Read Online Riding the Storm by Candace Blevins - Free Book Online Page A

comfortable with him already. She’d always taken care of
her humans, and yet it felt so natural for him to hold her.
    “We haven’t done anything more than kiss,” he told her, “yet
I feel as comfortable with you as if we’d had sex already. I guess in a way we
have, with the mind-blowing orgasm, but... we haven’t seen each other without
clothes and we haven’t, you know, touched each other. Well, not
physically, anyway.”
    “Do you feel like you’ve lost blood? When you stood to go
clean up, were you dizzy or lightheaded?”
    He ran his hand over her hair. “No, I feel fine. How much
did you take?”
    “Only about five ounces. For one thing, I’ve already fed
tonight, and for another I didn’t want to make you weak. If you want me to feed
from you often then we have to work up to it so your body gets used to
manufacturing more blood. If you don’t want me to feed frequently, we’ll figure
out how much I can take at a time before you feel it. For some people it’s five
or six ounces, for others it’s ten or twelve.”
    He pulled back, looked in her eyes, one hand at her
shoulder, the other tilting her chin up. “How much blood do you need a day?”
    He wasn’t asking for self-preservation reasons, but because
he wanted to know what it took to keep her alive, so she gave him the complete
answer. “I need about thirty ounces of liquid a day. On a normal day I need
from six to ten ounces of blood and the rest can be water. However, if I’m
injured and need to heal, or if I’m active and use up a lot of energy, then I
need more blood and less water to make up the thirty or so ounces. If I’m badly
injured then I need enough blood to replace whatever I lost, plus enough to
heal.”
    His mouth twisted into a grin, his eyes happy, suggestive.
“Does sex with a vampire work the same as sex with a human?”
    “Yes, even though we can’t make babies, so you might think
evolution would’ve made our bodies do away with that particular function, but
the ability to attract and hold onto humans sexually has helped us survive
through the years, and we’ve evolved so sex works the same, just without the
reproductive possibilities.”
    “So, if you and I get together for... for good... we can
never have kids? I won’t be a father?”
    Kendra softened. “I’m sorry, Eric.” Looked like she’d
overshared too soon, after all.
    And now, Kendra saw the wheels turning in his head. She
knew, without peeking into his thoughts, he was now putting together all the downsides to dating a vampire.
    “You sleep during the day. Can you stay up if you want? Can
you go out in the sun?”
    “I haven’t felt the warmth of the sun on my skin in
thousands of years. I literally die at dawn. Most vampires awaken as the sun
drops below the horizon at night. I’m strong enough to rise a few hours before
sunset, but I can’t leave the basement until the sun goes below the horizon.”
    “Thousands of years? How old are you?”
    “I don’t know, exactly. Probably just under three thousand
years old. At least twenty-five hundred, though my best guess would be about
twenty-eight hundred.”
    “You’ll watch me grow old and die?”
    This wasn’t an easy question to answer, but she felt
relieved he hadn’t asked about the circumstances of her being turned. “Yes,
unless you someday want me to turn you, but I’ll never try to talk you into it.
If it’s something you think you may want at some point, you’ll have to bring it
up, and you’ll have to do a lot to convince me you’re serious, and then you’ll have to talk to Abbott and convince him you’re serious, too.”
    Eric went a few moments without saying anything, and Kendra
thought it was time to lighten the conversation.
    “You were going to take me for a boat ride tonight. Can we
still go?”
    “You’re changing the conversation.”
    “Yes, I am. You’ve been hit with a lot tonight, and I think
you need time to think it over. Let’s go for a ride and have