Night Born Read online

  Night Born

  Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  Love and hate, vampire and slayer—opposites too closely connected for their own good?

  After her mother is nearly killed, slayer-in-waiting Danika Douglas vows to destroy the vampire she believes is responsible—Alexander Kent. An experienced vampire older than sin itself, Alexander possesses dark good looks and a strong sensual allure.

  Danika knows a slayer and her target are chained together by fate, compelled to find each other. Yet she never expected them to share such a powerful attraction, leaving Danika torn between revenge and desire….

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter One

  The blonde had the ability to alter the temperature of her surroundings, making things seem warmer than they were. In this case, she was affecting the carefully monitored and air-controlled gallery of a private museum showcasing priceless impressionist art.

  Alexander Kent’s museum.

  From the doorway of the gallery, Alex watched the blonde carefully. It was the third day in a row she had taken up residence, perched on the same marble bench, in the same room, staring up at the same painting; as still as one of the museum’s statues, with her spine straight and her hands in her lap. She was, he decided, equally as beautiful as any of the statues in his collection and she seemed almost as timeless.

  He began to fear for the paintings in that room with her. All that heat…

  He had also, Alex realized, started thinking of the anonymous woman as a central feature in his show. To hell with the art.

  Who are you?

  Why does this picture draw you?

  What do you see?

  It was a dangerous puzzle, but one of his own making, of course. As far as he knew, she was only interested in this one particular painting. The little flutter of apprehension at the base of his neck was unwarranted, because no one in the world knew his very private secret—the reason for the choices he’d made in putting together this collection. A young woman who was only part way to her thirtieth birthday would never understand. A young woman who was so very dazzling on the eyes.

  Today, she wore a coat the color of a garnet, not quite the hue of an open vein, and the shade made her hair seem very fair by comparison. Like glistening wheat, maybe, Alex decided. Or slightly faded golden thread. She wore it softly twisted upward, and held with a diamond clip, allowing him an unobstructed view of the graceful curve of her neck—a stretch of unblemished ivory sleekness punctuated by delicate bones and highlighted by a few flyaway tendrils of that same spun gold.

  It had taken him a while to move past the erotic lure of the woman. Each day was the same. Pausing to admire the lustrous hair he wanted to reach his hands into. Sensing the pulse in her beautiful neck that he wanted to stroke with his lips, and…bite.

  He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d caved to these kinds of barbaric sexual urges. Like most vampires as old as himself, time had ceased to mean much. He now counted weeks by the changing art collections, and years by looking at the date above the newspaper headlines. His efficient staff saw to everything else. The museum was a well-oiled machine.

  Lust, however, was another matter. How could anyone else help him with that? This woman on the bench, for reasons not quite clear to him, had him by the privates, as surely as if she’d grabbed hold and squeezed. With her very first appearance, she had made whatever time he was missing stand still, as if she somehow had control over that, too.

  Very intriguing. This sudden allure.

  Under the red coat she wore a fitted skirt that all too sensibly reached her crossed knees. Her long, shapely legs were covered by opaque tights in the same shade of black as her chic, very high-heeled shoes. Long ago, in Venice, he would have sipped champagne from those shoes and torn her clothes off to get at what lay waiting beneath. As a matter of fact, he wanted to do those things now—maybe also indulging her own secret fantasy to make love surrounded by centuries of master painters.

  She seemed to be completely captivated by the art she was studying so intently. Oddly enough, she actually seemed to be staring at his image in it. At his face—nearly hidden by the extravagant strokes of the artist’s brush, but visible enough to those who looked.

  The thought of the woman admiring him made Alex’s pulse quicken. He was becoming noticeably aroused as he daydreamed about this sleek female whose voice he had never heard, and whose eyes he hadn’t yet looked into. He hoped those eyes were green, his favorite color, and bright with intelligence, instead of the dullness pointed out in modern jokes about tow-headed blondes.

  He’d known scores of brunettes in his many lifetimes, all of them lush, beautiful, thought-provoking and temporary. True blondes, natural blondes, such as this one, alight with creamy skin, petal-pink lips and fine bone structure, were as rare and elusive as any other earthly treasure. He had only known one such creature closely in the long span of centuries gone by, and it was she who had hurt him so deeply…with a sharp, silver-tipped arrow.

  With that memory in mind, Alex’s eyes roamed over the woman on the bench. His pulse continued to pound.

  Would you agree to a dangerous liaison with a creature such as myself if I asked politely?

  She didn’t turn her head to acknowledge his silent question. He tacked more on.

  If I signed a pledge in blood that you will walk out of here alive when we’re through?

  How about, Alex thought, if he offered her that damn painting in return for taking him on?

  Win-win?

  No matter about the painting, he’d say to her. He had never much liked that one, or its artist, anyway.

  “Brings back too many memories, don’t you see?”

  He’d said this last bit aloud without meaning to, catching glances from several college students passing by in a clump. She didn’t look his way. His vixen in red. The only objet d’art he wanted at the moment, and so badly he could taste it. The one for which he might have given up all the canvases in the room, in this moment, for just one sample of.

