Dream Lover (18 page)

She looked at him. “The blood?”

The woman shivered. He understood her. “I’m not crazy,” she said.

“I’ve been told a few things.”

So forget them,
he said.

“All of them? Do I have to?”

You’ve got a fixation with humans
.

“I’m not fixated with humans.”

“I didn’t know there was anything else.”

“There’s us,” she said, then thought another moment. “Can we turn humans into what we are?”

“Yes.”

The wolf man laughed.

“Stop laughing.” She hit him in his face, and so the wolf man bared his teeth at her; a tooth fell out and hit her forehead. He was beginning to change. Incisor replaced by canine. She
blinked. The wolf man was still human. He lowered his face and kissed her.

“So we can’t turn others?” she said.

No.
He’d rolled onto his back. The wolf man stared at the ceiling now.

“Okay.” She found his tooth and played with it between her fingers. She scooted closer to him. She wanted to stick her face in the wolf man’s armpit and inhale his smell.

“I wish we could though.”

The wolf man rolled over and pinned her.
It’s a stupid fixation.

“It is? I don’t know.”

Right, you don’t know
.
The wolf man sank his teeth into her shoulder.

She yelped then slapped wherever she could reach him. He wrestled with her. Feathers stuck to her hair. He felt one in his teeth. Then he said,
A man will never love you, Moongirl, no matter what you think or how much you hope he does. You’ll be his freak, like a pet or something. Then what?
The wolf man waited. The wolf man shook her when she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. The old man had died: it hadn’t been his fault. The surface of her skin rippled. She remembered eating him. She liked the blood too much.

You’re alone again
,
that’s what.

The wolf man held his mouth to her ear. His breath was hot. The woman shivered.

“Don’t leave me.”

“I said, don’t leave me.”
Pieces of bedsheet came away in her fingernails.

We’ll fuck and hunt
, the wolf man promised.
So much come and blood
.

He got to his knees then flipped her over and pulled her toward him. He entered her from behind. She pushed against him. Fur rose on his spine. She chewed a hole through another pillow. The wolf man drooled onto her back when he came. She collapsed. He pried the pillow away from her then licked the tears off her cheek; he licked them from her earlobe too. He licked her throat and then her shoulder.

Finally, she closed her eyes.

 

In the morning, when she woke, Hayden turned his head to look at her.

“Moongirl, I’m here.”

In the sunlight she saw his eyes were two different colors, like hers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D
evlin had flour on the tip of his nose.

Louisa stopped in the communal kitchen’s doorway and watched him absently brush his nose with one floured knuckle. He’d spilled flour on the counter, and was scraping it into a paper towel. Flour puffed into the air like tiny, coded smoke signals and settled on his black T-shirt, just over his stomach.

She recognized eggs and butter, but not the long, thin black item—seemingly organic—that he’d placed next to one of his mixing bowls. His supplies were arrayed on the island counter in the center of the research facility’s kitchen.

“What’s up?” Devlin asked, intent on what he was doing, but apparently recognizing her without looking up, almost as if he was a telepath, like her.

He seemed different without his lab coat—he worked with clairvoyants, one section over from where she regularly both underwent testing and administered tests with the empaths and telepaths. “I was only passing,” Louisa said.

“I’m making cookies,” Devlin said, glancing up at her and grinning his blinding grin. “One of my postdocs got a job at the Institute of Psychic Studies in Switzerland, so we’re having a party for her. It’s more special when you don’t just program a baking machine, don’t you think?” He measured sugar into a bowl, first light, then dark. He picked up the black item.

Louisa stepped closer. Devlin, an American like most of the scientists here, was a few years younger than she, terribly handsome and, she’d discovered, as chivalrous as her own aged grandfather. She had wished he would be a little more forward; they worked in separate departments, so there would be nothing improper in a relationship. But if he had no interest, that was that. She could almost be satisfied with less. She and Devlin had always gotten on well at the frequent lunches, teas, and beer-fests held for researchers and subjects alike. “What is that?”

“Vanilla bean.” Devlin used a small knife to slit the length of the bean. Fragrance spilled out. Louisa’s nostrils flared to take it in. “Here, look.” He peeled back the edges of his cut as if exposing a wound. “It’s the seeds you use. My father taught me.”

He had never mentioned his family before. Louisa said, “I had no idea.”

Devlin scraped out the minuscule black seeds with his thumb, letting them drop into the bowl of sugar in small clusters. Louisa admired the precise grace of his long-fingered hands. He said, “I mix the seeds into the sugar, then cut in the butter.”

“This seems rather a lot of trouble.”

“But it feels great. The texture of the sugar, I mean,” Devlin said, as he began mixing the sugar and vanilla seeds together. Unexpectedly, Louisa received a telepathic flash of his visceral gratification as his fingers combed through the mixture.

Louisa blinked. This was the first time she had sensed
anything at all from Devlin. She was used to brushes of unintentional contact from “normal” people in the facility, which she had heard likened to
feeling
auras rather than seeing them: snippets of pain or intellectual insight belonging to others, but experienced by her.

What she perceived now was his sensual pleasure from his fingers in vanilla sugar, a pleasure almost sexual. Louisa’s knees felt weak. She sat down in one of the hard chairs.

Most of the time, Louisa avoided thinking about sex. She had signed a five-year contract that might lead to tenure, so she intended to devote all of her energies to the laboratory programs she had devised.

And without reinforcing telepathic touch, the idea of sex lacked…spice. Her sole relationship, with another of her kind when she was in her twenties, had convinced her of that, though the affair had ended in apathy. Christopher’s politics had ended the affair, not any sexual incompatibility. With a wave of heat, she remembered endless afternoons when nothing was said; Christopher’s hands arousing her as swiftly and knowledgeably as her own, his touch never too soft, her orgasm never too soon, the two of them blurring into one in a haze of sex that shrouded the mind more than the body.

