One Bite with a Stranger

by Christine Warren

  She pursed her lips and tapped the pen against the pad. “So were there any rules about these fantasies? I can’t remember all the particulars we decided on. I think I was too drunk.”

  “Anything goes, baby.” Danice grinned. “You can ask for anything you want, and if we can’t get it for you, we have to pay the forfeit. One month of celibacy each.”

  “Which is not going to be a problem, darling. We can get you anything you want, Regina, so quit stalling and start writing.”

  Reggie narrowed her eyes and obeyed Ava’s command. She knew she was being vindictive with the first four slips of paper she filled out, but panic had taken over and she found the insistence of her friends only added to the tension. As far as she could tell, a month of abstinence would be good for them. Maybe it would get their minds off sex for sixty consecutive seconds.

  Pushing down her conscience, Reggie quickly scribbled out four fantasies, each impossible for anyone to fulfill. Not even her resourceful friends could manage to find a vampire, an alien, Bigfoot or Elvis, still alive, in shape, and fully functional.

  Take that, she thought, folding the scraps of paper neatly and setting them on the table.

  “Oh, you cannot tell me you don’t have enough fantasies,” Danice glared, planting a hand on her hip and shaking her head at Reggie. “You are twenty-seven years old, girl, and the last two, you spent chained to Groping Gregory. You got time to make up for!”

  “I’m thinking,” Reggie snapped back. And she was, but unfortunately she’d just run out of Weekly World News headlines.

  “Don’t think,” Ava ordered, holding out the hat. “Fantasize. Now.”

  Reggie racked her brain for another ten seconds and came up blank, but when even softhearted Missy started in on her to finish, she dashed off the first thing that came to mind and tossed the five folded slips of paper into the hat. The last one really was one of her fantasies, and her stomach knotted at the prospect of it becoming common knowledge, but the chances of it being drawn weren’t good. If the gods loved her, she reassured herself, it would never see the light of day. She’d be cuddling a yeti before it ever happened.

  “Fine. Do your worst,” Reggie muttered, having no trouble projecting a tone of nervous resentment. “But I hope you all pay for this one day. One day soon!”

  She drained her wine glass while her friends whooped their glee, then she reached for the bottle of pinot grigio and poured another.

  Corinne settled down on the couch beside Reggie and patted her knee companionably. “Buck up, grasshopper. We love you, and I can guarantee that we will give you one hell of a Fix.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Reggie had never really wanted a Fix. She’d wanted a marriage and a family and a white picket fence, but Greg had ruined all that. And what was worse, her friends would probably have had a harder time believing that was her fantasy than they would with the alien abduction scenario. For Reggie, though, sex wasn’t just about sex. Sex was great, of course, but she’d never been able to treat it lightly. She wasn’t wired that way. For her, sex was about having a relationship with another person and allowing herself to be vulnerable to him, and who wanted to be vulnerable to a stranger?

  Reggie wanted to be in love, not in lust.

  “All right, ladies.” Ava stood in front of the coffee table with Reggie’s hat in her hand and a wicked smile on her face. “If I may have your attention, let’s get started, since our Fix for this draw is already a bit behind the rest of us. Corinne, if you’d care to do the honors? Remember, we need a double draw for Ms. McNeill.”

  Corinne grinned and leaned forward to reach into the hat Ava held just above their heads. “Can I get a drum roll, please?”

  Danice banged her hands on the edge of the coffee table. As if I don’t already have a headache, Reggie thought, crossing her arms and tucking her chin to her chest like a petulant two-year-old.

  With a flourish, Corinne drew two slips of white paper from the inside of the hat and rubbed them together like a couple of crisp twenties before handing them off to Ava. “The envelope, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Corinne, darling. Now, what do we have here?”

  The other three women leaned closer while Reggie sulked into her glass.

  “Let’s hear it!”

  “Come on, what’s it say?”

  “I bet it’s kinky. The quiet ones are always kinky.”

  Ava ignored them while she read. While one carefully sculpted eyebrow arched into a perfect bow. While her lips pursed. While she whistled long and low.

  “I knew it!” Corinne blurted out, punching the air in emphasis. “I told you it’s the quiet ones.”

