“Indeed.” Sebastian smiled wickedly. “So do I.”
Getting up from the table, I took his hand: “Let’s go make this honeymoon official.”
Knowing that Sebastian was now my husband made me strangely shy. It wasn’t like we hadn’t made love on our wedding night, but, honestly, that whole wonderful day was kind of a happy blur. Then afterward, we’d been so busy making plans and getting ready for the honeymoon that we’d . . . well, neglected certain things.
I’d packed a special, lacy outfit just for this moment and now wondered if it was too trashy or too silly.
The suite was dark. Outside, the gray wind yowled restlessly and spattered angry splotches of snow against the pane. Sebastian, who could see perfectly, of course, led me through the rooms. It was so quiet that I could hear his breathing, shallow and anticipatory.
I doubted he needed the lace.
Despite his obvious interest, a stab of self-doubt raced through me. Would I still be sexy as a wife?
Wife was such a loaded word, and, tripping clumsily through the lavish and expensive honeymoon suite, I felt all its weight settle on my shoulders. What if this moment disappointed? Would he question his commitment?
At dinner Sebastian had said that people like James were the reason he’d kept on the move. Now that we were married, picking up and leaving would be more complicated to say the least. I’d settled him. Is that what he’d been brooding about?
We reached the bedroom. Sebastian took both my hands in his and held me at arm’s length. “Let me look at you, my wife.”
Eek, there was that word sounding so foreign and fraught on Sebastian’s lips. I tried not to flinch.
I should have known the dark wouldn’t hide my reaction from a vampire. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m having a little performance anxiety,” I admitted with a ghost of an embarrassed smile. “This is it. The big night.”
He shook his head, but I couldn’t read his expression in the muted light that filtered in through the window. “Every night is special with you,” he said.
Aw.
His words helped, but I still felt an enormous pressure to live up to the expectations of this night, the label “wife,” and, well, everything.
“Just relax,” he coaxed, drawing me closer.
I tipped my head back, ready for his kiss and for everything to be all better. Lilith chose that moment to rouse from Her usual slumber. Every time I thought too much about marriage, She bristled. I felt a white- hot surge of power encircling my wedding ring. It burned.
“Ow!” I shook my hand, breaking the moment with Sebastian. Clenching my teeth to suppress the desire to pull the ring off and throw it to the floor, I hopped around uselessly. My fingers pinched hard on the gold, keeping it on my finger. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Something nudged inside me, and Lilith relented. Her sudden release made my limbs feel like wet, limp noodles. Luckily, before I hit the floor, Sebastian caught my elbows.
“Lilith?” he asked.
I nodded mutely, still trying to shake the phantom burning sensation.
“What was She objecting to now?” Sebastian sounded really angry. “Is She planning on joining us, perhaps?”
Except She was always between us.
I didn’t want to make things worse by reminding him of that fact, though. “Forget about Her. Let’s get back to where we were, shall we?”
Reaching up, I stroked the planes of his face. Stubble scratched my palms pleasantly. I made a noise of appreciation of his manliness, and shifted my hips to press closer to him.
My ploy worked. I could sense his mood shifting, softening.
He ran his fingers through the spikes of my hair, pausing, as he always did, to tousle the shortest hairs at the back of my neck, as though he liked the prickly feel of them.
I closed my eyes, heightening the sense of blindness, and let my hands slowly trace the outline of Sebastian’s body. I felt the strong lines of his long, aristocratic neck. Then I let them trail the lean muscular frame of his broad shoulders. A sigh escaped my lips, only to be caught up in his mouth.
Sebastian kissed me with a similar tentative exploration. It was as though we kissed for the first time. His tongue gently, slowly probed my mouth. We played, back and forth, controlling the kiss. When it was my turn, I was careful of his fangs, though I let the tender skin of my tongue glide past their sharp edges. I let them cut just enough to give him a small taste of blood.
His whole body quivered slightly, as though instantly more alert.
My hands had come to a rest on the firm muscles of his chest. At his response to the blood, I let my hand drift down to the growing bulge beneath his belt.
