Chapter Thirteen

William picked through the box of chocolates that he had asked Lucius to find for their tea, selecting a milk chocolate with a rosette crown. Willow was sitting beside him on the settee in her bedroom. He had removed the half boots she wore to walk in, and she had tucked her stocking clad feet under her. He found one of the hairpins holding her hair up and loosened it as he offered her the chocolate. She still looked a little wary and uncertain, but she took the offered candy from his fingertips and he slid the hairpin out, watching another section of her neat chignon collapse.

He had to be a little careful. The heavy drapes that blocked out the sun were not pulled completely together and she was sitting so that a ray of direct sunlight was hitting the top of her head. It would have been a simple enough thing to nudge her to her feet and have her close the drapes for him, but he liked the way the sunlight drew out the coppery tones in her hair, so he was content to leave it.

He had nibbled on the biscuits transferred from the bakery box to a Delph blue china plate. The small, oblong biscuits folded over a center dotted with raspberry jam were similar to shortbread with a slightly different, lighter texture. Occasionally, when she got bored, Willow entertained herself with baking. Mostly by trial and error she had developed her own recipe for a shortbread-like biscuit with a layer of tart lemon curd over a filling of slightly sour creamed cheese.

She sipped her tea, holding the teacup with both hands, the fingers of her left hand lightly braced against the thin china. A book she was reading lay on the low table next to the tea things. He picked it up and examined the title embossed on the spine, Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, without recognizing the title or author. She read voraciously, and her tastes were far more eclectic than Angelus', who hadn't seemed to notice that Willow's reading habits were starting to influence his.

“Do you get lonely when we leave you here alone?” he asked, thumbing through the book. She had her page marked with a bookmark Dru must have made judging by the needlework. A motif of swirling ivy that might have been stylized rendered by other hands. Dru's clever needle added details, like a mouse peeking out from between two leaves.

Her gaze drifted downward for a moment as she tried to decide how to answer him. “No,” she gave a spare shake of her head. It wasn't entirely true, but not a lie either. She couldn't begin to explain the sort of loneliness that she felt.

The house had running water, and she still found herself reaching for the tap to fill a glass, as if it were so simple. The water that ran through the copper pipes in the house was not potable. The hand pumped spring water in the kitchen was the only source of water in the house that was safe to drink. Simple things like that made her feel alone.

Living amongst other humans for two months, with all of her secrets, made her feel alone.

She no longer thought of what William was doing when he was away from the house after sunset. She knew, and she knew that what she could do about it lay on her conscience, tangled in theories that she had developed over the years. He no longer took her with him when he hunted, and that was a kind of truce between them. Unspoken, and possibly a misunderstanding of his intentions on her part, but she clung to the margins of it.

He watched her a moment longer, mildly surprised when she did not elaborate on the ‘no'. It was a word she was not in the habit of using with him.

“We could go out tonight,” he offered. “Just the two of us,” he clarified, because he thought that she had to know that right now, it was just the two of them. His hand hovered over the chocolates. “What kind was that? The one you just had?”

“Hazelnut, I think,” she set the tea cup on its saucer. “I won't be used to help you kill people,” she told him.

He shot her a look. “Never occurred to me,” he claimed, selecting a heart shaped dark chocolate.

He turned towards her, running his hand down her back, his thumb following the centerline of her spine. When he reached her waist he exerted just enough pressure to make her lean towards him. He made room for her between his legs, shifting around on the small, uncomfortable settee with his left leg bent at the knee, resting against the cushioned back, settling her against his chest with his arm loosely circling her. He offered her the chocolate and she let him feed her, her head falling back into the space between his shoulder and his neck while he played with the decorative buttons and cording down the front of her dress.

“Or we could stay in,” he conceded, rubbing his cheek against her soft sun warmed hair. The heat warmed her scent. She was a constant reminder of the best of things lost with daylight. Angelus and Darla would go out. He wasn't so sure about Dru.

With his free hand, he lifted hers, threading his fingers through hers.

He had removed enough hairpins to leave the chignon unbalanced. A hairpin taking the stress of the weight of her hair was digging into her scalp. She reached up to pull it out. Her hair was too long. She would have never let it grow so long left to her own preference in the matter. A century ago, when lice infestation was more commonplace and wigs were in fashion, short hair was practical, at least according to Darla. Back when Matilde was her maid and not just another vampire who periodically looked tempted to eat her, she had trimmed her bangs and evened up the length.

