Bloodlust Denied Read Online Free PDF Page A

barriers he’d erected to protect his toxic sanity.
    Three years since that cursed woman had captivated him with her wanton dance, tempted him with her lush body and then disappeared into the night without a word or glance or lingering scent for him to hunt.
    She had vanished from the face of the Earth as if she had never existed in the first place.
    “What do I care for the truth?” He flicked Evan a dark glare as he alighted from the carriage. “No one dares question my movements.” Except for Evan and his blood relatives, but that was the price Alexius paid for such unwavering loyalty.
    But even the danger of discovery as he sequestered mind-shrouded debutantes in shadowed alcoves and sampled their untried blood did little to stir his own desires. Did nothing to slake the ravening want shredding the core of his essence, or halt the insidious disintegration of his brittle veneer of civility.
    For more than two thousand years, he’d taken his pleasure wherever and however he wished, had indulged his bloodlust without a second thought and navigated the ages with weary mastery.
    And all it had taken to wrench open the deceptive shell of his existence was a fleeting fuck with a tantalizing creature as sensual as a courtesan and refined as a countess.
    As he approached the assembly rooms, the rich scent of feminine blood drifted on the warm May breeze. Raw need seared him as impossibility slammed into his brain.
    It couldn’t be.
    But there was no mistake as her evocative fragrance spun through his senses, intoxicating tendrils igniting his mind. For a second he froze, unable to believe that after all this time he’d once again found her, but there was no mistake. His body had only ever reacted so violently to Morana’s presence.
    Lust stirred deep in his groin, thickening his shaft, arousing his anger, heightening every sensitized nerve.
    She meant nothing to him. Yet their fleeting encounter in a squalid back alley obsessed his thoughts and corroded his reason. He should have taken her blood when he’d had the chance, and then she would have been like all the others he’d claimed.
    Forgotten.
    Instead, the memory of her body plagued him, the recollection of her voice haunted him and the circumstance in which she had left him tormented his sanity.
    Tonight she would not escape him. Tonight, vengeance would be his.
     
    Morana edged through the pressing crowd inside the assembly rooms toward the refreshments where her beloved Thanatos lounged, violin in one hand, drink in the other.
    She took a glass of punch and pretended to sip the sweet liquid. “Our quarry isn’t here.”
    Thanatos offered her a lazy smile. “The night is still young, Morana.” He placed his empty glass on the table. “There’s a vampire haunting London this Season and he’ll be here tonight.”
    The familiar rage snaked through her veins, yet it was disturbingly diluted. She took a deep breath and refrained from going to Thanatos to seek comfort in his embrace. Such behavior would scandalize the ton and shred her credibility.
    “And yet I don’t feel his approach.” It was a facet of her gift, or her curse, to know when the bloodsuckers were closing in. She could feel their encroaching depravity like a suffocating fog. But all she could feel tonight was the clawing restlessness that had plagued her like an infection in her blood, a malignancy in her mind since that night three years ago when she had made a devastating error in judgment.
    Thanatos briefly brushed his knuckles across her cheek. “You still think of him .” His voice tinged with empathy for how she still, inexplicably, yearned for the touch of that stranger in the squalid alley.
    “Not as I once did.” That was a lie. She dreamed of him every time she closed her eyes and fought his constant intrusion during her waking hours. He had been arrogant, so sure of his power over her, so certain she was nothing but a cheap whore flaunting her body as she danced to the exquisite