Deep Desire: The Deep Series, Book 1 (2 page)

“Adin.” Donte loomed over him. “You have something that belongs to me.”

“I do?” Adin hook his head to clear it. “Wait—”

“You must not be angry when I take it from you.” He took Adin’s arms and helped him to stand, then kissed him tenderly, opening Adin’s lips again to take his mouth. “I will give you something of equal value in return, I promise. I’ll find something as extraordinary as you are, and it will be yours.”

“All right.” Adin breathed out the words. As soon as he got home he was going to have a thorough neurological workup.

“
Per favori, non dimenticarmi,
” Donte whispered.

Please don’t forget me.

When Donte left the bathroom, the privacy slider on the door still clearly read occupied. Adin gazed around for a moment, still foggy, still wondering what the hell just happened.

He dressed himself, noting his trousers, shirt and jacket looked even more disreputable than they had before. His tie was gone.
His tie?

Had he just had a bathroom hookup with some high-flying trophy hunter?

He had. Ohmygod.
He had.

Adin frowned into the mirror. He stared at his reflection, still gripping the counter next to the sink, pressing down hard, white at the knuckles.

He still tasted that deeply green herbal scent on his tongue.

He’d had impromptu sex before; in fact, he had fucked men without even the exchange of names. It was all aboveboard, a very
civilized
primitive exchange.

Yet something told him Donte was neither aboveboard nor civilized.

If he had it to do over again, would he?

He would.

Again and again and again
.

Adin left the bathroom sometime later, having made his clothing as presentable as possible. Anyone seeing him probably thought he was just another tired traveler. A little pale, maybe.

By the time he got to his seat, he was so dizzy he could hardly stand. He dropped into it, glad he’d chosen the aisle, glad his seatmate was two spaces over against window, sound asleep.

He started losing figurative altitude before the plane dipped into Los Angeles airspace. He couldn’t speak. Smacked his lips together to wet them but came up drier than before.

When he finally felt concerned enough to call for help, he didn’t have the strength to lift his arm and push the flight attendant Call button.

Something was very wrong. His hands fell into his lap, fingers curled into fists.

He knew there was something he ought to be doing—something he ought to be thinking—

Notturno.
That’s what it was.
That’s
what Donte wanted. And he’d drugged Adin, done something, to steal it.

But that was crazy, right? Paranoia wasn’t Adin’s usual thing, but then neither was fucking men in bathrooms.

That was madness.

Fucking out of my mind.

The situation turned out to be ironic, and not in any hipster way—though Adin’s best friend Edward often accused him of being one of those. Adin couldn’t laugh out loud, because people were watching and he already felt more than a little insane.

Yet his last act as he’d finished electronically checking out of his Frankfurt hotel room, was to switch
Notturno’s
case with the hotel’s informative guest binder. And even as he’d wrapped
Notturno
and his laptop protectively into the bag he planned to check through, he’d thought he was being overly cautious to do it.

It meant letting the journal leave his hands, but at the time he’d considered that the lesser of two evils.

Adin hadn’t liked giving in to his anxiety, but as the feeling of being stalked persisted, he’d forced himself to act in the interest of caution, which meant that
Notturno
was tucked safely in the cargo hold, and somewhere, out there in the night, his sexy stalker-who-bites could call for dry cleaning, in-room dining, and find a worship service in Frankfurt.

Donte can order pizza, if he can eat garlic.

Adin did laugh then, and as he knew they would, everyone around him stared.

But then the darkness claimed him and he knew nothing more.

Chapter Two

When Adin was finally able to check into his hotel, he went straight to his room and fell into bed. He dreamed of Donte, whose voice seemed to surround him in whispers of Italian, French, Romanian and Greek, sometimes all at once, like a chorus of bad angels building up to a crescendo in his veins. It was as if his blood were alive, independent, and pulsing with possibilities. Several times Adin woke, sweating and chilled, his cock banging against his stomach, leaving glistening trails in its wake. Adin could almost hear Donte laughing at him as he broke out the lube and gave himself to pleasure, a minute’s worth of frustrated groping that left him nothing but damp and hungry for more.

