Vampire Lords of Blacknall: Trinity by Shirl Anders Read Free Book Online Page A

was trying to help her. Not eat her.
    Besides, all the blood in her body had pooled into her head from the position she was being carried in. It made her feel lightheaded as her long hair trailed down to the back of Trinity’s calves. His pants were lighter colored than her hair and on different bounces of her body, she could see the black ends whipping against the material as he strode forward.
    It came to her in snatches that she’d read a romantic tale once about a great warrior saving a damsel and carrying her away over his shoulder. It had sounded so enthralling at the time. However, in reality it was horrid and jarring and completely breath-snatching as she moaned and felt a black curtain of unconsciousness fall over her.

 
     
    Chapter Six
     
     
    “M aiden?” Trinity questioned. He’d felt her body fall limp over his shoulder. Sweat strafed his temple with the effort he used to refrain from jerking to a standstill, to lick the blood he could smell like a lover’s scent, husky and cloying in a cloud around them. Yet he realized she was too delicate to carry as he was. He stopped his near-running pace and lifted his senses to the immediate surroundings and then the woods beyond.
    The foul creature that hunted human women, and strangely not for their blood, he thought, was gone from the woods. The monster’s last bloody corpse was to the east of where he stood and his own horse was straight ahead. Trinity felt his younger brothers’ attentions were elsewhere and that was good, because this newest dilemma of one virgin’s blood scent might be hard for any of the Blacknall brothers to resist.
    Resist they would … of course. Nevertheless, why put all of them through the agony that one of them could endure. And he was enduring. Church, he was certain, was not far away. Perhaps his brother had conjured an idea of what they were going to do with a young society miss. A very naked society miss, completely out of her gown.
    He steeled himself. It was becoming easier, or perhaps he was becoming stronger. The tempest of desires that attacked him was not the violent cyclone it had been. He would choose, and he chose not to bite and feed upon the warm and delectable woman in his arms. It was as if maturing from puberty into manhood. Youngsters found it hard to control their lustful intentions; a man did not.
    He’d lusted after and he’d bedded women in his long years. Always retaining a minute control to do nothing more than that. When he engaged, if he did at all, he picked older women. Widows whom he could ply with drink, so they might not really remember the rougher sides of their sexual encounters. If they happened to question a more animalistic tone, he simply wiped those thoughts away from them.
    In essence it had become tedious to control and a bothersome event, to the point he’d not even tried to form a liaison in well over …
    “A year,” he snapped, with dawning incredulousness. By god, it had been that long.
    Trinity drew an irritated breath at himself as he lifted the lady off his shoulder. He bent one knee to kneel as he lowered the woman to the ground, but he supported her with his bent leg. Her head lulled forward, then to the side, and finally caught arched backward. Dark tendrils of her thick black hair fell away from her flushed face.
    He saw several scratches on the cleavage of her lily-white breasts. The maiden was ethereal, her skin was so ivory, and he saw a cut on her pale slender neck. He forced himself to glance quickly over to another on her delicate cheek. All those abrasions had stopped oozing blood. However, the one that raised his hackles and made him suck in a controlled breath was seeping with sluggish determination over the hand and fingers he used to support her back.
    It was where the monster had slashed her as she ran. He’d heard her pain at the moment of the attack. Somehow, as he’d lifted her off his shoulder, his hand had reached beneath his jacket against her bare