  “You have no idea,” Ava purred, finally looking up to see Reggie turning a peculiar shade of magenta. “Why, Regina Elaina McNeill, I am shocked. You are quite the little vixen, aren’t you?”

  “What’s it say already?”

  Ava smiled. “It says that our dearest friend thought she’d be pulling a fast one on us. Sorry to disappoint you, Regina darling, but you are getting Fixed, whether you like it or not.”

  Missy frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Ava held up one piece of paper and read aloud. “Regina says she wants to be ‘seduced by a sexy, mysterious vampire.’”

  Corinne turned a glare on Reggie. “That is not fair, Reg! Your fantasies have to be plausible. You can’t hold us responsible for not being able to find you someone who doesn’t even exist!”

  “Hush. Don’t get your panties in a twist, Corinne, dear,” Ava soothed. “You are not destined for celibacy. We will provide Reggie with what she asked for.”

  Danice rolled her eyes. “You had a few too many glasses of that wine, Ava. Vampires aren’t real.”

  “I know that, and since Regina is perfectly sane—at least legally—she knows it as well. If Reggie actually wanted us to find her a genuine vampire, she would be cheating, and I know our friend would never do that. Which means we need to view her fantasy in a more creative light.”

  “Like how?”

  “I’m so glad you asked.” Ava purred her answer to Missy’s question, but her gaze never wavered from Reggie’s. “It just so happens I know of a certain club in the East Village that hosts a regular event on the last Friday of each month. They call it the Vampire Ball.”

  Corinne laughed. “So we can find Reggie a man there! Since she knows she can’t have a real vampire, she’ll have to accept a man who could pose as one. Ava, you’re brilliant!”

  “I try, dear.”

  “Yeah, you’re very trying.” Reggie scowled. “I can’t believe you’re going to pawn me off on some freak who is so out of touch with reality he pretends to be a vampire to get his kicks. That is so pathetic.”

  Ava’s Cheshire cat grin turned steely. “You agreed to the enterprise, Reggie, and you submitted the fantasy. You’re bound by the rules just like the rest of us, so unless you want to submit something more realistic, this is the fantasy you get.”

  “One of them, anyway.” Bless her mediating heart, Missy stepped between the two women before they could come to blows. “What does the other fantasy say? Does she want to be abducted by aliens, or have Elvis’s love child?”

  Missy tried to joke about it to lighten things up, which Reggie appreciated, but when Ava shook her head and smiled wider, Reggie felt every muscle in her body tighten with fear.

  “Neither,” Ava purred, holding up the other slip of paper. “She doesn’t want to be Bigfoot’s love slave, either.”

  Oh, no! In that moment, Reggie knew for certain the gods had abandoned her to an ugly fate. She knew which other fantasy Ava had selected. The need to escape suddenly overwhelmed her.

  “I need a drink.” Reggie pushed off the floor and attempted to head into the kitchen to hide. She never made it past the end of the coffee table. Danice grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her back to a seat on the sofa.

  “Ah-ah, Reg. Sit your butt back down and prepare to get
Fixed.”

  “Come on, guys. I’m sorry for making up the vampire thing,” she stammered. “Can’t we just forget about it? I’ll write a real fantasy this time. I promise. Let’s start over. Please?”

  “Not a chance. Now that we know you want to be”—Ava consulted the slips of paper—“as you say here, ‘seduced and overpowered by a lover,’ we are not going to let this go. Especially not when you also have this burning desire to be ‘bound, spanked, and dominated’ by a sexy, commanding brute.”

  “Oh, wow,” Missy breathed, her mouth rounding into an O of surprise, and she stared at her friend through new eyes.

  “Reggie, I can’t believe you never mentioned this. What else have you been keeping secret from us?”

  “Nothing,” Reggie insisted, though it came out kind of muffled by the hands in which she had buried her flaming face. “Not a damn thing. How could I keep secrets from you people? You’re worse than tabloid reporters!”

  “Actually,” Corinne offered, “I am a tabloid reporter.”