Eventually he must have slept; it was full light when he awoke again. He was so completely disoriented that it took a pot of room service coffee and a large breakfast before he could think again. He headed down for a cab with the
Notturno
manuscript in an expensive new leather briefcase, one he’d had delivered by personal shopper to the concierge and which he would mind very much losing.

He stepped into the bright sunlight of a ninety-something-degree day and caught a cab to Welkeil Pharmaceuticals. Inside the cab, religious symbols of every conceivable faith competed for his attention along with the smell of coffee and mint gum. The cabdriver was a portly man of unknown ethnic origin, pleasant and talkative. He followed the shortest distance between Adin’s hotel and his destination. A definite plus.

They stopped at the foot of the Welkeil Building on Wilshire, a towering edifice wrought in steel and smoked glass. The expression on the driver’s face was one of mistrust as he glanced up at it through the windshield, as if he’d had dealings with people in large buildings and didn’t approve.

Adin said, “My sister works here.”

The cabbie smiled as though that made a difference.

Adin paid him and went inside.

Welkeil was not the most welcoming place. After following protocol and checking in at the busy reception desk, Adin’s briefcase and person were searched. A blonde in a navy blazer with a tag on a lanyard that read Welkeil Security ran a handheld metal detector over his body. She smiled apologetically.

After he was cleared, one of the doors in a bank of elevators opened and Adin’s tiny, energetic sister, Deana, rushed out.

“Adin, oddball, you jerk!” She laughed as he picked her up and swung her, simply to illustrate that he still could. “You could have told me you were coming. It would have been a lot easier.” She smiled at the security guard and took Adin by the hand.

“You look great, Deana Beana,” he exclaimed, trailing after her, taking in her bronzed skin and sun-kissed hair. “You’re all golden and glowing.”

“It’s a spray tan, which makes me a proper Angeleno.”

“You’ll never be a proper anything.” She took him to the elevator.

“Look who’s talking,” she said. “What have you brought me this time?”

“Renaissance porn.”

“No kidding?” She clapped her hands, delighted.

“Entirely on the level. I thought we could take a peek.”

“And you want into the lab. Okay, the lab’s fine, but not the clean room this time. I assume you don’t want to prepare a slide?” They exited the elevator on the sixth floor.

“Oh hell no. This stays intact. Nothing invasive just yet. It’s my preciousssssss.”

“Well.” She pursed her lips. “Jeff’s got the electron microscope, so you’ll eventually have to. You know the drill.”

He held up his case and patted it. “You won’t even believe this manuscript. It’s unbelievably graphic. I want to look at the parchment under a standard microscope first before I make the decision to prepare a slide sample for electron microscopy. I’ve brought my digital camera, and you can help me photograph the pages. This is pretty racy stuff, Deana Beana; better gird your loins.”

“You and your smut.” She led him down a gray-carpeted hallway.

“This is historical smut, I will have you know. Erotica is an art form that has its beginnings in cave paintings—”

“Save the speech, Adin. I’ve heard it. What makes this one so special?” She swiped her card in a reader and then followed him as he entered a brightly lit, white lab room filled with long stainless steel surfaces. Various stations held microscopes, scales, centrifuges and burners, and each had file drawers underneath.

“Ah,” he said, finding a long stretch of clean counter. The room was a good one for handling the book. The temperature and humidity levels mimicked those in which he would eventually store his precious find at the university. He took out his case and handed her a pair of white cotton gloves. She pulled them over her small hands and watched with amused condescension as he carefully opened the special box in which the manuscript traveled. It was designed to allow the manuscript to be removed without any kind of pressure on the object itself. Gingerly, he opened to one of the pages. “See for yourself.”

“You are shitting me.” His sister stared at the book in shock.

