Free The Vampire Who Loved Me by Teresa Medeiros Page B

only to find it empty.
    “Please tell me the little fool latched it,” he muttered beneath his breath. But even from his vantage point, he could see that the window stood ajar.
    He stood there for a very long time, but he doubted even his saintly brother could have resisted such a compelling invitation. One minute his feet were firmly planted on the snowy ground. The next he was slipping through her window like a thief intent upon stealing some priceless treasure.
    He glided silently toward the bed. The canopy of the four-poster was draped in sheer gauze, giving it the appearance of a sultan’s tent. As he parted that shimmering curtain, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the woman he found sleeping within ruling over both a man’s harem and his heart.
    She’d made a valiant effort to contain her rioting curls in a neat pair of braids, but several silky, dark strands had escaped to frame her face. She slept on her back with one hand nestled against the sleep-flushed curve of her cheek. A rueful smile quirked Julian’s lips whenhe saw the stake clutched in her other hand.
    “That’s my girl,” he whispered as a delicate snore escaped her parted lips. Despite her fondness for whimsy, Portia had always possessed a practical streak.
    Julian knew that if he chose to press his suit, the stake would be a feeble defense indeed. He could only be thankful that she hadn’t yet realized she possessed other weapons that might be even more lethal to his heart.
    It didn’t take long for his overdeveloped sense of smell to betray him. His nostrils flared as he leaned closer, allowing himself the forbidden luxury of drinking in her scent. If not for the press of unwashed bodies and cigar smoke in the gambling hell, he might have smelled her coming and had time to flee out a back entrance. She still smelled exactly as he remembered—clean and sweet like wind-tossed sheets drying on a rope in the sunshine. Yet underlying that innocent fragrance of rosemary and soap was a woman’s irresistible musk, the elusive perfume that had been driving men mad with longing for centuries.
    He swallowed back his own longing, fighting the urge to bury his face against her throat.He was dangerously hungry and her enticing scent made him ache to devour her in more ways than one.
    In some ways, it had been easy to keep his distance from her as long as he could pretend she was still just a lovelorn little girl. He had put oceans and continents and scores of other women between them, content to let his memories of her both tantalize and torment him.
    Was he the reason she had never wed? he wondered. He had certainly wasted enough of the lonely hours between dusk and dawn envisioning her in another man’s arms, another man’s bed. Yet here she was, still bearing the scars of his kiss on her throat like a burning brand. The irony did not escape him. She bore his mark, yet he could never again claim her for his own.
    And why not?
    Julian stiffened. He was no stranger to that sly voice or its dark insinuations. He wasn’t even surprised to find its oily cadences identical to Victor Duvalier’s. After all, it had been Duvalier who had turned him into a vampire. Duvalier who had taunted him, swearing that he would never know a moment’s peace or satisfactionuntil he stopped trying to be a man and embraced being a monster. Duvalier who had hurled Portia into his arms in that crypt, encouraging him to slake both his hunger and his loneliness by ripping the soul right out of her and making her his eternal bride.
    The temptation had lost none of its allure since that moment. If anything it had grown stronger, honed by endless nights of feeding without ever sating his appetites, touching but never truly feeling.
    No longer able to resist touching her, he brushed his fingertips across the pale scars on her throat. A frown flickered across her face. Her lips parted in a soft moan that could have indicated either pleasure or pain.
    A savage wave of heat flooded