Things That Go Bump In The Night II

by Lani Aames

  "Exactly. Of course, up to that point she'd been a rational young woman of the new century, who would have laughed at the idea of vampires. She was terrified, thought she was losing her mind."

  "I know the feeling," said Eloise, thinking of the moment when Claude's face had transformed into a raging beast's.

  "That night, Philip stormed into my flat, furious about the way he'd had to leave her in hysterics. I handled the blasted thing all wrong. Instead of apologizing for my trespass, as vampire etiquette demanded, I made light of it. Asked him why he made such a fuss over an ephemeral. After all, he could always find another pet."

  "Pet?" She almost choked on her indignation at the word.

  "That's how most of our kind view their repeat donors. I had to pretend I thought that way, to keep from admitting to myself how the loss of my own 'pet' had hurt me."

  "So how did Philip react?" She reserved judgment about his claim to have been hurt.

  "Said he was in love with the young female. Of course, I laughed at the very idea. When he reacted by trying to throttle me, I had to take his infatuation seriously. I offered to talk to his young lady and undo the damage I'd done. Needless to say, he wasn't about to let me near her alone. We went to her place together."

  He poured himself a straight shot of gin and gulped it down, then resumed pacing. "I don't want to dwell on the details. We had to force our way in. When I tried to mesmerize her, she screamed and waved a cross in my face. Philip tried, and when he put his arms around her, she slapped him. He wouldn't use physical force on her, so when she ran outside, all we could do was chase her down the street."

  "Why didn't the hypnotism work?"

  Claude shrugged. "She had faith in the cross. It gave her a focus for resistance." He picked up a corkscrew from the bar and tossed it from one hand to the other. "She fled a couple of streets over, into a Catholic church. Philip followed her all the way to the altar. I stopped at the door. That was when the earthquake started."

  "Oh! The big 1906 quake?"

  He nodded, still fiddling with the corkscrew. "I shouted at Philip to run for it. He wouldn't leave the girl, and she ducked behind the altar and refused to go with him. When the roof collapsed, I cleared out."

  "You mean they—"

  "Both of them, buried in the rubble." He stabbed the corkscrew into the top of the bar, where it protruded like an arrow in a target. "After the quake, I went back to check. The whole church had crumbled into a heap of bricks."

  Eloise's stomach knotted. She swallowed a mouthful of acid. "But Philip's alive."

  "About a month ago, the church started a building program, which included archeological excavation of the present parking lot. They found two bodies, or, rather, a woman's skeleton and the strangely preserved body of a man."

  "So he woke up? What would it take to kill a vampire permanently?"

  "Decapitation, cremation, stake through the heart if it's left in place long enough. The usual." His lips quirked in a humorless smile. "Anything on the standard list except sunlight, which just gives us headaches that won't quit. Luckily for Philip, the falling debris didn't separate his head from his body or crush the brain beyond regeneration."

  "And now he's out to get you."

  "I'm afraid so." With a sigh he sat down with arms flung wide along the back of the couch. "To me, a long human lifetime has passed since the quake. To him, it's little more than yesterday. No wonder he's still furious."

  "But you didn't kill his girlfriend, donor, whatever. If you helped to cause her death, so did he. You couldn't have predicted how she'd react, much less that an earthquake would hit right that minute." Eloise wasn't sure why she felt like defending Claude, after the way he had treated her at the convention. "Anyway, it's a relief to find out you're not a murderer, much less a demon. I won't have to sell my soul to get my script produced."

  He laughed. "And I'm relieved you haven't run out of here screaming in terror."

  "It was close there for a while," she said. She still couldn't wrap her mind around the change she'd witnessed when the cross had grazed him.

  "Unfortunately, it's clear Philip doesn't see the situation your way. I'm afraid he'll use you to punish me. He thinks I destroyed the woman he loved, so what better way to get revenge than through someone I care about? The last thing I want is to see another ephemeral killed on my account, especially you."

  "How could you possibly feel anything special about me? You hardly know me." She heard an edge of harshness in her own voice. It jolted her to realize how much she wished Claude did care about her.

