Wet Heat by Jan Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

they had discovered Matilda, near death, lying in a heap before their villa gate in Italy. Knew she was special. That she was the one.
    “We’ll give her a few days to deal with her emotions, and then we will reestablish contact. Agreed?”
    “Agreed,” his brother answered, wishing they would go after her right this minute. Knowing she needed time to gather her thoughts and her composure.
    Paul could feel John’s pain. Could feel Matilda’s pain at thinking she had betrayed them. That she thought she had betrayed them didn’t sit well with either of them, especially since they were the ones who’d put the idea into her mind in the first place. Guilt seared through his nerve endings, leaving them raw and blistering.
    Being away from her for a few more days would be torture. And if she decided she wanted nothing to do with them, after discovering their bordella seduction, Paul knew they were doomed to an eternal hell without her.
    * * * * *
     
    “I’m worried about you, Mati.” Mati’s young female friend Christina Darksky-Bloodrayne pouted at her from across the dinner table. Christina’s twin sister Zeena gave an equally effective pout with her arched eyebrows crunched together making Mati shift uneasily in her chair at their concern for her.
    “I’m fine,” Mati lied.
    “No, you aren’t fine,” Zeena chastised, sending her black ringlets dancing as she shook her head in obvious frustration.
    Irritation flamed through Mati and she waved away the silver goblet of synthetic blood she normally took with her human meal. Her female servant, the human housekeeper she kept under her mind hypnotism, curtsied in acknowledgement and left.
    “I said, I’m fine,” she replied through gritted teeth, feeling the sharp edges of her fangs painfully pierce her lower lip. She tasted blood and dashed away the pinpricks of the metallic flavor with her tongue and hoped her young friends hadn’t noticed.
    Mati gazed at the human food set in front of her on her plate. Rare steak, steaming potato and the colorful arrangement of baby vegetables did nothing for her tonight. In her quest to appear a human, she’d adapted to eating three square meals of human food a day.
    Over the decades, she’d acquired a taste for their delicacies. But her exquisite sexual experience at the bordella, and following guilt at betraying her true loves, left her taste buds in nonparticipation mode. Everything looked bland. It seemed she’d reverted to when she’d first begun experimenting with food over a century ago. Yuck!
    She also found the synthetic blood…boring since having sex with those two bordella males. She wanted the real thing. Luscious sweet male blood. Wanted to bite and nourish herself from vampire males. Wanted to be female again and shed her human pseudonym.
    Another kind of guilt had wrapped around her over the past days too. She was the creator of Vampira. The female who upheld the no-sex rule to the members of the clique. She had fallen off the wagon. She had had sex and now she wanted real blood.
    She owed it to her young female friends to tell them the truth. She suspected they must know the truth. She could still smell the scents of those two males on her body even after washing many times and dousing herself with perfume. It seemed as if their scents had become a part of her very being.
    “I had sex,” Mati blurted, instantly regretting her confession as she took in Zeena’s sharp surprised gasp and Christina’s shaken expression.
    “You what?” Both Christina and Zeena said in unison as they blinked at her in shocked looks that devastated Mati.
    Although they weren’t fully members of Vampira, they may as well be. Their mother Megan Darksky-Bloodrayne had been in hiding from the twins’ fathers. Their fathers were two brothers. They’d taken Megan as their mate. Megan, it turned out, had the rare trait of allowing sperm from two different males to fertilize her ova during separate incidences of sexual