The Becoming Trilogy Box Set (Books 1-3) (3 page)

Withered old crone
, Connal growled. Taking care of DeMorgan’s blow-ins
wasn’t in his job description. She knew how he felt about handling females. If
this one was so different, why couldn’t she just take care of it herself? She’d
struck him, hard, for that insolent comment, after reminding him of the debt he
owed her. He wouldn’t have thought her arthritis-ravaged body capable of the
brutality, but Anann DeMorgan was to be underestimated at your peril. Her flesh
might be slowly mummifying around the bird-like skeleton of her crumbling
bones, but underneath she was sharp as a blade, and just as lethal. She was
like a cockroach. Indestructible. He wasn’t buying the oatmeal-drooling,
invalid pretence. He’d been to see her at the nursing home and she’d thrown
that oatmeal in his damn face. She might be mute, but hellfire still blazed in
her milky, cataract-blind eyes. He knew well if he defied her, she’d come back
from the bloody grave to wreak her vengeance.

Elbows propped on the bar, his
roughened fingertips worked a circling pressure on his temples. The muscles
fanning the breadth of his shoulders were tensed beneath his leather jacket.
His eyes were trained on the rippling surface of the drink in front of him:
Midleton Redbreast, mark five, all doubles. A waste of fine whiskey, but
alcohol dulled his edges and the way he saw it, life was too fucking long to
spend it drinking piss-water.

‘
Just look at the state of
yourself, Connal the Savage,’
the old woman’s words hounded him now, ‘
a
sorry sight you are, reeking of the drink and that den of sin and vice. If you
lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.’

Connal tossed back the drink
and slid the empty glass in the direction of Doyle, the bar-man. With his hair
gelled back at the temples and the tight white tee, and even tighter
expression, the guy was channelling James Dean, circa
Rebel Without a
Fucking Clue
, complete with guy-liner and a pack of smokes tucked into his
sleeve. Doyle paused in the middle of polishing the glass in his hand to look
at the empty one pushed under his nose. ‘You're not welcome here, Slayer,’ he
said.

‘You're fixing to make me
leave?’ Connal smiled coldly, glazed eyes fixing the guy with a challenge he
knew he couldn't accept.

‘You know I can't,’ Doyle sneered.

Connal sucked on his teeth.
‘That's right, bud. By Haven Law I'm as free to walk in here as the next son of
a bitch and there's not a sodding thing you, nor I, can do about that. So how
about that drink?’ He plastered a smile on his mug. The sacred ground on which
the club was built had its perks. Nobody was willing to spill Fomorian blood
here and risk an apocalypse. Whether Doyle liked it or not, and regardless of
which side Connal fought on, his blood was one-hundred proof, which was more
than could be said for the runt
thegn
.

‘No law says I have to
serve
you,’ Doyle replied, his jaw clenched like he was nursing a bad dose
of constipation.

Christ, but the
thegn
were all so uptight. It was a trademark, an affliction as distinctive as the
brand they wore on their chests. Enforced celibacy was unnatural, even if it
was to ensure the purity of the race’s bloodlines. All that pent up
frustration, all those retained sexual fluids, needed a release valve, and
Doyle looked ready to blow his stack.

‘Lighten up, would you, man.
You'll live longer. It's just a damn drink.’ Connal slurred his words, lifting
the empty glass and moving to catch the attention of the nearest bar girl, but
something caught his attention first.

He smelled the female before
he saw her, singled out the scent of her approach, cutting through the raft of
stale sweat and smoke churning out of the inadequate air-con. Like a distilled
single malt, she smelled good, fresh and primed, all laced up with that
delicious lick of fear that never failed to get him hard.
Fresh meat
.
The stray thought was tamped down with a mental snarl.
Let's try to play
nice
.

He took his time, taming the
hunger, stroking it into submission while the waitress refilled his glass. He
shot the amber liquid, savouring the burn, before lifting hooded eyes from the
counter. His gaze slid sidelong down the bar, following the direction of that
scent. He started from the floor and worked his way up, drinking her in, and
the visual, set against the backdrop of the pulsing club lights, was up to the
mark. The red-soled heels and the vertiginous hem, combined with the slight
wobble in her step, gave her a coltish appearance. A long mane of brown waves
skimmed the small of her back. Just the way he liked it.
All the better to
rein you in
.

She wasn’t ‘the one’. The
eyes weren’t right, but who the hell cared? He was happy to whet his appetite
while he waited for his mark to show. Didn't want to wind up like that
tight-ass Doyle, behind the bar now, did he? Besides, the new latent was strictly
off limits. Anann DeMorgan had been very graphic when she informed him that
under no circumstances was he to fuck the girl.

This one did have a look
about her. English? Almost certainly. It was a rare local girl that would bare
that much flesh to the Irish elements. These British girls blew into the city
for a weekend of anonymous debauchery and drifted out again on the tide.
Perfect.

A predatorial darkness came
down over his eyes as he swivelled on the barstool to face her. His thighs
widened to accommodate the strain of his arousal. She was nervous, a little
tongue-tied, eyes darting from the floor and back up to the penetrating
intensity of his stare, and he liked that too. She looked ready to bolt.
Run,
rabbit, run
. Instead, she held her ground, wetting her lower lip and
dragging the pink flesh through even, white teeth. That stirred something in
him. He mirrored her mouth action, moistening his own lips with the tip of his
tongue, running it along the sharp edges of his teeth. The ghost of a smile
hovered at the corners of his mouth. ‘Don't you look fetching.’
Positively
fucking edible
.

