Midnight Rose

by Shelby Reed

  With her entire world once again compressed into the two suitcases, she finally turned out the light, climbed beneath the bedcovers and stared at the red glow of the radio alarm. One-ten a.m. Was Gideon asleep? Was Jude prowling the shadows of the countryside with fangs bared?

  Of course not. Gideon would never allow it. So how would Jude get the blood he needed to live?

  She sat up on the edge of her mattress. Where did Gideon get blood to drink, besides Delilah? He didn’t kill, that much she believed. He had to have it almost every day, though. Did he stockpile it somewhere in the monstrous house?

  Seeking an answer to that conundrum served as a thinly veiled excuse to see him, because despite her shock and fear and disbelief, she still loved him, still desired him.

  She was in love with a vampire. Bela Lugosi. Nosferatu. Vlad the Impaler. Count Chocula . The urge to laugh seized her and she buried her face in her hands and cried instead.

  Minutes later, she stood outside Gideon’s bedroom door, half-crazy with sadness and confusion. She twisted the knob; the door was unlocked. Stepping inside, she closed it silently behind her and stood in the blackness, waiting for her vision to adjust.

  The bed was empty, covers wadded at the foot. The balcony doors stood open, curtains wafting gently in the breeze.

  Slipping outside, she found the balcony deserted and wandered to the rail. The backyard was bathed in moonlight, mist floating like thin souls a few feet above the ground. Fog and clear, crisp moonlight shouldn’t exist simultaneously. It was meteorologically impossible, wasn’t it? Why hadn’t she noted that her first night at Sister Oaks? She’d ignored so many warnings that things weren’t right, that life at Sister Oaks belied common scientific law, and it took inhuman courage for a mere mortal to dwell here. It was her fault her world had come apart. She’d enthusiastically laid her wellbeing in paranormal hands.

  The sound of splashing water reached her ears and she glanced down to see Gideon rising from the darkened pool steps, his gaze fixed on her, naked and glorious as he’d been the first time she saw him. How fitting that they should meet again in this manner, when in a matter of hours she’d be gone from Sister Oaks, and his life, forever.

  He paused on the edge of the pool, never taking his attention off her face as he dried himself and wrapped the towel around his waist.

  “Stay there. I’m coming up.” He spoke softly, but the stillness of night carried his voice to her, and she nodded.

  Mere heartbeats later he stepped into the bedroom and closed the door gently behind him. He moved almost soundlessly, but she felt his presence behind her. The hair stood up on the back of her neck and chills of dread and anticipation brushed her skin.

  She turned and rested her back against the balustrade, watching his approach. When he stood a foot away, she said, “Should I be afraid of you?”

  Gideon raked a hand through his damp hair, shoving it back from features made stern with sadness. “Only in the sense that I’ve inadvertently hurt you. And myself, in the process.”

  “I don’t know why I’m standing on your balcony in the middle of the night.” Her fingers gripped the concrete behind her. “I don’t even know who you are. I thought I did, but never in a million years could I have guessed the truth. How can you look so human, act so normal and gentle and…how can you be so wonderful when you…when…oh, hell.”

  He listened, a frown darkening his brow, until it became apparent she couldn’t finish. Then, wordlessly, he took her hand, led her back into the bedroom and closed the French doors on the late summer night. It was too dark in the room for Kate to see his face, but the blackness painted his figure a velvety silhouette. Passion radiated from him. Passion and desperation.

  Still, he didn’t reach for her. When she made no move toward him, Gideon turned on the bedside lamp and she squinted in the flood of soft light.

  “I’m the same,” he said, gaze lingering on her face. “The same man who made love with you less than a week ago. The only thing that’s changed is your perception.”

  She swallowed. “Thank you for telling me the truth, Gideon. But I don’t think I can live with it.”

  “I understand.” He took a step closer. “Have you come to say goodbye?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I’m in love with you. Dangerously, deeply in love.”

  His expression softened. “I guess we’re in the same boat, then. I’m in love with you, too.”

