Bound by Night(38)

“Simple?”
Taken aback by his curt, defensive tone, Nicole paused before saying, “I was going to ask if she was always so enthusiastic about candy.”
“Sorry.” Riker scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m a little protective of her. We all are.”
“How long has she been with your clan?”
“About ten years.” He started moving again, his long legs eating up ground and forcing her to almost jogto keep up. “katina found her in an alley. She was living like a rat in the sewers, doing h er best to avoid humans and feeding on bums and drug addicts. We have no idea how she got there, when she was turned, how old she is . . . nothing. She won’t talk about her past.”
How horrible. “Who takes care of her?” He glanced over his shoulder at her like she’d just asked the dumbest question in the history of dumb questions. “We all do.”
Of course they did. Judging by what Nicole knew about MoonBound so far, clan members were family.
Really, she wasn’t seeing anything different from how humans lived.
Aside from diet. Which was a pretty big deal.
But still, they took care of their own and found compassion even for the children of adults they hated.
Terese had taken care of Nicole as if she were Terese’s own child. She’d gone above and beyond what had been required of her even after everything humans had done to her.
Now it was time for Nicole to give back, to take the compassion Terese had taught her and use it to help the people Terese had cared about.
“Riker?” She seized his wrist and jerked him to a halt.
He swung around, his gaze hooded. Unreadable. So much distrust, and she couldn’t blame him. “Yeah?”
Squaring her shoulders, she said firmly, “Take me to your clan. Let’s get Neriya and Lucy back.”

Chapter 13
Hunter needed to get his head out of his ass.
At least, that was what the two drop-dead gorgeous sisters, Danneca and Tena, were telling him.#p#分页标题#e#
Problem was, he couldn’t concentrate on the naked females, and it didn’t seem to matter how much they touched him or touched themselves. His head—the one on his shoulders—was not in the game.
No, right now, his game was poker, and if he wasn’t careful, ShadowSpawn was going to realize that MoonBound had a shitty hand.
“C’mon, Hunter.” Tena sat up on the pallet, letting the plush fur coverlets fall to her hips. Her fi rm, high breasts, the opposite of her sister’s fuller, heavier ones, were a stark reminder of why he was here.
This wasn’t about sex for the sake of pleasure; it was about sex to make baby vampires. Danneca had given birth three years ago, but the boy had died two days after his fi rst birthday, leaving her heartbroken and the entire clan saddened. Children were rare for vampires, rarer still if the male wasn’t a born vampire or hadn’t imprinted on the female. Hell, that was an understatement. Hunter had been sowing his seed for more than two centuries, and only three females had gotten with child.
Two females had died during childbirth, his son and daughter with them. The third female had survived, but the child, a boy, hadn’t. Since then, he’d sworn to always have a midwife available, even if the midwife had to be borrowed from another clan because fucking poachers had killed MoonBound’s.
The memory brought a growl up from deep inside Hunter’s chest. He’d found the human poachers and torn them apart. Afterward, he’d burned their trophies—vampire fangs, organs, blood, and bones earmarked for sale on the black market.
Human scum.
Danneca swung her legs off the pallet and stood, her voluptuous body drawing his gaze. She wasn’t as pretty as her sister, but her curvy figure and quick mind more than made up for it.
“Come to bed,” she said, holding out her hand.
“We’ll even help you out of those jeans.”
He looked down at the unbuttoned fly, behind which was a tool he put to frequent use but which didn’t want to play today. He couldn’t even care enough to behumiliated, and when a pounding on t he door sent both females scurrying under the covers, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Hunt.” Riker’s deep voice boomed from behind
the heavy oak door. “We have trouble.”
“What else is new?” he muttered. He scooped up the females’ robes and tossed them to the bed. “Sorry, girls, we’ll have to do this another time. Let yourselves out the back way.”
Hunter shoved open the bedroom door, not bothering to throw on a shirt or shoes. Riker was in the office, shirtless, his body streaked with dirt, his jeans torn and bloody. In other words, it was business as usual for a guy who mixed it up with poachers and hunters whenever he could. What wasn’t business as usual was how Riker was splashing whiskey into two highball glasses. Rike was more of a beer guy.