Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [589]
Nikolai grunted, but he paused. “I’m a specific kind of guy.”
“Well, maybe I got what you need.” She grinned at him and hopped off her perch on the concrete stoop. “Matter of fact, I’m sure I got just exactly what you need, sugar.”
She wasn’t a beauty, with her brittle, teased-up brassy hair, dull eyes, and sallow skin, but men again Nikolai didn’t expect he was going to be spending much time looking at her face. She smelled clean, if deodorant soap and hairspray could be considered clean-smelling scents. To Niko’s acute senses, the woman reeked of cosmetics and perfumes, with an undercurrent of recent narcotic use that seeped from her pores.
“Whattaya say?” she asked, sidling up to him now. “You wanna go someplace for a little while? If you got twenty bucks, I’ll give you half an hour.”
Nikolai stared at the pulse point ticking in the woman’s neck. It had been several days since he’d last fed. And he did have two hours of do-nothing ahead of him…
“Yeah,” he said, giving her a nod. “Let’s take a walk.”
She took his hand and led him around the corner of the building and down an empty alley.
Nikolai didn’t waste any time. As soon as they were secluded from potential onlookers, he took her head in his hands and bared her neck for his bite. Her startled cry was squashed the instant he sank his fangs into her carotid and began to drink.
The woman’s blood was unremarkable—the usual copper heaviness of human red cells, but laced with a bittersweet tang of the speedball she’d had before stepping out for her night’s work. Nikolai gulped down several mouthfuls, feeling the blood’s energy course through his body in a low vibration. It wasn’t unusual for a Breed male to get aroused by the act of feeding. The response was purely physical, an awakening of cells and muscles.
That his cock was fully erect now and straining for relief didn’t surprise him at all. It was the fact that his head was swimming with thoughts of a certain raven-haired female—a female he had no intention of seeing ever again—that made Niko rear back in alarm.
“Mmm, don’t stop,” his human companion moaned, pulling his mouth back to the wound at her neck. She too was feeling the effects of the feeding, enthralled as all humans became when held under the bite of the Breed. “Don’t stop, baby.”
Nikolai’s vision was swamped with amber fire as he clamped back down on her throat. He knew she wasn’t Renata, but as his hands skimmed up the woman’s bare legs and under the short denim skirt she wore, he pictured himself caressing Renata’s long, beautiful thighs. He imagined it was Renata’s blood that fed him. Renata’s body that responded so eagerly to his touch.
It was Renata’s fevered gasps that drove him as he ripped at the cheap thong panties with one hand and worked to free himself with the other.
He needed to be inside her.
He needed—
Holy hell.
A light breeze eddied through the alleyway, carrying with it the stench of vampires gone Rogue. And there was spilled blood too. Human blood. A damned lot of it, mixed with the vile odor of bleeding Rogues.
Nikolai froze with his hand still on his fly, shocked stupid in one blinding instant.
“Jesus Christ.”
What the fuck was going on?
He yanked the woman’s skirt back down and swept his tongue over her neck wound, sealing up his bite.
“I said, don’t st—”
Niko didn’t give her a chance to finish the thought. With a glance of his palm over her brow, he scrubbed her mind of the entire thing. “Get out of here,” he told her.
He was already jogging up the alley by the time she shook out of her daze and started moving. He followed his nose to a dilapidated building not far from where he’d been. The stench emanated from inside, a couple floors off the street.
Nikolai climbed the lightless stairwell to the second floor. His eyes were practically watering from the overwhelming stink of death that rolled out from under a closed door. His hand on the gun holstered at his hip, Niko approached