  For a long moment Kate studied his eyes, the shift of shadows, the deepening passion there. Then he broke their gazes and moved away, fingers loosening the towel knotted at his waist as he headed for the bathroom. “You’re welcome to stay. I’m going to take a shower.”

  He disappeared around the corner, left her standing alone in the middle of the room, discombobulated and inexplicably aroused.

  “For crying out loud,” she muttered.

  The sound of the water spray, followed by the click of a shower stall door, drew her toward the bathroom. Vampires took showers, she thought aimlessly. Vampires made love and laughed and cried and not all of them were like Dracula, skulking in the shadows, or Delilah, wreaking emotional destruction wherever the chance arose.

  She paused in the doorway and breathed in the familiar scent of Gideon’s soap. His outline was blurred behind the frosted glass, but she could read the long lines of his body, the breadth of his shoulders, the strength in his arms and legs.

  Vampires could hurt, too. Their hearts could break. They yearned and desired and regretted. They could fall in love.

  Gideon had. With her. Whatever he was, he loved her, and she knew it.

  Her fingers went to the hem of her nightshirt and she drew it up and over her head, let it whisper to the marble floor. Her panties followed and she pushed the clothing aside, naked, her emotions just as bare.

  Shivering so violently her teeth chattered, she crossed the chilled floor and silently opened the shower stall door.

  Gideon’s back was to her. He stood under the spray, hands braced against the shower walls, letting the steaming water cascade over his dark head. There was despair in the way he held himself. He’d broken her heart. He’d broken his own.

  For a moment she stood in trembling silence and filled her senses with the sight of him, the proud, graceful breadth of his back, the curve of his buttocks, his muscled legs. Water sluiced over his fair, smooth skin. He had a faint spattering of freckles on his shoulders. A funny vestige of humanity that had never faded.

  Her heart swelled with yearning. Just for tonight, she wanted to lose herself in him, in his beauty and passion. She wasn’t afraid of him, her Gideon, the one who’d made her laugh and weep and cry out with pleasure. It was the impossibly dark future that drove her away. But for tonight she could sink into him and love him, woman to man, one last time. Couldn’t she?

  Stepping into the stall, she laid her palm against his back and felt the instant stiffening of his spine. When he finally moved, he didn’t face her, just turned on the additional showerhead and stepped aside to let her stand beneath it.

  She sought his gaze and found him watching her, his eyes hot with desire.

  “You realize, of course, that I can only stand so much of this.” His low voice echoed over the drum of water in the high-ceilinged room. “And then I’ll touch you, and I won’t be able to stop there. I’ll take you to bed. You understand?”

  “Yes.” Kate shivered, a mixture of excitement and fear as fingers of water trickled down her shoulders and back. “And I know I can’t stand another second without it.”

  Wordlessly he lifted a hand and brushed his knuckles over her cheek, then drifted them down to her breast, against her nipple until it tightened under the faint caress. Water clung to his lashes, beaded his nose, his lips. Sculpted details, a fine part of a finer whole. His throat moved as he swallowed and stepped closer to her.

  “I want this,” she told him, reading the uncertainty in his face. “I w
ant you, Gideon. I need you.”

  With a shaken sigh, he nudged her against the shower wall, his hands sliding around her back to protect her skin from the cold marble.

  His lips nuzzled her temple. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered, the tortured words half-lost under the hiss of the showerheads. “I love you, Kate.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and stood on tiptoe to reach his mouth. He’d smiled at her that first night, when he stood naked in the moonlight and she, on the balcony, stood paralyzed by his beauty. Her eyelids slid closed as an image of that moment passed before her, and the sense of loss nearly brought her to her knees.

  If Gideon knew she was crying, he didn’t show it. He kissed her, tilted his head and found a new angle to caress her mouth, his tongue hungry, hands worshipful as they slid over her water-slicked skin.

  They stood entwined beneath the steady beat of the water, letting it wash away the shadows between them until their need for each other consumed all sense of caution and futility. Then Gideon reached to turn off both sprays, opened the door, and wrapped Kate in a soft terrycloth robe he’d retrieved from a brass hook by the stall.

