Redemption (The Penton Vampire Legacy) by Susannah Sandlin

was beautiful—but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t experienced either lustor hunger in the last four hundred years and controlled both of them. Krys Harris was just a new kind of test.
    He’d had his mate, and she was dead because he’d failed her. He wasn’t going down that road again.
    The cool, damp air chilled his skin when he climbed down the ladder into the subbasement stairwell. The smell of cement and glue and wood remained fresh despite the ventilation system’s work to keep the heated air flowing. He might need to light the propane fireplace to take the chill off the suite if Will hadn’t done it.
    Thick carpet blanketed the long corridor and ornate brass light sconces showed off Will’s luxurious taste in furnishings. Left to Aidan or Mirren, the ambience would have been somewhere between storage room and hunting lodge—strictly function and comfort. But he could appreciate Will’s sense of style.
    He paused outside the door to Krys’s suite, key halfway to the lock. He sensed her presence, her heartbeat, her soft breath, the scent of her skin as she moved about the room. Shit. How the hell was she awake so soon?
    He’d had trouble keeping her enthralled upstairs. She’d started coming around when he tried to withdraw blood to test for the pandemic vaccine and he’d had to roll her mind a second time to put her under. There were stories of humans strong-willed enough to resist mental manipulation, but he’d never met one. Well, maybe until now.
    Chickenshit bastard that he was, he’d expected her to sleep well past daybreak, have her initial freak-out, and then be calm enough to talk by the time he rose at dusk. Think again.
    Maybe he should leave, go home to relax for a couple of hours before his daysleep, and just let things play out. She wasn’t screaming, and he wasn’t picking up signs of fear—norapid heart rate, no quickened breath—so she obviously didn’t realize she’d been locked in. Maybe he could find out what she thought had happened, salvage this mess somehow, and talk her into staying. Worth a try.
    He knocked softly on the door to give her a heads-up, and then slid the key into the dead-bolt lock. The heavy wooden door swung silently inward, and Aidan stepped into the room.
    The quilt over the king-size bed had been thrown back, and the bed was empty. The sound of water splashing from a faucet trickled in. What would she assume had happened? How could he explain...
    Krys appeared in the bathroom doorway and stopped with a surprised yelp. “Oh my God—you almost gave me a heart attack.”
    Her nervous chuckle blossomed into that husky, throaty laugh he’d noticed before, the one that made him wonder what she’d sound like late at night, tangled in the sheets with his hands and mouth on her. The laugh wasn’t all that drove his desire—she’d pulled off her business suit and wore a tiny red T-shirt and black panties that exposed a thin line of smooth skin between the lacy waistband and the hem of her top. She’d unbraided her dark auburn hair, and it fell in loose waves around her shoulders.
    She was magnificent and unself-conscious and, holy hell, why hadn’t he just gone home? His fangs and his cock were suddenly battling it out to see which one could ache with need the most, and the blast of desire that shot through him almost drove him to his knees.
    She quit laughing and stared at him with a half smile. “Did I faint or something? I can’t remember what happened, and this”—she looked around the suite—“this sure isn’t the littlehotel room in LaFayette.” She tugged on the hem of the T-shirt. “I found this in the bathroom. Hope it’s OK I took it.”
    “Ah, yeah.” Aidan shook off the mental shock and tried to focus. How had she come out of the enthrallment so completely and so fast? She didn’t even seem to have a post-enthrallment hangover.
    He improvised. “You got light-headed, so I thought you could spend the night here in Penton—one of our