Chapter Sixteen

The ever-resourceful Colin had managed to help Pete ditch Harmony and find a cozy hideout. They were checked into not a human motel but a demon one, owned by a law firm in LA that Colin’s mother had business with. Spacious, roomy, with all the comforts of a Hyatt Hotel including a stock of bagged blood for the vampire too lazy to shift for a meal.

Visions of Willow, shackled ankle and wrist to the bed danced through his head. She was lying on the bed where Georgia had put her. She looked a mess. Torn stockings, bloodied feet, bruises on her thighs, visible where her limp and wrinkled dress had ridden up, his bite livid on her neck, smeared with dried blood, her hair a wild tangle around her head. Out cold. Georgia had fretted about her failure to regain consciousness. Spike thought it had less to do with blood loss than having no reason to wake up. She had a hangover, terror, and guilt to look forward to, and it could wait.

Not that she was faking. He was on to that trick. He watched her for a few minutes and then, with an annoyed twist to his lips, went into the bathroom. He found himself standing in front of the sink, fingertips in the flowing tap water, waiting for it to warm. And why? So he could wet a wash cloth and clean her up a bit. It was ridiculous. He was going to play lady’s maid to an aggravating little chit who was taking his injunction not to cause him more trouble than she was worth to the absolute limit.

His eyes narrowed. When he’d caught up to her, he had been furious. When he threw her in the car, he had been angry. The ninety minute drive to Sacramento had taken the edge off his temper and he had started putting things in perspective. Her flight was, actually, his cock up. He had pushed her past her limits, and then he had gotten too distracted to pay attention when she was getting away. She had bloody well walked out of a room he was in, which was a bit embarrassing for him, but not entirely her fault. Beyond that, a combination of good timing, luck, and quick thinking had gotten her out of the club. He had underestimated her. She had managed well until her luck changed, and that was all it was. Dumb luck. One careless comment ignored, and he would have turned around and started down the street in the opposite direction and she would have been home free.

She was valuable, he reminded himself, shutting off the water in the sink. He turned the water on in the tub and set the stopper to allow the tub to fill. She was the lynchpin of one of his better schemes with a potential payoff that could only be described as priceless. He could do better, he reminded himself, than wandering off on some tangent about shagging her and sending her back to her do-gooder pals.

What? Was she supposed to kill herself because she was ruined for ordinary mortals? That kind of thinking belonged to another era. Aside from which it had fuck all to do with him getting what he wanted, which was not the guilty squirming of an inexperienced eighteen year old girl. It was the Gem of Amara. That was what he was in the game for. He had to keep the Slayer focused on finding the Gem, and not on hunting him down because she thought he was going to kill the girl in a fit of anger.

He sat on the side of the tub and examined several small bottles neatly arrayed there. Shampoo, conditioner, bath gel. He uncapped the bath gel and let it drip out into the churning water below the faucet. The scent of honeysuckle filled the room. It was a scent that had been out of fashion for forty years, and it was almost exotic because of that. With a sigh, he got up and returned to the bedroom, mentally unshackling the girl. There was a set of iron manacles, a memento from his years with Dru, tucked away in the boot of the Desoto—the Desoto, which he realized grimly, would have to be ditched. Angel knew the car too well and he’d have the police looking for it as well as Red. Bugger all. He scooped her up and carried her into the bathroom.

She started to come around while he was wrestling her out of her dress, which she seemed to find disturbing. “No, no, no, no, no,” she chanted, trying to push the dress back down as he lifted the hem. He gave up and set his hands in the top of the dress and ripped. The silk gave and split down the center, bead work flying. Ignoring her protests, he put her in the bathtub and she hit a new key. He checked the water, and swore under his breath, turning up the cold. Great, he’d scald her. He reached for her to get her out of the tub, and she fell back away from him fearfully, loosing her balance. He managed to catch her before she hit the side of the tub or exposed any more of her skin to the too hot water.

He put her down and tossed her a towel since she seemed unnerved about being naked. “It’s too hot,” he pointed out. “Give it a minute, and then you can have a bath,”

She wrapped the towel around herself and looked at him like he was insane. A not entirely unjustified surmise. Her hand went to her neck. He was guessing it hurt like hell. He wasn’t a sloppy eater, unlike that stupid bint Harmony, but he hadn’t been going out of his way to keep from hurting her either.

