Department 57: Rubies of Fire (13 page)

When she felt the suction again, it came from deep in her and outside her, his mouth wide, covering her clit and her vagina, drawing both deep into him.

“God, you taste so good! I can’t get enough of you!”

She was beyond anything past an elementary,
“Bite, bite!”

His fangs responded. Their sharp edges grazed her sensitive skin, and she moaned, encouraging him to move, to take her.

“I can’t stop this. What have you done?”

“Do it!”

She felt his sense of wonder. He’d never done this with anyone else? Before her confused thoughts could coalesce, she felt his teeth enter her, graze her. She knew he drew blood, but she trusted him, as she had with her throat. He wouldn’t hurt her. The intimate sting of his teeth jolted her into another climax, higher and sharper than the last one.

He lifted his head, licking her, and she sensed his panic.

She lifted a shaky hand to touch his shoulder. “No, Andreas; that was right. Lovers share blood in intimate places. Lick it clean, darling. I’ll heal in no time. You’re so good at this, I can’t believe you’ve never done it before.”

He stayed where he was, lying between her legs until he saw her cuts healing. She saw them in his mind, cruel slices, closing as quickly as he made them, and she knew he needed to see for himself.

He crawled slowly up the bed until he could gaze into her eyes. “That was good, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

“It felt right to me. I have to let you do it to me?” he asked.

She felt the doubt in his mind and loved that he allowed her to see it.

“Only if you want to,” she said.

She lifted her hand to push it into his thick, dark hair, the strands falling silkily around her fingers. “Right now I need you more. Love me, Andreas.”

He took her mouth, and she tasted herself, the metallic tang of blood mixed with her own juices. He slipped down her wet opening, his cock sliding into her as though it belonged there, as though he’d come home.

Which he had. They fitted together like the interlocking parts of a puzzle ring, coming together as though being apart was an unnatural state. He filled her completely, and his balls nestled against her perineum and ass, caressing her sensitive flesh, before he withdrew to impale her again, slowly, sensationally.

When he drew back from their kiss, his eyes opened, as did hers, and they watched each other as he slowly withdrew and thrust, withdrew and thrust. They needed no words, no verbal communication of any kind, only the communal experience: he in her, she in him. She felt his reaction and hers, doubled, tripled with the energy of awareness. They took each other higher with only the gentle movement of thrust and retreat, her legs wide and accepting, her body tilted up for him. They never lost eye contact as their shared orgasm slowly built and time ceased to exist. His thrusts deepened and increased in power, but there was no abrupt passion, only that slow, inevitable growing to a peak neither had imagined, neither had believed existed before.

Until they progressed to a spiraling, inescapable consummation, soaring above and beyond, into each other, deeply embraced until they truly became one being with one unbelievable climax.

* * * *

Roz wasn’t sure when it ended, but she found herself locked in his arms, nestled closely to him on the soft, cream coverlet of his large, welcoming bed. “Did I sleep?”

“Hmm? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I did too. Does it matter?”

“Not really. Andreas?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“What happened then?”

He grunted. “Something wonderful. I don’t know what to call it precisely, but I’m not sure I care. Only that I want it to happen again.”

“Me too.”

“Sometime soon.”

“Yeah.” She kissed his nipple and felt his instant response. “You taste good.”

“Good doesn’t begin to describe the way you taste.” He stroked her shoulder and back. “Roz, this is new to me.” He sounded uncertain.

“To me as well.” Shock arced through her when she realized how true this was. In all her time, all her years, sex had never been as intense, as powerful as this.

Had she been kidding herself when she thought John had been her one true love? Andreas had made her feel things John never had, but her late husband still held a place in her heart nobody else had ever reached. At least, not until now.

Still unsure about the way she felt, she lifted herself on one elbow and watched his eyes soften and his free hand go to her breast to caress it gently.

“What is it?”

