Riding the Storm by Candace Blevins Read Free Book Online

Not even through the damned pants.
    He cleaned himself in the bathroom, changed into different
underwear and jeans, and looked at himself in the mirror. He could barely see
where she’d bitten him, and it didn’t hurt at all. Shit, he hadn’t imagined it,
though.
    Two vampires were upstairs in his yacht, and he was pretty
sure he wasn’t crazy. Fuck .
    Kendra lived in a nice house on a golf course, she’d worn
expensive clothes and shoes, and she drove a limited edition luxury vehicle.
Unless this was an elaborate scam, she wasn’t after his money.
    He tried to put together what he’d known last night, before
the whole vampire thing. She was attractive, seemed well off financially, had
an adventurous streak, and had an icy exterior that challenged him to see if he
could thaw her out. She’d responded to his dominance, but also seemed to have a
dominant streak of her own.
    And he’d thought she was decades more mature than most women
her age.
    Damn.
    He climbed the steps and stopped in the doorway to look at
them — Kendra in white flowing crop pants with a pink clingy t-shirt and
a matching pink blouse over the top and unbuttoned. Abbott in a high dollar,
probably custom made suit. They looked perfectly normal, and yet… not. Too
perfect, and both with the same icy exterior, though Kendra’s seemed thicker,
harsher.
    As he stepped in the room, Kendra gave him a peck on the
cheek before walking outside, and Eric turned to Abbott, who removed a small
notepad and a pen from his inside jacket pocket.
    Eric accepted the pad and pen, and read the page opened to
him.
     
    Please turn to the next page and write about what you’ve just
learned. Start the sentence with, “The woman I am dating is a...”
     
    Eric’s hand and fingers worked against him as he wrote the V ,
but his entire arm went numb and hurt as he set the pen down to write the A. He persevered and managed to make the first line of the M , but it was a
full minute before he could drag the pen down to make the second line. His arm,
hand, and fingers simply would not do his bidding. As he tried to push the pen
back up the paper, his entire arm jerked away, leaving a shaky scrawl across
the page.
    He looked up to Abbott. “I can’t. There’s this vibration
inside me, and it hurts when I intend to write it, plus I can’t control
my arm — it won’t do what I tell it.”
    Kendra stepped back inside and said, “Yes, and I felt the
same vibration from outside. I’ll know if you try to tell, no matter where in
the world you are.”
    Eric was simultaneously freaked out, fascinated, and
disbelieving, though he’d just experienced it. “How? How is this possible? To
make an oath... real ! No matter how hard I tried, I could not write the word. How is this possible?”
    “It used to be called magic,” Abbott told him, his voice gentle.
“Nowadays it would probably be called metaphysics. If some of the physicists
out there knew about it, they’d probably use it to try to prove their nice
little string theories.” He sat in a chair, regal and proper as if he were
king. “Now that you’ve seen a taste of our abilities, you need to understand
vampire society is set up on a sort of magical hierarchy, with the more
powerful vampires having rank over the less powerful of our kind.”
    Abbott looked to Kendra, back to Eric. “I’m telling you this
because Kendra won’t. She doesn’t like to think of herself as being powerful,
but she’s probably one of the ten or so most powerful vampires in the United
States. She isn’t Master of her own territory only because she has no interest
in it at this time.”
    “So, Kendra has some sort of Master Vampire over her? What
kind of hold does he have on her?”
    Eric had no idea how vampire society worked, but he didn’t
like the idea of Kendra being at someone else’s mercy. He’d only known her a
short time, but she’d gone out of her way to be truthful with him at the first
chance, and he respected