Famine's Feast (The Templar Book 4) Read online

  “Play your cards right, buddy, and I might let you peek up my skirt.”

  Or maybe not. I suddenly remembered my underwearless state and decided peeking up the skirt would need to wait until I had some nice lacy stuff on. The idea of Dario seeing my naked lower half, running his hands up along my legs to my hips, exploring me with his fingers had me flustered. I was sprawled out on the floor with a drill in one hand, wearing no underwear, and he was standing over me, probably looking down the neckline of my dress, thinking about what was under my skirt.

  Yes, he was looking down the neckline of my dress, an appreciative smirk on his lips.

  “What are you doing here?” I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I had over four more hours of my volunteer shift to go and I couldn’t spend it all hot and bothered.

  “Didn’t you get my text? I want to see you. This is the first chance I’ve had to spend time with you since I came back from dealing with the rogues north of the city. I thought if I came by and helped out, you could finish early and we could go somewhere.”

  My mind was thinking of the places I’d like to go, all of them involving a bed. Or the couch. Or pushed up against a wall. If my neighbors complained about my “loud parties” now, I can only imagine what they’d say when my headboard started banging against the shared wall.

  I fanned my face. With the drill. It didn’t do much good. “It’s time served, not by the job. I need to put in five hours tonight or I’ll never be done with this community service. Plus, I promised Duane. There aren’t many of us here tonight. He needs me.”

  Dario looked around. “It’s warm out. You’ll probably only get ten or twenty guests.” Then he reached down to pick up the box of nails, tilting his head as if he were indeed trying to look up my skirt. “What are the nails for?”

  “For the sheets there. We need to make a divider to separate the women’s from the men’s sleeping areas.” I got to my feet and moved the assembled cot aside, grabbing another set of poles.

  Dario nodded, picking up the square of fabric that served as the cot mattress and handing it to me. Was he going to stay and help? Our time together so far had either been dinner at Sesarios or related to the supernatural in Baltimore that affected human and/or vampire safety. Was he really going to hang out and do volunteer work with me tonight?

  “How’d the tourney go? How much did you all raise for the animal shelter?”

  I loved how he actually listened to me, how he remembered the little things I’d told him and made sure to ask about them the next time we met.

  “There were a lot of spectators, so I think the fundraising part went pretty well. I won.”

  “Of course you won.” There was a self-satisfied note to his voice, like my prowess on the tourney field reflected positively on his own reputation.

  “It was a close one. There was this guy there—Wolfram—who was really good. He hit like a battering ram. I’m covered in bruises. There’s one on my hip that’s huge and swollen. It looks like someone surgically implanted a grapefruit under my skin.”

  He closed the distance between us, his hands gentle on my side. Then he began to slowly slide my dress upward. “Let me see.”

  What was he now, a doctor? The dress made it dangerously high on my thighs before my brain kicked in. No underwear. No underwear! I grabbed the hem and yanked it down, gasping as the motion pulled at the stiff muscles in my side. “What are you doing? We’re in public. You can’t just pull my skirt up.”

  “We’re over here in a corner. No one’s looking. If it’s swollen that bad, you might need to see a doctor. Just pull the dress up on the one side. I’ll block the view. It’s not like I haven’t seen you in less.”

  No, he hadn’t. “No! If it still hurts in the morning, I’ll go to the doctor.”

  I had no money. I wouldn’t be going to the doctor unless I had limbs hanging from my body by a tendon. Besides, it was just a bruise. A really big, deep bruise, but nothing life threatening.

  “If it still hurts in the morning I’ll send a doctor over,” he informed me. “How bad is it? I can get you some aspirin, or something stronger.”

  A doctor and now a walking pharmacy. Although I’m sure Dario had access to all sorts of things—pharmaceutical or otherwise. “I already took some aspirin. And I don’t need a doctor. I’m fine. It’s a bruise, you don’t need to see it.”

