Mastered: Ten Tales of Sensual Surrender Read Online Free PDF

it.
    She got back to work.

Chapter Two
     
    Debra, stripped naked, cowered in the shadows. She was far too pale, because they’d fed on her too long. A shadow loomed over her, a ham-sized fist wrapping in her blond hair, the usually clean and shining strands lank and oily. She was food. Nothing more, nothing less.
    When she was jerked to her feet, she fought despite her weakness, because she would. Most only saw a shy, socially awkward woman with a near constant frown of concentration on her face because of the rapid-fire workings of her brain, but Brian knew her courage never faltered.
    He lunged forward, but he wasn’t close enough. In that cloudy shift that happened during dreams, he knew he wasn’t even in the room. He was watching events unfold as if he was inside her mind but in a remote location. She was suffering all this alone. Yet he could feel her clinging to his name in her mind. She was drawing strength from her connection to him, even though he couldn’t reach out to her. The loss of that connection was like death itself.
    The massive vampire sank his fangs into her throat, over her windpipe, strangling her as he took the blood. He wanted to drink her dry then kill her, because he was done with her, in the mood for a new taste. He picked up a scalpel, intending to carve her heart out of her chest and dine on it, the blood alone not enough. He had to consume all of her.
    No.
    Brian jacked up in his bed, sheets fisted in his hands. He had a snarl on his lips, his fangs fully unsheathed. Yet he confronted a dark room where there was nothing but himself and the echo of his fury.
    Damn it. Ever since the night Debra had left the facility to help Gideon and Anwyn recover Daegan Rei from rogue vampires, he’d been plagued by these dreams. Because he’d tended the handful of traumatized human women who’d been kept in cells for months by those rogues, he couldn’t forget their sallow faces, hopeless eyes and trembling fear. Debra hadn’t been one of them, but irrationally, he kept imposing her face on theirs in his dreams.
    As yet more evidence of his illogical state, he kept having to resist the temptation to order Debra to stay with him during his sleeping hours, so she’d be close enough for him to protect. Even though he was least capable of protecting her when stuck in his daylight coma. She’d be far more likely to sacrifice herself for him in such a vulnerable state.
    He was behaving like an idiot.
    If he told her to stay with him during daylight hours, and if she wasn’t so respectful, she’d tell him he’d lost his mind. She was as much of a workaholic as he was, and such an indulgence would cut into the time they needed to manage their ongoing projects. The workload had blossomed, so demanding she was handling half the projects herself. He checked her notes and received a daily status update, but that was to satisfy his curiosity and enjoy what strides she’d made or brainstorm about new directions, not to check her work. Though she was several decades behind him in study, she was every bit as capable a scientist as himself.
    But she was his.
    The feeling that thought brought had no rational basis either, but ever since that harrowing night, such primitive feelings had been surfacing more and more. Along with those dreams. It irritated him. He had no time for such things, and neither did she. Science was their focus.
    Not right now, though. Dominance, sexual and otherwise, was a part of vampire nature that couldn’t be denied. Discovering the depth of her submissive nature when they’d met had therefore been a pleasure, but lately he found himself fighting a growing desire to explore it even deeper, underscore it further than he’d allowed himself since the earliest days of their relationship.
    It was dangerous, a desire so strong it was an obvious craving, one he had in full color right now, much like his way-too-vivid dream. He tried to push it away, tamp it down as he usually did, knowing