Two weeks ago, Dr. Aubrey Hart had still been alive. Now she’s a vampire, undead and starving, with a maker who shows no interest in helping her adjust to her new abilities.

Forced to either feed or die, Aubrey is drawn to her former supervisor Dr. Gavin Thibodeau—a man who arouses both hunger and desire. Her irresistible cravings lead them to an explosive erotic encounter and her first feeding. But when her attempt to erase the memory of their night together from Gavin’s mind fails, it becomes clear that their passion may have unleashed a force she never could have ever predicted….

The Darkling’s Surrender

Lauren Hawkeye

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter One

Aubrey pressed the cold metal against her heart and heard nothing.

She knew that she’d placed the stethoscope in the right place because she could feel the chill of it against her skin, right over her left breast. But there was no comforting thump-thump of her heart, no whoosh of warm blood as it moved through her veins.

She’d played this game before, as a resident at the local hospital. Thump—the stethoscope found her warm, human heartbeat. Remove the metal, remove the sound.

Now it didn’t matter if the device was against her skin or not. All that she could hear either way was silence.

Yet the silence was different with her new undead senses. It had a sound, of sorts—a never-ending reverberation, as if she could hear the very molecules of the air vibrating.

It wouldn’t have surprised her. She could hear everything else, from the tiny, scurrying steps of the spider creeping up her slick bathroom wall, to the beating heart of the human walking by outside.

Bored of the game, Aubrey let the stethoscope fall to the floor. Listlessly she pulled herself to a sitting position, and she could have counted the threads in her sheets, so sensitive was her skin against them.

They were the same sheets that she’d had two weeks earlier, when she’d still been alive. They covered the same bed that she’d slept in, which sat in the bedroom she’d had for over a year.

Not that she’d actually slept in the bed that much. She’d been almost finished her residency at the local hospital, had almost been fully accredited. Dr. Aubrey Hart—she’d had the title already, but hadn’t felt like a real doctor, not yet. She’d been so looking forward to it.

Instead, she was dead. Undead.

Undead and starving.

Malcolm, her maker, had come by earlier that evening. He’d peeled the covers away from her newly translucent skin and eyed her with disgust.

Get up, he’d told her. Go out. Feed. I won’t bring you blood any longer.

Aubrey knew that he wasn’t lying, just as she knew that he wasn’t sorry he’d turned her. To be sorry he needed a conscience, and that was something that Malcolm didn’t have.

Not all vampires were jerks, just like not all humans were good.

It was her luck that she’d been turned by an asshole.

His voice berated her as she sat there, staring blankly across the room at the mirror. The woman that looked back at her was familiar, and also looked like a complete stranger.

Gone was her golden tan, the one vice that she’d allowed herself throughout med school. In its place was skin the color of milky cream, threaded through with a webbing of amethyst veins.

Her hair was still flaxen, and her eyes still sky blue. But both were brighter and better now, despite how worn she felt.

It was the allure that came with her new life, or so Malcolm had said. She now had the power to draw the unsuspecting in, to draw them close, without them ever knowing why.

Not to mention that she was very nearly gorgeous. She would have considered herself plain at best, before.

But even with all these advantages, she was unable to adjust. She’d hidden in her bed for weeks, poking her head from beneath the sheet only when Malcolm visited. He’d taped aluminum foil over her window the second day, when streaming sunlight had burned a vivid ruby stripe across her arm.

She hadn’t known any better.

He’d also brought bags of blood, viscous cardinal-red blood, and had pinched her nose closed and poured it down her throat when she’d rebelled at the thought of drinking. He’d awakened the hunger, and now she had two choices—feed or die.

She still wasn’t sure which she’d choose.

She had to choose before sundown tonight, or she’d grow too sick, too weak to make the choice. And if Malcolm didn’t come back—and she’d believed him when he’d said he wouldn’t—she’d slowly wither away to nothingness.

