“What the hell are you doing frowning at my lady parts?”
Io sounded outraged.
“I’m not frowning at them.”
“You are. Your eyebrows are all pulled down between your gorgeous eyes, making me want to run my fingers along them to smooth them out. That, sir, is a frown, and it’s directed at my nether bits. There’s nothing there to frown at, I assure you. I pruned before I came to Austria, not that I expected to get it on with anyone, and especially not that we’re going to hook up.” She paused. “Other than what we’ve already done, obviously. But that’s not really going gung ho forward, is it? It was just kind of quasi there.”
He had absolutely no idea what she was going on about, so he focused on the one thing that did make sense. “My eyes are sufficiently smooth, thank you,” he corrected her, still frowning at that part of her that was so tantalizingly close. It was true that the entire front of the pale peach undergarment was wet with his seed, but that wasn’t what bothered him.
“You know what I mean. Why are you frowning at my crotch?”
“I am frowning at that ridiculous garment you are wearing to hide it from my view.”
She looked startled for a moment before looking down to where his penis—now succumbing to a restful state—lay against her pubic mound. “My…underwear?”
“Whatever it is called, I dislike it.”
“It’s Victoria’s Secret, you boob! It’s very expensive! I got it for myself last Christmas, before I was fired by my asshat of a boss. Besides, it matches the bra.”
“I don’t care what it matches, or whose secret it is, I dislike it because it keeps your flesh from meeting mine as is right and proper. Remove it immediately.”
“Look, I may have done things with you that I never do with a man I’ve just met, but that doesn’t give you the right to demand I remove my undies even if they are a bit ooky now because you got all excited on them. Not that I’m holding you entirely to blame for that, since your vamp-biting thing made me crazy wild with lust. But still, it’s not going to happen, so just get over it already.” She got to her feet and stalked over to where the remains of her gown lay on the ground.
Nikola stared up at the lightening sky and considered and discarded a number of scenarios in which he showed Io that he was not the type of man who cared what others thought or felt, and decided, in the end, to be magnanimous. He would allow her to continue believing that she had every right to speak to him in that wholly irreverent manner, but only so long as it took to write his brilliant paper and receive his award. In the meantime, he would sate himself on her, giving in to the siren lure of her delicious person, and take his fill, then simply walk away from her and continue on with his life.
The Incredible Adventures of Iolanthe Tennyson
July 13
I’m a bit embarrassed to write what happened early this morning. Oh, it was totally Nikola’s fault, because it’s obvious that he did something to my brain when he sucked my blood and all, but even with the vampire compulsion or thrall or whatever it is that vamps do to ensnare innocent women’s minds and make them their love slaves, it was still me that jumped his bones. Repeatedly.
And enjoyed every damned second of it.
“You are wholly to blame for this,” I pointed out to Nikola a short while after the scene on the side of the road.
“A fact which I have admitted, and reassured you that I will replace your gown,” he said in that yummy British accent he had. That voice seemed to do something to me, make all of my innards vibrate with happiness every time he spoke. I told my innards to cool it, that we’d shamed ourselves enough for one day.
“I was actually talking about the fact that you enslaved my mind with your lustful thoughts rather than the fact that you ripped my brand-new sundress to shreds,” I corrected him, glancing down at myself. With my dress in tatters, I wore his shirt and coat, the former of which reached down to my knees since it was exceptionally long.
“I didn’t enslave your mind.” Nikola rode next to me, the rosy fingers of dawn managing to caress his bare chest and arms in a way that made my breath stop in my lungs. “I cannot enslave anyone’s mind.”
I cleared my throat and dragged my eyes off him.
“Then you enthralled me or did something to make me your love slave.”
He sighed. “I’ve just told you that I cannot do that. That’s not to say I wouldn’t if I could, because the idea of being surrounded by love slaves appeals to me, and being a man, I am naturally in need of many women to attend to my varied sexual needs, but unfortunately, I have not yet discovered that a Dark One can enslave minds.”
“You’d love a herd of love-struck women swooning over you,” I said with a glare at him. The dawg!
“It is the way of things,” he agreed.
I was about to tell him what I thought of that sentiment when a thought occurred to me. “You said your wife has been dead for a bit?”
“Seven years, yes.” He shot me a curious look.
“How long were you married?”
The look got significantly more pointed. “Sixteen years.”
“And what did your wife think of you messing around with this great big herd of women that your manful lusts demanded?”
He stiffened in the saddle, making his horse do a little side step that he quickly got under control. “Madame, I can assure you that my wife never had complaints about me in that regard.”
For some reason, his outrage made me want to giggle. Oh, I had his number all right—he was all bark and little bite.
So to speak.
“However, I have been without a wife for many years, and it is a well-known fact that men have sexual needs greater than those of women.”
My amusement faded. “You are so—that is utter and complete bullshit! It is not a well-known fact! It’s a well-known fallacy put around by a bunch of horny men who want to justify having sex with every woman they can sweet-talk into bed, that’s all. For your information, women have the same amount of sexual needs as men. Boy, you guys really did have some messed-up ideas about things.”
