Bled Dry Read Online Free Page B

allowing her to raise an illegitimate child alone. Of that he was certain.
    “Take as long as you want. I get sick of you hovering over me all the time. You make me feel like a kid with a disappointed father, you know that? It’s freaking annoying.”
    Corbin winced as he headed out the door. A father. Good Lord, he was going to be a father. To a mutant child.
    It did not bear thinking on.
    Instead, he would head to his lab, and he, Corbin Jean Michel Atelier, would fix this.
    Eventually. Somehow. Maybe.

 
     

Three

     

    “Okay, what was so important?” Brittany asked. She was exhausted, her stomach still hurt, and a giant pit of worry had lodged itself in her chest like indigestion that no Mylanta could cure.

    Ethan had ushered her into his apartment and now he was pacing back and forth in front of the patio door. Alexis was biting her nail from her seat in a plaid easy chair.
    “I want you to know that you are not the first.”
    “The first what?” Woman to get knocked up from a one-night stand? Of course she wasn’t. That number could probably fill the UNLV stadium.
    “The first to have a three-quarter vampire child. There was one before, that I know of. It was kept quiet, but I had personal knowledge of the situation.”
    Uh-oh. This could get dicey. While her sister knew her husband had a past—a very long one—Brittany still didn’t think it was going to thrill Alexis to hear that Ethan had had a child with a mortal woman.
    “Was the baby okay?” Regardless of Alexis’s feelings, she had to know.
    “The baby was fine and was kept hidden from her father. I do not believe he has knowledge of her existence to this day.”
    “You’re not the father?” Brittany asked in confusion.
    Ethan looked startled. “No. Why would you think that?”
    “Can we just start at the beginning, please?” Alexis asked. “Before I get pissed off that you’ve kept yet something else from me.”
    “Alexis,” Ethan said with a look of forbearance. “I have nine hundred years of existence to account for. There hasn’t been time to tell you everything that’s happened to me, let alone to other people I’ve known.”
    Brittany felt guilty. “Don’t fight, you guys, this is all my fault. I’m causing problems for everyone.” She felt close to tears again.
    “This isn’t fighting,” Alexis said. “This is our form of communication. I get ticked, Ethan gets exasperated, we gripe at each other, then have sex. It works for us.”
    Well, that was too much information about her sister’s marriage.
    “ Any way,” Brittany said. “So who was the mother and what happened?”
    “The mother is my sister, Gwenna.”
    Brittany had met Gwenna only once, at Ethan and Alexis’s wedding, and she had popped in, vampire style, said nothing to anyone, then left again. She had looked pale and fragile, and was a full vampire, not an Impure like Brittany was.
    “I don’t understand. Gwenna is a vampire, right?”
    “Yes. I turned her when she bled to death after giving birth to her daughter. This was the eleventh century, you know, and childbirth was a risky, nasty business.”
    “I don’t think this is the beginning,” Alexis complained. “I had no clue Gwenna was an Impure. How was that possible if you weren’t an Impure?”
    Ethan’s face hardened. “My mother was raped when my father and I were away at war. Gwenna is seventeen years younger than me, and when I became a vampire and eventually came home, I realized that her biological father had been a vampire, because I could sense her vampire blood. Unfortunately, by that time my father was dead, as were all my other siblings. It was just Gwenna, who was seventeen, and my mother in our castle. I had some issues to the north I needed to resolve, and against my better judgment I left the two of them there, with several of my vampire friends to watch over them. At that time, these were friends I trusted, who had shown me the way of the vampire, and they were