Dates from Hell(6)

“This isn’t about your job,” Art said, his fingers tracing the trails he wanted his lips to follow, but there was a strict policy against bloodletting in the tower. She could tease and flirt, drive him crazy, let him drive her to the brink, but no blood. Until later.

“It’s about putting your time in,” he continued, and Ivy shivered when his lips touched her neck. God help her, he’d found an old scar. Pulse hard and fast, she pushed him away and around again so he was between her and the wall. He let her do it.

“I am putting my time in.” Ivy put a hand to his shoulder and shoved him back. He hit the wall with a thump, black eyes glinting from behind his black curls. “What is my evaluation going to say, Mr. Artie?” She leaned into his neck, taking a fold of skin between her lips and tugging. Her eyes closed, and as her own bloodlust pulsed through her, she forgot that they were standing in the elevator hallway, deep underground, amid the hum of circulation fans and electric-lit black.

Art rode the feeling she knew she was instilling in him, letting it grow. He had been dead long enough to have gained the restraint to string the foreplay out to their limits. “You’re argumentative, closed, and refuse to work in a team environment,” he said, his voice husky.

“Oh…” She pouted, gripping the hair at the base of his scalp hard enough to hurt. “I’m not bad, Mr. Artie. I’m a good little girl…when properly motivated.”

Her voice had an artful lilt, playful yet domineering, and he responded with a low sound. The bound heat in it hit her, and her fingers released. She had found his limit.

He moved so quickly, she sensed more than saw the motion. His hand abruptly covered hers, forcing her fingers back among the black ringlets at his neck and making them close about them again. “Your evaluation is subjective,” he said, his eyes stopping her breath as time balanced. “I decide if you’re promoted. Piscary said you’d be a worthwhile hunt, pull me up in the I.S. hierarchy as you resisted, but that you’d give in and I’d have a better job and a taste of you.”

At that, Ivy paused, jealousy clouding her. Art was conceited enough to believe Piscary was giving her to him when the truth was Piscary was using Art to manipulate her. It was a compliment in a backward way, and she despised herself for loving Piscary all the more, craving the master vampire’s attention and favor even as she hated him for it.

“I am giving in,” she said, anger joining her bloodlust. It was a potent mix most vamps craved. And here she was, giving it to him. The only thing they liked more was the taste of fear.

But Art’s domineering smile surprised her. “No,” he admonished, using his undead strength to force her back to the elevators. Her back hit hard, and she inhaled to catch her breath. “It’s not that easy anymore,” he said. “Six months ago, you could have gotten away with a nip and a new scar I could brag about, but not now. I want to know why Piscary indulges you beyond belief the way he does. I want everything, Ivy. I want your blood and your body. Or you don’t move from that shitty little office without dragging me with you.”

Fear, unusual and shocking, trickled through her and gripped her heart. Art sensed it, and he sucked in air. “God yes,” he moaned, his fingers jerking in a spasm. “Give this to me…”

Ivy felt her face go cold, and she tried to push Art off her, failing. Blood she could give, but her blood and body both? She had flirted with insanity the year Piscary had called her to him, breaking her, lifting her to glorious heights of passion her young body could scarcely contain before dropping her soul to the basest of levels to pay for it, to make her kneel for more and do anything to please him. She knew it had been a studied manipulation, one practiced on her mother, and her grandmother, and her great-grandmother before that until he was so good at it that the victim wept for the abuse. But that didn’t stop her from wanting it.

True to his word, she got as good as she gave. And she almost killed herself from the highs and lows as Piscary carefully built within her an addiction to the euphoria of sharing blood, warping it, mixing it with her need for love and her craving for acceptance. He had molded her into a savagely passionate blood partner, rich in the exotic tastes that evolve in mixing the deeper emotions of love and guilt with something that, at its basest, was a savage act. That he had done it only to make her blood sweeter didn’t matter. It was who she was, and a guilty part of herself gloried in the abandonment she allowed herself there that she denied herself everywhere else.

She had survived by creating the lie that sharing blood was meaningless unless mixed with sex, whereupon it became a way to show someone you loved him or her. She knew that the two were so mixed up in her mind she couldn’t separate them, but she had always been in a position to choose who she would share herself with, avoiding the realization that her sanity hung on a lie. But now?