She removed two more hairpins and a length of cotton wrapped in the collected strands of her own hair that came out of her hairbrush. It gave the chignon its shape, and the hair wound around it further disguised it inside the mass of her hair. Once her hair was free, William abandoned his play with her buttons and reached up to push his fingers into the coiled mass of her hair, his fingers rubbing her scalp.

She closed her eyes, resting her forehead against his jaw. Using so much magic took a little out of her. She had been practicing little things for a long time. Like, levitating objects more or less in place. Lifting it no more than a few millimeters and then holding it there. She had practiced on water glasses until she could move a glass without so much as a ripple across the surface of the water. That kind of magic use was soothing, though if she over did it, she felt a little light headed. The surge of magic she had felt go through her in the foyer left her nerve endings tingling in an unpleasant way. She had a pins and needles sensation inside her skull that had not completely faded.

“Tired?” he asked.

She nodded against his jaw.

He laid the hand he was holding on his thigh and unbuttoned the cuffed sleeve of her dress before working the button on the other wrist free. Then he started unbuttoning her dress, working from the throat down the front on each side. She was wearing a light cotton shift beneath the dress, trimmed across the top in lace. His hands shifted to her waist to urge her to sit up and he eased the dress over her shoulders, finding the hook at the loosely gathered waist to release the last impediment to removing the dress.

He stood up, picking up her book, and tucking it under one arm, offering her the support of the other as she stood up and let the dress slide down to lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. She was still wearing her stockings and the voluminous underpants that always made her feel like she was wearing pajamas under her gown, torn at the crotch from his brutal assault. He unknotted the drawstring and pushed them down over her hips before he led her over to the bed, turning it down for her and stacking the pillows.

“You're in a strange mood,” she commented when she was all tucked in, her book in her lap.

“I know,” a smile ghosted over his lips.



Whistling to himself as he made Willow something for dinner, William concluded that living so long with a human was starting to make him weird. The contentment and pleasure that he took in preparing a meal for her, seeing that she was fed, had nothing to do with practicality. It was some sort of bizarre corruption of his need to hunt and feed his . . . childe? Mate? Lover? Something like that. It was like the grooming instinct that made him want to brush her hair, and fuss over her clothes because she should have soft things next to her skin and warm colors and petty luxuries easily afforded.

Seeing what she could do had put him in a contemplative mood. There were reasons why she had not used her abilities against him. Reasons that she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge, perhaps, but no less real. There was a hardheaded, pragmatic part of him that refused to believe what it suggested about how she felt. That was the part of him that found her lack of resolve almost as contemptible as what it implied. There was another part of him, the part that was merrily putting together a hamper for a late night picnic that was convinced that he had discovered another piece of something important about her that made this one of the best days of his un-life.

There was something perversely charming about discovering a metaphorical stake pointed at his unbeating heart in a hand poised to strike.

Dru wandered into the kitchen. The elders were planning to attend the opera tonight. Prague was a city with a musical pedigree that included Smetana and Dvorak. She was playing with a new hairstyle copied from a magazine that depended on creating waves that were held up by hairpins and bisected across the crown with a length of scarf. She had chosen red silk, which set off her dark hair and pale skin perfectly. She wore it with the red velvet gown that he had seen before and an art nouveau ruby necklace.

She took a passing interest in the food he was placing on a plate before curling herself around him, one hand stroking his temple as she stared into his eyes. Charmed, he kissed the end of her nose. “You shame the stars, my love.”

Her expression turned thoughtful. She studied the kitchen, her eyes sweeping over the surfaces as if she could read them.

“Miss Willow was naughty,” she surmised.

Lucius had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, but William wasn't surprised that Dru knew they had fought. He pinched her chin. “And that would be mine to deal with, wouldn't it, Dru?” he made it a question.

She was as jealous of his prerogatives as he was, maybe more so. “Yes,” she agreed. “Yours, and ours, but only as you wish it.”

Her eyes lost focus for a moment and she tilted her head back, the fingers that had been stroking his temple now gracefully pulling at the air. “This will be a night of lovely sounds, like cats all rumbly and growling, and spitting at each other, biting, and tearing.”