  Or see me without underwear. That wasn’t the only bruise I had, but it was the ugliest. If Dario and I wound up naked together it should probably be in a very dark room.

  He removed his hands from my dress, stepping back. “Maybe I want to see your bruises, or maybe I’m looking for an excuse to peek up your dress. You sure you don’t want to sneak into the bathroom so I can play doctor?”

  Yes, but not in this particular bathroom. Yuck. “I’ll need to hear your credentials, Doctor Dario. I don’t just let any guy off the street claiming medical expertise see my many bruises.”

  He grinned. “I can’t say I’ve had much medical experience as a vampire. We don’t get sick and most injuries heal within a few days, max. Although as a human back in Haiti I encountered plenty of broken bones, cracked ribs, cuts, and other injuries. They wouldn’t let us have actual doctors, so we had to learn to stitch wounds, set bones, and break fevers all on our own. Plus, I’ve seen my share of combat wounds both as a human and as a vampire. Does any of that meet your exacting criteria? Now pull up your dress so Doctor Dario can take a look.”

  I grabbed my hem and held it down tight against my legs. “Maybe when we’re somewhere private. Just for the purposes of medical diagnosis, you know.”

  I loved this flirty banter, but he’d also revealed a part of his past that he’d always kept hidden away from me—and probably from his family. Thinking of what he’d said, I did the math with what little I knew of Haiti. “So you fought in the revolution? But you look like you were turned in your mid-twenties, and the revolution started in the late seventeen hundreds. You would have been over a hundred years old at that point, so you must have fought as a vampire.”

  Something dark came over his eyes, haunted, harsh and brutal, before it vanished with a blink. “There was plenty of combat before the actual revolution. Thirteen wasn’t too young to fight back then. In all honesty, I’ve been fighting since I can remember.”

  Suddenly my hurt hip seemed inconsequential, the cot pieces in my hand, forgotten. “You ran away from the plantation at thirteen to join up with the Tainos and Maroons in the mountains?”

  “I ran away at ten, but got caught. At thirteen I managed to get to the mountains.”

  His answer was short and unemotional, but I could see he was fighting the need to keep all this buried with the desire to share it. I wondered what had happened to him at ten. What scars did he bear from that escape attempt? What scars did he bear from the whole experience of being owned by another human, treated as if he had lower value than the livestock, or even the plants in the field. I knew that in the former Hispaniola, both the French and the Spanish sides of the island had found it cheaper to bring new slaves over from Africa rather than provide medical attention, or even much in the way of food, to their current staff. I was surprised Dario had survived to adulthood. I was surprised he’d been born at all.

  “What happened when you got caught?”

  He hesitated, then leaned against the wall. “I was returned to the plantation. Whipped and branded. Not too bad. No worse than when I got caught eating the cane from the fields and they made me wear a muzzle.”

  They made him wear a muzzle? A small child? And they’d branded a ten-year-old boy? “Do you still have the mark?”

  A cold fury lit up his eyes, belying his casual shrug. “I cut it off the next time I ran away, so it’s just some scarred skin on my thigh. I made damned sure they didn’t catch me again, though. Repeat offenders lost a limb or were mutilated. I’d seen a few buried alive or tied for days on top of insect mounds.”

  I didn’t know what to say. A ten
-year-old boy, beaten and branded. A child who had witnessed starvation, torture, murder. I wanted to know more, but this was so harsh that I wanted to return to our light flirting. I felt like I could only take the horror-story that was Dario’s past in little bits, with time to recover in between small reveals. How he survived it all, how he came through it without becoming a complete monster, was beyond me.

  He pushed away from the wall and came to stand inches from me, leaning down to whisper in my ear. “I’ll show you my scars if you show me yours.”

  There was something deeper to his suggestion beyond the “playing doctor” game. It wouldn’t be a fair trade. Whatever scars I had, they were insignificant compared to his. So I took a deep breath and chose to force this emotion-laden conversation back to where it had been.

