were both quiet as they drove the curvy mountain roads back toward Belnedge. She had learned something new about herself tonight—she’d learned that she still felt things, she still knew how to grieve.
She’d also learned that she might, just might, be ready to finally let go and move on.
“Can we stop again somewhere?” she asked.
“What, right now?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Fraze looked at her quickly, and then back to the road. She reached across the seat and touched his thigh. He looked at her again.
“I can smell what you want,” he said. “Your scent is beautiful all the time, but the scent of your arousal? Gracie, it damn near undoes me.”
She unbuckled and leaned closer to him.
“Buckle back up,” he said, his voice alarmed.
“What, you think an accident’s gonna kill me?”
He hit the steering wheel. “It could if we went into a tree or something.”
Laughing softly, she buckled in again. He pulled onto a side road, and drove a little while on a dirt road so bumpy that it made her head bounce up and down. It was like a washboard, all ridged from runoff.
He parked in the middle of the forest. Nothing around them except for little tiny creatures living out their own forest dramas.
She reached for Fraze, unbuckling both of them at once, and climbing over to his seat. Fraze pushed the seat back a little farther to make some extra room, then his hands went straight for Gracie’s hips.
“Gracie,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Neither do I. But I’ve got a little idea.” She lifted herself up with one arm, unbuttoned her jeans, and shimmied them off of her legs. Then she was just in her underwear and tank top, sitting on Fraze. His cock was hard beneath her and she rubbed her center against it, felt the friction delicious between them.
He groaned and sat up, his mouth crashing into hers. Tongue, teeth, lips. Life. He practically exploded with life and energy. She could take it from him. One sip, and she could join his mind, make it so he didn’t know what was happening.
Except she couldn’t—she couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him or taking from him when he didn’t know it. She was so thirsty, but she’d rather suffer the thirst than take from Fraze.
Gracie arched back and Fraze’s hands came up to cup her breasts. He lifted her shirt, shoving the fabric aside. She didn’t have much of a bust so she’d decided to go without a bra today. He grinned at the sight of her bare breasts, and rubbed her nipples tantalizingly slowly. Rough fingertips on her soft skin. She leaned forward again and nipped his neck, not with her sharp incisors but with her duller front teeth, just enough to show him how she was enjoying herself.
He chuckled low, and she felt it all through her body.
“I want you sooner rather than later,” she whispered, fumbling with his belt.
“You can have me. I’m ready. You ready for me?”
He was big to the point where it had almost been uncomfortable last time, but it had felt too good. She’d do it all over again, over and over every night if he’d let her.
“Yeah,” she breathed, and kissed him again.
He finished pulling his cock out of his pants, and she looked down to marvel at the size of it. Should she touch it? She’d never done anything creative with Clive. He’d gotten them both naked, and he’d put himself inside her, and he always made sure she felt good during, but he’d been in charge. Now this beautiful man was right here, and—
“You can grab it,” he said. “You can wrap your fingers around it. It’d feel good to me.”
She didn’t need to be told twice, and she encircled it with her thumb and forefinger. He felt soft. Silky, almost, over a thick, pulsing rod. She knew how this instrument could make her feel, and she couldn’t wait.
Shoving her panties to the side, she lifted up slightly, pointing him toward her entrance, and slid down.
So full and complete. She wanted to feel this all the time. His hands came up to her breasts again, tugging lightly at her nipples. She moaned and rocked up and down on his member. It felt so, so good. She’d never done it like this before.
She moved up and down again, felt him retreating and then pressing inside. Fraze brought a hand to her hip and his fingers dug into her flesh. Painful, but such a great pain. It was almost like the bliss of the bite. It was ecstatic. Euphoric.
Fraze moaned and sat up again. His mouth went to her chest and his tongue—oh. His tongue flicked over her skin, laved her nipples. She rocked up and down faster and faster, so that his head bobbed to keep up with her. When the pleasure built to a breaking point, she slammed down on him one last time and froze in place, her center full of pleasure that erupted into pinpoints and scattered outward like stars.
Fraze didn’t last long after that, and he pumped in and out of her, helping her savor the aftershocks, helping her enjoy every last bit of it until he, too, froze and pulsed in place. His own pleasure, it seemed, was secondary to him. He would make sure she came first, and only then seek his pleasure.
Clive, bless him, had been different. Her pleasure was a bonus, but it certainly hadn’t precluded his own.
Fraze pressed tiny kisses over her collarbone, his mouth warm on her skin. Once again she marveled at how alive he was, how present.
How well they fit together.
She reluctantly climbed off of him, and he hissed at the feeling of losing contact with her. She didn’t like moving away, but dawn would be coming soon, and she had to be safe.
Fraze let her go, but he kept his hand on her waist as she pulled on her pants. He held her hand while she straightened her top, and he didn’t seem to want to let go of her.
“You’re perfect,” he said. “You’re—you’re everything. But how is this possible?”
“I’m not gonna question it anymore,” Gracie said. “I just know I want to do that again as soon as we can.”
Fraze nodded. “I don’t want to keep this a secret, but not even my brother likes the vampires.”
She nodded. “I understand. It makes sense—your pride and my court aren’t exactly getting on right now.”
“It would probably be a bad idea to meet every night.”
Gracie agreed. Bo’s idea was to kidnap Fraze on Saturday. She was bound by Court law to not say anything of their plans. “What if we met on Friday night again?” she asked.
“Hart’s?” he said.
“Too public. “
“You can come to my place.”
She hesitated. No one had surprised her since she was turned into a vampire. Her mask was always carefully in place. She didn’t love, she didn’t form attachments. But this shifter, here, was surprising her at every turn. His home? It was so…personal.
And should she have the responsibility of knowing where he lived? Her people wanted to give him the final kiss.
She couldn’t afford to get too close, and he sure as hell couldn’t afford to get too close to her.
“We can’t tell each other where we live,” she finally said. “Whatever we’re doing, it’s not safe. I’m bound by my court laws not to say anything, and I shouldn’t know where you live.”
“I trust you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t.”
If only she could tell him. She hated this.
“My parents had an old cabin on some property,” he said. “Nobody else knows about it. We could meet there.”
She nodded. Even this was a risk, but the thought of not being able to see him again was even worse. “Sure. Text me the directions.”