“I have read many scientific papers on the subject, and they all agree that men’s needs are more prevalent and varied than women’s.”
“You can stuff your scientific papers where the sun don’t shine as far as I’m concerned.”
“Doesn’t.”
I gawked at him for a few seconds.
“The correct grammar is ‘where the sun doesn’t shine.’” He frowned as he thought. “Although that is an odd thing to say. If you meant night, why did you not simply say ‘at night’?”
“I know what the correct grammar is, you ignoramus! It’s a saying. It means you can shove your outdated, woman-stifling, chauvinistic ideas up your butt.”
His eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. “I do not at all enjoy that sort of thing, either. And if you do, I regret to inform you—”
“No!” Thor, Imogen’s horse, tossed his head around at my shriek. I lowered my voice and gritted my teeth. “I don’t like that, either, not that I’ve tried it, but it’s not something I intend to experiment with, so let’s move past that, shall we?”
“You’re the one who brought it up,” he pointed out.
“I didn’t mean to literally stick something up your—” I took a deep breath, struggling to get a good, solid grip on my temper, which was not an easy task when Nikola seemed determined to drive me bonkers. “I don’t even remember how we got onto the subject of your ridiculous ideas about women and sex.”
“You accused me of making you my love slave, which is lamentably incorrect, because if you were my love slave, you would even now be impaled on my penis.”
The image of that so filled my mind, I had to take a minute or two to get past it. “Er…while we were on the horse?” I eventually managed to ask, unable to keep myself from glancing at his lap.
His eyebrows rose again. “If you desire. I’ve heard it can be stimulating, assuming both persons
have good seats.”
That thought kept us both quiet for a short bit. After realizing that I was considering just where my arms and legs would go with regards to his saddle, I gave myself another mental scold, and returned to the matter at hand. “I was simply pointing out that someone is responsible for my state of mind. How else do you explain the fact that I’ve jumped you three times now?”
He glanced at me with those wickedly gorgeous pale blue eyes, a little smile dancing on his lips. “Perhaps you simply desire me as much as I desire you.”
“We just met, and I’m the sort of a woman who likes men for their minds, not their bodies. It’s a well-known fact among my friends that I have to know a man for some time before I get sexually interested. Gretl says I’m too picky that way, but it’s just the way I am. So clearly, this whole situation with me wanting to do things to you is your fault, and not mine.”
“Indeed.” That was all he said, but when he did so, he brushed a bug off his chest. Instantly, my gaze went to his bare chest, my hands tingling with the desire to stroke the lovely muscles that made up some really spectacular viewing.
Oh, dear lord, I was doing it again! Honestly, I wasn’t such a ninny that I couldn’t be near the man without wanting him to do all sorts of erotic things to me.
But I want to do those erotic things. Especially that one where you spread oil on us both and slither around on top of me.
“And you can stop egging on my poor, deluded brain! Besides, that’s eavesdropping pure and simple, and I’m not going to stand for it. Now, what we need here is to get organized.”
“I am completely organized,” Nikola said blandly. “Every aspect of my life is orderly and well-thought-out. I run my house with a firm hand. My children and servants know that should they disorder that to which I have brought order, they will suffer the most grievous of penalties. Dedicated study to the unknown, order, and a calm clarity of mind are all my bywords. In short, madame, I am the personification of the word organized.”
I murmured a word to myself that was not at all polite, and gave some thought to the situation. “It’s clear that somehow that swirly thing in the woods was responsible for me being zapped back here. Therefore, I need to find it again, and let it send me back where I belong.”
“You have not fully explained this swirly thing, as you call it. What, exactly, is it?”
“It’s kind of hard to describe.” I spent a few seconds summoning my memories, and explained to Nikola the happenings in the woods.
“I do not understand this photograph that you keep referring to,” he said after a long pause. He had pulled out his notebook from a pocket in his breeches, and made a brief note or two. “Nor why a cloud of smoke had the ability to alter time.”
“The swirly thing wasn’t really smoke—it just kind of looked smoky. It was more like—I don’t know—light, I guess. Swirls of light twisting around on itself. And a photograph is like a painting, only more realistic. It’s a two-dimensional representation of an object or scene.”
“Indeed.” He made a few more notes. I smiled to myself. I’d never thought that I was an overly curious person, but the fact that Nikola’s interest in the world around him was clearly far more developed than mine tickled me.
It also made me feel profoundly stupid about those things that people in my time took for granted.
“And why were you in the woods to begin with?”
“Hmm? Oh, I was looking for a setting to take some pictures of Imogen, but she—” The words stopped as a memory of Imogen’s face rose with horrible clarity in my mind.
Imogen refused to go to the woods because she said that’s where her uncles had killed her father. Slowly, I turned to look at Nikola. He rode beside me, one hand holding the reins against his thigh while the other hand flipped through the pages of his notebook.
I was confused pure and simple—Imogen said her father was killed in the woods one fateful night, while her brother had claimed he was alive and well and living in South America, enjoying the scantily clad women that abounded there.
