Free blood 03 - blood chosen by Tamara Rose Blodgett Page A

rich.”
    Jacqueline's dark eyes were shadowed in warning, which he ignored. Tony could barely close his legs for the brass balls he held there. He knew it even if she did not. Jacqueline would eventually know, he vowed.
    She moved toward him, her long skirt ill-suited to the environment. Jacqueline stopped so suddenly in front of him that her skirt wrapped his ankles and Tony became acutely aware of two things: she was female and dangerous. A tandem combination he didn't ordinarily encounter.
    It was hot as fuck.
    He just didn't know how to handle it. How could you control a snake as its rattles shake? Tony didn't know but he was jonesing to find out.
    “It would do you well to remember that I am the one who holds the strings here, Were. It is only our mutual objectives that bring us together.”
    He grabbed his package, giving it a definitive squeeze and she snorted in disgust. “Yeah... but you need me, bitch.”
    The ring of her slap echoed in the open meadow of the forest and he grabbed her small wrist, subtly grinding those fragile bones together. “Don't start things you can't finish,” Tony warned, jerking her against himself.
    “You are a foul creature, Tony of the Were,” she stated softly, the proof of his arousal like a rigid pole between them.
    “Yeah I am. You might want to remember that.” He cocked his head, pegging her with eyes as dark as her own. “I don't notice you hitting me over the head with your talent to get me to stop.” He smirked in condescension, knowing his superiority- owning it. He jacked her arm up behind her back and she made a small pain noise and it amped his shit up even more.
    Jacqueline did the opposite of what he thought she'd do and that unpredictability was the very thing that Tony should have anticipated. Instead of struggling to get away, she allowed Tony to keep her pressed against him, her arm shrieking behind her, as she leaned deeply into his space. So deeply he could smell the soap she had used that morning.
    “There are other ways,” Jacqueline murmured against the shell of his ear and every fiber of his being relaxed, thinking that she symbolically offered her throat. That was always the trouble with Tony; sex scrambled his signals and his instincts misfired.
    She lifted her knee into his groin with a deft impact that caused instant nausea to roll in his gut, unfolding into a heated lump that roared up his throat. Jacqueline stepped back, sending him into a staggering sprawl to the forest ground with a perfectly executed flat-palmed shove dead-center in his sternum.
    Tony felt his fingers bite into the damp fragrant earth, comprised of coniferous needles, the rotting undergrowth of leaves and moss. The organic reek became the catalyst for what happened next. His vomit joined everything beneath him as he heaved his guts, his nuts crawling to safety underneath his cock.
    And all the while Jacqueline stood cackling in the background.
    That cunt would pay. And if it be with more than her life, that was just fine by Tony.
     
    *
     
    Jacqueline left the Were where he lay, the imbecile. Cunning though he may be, and necessary... horribly necessary; Jacqueline could barely abide their acquaintance. If she could but gain free passage, she could bring to Marcus the words from the Book of Singers that would exempt her. Then he would be forced to acquiesce.
    For the Rare One had not consummated. With her biological son, nor with the two that she must to close that loop Jacqueline desperately wished to remain open. Until such time, there was a fracture in the perfection of Julia's future rule. The Singers would lift her up, but Jacqueline's bid for her throne should have underscored that damning fact that, if it had not been for the Were and Vampire, she would be a dead Queen. Julia's indecision made her vulnerable. And where vulnerability lay, the Singers would never realize unity and freedom from the supernatural wars.
    Not that those things were a remote concern to