  Broken, she stood with head bowed, let him draw the sleeves over her arms and close the garment across her breasts. A deeper sense told her this night would end badly, with hearts and hopes and expectations crushed, but she couldn’t help herself. Love cloaked her in denial and silky desire; it spawned hope where only disillusionment had existed. She clung to his neck when he picked her up in his arms and carried her like a child into the bedroom.

  “You’re wet,” she whispered, sliding her palms over the slick expanse of his shoulders as he laid her on the sheets.

  His hand slipped beneath the hem of the robe and brushed between her thighs. “So are you.”

  Arching into his touch, she let the garment fall open and drew him down to her, welcoming the cool, damp press of his body, the tiny droplets of water dripping off his hair and onto her shoulders, where his lips sipped them away.

  His palm enclosed her breast, gently kneading, as though he held her very heart in his hand. His mouth scalded a path down her throat to the other breast, where he caught her nipple between his lips and suckled it until she ached with the fire shooting like a direct line to the center of her femininity.

  Love and tenderness and pain melded together and rushed through her, sent the tears slipping down her temples to be lost in her hair. How could a darker reality exist beyond the piquant joy of this moment? She wanted to open her eyes and awaken from the nightmare, pull Gideon from its clutches. But love was all that bound them, and it seemed a paltry spark in the huge black void that stood between them.

  Holding his face, Kate drew him up to brush her lips over his eyelids, nose, cheeks, lips. She breathed in his delicious scent and stored it in her memory to take with her. Memories of the man, Gideon. Not the inhuman creature the surreal truth painted him to be.

  His hands were so gentle on her breasts, her hips, molding her, arching her to his touch. His mouth drifted down her body, spreading tiny kisses in a path to the soft, yearning place between her thighs.

  And Kate’s pleasure, so shameless and uncontrolled, was fed by the sadness flowing between them. It fueled her urgency, drove her desire to new, treacherous heights.

  “Put your mouth on me,” she whispered. “Make me forget everything. Make me come.”

  When Gideon knelt before her, nudged her legs apart and leaned to taste her sensitive, swollen flesh, she gripped the pillow behind her and closed her eyes. His bold caress washed over her and she strained toward fulfillment with each slow drag of his tongue over her clitoris, until her body quivered uncontrollably and she held her breath, poised on the edge of a fathomless plunge.

  As though sensing her impending climax, he rose over her, found her with the sleek tip of his penis, and thrust inside her body, again, again. Smooth. Rhythmic. Relentless. Pounding into her until the headboard rattled, until her heartbeat exploded, until she dug her fingers into his buttocks and screamed, shattering around him. Then, inexplicably, he withdrew, his muscles tight and trembling as he slid down and rested his cheek against her belly.

  “Gideon…” Drowsy with fading pleasure, Kate reached to stroke the damp strands of his hair. “Come back inside me.”

  “I’ll lose myself if I do.” But after a quiet moment, he moved up, his cool skin gliding against her fevered body, to stare into her eyes.

  She read the despair in his face and sought to comfort him in the most primal way. Her fingers slipped between their bodies and encircled his erection as she nipped at his throat, tasting soap and desire. “Please.”

  Gideon fought the inevitable, his struggle stamped in the tight lines of his face, the clench of his jaw. Then with a whispered curse, he covered her hand with his and guided himself between her thighs. “How can I let you go?” The anguished words wrapped themselves around her heart as he slid inside her again, filling her. “How can I, after this?”

  Kate cradled his head between her palms and sought his kiss when a reply wouldn’t come. Beneath him her body yielded, soft absorbing hard, man sinking into woman, ecstasy swallowing grief.

  “Oh…” he whispered, lips by her ear as he drove into her, then her name, like a chant, with every thrust. “Kate. Kate.”

