Free Dracula's Desires by Linda Mercury Page B

and closed her eyes.
    Memory teased her nose. Something had happened, something that smelled almost like love. She opened her mouth, tasting the air. Earlier, her past had opened up and poured out on top of her. What was it?
    Wood smoke and lavender. The olfactory calling card of her late wife.
    Valerie sat on the concrete stage and covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. She had to concentrate.
    Ilona’s spirit lived on in someone. And whoever that was had John. Valerie pinched the bridge of her nose.
    When in doubt, strategize. Valerie tipped her head to the overcast sky and laid out her thoughts. A spring snow was on its way. She closed her jacket over her stomach.
    Fact: John Janté’s scent led to Mittlebau (why here?), but disappears.
    Supposition: John has been taken to a pocket dimension location.
    Radu: no sign of him. Could be behind this, but the act was too impulsive, not planned at all.
    This kidnapping stunk of desperation. Her brother was a master planner. If he was going to react fast to something, it wouldn’t be this sloppy.
    Ilona reborn: how? Who? What does she have to do with John? Other than liking dark-haired men, this was not her wife’s style.
    Valerie hoisted herself off the stage and paced the length of the muster grounds.
    She couldn’t do this alone. There were too many options, not enough data. Not even a whatever-she-was could retrieve John if he were not on Earth. After all, there were too many to kill all by herself.
    She’d need . . .
    No. No, no, no. No way in hell could she do that. She wasn’t about to risk her new life by finding Lance Soleil and asking him for help. He’d ruined her once. She was not about to let him ruin her again.
    The seductive perfume of cloves and freshly baked bread caressed the memorial ground and rendered moot the need to find Lance. Valerie rested the heel of her hand on the butt of her pistol. He held no power over her emotions anymore, she reminded herself. John’s rescue first.
    Her fingers tapped the pistol like an angry gunslinger at 11:59 A.M. She was ready for anything.
    Except her body’s response.
    As he approached her from the back, the warmth of his aura relaxed her muscles. Her shoulders lowered. Despite her fatigue from driving for seven hours straight, her hamstrings loosened and her clit strained against her stained jeans. Her already-sensitive breasts firmed and swelled inside her T-shirt. Her vagina clenched, eager for his life-changing lovemaking even before she saw him. Finally, her fangs emerged. His blood had transformed her, thrown her into pain and confusion, but how she wanted a taste of that crazy-making divine blood.
    A woman could think with more than her clitoris, though. This reaction was nothing more than classic stimulus response. Give her a whiff of that sweet-hot spice and she was ready to fuck him to Heaven here in the midst of this memorial to pain.
    No matter how hot that would be, though, sex with him would not make her happy. It would only remind her of what she had lost.
    Safe again, she looked at him for the first time since his ascension.
    Her sensitive eyes squinted against his blazing aura, now pure silver and gold. No more humanizing black spots of guilt lay scattered against his purity.
    She blinked away bloody tears at the blistering light and continued her appraisal. Enormous, glorious wings, of course. His arctic blue eyes retained their soul-searching gaze. Only his gaze was warmer, more compassionate.
    No more was he her warrior. Instead, he had transcended to something she could never touch.
    The putrid taste of loss filled Valerie’s throat. Tears prickled behind her nose.
    Lucifer’s balls. The bastard still looked like hot sex on a stick, too.
    Resisting was not going to be easy.
    Fuck it. She was Vlad Dracula, the scourge of the Turks, the embodiment of sex and evil. The Impaler did not beg.
    For John, she’d be polite to that damned angel.