Fangs for Nothing(34)

LOVE BITES, LOVE BLEEDS

DRAKE hesitated just slightly before he opened the door. He wasn’t scared about the alligator for himself. Shit, he was a vampire. He could take his knocks, even from a wannabe dinosaur. But Josie Lynn was another story. Being human, one bite could be fatal. And that scared him. A lot.

More than he really understood, actually. Sure, he wouldn’t want to see anyone maimed and killed by an alligator, but the idea of Cupcake getting hurt. That really bothered him.

Because you want to see her brought to justice in a way Captain Morgan never had been, he told himself. This was about a lying woman getting what she deserved. This was about comeuppance.

Or so he would tell himself.

Slowly he opened the door, and there Waldo lay, his back to them, looking more like a stuffed gator than the real McCoy. Unfortunately he was dead center in the hallway, making it hard to stay to one side of him. They were going to have to get pretty damn close to him to make it past.

So that meant one thing; he was going to have to go first. That way if Waldo decided to go all prehistoric, he’d hopefully attack Drake first, while Josie Lynn fled to safety.

“Follow me,” he said, whispering, though he wasn’t sure why. Did alligators even have ears?

“Maybe I should go first,” Josie Lynn suggested, and Drake shot her an astonished look. Was she crazy? That would be like sending old Waldo an appetizer.

“No way.” He stepped out the door, staying to the left of the hallway, since that seemed to be the side with the most space between the wall and the animal. He walked carefully, being as quiet as he could. Which was very quiet. That whole vampire thing.

Behind him Josie Lynn was being quiet, too, although he could hear the soft pats of her feet on the bare wood. He just hoped his vampire hearing was more acute than the alligator’s.

Once he reached the beast, he debated where the best place to step was. It was like a bizarre game of Twister, except in this game if you didn’t pick the right spot, you didn’t collapse into a tangled pile of limbs and laughter. In this game, you just lost a limb.

He carefully took a step over the curve of the gator’s tail. Then another over his back leg. So far, so good. Waldo hadn’t even twitched. He took another small step, bringing him up to Waldo’s front leg. At this point the best bet seemed to be to quickly step over that front leg, then run as fast as possible past his head and the long snout.

He looked over his shoulder to tell Josie Lynn his strategy, and that was the exact moment he heard the swish of Waldo’s scaly skin on the floor and a noise that was somewhere between a snarl and a hiss.

Then Drake was on the floor right beside the beast. Shit, the damn thing had swung its head and knocked him down. Now he was right near that huge mouth, stuck between the animal’s side and the wall.

He lay still for a second, debating at this angle if he could shove himself backward fast enough to avoid those teeth. His vampire abilities made him very fast, but this was a weird position.

But before he could do anything, Josie Lynn was on top of the gator, her bare legs straddling its back. She lay down on the beast, pressing both her forearms down as hard as she could on the alligator’s snout.

“What the hell are you doing?” he cried.

“Shut up,” she yelled back. “Take this cord and wrap it around his snout.”

Drake didn’t argue, taking the bungee cord from her and circling it quickly around the alligator’s long nose and mouth.

“Higher up,” she said, still using all her strength to keep his huge jaws shut. “That’s it.”

When it was secured, Josie Lynn sat up, still straddling the beast, her legs bare and her coffee-colored hair tangled around her face. Her chest rose and fell as she struggled to catch her breath.

Holy shit, she was sexy.

His dick shot straight up against his stomach, painfully hard and swollen, but fortunately she didn’t seem to notice.

“How—how the hell did you learn to do that?” he asked, struggling to catch his own breath.

She smiled then, the first time he’d seen her genuinely smile.

“I’m Cajun. This is what we do.”

Damn, he was in love.

* * *

JOHNNY WAS PUSHING his luck, and he knew it. But Lizette looked so disheveled and sexy that he couldn’t resist. Besides, the fact that she had said she wasn’t wearing panties had him hard in two seconds. All he could think was that his dick was currently so close to her pantyless deliciousness, and all it would take was a little tug of her skirt and he’d give her something she wouldn’t forget this time. He could take her wrist that was attached to his, raise it above her head on the hot pink wall behind her, and make her sore all over again in the best way possible.