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  Table of Contents

  Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Vampire’s Heart Kristina Lloyd Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Buddies Don’t Bite Portia Da Costa Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Under her Skin Mathilde Madden Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  Day 8

  Day 9

  Day 10

  Day 11

  Day 12

  Day 13

  Day 14

  Day 15

  Day 16

  Day 17

  Day 18

  Day 19

  Day 20

  Day 21

  Day 22

  Day 23

  Day 24

  Day 25

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  Lust Bites

  Kristina Lloyd

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  Portia Da Costa

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9780753519165

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Black Lace books contain sexual fantasies. In real life, always practise safe sex.

  First published in 2007 by

  Black Lace

  Thames Wharf Studios

  Rainville Rd

  London W6 9HA

  Copyright © Kristina Lloyd, Mathilde Madden, Portia Da Costa 2007

  The right of Kristina Lloyd, Mathilde Madden and Portia Da Costa to be identified as the Authors of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  www.black-lace-books.com

  http://lustbites.blogspot.com/

  Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

  Printed and bound by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

  ISBN: 9780753519165

  Version 1.0

  Distributed in the USA by Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  The Vampire’s Heart

  Kristina Lloyd

  Prologue

  In the moments before Esther’s return to the world, Billy Dresner III was slouching towards the waterfront, past crumbling tenements, alleyways and whores, a stolen black Labrador trotting at his side. According to the tag, its name was Maxie. But no matter.

  By the derelict warehouses of the Hudson, Billy knelt and killed the dog with a single bite. He fed in a guilty frenzy, trains rumbling in the distance, until he was snagged by a sense of movement far beyond the city and across the cold dark ocean.

  Could it be?

  Billy rose, face lifted to the heavens. Yes, it had to be. This was it. The moon silvered him in a seraphic glow, his shorn hair glinting, and he stared into the night, a bloodied masculine angel, hardly daring to believe.

  Over 3,000 miles away, north of London’s Maida Vale, a girl was born who, according to the midwife, had ‘two arms, two legs, one head’. When the slippery livid child released her first roaring breath, Billy knew the world had changed.

  He stood by the crumbling docks, gazing up at a hundred thousand million stars.

  She was back.

  Somewhere on earth, she was back. Centuries of longing were coming to a close, a prospect that filled him with happiness and dread. Tears glittered in his eyes. He blinked and let them fall, promising himself that this time he would be kind to her.

  1

  The icecap sparkled in the starlight, and the team was the only sign of life, six halogen headtorches shining on the snow, sledges hissing as they hauled. Doug’s breath was laboured, his coughing fits hampering their progress. They were behind schedule and wouldn’t reach camp for another hour.

  ‘You OK?’ checked Esther. It hardly seemed worth asking because she couldn’t see his eyes. Instead, she saw only her reflection in the silver mirrors of his snow goggles.

  ‘Fine,’ said Doug, his voice hoarse. ‘Stop asking, will you?’

  A fur hood fringed his half-masked face and his brown beard was jewelled with frost. Esther heaved alongside him, ski-poles stabbing in the snow, saying nothing. Half a mile ahead, the other four moved as one; small colourful figures on the dusky ice. It shamed her to think they might have guessed her secret.

  ‘Give me your warmth,’ Doug had said last night. His hand had moved inside her thermals, making her whimper in response. Their breath had puffed out, freezing white in the air. She remembered his voice, gentle through gritted teeth. They mustn’t be heard by the others.

  ‘You’re wet. You want it,’ he’d huffed. His fingers, brutally cold at first, worked inside her. Their sleeping bags hissed as they moved on shifting layers of caribou skins and synthetics. Doug’s voice scoured her senses the way his beard scoured her skin.

  Even in a heated tent, it was too cold for sex. Doug was too cold for sex. Esther couldn’t even be sure they liked each other any more. But she could see they were complicit in their need, hungry to stave off the threat of oblivion this boundless, moonlit world inspired.

  And yes, she had wanted it. Still did. But she wanted it in the way an animal wants it, and that wasn’t reason enough.

  Imagine a place where your mind is free, where the glacial air is fresh and pure. Imagine dazzling white landscapes, polar bears and seals as you follow in the footsteps of history’s great explorers. Imagine the Arctic. Imagine the challenge. Imagine everything is possible with White Sky Adventures.

  This trek was no holiday. Partly sponsored, partly funded by White Sky, its purpose was to establish routes and itineraries for a new line in extreme vacations. Doug, a healthy office worker with a sense of adventure, belonged to the company’s target demographic. If he struggled with the level, then it was probably too tough.

  Esther had to slow to match his pace and the rhythm frustrated. Her thighs and arms wanted to push on, to work at their muscular peak, and this sluggishness dragged on her body. She would need to gain greater patience if she were to make it as an expedition leader.