Cuddling Willow in the front seat, Georgia had run her fingers over his bite mark and cast a questioning look at him. It was an odd thing to have done. Vampires bite humans to feed or claim. Period. There was something about the way he had bitten her that was nagging at him. Something Georgia had noticed right away but had kept quiet about while he was getting a grip on his temper.

“When you get in the bath, soak a washcloth and put it over it,” he said. “I’ll get some ice for you, for later,” his voice was even.

“I know how to deal with a bite,” she said shortly. “What are you going to do to me?” she asked.

Fear was a wonderful thing, he reflected. He sat on the side of the tub, letting his fingers trail through the water. Still a bit too hot, he noted. “Keep a closer eye on you, I suppose, pet,” he said after a moment.

He looked at her. Dark circles under her eyes. She was exhausted, and she didn’t look like she believed him. She certainly did not trust him. There were infinite levels to that, he was guessing. He had assailed her fragile belief that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt her—but she was depending on her definition of hurt, not his. To his thinking, no one had gotten hurt tonight, and aside from her cuts and bruises, he included her in that estimate. So, she had had a little too much to drink, and had let her hair down a bit? A fucking glorious bit, with her head thrown back and her skin all flushed and hot. It was just sex. Nothing to get all bent out of shape about. He thought about telling her that as he checked the water again.

“I think it's safe for you to get in the bathtub now,” he told her.

“Where are you going to be?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

He shrugged, “You want to be alone? Be my guest,” he stood up. “Leave the door open. You fainted and you were out for a couple of hours. If you fall asleep you could drown,” he pointed out.

There was nothing in this logic to rail at, but she wanted to. God. She wanted to rail and rage. He bit her. He had sex with her. Not intercourse precisely, but his fingers had been inside her, and he had pushed a pearl necklace inside her. It was easier to deal with by calling it sex. He watched Georgia have sex with her. He bit her. Now he was being . . . nice to her? Fat chance. It was all some game to twist her into knots. He was manipulative, amoral, cruel, and an utterly unconscionable killer. And she had had sex with him. He walked out of the bathroom pulling the door half closed for privacy, but leaving it enough ajar that he would be able to hear.

She wanted to refuse the bath, but at the same time the idea of being in her own skin a single moment longer repulsed her. She dropped the towel and got into the tub. The water was still almost uncomfortably hot. She shut it off and reached for the washcloth folded into a neat triangle with a thin bar of soap tucked into a fold. She soaped the washcloth and set about washing every inch of her body as if she could scrub away the entire night. When there was nothing else to wash, she sat in the tub with her legs pulled up to her chest and buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

She had been so close to getting away. That was the worst part. She hadn’t tried hard enough before. She hadn’t been daring enough, or ruthless, and she didn’t know when she would be brave enough to try again.



With the witch in the bathroom, busy scrubbing herself back to pristine, Spike dug up his purloined cell phone and rang the Watcher. It annoyed him that Willow had called Angel. Spike didn’t think Angel saw the girl beyond her connection to his one truly nauseating love. That was what made it so funny that Willow had been the one to broadside Angelus, not once, but twice, though reprising the curse that gave Angel his soul could be thought to cast her un-invite parlor trick into the shade.

She called Angel. Maybe she was just smart. Given a choice between the Slayer, the Watcher and Angel, aside from the irritating do-gooder poofiness, Angel was the steadiest in a crisis. He would stay focused, save the girl, and worry about evening the score latter—and only if he could really get it done. Angel didn’t go off half-cocked or do anything halfway. The Slayer was a damn good fighter, with the emotional ballast of a hormonal teenage girl. As for the Watcher—well, as fun as it had been to watch the old sod take a mace to Angelus, it was a suicide mission, and it smacked of poor judgment, in Spike’s view.

Not that he cared who Red fancied in the role of knight in shining armor. He kicked the unoffending leg of the desk, staring at the phone blankly for a moment before remembering to key the talk button.