  "But I do know you. Intimately. For vampires, a night or two is all it takes. We can read emotions, remember?"

  Shocked, she stared at him, met his intent gaze, and hastily looked away. Her cheeks flushed. "You mean all that stuff about Varney sensing Flora's reaction wasn't just theoretical? You know every thought in my head?"

  "Not thoughts," he said. "Emotions, sensations. For true telepathy, we would have to bond—share blood both ways."

  She hid her face in her hands. "I don't believe this," she muttered. No wonder his lovemaking fulfilled her needs so perfectly. He saw, scented, and tasted every impulse that flitted through her body and mind. "Oh, God, it's like you stripped me naked." Remembering how she'd awakened in her bed at the hotel, she said, "You did, but this is worse."

  She hurried to the window, staring at the sun low on the horizon above the ocean. "How could you do that to me and then call me a friend? You—actor!"

  "Cherie, please don't!" He crept up beside her and reached for her arm.

  Shaking off the tentative touch, she said, "And don't try to charm me with bilingual sweet talk."

  "Why does it upset you this badly? You enjoyed the encounters as much as I did."

  "That's not the point." She swiped at the tears spilling from her eyes. "You played me like a musical instrument. You never gave me a chance to accept or refuse."

  "Suppose I'd told you the truth from the beginning? Assuming you believed me, would you have leaped into my arms?"

  "I don't know. And since you didn't take the risk of being honest, we'll never know."

  "Didn't you understand when I said I'd vowed not to mesmerize you again? After I realized I wanted you as a companion, not just a food source or even a business associate, I stopped 'playing' you."

  She could almost hear his teeth grind. "Confound it, Eloise, look at me!"

  She turned in a slow circle toward him. Her breath rapid and shallow, she avoided his eyes. "You think it's that easy to make me trust you?"

  "What can I do, then?" Some emotion roughened his voice. She didn't dare let herself assume it was pain at her rejection.

  "What did you change into when I touched you with the cross? Show me."

  "Oh, hell, do you have to ask for that?" When she just glared at him, he said, "I apologize for the lapse in control. We have a limited ability to shape-change. It's an ancestral form encoded in the genes, a vestigial skill, not much use in the modern environment."

  "Limited? No bats, wolves, clouds of mist?"

  "Don't we wish," he chuckled. "No, just what you saw. Well, and a spot of levitation."

  "That's all? Gosh, what a letdown." She maintained the sarcastic tone to shield herself from the attraction that could easily override her judgment. "Come on, demonstrate."

  "Yes, that's all. Any elaborate transformations you might see are purely illusion, including a veil of invisibility that's almost as good as mist." He narrowed his eyes in concentration and faded from her sight. Before she could blink, he reappeared as a blurred outline then sharpened into solidity.

  "Oh, wow." Gray patches gathered before her eyes. She stumbled backward to lean against the wall.

  Folding his arms, he focused on a point somewhere past her shoulder and blurred again. A dark velvet pelt spread over his face and arms. His ears grew points, his eyes glowed red, and fangs sprouted in his mouth. A shadow of silver wings momentarily hovered behind him. After a fe
w seconds, the change reversed itself like a tape on rewind, and he reverted to normal. Stretching his arms wide, he rose from the floor and floated toward the ceiling. He drifted to the floor, where he stood with his hands extended toward her, palms up. "Please don't be afraid."

  "I'm working on it." She reached out to run her fingertips over his right palm. "You're real. Not dreaming. Not crazy."

  "No. I'm real." He shivered when she repeated the light touch. "Easy."

  "Hey, little hairs." The folktales had preserved the facts about vampires in random hit-or-miss fashion, it seemed.

  "Yes, and they're sensitive." He drew back and folded his arms. "If I can't touch or look at you, it's unfair for you to take advantage."

  She couldn't decide whether he was teasing or serious. "How sensitive can they be, if you use your hands normally all the time?"

  "Firm grasping doesn't trigger the response. Other kinds of touching do."

  "Great, I have a way to get back at you for some of the things you did to me Saturday night." She clamped a lid on the turbulent images of those things.

  He drew a hissing breath. "Does that mean you may allow it to happen again?"

