Unwavering Read online

  We also needed a lot of security (see above), lots of room to spread out (see above: the mansion menagerie), and it wasn’t just our home. It was vampire HQ. Sinclair and I were expected to live like we were large and in charge. Apparently knocking on the door of a two-bedroom condo in South Minneapolis to pledge fealty to the ruler of the undead nation was...anticlimactic.

  All in all, good “problems” to have. But today I wished we lived in an RV, or the smallest mobile home ever designed, because getting down the hall to our room was taking too long. But then! Coming into sight: our door, end of the hall, like an oasis. A sex oasis.

  In half a second we were back in each other’s arms on the right side of a (locked) door, and now my outfit was the one that looked like someone had fed it through a shredder, jamming be damned. Especially my sports bra. Sinclair loathed sports bras.

  I loathe sports bras.

  Yeah? Do you want to walk around with a big band of elastic cinched around your chest for ten hours a day? No? Then shut your fang hole.

  How do you make the silliest comments sound unendurably erotic?

  I don’t—wait. Is that a compliment? Because that’s gonna determine how I respond.

  Or I could just hold you down and do filthy things to you until you’re delirious with pleasure.

  ...that works.

  Sinclair tossed a few more scraps to the floor

  (whee! fabric confetti!)

  and bent his head toward me. The sting of his fangs breaking the skin over my jugular worked on me like Pavlov worked over his dogs, or whatever the hell he did to them. You’ve heard “my knees went weak”? My knee bones disappeared. Knee bone? Singular? (Mental note: check with Marc on the number of knee bones.) Everything disappeared except Sinclair and his sinful sweet mouth. In seconds he’d pushed me from ‘damn, have I ever been this horny?’ to “oh, shit, I’m gonna come”.

  Which is when he pulled back, the bastard, and held me at arm’s length. Like he was going to hug me and we’d go our separate ways. Like he wasn’t going to fuck me, the mere thought of which was horrifying. He grinned at my outraged squeak, his teeth red with my blood, and the overriding thought

  (I’m about to fuck a very dangerous man)

  had lost none of its power in the five

  (six? two?)

  years we’d been together.

  He put his big hand in the middle of my chest and gave me a gentle push, which sent me flying back six feet

  (wheeeee!)

  and landing in the exact center of our bed. (Sinclair knew about physics.) Before I could even prop myself up on my elbows, he was on me. His kissed and sucked and nibbled up and down my throat, occasionally helping himself to a sip while I did my best to spell his name out on his back in scratch marks. (Fun vampire sex fact #4: the marks and bites would heal within minutes.)

  My love, you define delicious.

  S-I-N-K—dammit! Your name doesn’t have a K in it. I’m pretty sure...I can’t think when you’re doing thaaaaaannnnnggg...

  Sinclair and his clever clever tongue were doing wonderful things to the shell of my ear while his hand slid between my thighs as I tried to remember if there was a K in his name. It was on the tip of my tongue—oooh, his tongue! Of all Sinclair’s yummy collection of parts, his tongue was—

  “Uh, Betsy? Sinclair?” A tentative rap-rap-rap. “Sorry to bother you, but we need the heating pads.”

  Sinclair froze in mid-nibble, then turned his head and honest-to-God snarled at the door. “Touch that door again and I’ll pull your eyes from your skull.”

  (This is all kinds of wrong, but: oh my God soooo sexy!)

  I knew the voice. “Not a good time, Will!” Will Jar, part-time blogger and full-time zombie, the latest to join our little clutch. (Our gaggle? Our herd? Our litter? Coalition? Brace?) “It’s our special day!”

  “Yes, ours too. Um. Sinclair? I’m not actually touching the door—just having a conversation through it—so maybe don’t yank my eyeballs out?” Will’s voice was calm, measured, and just short of wheedling. “We just need the pads.”

  I shifted beneath my husband, who was resting his forehead on my shoulder and muttering dark threats into the side of my neck. “Wait, we?”

  A fresh bout of hammering actually shook the door in its frame. “Heating pads, you oversexed bimbo!” Marc Spangler, Zombie M.D., sounding a tad—shall we say—peeved? “And yeah, Sinclair, I mean you.”