The Watcher’s phone was answered almost at once. It wasn’t the poncey librarian. It was Americanized Angel. Red had called the Watcher. Angel was there. Mystery solved. “You sound like a bloody weatherman,” he told Angel after missing a beat in following up on the obligatory ‘hello’. “All manly mid-western accent. Next thing you know you’ll be saying ‘please’ when what you really mean is ‘what the fuck are you on about?’” Spike complained.

“Spike,” Angel’s voice was tight with anger and repressed emotion.

Spike grinned. “That’s right, mate. Your old pal, Spike,” he chuckled, “the bug up your ass,” he added sweetly. “How’s tricks? Making desperate cow eyes at the blonde chit, are you?”

“Where is Willow?” Angel asked.

He sat back in his chair, settling in, “Having a nice, relaxing soak in the tub, last I checked,” Spike reported. “What’s it to you?”

“I want to speak to her. Now,” Angel insisted.

“Hmmm. I don’t think so. Imagine she would object, strenuously, if I go barging in there while she’s all naked and steamy,” he smiled to himself. “Perhaps I could be persuaded,” he mused. “She is naked—“

“Spike!” Angel interrupted. “You know how this works. We want proof that she is still alive,” Angel said.

“Maybe later,” Spike countered. “You want? When you’ve got something I want, bore me with what you want,” he advised. “She’s alive. I don’t fancy having to kidnap Xapper, though no doubt he is spectacularly useless to the team effort. Making lots of lovely progress, I trust?” he got to the point.

By the time the police reached the Shell station, Willow was gone. Faced with a lot of awkward and unanswerable questions, Angel had hung up on the dispatcher, who probably had his cell phone number. It remained to be seen if the police would pursue it further, but Angel thought it was unlikely. He knew in his gut that Spike had her, though what shape she was in at this point was less certain.

“Take your time organizing a thought,” Spike invited. “She might pop out if you drag it out long enough, but if you’ve nothing to say, I’ll just hang up.”

“Ever heard of star 69?” Angel retorted.

“Ever heard ‘does not work in the o-f-f position?’” Spike fired back. “Please tell me you have made some progress. I want the Gem of Amara. I can settle for the girl,” he said consideringly. “All that luscious red hair . . . hmmm? She’s a fetching little thing,” he went on. “You should have seen her tonight. Glowed like a bloody jewel given a proper setting. Wonder what she would be like if I made her like us? Fancy a witchy great-granddaughter, Angel? You always did like ‘em young,” he taunted.

“You won’t,” Angel predicted. He was not going to let Spike provoke him. Spike had never been one for turning humans. Minions? That had been Dru’s work, or other vamps in their train. Not Spike. No true childer for Dru or Spike in the hundred years since they had been together he was willing to bet. Spike was too damned selfish.

“Never went in for it,” he admitted.

“And you aren’t going to kill her,” Angel added.

Spike smiled. So predictable, was he? “Of course not. She’s valuable,” he agreed.

Angel’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve made some progress. May start digging this week,” he allowed.

Now they were getting somewhere. “Good,” Spike drawled.

“How did she manage to get away from you?” Angel asked, since they were almost being civil.

Spike laughed softly. “Walking out of a demon bar? That’s a neat trick,” he said, knowing Angel would appreciate it. “I’m sure you’ll be busy figuring it out,” he added, just to let Angel know that he was on to their efforts to track him. “Stands to reason, mate. You’re wasting my time looking for me. I’m not going to kill her, Angel, so the next time you think about dividing your efforts between finding my bloody Gem and finding me, you just think about all the things I can do without killing her and the time you are giving me to enjoy them. Christmas is coming early this year, Angel,” he said with quiet menace.

“You know I’m going to have to kill you,” Angel pointed out.

“It would disappoint me if you didn’t try. I’d start thinking you didn’t care,” Spike mocked and keyed the end button, achieving the last word.

He listened for sounds from the bathroom and heard what sounded like weeping. He reconsidered. Messy sobbing. He ran his fingers through his hair, thinking for a moment, then nodding to himself as he got to his feet. He checked the small refrigerator and found orange juice and a few yogurt cups. He set the improvised breakfast items out and went to the bathroom door, pausing there. “Red?” he called out.

There was a long, sniffling pause. “What?”