  Because he wanted this so badly, he supposed it was up to him to make the first move.

  But when she got to her feet, he felt a thud inside his chest. When she moved toward the painting and reached out, tentatively touching it by running a fingertip across its aged surface…his fangs dropped, as if she had touched him, not only in oil, but in the flesh. As if she had dared to stroke his cheek, here, now, in the present and in front of everyone else in the room.

  It was such an intimate sensation, so erotically charged and seductive, her action kick-started a long tamped-down thirst that pulled him from his position in the doorway.

  No one had ever dared to touch him like that.

  Alex watched avidly as her hand dropped back to her side, hearing the rustle of her coat, feeling the shudder that shook her shoulders as she stared at the painting, absorbed by it, as if she had found within the art some hint of a long-lost lover.

  And then he got it, with the suddenness of insight and an instinct for survival that had taken him this far. It was his face she studied in the painting. Her gaze was trained on the likeness of himself.

  The realization was one hell of a surprise.

  New questions arose. Had she see him in the corridor and just noticed the similarities by chance? Did she know him from someplace else, such as other galleries and auctions? He didn’t see how he could have forgotten her. No. He could not have forgotten the beauty of this blonde’s physical symmetry, or her regal bearing. Nor could she have an inkling about that face in the painting being his.

 
He blew out a sigh, concluding that his intentions had just been made easier by half. This striking art lover had found something she liked in that former incarnation of himself, captured on canvas many years ago. What would she think if he interrupted whatever personal fantasy she had going on, in person? If she saw him here in the doorway and made the connection—his face, with the face in the painting—he’d have plenty of excuses ready for the similarities by the time his lips grazed hers.

  Alex almost moved toward her. Yet, wait, his prickling senses warned. The way she was staring, the intensity of her scrutiny, suddenly seemed more than just some serendipitous accident. The way she touched the canvas seemed uncannily like foreplay. A certain kind of recognizable foreplay that resonated deep in his bones, where a fine sliver of a silver-tipped arrow still remained.

  Hell…

  Rolling his broad shoulders, and with a centuries-old vampire’s well-honed instincts for survival, Alex stepped back into the shadows with his fangs aching.

  “I’ve found you, you son of a bitch.”

  Danika Douglas hadn’t stopped to think about whether touching a priceless painting might be committing museum sacrilege or a crime. She’d been too immersed in the moment to care.

  Here he was again. The same face she’d found in a Baroque period painting two days before. Exactly the same face.

  Same wide brow and prominent, aristocratic features. Same penetrating blue eyes beneath the tangle of dark hair—here, seen only in profile, and in dashes of color and shadings, but the likeness was exact, give or take the hairstyle and clothes.

  She had just won the bloodsucker lottery.

  A telltale tingle of excitement flushed her cheeks and neck with heat. Shivers of apprehension chilled her back. It was always the same clashing of heat and cold within her when her assumptions were correct. She might not yet have inherited her mother’s ability to track the vampire in this painting with a Slayer’s DNA-based, biologically built-in GPS system, but those powers were agonizingly inching toward her.

  She felt him now, as if she had found him for real, and in person. Her gut reaction to his image was strong. His presence in the Renoir was like an icy breath on the back of her neck. She could almost smell him, beyond the aged oils of the artwork and the polished marble museum floors.

  He smelled like…leather.

  Like doom.

  This was a first connection. An introduction. Had to be. Finding this arrogant creature was the first step in her enactment of revenge. Danika now knew who she’d be dealing with. She was sure she was looking at the face of the monster that had put her mother in the hospital the week before in an irreversible coma. She had found him first in the Baroque gallery painting, and now here with the Impressionists. And if she had found him in two places, in two different eras of artwork, how many more traces of him would a diligent search turn up? How long had this killer been around, flaunting himself?

  Where was he now, waiting around for his next challenge? A challenge marked with her initials?

  “Bloodsucking bastard.”

  She wanted to slash the painting, the hurt of what he’d done to her mother was so bad.

  Danika dropped the piece of paper she’d found in her mother’s drawer that had led her to this museum in the first place, and heard it flutter to the floor. It had to be some kind of cosmic mistake that allowed blood-drinking parasites to walk the earth. What good were creatures that preyed on others, feasting on the life blood of innocent people; blood that helped to perpetuate their inexcusable existence?

  This one was a master. This vampire in the painting, with his supernaturally enhanced thirtysomething-year-old looks and intelligent, knowing gaze, had cruised through time, avoiding each Slayer tuned in to his frequency.

  There had to have been a lot of Slayers after him in all those years from the Baroque to the present. Her mother was the latest victim. The same mother who lay dying; irreparably damaged by this vampire’s hand.

  When her mom’s last shuddering breath ended, Dankia would inherit her mother’s job. Whatever that thing was that kicked a Slayer into existence would happen to her. It would happen in one second—from one Slayer to another, one breath to another, as if the whole Slayer thing was airborne and contagious.