  She squeezed her eyes closed and listened to the harsh sound of his breathing against her neck. The mattress shook with the rocking motion of their bodies, harder, faster. She sensed his orgasm as it coiled within him, felt it in the tightening of his muscles, the hard, relentless piston of his hips.

  A ripple shivered up Gideon’s spine, then another, beneath her hands. Electricity danced on the air, and the bedside lamp flickered.

  He faltered, lost his rhythm.

  “Gideon.” She clutched him tighter, sought his lips, but he turned his face away and released a low, drawn out curse.

  “Let go, Kate.”

  She couldn’t see his face. Confused, she caught his chin, forced him back to look at her. Fear instantly stole the breath from her chest. “Oh, my God. What…”

  His eyes glowed with an inhuman light, pupils swallowed by swirling darkness, the bones in his face reorganizing into a nightmarish mask.

  Kate could only stare. This was the monster. Horrible and inevitable and true.

  Jerking from her grasp, Gideon backed off and buried his head in the sheets, fists gripping the cotton material to hide himself while every vein stood out in his hands, his arms. The muscled planes of his back bunched and stretched as though they had a mind of their own, and eerie, torn rasps escaped his throat. Grieving sounds of a wounded animal.

  “Get dressed.” His words, however muffled, sounded like a feral growl. “Go. Get out of here.”

  It snapped her from her paralysis. “Gideon…”

  “Do you want to die?” He raised his head and stared at her with those strange, unearthly eyes. Colors drifted through them now, crimson and smoky gray and the ochre of brimstone. The windows to hell. The pointed tips of fangs flashed between his lips as he spoke. “Get out of here before I forget who you are. Hurry.”

  Breath coming in frantic gasps, Kate stumbled from the bed, grabbed the robe and threw open the door. It crashed behind her as she dashed into the hall, but not before she heard the muffled, anguished cry of the creature she left behind.

  Locking herself into her bedroom across the house, she huddled in a dark corner, listening for the sound of inhuman steps while her breath rent the air in short, frantic pants.

  Silence reigned in the aftermath of the nightmare. The mansion seemed to sigh, and resign itself to sleep once again, and somehow she knew that whatever dwelled behind Gideon’s bedroom door wouldn’t be coming for her.

  Eventually she forced herself to uncurl from her hiding place. Gathering her courage, she dressed and called a cab, then hauled her luggage downstairs to the foyer in one clumsy trip, so blinded by tears that it was a miracle she didn’t fall on the staircase.r />
  Nothing stood in her way now. The halls and stairs were deserted. Doors opened as they should, and the phantoms stayed behind when she stepped out into the night and sucked in greedy lungfuls of air.

  The taxi rolled to a stop in front of the mansion in record time, and Kate scrambled into the back seat while the driver set her suitcases in the trunk.

  “Please hurry,” she called, eyeing the house’s darkened entrance as though an army of ghouls and ghosts would spill out any moment.

  I won’t look back, she told herself as the cab pulled away from the mansion and around the circular drive. But she did, through blurry, aching eyes, and saw Jude standing in his bedroom window, palms pressed to the glass. A white face surrounded by darkness. Then the passing trees swallowed the estate, and Kate faced forward, wondering how she’d managed to get out with every part of her safe and unbroken, except her heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The blood of Xanthia will deliver the darkness of death, and it will come like a slow oppressor, visiting much agony upon the perpetrator until the end, when God and soul shall be forever parted.

  “No…” Kate jerked against the pillow, grappling to wake, but she couldn’t escape the horrific scene unraveling before her.

  Fire, flashing ochre and crimson, smoke thick and cloying. Gideon, face twisted with agony, flesh melting away under the raging heat. Beautiful face pulverized.

  Blinding light pierced the shadow of Kate’s nightmare and brought her too quickly to the surface. With a jolt she sat up, confused, mind spinning with memories and reality jumbled together. Then Mike’s lanky, fair-haired figure swam into view. He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands on his hips, sunlight pouring between the curtains he’d thrown open.

  With a groan, she fell back against the pillows and buried her throbbing head under the covers. “Go away.”

  “Get up, girl.”