He pushed the door open. She was sitting in the center of the tub with her knees pulled into her chest, mostly obscured by collapsing layers of bubbles from the bath gel. She was washing her hair. “Poof says hello,” he told her.

She didn’t have any response to that. She knew he meant Angel, and that meant he had called them in Sunnydale. Probably to gloat.

She closed her eyes, hoping that he would go away. She could feel him sitting there, inches away from her as she worked the shampoo into her hair and scrubbed her scalp with her fingernails. Was this what he meant about keeping a closer eye on her? It wasn’t like she could escape from a window-less bathroom. He was probably just doing this to unnerve her, and it was working. Or maybe this was his way of making the point that he had already seen her naked and that there was no going back from that.

Was there? What did she have to negotiate with? If she offered not to escape again, would that give her something to bargain with? So far he had been one step ahead of her, but she had come close this time. He had no reason to believe that she would keep her word if she did promise not to escape—hell, she didn’t believe she would keep her word.

She had nothing. On the other hand, maybe it was a typical Spike moment. Spur of the moment, too much to drink, following Georgia’s lead. It might have nothing to do with her and everything to do with Georgia. Maybe it was Georgia he wanted, as a replacement for Dru. That thought was reassuring on so many levels.

He watched her for a moment. The way she was using her fingernails on her scalp he half expected her to draw blood. His gaze shifted to the shower configuration for the bathtub. The shower head was attached to the wall by a slack length of flexible hose. He came the rest of the way into the bathroom and took it down for her so she could rinse her hair without leaving the warmth of the water.

“There isn’t any coffee, but there is juice and yogurt. You should eat something.”

She took the showerhead from him warily. His voice was studiously neutral. Her lip curled. She wasn’t going to talk to him. No more talking. Talking had made her regard him almost as a companion, albeit one that had to be kept amused and relatively pleased with her at all costs. He wasn’t a companion. He was her jailer. No more talking to Spike or Georgia.

Taking in her uneasy silence, the corner of Spike’s mouth twitched. She was being childish, and she had picked a lousy battleground to fight him on. Keeping her mouth shut was not her strong suit. She would probably explode given her tendency to babble. She closed her eyes and rinsed the shampoo out of her hair.

Once her hair was soap free, he shut off the water again and took the showerhead from her to return it to the cradle.

“There is a bathrobe on the back of the door.”

To her intense relief, he moved a pair of towels closer to her, setting them on the side of the tub, and left the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him. She opened the drain on the tub, wrapping one towel around her wet hair before she stood up in the draining water to dry off in the tub.

A stabbing pain shot through her foot, though she had the presence of mind of mute her cry of pain. The last thing she wanted was more attention from Spike. She lifted her injured foot off the bottom of the tub and continued to dry off, balancing on one leg. Through trial and error getting out of the tub she discovered if she kept her weight on the toes of her right foot it wasn’t too painful. The great toe of her left foot was throbbing unpleasantly and under quick examination Willow discovered that her toenail was torn into the nail bed, and turning shades of blue and purple from bruising.

She put on the robe, feeling her other aches and pains clamoring for attention. Her neck throbbed. The insides of her thighs were mottled with finger sized bruises from Georgia’s none too gentle grip. Her head and chest ached, the former due to a headache that seemed to be getting worse. She pulled the robe tight around her, pressing it into her chest as if she could squeeze the tight sensation out of her chest. There was the insistent hurt of it, inescapable, that made her feel like she couldn’t breath. They had done things to her that she hadn’t really been able to stop. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that Spike or Georgia could overpower her or kill her without a lot of effort. By their standards, what they had done probably passed for restraint or gentleness, but it had been done to her and she didn’t like it.

The memory of how she had reacted to it tormented her.

She stayed in the bathroom. There was a cosmetic type bag on the vanity and she found that it contained a toothbrush, sample sized toothpaste, a wide toothed comb, and sample sized moisturizers, perfumes, and premium brand cosmetics. She brushed her teeth, eradicating the lingering, stale taste of alcohol from her mouth and sat on the toilet seat to comb her hair, trying to make her mind a blank.

