Cafe in the Park (Siren Publishing Classic) (2 page)

At one fifteen, she slipped her cell phone into her jacket pocket after checking the time, and stood. She walked to hang around outside the café entrance for another five minutes, but then feeling foolish, she went back to work.

She detoured into the staff kitchen and got coffee to take back to her desk. As she sat down in her desk chair, she couldn’t help a sigh of disappointment escaping. That afternoon sadness crept over her. At the end of the working day as she traveled home, she realized just how much she’d hoped to meet a man who might love her. A fresh wave of foolishness flowed over her as she acknowledged hurt at being lured to the meeting only for no one to show up.

She almost cancelled her membership of the matching service and especially her attendance at the speed-dating event the next evening, but then a little flame of hope sprang up.
I’ll try for a little longer.

Chris stood by the duck pond for a few moments after he’d watched Emily walk off. She was pretty, and he liked the way she moved. His interest sparked by the sight of her, a pang of sorrow that he’d not approached her bit at him, and yet he felt vulnerable even in the dense shade of the trees at this end of the pond. The collar of his jacket was turned up, and his sunglasses were black frames with black lenses. The cuffs of his charcoal colored shirtsleeves came down over the backs of his hands, and he wore black leather boots under his dark denim jeans. A hot summer meant he needed to take extra care.

He stepped out of the shade for a few seconds to see Emily go around the corner at the end of the block. He checked no one was looking at him and accelerated into an incredible speed, reaching the sanctuary of his parked car across the street in seconds. He was inside behind the special glass of his windscreen when a wave of need overtook him and he covered his face with his hands. Long ago, he’d still been able to shed tears, now the weight of sadness bowed his head, and although he would like the luxury of tears to soothe the pain, he couldn’t shed them. Chris allowed himself the moment of grief and then started his car. He pulled out into the traffic and drove back to his palatial home in the hills.

His garage was integral and he drove straight into it. The house was built against a rock and partly within it. Chris enjoyed the cool air as he went into his favorite living quarters. Once in the vast room, he took off his jacket and boots and rolled up his sleeves. In one corner of the room stood his old leather sofa next to an array of lush plants, and in front of it, a water feature, sunk into the floor. Big colored fish swam in there among specially imported water plants. His favorite had big pink waxen flowers. He went to the kitchen down the hall for a glass of water and then padded back to his sanctuary. Chris sipped at his drink as he sat to watch the fish swim.

He’d started reading the personal column three years ago. He belonged to four different online dating agencies, every year joining a new one in his quest for someone to light up his lonely existence. This year, by chance, he’d joined the same one as Emily. It immediately matched him with her. Naturally, he had some random picture for his photograph. He’d acquired it from an online advertisement for software. The photo was nothing like him, but he couldn’t upload his real image. Not that he considered himself hideous. His instinct was not to post it.

Chris was astonished when he read that this new match wanted a man who could cry. It must be the same woman advertising in the magazine personal column he read and on the date matching website. Of course, he couldn’t cry now, but he wanted to, not only that, he desperately wanted to love and receive love. He’d spent so long without a lover he thought he might soon go mad with need. Chris was so old he’d forgotten his real age. He had so many memories, they crowded in on him, jostling for space in his brain until he blanked them out, determined to live each day as it came.

On the top floor of his enormous home was an apartment where his human friend Art lived. The man was about sixty now. Chris came across him in an alley being savagely beaten by three other men. They’d picked the fight in a nearby nightclub and taken it onto the street to finish.

What was supposed to be two men watching their friend in a fair fight with Art, turned into all three producing brass knuckles, and short heavy sticks to beat him almost to death. If Chris hadn’t happened along and stopped it all, they would have killed Art. Since then Art had been an employee, faithful, well looked after, discreet, reliable. More than that, he was a dear friend.

When Art found out what Chris was, he’d been shocked, then in awe of the easy way Chris controlled his nature. Chris acknowledged he was unusual, but there’d been a long time to practice.

He didn’t actually know how he’d become what he was. When he’d woken at twilight, surrounded by his dead comrades, all he could think of was running from the carnage. He’d dug himself out of the stack of dead in various stages of decay. A severed head rested on his chest. A severed hand clutched at his bare arm. Jerking away, Chris took off at a run from the battlefield. He ran far into the night. When he finally stopped and realized he was terribly hungry, he saw a young deer grazing at the edge of the trees. Without hesitation, he’d launched into the air, grabbed the deer by the back of the neck, and killed and eaten it. Only when he’d appeased the gnawing pain of hunger did he realize he was no longer human. The massive pale golden paws that held the partially devoured deer carcass shocked him. He dropped the meal and leapt back from the paws, but they followed him. He was standing high on a mountain ledge having ascended at least fifteen feet in the leap. He shook himself as the scent of blood receded. He took great gulps of the cool, misty air as he saw his legs and hands. He was human again. Chris walked on. The following night he’d found a cave and slept in there. It felt safe. When he woke up ravenous, curled up on the dry sandstone floor, he’d transformed into the animal. The terrible, almost constant pain of hunger in the early days drove him to hunt accepting the change without much thought. It became the way he lived. Even as a human he stayed away from the villages because he felt fearful he’d shift and kill. He sought out caves for the cool air in the heat of summer and shelter in winter. He fed on deer, squirrels, and fox, other rodents in the lean times, and occasionally a young wolf, but never humans. He never tasted their blood, until Veronique.

She was nearly his undoing.

