Accidentally Married To...A Vampire? by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff Page B

been wrong, dead wrong, about this whole mate business.
    Yes, there was a connection the first night they’d met, but this…it was ridiculous. And the connection only grew stronger each day.
    Cruel! The desire he felt to take her body was nothing short of unbearable. Torturous images replayed in his mind of her soft body writhing beneath him while he pumped himself between her silky thighs. The more he denied himself, the worse his hunger for her became.
    Yes. Hungry. So hungry…
    He’d never been so goddamned famished. Yet, he could barely feed. And make no mistake about it, he’d tried. But everyone tasted like putrid trash, including the humans he’d sampled from the queen's pool of willing blood slaves who were far tastier than his normal fare of rapists and thugs with the blackest of auras. This morning, out of pure desperation, he’d opted for bagged blood—cold, lifeless, revolting. One of his men compelled him to keep from vomiting.
    There was no getting around it. He wanted Helena.
    One week to go.
    Could he make it? Only if he stayed away from her. But if he did that, he’d never have a chance to win her. He was running out of time. He had to turn her willingly—that’s what Cimil had said.
    Why hadn’t the insane goddess warned him that the icing on his frigid misery-cake would be exposure to Helena’s emotions—an IV drip filled with concentrated, irrational, human feelings! Distance dulled the effect, as with any bond, but in her presence, he didn’t know where she ended and he began.
    She got angry; he got livid. She felt lust; he spiraled into a sexual frenzy.
    Then there were those emotions that lacked descriptive words. PMS, for example. Helena had it on his last visit, giving him the overwhelming, simultaneous need to fuck her and cry uncontrollably.
    The fucking part he could relate to, but crying? Vampire didn’t cry!
    He could only hope things would stabilize—as others had told him they would—after her transformation.
    His hands dropped to his side as he stared at the open elevator doors. His heart thumped wildly against the walls of his chest.
    Anger. Sadness. Guilt. Helena is feeling all these things.
    He let the elevator leave and turned back to tell Helena he was sorry. Would it be enough? He still couldn’t tell her the truth about his world or how he spent his days.
    Buon. To hell with it! I must to tell her I’m sorry. He reached for the front door as Helena screamed from the other side, “You lying leech! And if we’re vampire-married, then I want a vampire-divorce! Do you hear me? I want a divorce!”
    Niccolo winced. That was not a good sign.
     

Chapter 7
     
     
    Andrus stood in the empty foyer tiled with dingy white marble and illuminated by a lonely, dusty lamp sitting on the floor.
    His eyes burned as he ran both hands through the spikes of his hair. It was four in the morning, but he had been summoned by Antonio who believed office hours were for mortals or the weak.
    Andrus snarled to himself. The last time he had come, that bastard Antonio had sadistically dangled the one carrot which could make him hop: he promised their situation would soon be evolving.
    “Evolving” was not a word Andrus would have chosen. It implied a natural order to things. This long-awaited change would come by brute force. Blood. Pain. Souls lost.
    No matter, he mentally shrugged. Life is long. Too long . Without this coming change, it simply wasn’t worth living.
    He reached for the tarnished brass doorknob, hoping and praying this would be the last time his shadow darkened the doorstep of the Demilord compound.
    He pushed open the heavy oak door and found Antonio in his usual place behind his dimly lit desk, dark eyes buried in the thick leather bound text.
    Antonio had occupied the same Victorian in Sausalito, north of San Francisco, for the last one hundred years. Nothing in it ever changed. Not one piece of dark furniture, nor the dusty bookshelves that reached the vaulted ceiling.