a Vampire betrayed (paperback)

Vampire Christian Moore has spent his entire life, both human and immortal, fighting for the respect of his peers. He has codes he lives by. Strict moral codes, both in his personal life and his work. And he doesn't break them. Ever.

Until he finds himself at the carnal mercy of a woman with eyes like the midday sky and hair the colors of a summer sunset. His craving for her is unnatural, and watching her dance makes his blood burn like acid in his veins.

But he can't not watch her.

When she was fifteen, Ryan Moss lost her mind. Or, at least that's what the voices in her head would have her believe.

On the streets of Tijuana, she finds something that makes the voices go away. To get it, she's ashamed to admit, she'll do just about anything, even strip for a man she can't see or hear.

However, she can sense his raging need for her through the haze of her high, and her body responds with a voracious hunger of its own.

Christian can make the voices go away, and he wants Ryan to be his. But first, he will have to learn to trust her, and she him.

Both of their lives depend on it.

He was dying. Literally.

Christian slammed his sweaty palm against the glass wall in front of him as his bloodshot eyes watched the woman on the other side. His silver cuff bracelet clanked against it so hard, the turquoise stones should have left chips in the glass. But they didn’t, because this was no ordinary glass. It was some type of indestructible, vampire-proof glass.

Through eyes that burned with lust and sweat, he watched her: The woman who had been both his sweetest fantasy and his worst nightmare for as long as he could remember now. The girl with skin so pale and translucent he could see the delicate blue veins just underneath where her life’s blood flowed. The girl with eyes just slightly darker in color than the ancient stones on his wrist.

The girl whose full, up-tipped breasts made his mouth water to taste them and his hips rock to and fro uncontrollably, like a dog near a bitch in heat. The girl with the hair that had stolen all of the colors of the fiery sunset he missed so much.

He shoved his other hand down the front of his jeans, gripping himself tight at the head and then sliding up and down the swollen girth with short, hard pumps. The hypnotic beat of “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails thumped throughout the room, and his blood pulsed heavier through his veins with every beat. His fangs were bared on a hiss and his gut ached with a razor sharp hunger he had yet to experience in all of his long years — until now.

But he knew it was his eyes that would surely give him away for what he truly was. From the feel of them, they would be glowing bright and eerie from under his heavy brows, the color a vivid topaz, as he tracked every move she made with an intensity that human men did not possess. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to not watch her.

Besides, she never looked at him when she was dancing. She was alone in the empty room of the club on the other side of the glass, her back up against a single silver pole that ran from floor to ceiling. Facing him, she writhed against that cold metal that she could work like nobody’s business. But she wasn’t dancing anymore. She’d stopped dancing a while ago.

Instead, one of her dainty hands was shoved up under her short, gold skirt, and although he couldn’t see it, he knew that she was touching herself. Something she’d never done before; at least not for him. Her other hand was on her bare breast, manipulating the soft flesh and then pinching the dusky nipple. Her skimpy top had long since been removed as part of her striptease.

As the end of the song rose to a throbbing crescendo, she threw her head back and cried out, her body convulsing as she made herself come while he watched. Her face contorted into an erotic mien, lost somewhere between pleasure and pain and made all the more beautiful for it.

He cried out with her, his forehead smashing into the glass as his body jacked towards her instinctively. But even though he was hard as a fucking rock and rubbing himself raw, he couldn’t get off. And he knew he wouldn’t be able to, not until he was inside of a woman’s tight sheath, whether it be hers or another’s.

She wobbled in her stiletto heels as her legs gave out and she slid down the stripper pole to sit on the floor. His hand was still fisted around his cock, and he squeezed it way too hard as he collapsed to his knees, wishing he could just rip the fucking thing off. But honestly he barely felt the pain he was causing himself. He couldn’t feel anything over the burn of his screaming muscles as they cramped and twisted around the acid in his veins.

He lifted his head at the same time that she lifted hers, and they stared at each other through the glass for the first time. Her sapphire blue eyes were large in her pale face; the purplish circles underneath making them appear even brighter than normal. 

As she stared at him, a single fat tear slid down her flawless cheek, and he pressed his forehead to the glass again as he watched it fall.

