overwhelming and
irresistible. Yet over time, feeding had become an altogether different erotic need.
It was the pinnacle of uninhibited ecstasy, sexual or otherwise, the one time
when males were allowed to simply let their bodies fully enjoy the exchange of
blood.
Salvatore held back his release, although it was
difficult: The blood Zarek had recently consumed was especially sweet, and it
lit him up like a fire burning from the inside out. Reluctantly, he released
the seal he had made over his baby brother’s vein and slowly removed his fangs.
The moment Zarek stirred, Salvatore knew precisely
where he was going next: to the Chamber of Cobras. To the one place where he
could take pleasure in as many venomous bites as he desired, invite as many
strikes to his body as he craved.
Release his pent-up sex in private.
Or maybe not .
As Zarek rose from the floor, sporting the same
proud gait in his retreat, the male turned directly toward Derrian’s crib—and his
new nanny.
Susan .
Oh, shit! Salvatore swore to himself. Now
that was an inexcusable oversight.
Salvatore rubbed his eyes. His grief over
Valentine was worse than he thought: He was missing things he would have never
missed before. Females didn’t stay alive very long around the sons of Jaegar, not
unless they were sired vamps who had willingly relinquished their souls for the
promise of immortality. And even then, the moment they became pregnant, the
relationship was over. Well, technically, forty-eight hours after they became
pregnant, but why split hairs?
Thinking he could feed from Zarek in the presence
of a female and still keep her alive afterward was...well, unworthy of
an ancient. Salvatore shook his head in frustration, but he made no attempt to
stop his younger brother. It wasn’t worth the battle. Rather, he simply sat
down on the bed and prepared to watch. No doubt, Zarek’s performance would be
better than the movie of the week.
The sexed-up vampire stalked toward the human female like an African lion approaching
a zebra. He snatched her up from the bench by the waiste and threw her face-first
into the stone wall, securing her there with a callous forearm across her back.
The nanny wailed a blood-curdling scream and
turned her head toward the bed, her eyes desperately pleading with Salvatore—for
what, he had no idea. If anything, her terror only aroused Zarek more—which
meant, at this point, trying to remove the female from Zarek’s grasp would be
like trying to wrench a piece of meat out of the mouth of a pit bull. Not
something an intelligent being did.
As she begged and pleaded—reminded Zarek of his
nephew’s need for a nanny—the vampire ripped her tattered clothes from her body
in one harsh movement and shredded them to pieces with his talons, watching as
they curiously drifted to the ground like snow.
The female was practically hyperventilating.
Damn, could that girl scream or what?
And struggle.
Oh, bad move!
In desperation, the nanny tried to head-butt Zarek,
cracking the tip of his nose with the base of her skull. Salvatore winced
before laughing.
Zarek growled in anger...and ecstasy...at the
female’s unexpected assault, and then he fisted her hair, jerked her neck back,
and sank his fangs so deep into her jugular that Salvatore heard his fangs scrape
against her bones.
Salvatore grimaced as an unnatural howl of pain
echoed through the lair, and the female’s body began to convulse, making her a
rather difficult target to nail. With a guttural snarl, Zarek wrenched her hips
away from the wall, kicked her jerking legs apart, and speared her so hard with
his shaft that the air left her body.
And then he groaned...as his eyes rolled back in
his head.
Salvatore was positively enthralled, watching
Zarek ride the nanny with such brutal force and primal desperation, drowning
out her pain-filled cries with his own raspy groans of pleasure, turning her heart-wrenching
pleas into metrical grunts, and clamping down even
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