Zane’s Redemption (6 page)

According to Lauren’s father, Scanguards bodyguards were the best-trained bodyguards in the nation, and apparently the most lethal. She’d gleaned from Oliver’s ID, which he’d presented when he’d picked her up to take her to her classes, that he had a class A clearance. It had meant nothing to her until Lauren had explained that it was Scanguards’ highest security ranking, and only the best of their guards, and those who knew about the existence of vampires would receive such honor.

Portia snorted. She could still take that kid and lift him right out of his fancy shoes. After all, Oliver was human. It appeared even Scanguards, which employed not only humans, but also a large number of vampires, didn’t have a hybrid on staff to assign to her. And that put her in the stronger position. Whenever she was ready to make her move, she’d leave her human bodyguard in her wake while she went off to find herself a suitable candidate to take her virginity. Bodyguard or not, her father wouldn’t win this fight.

“Do you want to get a takeout for dinner?” Oliver asked as he left the campus behind and navigated through rush hour traffic.

Portia wondered whether she should make him drive out of his way to get to some obscure greasy food place, but decided against it. She wasn’t mad at the bodyguard but at her father, and she wouldn’t let her anger out on an innocent. Oliver was just doing his job. Besides, he had behaved very discreetly all day while she’d had classes. Even though he’d followed her around, he’d blended in and not indicated to anybody that he was there to protect her. No, she corrected herself, watch her. At least, she’d been spared the embarrassment of everybody knowing she had a fucking nanny. Luckily, the others had just assumed he was a new student. At least for that she was grateful to Oliver.

“I’m not hungry. Besides, I can always snack on you later.” God, she hadn’t wanted to say that, but it was too late to take it back now. Maybe she should simply keep her mouth shut when clearly nothing civil was coming out of it at present.

He tossed her a get-real look before concentrating on traffic again. “Try it and you’ll regret it.”

Portia frowned. “You’re bluffing.” Not that she’d even for a moment contemplated making good on her threat. Truth was she’d never bitten anybody in her life. When she needed blood to supplement her human diet, she drank it from the bottles her father ordered from a vampire-owned medical supply company. She didn’t particularly like the stuff, but luckily her hybrid body required blood just twice a week to maintain its superior strength. She’d realized during exam stress the year before that if she increased her intake of blood, she had more energy and could pull all-nighters if she needed to. It had come in handy once or twice.

“Just because I look unarmed doesn’t mean I am.”

“Whatever.” Portia looked outside, not particularly in the mood for a chat. It was still January, and the sun was setting fast. In half an hour it would be dark. But even with her eyes closed, she would have known when sunset occurred. It was in her bones. For full-blooded vampires, this instinct was a survival mechanism, but for her as a hybrid it wasn’t essential. She was lucky: she could be out in the sunlight whenever she wanted to. However, she preferred the dark. Even as a young child, she’d gotten up in the middle of the night to stare at the stars in the dark night sky.

“Why do you work for them?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but her mother had taught her to make polite conversation, mostly to blend in. And she felt bad for having behaved so bitchy with Oliver so far.

Oliver shrugged lightly. “It’s a good job. It pays well.”

“Aren’t you afraid of them? What if one of them bites you?”

Oliver suddenly chuckled. “You think I’ve never been bitten?”

Portia whirled her head to stare at him. “You just told me I’d regret if I bit you!”

“And that’s still the case!”

“But you let others bite you? What’s wrong with me then?” Was she some sort of outcast? Granted, she didn’t know a lot about how vampire society functioned, but did that make her undesirable?

“Nothing’s wrong with you. But I only let a vampire bite me when there’s an emergency.”

Her heartbeat accelerated by a notch. “What kind of emergency?”

“When one of the guys is wounded so severely that he instantly needs blood, I let him have mine.”

“Wounded? Why the hell would they get wounded? They’re just working as security guards, probably sitting in some office building all night.” How dangerous could that be?

“You’d better not let them hear that. They’ll take your head off. They’re warriors, all of them. Their jobs are dangerous, and occasionally one of them gets injured. I’ve been on some missions with them. We were attacked many times. There were casualties.”