  "Don't push it!" she snapped.

  "Very well." He backed up, hands raised in surrender. "I swore I'd leave your free will intact, and I won't break my word."

  "Darn it, Claude, don't you have any idea how I feel, knowing you practically turned me inside out and hardly let me remember any of it?" After a pause for thought, she said, "Oh, yeah, you know everything I feel."

  "I know you're angry and frustrated, understandably."

  "Talk about unfair advantage!" She flung herself onto the couch. "Let me get this straight. You drank my blood, and that's like sex for you."

  He sat down, too, still keeping his distance. "We breed so infrequently that reproductive sex means very little to us. I've never been chosen as a stud, but I can't miss what I've never experienced. And it doesn't matter that a male vampire can't mate with a human female. We get our satisfaction from our donors' arousal and fulfillment."

  "The emotion-reading thing." She couldn't suppress a mental flashback to her "dream" of the other night. A shadow of that excitement tingled through her body.

  "I told you I feasted on your passion. Those of our kind who have produced offspring say the blood-sharing is far more intense than ordinary sex."

  "And you made me forget the whole thing." She gulped a deep breath to gather her nerve. "If you want to make up for lying and manipulating, you can start by doing it all over, with me fully conscious."

  He became very still. "Eloise, are you sure you want this?"

  "Why not? You said you don't take enough to do any harm." She hugged herself, feeling as if her heart might burst out of her ribcage.

  "It's harm to our relationship that concerns me. Don't tempt me into this if you might regret it."

  She shook her head. "Why worry about closing the barn door after the horse goes to water?"

  "The more often we indulge," he said, "the easier it will be for Philip to notice my mark on your aura. It'll be obvious that I have a special interest in you. I don't want to make you a target."

  "If we're supposed to be friends and equals and all that, I get some input on that decision, too."

  "Damn. I never did develop the habit of resisting temptation." He ran his fingers through his hair, got up, and paced to the bar and back. "What you should do is leave right now. Call a cab, go to the airport in Monterey, and catch the first flight south. Make Philip think you took his advice and rejected me. Then he'll leave you alone."

  "What if I don't want to leave right now?" She stood up, hands on her hips.

  Claude took a step toward her, reached for her, let his arms drop, and then, with an inarticulate growl, grabbed her. "We'll discuss it later."

  He pulled her to him and captured her mouth with a hard kiss. She gasped in a spasm of alarm. She knew he must hear and feel the hammering of her heart.

  He raised his head to impale her with his violet-silver, red-tinged eyes. "You are afraid. I won't continue if you have doubts."

  Wrapping her arms around his waist, Eloise shook her head. "Not afraid, just startled. I don't have doubts. I want to experience this. But slower."

  He rubbed up and down her spine as if petting a kitten. "Yes. Forgive me for pouncing so hard." Easing her head onto his chest, he stroked her hair and sighed. "It's been so long since I've enjoyed a woman who's fully aware. I got carried away. You know, you'll still have to leave sometime within the next day or so. We have to get Philip off your trail."

  Was he trying to get rid of her? She looked up at him. While he could read her emotions, she had no clue as to his. "Okay, whatever, just call me Scarlett." When he quizzically raised his eyebrows, she said, "I'll think about it tomorrow."

  "Very well, I can't refuse a lady's wishes. Where? Couch or bed?"

  Her breath caught in her throat. "Bed. Yours. You invaded mine enough already."

  Chapter Ten

  He picked her up and carried her into the other room. She kicked off her sandals on the way. Placing her on the satin sheets, he removed the tie from her ponytail and ran his fingers through her hair, making her scalp tingle. When he rolled up the hem of her T-shirt, she said, "Wait. You have to undress, too."

  "Why? I told you ordinary intercourse doesn't happen." His fingers skimmed the waistband of her shorts. His cool skin on hers made her shiver.

  "Equality. If I have to be exposed, so do you."

  "Fair enough. Come to think of it, skin-to-skin contact sounds very pleasant." He peeled off his shirt. "Your aura glows red with heat. I want to bathe in it."