  “I can’t show you the bruise on my hip right now. I don’t have any underwear on. Like, no underwear at all, not just nasty grannie-panties or the ones with holes in them.”

  His brows shot up, the darkness leaving his eyes as a slow grin creased his face. “Seriously? You’re in a dress with no underwear on. It’s like all my prayers were answered right here today. Let’s find somewhere private so I can check out this gigantic bruise of yours. I’ll kiss it and make it all better.”

  Oh, that would definitely make it feel better. It would make everything feel better. “We’re in a church. You’ll just have to be satisfied with your imagination, because I don’t finish here until two a.m., and I’m not sneaking away to play kiss-the-boo-boos with a vampire in a church.”

  There was definitely an unholy light in his eyes now. “Two o’clock. I’m counting down the hours, then I’m going to drag you off somewhere private and tear that dress right off of you.”

  My heart thumped, everything south of my waist wanting that to happen right now. The next four hours were going to be torture.

  “So how bad is this bruise? Describe it in detail, lots of detail. Then let me know if I need to go kill this Wolfram person.”

  I started assembling the cot. “The swollen part is oblong, probably about five inches long and two wide. That’s where he hit me. The bruise extends out from that about three inches or so. The usual purple and black. I’ll get some green going on there in a day or two.”

  If we’d been fighting with real swords I don’t think I would have been quite as beat up. Those rattan things left a mark, and something about using real steel made the participants dial it back a notch. Although I got the feeling Wolfram would have hit just as hard with a real blade as the wooden ones.

  “Do I need to kill him? Was he using excessive force?”

  His voice was still light and teasing, but a muscle twitched in his jaw, reminding me that the vampire didn’t have any problems when it came to killing.

  “Yes, and I used excessive force back. I didn’t get to see him naked after the fight, but I’m sure his skin is just as colorful as mine. Plus, I gave him a black eye. His helm didn’t fit properly. Guy is lucky I didn’t break his nose.”

  “Well since you delivered a humiliating and painful defeat, I guess I’ll let him live.”

  Was he teasing? I wasn’t really sure. “Totally humiliating. We had a side bet going on and he had to show up at dinner in a dress and eat at my feet.”

  Dario laughed. “Now I’m starting to feel sorry for this Wolfram. How did Zac take this whole thing?”

  Did he know Zac and I had dated? And did he know we weren’t any longer? I’d mentioned him a few times as a friend, but I wasn’t sure if Dario knew the rest of our story. Especially the fact that I’d ditched a perfectly cute, nice man because all I could think about was this vampire in front of me.

  “Zac is thrilled that he’s now going to be my queen, having climbed into the royal ranks on my back. He didn’t seem to care one way or another about Wolfram once I won the tourney. I don’t think he even noticed Wolfram sticking his hand under my skirt and feeling up my leg.”

  Dario sucked in a breath. “What? He did what? The guy whacks you hard enough to cause bruising through your armor. You return the favor and make him sit at your feet in a dress, and he feels you up?” The vampire put his hand on my thigh, bunching up a fist-full of my dress. “How come he gets to put his hands under your dress in the middle of dinner, but I have to wait?”

  I tried to push his hand away with the butt of the drill. “Because my skirt at that time reached the ground. All he was groping was my ankle. Well, maybe my calf. Your hand right now is much higher than Wolfram ever got.”

  “So he didn’t touch you here?” His other hand snuck under my hem to rest mid-thigh. “Or here?”

  “Stop,” I hissed, half laughing as I tried to evade the palm working its way up my thigh.

  “Are you guys actually going to work, or what?” Duane’s disapproving voice was like a splash of cold water making me jump away from Dario. “We’re starting to let people in, and you’ve only assembled four beds.”

  I watched Duane walk away, nearly laughing at the expression on Dario’s face. How long had it been since someone actually had the nerve to scold him?