  Their skis hissed in the lengthening silence until, in a voice quivering with emotion, Doug said, ‘My feet hurt. Can you understand that? My feet fucking hurt.’

 
; ‘We’ll look at them later,’ said Esther, and she thought of Shackleton all those years ago, removing his boots and seeing frostbitten flesh fall from his toes, exposing bone.

  You couldn’t escape the stories of this place. Sometimes, it was a mythical land where ancient explorers sailed through peppermint green seas, mistaking icebergs for giant swans and narwhals for aquatic unicorns. Over the centuries, reports had come back of ghostly mountains, mock suns and nights lit with curtains of coloured phosphorescence. Sometimes it was a frozen desert, tempting men onto foolish, heroic quests. Their stories hung in the emptiness: tales of survival and loss; of horror and madness; of people on the borderline between life and death. And, of course, there were many untold stories too, stories with no one left to tell them.

  ‘Give me your warmth,’ Doug had said.

  Esther cringed now to think of his hand between her thighs last night. It seemed an extraordinary intimacy when, for the most part, hands out here were hidden inside gloves. If you wanted to cat a person, it was said, first remove their hands. Hands make us human. And hadn’t there been rumours of cannibalism and severed hands on Franklin’s final expedition? Where might the hands go? Could there be a cache or two out here, buried under the snow, perfectly preserved?

  No, it didn’t do to think such things. But spend enough time on the ice and anyone’s thoughts will start to warp.

  ‘Hey!’

  A voice sailed across the ice.

  In the starlit gloom, Esther could make out Bird, their team leader, waving a ski pole in the air. He pointed east, directing their attention. Esther checked her wrist-watch for bearings. It looked like a minor deviation, probably to investigate something unusual, most likely a dead animal. A break in the monotony was always welcome. She started to pull away from Doug, towing faster.

  It would be better tonight. They would reach the mushers’ cabin, an isolated timber lodge where all six would share a room. For the last three nights, they’d camped by snow walls, the team dividing themselves among four-man and two-man tents, an exercise in team-building Bird was experimenting with. Even the married couple, Margret and Johannes Kappel, were to sleep apart. Esther had spent most nights in the large tent, lying alongside Adrian, the landscape photographer, or Margret, who talked German in her sleep. She’d spent last night paired with Doug.

  ‘I haven’t slept since we got here,’ he’d said bitterly just as Esther was about to drift off. He made it sound as if it were her fault and Esther, cocooned in her sleeping bag, didn’t reply. He would never sleep if they started talking.

  ‘I hate this place,’ he went on, addressing the domed ceiling. ‘I hate the darkness. The sun doesn’t rise. There’s no dawn, no new day. I hate it. It’s all the same fucking endless night.’

  Esther rolled onto her back and they lay there like two larval grubs. ‘It’ll change soon. When the sun comes, the days start getting longer really quickly.’

  ‘It’s too big,’ he said. ‘I can’t get my head round it. Too much space.’

  ‘I know,’ murmured Esther.

  ‘And too cold. Too cold to sleep.’

  ‘Try,’ said Esther. ‘Just try to sleep.’

  They lay there in silence, the amber tent faintly lit by a star-encrusted sky, shining down and glancing off the ice. Snowlight, Esther called it. She adored the ice. It thrilled and appalled, holding a serenity never far from treachery. You couldn’t fathom it. Areas of Greenland were still marked ‘unexplored’ on maps. And even if its terrain were charted, you wouldn’t know it. You could never know its heart.

  ‘You enjoy patronising me, don’t you?’ whispered Doug. His breath had misted above them in apricot-tinged clouds.

  Esther sighed quietly, ‘Doug, please. I don’t want to –’

  ‘You enjoy it,’ he accused.

  His sleeping bag rustled as he edged closer, speaking against her ear now, his breath tickling. Esther turned away, wanting to ignore him because he was being an idiot, but Doug was quick. Fabric hissed in a flurry of movement and he switched on a torch, filling the tent with the fake daybreak of halogen.

  In the clear white light, Esther could see all the detail of his toffee-brown eyes, the pores on his nose and individual hairs on the edge of his beard. She recalled first meeting him at a cheap and cheerful pasta restaurant with a bunch of other people. ‘Mmm, nice,’ she’d thought, knowing he was slated to join the team. And ‘Mmm, even nicer’ when, at the end of the evening, he’d given her a goodbye peck on the cheek, his beard scratching pleasantly, his hand a light pressure on her hip.

  There’d been a spark between them from the off but they’d always maintained a professional distance, even when flirting.

  ‘If it weren’t for this trip,’ Doug had once teased, ‘I’d make a pass at you.’

  Esther had tried to convince herself their feelings would fade once they hit the ice but instead it seemed Doug’s desires were being channelled in a new direction. He was becoming increasingly irritated with her. She could see he was struggling with the trek but wasn’t sure how much. He might be just tetchy. Or he could be seriously losing it.