He met Veronique in France toward the end of Louis XIV’s reign. Chris owned a huge country estate there at the time, and lived a solitary existence there. Centuries had passed since his change, and Chris had grown incredibly strong. He never looked any older than the twenty-eight-year-old he was, when his group of soldiers, lost from the legion in the forest, was massacred by who knew what. His senses were excellent. He travelled huge distances, able to sprint at around fifty miles per hour. He’d amassed great wealth largely through the acquisition of land, gold, and diamonds. He avoided strong sunlight, which woke the beast in him. He could control it, but it was painful. For the most part, he was human, but if he let himself become too hungry or took too much sun, his body took over, and he became a massive, pale tawny mountain lion. The “shifting thing,” as he called it, shocked him, but his longevity amazed him.

Chris believed he was in love with Veronique. He met her at a masked ball in the nearby palace, a summer haunt of Louis’s court. She was beautiful and clever. Her lovemaking was addictive and she enticed him to reveal his nature. He insisted she lock him in the cells beneath his château so that she would be safe from him. When he shifted back from the lion to the man, she led him to the bedchamber and fucked him. She declared his shifter nature erotic. In the depths of passion, Chris licked along her shoulder, sucked a huge love bite there, and tasted her blood.

The first time gave him such a high it scared him. He told her that she was better than the finest wine for chasing away his demons. He was careful not to suck too much, but more and more he would raise the marks of love bites along her neck, to taste her blood. He reveled in her softness, her touch, and the way she called him “Chrees” in her beautiful voice. He dreaded he might shift and devour her, but it never happened. To rasp up a few molecules of her blood with his tongue was always enough, and she encouraged him, moaning with pleasure, occasionally giving him a love bite in return.

She left him one day as he slept. He didn’t know why. He searched for her, expecting to be able to track her, but never found a trace of her. A year later, he left France. He was skilled at avoiding detection, setting up residence in a semi-ruined castle initially in the Scottish countryside. Then merging easily into London high society, he occasionally found a lady friend from whom he would take a tiny hit of blood. As the years went by it became harder to hunt animals. The towns encroached on their habitat. He tolerated bought meat to supplement the few animals he did hunt.

The years went by until Chris was completely urbanized. He needed only a little of his food raw, but because he didn’t hunt, his beast would roar for freedom in a harsh summer sun, and so he chose to live in a country where the weather was often inclement. It soothed him. The only thing that chipped away at his composure was his need for love and sex. Chris hadn’t been with a woman for a very long time. His loneliness was crippling.

He talked with Art about his crushing need for love, for a woman in his life. Art joked about dating agencies. Chris took it seriously.

The speed-dating venue hummed with chatter. Emily checked out the men in the room. In a few minutes, the bell would sound for the speed dating to start. She lined up with the other women ready to take a seat at her allotted table. Each one a square meter of white wood with two chairs on either side, so that the man and woman faced each other like combatants in some strange battle.

The men gathered in a small group at the specially set up drinks table designed to relax them. The women gave each other nervous smiles. Emily guessed how hard they’d all tried with their makeup and dress. She read the signs of extra mascara or higher heels. She wore a fitted dress, designed to show off her figure. Having accepted how much she hoped to meet a man that night, she dressed to entice.

The men hadn’t looked at the women very much so far. Something Emily found strange. They stared down at the floor, or into their drinks, or at each other. It was a woeful spectacle. Emily couldn’t see anyone she found sexually attractive. She considered leaving. Then the bell sounded.

Emily took the last table as all the women walked in a row and peeled off the line to sit down. When they were all seated, a few seconds passed, and then another bell rang and the men began to sit at the tables.

Emily clutched a stubby pencil and the form given to her by the organizer on arriving at the venue. A man sat down and began to Emily things. A paper label with a number on it was stuck to his shirt, there so that Emily could write the number in a box if she wanted his contact details. She didn’t.

Another man very soon replaced the first when the bell rang, and so it went on, until finally a man sat down and remained silent. Emily waited. He was curiously pale and wore dark glasses even though the light was low in the room. The collar of his leather jacket was turned up. The open zip of the jacket allowed her a view of what looked to be a muscular chest beneath the black T-shirt he wore. His dark hair, glossy, cut, but not too short, looked as if he’d run his hands through it rather than combed it. This man was attractive. Emily stared at his enticing mouth for a few seconds. A shade of stubble on his handsome jaw completed the picture.

Even so, it was difficult to assess him properly, what with the low light and a shadow falling across him from a nearby pillar. He’d pulled the chair opposite her a little off center so that he sat in this extra gloom. Emily hadn’t ticked any box on her form yet. She looked for the expected number on the man’s jacket and saw the label had curled away from the leather so that she could only read the last digit.

As the seconds passed, unable to think of an opening line, Emily nervously twirled her pencil around on the table, feeling an unexpectedly strong desire to see this man again. Suddenly, and surprising the hell out of Emily, the man spoke.

“I’m not afraid to cry.” He stood up and walked away. The bell rang a second later. Emily watched him stalk away. He bent to place his form on something behind the organizer’s desk. After, he went straight down the stairs that led to the bar on the ground floor. Right then most of the men followed in the same direction.

Since she hadn’t been able to see the whole number on his label, she wrote down a description of him on her form. When she handed it to the organizer, she explained.

The woman smiled in an understanding way. “Oh yes. That’s number twenty-nine. He’s very distinctive. So you want his e-mail address?”

“Yes, please.”

The organizer looked at Emily’s form. A frown furrowed her forehead. “Is he the only one? You didn’t want to contact any of the others? You didn’t get any names?”

Emily was about to apologize when the woman grinned. “That’s okay of course.” She indicated her intention to collect the other women’s forms with a gesture and strode off in a businesslike way.

Emily knew the agency would send her an e-mail with the man’s contact information because that was their policy. The men had forms, too, and Emily wondered if any of them had written her number down. She peeled off her label and dropped it in a waste paper bin by the drinks table. The young man serving there smiled at her. Emily smiled at him and then turned to leave the room.