My attention spurred Sebastian to reach his arms around my back. He felt for the clasp of my bra under the thin fabric of my shirt. Finding it, he expertly undid the hook without even lifting my shirt, releasing the heaviness of my breasts. Taut with excitement, my tender skin felt exposed under the loosened bra. My nipples brushed lightly against the fabric with every quickened breath.
As though in retaliation, I pulled at his buckle until I had it free in my hands. I stripped the leather from his waist so fast it made a hissing sound.
Lilith murmured a warm approval along my nerves, increasing my already intense sensitivity. I ached. With a moan I returned to the kiss we’d momentarily forgotten with renewed passion.
Eagerly, I pressed harder into him, letting Sebastian know exactly how much I wanted him with a firm stroke of encouragement.
We broke from our kiss so he could hurry me out of my shirt. The cold air prickled along my exposed flesh. I shivered, but not from the temperature. Even in the dark, I could see the glitter of Sebastian’s brown eyes.
Quickly, I wriggled out of my jeans to stand completely naked under that sexy, predatory gaze. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and I enjoyed the sensation of being observed. Half seductive, half self-consciously, I rubbed and caressed my own goose-pimpled flesh.
A slow, secretive smile spread across Sebastian’s handsome face. “What if I put on a show for you?” he asked. “Shall we play a little role reversal?”
Why not? It sounded fun.
At my assent, he looked downright pleased with himself, though he muttered, “What I could really use is some music.”
We’d brought along an MP3 player for the trip. It had a speaker it slipped into, but both were somewhere in my jumble of a bag. “I could try to find it,” I offered.
“No, no, I’ll improvise,” he said. “You can imagine that song ‘Take Your Hat Off.’ ”
“Are you going to do a striptease for me?”
“Watch,” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows.
So I did, as he popped the buttons on his shirt. At each one, he jutted his hip out. It was meant to be sexy, but I couldn’t hold back a little laugh. My reaction only encouraged him. His movements became even more exaggerated, and he did a little shoulder shimmy with his completely open shirt. When he did the classic twirl and toss, I squealed with joy. His shirt landed on a lamp, nearly knocking it over.
“You are so awesome,” I told him between laughs.
“The best is yet to come,” he promised as he ran his hands down his now bare chest to his pants. Despite the silliness, I found myself anticipating this part. He played coy, and turned his back to me to look over his shoulder. Wiggling his butt at me, he slid his hands into his jeans.
“Take it off!” I shouted, egging him on.
The pants came down a bit, revealing a taste of his fine behind, but then slid back up. He waggled his hips as if to say, “Not yet!” He did a series of peek- a-boos that got progressively more revealing. He started turning a bit so I got a hint of the front. I was busting a gut, but tantalized too. I couldn’t remember having this much fun in the dark with my clothes off. If I wasn’t already in love with Sebastian, I’d have fallen for him all over again at this moment.
At last he let his jeans fall to the floor. With a “Ta
-da!” he turned around for me to see him in all his glory. What a fine sight it was. Worth the wait and the hype! I applauded with all my might. After sketching a quick bow, he came up and wrapped me in his arms.
The mood shifted to serious the second our skin touched. We stumbled backward until I was pressed against the wall. Sebastian took my breast into his mouth. My fingers grasped his head as his tongue tore breath from my lungs.
When his fangs pierced the sensitive skin of my areola, a hot rush coursed through me, electrifying every nerve end. My knees wobbled, but I impressed myself by staying upright and not collapsing in a spaghetti-muscle heap.
From his growling grunt, I knew he’d nicked the skin enough to draw blood. He suckled the blood from my breast with slow laps of his tongue. The sound of his feast stirred heat in my thighs again, and I moaned.
Still sucking on my breast, Sebastian’s hand found the space between my legs. His fingers slid easily into me, given how wet I already was. I roughly twisted his hair in my fists as he explored deeply, rhythmically. I felt my heat rising, but I desperately wanted his cock inside me.