Why the hell was he so juiced
tonight? Sure, he'd hit on random strangers in clubs. Many, many times. He was
a male with itches that wanted scratching and these ship in the night, foreign
girls were easy, willing prey. Uncomplicated. He never gave his number and he
never promised to call. But this? It wasn’t natural, like his anchor had been
pulled and his control was drifting out. He was ravenous, the need clawing at
him from the inside, demanding a release. He was on the edge and humming with
some intractable energy he couldn't pin down.
You can pin her down,
he
thought. Even as he made his move, he was stuck with the grim conviction that
this
rendez vous
wasn't going to end well, but he was horse-bolted, way
beyond caring.

As he led her down through
the dark labyrinth of corridors, the exchange of words was minimal. The
exchange of names was none. The insistent beat of the music above grew muffled
and the ceilings got lower the deeper they wound down into the core of the
club’s dark heart. The edge of nerves in the female’s breathless laughter was
proof that alcohol only bolstered courage to a point. Beyond that point, you
had to rely on instinct, and if hers were not clouded by lust, they should be
screaming for her to run. Instead, she clung to him.

Connal’s hand curled around a
door handle and he tackled the girl into the darkness of Doyle’s office.
Without warning, he wheeled her around and pushed her up against the desk. His
stubble scratched her nape as he growled in her ear. ‘I’m hungry. Are you
hungry?’

‘Insatiable,’ she laughed
breathily, rolling her ass into the grind of his hips. Her head fell back,
opening up the vulnerable line of her neck to his wandering mouth.

He slipped his fingers
beneath the hem of that impossibly short dress and rode it up her hips, guiding
her back onto the hard press of his arousal. As his teeth closed around the
soft flesh of her earlobe, he growled the words. ‘Hunger sharpens the senses.’

‘Yes.’ Her spine bowed from
the centre span of his palm, arching up and writhing in his hands.

He laved a wet, shivery
stroke to the pulse in her throat. Pounding on his tongue, her heartbeat
matched the rapid pace of his own. His hand cupped the taut lace between her
thighs and a low moan escaped his throat.

She danced into his palm,
urging him on. ‘Your plan is to kill me isn't it?’ she breathed.

‘I could eat you alive.’ The
words rasped from his throat on a sound more animal than human.
She had no
idea
. In the span of a heartbeat, her lace panties were sacrificed to a
slice of bared claws. Thighs slammed up to the desk, a rough hand to her spine
bent her forward, crushing her cheek to the smooth leather of the desk. Trapped
by the solid wedge of his lower body, his growl was lusty. ‘You're going to
like it better this way. Trust me.’ He pinned her with his thighs, freeing his
hands to manacle her wrists at the base of her spine, the ripped lace of the
panties wound around their slim circumference and knotted to a firm ligature.

‘I trust you. Please ...’

She hadn’t even asked about
protection, but where he was concerned, protection didn't come in little foil
packets. Her fingers splayed over his lower stomach, blindly straining to touch
what she could. He muttered a ragged profanity, claws scoring down polished
mahogany, canines elongating as he rode the underside of his erection through
her fingertips. Dangerously close to the edge, he craved the slap of flesh,
pictured the pummelling force of his thrusts and how they would ride her
sex-flushed body up the sweat-slick desk.

He never got that far.

His teeth closed around the
delicious yield of her skin and it was game over. He tasted blood, laced with
the sweetness of whatever cocktails had loosened her up enough to follow a
stranger into the nether reaches of this dark club, to let him tie her up with
her own panties and fuck her senseless. Inhaling deep, he caught the scent of
her panic. His lids slammed down on a wash of crimson vision, and even as she
gasped, he knew he’d fucked it up. Again.

He could already feel the
climax coiling in her body begin to derail as she choked out a nervous bravado.
‘My,’ she said, ‘what big teeth you have ...’

 ‘M
y ... what big teeth you have.'

He barely heard her lame
attempt to diffuse the tension with humour. Animal aggression pumped off him in
waves, fuelled by the scent of the girl's fear. But then, ironically, the
faintly ridiculous Big Bad reference hit him, like a slap of humanity to his
killer instinct. Repelled by her words, he jerked away, panic and adrenaline
flooding his veins, his lids peeled wide on wild, crimson eyes.
Fight or
flight
.

His body chose flight.
Stumbling out into the corridor, Connal slammed the door on the female within,
leaving her, and her rapidly cooling ardor, bent over the desk. He’d pulled out
in time, hadn’t he? Numbed by the alcohol, the bruise to her ego would hurt
more than his bite. She’d wriggle free and stagger back to her friends,
convincing herself that what she’d felt was just the product of her over-sexed,
cocktail-drenched imagination. Funny how that human mind-eraser worked, editing
out the details that failed to fit the accepted reality. He hadn't actually
broken her skin with his teeth, had he? Connal wiped his mouth and it came away
bloody.
Fuck.

He wrestled his shirt back
into the waistband of his jeans, struggling to focus on anything but what had
just gone down inside that room. He was seriously losing his shit. Ever since
DeMorgan had checked out with the stroke, it was as though some external force
was exerting its draw on him, luring the animal to the bars of its cage. And
its pull was growing more powerful with every passing day. Heart thumping
against his ribs, his breaths came in snarled grunts. Long canines prevented
him from fully closing his mouth, and when he cranked his head up to orientate
himself, a curtain of red bled down the canvas of his vision.

He turned and bolted,
instinct guiding him through the crimson-hued labyrinth of tunnels, until
finally he was punching his way out through an emergency exit. Momentum spilled
him into the alley at the rear of the club, where he’d parked his Shadow
earlier in the night. Bracing his arms on the saddle of the motorcycle, he
growled a string of curses. He worked his lungs, sucking in the night air like
a man drowning, diluting the female's scent, willing his body to come to heel.