Forbidden Blood (34 page)

Naya turned pink.

Kenzie laughed uncomfortably. “Oops,” she said, only making Vaughn laugh harder. “Sorry,” she said to Naya as she shrugged.

“
It’s okay. You didn’t know. But it’s not like he needs any ego-stroking.”

Naya and Vaughn
grinned at each other, and Naya nudged him with her shoulder. The large T-shirt she was wearing moved, revealing part of her shoulder and the bite there.

“
So, what’s with the neck-biting thing you do?” Kenzie asked Vaughn, pointing to Naya’s neck. She hoped he wouldn’t know she was asking because Sawyer had bit her, too.

Vaughn looked down at the mark on Naya.
“It’s an intimate bite that shifters put on someone to mark the person as theirs.”

Kenzie raised her eyebrows and swallowed hard.
“It sounds primitive.”

“
Well, I suppose it is, but you have to remember that we’re half animal, and just like any other animal, we can be possessive when it comes to something we think of as ours.”

Naya suddenly sat up straight,
her shoulders stiff. “Do you do this with every female you sleep with?” she asked Vaughn.

Vaughn smiled with laughter in his eyes, but he was smart enough not to make a sound. He kissed her on top of her head again.
“No, baby, it’s reserved for mates. Our biology isn’t made for one specific person. However, when we’re drawn to someone, it’s primal, an instinct. Marking is an impulse we really can’t control.”

Intimate? Possessive? Mates?
And Sawyer had bit her.
Could she possibly…

For a second, she felt a tingly sensation in her chest she recognized as hope
, but then she recalled Sawyer’s words from that night. He’d only bit her to get his friends to stay away, not because he wanted her for himself. She wasn’t good enough for any of them. Plus, his neck-biting had come across as deliberate, not some uncontrollable impulse. At least now she understood a little more about what had happened between them. Maybe she wasn’t good enough since they were cat-shifters, and she was human.

She felt a sting behind her eyes
, and she was afraid she might start to cry in front of Naya and Vaughn. This only confused her more, considering she didn’t even like Sawyer. It was ridiculous to feel any hope she might be his mate, and then be sad and disappointed when she realized she wasn’t. Sawyer was making her crazy, that was for sure. She mentally pinched herself. She needed to save her thoughts for when she was alone.

She looked at Naya.
“So, you and Vaughn are going to have a baby. Are shifters really fertile? Is that how you got pregnant?”

“
No,” Naya answered. “Shifters have the same problem vampires have. My doctor doesn’t understand how or why we conceived this quickly. Vaughn is going to ask his doctor if he or she has any information that might help us.”

Vaughn brought his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat.
“Actually, I already spoke with my healer yesterday after I left here,” he said, “and I do have some info to share with you.” He glanced at Kenzie. “You might hear more about pregnancy and biology than you planned tonight. I can wait until after you leave. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“
Oh, Vaughn, how little you know me. Of course, I want to hear everything.”

His brow went up for a second.
“Okay. Well, shifters and humans have mostly similar qualities, but we have other differences besides the ability to shift. Our bodies are mostly like yours in human form. We have legs and arms, hair in all the same places, and the same internal organs. However, when it comes to our”—he cleared his throat again—“penises, at first glance, we look the same, but we’re different.”

Vaughn glanced
between Naya and Kenzie to see if they were okay, and then he continued. “One of the variances in cat-shifters is that we don’t have foreskin like a human male does. If you saw a cat-shifter dick and thought it belonged to a human, you would assume it was circumcised. Our foreskin doesn’t cover the head of our penis. Instead, it covers the underside of the head of the penis because when we have an orgasm, we have six barbs that come out of the underside of the head. The foreskin covers and protects them when they aren’t erect.”

Barbs?
Kenzie tried to hide the look of wonder she felt because she didn’t want to interrupt.

“
Our bodies are designed that way for a reason. Female shifters only go into mating heat twice a year, usually starting around age twenty-one, and it is the only time they can conceive. Like our cousins in the wild, the barbs scrape the walls of the female’s vagina when she’s in mating heat and signals her body to ovulate. With non-vampires or when a cat-shifter female isn’t in heat, most guys only worry about the barbs hurting his partner upon withdrawal. To avoid this, we wait until the barbs have retracted before withdrawing from a female, or we pull out before we come.”

“
So, basically you can control when you impregnate a female?” Kenzie asked.

“
In theory, yes. However, it doesn’t really work anymore. What used to be a sure way for cat-shifters to breed seems to have become more and more desensitized as the generations go on. The barbs rarely trigger ovulation anymore. Now, it seems a female can ovulate more on her own during her heat, making the barbs unnecessary. The sad part is, it doesn’t mean a female will ovulate every time she’s in heat, barbs or no barbs, and since Mother Nature only gives shifter females two chances a year, there are fewer and fewer babies.