William grinned at this apt description of the opera—not his favorite entertainment. “I wonder if they'll have orange girls?” he asked. At Covent Garden the orange girls sold fruit, making a tasty after-theatre snack for the hungry vampire while providing a treat for the hungry vampire's lover. He had a fondness for the scent of oranges and loved the way they tasted on Willow's lips and throat when he painted her throat with a section of an orange and drank from her.

Dru kissed the corner of his mouth, patting his cheek, sharing the song in his head without [[without what?]]. “I told you that we would be happy here,” she reminded him.



Darla, Angelus and Dru had gone out for an evening at the opera, taking the larger of the two carriages, which required a coachman and Lucius to manage. They took Matilde with them as well, mostly for show. Darla liked having a servant or two to hover in the background, lending consequence to her public appearances.

Willow woke up to the sensation of cool lips exploring the back of her knee and lifted one hand to swat at the tickling sensation. William retaliated by pushing the hem of her shift up and kissing the back of her thighs, his hands framing her hips, keeping her from moving too much.

Willow opened her eyes. The room was dark. She had a mildly disoriented feeling, complicated by a fizzy, itchy sensation inside her skull. She wasn't sure what time of day or night it was. She could feel his fingers splay on her skin as he moved up, unerringly finding the sensitive spot above the cleft of her ass and running his tongue over it.

“Wake up,” he murmured against her skin.

“I am awake,” she told him.

He paused, lifting his head and then tilting it to shake his hair out of his eyes. “Hmm. So you are,” he pretended to think about it while she pushed up on one elbow to look at him over her shoulder. “Human,” he made it a friendly insult. “You wake up too easily,” he complained. “Don't suppose you'd pretend to be asleep?” he asked while his fingers glided over the skin on the inside margin of her hipbone.

Sometimes she did pretend that she was asleep. Not so much when he was coming to bed, but when he stayed the night with her and she woke up to him spooning into her, his hands moving over her. He picked up a lot of her body heat when he slept with her. Sometimes she pretended to sleep and he pretended he wasn't waking her up.

Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn't had much more than dry toast and chocolate to eat today. William's hand slid between her body and the mattress under her and he rubbed her stomach, dropping a kiss on her shoulder.

“Nearly everyone is out for the evening,” he told her. “It's just you and me and . . . the short git . . .”

“Cook?”

“That's the one,” William agreed, hanging over her a second. He climbed off of her and the bed. “Have to admire that actually,” he said as he went to her wardrobe to get her dressing gown. There was an ivory satin one with quilted lapels that he had seen before and a fairly tatty looking dark blue wool flannel dressing gown. “How did this escape my attention when we were burning ugly dresses?” he wondered.

She couldn't really see what he was holding up for her, it wasn't more than a shape in the dark. She sat up. “I don't know. I wasn't consulted,” she said sourly, the ‘as usual' was implied.

He brought it to her as she hung her legs over the side of the bed, feeling for her slippers with her feet. She found one and slid her toes into it, yawning, and then found the other slipper, repeating the process, slowly registering that he was standing in front of her, waiting for her to stand up.

She stood and he held the dressing gown for her to slip her arms into. Recognizing the soft, worn warmth of the robe, she yawned again. “It's nice and soft and comfy,” she explained.

“Right,” he seemed amused. His arms circled her loosely as he fastened the two inside buttons that secured the dressing gown at her waist.

“You have to admire what?” she asked to avoid a discussion of her wardrobe. His sporadic interest in her clothing was never particularly flattering, or it had to do with getting her to take off whatever she was wearing at the moment.

“Hm?” His hands were moving up to cup her breasts. He picked up the trailing thread of his abandoned observation about the vampire who called himself Cook, feeling her fastening the outer buttons to the dressing gown. There was something he admired about the name. It came to him, “The utility. Cook? It's simple, direct, unaffected. No poncey Latin or Greek,” he left off handling her breasts for the moment, smoothing the fabric over her shoulders. “Take Angelus, for instance,” he rolled his eyes. “I had my little renaming period,” he admitted. “Not so long after I was turned,” he grinned at the memory, adopting the East End accent that went with it. “Took to calling myself Spike,” he said with a certain relish.

“S-spike?” she went still, feeling a few of the cobwebs in her brain scatter.

“Yeah,” his voice turned husky as he wound his wrist in her hair, baring her throat. “Mmm. Say it again, sweet,” he urged, breathing in her scent, more potent at her throat, where her hair had trapped it behind her ear. The way she stammered his abandoned name was interestingly full of startled tension.