It didn’t work. She closed her eyes. Disoriented by the ache in her head and the lingering alcohol in her system, random images and sensations played behind her eyelids and rippled through her nerve endings. She touched her tongue to her lower lip and phantom sensations that she recognized from Spike kissing her made her heart race and brought up gooseflesh that made her nipples harden. Worse than anything, was this stew of sensory confusion. Her only conclusion was that she was attracted to him. Just wetting her lips made her think about him kissing her, and her body was tingly from the thought in a weird, hot and cold way. Kissing Oz had made her feel good, in a warm, safe way. Kissing Spike made her feel like she had been dipped in cold water and needed to press every inch of her skin into something.

There was something fundamentally wrong with her, Willow concluded. Maybe it was the same impulse that had made her respond to Xander the first time they kissed. She had known it was wrong. Kissing Spike was beyond wrong. It was badness squared to an infinity full of wrongness. It would have been better to force him to hit her, to have at least the fragile dignity of having defended herself to cling to, she thought sadly.



He had settled in to watch a bit of television, discovering that the hotel offered a wide variety of cable television stations. All was quiet in the bathroom, where the witch was no doubt cowering with her tattered virtue. He smoked a cigarette and was almost ready to go in after her when she finally emerged, moving stiffly, gingerly keeping her weight off her left foot.

She made her way slowly to the table. There was a bottle of orange juice there, with a cup of yogurt and a heavy, ornate spoon. She sat down, ignoring him, and grimly applied herself to the task of consuming what had been provided for her like a good little soldier. She had learned on their little three-day jaunt around northern California to eat and sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself.

After she ate, she pulled her injured left foot up into her lap examining it with her fingertips. He watched as she dug a sliver of glass out with her fingernails and dropped it on the table, pressing her thumb against the open cut. His threat to beat her feet until they were bloody flashed through his mind. It made a certain amount of sense to him. It would put an end to her increasingly successful escape attempts, but at the moment it was overkill. She didn’t have clothing and she’d have hell’s own time figuring out how to get out of their present accommodations.

She finally made her way to the other side of the bed and got in, turning her back to him to face the wall. He lit another cigarette and watched television, aware of the tension in her that was thick enough to cut with a knife. In a way, the evening remained incomplete for him. Georgia had distracted him. He had been so close to taking her right there on the floor. His mind wandered that path for a moment, his body responding to the mental picture of her, on her back, her head thrown back, exposing her throat, her hair fanned around her face. It had surprised him. She had surprised him. She wasn’t voluptuous or exotic as Dru or Georgia, but he hadn’t been disappointed or thinking about Dru when he was kneeling between her thighs.

He crushed out the cigarette. He ought to let her sleep. She was exhausted. Anyone could see that. He sat up and divested himself of his t-shirt and shirt, dropping them on the floor. He heard her breathing change. He unfastened his belt and opened the fly of his jeans, pushing them down and kicking them off to land on the floor. The sound made her flinch.

Naked, he straddled her body, forcing her to her back. Through the terry cloth robe and the blanket on the bed she was a female shape in a dense shroud, hard, shallow breaths escaping. Bracing one hand on the mattress, he parted the collar of the robe, running his finger down over her breastbone, absorbing the softness of her skin and the heavy beat of her heart. He found the terry cloth belt she had tied and worked the knot loose, watching her face. Her eyes were open. “You didn’t think we were done, did you?” He wondered how she would react.

She looked confused. Done with what, exactly? Done with sex? Done with running away? Done with the retaliation for running away? She had not thought they were done. She hadn’t thought about what came next much at all. She was still back on what had happened, and not catching up fast enough, apparently. She felt the belt digging into her ribs loosen and then he pushed aside the wings of the robe. Cool air bathed her skin, dredging up gooseflesh. He seemed to be expecting an answer.

“No,” she said after a long moment, closing her eyes as a wave of angry despair rose.

He peeled back the edges of the robe like he was unwrapping a present. His hand slid behind her neck, between the collar of the robe and her skin, feeling the lingering dampness from her bath as he lifted her head from the pillow, his fingers threading through her hair. The heavy robe parted company with her shoulders, catching on her upper arms as the weight of the fabric made it sag. She wasn’t fighting him, but she wasn’t helping either. She was holding herself as still as possible. The dark circles under her eyes made her eyes look bruised.