My eyes narrowed at Nikola. I had no difficulty imagining him being in seventh heaven in such a surrounding.
But which of the siblings was right? Had Benedikt lied to me about his father being alive? Or had Imogen? And if Imogen was telling the truth—a cold wave swept over me despite the warmth of Nikola’s coat. “The anniversary of his death is in a couple of days,” I said softly, repeating the words Imogen had spoken to me.
“Whose death?” Nikola asked, looking up from his notebook.
“Er…no one’s.”
A chill swept over me. It was clear now that Imogen had been speaking the truth. No doubt she had told her younger brother a lie to keep him from being traumatized by the true events of that dreadful day.
None of that altered the horrible realization that Nikola could be in deadly peril. Possibly we were a few hours away from the day when, in some unknown year, Nikola would die.
What if it was this year?
That thought held me in its terrible grip the remainder of the trip back to Nikola’s castle. By the time we got there, I’d come to two conclusions—one, that I needed to waste no time finding the swirly light thing, and returning to my own reality, and two, if it was at all possible to warn Nikola about his brothers’ murderous intent without messing up the time-space continuum, or whatever it is that the people in Star Trek were always worried about whenever they time traveled, then I would do so.
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” I told the empty room into which Nikola deposited me once we arrived at his castle on the mountaintop. “But Imogen is Gretl’s friend—will be Gretl’s friend—and for that reason, and because you were nice enough to let me wear your shirt, not to mention the fact that your chest holds an unholy fascination for me, because of all that, I will warn you about the evil plot your brothers are hatching. But that’s it. Nothing more. No sex, no more nooky, nothing.”
The fire crackling in the fireplace across from the bed was the only response to my bold statement. I sighed and sat down on the bed, wondering how on earth I was going to manage to keep myself from jumping Nikola the next time I saw him.
“You’re doing this on purpose,” I said three minutes later when the door opened and Nikola strolled in, clad once again in a white shirt, long waistcoat of blue and gold, and midnight blue coat that reached almost to his knees.
“Yes, I am. I frequently have a purpose when I enter a room. I find that if I don’t, I just wander around the castle bumping into things. Why aren’t you in bed?”
I gasped and clutched a beautifully embroidered pillow to my chest. “I knew it! You just want to get into my pants! Well, I meant what I said, Buster Brown, so you can just put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Nikola frowned. “I do not smoke a pipe. Tobacco bothers my daughter. You are supposed to be in bed. I instructed you to retire since you have fallen off a horse four times—”
“That last time was totally your fault! I told you to catch me and you didn’t.”
“I wasn’t aware you were going to dismount on the incorrect side. If you had done it properly—”
“Oh, I like that! I’m the newbie at riding, so you should have made your dismounting instructions more comprehensive. And as for your instructions—”
“In addition to which you ran headlong into Heinrich with such force as to make yourself insensible—”
“That was probably also your fault, too,” I said darkly. Although most of my memory had returned, I didn’t remember running into Nikola’s carriage, as he said I had.
“And finally, the exertion of attempting to seduce me on three separate occasions must all have taken its toll on your constitution, and thus you need rest.” He finished with a little bow to me, hands making an elegant gesture that was heightened by the pretty lace at his wrists. Oddly enough, the lace didn’t make him look effeminate—quite the opposite, it enhanced the raw masculinity that he seemed to exude.
> I was about to point out to him that I was a big girl, and perfectly able to determine when I needed sleep, but the truth was, I felt as if I were two inches away from shattering into a billion pieces of exhaustion.
The door opened before I could inform Nikola of my intention to get some rest. Imogen bustled into the room with her arms full of white linen.
“Papa?” she asked, giving him a curious look before sliding it toward me. “What are you doing here?”
“This is my castle. I own it. I inherited it from my father, your grandfather for whom you are named.” Nikola frowned at his daughter. “Thus the answer to your question is that I am here because I have every right to be here.”
“Your father’s name was Imogen?” I asked Nikola.
He moved the frown over to me. “Of course it wasn’t. Imogen is a female name. My father’s name was Fidele.”
“But you said—”
“Papa, you should not be here. Miss Iolanthe is an unmarried woman in an advanced state of undress, and I will not allow you to take advantage of her,” Imogen interrupted, setting down the stack of clothing on the corner of the bed. “You may leave, and I will attend to her.”
“Woman!” He fairly yelled the word. “I will not be gainsaid in my own home! If I wish to be here, in this room of the castle of which I am the lord and master, so that Io might seduce me again, then here is where I will stand, and there is naught you can say to me to remove me from the premises. Now begone, so that the lady might begin her seduction without an audience.”
Imogen slowly turned to look at me, a speculative glint in her eyes. “You seduced my father?”
“No! I would never! I just happened to jump him once or twice—”
“Three times.”
“Once or three times, not that anyone should be counting.” I shot Nikola a potent glare. “But there was no seduction. It was just…er…how old are you?”
Imogen’s lips pursed for a moment. “Does my age matter?”
“It does if you don’t know about the birds and bees.”
A Tale of Two Vampires Page 10