  Danice grinned. “Hey, it’s not like you want to get back together with Gregory the Grotesque. Now we just know you’re a wild thing in the bedroom. No biggie.”

  “Oh, not at all.” Reggie drained her wine glass and refilled it, taking it with her when she curled into a ball in the corner of her sofa. “Humiliation never killed anyone. I’m sure I’ll get over it in another couple of incarnations.”

  Missy, always the softy, wiped the smile off her face and squeezed Reggie’s arm. “Hey, it’s not so bad. It’s not like you don’t know anything embarrassing about any of us. I mean, come on. You know about my mountain man thing. You know Danice got picked up by a marine on shore leave. You know Ava auditioned for a strip show. Let’s face it, honey. You’re not the only girl out there with…sophisticated tastes.”

  Seeing their words were maybe beginning to get through to their blushing comrade, Corinne perched on the arm of the sofa beside Reggie and topped off the other woman’s drink. “She’s right, you know. Besides, we’re your best friends. We’d love you even if you had secret fantasies about Dubya. We’d think you were insane, but we’d still love you.”

  That drew a reluctant smile.

  “We would,” Danice insisted. “A little kink ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, girl. If your fantasies were as vanilla as the rest of you, that’s when I’d start to worry.”

  Ava waved a hand to get their attention. “All true, of course. And, since our reluctantly cooperative friend has two fantasies that work so very well together, I think we can safely assure her that we are going to make sure they come true, and quite quickly as well. Next week happens to be the last Friday of the month, which means the five of us will be having a very interesting night in the Village. If I can propose a toast?”

  The women reached for their glasses and held them aloft in anticipation.

  “To our dear friend Regina,” Ava said after a brief pause. “And to her very own Fantasy Fix. May they be very happy together!”

  Chapter 2

  Just because the Gods had abandoned her to a cruel fate didn’t stop Reggie from praying they’d keep her from breaking her ankle.

  She took as deep a breath as the black satin corset her friends had laced her into would allow, and concentrated very hard on balancing on her four-inch heels while she descended the steps into the darkened club.

  Seven solid days of frantic pleading, threats, and attempted bribery had failed to sway Ava or any of the other three women from their determination to “Fix” Reggie. They insisted on making the scheduled trip to a nightclub in the heart of the East Village that had been made over for the monthly vampire event as the Mausoleum, an unrepentantly gothic piece of urban kitsch. None of them had even shown any sympathy for Reggie’s pleas, except for Missy.

  Even then, as softhearted as she was, Missy refused to side with Reggie against the others. Instead she’d tried to offer reassurance.

  “It’s not like Ava is really going to pawn you off on a loser, Reg,” Missy had said over the phone earlier. “She was just trying to get your goat for giving us such a hard time. You know what she’s like. She’d kill me if she knew I told you this, but she knows a guy she’s been planning to hook you up with forever, and she’s having him meet us at the club. I’ve met him, and he’s great. Now will you relax?”

  The answer to that—a resounding no of a headache—began to throb behind Reggie’s temples in time to the industrial-techno music that boomed through the loudspeakers. She tried her best to ignore it and stuck like glue to her friends. If she lost them, she’d never find them again in the gyrating throng of identically black-clad bodies.

  Of course, that went both ways. If she could slip away unnoticed—

  A hand clamped over her wrist.

  “Stay close!” Ava leaned into their little huddle, but she still had to shout to make herself heard any farther than six inches away. “Let’s head over to the bar and get a drink before we plan our attack.”

  Ava always had been perceptive, and she refused to let go of Reggie while she squeezed and shimmied her way through the crowd toward the black-lit bar at one end of the cavernous room. She must have guessed that Reggie had already been planning to bolt.

  The women squirmed their way across the dance floor like an amoeba with five pseudopodia. Getting up to the bar required the judicious use of a few elbows and an acquired immunity to insults. As the first to reach an empty inch of space, Danice yelled their drink orders, and the others closed ranks around Reggie, who promptly rolled her eyes.

  “Come on, guys,” she protested when they hurried to snag a tall bar table that had just been vacated. “Don’t you think you’re being just a little paranoid? I’m here. I came. I answered my door when you picked me up instead of refusing to buzz you in. I put on these excuses for clothes you told me to wear. I even let you plant a bag full of sex toys in my closet! I’ve surrendered. I’m not likely to go anywhere now.”