  ‘What’s wrong, Doug?’ she asked. ‘Why are you being like this?’

  He looked down at her for a long time before declaring, ‘I want you’. His voice, bold and strong, made the words sound so uncomplicated, and it stirred Esther’s lust. She gazed back, confused. For that moment, she felt she might be with Doug from home, the man she liked, not Doug the team-mate who’d been behaving like a prick. This was too dangerous. They had another three weeks on the ice, and the fallout could be hell, the impact on the team disastrous. Esther wondered if Bird, noting the tensions between the two of them, had paired them in a tent hoping to solve the problem.

  ‘Doug, please,’ she said. ‘Let’s just sleep.’

  Doug frowned then, before Esther knew what was happening, he was kissing her hard, his bristles crushing into her skin as he filled her mouth with the hot slithering shock of his tongue. He clutched a fist of her long dark hair, knocking her woollen cap askew. Despite herself, Esther responded, protesting faintly as they kissed.

  She could smell him, a hint of stale sweat and unwashed hair but knew she didn’t smell too great either. When you bathed by frolicking half-naked in the snow, you didn’t bathe too often. Their mutual grubbiness excited her. It felt primitive and abandoned, perfectly in tune with their surroundings.

  Oh, why couldn’t this have happened months ago? Why couldn’t he have pressed her against his car and pushed his hand up her skirt? Why couldn’t he have fucked her over the big table after one of their team meetings? Why couldn’t they have done what she’d fantasised about and maybe they’d have got it out of their systems?

  Esther pulled back. ‘Doug, don’t,’ she whispered, her breath clouding on his face.

  Again Doug ignored her and again she let him. He tugged the zipper of her sleeping bag, its metallic rasp slicing through the silence as the casing split open, revealing Esther, unpeeled in tubular underclothes.

  She wriggled to tug a caribou skin over them as Doug shoved his hand down her thermals. His fingers were so cold that when he buried two inside her, Esther gasped in discomfort.

  ‘You’re wet. You want it,’ he breathed, watching her expression as he roused her.

  ‘You sod,’ she whispered, closing her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ he murmured. He kissed her neck, teeth scraping and whiskers prickling.

  Esther adored it, and was disappointed at how easily Doug had knocked her off balance. Christ, was she that weak? A few days in the Arctic and any man starts looking good? But no, she liked him. Not this much though. Oh, get a grip, she told herself. Think about tomorrow and the day after: six people in the middle of nowhere, team spirit splintering around their sordid little secret.

  But it was difficult to stop when his fingers were so good. Physical pleasures were rare, and this was heaven, her juices spilling warmly as he masturbated her.

  A s
pasm of willpower made her push against his chest. ‘Doug, back off. We can’t do this.’

  He curled his fingers inside her, giving her a steady look. ‘We can,’ he said, and Esther began sliding towards agreement.

  ‘You’ve wanted this as long as I have,’ Doug went on.

  ‘But the others,’ breathed Esther.

  ‘They don’t need to know,’ said Doug, and he worked his fingers with deep slow thrusts.

  Esther moaned, succumbing fast. She needed badly to feel him inside her, to have his cock hammering into her soft wet warmth. She wanted to feel fleshy and vivid, and soon all she could think of was something along the lines of being hung for a sheep as a lamb.

  ‘Oh, just fuck me,’ she gasped, shoving her thermals down to her ankles.

  Doug seemed surprised and a touch disappointed that she’d relented so quickly. Perhaps he’d been hoping for a fight. Puffing and grunting, he knelt up, fiddling with his underwear as Esther dropped her knees wide, her hips tipping in search of him. Doug fumbled to drape a fur over his half-bared butt. His knob nosed at her entrance then he plunged deep, his thickness prising her flesh apart, making Esther groan.

  ‘Shhh,’ he warned, because the other tent was only feet away. Bearing his weight on his arms, he slid in a series of deep deliberate strokes.

  ‘Ah, ah,’ she whimpered, doing her best to keep quiet. Increasingly urgent, their groins mashed together in a clumsy, savage fuck. Skins and fur slipped about them, nylon hissed and the flysheet flapped as they gasped and panted, bucking and frigging.

  ‘Take it, go on,’ Doug had murmured as he’d neared his peak.

  Then they’d climaxed separately with hushed private shudders, eyes squeezed shut, heads turned aside. In the morning, Esther had woken with embarrassment and regret. Presumably Doug had felt the same.

  He’d worn snow goggles for much of the following day, even though it was dark. ‘My eyes are sore,’ he’d rasped when Adrian had asked about them. ‘My eyes and my feet, OK?’ He broke into a fit of coughing. ‘Oh, and did I mention my throat?’