  Another snarl from the vampire king. “Do you think because you’re zombies I cannot kill you? Gentlemen: I have been at this a very long time.”

  Somebody cleared his throat, and then Will piped up with, “Yeah, um, noted, but...your wife would prob’ly just bring us back to life. Again.” A pause. “Right?”

  “Right,” I sighed. “You’re not leaving until you get whatever it is you want, are you?”

  “Whatever it—I’ve told you what I want!” Little known fact: when Marc lost his temper, his voice climbed so high, dogs all over the block went crazy. “More than once! We could have taken care of this in the kitchen ten minutes ago!”

  “Right, right. I remember.” To Sinclair, I added, “He wants oven mitts for some reason. He won’t shut up about it.”

  A howl from the other side of the door. “I never asked for oven mitts! Heating pads, I want your heating pads and I’ll be damned if Will and I are re-bingeing Game of Thrones without them!”

  “What?” Betrayal! Marc was supposed to binge GoT with me. Oh, wait. That was Better Call Saul. Wasn’t it? We needed a bingeing schedule. A vampire queen’s work is never done. “Besides, you’re already damned. You’re a zombie who hangs out in Hell, for God’s sake. Textbook definition of damned.”

  “Focus, if you please, on his reasonable, if inane, request,” Sinclair muttered. “Just surrender the heating p—“

  “Never!” I’d elbowed my way out from under Sinclair, climbed off the bed, and was on my feet yelling at the closed door. “Those are ours! I’m claiming squatter’s rights, Marc Spangler, and you, too, Will Jar!”

  “Mason. My name’s Will Mason.”

  Do. Not. Care.

  “You get your own!” I finished, relieved because one way or another, this discussion was almost over, and also because I had the moral high ground. I almost never had the moral high ground. I was a vampire, for Christ’s sake.

  “Those are our own!” This punctuated with another flurry of rage hammering. Our poor door! If it buckled under the stress, we’d get a new one for half price. You’ve heard of cut cards? Get ten haircuts at the same place, the eleventh is free? We have bed cards. “I bought two of them from Walgreen’s just before Christmas and I bought three more from Target last month.” Thud-thud. Kick. “Want to see the receipts?”

  “Oh. I mean, no.” Huh. “So...you don’t want more oven mitts.” A peculiar movement caught my eye and I turned to look. My husband was lying face-down on our bed, shoulders shaking with what I hoped was a fit of the giggles. “But you do want half a dozen heating pads, all purchased by you?”

  “Yes! Jesus, finally.”

  “Ha!” I was now directly in front of the door; I was about to chastise the hell out of the door. The door would not know what hit it. (None of our doors knew what hit them.) “Trick question, we have eight heating pads in here!” I’d have mimed a mic drop, but it wasn’t 2010. Take that, locked bedroom door!

  Then the door got demanding: “Give. Me. My. Heating pads.”

  “You may have half of one heating pad.”

  “Half?” The door wasn’t too keen on that, given how it was shuddering in its frame again. Yikes, hope Marc put on shoes for this.

  “Darling, for the love of...” Sinclair, his giggle fit apparently under control, had gone into the bathroom and emerged burdened with heating pads, trailing cords like they were tails. “There are mere hours left of our special day. Give him the pads and then give yourself to me.”

  All right, two things wrong with that. One, I was pretty sure I still
had the high ground. Two, he should be giving himself to me. It was only—

  “Agreed,” he said at once. “Take me. Have me. As long as one of us does something to the other one of us. Soon.”

  Well then. I reached out, unlocked the door, swung it wide open. “You win, whiners.”

  “I don’t think the plural is fair,” Will said mildly, peeking over Marc’s shoulder. He was a writer, and they’re the worst when it comes to nit-picking language.

  “Jeez, Betsy, maybe a robe next time before we’re subjected to...” Marc made a vague gesture toward my mostly-naked self. “All of that.”

  “So avert your zombie gaze,” I snapped. “You weren’t exactly invited up here, y’know.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? I hadn’t known you a month the first time I saw you naked. In the kitchen, no less! How does someone with your money never have a robe at hand? It’s so tacky and helloooooo, Sinclair.”

