Wicked Wednesday – Wounded Heroes and BLOOD CALLS

There’s something wickedly interesting about wounded heroes. You know they’ve either been bad or have had something bad happen to them which makes them all that much more intriguing. Will they stay good or become bad again? Can they be trusted? So many more questions and things that you can do with them.

BLOOD CALLS is definitely all about wounded heroes. Diego Rivera was a Spanish Lord before his wife betrayed him to the Spanish Inquisition because he had been selfish and unfaithful. Ramono Escobar has had a hard life, including a stint in juvenile detention when she got mixed up with the wrong crowd after the death of her father and her mother’s illness.

Somehow Diego and Ramona have managed to change their lives and find each other, but trouble isn’t all that far away. Both Diego and Ramona have secrets and in BLOOD CALLS, those secrets threaten to destroy their lives.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the first encounters between Diego and Ramona, who is now a talented artist.

*****
WARNING — Some adult material follows
*****
The sofa creaked with each subtle movement of his body.

He hadn’t been resting well until about an hour ago, when it seemed as if he had finally fallen asleep.

She wished she could do the same, she thought, unable to forget that the object of the other night’s erotic dream lay barely thirty feet away on her sofa. In between her legs, damp need throbbed, demanding fulfillment and she itched to reach down, imagine that he stroked her to completion.

She had to channel that need to into something more worthwhile and infinitely less risky.

Escaping the tangled sheets, she inched to her workspace, grabbed up her sketch pad and pencils, and padded to the love seat across the way from where Diego slept.

He sprawled across the cushions, magnificently graceful even in sleep. The only shame of it was that he had just too many clothes on, she thought as she began by sketching the general pose of his body. One long leg outstretched. The other bent and flat on the couch, creating a Vee between his legs.

She dragged her eyes from that spot and upward, along the flat planes of his stomach and to where the shirt gaped open to mid-chest, exposing an enticing amount of flesh and the hair there which she craved to touch.

She satisfied that yearning by creating the enticing whorls with her pencil on the paper beneath her hand. As they took shape, she paused to smudge the lines with her finger to delineate the hollow between the well-defined muscles of his chest. A chest which still rose smoothly and peacefully in sleep.

Pleased with how the drawing was taking shape, she continued capturing the lines of his body. The broad shoulders straining the fine cotton of his shirt. His arms, one pillowed behind his head and the other resting loosely along his side. Palm upward with his exquisitely long, but masculine fingers relaxed in slumber.

She moved upward to his face, stroked the sharp line of his jaw onto the paper. Smoothed it by working in the lock of his hair that spilled downward to soften the line of his jaw and high cheekbone.

Shifting ever higher, she nearly jumped out of her seat as a startling blue-green gleam eked out before his eyelids fluttered open to reveal the cool of his ice-blue eyes.

“You’re awake,” she said with a soft exhalation, afraid to disturb the moment further.

“Make believe I’m not,” he said, closed his eyes once again and maintained his position, but she couldn’t fail to miss how strain crept into his muscles.

“Relax,” she urged, but he chuckled and peaked at her from beneath his lowered lids.

“Should I be as relaxed as you?” His tones were soft, like a lover’s in the night, but tinged with his typical biting humor.

With the moment fleeing, she dropped her hand into her lap, frustrated at only capturing a part of his grace on the paper. Determined not to lose the inspiration, she said, “Close your eyes and take a breath. Do something to get comfortable again.”

Diego wanted to laugh out loud at the thought that he could somehow be at rest with her sitting across from him, naked beneath the soft and very thin cotton of the nightshirt. In the brief moment before he reined in the demon, his vamp eyesight had picked up on the dusky shadows of her nipples beneath the fabric. Had smelled the musky dampness of her arousal, begging for him to taste.

Comfortable? he thought as between his own legs, human passion awakened once again. He knew there was only one way he could remotely get comfortable.

His one hand was pillowed behind his head, but with his other hand he reached down and undid the buttons on his shirt, parted the fabric to let the chill of the night air wash across the heat lingering from the demon and the human passion reasserting control. His nipples tightened with the chill and he forced himself not to imagine how it might feel if her warm mouth replaced the nip of the evening.

The scratch of Ramona’s pencil against the paper stopped and he opened his eyes, stared across at her.

“You can . . . you can take it off if you’d like,” she said, gesturing to his shirt.

Even as he slipped off the garment and tossed it aside, he called himself a fool over and over again. His passions had gotten him into trouble once before and tonight was no different, he told himself, but it wasn’t enough to quench the fire building in his loins.

Especially not when Ramona’s hungry gaze traced the lines of his muscles and her hand moved quickly across the paper, rendering those lines in her drawing.

She paused for a moment as her gaze drifted downward and even in the dark, he detected the becoming flush spreading across her cheeks when she settled her attention on his erection.

He decided to continue with her earlier request and undid his pants, dragged them and his briefs away before reclining back onto the couch, attempting to resume his original position.

*****
Blood Calls
ISBN: 0373617631
Publisher: Silhouette Nocturne
Pub. Date: May 2007

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