It was too confusing. She wouldn't let herself think of him as Spike. He wasn't Spike. He was William. She hardly knew Spike. She stalled. “Why?”

He misunderstood the question she was asking. He thought she wanted to know why he had started calling himself Spike. For a second he considered telling her the truth, but then abandoned the notion. She knew what he was, and he didn't have to remind her. His arm slid around her waist, pulling her hips against him. He rubbed himself against her in a deliberate way. “Utility,” he reminded her, letting her feel him harden against her.

She frowned a little, knowing that he was lying to her, but not sure why. She remembered Giles explaining where the nickname had come from.

He nuzzled her neck, nibbling on her earlobe. “Say it,” he growled in her ear.

She really didn't think she could. In a very crazy way it felt . . . wrong. She made herself touch the side of his face, her index finger tracing the unmarred surface of his eyebrow before slipping into his hair. He abandoned her ear to kiss the corner of her eye, using her hair to tug her head back.

“Will?” her soft voice called to him.

A part of him recognized that she was being stubborn, that she didn't want to call him Spike for some reason, and a part of him recognized that she was the only person in the world who had ever called him Will and made him feel singled out by the silky sound of her voice wrapped around one syllable.

It made him want to kiss her forehead and her cheeks and the space beneath her eyes and every little place on her face that his hands wanted to touch. There was time for that. She had just woken up and she was still sleepy, and he knew from experience that as soon as she really woke up she would want to wash her face and clean her teeth and eat something. She would be distracted. He unwound her hair from his wrist and kissed her upper lip, his tongue flicking out to graze the crisp upper bow of her lip, feeling the dryness of her skin where she had drooled a little in her sleep.

Drooling upside down. It was only something she could manage. He'd find her sleeping sometimes with her head tucked into her chin and the top of her head pushed in between pillows with an armful of bedding gathered under her against her chest. It looked too awkward for sleep, but she did it, and did not like being shifted one bit. He had tried to untangle her once and she had, without waking up, held on to the bedding and muttered a fierce, “No! Mine!”

“Go do your bathroom stuff,” he said, releasing her.



He found the minion called Cook sitting in the front hall, looking bored out of his mind with guard duty. Barrier wards or no, Angelus was strict about keeping someone on watch at all hours. It was hard to place his age. He was a small, compact man with thinning hair and an unlined round face that looked almost innocent even when his demon was in the forefront.

Earlier William had an idea about taking Willow out for a late night picnic, but he opened the front door and stepped out to gauge the temperature and the weather. It had turned cool and damp, and while that didn't bother him, he knew that it was too chilly for her. He changed his mind about the picnic. It was an idea for another night.

He set the younger vampire to work making dinner for Willow. He made crepes with spinach and a white sauce and chicken, cut into medallions, lightly seasoned, and seared in a frying pan.

He told Willow to come down to the kitchen when she was done performing her ablutions. She padded in, still in her dressing gown and slippers, with her hair down and loose around her shoulders. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes scanning the room for evidence of their earlier fight, her gaze flicking to the vampire at the stove.

“It smells good,” she offered gamely, switching to German, so William knew the observation was not entirely for his benefit.

“I wouldn't know,” Cook answered. He dipped his pinkie into the white sauce and tasted it, frowning. “Nothing smells or tastes the same. Makes it hard to cook,” he admitted.

For some reason, this observation piqued her interest. William poured a glass of wine for her, sitting on the stool he had lifted her up on earlier that day.

She made her way over to a cabinet to retrieve an earthenware cup and then to the sink to work the pump with an intent expression on her face. “Is it like food doesn't taste like much of anything, or is it like your sense of taste is more acute?”

The younger vampire gave her a startled sideways look as she emptied the contents of a headache powder into the cup. When he wasn't dead and was actually a cook, they had talked, probably a bit more than anyone knew. She didn't have to talk to him. He was a cook, not a chef. Food was a funny thing. People talk about food, and the kitchen was a comfortable place. Much too big, in his estimation, but he had learned to cook in galley kitchens on the ships that sailed on the Vltana River and in taverns on the quayside.

He gave an internal shrug at the odd question. “It tastes like food, but it's like tasting food when you're not hungry, or when you want something else.”

She let the headache powder dissolve, swishing the water in the half-full cup. “Smell and taste are connected. I thought it might have something to do with smell,” she explained. “Like, cheese? Cheese is good. Stinky cheese is . . . eeew!”

