Hunger Embraced (The Hunger Series) by Jennifer James Page B

really strong. Particularly when they’ve been well fed. I didn’t stand a chance against one with nothing but a knee to the groin and strike to the face. They’d stand there and laugh if I even managed to land a blow.
    I finally found the cutoffs folded up with my bra sitting on top of them on an armchair in the corner. I whipped the T-shirt off to put on my bra but paused when I saw Daniel watching, enjoying the way his gaze roved over my body.
    Unfortunately, I had to get him to focus. “T.T.B., what do you know about fighting?”
    He shook his head, and his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. Being only human strong, I needed an advantage in combat.
    His hand obscured his tattoo when he scrubbed his palm over his chest. “I can handle a sword, although they’ve fallen out of favor since the invention of guns. And I’m decent at hand to hand. There are other weapons of course, knives and such. But the older vampires are so fast it is difficult to hit them with a throwing weapon, and it just doesn’t seem sporting to use them against the younger ones.”
    I slid my bra straps over my arms and stretched to fasten the clasp in the back. “Sporting? You think fighting—maybe getting killed—is sporting? What? Have you been alive so long things have just gotten damned boring?” The underwire dug into the bottom of my boobs so I reached into the cup and adjusted the girls. Ah. So much better.
    When I gave him my attention again he leveled a look at me. I flinched. Perhaps he had. I cleared my throat and turned the conversation back to safer topics that wouldn’t leave him depressed and me wondering why I had to put my foot in my mouth so often. Daniel rolled off the bed and crossed the room to his dresser.
    “I’m sorry. I think sometimes I’ve forgotten how to have a normal conversation.” Crap, I sucked at apologizing.
    He shrugged in response. “Don’t worry about it.”
    I liked the way his ass flexed as he walked and the play of shadow and light on his back as he rooted in the drawers, removing clothing. Each muscle stood out, defined and sculpted from his shoulders to his trim waist. Damn, I wanted more of that. “Look, I need training. If I’m this Chosen…person there may be more people out there who want a piece of me. I don’t like the idea of being held captive as some sort of breeding slave. Having horny vamps track me down all the time is bad enough.”
    He glanced at me. “That may cease now that your king has found you. If you feed and are in his presence that should help you control your power—”
    “Please, please Daniel. Don’t refer to him as my king. Just don’t mention him if you don’t have to. I have a feeling the ‘contract’ he mentioned is bad enough news for me as it is.” I’m not sure what the look on my face told him, but he nodded. I secured the waistband of the cutoffs. “Just tell me you’ll give me some self-defense training once we figure out the sitch with my father and his coven.”
    “Yes.”
    “All right then, back to our little interrogation.”
    The quip earned me a smile. We headed to the kitchen with the dirty dishes, and I stifled a laugh at his expression when he saw the mess I’d made cooking breakfast.
    There wasn’t much he could tell me that was different from what I already knew. I didn’t know if it was because he wanted to withhold information or for some reason he wasn’t allowed to tell me. Most vamps still fell into one of the four broad categories of Eaters, Feelers, Fuckers, and Suckers. E.F.F.S. was my snappy little acronym for that.
    Finding out the Flesh Eaters could assume the appearance of humans and other vampires they’d fed on gave me the heebs. I hadn’t known that all vampires could feed on blood in an emergency. Guess that’s why my father had fangs. They weren’t just decorations after all.
    After our chat, I was more unsettled than ever about my father’s court. Any vampires in the area could have taken over his