“Nope.” He grinned.

“It’s gay porn from beyond the grave.”

He laughed outright. “You can’t be terribly shocked.”

She shook her head. “Oh, oddball. Only
you
.”

She went to the phone and dialed four numbers. “Hello, Jeff? I need the TEM. No, Adin’s here. It’s for ink.” She glanced over her shoulder at her brother, who was sticking his tongue out. “No, he still doesn’t spell it
O
-
D
-
D
. You have to promise not to file sexual harassment charges
.
I
am
serious. If you aren’t okay with
Brokeback Mountain
meets
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, don’t hang around. Okay, then, we’ll be up in a while.”

Deana leaned over him to explore the page further. “Oh, Adin,” she said. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I know. I looked it over as carefully as I could in Frankfurt, but I didn’t have the time to read much of it.” He took a magnifying glass out of his jacket pocket, and Deana pulled over a couple of stools.

“
Can
you read it?” she asked.

“It’s Italian, but of course not the Italian we use today.” He thought of Donte, whispering “
un amore vietato
”.
Forbidden love.
He shivered a little. Deana studied him closely. She didn’t miss a thing.

“Cold?”

“Just thinking,” he said, going back to the manuscript. “Somebody tried to steal this from me on the plane.”

“No.” His sister stared at him. “That is so very
not good
.”

“I know.” He peered at the words under a nude rendering of a really beautiful man. “Oh, this is interesting. He refers to the man as his award. Like a prize or the result of a bet, almost; something he won. Hmm. ‘I possess him, yet he possesses me entirely. My will is no longer my own.’ Whoa. Time for an intervention. Ye olde Codependents Anonymous.”

Deana looked closely at the page. “Yet look at the drawing. Wow.
That
is the expression of a man in love, isn’t it?”

“How would
I
know? It’s a lovely drawing, though, isn’t it? Look at the eyes; they’re so…soft. I can assure you, I don’t inspire that look at all.”

“Yet you persist in playing hit-and-run all over the world with what, fuck buddies?”

“Friends. I have really good friends when I need them and strangers when I want them. It’s not like anyone needs much more than that.” He turned a page gingerly and drew in a deep breath.

Deana gasped and clutched at her heart. “Oh hell, I don’t care what century you’re from, that has got to hurt.” They tilted their heads in unison and leaned in to look at the drawing more closely. Her face caught fire. “Sorry.”

“No worries,” he replied, schooling his expression. He wished he could just sit somewhere and read this damned book in private. His dick was interested now, and his sister was watching. “What?”

“Maybe we should go see Jeff now.”

“You think he’s ready?” He replaced the book in its case without meeting her eyes.

“No. I don’t seriously think Jeff will ever be ready for the contents of that book.”

“I know.” He followed her out into the corridor. Waited while she pressed the elevator Call button. “To be honest, I’m not sure even I’m ready, and I bought the damn thing.”

“Think this time the university will say you’ve gone too far?”

“Maybe.” He turned to her and grinned cheekily. “Probably.”

“You go, oddball!” She high-fived him.

They spent an hour in Jeff’s lab and two more meticulously photographing each page of the journal. It was painstaking work, each page carefully checked on Adin’s laptop to see whether the writing was legible enough for translation and the drawings could be reproduced adequately for study. Better copies than these would eventually be made of the work, but Adin couldn’t help wanting to get started on the translation right away, and Deana had always been a willing accomplice. While she drove Adin back to the Bonaventure, she tried to make him promise he’d come for dinner.

He wasn’t about to tell her that he planned to stay indoors at night or
why
. He merely begged off dinner, using jet lag as an excuse. Of course he
was
tired. He looked like hell.

When he got back to his room, he stored the manuscript away in his wall safe. So far, he’d been right about the document. It was written with iron gall ink on true vellum—step one to authentication.