Aubrey’s new, sharply tuned eyes fell on the framed photo that sat on her dresser across the room. Though the gleam of the brassy frame was brighter than ever before, and though the grain of the dark wood swirled in an intricate dance that she’d never before noticed, it was the girl in the photo that caught her attention. With a mortarboard on her head, and pale hair falling in a curtain around rosy cheeks, the young woman looked fierce—ready to take on the world.

Aubrey felt that that young woman was a million miles away from where she was right now.

But the longer she looked at the picture, the more she could feel a sense of dissatisfaction growing. She’d sat here for nearly two weeks, stewing in anger and misery. Anger at Malcolm for thrusting this life, or unlife, upon her when she hadn’t wanted it. For stopping her dead when she’d almost achieved her dream.

The girl in the picture would have simply crinkled her nose and crunched the anger and misery into submission if they stood in the way of her goals.

Aubrey wondered if she had enough gumption left to channel that girl back into her empty shell.

Suddenly wanting a closer look, Aubrey pushed back the sheets that had tangled themselves around her legs. Shifting her weight, she placed one foot flat on the prickly carpet, then the other. Then she tried to put her weight on those feet for the first time in two weeks.

She wobbled and nearly fell. And it was the struggle that awoke some of the old Aubrey in her.

If she was going to wither and die, it would be by her choice. Not because Malcolm had made choices for her.

She hadn’t sampled this new existence yet, hadn’t seen if she could bear it.

Tonight, she decided, she would. She would hunt. She would drink.

Then she could make an informed decision.

Though she’d pretended not to listen, Malcolm’s words had actually sunk through the undulating waves of grief, when he’d bothered to talk at all, that was. He’d given her the most cursory of explanations of her new life, the minimum that he could get away with without setting some council down upon his head for abandoning a newborn.

As she walked down the street, the soles of her boots clicking decisively on the wet pavement, Aubrey was suddenly grateful for the bits of information that he had imparted.

Go hunting someplace where you won’t know anyone, he’d told her. It was harder to take what you needed when the victims were a part of your old life. Bite from the neck, the wrist or the inner thigh. That was where the blood flowed hot and rich.

And most important, don’t drink too much from one person. If you drank too much, the person either died or was turned. And then either the humans fell into an uproar, or you were responsible for a newborn vampire.

Like many a person who’d had an unplanned child and hadn’t had the grace to accept it as a gift, Malcolm had been disgusted with the responsibility of an infant. Aubrey had had no idea that he was a vampire—she’d thought he was simply the man who made her mocha latte at the coffee shop she frequented every evening. His shift had ended; he’d asked if he could walk her to the hospital. Though she had been reserved around many people, Malcolm had been both unassuming and sweet, and she’d enjoyed his company—at least, she had until he’d bared his fangs at her.

He hadn’t meant to turn her—he’d simply taken too much from her wrist

He’d made it quite clear to Aubrey that siring a newborn was the worst thing that could happen in a vampire’s life.

Like a child feeling the sting of rejection from a parent, it had hurt Aubrey to hear it. And perhaps that was why she decided to disobey the first of her maker’s orders.

Instead of going to a place she’d never been, she went to the hospital where she’d been a resident. With every step closer that she took, the weaker she felt.

The hospital smelled of blood. Old blood, new blood. The bittersweet smell saturated the area for the entire city block, and Aubrey inhaled deliberately to draw the scent in.

It made her thirsty. It made her hungry. It made her want.

The thirst warred with longing as she stepped close to the automatic double doors of the front entrance. She’d spent so many hours there, closed inside the building where the smell of acrid antiseptic tried to wash away the delicious tang of blood. She’d spent more time here than she had in her own home.

The snaking hallways, the small, windowless rooms. She knew them all.

The people, too. So many familiar faces. It was comforting, a soothing balm on her grieving soul.

If she even had a soul anymore.

But surely amongst all the new faces that appeared in Admitting and the emergency room, she could find someone she didn’t know. Someone whose scent appealed to her in the way that cinnamon rolls and freshly brewed coffee once had.

