I will fuck you, Dr. Donahue. Then I will kill you.
With a gasp, Sara came awake. Sweaty and disoriented, she sat up and looked around the room, saw the chair against the table and the uneaten food, and the view of the city lights out her window. Oh God. Thank God. Alexander’s house. SoHo.
“Sara? What is it?”
She turned and breathed a sigh of relief. In the dark, she hadn’t seen him, hadn’t known he’d come back. But there he was beside her, his large body so near, ready to protect her both in body and mind.
She lay down, her arms going around his neck, her face burrowing in his chest. “Hold me. Jesus. Just hold me tight.”
She knew why she was dreaming about Tom; it was normal for her fears of him coming after her to be worked out while she was asleep. But the sexual nature of the dream had felt so real. Her lower half ached with it.
“You’re shaking.” Alexander wrapped his arms around her and pulled her even closer against his warm chest. His shirt was off and he wore sweats on his bottom half, but it did little to stop her from feeling his erection against her belly, stiff as marble and pulsing. Her skin tingled, desperate to be touched, and she arched her back. Alexander’s hand slipped from her lower back to her bottom, gathering her against his hip, and when it did, he felt something there that made his cock jump.
“Not fear that has you calling out, is it?” he growled against her neck. “Were you dreaming about me?”
Sara didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to tell him about her dream, not now, not yet, not when it was so fresh. The conflict her body was under made her irrational and selfish and all she wanted to do was to have his hands on her, in her.
She pressed her hips forward, her core squeezing against his thigh. “Alexander . . . please ...”
Alexander gave a soft chuckle as though she’d just affirmed his query, and he kissed her ear as he slid his fingers from her backside all the way down the soft, wet trail to the opening of her body. “Is this what you want?” he whispered, his fingers finding the sensitive spot his tongue had lapped at hours earlier.
Sara moaned softly. “Yes.”
“Is this what you need?” he asked, his two fingers making lazy circles over her clit.
“God, yes . . . please ...”
His mouth was on her neck, then her ear. “Is your cunt aching to be filled, Sara?”
“Yes.” With you, she wanted to call out, but before she even had a chance, Alexander drove three fingers so deeply inside of her that his knuckles disappeared and her breath, her words, were caught in her throat.
“No more dreams,” he uttered against her neck, his mouth suckling at the skin over her vein as he slid another finger inside her.
24
Pearl McClean sat on the edge of her seat in the visitors’ room wishing she had a mirror. She knew she looked like shit and it made her crazy. Alistair was here, the one who watched over her for Ethan—the one who’d seduced her mother so he could remain close to Pearl.
Dammit. She wished Ethan could come and see her. It was so boring here. No fun, no blood. She lowered her lashes over her large brown eyes and used her little-girl voice. “I want to go home.”
“I know,” Alistair said, staring out the window at the cloudy winter morning. “But it isn’t safe. You need to stay here until everything is complete.”
Pearl watched him at the window, tall, lanky, his long, brown hair framing a rock-star-like face. In fact, when she’d met him and Ethan at a Slayer concert six months ago, she’d thought they were part of the band. She smiled, remembering that night. Before the band had even gotten to their second set, Pearl had offered Ethan her virginity, and a few weeks later, when she’d found out what he was really a part of, she’d offered him her life too . . . and her womb.
“They’re giving me pills,” she told him, unease in her tone. “They watch me to make sure I swallow them.”
He shrugged. “It won’t affect your balas.”
“Ethan’s balas,” she corrected him gently. “Ethan’s child.”
“Yes.” He turned then, giving the city his back, and grinned at her, his black eyes sharp. “Once you release it from your body, it will belong to the commander.”
A wave of distress moved through Pearl. She didn’t like when he called the baby “it.”
Alistair must have sensed her concern because he went over to her immediately and sat down, spoke to her with a soothing tone. “Once the balas is no longer within you, you and the commander can be together again. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If this balas survives, you will become a very important human to him.”
Pearl swallowed thickly. She wanted more than to be important to Ethan; she wanted him to change her into what he was. She wanted to feed from him, then let him take her vein as he took her body. It had taken seventeen years to realize that she wasn’t meant for this life, this human existence. And this life had no need for her either.
“Can you ask him to come?” she begged him softly. “Just once.”
For one moment, a look of annoyance crossed Alistair’s face; then something stole his attention. The black in his eyes blurred with gray and he froze, cocked his head to one side. He looked as though he was listening to something, but Pearl didn’t hear a thing. Suddenly, he stood up. “I have to go.”
Pearl’s heart dropped. “What?”
“She’s here,” Alistair hissed harshly.
Pearl stopped protesting. “Who?”
“Your nosy little doctor. She’s just walking into the hospital now.”
Sara took the fire stairs two at a time, energy racing through her blood. For the first time in her career, she was both late for work and not sorry about it. She grinned, shook her head. Screw the “impossible.” She was going to live in it for a while, for as long as it felt like this. Last night and early this morning, something had been turned on inside her, a fresh wave of passion she hadn’t known she’d been missing.
She threw back the door and headed onto the fourth floor and to the keypad on the wall leading to the adult ward. She’d closed herself off all these years, turned herself off completely, maybe because she’d felt she didn’t deserve passion or release or anything that gave pure pleasure until her brother could have those things as well.
Whatever the answer, tonight, instead of going home to an empty apartment and an empty bed, she would go home to Alexander. And anyone who had an objection to that could just suck it.
She was down the hall and nearing her office when Claire stopped her, motioned for her to come over to the nurse’s station.
Sara walked over, grabbed her messages from her box. “What’s up, Claire?”
“You said you wanted to know when Pearl McClean had a visitor.”
A strange sensation coiled through Sara. “Yes.”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
“They’re still here?”
“He,” Claire corrected, popping a Certs in her mouth. “He’s still here.”
“The boyfriend?” Sara asked, her body on alert now.
“Yep.”
Shit. Dropping her notes on the desk, Sara turned and headed back toward the juvenile ward. What was the mother’s boyfriend doing visiting the girl alone? Did the mother even know about it? As Sara hauled ass through one ward into the other, she knew this wasn’t about pseudostepfather types in general—this was about this particular man. Everything in her gut told her something sketchy was going on with that relationship and she should’ve blocked the man from visiting without the mother, even if it got her in some legal hot water.