Time to come clean, to tell him everything. She’d run out of excuses, and she owed him this. Especially now. She might have known he’d notice the change in her mind. The easiest way to tell him would be mind to mind, but it would also be unfair to both men. Andreas should never see her images of herself and John, and a man of John’s generation would feel betrayed by the sharing of such intimate memories.

“There is a place in my heart forever closed to you, as it should be.”

He tensed, and his hand fell away from her. His gaze sharpened. “Tell me.”

He suspected someone else. He was right, but the someone else didn’t form a rival to him. Such different men, but she could see they had similarities. She hoped the similarities went as deep as she suspected.

“Let me tell you in my own time, in my own way. Please.”

He sighed. “Does this mean you want me to wait until you’re ready? I’ll wait, but if you make me wait much longer, it will drive a fence between us.”

“I know.” She rested her hand on his chest, more because she had to touch him than from desire. “Just let me begin where I need to, and try to explain to you.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

And as though she had shot him for real, she saw pain enter his eyes and she hated herself for what she was about to tell him.

“Andreas, I was born British, at the height of the British Empire. In 1852.”

He smiled. “You told me how old you are.”

She lifted her hand and gently pressed her fingers against his lips. He half closed his eyes, then kissed her digits but didn’t say anything when she drew them away.

“I lived a quiet spinster life for my first fifty years. With the turn of the new century, I decided on a new life, so I disappeared from my old haunts and became a secretary in Liverpool. It was going really well until 1914. After that, I lived through a terrible world war and saw my country brought low by it.” She heard the British accent creeping through her educated American one and relaxed into it. The better to convince him. “I decided to ‘die’ early. I’d seen too much, and I wanted to start again. It was easier then. I moved cities—that was all—from Liverpool to London and began as a young woman with family in the north. By the time prosperity began to return, and other times I never want to remember in any detail, we were heading for war again.

“In 1932, when I was ostensibly twenty-three years old, working as a secretary in the City of London for a law firm, I met a young lawyer of great promise called John Templeton.”

He knew; he knew then, and his eyes flattened as he drew his thoughts together, from postsexual relaxation to full awareness, but she couldn’t stop. She had to tell him everything, or he would wonder. The whole story.

“We fell in love. My family wanted me to have an affair, to indulge myself and then leave, because John was a mortal. I thought I knew better, and I married him. I told him what I was before we married, and I was terrified of losing him. He was so conventional but passionate about the causes he believed in. He was braver and wiser than I gave him credit for, and he accepted me for what I was. He understood that I would not age as he did, and he forbade me to take on that burden. We never bonded as I wanted to. Then I would have taken on his lifespan, and it would have been resolved at our deaths, but he wouldn’t let it happen. I respected his wish and accepted it. He told me to go on, to live my natural lifespan, and when he heard about the donor scheme, he demanded I never volunteer for it, to let another young couple take my Gift from me. He knew I planned that too. He couldn’t bear it, he said, if I allowed anyone to take the life out of me, to make me suffer.”

She gazed down at Andreas and saw the same integrity in him. “I think you would have liked each other, had you met. I could almost wish you had met.”

He winced, but he kept his gaze on hers, kept his mind quiet, although his violent emotion suddenly rose and just as suddenly banked. His control surprised her. For such a young vampire, Andreas had resources some of her elders never developed. This took real strength, to hear her talk about the man she had loved and lost. Her husband. She swallowed.

“But the revelation created a wedge that slowly drove us apart. He was a man of great truth, so when he fell, he fell hard and painfully. John fell in love with someone else, someone I only knew by sight, the wife of a colleague. Small, blonde, sweet. She fell for him. But they never did anything about it.” She fought back her own pain, so effortlessly recreated by the articulation. She’d never told anyone about this before.