  My mostly-naked husband handed off the pile of pads. “Here. With our compliments. And so begone.”

  I stuck a finger under Marc’s nose and his green eyed gaze managed to shift from Sinclair to me. When he wasn’t being shrill, Marc was actually great-looking: short black hair, vivid green peepers, about six feet tall, and he looked competent AF in faded hospital scrubs. His sweetie, Will, was cute, too, in a slender blond mild-mannered way. For a guy who sat in front of a computer all day when he wasn’t chatting up ghosts, he was in good shape, with lean lines and placid blue eyes. He smelled like clean laundry and was helpful and nice...an example to zombies everywhere.

  Now that I thought about it, there were only two zombies in the world, and they both looked terrific. They were a credit to their species! (Right? Species?) Instead of the movie stereotype of rotting corpses stumbling around yearning for brains to slurp, Will and Marc were only one or two minutes dead. Maybe just seconds dead. And instead of devouring brains on the half shell, they needed intellectual challenges to “live”. And they’d remain that way—seconds dead, still warm—as long as they didn’t stray too far from my side. So there were gonna be zombies living here for a long, long time.

  In my younger days (three years ago) when I was a naïve waif, that would have been a deal-breaker the size of Alaska. But I’d had to adjust my thinking on a number of issues since I woke up dead. Betsy Taylor: vampire queen, ruler of Hell, stereotype shatterer.

  (I really don’t get enough credit for the amazing shit I do.)

  And none of it was relevant. So back to the subject at hand: the handing off of the heating pads and the banishing of the zombies. “You got off lucky, pal!”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a lie,” Marc said, still averting his gaze from my nudeness while trying not to openly drool at Sinclair’s.

  “Nobody’s getting off,” Will piped up. “We’re taking it slow.”

  “Yes,” my husband sighed. “Quite right. No one is getting off.”

  “Spare me the grotesque detail of your zombie sexual shenanigans.”

  “But that’s my point,” Will continued. “There aren’t any, because—“

  “Keep up, Will, the topic is heating pads, which you came looking for, and now have, and we didn’t have to give you shit, but we did.” Again: not enough credit for the nice things I do. “Why d’you want so many?”

  “The same reason you do,” Marc replied. He’d finally torn his gaze from Sinclair’s splendid flank and was winding cords so he could dart off with his horde of heating pads without tripping. “While we’re only in the very earliest stage of autolysis, we still can’t regulate our cell temperature without outside assistance.”

  I just looked at him, then blinked slowly, like an undead owl.

  “They help us keep warm,” Will translated. “For snuggling.”

  I turned back to Marc. “Next time, just say that.”

  “Next time, I’ll burn this fucking house down around your ears,” came the muttered reply, and then Marc was grabbing Will’s hand and off they went. Will looked at us over his shoulder and opened his mouth as the door (finally) started to swing shut.

  “Sorry to bother y—“

  Slam. Click. Fuck?

  “Yes,” Sinclair said, but before he could do the old grab n’toss, I gave him a shove and followed him onto the bed. We tussled like puppies (horny pupp—nope, no, never mind, terrible simile) for a few seconds until I stretched out on top of him. I lowered my head and indulged in a long kiss.

  “I don’t care if they find a bomb in our basement (again). We’re not leaving this room and we’re not answering the door for anything.”

  “Agreed. Now if it won’t trouble you overmuch, could you...ah...that? Please?”

  I smiled against his throat, took another sip. Marveled for the hundredth time that something that sounded disgusting could feel so indecently amazing. Drinking my husband’s blood was like the best drug rush ever coupled with the best brownie sundae ever and the cherry on top was multiple orgasms.

  From one nibble. Just one.

  Pleased with his delighted groans, I kissed my way down his throat, across his shoulders, down his chest. I licked and licked at his nipples—Sinclair’s were as sensitive as the cup of my ear was. His fingers were already sliding through my hair and carefully cupping the back of my skull.

  There ought to be a law against you.

  Well, there isn’t. But there are laws against some of the things I do, if that’s any consolation.

  Surprisingly: yes!