He kissed her, avoiding her lips, his found the softness between her nose and cheekbone, beneath her eye, where her skin was thinnest, nearly translucent, nerve rich. He tested it with his lips and the tip of his tongue. He nipped at the small space between where eyebrows began, a small notch formed there when she frowned, and he felt the muscles in her face trembling under his lips. Her humid breath came soft and shallow against his skin as he continued his leisurely exploration. His fingers stroked her cheek down to her jaw, resting briefly against her throat, dipping lower to explore the hollow inside her collarbone.

For Willow, this passed beyond strange. She had expected a resumption of the early part of the evening with violent retaliation folded in. She did not expect the unhurried, graceful, controlled way he was exploring her face. She had closed her eyes instinctively when he kissed her below her eye, in a place no one had ever kissed, even accidentally. His lips were cool and dry with the counterpoint of the tip of his slightly cool, damp tongue. It took her a few moments to realize that this was a simulacrum of tenderness and sensuality, designed to effect a response, and even then, knowing that he was manipulating her, she wanted to know what came next.

The curiosity was purely clinical. She was tired, but impressed by his effort to wring a response out of her as his lips drifted over the apple of her cheek, placing a small kiss in the slight hollow proximate to her ear, his tongue slipping out to trace the shape of her ear down to her earlobe, drifting back to the corner of her mouth. Wow. Simple and effective, this variety of manipulation.

“Let me know when I can go to sleep,” she said, surprised at how tired and emotionless her voice sounded.

He grinned at her tone of voice. He heard the flattened inflection, but he wasn’t imagining it, there was a little catch in her voice, barely perceptible, but it was there. He nibbled on her full lower lip, feeling it tighten under his lips as her lips compressed. His attention shifted to her stubbornly set chin and he took it in his mouth, sucking on her skin before ducking his head to kiss the triangle of flesh under her chin, forcing her head back into the cradle of his hand.

“Go ahead,” he invited, painting her throat with his tongue. “I’ll wake you up when we get to the important parts.”





“Enjoy your party?” Colin asked.

Georgia prowled around their room. “This is more like it,” she said. “How did you find this place?” she wondered.

“It belongs to a law firm Mum’s done business with,” Colin told her.

The lodgings were an upgrade. There was a small amount of light in the room from a pair of soffits that bracketed the room. Stained glass panels in abstract geometric designs were hung at regular intervals between the soffit and the ceiling and backlit. It took her a moment to recognize that the colored light filtered through the stained glass combined across the ceiling in a larger work of art, a modern abstract ceiling painted in light on the irregular plaster surface of the ceiling.

The bed was huge. King sized and extra long, and the sheets were expensive. Egyptian cotton, she guessed, dyed a deep red and layered under with a herringbone weave blanket in a complimentary shade of red, and a matelasse spread, also in red. A heavier mink blanket was pooled at the foot of the bed.

The bed wasn’t a standard issue hotel bed, with the headboard bolted to the wall. The headboard that was bolted to the wall was an iron gate that could have been mistaken for the gates of hell, complete with a leering gargoyle at the center where the gate would have opened had it been properly hung. Four wrought iron posts from floor to ceiling with the bed between the posts created the illusion of a massive four poster bed.

The bedside table closest to her, on her left, was a rock, irregular in shape, flat to form a table top and polished to a high gloss showing a striated ring formation in purple, frosted on the edges with crystals. The floors were wood. It wasn’t a real wood floor. It was some kind of composite material that looked like wood and was sealed. It felt different underfoot than real hardwood, spongier, and it was sound deadening. The walls were plastered and painted a neutral and non-reflective white. There were no mirrors. The walls were hung with drapes and tapestries on iron rods.

There were three doors. One she knew led to the bathroom. There was a double door to her left and a single door to her right that led to the hallway outside the room. She went to the double door and opened it to see where it led. The room beyond the double door was dark, but there was enough light for her to see the three steps down into a chamber that was surrounded in brick, paved in stone, arranged as a lounge, and complete with a delightful variety of instruments of pain that were hung on the walls. Wasted on Colin, unfortunately. He tended to regard torture as work rather than fun. Came from his misspent youth, she supposed, turning back to the room.