  “But we know you well enough not to trust you,” Corinne pointed out, accepting a dark brown beer bottle and taking a moment to survey the crowd. “Ava was the one who thought the corset would be enough to keep you from running. But I brought a leash along just in case.”

  “Bite me.”

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Children, please. We have more important things to do than squabble like three-year-olds. Regina looks fantastic in her corset, and I’m sure a leash won’t be necessary, unless her fantasy wants her to wear one.” Ava glanced discreetly at her watch. “We have exactly four hours and fifteen minutes before the party ends and Regina turns back into a pumpkin. Battle stations.”

  Reggie’s four friends faced the four corners of the bar and started scanning for potential partners. Frowning, Reggie leaned close to Missy’s ear and spoke in a low murmur, “I thought you said Ava already had someone picked out.”

  “She does, but she wants you to squirm a little,” Missy hissed back, her eyes on the masses of men and women passing before her. “Could you at least look a little nervous? If she knows I warned you, she’ll kill me.”

  Looking nervous would not be a problem. Reggie felt more than a little out of place surrounded by so many strangers, all of whom seemed to have a genuine fear of sunlight and rather theatrical wardrobes. She hadn’t known you could see so many white faces outside of a mime convention.

  With a sigh, Reggie scanned the crowd and hoped Ava’s friend turned out to be significantly different from any of the men she’d noticed so far.

  The crowd really wasn’t her type. Most of them were too young for her, and even the ones who were her age or older somehow managed to look like children playing dress-up. How could she feel attracted to someone who put so much time and effort into pretending to be a fictional character? She had always preferred her men to have a tighter grip on reality, not that you’d know it from her track record. Take Gregory, for instance. Apparently most of the women in lower Manhattan already had
.

  Sipping her amaretto sour and leaning her elbows on the scarred table, Reggie figured since her friends wanted to do all the work in picking up a man for her tonight, she could indulge in a little brooding over her recent failures.

  Greg epitomized her “type,” which probably meant she should reevaluate the concept of types from the bottom up. He’d been confident, attractive, intelligent, and ambitious, the kind of man mothers all over the world dreamed would walk into their daughters’ lives. If she hadn’t died when Reggie was a kid, her mother would probably be calling daily and asking what happened to that charming Greg fellow Reggie used to bring home for holiday visits.

  Lisette the Slavic Slut had happened, Reggie acknowledged, trying very hard not to picture the little blond bimbo bent over Greg’s desk with her skirt hiked around her waist and her G-string tangled around her ankles. Reggie had been late for her lunch date with Greg and hadn’t thought anything about walking right into his office when she saw Lisette’s empty desk. She’d thought the woman had been taking a break. Instead, she’d been taking it doggy-style from Reggie’s fiancé.

  “Reggie! I can explain!”

  Had anyone ever invented a more hackneyed reaction to that scene? She’d always credited Greg with a certain level of intelligence, but apparently she’d overestimated him. He might have been a genius when it came to portfolios and earnings ratios, but when it came to facing a shocked lover with his dick hanging out of his pants, a dark smear of lipstick on his neck, and his hands all over his administrative assistant, he possessed the approximate smarts of a seven-year-old caught throwing snowballs at the poodle next door.

  “Reggie, I swear, Lisette and I were just—”

  “Screwing like rabid minks on top of the latest NASDAQ reports?”

  Reggie wished she’d come up with that response at the time, but all she’d been able to do was stand there with her mouth open and her breath frozen in her chest and the hand that wore his ring clenched tightly around the doorknob.

  She took another sip of her drink and forced her mind away from replaying the rest of the memory. She still recalled every ugly word they’d hurled back and forth at each other, oblivious to the hallowed reputation of Sterling and Woulk Financial, Inc., but that didn’t mean she wanted them echoing in her head right now. Greg’s infidelity had ruined her plans for a marriage and family, her trust in the ability of men to keep their promises, and most of her last six months. She’d be damned if she’d let him ruin her night as well.