A Girls Guide to Vampires (19 page)

"Joy, I don't know what you want—"

I squirmed against his crotch.

"All right, I do know what you want, but I don't know why you want it,
nor
why you're holding whatever you have found out about me over my head, but I do know this."

My heart did a little dive to my feet. He wasn't going to bite me and make me his Beloved? Not even after I went through all the angst to believe in what he was, to trust him with myself despite the disturbing vision?

"I know that it's not going to be physically possible for me to remove you from your current position," he continued, his voice suddenly hoarse. It just added a new element of sexy to a man already at the top of the tingle-meter. "I thought I might be able to, but that was before you sucked the brains right out of my head with kisses so hot they could melt steel. My grandfather was right."

"Huh?"

"When he told me that a St. John man knows from the very first meeting who the woman is that he will spend his life with.
He was right. I know."

I sat perfectly still as my heart did a happy somersault. "I don't think that sentence is grammatically correct, but it is hands down the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me."

He twitched in response to my words. We both looked down at the twitching part. Raphael's adorable lips twisted into a grimacing smile. "You see? Even my body knows. And if just thinking about you has this effect on me, how am I supposed to make you remove those long, glorious thighs from where they're burning every inch of my legs, and walk away? It's just not possible." He shook his head for emphasis.

I disentangled my fingers from his hair and sat back on his thighs. He shuddered, and his fingers spasmed, but he didn't grab me.

I didn't quite understand what was going on here, but I was determined to figure it out. "Let me see if I have the sequence of events straight here."

He nodded, his eyes momentarily devouring the exposed parts of my breasts before he gulped back a big breath of air, and nodded again.

"First you came into my room and did weird things to the air, and then you kissed me and were about to feed on my blood when I begged you to stop."

"What?" he asked, his eyes narrowing. "What are you talking about?"

"You came into my room," I answered, a bit annoyed with this pretense he obviously insisted on maintaining. It wasn't necessary; he certainly had no need to fear I'd expose what he really was.

"You invited me," he protested. "You gave me come hither looks, and you're wearing that flimsy little bit of nothing, and if that's not an invitation, then I'd certainly appreciate you telling me what it was."

"No, not just now; earlier.
You nibbled my neck, and you were about to sink fang."

He stared at me, his jaw slack for a moment.

"Then, when I beat you back, you went away, only to return a couple of hours later and refuse to do what you wanted to earlier."

"Joy." Raphael put both hands on my thighs. He twitched again. "I want you to listen very carefully to what I say, because I'm not sure how much longer I can sit like this with you all warm and inviting and hotter than purgatory without actually going insane, but I did
not
come into your room earlier this evening."

I stopped staring at his crotch and blinked at him. "You didn't?"

His eyes held mine in a solemn gaze. "No, I didn't."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely."

"Maybe you forgot?" I really didn't want to think that my midnight visitor wasn't him.

"Joy—" I shifted on his lap and he
groaned,
his face tight with strain. "God help me, woman, stop tormenting me like that! I'll say this one more time, and then you're going to remove your luscious self from my lap and allow me to go back to my own bed. I did not come here earlier and touch you."

"You make it sound like touching me is something repugnant," I said indignantly, pulling back.

"Do I look like I'm repulsed by you?"

He didn't
Especially
the bulgy parts of him. "Well, no—"

His eyes smoldered into mine as his fingers clutched my hips. "I am a man, just a man, but a man who has limits to what sort of torture he can stand, and if you wiggle just one more time, I'm going to die and then you'll have to explain to the police why you have a dead Englishman in your room."

I resisted the urge to move again. He really did look like he was at the end of his rope. I decided to leave the subject of who had visited me earlier and tackle something else he'd said. "What exactly did you mean when you asked what I knew about you? Did you mean to imply that I was blackmailing you about something? Do you have some deep, dark secret that you're not telling me?"

He grunted in pain as I leaned forward, the better to see into his shuttered eyes. "Forget I mentioned it. I was simply being overly cautious. It's of no matter."

I touched the frown wrinkling between his brows. "Are you in some sort of trouble?"

He caught my hand and looked at it for a moment before kissing the tips of my fingers, his tongue flicking against my suddenly sensitized skin.

"Joy, I want to make love to you, but I don't think now is the right time. You're obviously distressed about something that happened earlier, and… well, much as I would like to take you up on your offer, I don't think tonight is the best time for either of us. I think it would be better if I left."

I touched my fingers to his lips for a moment, disappointment warring with the knowledge that he was being wise when I was not. "You don't want me?"

He put my hand on his groin. The evidence there was indisputable.

"You
do
want me?"

"So much that I'm willing to wait until a time when I can show you that with us, lovemaking will be more profound than just sex, yes."

"We'll be profound together?" Gee, I was just brimming with questions.

He twined a strand of my hair around his finger. "Oh, yes, baby. We'll be
very
profound together."

I nodded and thought about what he said for a moment,
then
got off his lap. "Are you sure it wasn't you earlier?"

"Quite sure," he said, standing up, grimacing as he adjusted his pants.

I tried to piece the puzzle together—to see how the early Raphael and the present Raphael fit together—but they didn't mesh. I blinked a couple of times in an attempt to clear my mind. "Well, if it wasn't you who came calling, then who was it?"