“
I’m embarrassed to admit I presumed a few things the night Naya and I were together. I never thought I would cause a non-shifter to ovulate. Female humans and vampires are different from female shifters, obviously having their own cycles and times when they can get pregnant. Male shifters can smell when females are fertile, so we usually don’t have sex with humans when they are ovulating to avoid pregnancy. The night we met, I didn’t smell Naya ovulating, so I wasn’t worried about getting her pregnant. But the first time Naya and I separated after sex, she was on top, and before I could stop her, she got up.”

Naya inhaled loudly.
“I remember that. I felt you as I got up, but it didn’t hurt. Instead, it made me have another orgasm. I also remember having a strange feeling in my stomach. I must have ovulated then.”

“
Yeah, something that no longer works on cat-shifters, like nature designed, worked on a vampire. I think this will give our doctors a lot to think about.”

After the big revelation, they talked for about a half hour more before Vaughn got up to leave them alone for a while. Naya then filled Kenzie in on what
had happened with her parents and how she’d left. She said things were good with Vaughn so far, but they’d been together for less than a day. If things didn’t work out, Kenzie assured Naya that there would always be a place to stay with her, babies or no babies.

It was getting late, and Kenzie decided she
’d better go home and get to bed before she had to go to work the next day. Thankfully, tomorrow was Friday, and she had the weekend off.

As she was getting ready to go home, Vaughn was coming downstairs, and she got up the nerve to question him about something that
had been bugging her ever since she’d found out about him and Sawyer being shifters.

Standing by the front door and set to leave, she asked,
“Vaughn, does Sawyer dislike humans?”
Or just me?

“
Sawyer has a few issues. His parents were killed by humans when he was a child. The people were actually friends of the family, but somehow, they’d found out his parents were shifters and murdered them. Sawyer was at a friend’s house at the time, and he was the one who found them the next morning.”

“
That’s awful,” Naya said.

Poor Sawyer
.

“
Is that why he is so unhappy?” Naya asked.

“
It is, but at least the couple will be spending the rest of their lives in prison,” Vaughn said.

“
And that’s the reason he doesn’t like humans?” Kenzie asked.

“He hasn’t actually come out and said that
he hates humans, but he does have issues with them. It’s not the whole reason though.”

“
What else is there?”

“U
h…well, it’s not really my story to tell. You’ll have to ask him,” Vaughn said.

Yeah
,
right
,
like that was ever going to happen
. He could barely talk to her, so he certainly wasn’t going to share his feelings.

“
I understand.” But Kenzie really wanted to hound Vaughn for more answers. She might as well forget about it. Sawyer would never tell her. “I’d better get going,” she told them, dropping the subject.

She hugged Naya and said good-bye.

On her drive home, she thought about Sawyer the whole time. She couldn’t tell if it made her feel better to know he didn’t like all humans or if it depressed her to know that she wasn’t special enough to change his mind. She reminded herself again that she didn’t even like him. Except hate or no hate, she desired him, and she often wondered what it would be like if he felt the same way.

It was too bad she’d never find out.

A
FTER
K
ENZIE WENT home, Vaughn and Naya sat together in silence, eating the dinner he’d made for her. The spaghetti was a little on the cool side, but it still tasted good. The lukewarm food didn’t bother him anywhere near as much as not knowing where Naya’s head was. She hadn’t said anything since her friend left.

Was she upset he hadn’t given her all the information earlier when they woke up?

Instead of talking, he
’d been too busy having sex with her. And since all this information revolved around what happened when they had sex, maybe she was mad he hadn’t brought it up before they got naked again.

Maybe she wasn
’t mad but turned off by what his penis did when he had an orgasm. It probably came as a shock and sounded unusual, but he wasn’t a human or a vampire. He was a cat-shifter, and this was a part of who he was. He admitted he could have given her some warning though, or maybe he should have told her when they were alone. She’d just found out what he was, and he knew the shifter thing was new to her.

What if she never wanted to have sex again?
The thought of never being inside her again made him almost groan out loud in frustration.

She might be pissed he
’d been so stupid and blame him for her pregnancy and the situation with her family. She appeared to be happy about the babies, but she might resent him for everything else that had come with it. If he hadn’t been such an ignorant dumbass, she would be home and preparing to mate with the vampire her parents wanted.

He held in his growl. She might be upset about the pregnancy, but he wouldn
’t apologize for that. It had brought her back to him where she belonged. She never would have been happy with that other male.

They finished their meal and cleared their dishes from the table. The quietness was starting to get on his nerves, but he didn
’t want to say the wrong thing. Finishing up, they put all the dirty dishes in the sink and dishwasher.