Portia shook her head. Oliver was probably embellishing to make himself and Scanguards look more important. “You’re trying to tell me that vampires are assigned as bodyguards to your human clients and will take a bullet for them?”

Oliver nodded, his expression serious. “We guard all our clients with our lives. And that goes even more so for the vampires. They will fight to the death.”

She snorted. “Easily said when they’re practically indestructible.”

“Believe what you want to believe, but I warn you not to underestimate any of us.”

 “No need to be rude! I guess protecting a client and being polite at the same time is too much to ask.” Not that she could really blame Oliver. He was probably just paying her back for her own rudeness earlier.

Oliver bent toward her, never taking his eyes off the traffic in front of him. “Your father is our client. You, my dear Portia, are what we call a charge. We’ll take care of the charge, but we only take orders from the client.”

At the mention of her father, Portia expelled an angry huff. Like she wanted to be reminded of him right now! She spun her head to the passenger window, making it clear that she was done talking to him. Well, maybe just one more word. “You’re just a human, I could take you anytime I wanted to.”

Oliver didn’t oblige her with a comeback, so she kept quiet until they reached the little house in Noe Valley her father was renting for them. It was a two story home with a garage underneath and a flat yard out the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and downstairs was a large open-plan living and dining area with an adjacent kitchen with a small laundry room and a half bath. Portia had liked the house the moment she’d set foot in it for the first time, but at the same time she tried not to get too attached to the place. For all she knew, her father would be moving them again in a few months. He always did. And she would have to—hell no! She was going to be twenty-one, and soon her father would have no power over her anymore. Next time he wanted to move somewhere else, she could simply refuse and stay where she wanted to stay.

Portia jumped out of the car as soon as it came to a halt in the driveway. Her sudden epiphany lightened her steps as she sauntered to the entrance door and turned her key in the lock. Now all she needed to do was trick Oliver into thinking she was going to sleep early and then sneak out the back when he wasn’t looking.

With Lauren’s help, she’d made a date with Michael, the guy who’d thrown the party the other night. She didn’t want to give Eric another try. He’d suffered enough, even though she’d made sure to wipe his memory so he didn’t actually remember any of it. But she was sure he was still in pain from the injuries her father had inflicted by tossing him against the wall, and was probably scratching his head about how he’d obtained them.

Portia tossed her bag on the floor in the foyer. There would be no studying tonight. She marched into the kitchen and opened the fridge.

Oliver followed her and leaned against the kitchen island. “I thought you said you weren’t hungry.”

Without turning, she continued perusing the contents of her nearly empty fridge and chuckled, making sure Oliver understood that her next comment wasn’t malicious. “I also said I could always snack on you.”

A strange tingling at her nape signaled danger, but before she had a chance to turn, she received a reply to her remark, a remark that was merely meant to needle Oliver.

“I don’t think that would be wise.” The deep voice of a stranger sliced through her body as she spun around to face the intruder.

Before she even laid eyes on him, she knew he was a vampire, and she felt waves of power rolling off him.

When she lifted her eyes, the stranger standing calmly next to Oliver took her breath away. She’d never seen a vampire like him. His head was bald. Not a single hair graced his nicely shaped skull except for the thin eyebrows and the dark lashes that framed his eyes. Brown eyes; not ordinary brown though. There seemed to be a rim of gold around the irises and flecks of the same gold sprinkled all over.

His lips looked hard and unyielding, and there were no laugh lines around his mouth. His nose was long and straight. He was over six feet tall and lean, extremely lean. The stranger was dressed in black jeans and a long-sleeve black shirt, and he made the simple outfit look like a million bucks. The top two buttons of his shirt were open, revealing a glimpse of his chest. Apparently hairless too, just like his head.

Portia allowed her eyes to travel lower to his narrow hips and strong thighs. Her stomach flipped, and her knees suddenly felt weak. Looking at a man had never before made her feel like this, so … so feminine. She suddenly regretted that she hadn’t taken better care of herself this morning, not bothering to apply makeup. Why hadn’t she at least moistened her lips with lip gloss before she’d left campus?