Sensing what Devlin radiated was not mind reading. It was only the body. The body gave away so many of its feelings through posture and movement already, it would be no great imposition to…and there was always…

Well. She really ought to do something about this, but she couldn’t think of what to say or do. So she sat still and watched.

Devlin used a fork to mix in the eggs. The movement of his hands was hypnotic. Louisa’s vision blurred. She could almost feel the hardness of his long body against hers….

Louisa caught herself with a gasp. Luckily, Devlin didn’t
notice. She rose and, turning her back to him, began to draw herself a cup of coffee from the urn that never slept. She almost flung the contents into the air when she felt a large, warm hand close over her shoulder.

“Are you feeling all right, Louisa? You look flushed. I know it’s not my job, but…you should take care of yourself. You work too hard.”

The aroma of vanilla on his hand seemed to penetrate to her brain. There was nothing to do but blush even more hotly. Louisa half lifted her cup, then set it down on the counter in front of her with a little
click
.

Without speaking, she reached up and covered his hand with hers, gently caressing.

His breathing changed. His fingers flexed slightly, then laced with hers and pulled gently. Louisa found herself facing him, her cheeks hot, her right hand pressed into his rib cage as it rose and fell with the force of his breathing. She had never seen eyes so blue. His right hand clasped her left, tightening as he drew her closer still.

Louisa bent her head and tasted sweet vanilla on his fingers.

Devlin sucked in his breath. Louisa slowly, slowly lifted her eyes to his. His lips parted as if he were about to speak. Instead he stepped back, away from her.

Louisa’s heart clenched tight.

Devlin closed and locked the door.

Her knees weakened. She could not sense his intentions at all, though his actions made them clear, a confusing dichotomy for her. She’d been spending too much of her time isolated with other telepaths. Devlin took her in his arms so quickly she had no time to analyze. Her head fell back when he delicately kissed her throat, his long hands sliding down her back as if he were modeling a statue. His mouth traveled to her ear and
her fingers clenched in the back of his shirt.

Still she sensed nothing telepathically, but the warmth of his body was somehow more intoxicating. She had forgotten how good it could be simply to touch, and she had no distractions from physical sensation and the rich scent of sugar and vanilla permeating his skin. Delicious bubbles danced unpredictably down her spine. Devlin licked her temple, then their mouths joined in thirsty, hasty gulps. She fumbled at his shirt, lifting it as high as his sternum, then impatiently abandoned it for the fastenings of her lab coat. Devlin’s hand met hers and they pushed it off together, pulled his T-shirt up, then pressed newly bared skin against skin.

Louisa almost flinched from the intensity of the contact but tightened her arms around him, instead, and looked up at his face, now as rosy as her own. He shook his head once, as if to shake off a blow, obviously seeking control. “I never thought you—Louisa, I’ve wanted this for a long time.”

She had to concentrate to remember to speak aloud. “Devlin, if it’s all right with you, I would rather not stop.”

Devlin’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “Here?”

After experiencing a sample of his skill, Louisa found this evidence of prudery endearing. “Is that a problem?” she asked, wide eyed herself. “You locked the door.”

“I guess I did. Must have been your sexy accent. Nope, wait, you didn’t say anything, so it couldn’t have been that.” Devlin’s expression shifted from teasing to serious. He slid his hands up and down her arms. “Louisa, this is all right, isn’t it? Maybe I shouldn’t have—”

Louisa touched her fingers to his lips, silencing him. “I trust you.”

“Trust,” Devlin said, breathing out shakily. “Thank you, Louisa.”

She hooked her hand behind his neck and pulled him down to her, savoring the skin beneath her fingers. Against his lips she whispered, “Join with me,” before kissing him.

Perhaps she had been wrong. She was solidly within her body, and her mind, too, was focused only on her body; she could not sense what new sensation would come next. This purely physical communication seemed more intense than she had expected, and there was an added sense that it was somehow forbidden, animal.

She gasped as his slender hands gently molded her breasts, leaving behind traces of vanilla. Her fingers dug into his hips, trying to pull him closer. Instead, his hands encircled her waist and lifted her effortlessly to the countertop. She sat blinking at him as he grinned and very carefully nudged her mug of coffee out of the way. He tugged her shirt over her head, then removed her bra, dropping both garments onto the floor.

Louisa toed off her shoes and pulled ineffectually at his shirt, but he was simply too tall for its easy removal, even though the counter gave her added height. He grinned again and took it off himself, and she leaned forward, caressing his lean, muscular chest with her cheek, arms clasped about his rib cage, inhaling his scent. His fingers tangled in her hair and his head rested atop hers, and for long moments they were still and silent.

Finally, Devlin let out a shaky sigh and cupped her face between his palms, leaning down to kiss her gently. Louisa’s hands wandered over his chest, her thumbs lingering on his nipples, stroking them into hardness. When she heard an unguarded sound escape him, she bit his right nipple, then his left.

Devlin growled and lifted her off the countertop, letting her slide down the length of his body. Taking this for encouragement, Louisa slipped her hands into the waistband of his trousers, caressing the muscular curve of his buttocks. She grinned into his
chest when he impatiently pushed down her khakis and panties together. After bending to untie his shoes and pull them off, she reciprocated with his jeans, popping open the buttons one by one while trying to maintain her teeth’s grip on his nipple.

His hands kneaded her shoulders with sporadic clenches as she kissed, licked and bit her way across his chest. Louisa backed him against the island counter and managed to pull down his shorts partway; a bowl skidded but rattled to a stop before it could fall; she dropped to her knees and mouthed his leaking cock through his boxers, swiping with her tongue and heating the damp spot with her breath.