Bit the Jackpot (Vegas Vampires #2)(7)
Author: Erin McCarthy

"Damn it." He knew what he was thinking. Knew he shouldn’t be. Seamus stood up, paced back and forth.Ignored the hunger that gnawed at his gut from the scent of her blood spilling out over the street. "This is a bad idea."

It wasn’t just a badidea, it was a horrible, dumb-ass idea. They were in the middle of a reelection year, and Ethan was fighting for every single vote. Having his campaign manager turn a mortal just for the hell of it would raise eyebrows. It would undermine Ethan’s current presidential policy of vampire population control. The latest polls showed Ethan only had a narrow lead of fifty-two percent with a two percent margin of error.

Turning Cara would be a bad political decision, a complete strategical error.

"Shit, shit, shit." Seamus ran his hand through his hair and glanced down at Cara’s body. Blood encircled her head and shoulders in a dark, sticky puddle as Seamus marveled that her eyeliner was perfectly intact on her closed lids, still drawn out into those cat eyes he’d found so sensual.

"Oh, man." He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t walk away and leave her like this. It was his fault she was dead, and he had to fix it to the best of his ability.

"Good thing you’re used to nightlife, Cara," he said as he dropped back on his haunches, talking out loud to give himself courage. "Look at it this way. Now you’ll always be able to find work as a dancer. Your body will never change. That’s something." He gathered her limp body in his arms and retreated to the alley."Right?"

Like she was going to answer.She was dead and was going to stay that way until he stopped dicking around and bit her.

Okay, he could do this. Seamus tilted her head to gain access to her neck. Her head flopped back over his arm, her hair dangling toward the street in a black cloud. He winced. Yep.Definitely dead. Her jugular vein showed clearly through her fair skin and Seamus took a deep breath, bent over, and sank his fangs into her smooth flesh before he could change his mind.

He was acutely aware of the stillness of her body, the lack of a heartbeat, the need to use more effort to pull her blood up into his mouth since her heart wasn’t pumping it out to him. There were no thoughts from her either, none of the usual jumble of emotions, confusion, sexual desire, and titillation he had always experienced when he fed from live donors.

Cara was no longer alive and the guilt of that made him draw harder, faster. This wasn’t fair, that the one night he decided to forgo his loner status he wound up responsible for another death. And even turned, Cara would be his responsibility, to guide andadvise , just like he did with Kelsey since he had revived her.

It was the great truth, illustrated for him all over again. Life for Seamus Fox was not meant to be fun, or filled with pleasure. He had been bound to the land in physical servitude as a mortal. That was his role as a vampire as well, and he needed to accept that, stop fighting against it. Deal with it.

When there was no blood left to draw out, Seamus removed his fangs, sick with the feeling of fullness. Using his teeth, he sliced open his wrist and dribbled blood on Cara’s, lips. She didn’t respond at all, so he forced her mouth open with his fingers and let his blood run down into her mouth. He raised her jaw to encourage swallowing, and after sixty seconds, he sensed her stirring back to life.Felt her arm jerk against his thigh.

Then she started thrashing, jerking her lips away from his blood, her hand slapping weakly at him.

"You’re going to be fine, it’s okay," he said, in a lame effort to calm her down. He wished he’d had a mother who had comforted him as a child, but his da had been more inclined to cuff Seamus on the head when he was sick, to toughen him up. Whether his mother had agreed with that philosophy was unknown to him since she’d died during his birth. That and the last couple hundred years of avoiding female companionship had left him feeling like an idiot with the whole nurturing thing. He knew nothing about soothing someone’s discomfort or fears.

Nor did he understand why Cara was fighting his blood. She kept batting at his wrist, and flinging her head to the side, an expression of distaste on her face. Most mortals clung to the source of vampire blood, and wanted more.Would feed until they burst that first time if they were allowed. This particular mortal, soon to be immortal, was wrinkling her nose like she smelled something rotten.

First she’d resisted his mind-reading attempts.Turned down his offer for coffee. Now she wouldn’t take his blood. How many ways could one woman reject him in a night?

He didn’t want to find out.

"Come on, Cara, you have to drink it." There was no going back at this point, but if she didn’t drink enough blood, she’d be too weak to fully make the change. He wasn’t even sure what would happen if she refused to drink. Starvation, he guessed.Which would be horrible to suffer through.

Slashing his other wrist, he let the blood flow freely without making her drink, to let her smell the rich scent, let her hunger recognize it, desire it. He moved her head down into his lap, pinning her lower body to the ground with his leg so she couldn’t wiggle away. With his right hand securely in her hair, he took his other wrist and let the blood drop over her mouth again, hoping for better results.

She still frowned and turned her head, but her tongue also popped out and licked a bead off her lips. Relieved, Seamus put his wrist right onto her mouth so she could drink faster. Her hand gripped his knee weakly, like she was going to push him away, but instead she settled down and let him feed her.

"That’s it, good. You’ll feel better in a minute." He hoped.

After five minutes her eyes suddenly popped open and she wrenched her mouth away from his wrist. "I told you I didn’t want any coffee."

He gave a strangled laugh. Even though her face was upside down, he could tell she was mad, her dark eyes spitting fire. It wasn’t gratitude or raging lust, but he’d take it. It was a big improvement over dead.

"It’s not coffee, babe, that I can promise you."

"It tastes horrible." She rubbed at her lips. "Why am I in your lap? Did you drug me?"

"No." Did he look like a guy who drugged women? He was kind of insulted by that, but would attribute her statement to her recent trauma. "You got hit by a car, Cara."Might as well ease into the whole "you’re now a vampire" thing.

Her eyes went wide. "Am I hurt? I feel kind of strange, like I’ve been drinking cherry bombs. Light-headed hey, is that my blood?"

She grabbed his wrist and yanked it over in front of her face. "It’s everywhere, all over you. This is a lot of blood why don’t I feel that hurt? Is the ambulance coming?"

Seamus eased his hand away from her as she struggled to get up. Okay, so how did he put this? "Cara, you were hurt. But you’ve healed because I gave you my blood to drink."