“You done?” the vampire asked, catapulting her head first into a wave of embarrassment at being caught checking him out. And unlike a full-blooded vampire who couldn’t blush, the cheeks of her hybrid body burned, and she knew she was flushing the shade of a bottle of blood.

“Who are you?” she fired back. “And what the hell are you doing in my house?”

The vampire gave Oliver a sideways glance. “I take it she’s the brat I’m supposed to guard?”

Portia’s heart sank. Figured! The first man she felt the slightest bit of excitement for had to be the enemy. Right now she was ready to throttle her father. “Oh, this sucks,” she muttered.

***

Zane forced himself to remain calm when inside he was anything but. Years of practicing his stony expression helped him keep his cool. Samson was messing with him. Why the fuck had he assigned him to guard this … this vixen? How else could he describe her?

Her green-brown almond shaped eyes had traveled over his body while she’d licked her red lips, making them appear even plumper. He’d noticed her heartbeat accelerate and her breaths turn irregular, drawing his attention to her shapely breasts. She wore a bra under her casual tight sweater, something he shouldn’t even notice. But he did, just like he noticed her slim waist and those long, toned legs that were hidden in her jeans. She was tall for a woman, but that fact didn’t detract from her femininity.

Zane had expected to find a teenager; instead, he was faced with a grown woman. While that in itself shouldn’t bother him, his reaction to her did.

He was tempted to step closer to allow her tantalizing scent to wrap around him. He wanted to bury his face in her long black hair while his hands explored her body, peeling her out of her clothes. The thought of what he would do next made his pants feel tighter instantly. The teeth of his zipper dug into his aroused flesh, threatening imminent release. He’d heard of spontaneous orgasms, but he’d never imagined being so close to having one. Shit, he had more control than letting a beautiful face and an enticing scent screw him over like that!

“Zane!” Oliver was trying to get his attention.

He jerked his gaze away from Portia. “Yeah?”

“I’ll be back a half hour before sunrise. Will that give you enough time to get home or shall I get you a blackout van?”

It gave him way too much time in the presence of this walking sin called Portia for starters. Zane cleared his throat. “That’s plenty of time.”

He barely noticed Oliver leaving as his eyes moved back to his charge who still gripped the fridge door as if her life depended on it, her knuckles white as if she were riding a rollercoaster.

“I thought Oliver was my bodyguard.”

Zane shrugged, shaking off the feeling her melodic voice conjured up as it sank deep into his chest. “Even a bodyguard has to sleep, and your father doesn’t pay us for sleeping.” Had she really thought that they would make it easy for her to go against her father’s wishes?

“Nothing is going to happen to me while I’m at home. You might as well save yourself the trouble and take off.” She slammed the fridge door shut, signaling her contempt for him.

“Nice try, baby girl, but I’m staying.” Hell, what had he just called her? Baby girl? Was he losing it? He wasn’t one to toss out endearments like beads during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Her eyes flared, a red glint appearing in them as she planted her hands on the kitchen island. “My name is Portia. Use it if you must, but call me anything else and I’ll have you fired.” Then she turned and marched to the door, the clicking of her heels in synch with his rapid heartbeat. “And now I’m going upstairs to be alone.”

“Suit yourself,” he grumbled under his breath, his eyes glued to that backside she moved as if wanting to enthrall him.

Great, it had taken him under thirty seconds to get her to hate him. That had to be a record, even for him. Unfortunately, while he normally couldn’t care less who hated his guts and why, in this instance he had a sliver of regret. This time, his subconscious had done all the work for him, pushing her away with the ridiculous endearment he’d used, making sure she’d never look at him the way she’d done during the first ten seconds of their meeting. There’d been desire in her eyes, and that was the last thing he needed if he wanted to survive this assignment.

It was bad enough that he was alone in the house with her, charged to protect her from herself. Who would protect her from him? The only thing standing between him and running after her now, throwing her onto the nearest flat surface and burying himself in her was his loyalty to Scanguards and the veiled threat Samson had issued. If he screwed this assignment up, he’d be out. Once more, he’d be without a family.