Sensing my need, he lifted his bloodied lips from my breast. He kissed me, and I tasted a coppery tang.
Sebastian removed his fingers so quickly I nearly wept. Scooping my buttocks up in one arm, he lifted me off my feet. Instinctively, I spread my legs to receive him. His hard, thick shaft drove deep inside me.
My cell phone buzzed. Tinny strains of Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” sounded somewhere on the bed.
My body jerked in surprise and an impulse to answer it, but Sebastian continued pounding into me so hard I forgot everything until the phone rang through into voice mail with a loud, shrill tone. Despite the shocking interruption, it took no time to work ourselves back into a frenzy. He came in a wave that I followed shortly after.
Though I could tell he was spent, I clung limply to him as he carried me hot and panting to the bed. Exhausted, I dropped off to a deep sleep with a satisfied smile on my lips.
I woke up half a minute later when the caller tried again, and that horrible voice mail alert twittered noisily. It was so dark out that I thought it must be past midnight, but the clock read eight. My hand flapped blindly on the bed until I found the phone.
I’d intended to switch it off, but the caller ID showed the number for my pagan bookstore back home in Madison, Wisconsin. My eyes snapped open in a shot of adrenaline. I untangled myself from Sebastian’s arms and quickly hit “connect.” My mind raced with fear of fire, burst frozen pipes, theft, or worse. William answered after the second ring. “Mercury Crossing, your friendly neighborhood source for all things New Age!”
Well, he sounded too cheerful for a complete disaster. “William, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“Oh, Garnet, thank God it’s you.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Sebastian must have heard the frantic sound in my voice, and he cracked open one eye to watch me warily. I pointed to the phone and whispered, “The store.”
“Mátyás woke me up from a very pleasant nap, I might add, screaming about some plane crash dream. Then I heard on the radio about all the trouble the Minneapolis airport is having with ice. I was worried sick.”
I rubbed my face with my hand, the fading excitement making my entire body feel heavy with a desire to sleep. “Great Goddess, William, I thought the store had burned down or something.”
“That kind of crazy stuff happens only when you’re here,” he reminded me. “No, everything’s fine. In fact, it’s been a bit quiet. Are you in Austria yet?”
“The plane had to make an emergency landing. We’re still in Saint Paul.”
“Oh, man,” William said. “You know, Mátyás is always right about these things.”
Mátyás could dream-walk—though he mostly dream-stalked . He was also aging so slowly he’d been a teenager for the last century and a half, or so, which might explain why he was such a pain in the ass most of the time.
My sexed-up-and-sleep-deprived fuzzy brain returned to the part of the conversation where Mátyás woke William up. Mátyás normally didn’t sleep anywhere near William. In fact, last I heard Mátyás was dating my best gal pal, Izzy. “Are you and Mátyás . . . ?” Oh, this was awkward. Maybe I misheard him. “Uh, how did you say you found out the dream?”
“Mátyás is sleeping on my couch. He and Izzy are on the outs again.”
Again? I had no idea there was any trouble between them, but William made it sound like an everyday thing. Boy, maybe I needed to call Izzy to get the scoop. But I didn’t want to sound out of the loop to William so I just said, “Huh.”
“So, when are you leaving?” William asked.
Sebastian and I hadn’t really talked about our plans yet other than that we needed to make some, but I had my own ideas. I poked Sebastian lightly on his arm. He blinked an eye at me, like an annoyed cat. “I don’t know, but I was thinking about talking Sebastian into hanging around up here. You know I went to school in Minneapolis, and I’d kind of like to take him on a tour of my old stomping grounds.”
“Hmm, sounds nice,” William agreed absently, like his mind was elsewhere. I could hear the ding of the cash register faintly in the background.
Sebastian’s eyes opened, and he sat up slowly. He frowned, but not deeply. “What about Europe?” he asked.
“We could go to Austria when the weather is nicer, like summer or something, don’t you think?”
Sebastian seemed to be considering that, when William said, “I’d love to see Vienna in the spring myself.”