Maybe she could even find someone who was sick, sick enough that their fate was already decided. Then it wouldn’t matter how much blood she took. She could drink and drink, drink until this dreadful, ever-growing thirst was finally assuaged.

“Dr. Hart!” Slowly, Aubrey turned her head. She’d just reached the front doors of the hospital, and the fluorescent lights that were placed around the perimeter of the musty brick building cast everything with a minty-green tinge.

A man sat on a dilapidated wooden bench that was set back into the grass. Huge goose bumps prickled his skin from the kiss of the chilly breeze—he wore nothing overtop his flimsy hospital gown. An intravenous line carried something that smelled sickly sweet to his hand from a clear plastic bag, and Aubrey could smell the blood that was crusted around the tiny wound.

She recognized the man, but it was as if she was seeing someone she’d once known a very long time ago. He had been a patient that she’d tended a few times, and she couldn’t remember his name.

She stared at him openly, fascinated with the changes in him. Or rather the changes in how her new eyes saw him, she supposed.

More than anything, she saw the flow of blood through his veins, moving with every beat of his heart.

“Dr. Hart?” The man lowered his contraband cigarette from his mouth slowly, and Aubrey admired the beautiful tangerine ember of the lit end. She cocked her head curiously, studying the man as he studied her.

He seemed to be growing uncertain, and slightly embarrassed with it.

“I’m sorry.” He stubbed out the cigarette on the wood of the bench with nervous fingers, the lit stick burning a round circle into the grain. “You just… you look like someone that I haven’t seen in a while.”

Aubrey nodded. The mirror had told her how different that she now looked, but it was still surprising to have it confirmed. But more curious was the knowledge that she could bite this man here, could drink from him, and it would be easier than anything she’d ever done in her life. He was here, waiting, like a gift.

But she didn’t want him. Something in the smell that wafted off of him was slightly distasteful to her senses, and she knew that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—drink from him.

Dismissing the man, she turned, walked away from the entrance to the hospital and instead found herself compelled to walk around the side of the building to the poorly lit loading dock where the staff of the hospital made their way to and from work.

The concrete beneath her shoes was damp, and its dark tone seemed to swallow the flickering robin’s-egg light of the fluorescents and the silvery gleam cast by the moon.

She liked how things looked through her new eyes.

More, she liked the smell that intensified with every step that she took. There was someone back here. Someone who smelled like chocolate, rich, silky chocolate.

She could hear the steady thump of the person’s heart, and the quiet fizz of that chocolate-infused blood as it was pumped through iridescent veins. She could already taste it, that first taste of blood from the vein, and she wanted it like she’d never wanted the disgusting, congealed sludge contained in the plastic bags that Malcolm had brought her.

“Could I get a hand with this?” The voice attached to the cocoa smell was irritable. Aubrey was taken aback.

She recognized the voice. Unlike the fog that had clouded her memory of the man at the front entrance, this remembrance was like a scalpel through soft flesh.

“Gavin Thibodeau.” She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until the man himself whipped around and squinted through the night in her direction.

“Hart?” His voice sounded like metal shards, scrubbing away at the quiet din of background noise of a hospital at night. “What the hell are you doing lurking around in the shadows? And where have you been? Do you know—”

He cut himself off as Aubrey stepped closer, and was more easily seen. The last time she’d seen him, her locks had been lank and habitually in a long tail, and she’d never bothered with makeup or jewelry. There had been no point when she wore scrubs all the time.

Now she was vivid, a colour image in a black-and-white picture, something that she had made an effort to accentuate, though she wasn’t entirely certain why.

She felt like a different person. She was a different person, one who could attract someone like Gavin.

Yes, she could attract him. She could have Gavin if she wanted him.

She found that she did. That, at least, hadn’t changed when she’d died.

“Hello.” Even her voice sounded different than it had. It was warm and smooth, like thick, creamy honey.