  I kept working my way down until I was eye to eye (so to speak) with his cock. Here’s something fun: the stereotype about big tall men who have large hands and feet? Totally true. I licked the plummy head for a few seconds

  (hhhhhhnnnnnngggggg)

  and then sucked him in, taking care with my fangs. Sure, we healed pretty instantly, but who wants to risk a fang to the testicle? I didn’t even have testicles and it sounded terrible. My lips had to stretch just a bit to accommodate him, but given that he was always happy to go down on me for half-hour stretches, I in turn was always happy to return the favor. Well. Maybe not a thirty-minute favor, because if I wasn’t bouncing on his cock in another minute, I wasn’t going to be responsible for my actions, even the really bitchy ones.

  “I know, I know,” I said, pulling off, giving the crown of his cock a buh-bye-for-now kiss, then straddling him. “The lack of foreplay—it’s gauche. Rushed. Sophomoric!”

  “Fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine, whatever you want is fine, that’s fine.” (Oral sex rendered my husband incapable of using synonyms.)

  “Terrific! Glad you’re on board. And technically we’ve been indulging in foreplay since the kitchen. Interrupted foreplay, but nonetheless...you mind grabbing...?” I gestured toward the drawer beside bed and Sinclair tried to vocalize

  “Muh?”

  and then groped for the bedside table. My book (I was re-reading my favorite, Gone with the Wind...I still remembered reading it for the romance and being kind of amazed to find there was a huge war in there, too), the lamp, and our old-fashioned (it wasn’t even digital! old old fashioned) clock all hit the carpet, the latter with a jangly thump. For a second I was afraid he’d just rip the drawer out and hurl it across the room, but I needn’t have worried.

  “Dammit!” he growled, “where is the blasted thing?”

  He just yanked the drawer all the way out, then upended it, then nearly pitched me to the floor when he moved over to scoop the contents off the floor, and finally tossed it to me in triumph. I caught the tube of a sexually active vampire’s best friend (mint chocolate chip flavored), flipped open the top, squeezed a generous dollop into my palm. In the old days, I’d hold it in a clenched fist to warm it a little, but...

  Sinclair’s sly thought slipped into my brain: This would be a perfect time to utilize one of the heating pads.

  “Don’t even start with that,” I warned, but couldn’t stifle the giggle. “And brace yourself.”

  He let out a hiss as I slicke
d him up, and nearly leaped off the bed when I squeezed his length while running my lubed palm over and over and over the head of his cock. One of those don’t-stop-wait-too-much-don’t-stop sensations. (I felt the same way whenever I wolfed down a DQ Peanut Buster Parfait.)

  I leaned forward a bit, he leaned up a bit, and then his thick cock was filling me exactly the way I liked: hard and inexorable and so, so fine. I pressed my palms against his shoulders and started to rock back and forth

  (ah God that’s good)

  as I took from him exactly what he wanted to give me, which was everything. “Christ,” he gasped, gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, and I leaned down for another kiss, nibbling on his lower lip and teasing him with my tongue.

  More.

  “Yes.”

  Harder.

  “Yes.”

  His hands left my waist and cupped my breasts. I leaned down so he could kiss and lick my nipples, so he could whisper dirty glorious things into my cleavage, so I could feel him smiling against my flesh. We delighted in each other, there was no other way to put it, and we lived for these moments when we could indulge in an act made joyful as much by what we said and were to each other as by the physical part.

  “You. Are. Glorious.” Each word was punctuated by an upward thrust.

  “Yes,” I agreed. I gripped the headboard to steady myself as I rode him. “Which works out nicely, since you are, too.”

  He smiled up at me, his dark gaze never leaving my face. My own, I should be dead without you.

  “We’ve done the dying thing. It’s passé. Good thing we got it out of the way early, huh?”

  Only you could make returning from the grave—on multiple occasions—sound like filing your taxes in January.

  This time on the upstroke I didn’t go right back down, so only the tip stayed inside me. I kept us there for a couple of seconds and smirked as Sinclair cursed. I didn’t have the upper hand for long—my smirk was premature—because Sinclair seized my shoulders and rolled, and in half a second I was on my knees, eye-to-eye (so to speak) with the headboard as he eased his cock back in.