That, as it turned out, was indeed the question.

Chapter Nine

"So who
did
go into your room earlier in the evening if it wasn't Raphael?" Roxy asked several hours later as we sat together in the pale sunlight of a late October morning.

"I don't know for sure."

"But you have an idea?"

"Possibly."
I wanted to avoid my idea, actually. It was fairly unsavory.

"Well, we'll come back to that in a minute," Roxy said as she waved a roll slathered with butter and jam at me. I damned her metabolism for a moment before turning to my naked toast and fruit. "First I want to hear what happened to you."

I frowned. "What do you mean, what happened to me?"

"You know!" She scooped up another large spoon of preserves and coated her roll with it.

"You'll get diabetes doing that," I predicted sourly, nodding to the roll. She just grinned and licked her fingers. "Assume I don't know what it is you're talking about and fill me in with words of one syllable or less."

"I'm talking about what happened last night after Raphael told you he couldn't peel you off his lap. Did you…
you know
… or did you talk, or did you get up and cordially wish him a good night and spend the rest of the night touching yourself pretending it was him doing the touching?"

"Roxanne!" I choked, coughing and sputtering on my toast until I had tears in my eyes. I wheezed and snorted as I sipped a little coffee, trying to end the paroxysms.

"I didn't say you got your jollies off, I just asked if you did!"

I hadn't, but the thought had crossed my mind. "No, I did not—not, I might add, that it's any of your business. Nor is it any of your business
what
I might or might not have done with Raphael. You may rest assured I will tell you anything of importance."

"I can tell you didn't get any last night," she said sanctimoniously, licking the jam from the butter knife. "You're always surly in the morning when you're in a frustrated way."

I gave that statement all the attention it deserved—none.

"So if it wasn't Raphael about to do the blood thing with you earlier in the
evening, who are
your prime suspects?"

I poured myself another cup of coffee and leaned back in my chair, enjoying the warmth of the sunlight. This late in the morning, we were the only people in the tiny dining room.

"I don't know, Rox, that's the problem. It seems to me the field is narrowed down to just a couple of guys."

"Well, I still think
it's
Raphael," she sniffed, sipping noisily on her hot chocolate. She licked the whipped cream from her upper lip and added, "For some reason, he just doesn't want you to know it's him. We just have to figure out that reason, and then you can tell him to knock it off and get on with step four."

"That doesn't make sense," I said, poking at the remains of my breakfast. "Have you ever read about a Dark One lying to his Beloved?"

She frowned as she thought.
"Mmm.
You may have a point."

"No, I think…" I chewed on my lower lip as I pulled out the memories of the past evening. "I think Raphael's telling the truth. It didn't
feel
like him the first time."

"But you said you saw his eyes, saw him standing beyond the door before he melted through it—which I have to say is a totally awesome thing to see."

I was shaking my head before she finished. "No, I told you I couldn't move, couldn't even open up my eyelids. The stuff I saw—well, it could have just been my imagination. I could have
imagined
I saw Raphael there, that it was him touching me rather than whoever it really was."

"But then who was it really?" she asked for a third time. I just stared helplessly at her in return.

"OK, let's go about this systematically." She pulled out a tablet of paper and started writing. "One: you say the Dark One is not Raphael."

I nodded. "At least, the Dark One who came to my room last night wasn't Raphael. I thought it was until he kissed me; then I knew something was wrong, that it wasn't him."

"Check. Since it's impossible for more than one Dark One to claim a
Beloved, that
means the first batch of visions you were having were also from our mystery man, to wit, not Raphael."

I nodded, then shook my head, then nodded again.

"What?" she asked, sucking on the cap of the
pen.

"I don't know—it seems to me that it was Raphael that first night. I felt him approaching, felt him feeding, and then, whammo! There he was with Dominic."

Roxy tapped the pen on her chin for a moment before making another note. "OK, that's point
two
: Who arrived with or just following Raphael?"

"Dominic," I said. "But he's not the vampire, I know that. I can
feel
that."

She grinned and tipped her head to the side. "You've sure come a long way in just a few days. Once it was 'Oh, no, Roxy, there's no such thing as Dark Ones,' and now you know with just a feeling if someone's a vampire or not. Next thing you know, you'll
be believing
in leprechauns and the Loch Ness Monster."

I didn't feel like laughing. It wasn't
her
neck that was attracting rogue vampires all over the place. "This is serious, Roxy."

"Nothing is so serious you can't have a bit of fun at your oldest friend's expense. So, if it's not Dominic, then who? Who've you met since we've been here?"

"Tanya and Arielle," I counted off on my fingers, "but they're women, so they don't enter into the picture. Then there was Dominic and Raphael, but we've already crossed them off the list."

"
You
have," Roxy said darkly. "I haven't until I see some solid proof."

I let that go. "Then Christian showed up—"

I looked up at her. She raised her eyebrows for a moment as she tapped her pen on her lips. "
Naw,
can't be," she shook her head. "He ate dinner with us, remember? And wasn't he in the bar much earlier, before Dominic and Raphael arrived?"

I closed my eyes so I could concentrate better on the memory of that night. "I think so—yes, I remember seeing him with a wineglass as he joined a table where some men were playing chess."