He wanted to go to her. He wanted to gently wipe that tear from her delicate face.

Then he wanted to rip that flimsy excuse of a skirt off of her and bury his aching cock in her warmth as he sank his fangs deep into that slender throat. He groaned aloud at the thought of feeding from her while he fucked her senseless. He swore he could almost taste her from behind the glass. But he couldn’t do any of those things, because he was trapped in this goddamned, vampire-proof viewing box with his jeans hanging open and his cock jutting out of his hand like some kind of animal.

Gritting his teeth against the pain that scorched through his body like hot acid, he slapped his palm against the glass. “Help me!” he snarled.

She blinked once, slowly, her eyelids appearing heavy. Lifting her hand from beneath her skirt, she stared at it for a moment with a frown marring her pretty features before it dropped onto her lap, like she didn’t understand what it had just been doing.

Christian folded forward as the fire in his blood surged across his abdomen and down into his balls. Releasing his throbbing cock with a hiss of pain, his other hand joined the first to pound on the glass. “Open this fucking thing!”

Her bemused gaze wandered to the side, and then drifted over the entire wall of glass, as if she were searching for something but didn’t quite know what it was. She closed her eyes again for so long that he began to wonder if she’d fallen asleep, but then she seemed to rouse, and slowly pushed herself to her feet. She teetered unsteadily for a moment in her ridiculous shoes. 

Gathering up her top that she’d taken off during her dance, she stumbled across the room and out the door in the back. The music shut off as soon as the door closed behind her.

She couldn’t see him, he realized. She couldn’t fucking see him.

Rearing back, he threw his head forward and smashed it into the glass wall so hard it should’ve shattered. But it only formed an outline of the shape of his head, and then snapped back into its former shape as soon as he pulled away.

“AHHHHHH!!!” He screamed until his voice gave out.

Collapsing onto his side, he curled up into a ball with his arms wrapped around his middle to ride out the pain. It would subside after a bit, enough so he could move about freely, though it never completely went away. And he knew that it wouldn’t until his body had what it craved.

He needed blood. And he needed sex. Physically needed it. Thanks to whatever the hell had happened to him after his creator, Luukas, had been taken. Before he’d been swiped up off the street near his home in Seattle and locked in this hellhole, he’d been going through six to eight females a night — every night — for the past seven years.

He’d fuck them, feed from them, and then send them home to their families. Safe and sound. And he’d discovered real quick that if he tried to change up that routine, he suffered the consequences. The urges would become more and more intense until he was a danger to anyone around him. Thank the gods Seattle was a large city with a rising population and had plenty of human females. And that vampires were immune to STD’s.

And now, if he wasn’t mistaken, he’d been locked in this place for weeks. Long enough that it wasn’t only his body that was suffering. He was beginning to feel like he was losing his mind, losing what was left of his humanity, and turning into the mindless creature that the horror movies always depicted those like him to be.

Of course it was all because he’d lowered his guard and gotten himself captured because he was too busy thinking about his dick, rather than what he should’ve been doing.

Keeping to his usual nightly routine, he’d left his apartment building to hook up with a new girl at a nearby strip club instead of helping Dante and Shea prepare for Luukas’ rescue mission. He and the other Hunters were supposed to join Nikulas and

Aiden across the Canadian border. They’d only just discovered that the psycho who had taken their leader had returned to the area with Luukas in tow.

He’d let down his friends who’d been depending on him. And worse, he’d failed his creator. The male that had taken him under his wing and taught him what it was to be a male worthy of calling himself such.

He wasn’t worthy of anything or anyone these days.

Christian groaned and flopped over onto his back, the pain in his body overriding everything else as it always did. God help the first female he came across when he finally got the fuck out of here. And he would get out of here, somehow. He only hoped the first woman he came across wasn’t his dancing girl with the fiery hair, because the odds of her surviving that encounter were pretty much shit. At the thought of hurting her, a sharp, stabbing pain pierced through his heart and added to his agony.

He wouldn’t mean to hurt her. He wouldn’t. But in the state he was in, he didn’t think he’d be able to avoid it.

And didn’t that just suck balls.