Gavin—she’d never thought of him as Dr. Thibodeau, though she’d always called him that to his face—had been her preceptor, her supervisor, at the hospital. He was tall, had spiky hair the color of espresso and eyes of glacial ice. A silver bar pierced his eyebrow, one that he took out when on duty, and she knew from the clothes that he wore to and from work that when not in scrubs he preferred skinny, low-riding denim, studded belts and fitted T-shirts.

She’d had a yen for him even before she could smell the intoxicating aroma of his blood.

“Where the devil have you been, Hart? It’s bloody unprofessional to just take off without a word. You’ve screwed up your residency but good.” Aubrey watched as he raked a hand with long, skilled surgeon’s fingers through the gelled spikes of his hair. He was wearing a pair of those skinny jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

Her mouth watered, and she felt the sting of her fangs as they began to descend. They pricked her tongue, and she tasted the salt of her own blood, but it held no appeal.

It lacked the essence of life that Gavin’s did.

She wanted his blood, wanted it spread out on her tongue, in her mouth and down her throat.

She wanted more than that, too. She could feel arousal spreading over her like the warmth of the sun that she could no longer worship. It was a sensation that she was familiar with, only intensified with her new senses.

“I’ve been sick.” She took a slow, deliberate step toward him, and then another, and saw his pupils dilate and his nostrils flare just the tiniest bit.

Interesting. She hadn’t used any of her new vampire allure—at least she didn’t think she had. Malcolm had told her that it was a force that had to be released consciously, but who knew if he’d been telling the truth.

“You work in a hospital.” The tempo of Gavin’s heartbeat quickened, and it sounded musical to Aubrey’s ears. “If you were seriously sick, you should have come here.”

“I couldn’t go to a hospital.” Aubrey stepped closer still. She understood now what Malcolm had meant when he’d spoken of hunting. She was the predator, and she’d locked in on her prey. “It wasn’t like that.”

Gavin’s stare fell to her lips, which she licked. His voice was shaky as it uttered his next words.

“What was it like, then? Do tell.” She liked that he hadn’t lost his sarcasm, even in the face of his confusion. And he was confused, she knew that, even before she’d done anything more than talk.

She was different now. She was confident, she was sexy. She was beautiful.

She was going to have what she’d been dreaming about for months. And she was going to have blood, too.

“Do you really want to talk?” Closing the rest of the distance between them, Aubrey leaned in a calculated inch. If she’d had any breath left, she would have been able to exhale on his lips and have him feel the warmth.

“You’re… different.” Gavin closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. “What’s different?”

Aubrey placed her rear at the edge of the van floor that was now at her back. Gavin had been moving a box, it looked like. A large, heavy box. She pushed at it with a hand, and it slid back into the vehicle as if it was empty.

She saw Gavin blink at the ease with which she moved the item, when he’d grumpily asked for help… and he was no weakling. She’d seen the muscles of his arms under the short sleeves of his scrub shirt. He was lean, but he was also ripped.

Leaning backward so that her weight rested on her elbows, Aubrey stared at Gavin, unabashed. “I’ve had to reevaluate my life. Being sick… changed me. And now all I can do is work with what’s left.”

She wanted him to come closer. Wanted him to touch her. She could’ve just grabbed him and torn her teeth into his neck, but she wanted him to come to her willingly.

She wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t do any of this, unless he was at least partially willing. Which was probably why Malcolm had told her to hunt only those who were strangers to her.

It was too late. She’d caught the scent of her prey, and like a decadent fudge brownie to a dieter, she could think of nothing else.

She would have him inside her, just as she’d wanted him for months. And while he was inside her, she would taste his blood. She’d drink, she’d grow strong.

And then she’d make him forget that any of it had ever happened.

Gavin was horribly confused. Dr. Aubrey Hart, the resident who’d abruptly dropped out of her residency weeks earlier, was lying against the back of his van with a confidence he’d never seen even a hint of before, and her body language was screaming at him to take what he’d tried not to think about taking from her before.