  When her mother died, this pretty vampire would become Danika’s target, her goal, her reason for existing. Nothing up until then would matter. There might be no future. Working hard at anything else would be a waste of time and an energy drain on a system designed for one purpose only…

  “You,” Danika whispered to the face in the painting.

  The chills of making his acquaintance in this way persisted long after she had closed her eyes to imprint the vampire’s face on her mind, burning its planes and angles into a permanent record. Along with the spreading cold came a faint tingle of apprehension and a sense of being watched. No doubt this was normal under the circumstances. She had been touching priceless artwork, after all.

  But no guard came to issue a warning or escort her from the premises. She heard the shuffling feet of people moving by, and their muted whispers, without bothering to look.

  The pain she held inside was compounding. Heartbreak set her jaw on edge, as it had each day her mother clung to the separating threads of life. Her beloved mother, who had been torn to pieces and nearly drained dry by a vampire wielding lethal fangs, and for whom only an act of God had allowed her to hold off death on a grimy side street for a more kindly end in a hospital bed.

  Do I have this kind of end to look forward to?

  Probably. Inevitably. It comes with the territory.

  You didn’t shirk the duties of being a vampire hunter. There was no refusing the job or requesting a rewind. Mother to daughter was how this particular genetic red ribbon was tied, as far back as anyone knew.

  In her family, there was one Slayer for one main target—another kind of strange cosmic linking. If the vampire who had taken on her mother knew this and had survived this long, it was logical he’d be after her mother’s daughter next. He would know her somehow, just as she had instinctively known him on this canvas.

  Hopefully, she would see him coming. The handsome bastard in these paintings would be hard to miss. He was, in fact, too good-looking to be real.

  And waiting to become something she only had a sense of at this point was unnerving. There was no Slayer school. No How to Kill A Vampire handbook. She’d been trained as an athlete, but wasn’t anything like her mother in terms of speed and agility. She had only known about her mother’s secret life for the past couple of years, when her mother began to tell her stories—stories that didn’t in any way translate to finishing the task her mother had started.

  Danika opened her eyes reluctantly, uncomfortable with the overhead lights and the persistent chill that seemed to be hanging on despite her layering of clothes. The room had grown cold. Most of the people had moved on to the next room, leaving her there with her budding vendetta against a creature of the night that she hadn’t ever really seen. A monster whose hurtfully handsome, chiseled exterior camouflaged a rotten core. A freak with a craving for blood.

  “This one will be for you, Mom, I swear.”

  Pledge made, Danika put a hand to the back of her neck to ward off the ongoing sensations, and felt a sudden jolt of electricity slide through her arm. Startled, she swayed as another jolt hit, this one coming straight through her back with an impact that rocked her on her heels.

  She reached to the wall for support, splaying her hands over the painting, careful not to touch him again…and turned her head.

  Her eyes met the deep blue quizzical gaze of the man across from her in the doorway. Familiar blue eyes, she thought, surrounded by features that had been tattooed into the space behind her skull just minutes before.

  “You!” she whispered again, barely managing to speak through lips already going numb with shock.

  In the time it took her to blink, and thinking she had to be mistaken, that she had merely i
nvented some freaky mirage in order to get a grip on her new destiny…the man with the blue eyes was gone. Taking the extremes of the chill with him. Leaving in his wake the nearly overwhelming fear of having actually found a conscienceless killer.

  Careful to wait out the sudden weakness in her knees, and afraid she might not make it to the exit, Danika pushed off the wall. It was possible she really had made a mistake and paranoia was preying on her. Yet her breathing was labored. Her hands were shaking.

  “Some Slayer I’ll make.”

  Gathering herself, Danika stood straighter. “Lots of people have blue eyes. The city is filled with handsome, dark-haired men with classic features. There are probably several men fitting that description in this museum right now.”

  She managed a step toward the doorway with her heart continuing to pound. Despite her reasoning, apprehension circled. The air in the gallery, if not as cold as it had been a moment ago, seemed noticeably disturbed. Her racing heart refused to calm down; she felt each damning beat in her throat.

  And again, that icy breath on the back of her neck.

  Turning toward the far gallery that lay beyond the arch, Danika thought she saw him there. The man with the blue eyes. He was weaving his way through a group of people admiring the Monets, clearly not one of that group. His dark good looks stood out among the scruffier younger crowd. He was taller than everyone else, and dressed in a black leather jacket that matched his dark, collar-length hair.

  There was something eerily unusual about the way he moved. Too graceful, maybe, for a man his size. Sinuous. Almost…predatory.

  He could be a mental mirage, Danika thought reproachfully. Wishful thinking about finding the vampire who had damaged her mother. But whether or not this was who she thought it was, her instinct was to run. Get out of there. At least until she had a better handle on her situation and how it was to go down.

  Unfortunately, her legs weren’t responding.

  More people had filed in and were threading around her, eyeing her, probably wondering why she was gazing into the distance instead of at what hung on the walls. She didn’t care. Nor did she move out of their way. She was haunted by the thought of the imminent approach of her birthright, and the remembered sight of her mother’s shredded body. She had every right to be anxious about the guy in the leather jacket. You just never knew how many predatory creatures were on the loose.