  “See? You’re going to get me in trouble. Put your libido in check and help me out here. Nail those sheets up, and I’ll finish the cots.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Seemingly subdued, the vampire grabbed a nail of out the box and unfolded a sheet. I assembled another set of cot pieces and picked up the screw gun, watching him the whole time. A few of our guests had started to filter in, one of the other volunteers checking them in and giving them their packets. Duane was putting a clean blanket on each cot. Ten thirty. Three and a half hours to go and then…then what? I eyed Dario’s broad shoulders as he shook out the sheet, holding one end up against the wall. The muscles in his arms flexed and I caught my breath. I didn’t care how doomed this was, how we were going to end in tragedy. All I cared about was now. I was going for it, throwing caution to the winds and not looking back. We might crash and burn, but I’d sure enjoy the ride.

  “Wanna watch me screw?” I couldn’t resist.

  He turned to look at me over his shoulder, a slow smile curling up his lips. “I’d rather participate in the activity with you.”

  “Sorry.” I waved the drill at him. “I’m going to be screwing solo tonight.”

  “Not if I can help it,” he muttered. Putting one of the ten penny nails against the sheet he slammed it with his fist, driving it in all the way to the head. Then he turned to look at me in smug satisfaction.

  Oh, I was so not going to be screwing alone tonight. I had plans for the two of us that involved a mattress of our own, but I loved teasing him.

  “If you think you’re turning me on with your ‘hammer that sucker home’ routine, think again. All I can envision now is a trip to the hospital. Ouch. And that sheet isn’t supposed to go there. Stretch it across the wooden frames and nail it on so we can move the partition if we need to.”

  “Oops.” He picked at the nail with his fingers, digging into the wall to grab the head and ease it out. “And here I figured you to be a rough-sex sort of woman. Why don’t you start screwing and show me how you like it?”

  This was going in a direction…well, it was a direction I really wanted it to go. My whole body went hot and tingly with the thought. I’d done stupider things in my life. Might as well add sex with a vampire to them.

  So I screwed, joining the cot together. When it was done I held up the screw gun. “Was it good for you? It was good for me. It was definitely good for this bed I’m assembling.”

  “So you like a slow, utilitarian approach. I see.” He stroked his chin, tilting his head to eye the metal bed frame. “Hopefully I can broaden your horizons.”

  “As long as you’re not hammering me into the wall.”

  His dark eyes were intense as they roamed my body. “Trust me, if I were to hammer you into the wall, you’d enjoy it.”

  Yes, I probably would.

  “Get a room,” one of the guests growled as he walked by.

&n
bsp; I intended to. Two o’clock couldn’t come soon enough.

  Chapter 6

  We finished the cots and the partition with continued sexual innuendo. Several of the guests had come by to stand around with their cups of coffee and add to the R-rated conversation. I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be making double entendres about rocking the cots, and spreading legs farther apart while in a church surrounded by homeless people, but it was fun. And our participative audience seemed to enjoy it. Two o’clock arrived before I knew it. The residents were tucked in for the night, and the second shift had arrived, so Duane signed me out, and Dario and I walked through the narrow alley beside the building toward the front where my car was parked.

  The only sounds were the cars on the street and our footsteps on the pavement. This side of the church was unlit, the front spotlights casting a beam of gold that made the walkway seem even darker in contrast. The hot sexiness we’d started the night with had turned to light-hearted fun, and I wasn’t sure how to transition back. Should I just invite him to my place? Should I come right out and tell him what I wanted? We had five hours until dawn—plenty of time to have sex twice or maybe more before he had to be underground for the day.

  I turned, opening my mouth to deliver the most awkward proposition in the history of the world only to find myself pinned against the wall, Dario’s mouth on mine, taking every advantage of my parted lips.

  There was a moment when it seemed time stopped, then I got with the program, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him back. His body pressed hard against mine, his hands working my skirt up as he caressed my thighs before snaking around to grip my ass and angle my hips against his.

  Wow. Damn. I found myself not caring about the bed anymore. He really could nail me up against this wall, and that would be just fine with me right now.