  His resonant voice made her insides vibrate, like feeling the notes of a pipe organ through the floorboards. "And I need to see better," she whispered. "Need light." The heavy drapes made the room dim even now. When the sun finished setting, it would be too dark for her. Claude, she suspected, could see like a cat.

  "No electric light," he said. "Too harsh." He opened the nightstand drawer and produced a fat candle, which he set in an ashtray and lit. The scent of vanilla wafted from it. "That should last several hours." He removed his shorts and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Eloise scanned his lean, pale body in the candlelight. An inverted triangle of fine hair covered his chest from the nipples down, tapering to a point at the navel. From there, a thin line of hair arrowed down to the groin, where his cock lay at rest against his thigh. A shuddering breath escaped from her. Her abdominal muscles tensed, but not with fear, when his fingers crept under her T-shirt. He rolled it up, the backs of his hands brushing her skin, skimming the inside curves of her breasts.

  She lifted her arms to let him pull the shirt over her head, then leaned on her elbows to give him access to the hooks at the back of her bra. When he tossed it aside with the shirt, a draft from the air conditioner raised prickles on her skin. His fingertips brushed her neck, swept down between her breasts, and settled at her waist, creating a fresh wave of shivers. Wetness pooled between her legs. Could he tell how aroused she was? Of course, he sensed everything she felt. A flush suffused her body.

  He spread his hand on the bare skin just above her beltline. "When blood rushes to your skin that way, it's all I can do to wait." He rubbed her middle in a circular motion, with the lightest possible contact. "Your warmth makes my palms tingle. If only you could see how your aura turns deep red here, when you become excited." He moved down the front of her shorts to the apex of her thighs. "And you smell delicious."

  She couldn't suppress a wiggle of her hips. "So taste me."

  He bent over and licked first the right nipple, then the left, each in one long stroke. The heat of his tongue contrasted with the near chill of his hands, one of which explored her inner thighs while the other cupped her mound.

  "Not fair," she gasped. "I want to drive you crazy, too."

  "You already do." He unzipped her shorts, and she raised her hips to let him strip them off. R
eclining beside her, he leaned on one elbow to tickle the inside of her legs just below the nest of curls.

  She grabbed his hand and ran her thumb over the delicate hairs in the palm. "How does that feel?"

  He closed his eyes. "Maddening. If you want me to go slowly, don't do that." He freed his hand and returned it to the space between her legs. One finger grazed her inner lips. She felt herself melting.

  "Are you hypnotizing me now?"

  He nuzzled her neck. "I promised not to."

  "Then how do you do this?" He probed her slit, which throbbed eagerly. She squeezed her legs shut on his hand.

  "I stir the currents of your aura. I follow the path of your arousal. I feel exactly when your excitement rises." He spread a sheen of wetness up to her clit. "I feel you want me to touch you here." His fingers swirled around the tight knot of sensation and zeroed on the spot where it burned hottest. He echoed her earlier question. "How does that feel?"

  "You know how," she said through gritted teeth. "You read my emotions."

  "But only from the outside." He lapped each of her nipples again, then abandoned the aching peaks to lick her throat. "We're not bonded, so I can't share your sensations from inside. What does human arousal feel like?"

  "Like my skin's on fire. Especially there." Sparks danced from his flickering tongue at her neck to her taut nipples and the swollen bud where his fingers played. "Like I'm melting into a puddle of hot lava. And tight. Like my clit's about to burst."

  His teeth stung her throat. A rush of warmth quenched the minor pain and transformed it to a bolt of electricity that zapped from that spot straight to the center of her need. He responded to the arching of her hips with a frenzied rubbing of her clit. His fingers plunged inside her. The suction of his lips at her neck pushed her over the edge. Her clit pulsed like a second heartbeat, and her sheath convulsed to the same rhythm.

  Still lapping her blood, he lay on top of her, tucking one leg between hers. The pressure gave her all the stimulation she needed to shudder through wave after wave of overlapping climaxes that seemed to last forever.

  Finally, when she felt ready to faint from sensory overload, he stopped drinking, with one last flicker of his tongue. He rolled on his side, bringing her with him in a tight hug.