“You don’t get to come on our honeymoon, William, sorry,” I said with a teasing laugh. “But yeah,” I said, meeting Sebastian’s eyes and nodding, “spring does sound even better.”
Sebastian twitched his lips and echoed my nod, like he thought that might be all right as well. I smiled at him and he returned it warmly.
“Since I have you on the phone, where do we keep the Dittany of Crete?”
I told him to look in the storeroom on our herbal shelf and reminded him of possible substitutions to offer the customer if we were out of it.
“Well, I should go,” William said. “Things are picking up here. After Yule rush, you know.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Bye!”
William signed off with a good-bye and hung up. I snapped the phone shut and looked again at Sebastian. “Is that really okay? About us staying here this time?”
Sebastian shrugged. “I haven’t booked new tickets yet. We could wait. Vienna is beautiful in the spring.”
“I can’t wait to see your home,” I said, suddenly regretting my selfish impulse. “We could go now, if you really want to, honestly. It was just a spur of the moment thought.”
“Well, given that Homeland Security and the Illuminati have us on their watch lists, we could probably stand to lay low for a while,” he said.
Sebastian and I agreed to do a little nighttime sightseeing. After a brief nap and a shower that involved mutual soaping up—I was loving the naked parts of the honeymoon so far!—I called for a cab to take us to Uptown in Minneapolis.
It should be noted that cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing like they are in other major metropolitan areas, except that the driver usually speaks little English. Here, they’re likely to be immigrants from Somalia or other parts of Africa and observant Muslims, to the point that they may refuse to carry the case of wine you’ve brought back on the airplane with you from your recent visit to the Napa Valley. You also cannot catch one by waving, no matter how frantically. They rarely stop for people on the street. Most times, you have to call and book one, though they will wait in queues at the airport and some hotels.
This is why, when I lived in Minneapolis, I actually owned a car. I still tried to take the bus when I could, but there are actually many places in the nearby suburbs that are unreachable by Twin Cities public transportation.
As we stood in the blustering snow under the awning of the hot
el, I muttered beneath my fluffy scarf, “Maybe we should just take our own car.”
Sebastian brightened up. “Can we?”
I’d explained this earlier. “We could, but parking is horrific in Uptown. Not to mention all the weird snow-emergency rules. I can’t remember anymore which side of the street is the one you’re allowed to park on.”
“So you said,” he said, clearly disappointed. Though watching eddies of snow swirl in the street, I was just as happy to have someone else navigate unfamiliar streets in these conditions.
“We can drive around tomorrow. I promise. Especially if it clears up.” I smiled and gave him a playful poke in the arm.
Despite the nearly freezing temperatures, Sebastian wore a thin, tweed black coat and a paisley silk muffler and matching necktie I’d bought him from the Smithsonian catalog. He looked pretty styling, and I’m sure I looked like I had my arm wrapped around a truly fabulous gay man. Especially since I never pulled off fashion quite the way he could, what with his vampire glamour and all.
I’d decided to go with warmth over fashion and so had on my black jeans and knee-high, faux-fur-trimmed boots. Over that I wore the coat I found at a rummage sale, which I called my babushka coat, because it looked like something a grandma in Russia might wear. It was sort of shapeless, red and black checkered, with big black buttons, and a black trimmed, wide collar. It could pass as retro chic, on a good day, I supposed, but next to my fab guy I felt a bit frumpy.
Sebastian scanned the snow for any sign of our cab. He checked his watch. “Why can’t we just wander around downtown Saint Paul?”
“Because,” I said. “It’s after six. In fact, it’s nearly ten. The streets are rolled up. Nothing will be open.”
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
When I shrugged, a tuft of snow slid off my shoulder. “Saint Paul likes to think of itself as an old- fashioned small town. The neighborhoods are strong and the downtown is dull. Well, okay, maybe that last part isn’t fair, but, trust me, there’s a lot more happening on the other side of the river.”
Honeymoon of the Dead Page 5