Next, paleographers and codicologists would assess the writing and the binding. Translation and further testing would be required to prove its actual age. At this point, Adin had no reason to believe it was anything other than what it seemed. He allowed himself a small, triumphant smile and went to the window. Still light out on a balmy Southern California evening. It would have been perfect for dining alfresco at one of his favorite Westwood eateries, or even taking in a Dodgers game.

But jet lag was messing with his internal clock, and his fertile imagination supplied a solid reason to succumb to exhaustion. He had to rest this night and rise early again the next day in order to get himself back on Pacific Standard Time.

Adin was so exhausted he fell asleep on his bed with his laptop still glowing.

Soon, the dream from the night before returned. His blood sang. Passion heated his body and stained it crimson at the surface of his skin. He woke, flushed, imagining he’d heard Donte’s voice again. Words murmured in Donte’s soft Italian accent seemed to come from under his very flesh.

“Crap,” Adin cursed. He got dressed and jammed his wallet into his pocket before heading for the BonaVista Lounge. Maybe he could still get something light to eat as well as a drink. Eating alone in his hotel room felt like a losing proposition.

He entered the elevator, glad to see a few smiling faces—an older couple holding hand, and two Asian girls who were dressed for and talking about business. By the twenty-second floor, everyone exited the elevator but him. He stepped off at the top floor, looking for the lounge, when a large hand swept out from behind him and pulled him back inside.

“
Caro
.”
Donte’s voice.
Adin watched as the floor buttons lit up chaotically, random in a way that made him think of science fiction movies from the ’50s. He tried to step off again but Donte prevented him by catching hold of his arm.

“Adin.” Donte’s breath whispered against his ear. “I’ve called you and called you, yet you only just now come to me.
Stubborn.
”

“What do you want?” Adin refused to turn.

“Only that which belongs to me.”

“And what would that be?”

“What do you think, Adin? Of course I want my journal back. And yet…I wonder if you recall how completely you gave yourself to me.” Donte’s sigh lifted the hair on Adin’s nape. “Perhaps I would like your surrender again as well.”

Adin watched the flashing lights and concentrated on thinking clearly.
It’s a trick of some kind.
This isn’t real.

He kept his voice even. “Does this kind of thing work for you?”

“What kind of thing?” Donte stiffened.

“This whole,
I am Donte
thing.” Adin affected the accent, giving it a little more Bela Lugosi than was strictly necessary. “
Come to me, caro, and your blood will sing in the moonlight.
”

“Now, I know I have never said that.” Donte laid his hand on Adin’s shoulder. Stroked his thumb on the back of Adin’s neck.

“It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure,” said Adin.

“I fear it loses a little of the
oompah
if you are not looking at my face.”

Adin snorted. “I gathered.”

“Turn around, caro,” Donte ordered.

“Nope. When I look you in the eye, things happen inside my head that I don’t necessarily like.”

“I promise I won’t manipulate you right now.” Donte tugged at him. “I am a man of my word, if nothing else.”

“I can tell when it’s happening so it’s no use anyway,” Adin lied.

“You would be foolish to assume that in the future. Just because you can tell it’s happening doesn’t mean you can stop it.”

“What is it you’re doing, anyway?” The lights on the panel had stopped blinking maniacally and the elevator had ceased its descent, giving the impression they were hovering, floating in the glass-enclosed space.

“I don’t know, maybe a kind of hypnosis. A push of thought that takes root in a weaker mind.” Donte leaned against the round brass railing that surrounded them like a skeleton inside the elevator car.

“Weaker. I see.”

“You don’t like to think of yourself as weaker, but Adin, you cannot hope to prevail against me as you are.”

“You can’t have the journal because I bought it fairly and with proper provenance. But you may try to dispute it in a court of law if you like.”

“Yes, well. That presents a problem, doesn’t it?”

“Do you really expect me to believe the impression you’ve been constructing here? The biting, the mind control, the Vlad the Impaler accent.”

“Vlad—” Donte sputtered. “I’m
Italian
.”