“Ended too early,” she said of the evening, with a moue of disappointment, advancing on him.

“Doesn’t have to,” he said. “Tell me everything,” he invited as her arms curled around his neck. “Did you learn anything more about what Spike is up to?” he asked. The three blokes who had been sitting in the bar when the girl took off had been dusted. They had regrouped at a rest stop outside of San Francisco that had started off like a team meeting with Spike playing with them. Asking in a deceptively calm way what had gone wrong.

He had gone through two minions before the quality of the answers started to improve. Colin suspected that the thinning the herd activity was deliberate. Spike had little patience with minions. Once they became too much of a bother or expense to put up with, he was done with them. Jeanie was the only one who survived his temper, and was settled in with Pete now that he had managed to lose Harmony.

“No,” she said. “Busy fucking, not talking,” she added wickedly.

He could smell the girl and the older vampire all over her. “But, you will find out?” he guessed.

“Eventually,” she agreed, rubbing against him.

“And what about the girl?” he asked.

Georgia licked her lips. “She’s delicious. Can we keep her?”

He cocked his head to one side. That depended on Spike. “Have I ever denied you anything?”

She chuckled. It was why they made such a devoted couple. “Never.”





He didn’t hurt her. He didn’t add to the bruises she already had. If not for the insistent pounding in her temples, she might have relaxed enough to have gone to sleep while he explored her body and Willow let the numbness settle in. The weight of it was comforting. He didn’t talk. She felt oddly grateful to him for that. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking or feeling.

By the time it was sex, actual intercourse with corresponding parts fitting together, she was sufficiently well prepared to receive him that it didn’t hurt. There was a distinct lack of urgency in it, on his part as well as hers. She could have gone to sleep, lulled there by the gentle rocking of his body against hers, light years away from anything like an orgasm, or feeling beyond the resentment of being kept from sleep for this. She was grateful for that too. Whatever bizarre thing had happened in the club, alcohol induced lack of inhibition, it wasn’t being repeated.

It was also taking too long.

A muscle in her cheek quivered. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes to look at him. He was on his elbows, keeping his weight off her chest. She kept her gaze fixed on his shoulder, where it joined his neck. His skin was as pale as hers, but more translucent. She could see the fine tracery of blue veins under his skin. It made him look oddly fragile.

Despite their many advantages, vampires were fragile creatures. A vampire that had belonged to Angelus had walked into a classroom during their junior year to deliver a message to Buffy. Already smoldering when she entered the classroom, she burst into flames when she flung off the blanket she had used to protect herself from the sunlight pouring in through the windows. A life, or as Spike put it, an unlife, casually disposed of. No one to really trust, not even the vampire who made you. Vulnerable to stakes, holy water, decapitation, and direct sunlight. Advantaged by strength, speed, and immorality—the lack of moral qualms seemed to be more an advantage than not, even if it did seem to be connected to a lack of discretion that was ultimately self-destructive.

His fingertips came to rest lightly on her face. His thumbs stroked her jaw bones. Heaving an inward sigh, she forced herself to meet his gaze. He looked amused.

“Waking up yet?”

His fingertips massaged her temples, soothing away some of the ache.

He had picked up some of her body heat, but the distinctions in their body temperatures were still sharp enough to be noticeable.

It came to her slowly, that she could finish this. In a purely mechanical way, her body understood what to do to bring the act to completion. If she tilted her pelvis just so, and arched her back a little, maybe tightening up her abdominal muscles, and made the appropriate noises, she could draw this to a conclusion and go to sleep at last. Pay him back in his own manipulative coin.

He saw exactly the moment that she figured it out. He wasn’t going to get tired or go away until he got what he wanted, though Spike wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted at the moment. He knew that, physically and mentally, she was completely spent. There had been something about that shoulder, turned to him when she got in bed that made him start this. He didn’t want the tired, distant girl she had become after she had been forced to wake up in the bath. He wanted the girl that he had nearly shagged on the floor of the club, the one who had panted and moaned under Georgia’s mouth. He had stroked her honeysuckle scented skin with his hands and his mouth until she was sufficiently aroused to fuck, and she had accepted this with a passivity that had been a little creepy, even for him.