He wasn’t sure that he believed that she’d been sick. It was more like she’d had a complete personality transplant. But if he’d found her skittishness cute before—in a forbidden, can’t-ever-act-on-it kind of way—he found her new seduce-me attitude sexy as hell.

He liked strong women. They were difficult, they were demanding and they were a hell of a lot work, true, but they also challenged him.

What kind of man would he be if he wanted some sweet young thing who would just acquiesce to his every desire?

That was why he’d never understood his attraction to Aubrey. But now, with the memory of the sweet girl and the reality of the new woman in front of him, the two swirled into a delicious mix that made his mouth water and his cock thicken. Like whiskey and beer, the combination seemed as if it shouldn’t work.

But oh, how it did.

But something still seemed off to him, and that something had him holding back from simply climbing into the back of the van with her and covering her body with his own.

“We should go inside and discuss your residency.” He tore his eyes away from the curves clad in tight denim and reminded himself that he was her preceptor. This was not appropriate.

His glands screamed at him in response, and his hands actually twitched with the need to put them on her, to feel her skin.

She simply blinked, continuing to watch him brazenly with that direct stare. He decided that that was what had him unnerved.

The Aubrey Hart that he knew rarely made eye contact with anybody.

“Come here.” He was completely taken aback at the words that left her mouth, and even more so at the subtle movement that accompanied them.

As she spoke, she sat up slowly and at the same time opened her legs, just the slightest bit.

There was no doubt in his mind as to what she was getting at. But he didn’t know how to respond.

He wanted her. Oh, he absolutely did. This newfound brazenness that she was displaying all but made him drool. But at the same time, he was used to being the aggressor. The initiator. Part of him fought against the idea of being reeled in with suggestive body language and a sexy stare.

Not to mention that he was her boss. Even if that fact was rapidly fading away.

He found himself taking a step closer to the van—and Aubrey—and then one more.

Could he do this? He wanted her so badly that he didn’t feel like he had a choice. Was it possible that she wanted him as much? Or was this some strange kind of power play?

His cock pressed painfully against the zipper of his jeans, demanding an answer.

He made up his mind.

“No. You come here.”

Chapter Two

Aubrey was so thirsty that she could barely speak. But she managed to murmur assent over the thickness in her throat as she slithered down from the van and moved to where Gavin stood.

This was it. She was about to make her first kill—in figurative terms, of course. She wouldn’t kill him, she’d simply wipe his memory after it was all done.

But the thought of killing, of how very easily she could accidentally take his life, brought feelings from her old life foaming to the surface.

This was Gavin. Dr. Thibodeau. The hard-assed preceptor who nonetheless had comforted her when she’d lost her first patient. The one who was always on her case to be better, because he knew she could be.

The one with the smile that made her weak in the knees.

If she could have walked away at that point, she would have. But she was too far gone, both with the thirst and with lust.

She had to have him, and so she snugged her body up against his own. She could feel the outline of his arousal pressing against the flesh of her belly, and it pleased her immensely that she hadn’t yet had to use her new vampire allure.

At least, she didn’t think she’d used it. Again, she couldn’t be sure.

“Aubrey.” Her name falling from his lips sounded like a curse, and she savored it as well as the rich smell of his blood. She’d never heard him say her name before, not her first name. It had always been “Dr. Hart,” and it was usually barked at her in disgruntled tones.

She shushed him, the soft shh slithering into the night. His frame was tense as she closed the last whisper of space between them, tense with what she thought was confusion.

Tilting her head up, she let their gazes meet. She’d been intending to try using some of her new allure, but instead found herself feeling weak in the knees. Though she assured herself that it was just due to the hunger—though lust for Gavin made her hunger fade from the forefront of her mind, she was starving—in her gut she knew that it was likely because of the intensity in his icy-blue eyes.

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