It hurt more than she’d imagined, even after all this time. “In those days, people didn’t. She was married. So was he. It hurt so much to see him look at her at social functions, the only places they allowed themselves to be together once they realized how they felt.” She blinked back her tears. “I offered him a divorce, but it was no use. He still loved me, he said, and her husband wouldn’t have divorced her. It would have damaged his career as a family lawyer, destroyed two families. I said they could have an affair. I would go away for a while, or ‘die,’ and he would be free. He wouldn’t hear of it. He cried, said he’d get over it. For a while we worked at what we had, and we were happy. When we married, I told him about my probable infertility, and he accepted it, but I think after a few years that made him unhappy. Men have biological clocks too. He would have loved children. I’m sure of it.”

She no longer tried to blink back her tears. They came too fast for that, trickling down her cheeks and dripping onto his chest, sticking his chest hairs to his skin. She looked down and concentrated on the effect, hoping she would stop soon. “In September 1939, Britain declared war against Germany. In December, he joined the air force. He had a private pilot’s license, rare in those days, and he felt he could do his duty better as an airman than a lawyer. We were all filled with loyalty, a desire to get this over with quickly and stop the Nazis taking over Europe. We didn’t realize what it would cost us, least of all me.”

She lifted her gaze to his face. What she saw there stopped her breath. He felt her pain; even though hearing of her love for another man must hurt him, he still felt for her first.

“He died?”

“He died in the Battle of Britain. Shot down. When I heard the news, I wanted to give up. I felt guilty for everything: our marriage, his death. And then the woman who loved him killed herself. I know that it wasn’t my fault, but at the time that was what I felt. I’d promised I wouldn’t give myself up to the donor scheme. That’s when I made the promise to my family, the Gardiners.”

His gaze sharpened.

“They provided a Gardiner man for me, a nice man, one who might not bring me to the heights of love, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anyone, so I told him to wait. He agreed. I emigrated to the US after the war. I wanted,
needed
to start again. He came over too, not because of me, but because he felt, as so many of us did, that we needed to start anew. We’d seen too much. Europe was too tired, too worn-out by years of war and deprivation. It wasn’t a good time to be born in Europe, not a good time to live, and we’d had enough.” She swallowed. “Bill died six years ago.”

They stared at each other, naked in mind and body. She held nothing back except the very private thoughts she’d shared with John, things it wouldn’t be right to share with anybody else.

“He was one of the San Francisco vampires, wasn’t he?”

She met his gaze fearlessly. “Yes, he was.” She kept still, watching his face. “We never loved each other, but neither of us wanted that. He’d lost a mortal wife. The family thought they were doing us both a favor and giving us a chance to make a child together, and we agreed, always putting off the marriage, busy with other things, other people. When he was killed, they agreed it was my right to help in the search for his killers. They want to hold me to my promise, and they’ve provided someone else for me. I promised to marry a Gardiner, and they want that. They do care, Andreas, truly, but some of them are stuck in their ways.”

“Yeah. But they’re not having you.”

She waited, watching the bleak expression in his eyes morph into a new, fierce one.

“You’re mine. Especially after tonight.”

His grip on her strengthened, his fingers biting into her hips. She felt the edge of his claws before he retracted them. In a vampire, a possessive gesture of claiming. Filled with wonder, she said, “You still want me?”

“I still want you. We’re here, you want me, I feel a pull toward you I’ve never felt with anyone else before.” With one hand, he stroked her back, smiling at her shiver of response. “Everything’s against us. My lack of family, our respective ages, my job, your past, but I still feel it. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want us to call it love. Not yet. I’ve known you for two months, but all you knew was that office wolf, so you can’t say you know me.”

She leaned down to kiss his chin. “Can’t I? Can’t I get to know you better while we call it love?”

“No.” Gently he put his hand under her chin and pushed her head up so she met his gaze once more. “I don’t want you hurt again. What you just told me makes me even more determined. If we part, then we do so with goodwill and friendship on both sides. If we let our feelings run away with us, call it something it isn’t, then we risk losing that. I want to know you for a long time, Roz.” He stroked her cheek, caressed her shoulder, curving his hand around her. “You’re a fiery, precious jewel of a woman, vampire or no. Your essence blazes through you. I don’t want to damage that.”

She laughed, and he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What is it?”