She reminded him a little bit of Dru, who wasn’t always all there when he was inside of her. In some of the semi-lucid moments his princess struggled to hold on to, she would lay quiet in his arms, neither accepting nor rejecting him, letting him practice his considerable skills on her until she was moved to respond.

But Dru had never gotten that calculating look on her face. Purely feminine, knowing, and resigned. She had a completely different set of expectations. If she wanted to stop him from having sex with her, she’d tell him in no uncertain terms to get off of her and go away. She felt no responsibility for his orgasm unless she had instigated sex, and even then, she might loose interest before he did.

He was curious about what she would do with it.

Even as much as she loved Oz, sex with him had not been a grand mystical experience that made sense out of the big deal that sex was supposed to be. Sex was, in her opinion, pretty much what it seemed to be if you broke it down into the unthreatening descriptions in ‘Changing Bodies, Changing Lives’ that her mother had presented when Willow started eighth grade. Sex was less hearts and flowers than a bead of sweat rolling off your boyfriend’s heaving shoulder and nailing you right between the eyes. Funny, and weird, and mostly nice, but not actually as nice as the feeling of being pleasantly tired and snuggly afterward. The first time they had had sex it had been a little awkward and fervent, with the impending doom factor weighing in. It went through stages, becoming less awkward, and a little more knowing as you figured out what worked and what didn’t.

In short, she had been here before, and she knew how to deal with it, so she let out a sigh, shoved aside the moral arguments, and bent her knees to get some leverage, thinking something along the lines of ‘let’s get this over with so I can go to sleep’.

The little roll of her hips didn’t catch him by surprise. He had seen her come to a decision about her non-participation. He knew she wasn’t thinking about much more than getting him off to get him off of her. Her first little sigh of pleasure was so patently fake that he almost laughed. He drew his knees up under him, his hands moving to her hips to guide her to him until she got the idea and matched his rhythm. He let his hands rove over her flat abdomen and breasts, cupping them, rolling her hardened nipples between his fingers while he watched her face.

Her eyes were squeezed shut and the muscles of her face were tense with concentration. She looked . . . disgruntled. He nuzzled her throat, seeking out the abused flesh he had sunk his fangs into. She lost her place when he did that, tightening up as she tensed in fear. He restricted himself to sucking lightly on her broken skin, picking up the faint impression of blood against the flat of his tongue while his hands stroked her sides and he moved a bit more insistently in her.

She felt a little odd around his cock. Too warm. It bordered on uncomfortable. Until she had started moving with him, she had felt . . . tight, but uncoordinated. When she shifted her hips into him, he had felt the muscles in her cunt grab at him. Much better. Almost there, he thought, letting his hands drift back to her breasts when she settled down. She hooked her leg around his hips, the muscles in her inner thigh tightening and he snaked an arm under her, his hand squeezing her ass as he supported the increased arch of her back. Under his lips he felt her throat vibrate with a startled sound he instinctively recognized.

Before she could analyze it and screw up a perfectly good, if not spectacular, shag, he slid his hand down her sleek belly to find her clit, using his thumb to rub it, alternating the pressure to squeeze it flat against the bone before dragging his thumb over it. She bucked under his hand like he had introduced live current to a flagging battery. Her eyes flew open in surprise. She brought her hands up to grab his arm, but for strength she was badly outclassed, and when he dragged his thumb over her clit again, thrusting more deliberately, her fingernails dug into his arm as her hips rocked into him, riding his cock and his hand.

He could feel her shaking as she got closer and closer, exhaustion competing with arousal. With a wail that was almost as despairing as pleasured she slammed into him, just the signal he had been waiting for. He drove into her harder, riding her orgasm until his own arrived, long delayed and extended deliciously in spasms that made him growl.



He enjoyed a long delayed post coital smoke while she scurried back into the robe and then to the bathroom, no doubt to purge herself of their mingled body fluids. She came back, staggering a little, glaring a lot, and settled herself back down as far as she could get from him on the bed with her back to him.

He regarded the glowing end of his cigarette for a moment. “Not bad for a first shag,” he said, wondering if he could get a rise out of her.

She huffed a little. “I liked your hand better,” she said snidely.