William grinned. “Stilton isn't stinky,” he inserted.

“Hmpht,” Willow snorted. “It's vile,” she shuddered, and then drank down her headache medicine, grimacing.

She washed and rinsed the cup, drying it off before returning it to its place in the cupboard. “Is there anything I can help with?” she asked.

For Cook it was like déjà vu, except that the moment that he had experienced in the past came across as somewhat incomplete. It had made him nervous then, when she was the mistress of the house and he was . . . someone she really shouldn't be talking to even if she didn't seem to know that. Now that she was, more or less, reconciled in his mind as the mistress of the vampire watching them, he had the same feeling. She shouldn't be talking to him. The skin on the back of his neck tightened. She wasn't standing that close to him, but he could smell her, distinct from the cooking odors right in front of him on the stove. She smelled like fresh water and milled soap and something warm and rich. It was a smell that was utterly unlike fresh bread baking or a chocolate soufflé rising, but connected in a way those remembered scents had appealed to him.

“Come over here and drink your wine, pet,” William called her away.

Cook breathed a sigh of relief when he felt her move towards the workbench. William didn't give up the seat to her, he opened his legs to make a space for her and let his arm rest on her waist when she came to stand beside him at the workbench.

She ate there at the table while Cook cleaned up, scrubbing the skillet, crepe pan, mixing bowl, and the copper bottomed sauce pan as well as the more delicate tea cups and dishes that had been used earlier. She didn't eat all of the chicken, reserving a portion of it that, after she finished her dinner, went into one of the shallow dishes reserved for the dog. She crumbled the meat with her fingers into smaller pieces, rinsing her hands, and wiping them off on a towel.

Cook had resumed his post in the hall when they left the kitchen. He watched them go back upstairs, quietly mulling over the odd relationship.

Mr. Buttons was dozing when Willow let herself into Dru's room to feed him. He had a doggie bed that Dru had made. Angelus was the self-acknowledged artist of the family, but Willow thought Dru surpassed him in most respects. Her needlework was stunning, and she had a way of making things out of nothing that Willow found impressive. The doggie bed had started life as a doll's house. It was one of the forgotten bits of someone else's life that had been found in the attic. Dru had gutted the interior and made a purple cushion finished in a thick section of gold braid that probably belonged to a drapery pull. The interior was elaborately re-painted with an outdoor scene that was rendered in a primitive style. The trees were chunky and squat, dominating the misshapen hills that had been painted in. The windows were inside the hills and trees, the small glass panes painted across without any break.

She refilled his water bowl while he ate and spent a few minutes playing with his silky ears and lightly scratching his small domed head while he settled down again on his pillow to sleep. The headache powder had dispelled the last of her headache, but the wine on top of it made her feel a little lightheaded. When the dog was asleep, she picked up the empty dish he had fed from and took it into the bathroom she shared with Dru to wash it in the sink. She caught herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror, and frowned at the spaciness in her expression. She probably could have managed the headache without the headache powder. She knew they were a little dangerous, especially on top of several glasses of wine. The strength and potency of the medication varied and it was laced with opium, which was not yet widely understood to be addictive.

She dropped the dish into the sink when William's hands slid up her sides. She couldn't see him in the mirror, given his lack of reflection, and she hadn't heard him enter the bathroom from her room.

“Scared you?” he sounded smug.

She shut off the tap. “You're a credit to vampires everywhere,” she said, unintentionally waspish.

It made him laugh. “And you, my love, are higher than a kite,” his voice was a contented purr in her ear. “Look at you,” he bade her. One arm moved around her waist to hold her while he probed the back of her head.

When he saw her taking the headache powder it occurred to him that she might be more hurt than she was letting on. He had flung her across the kitchen and she had taken a good deal of the impact across her shoulders and the back of her head.

She stared at herself in the mirror, feeling him against her without seeing him, taking in her slightly dazed expression. She could see her hair moving and knew that it was from the pressure of his fingers. She closed her eyes. “It's making me dizzy,” she protested.

He made a sound of agreement in his throat. “Sometimes you do that to me too,” he told her. “I look at you, and it makes me feel like I can feel the ground moving under me.”

With her eyes closed, she could appreciate the sentiment. She opened her eyes, avoiding the mirror, turning her head towards him. “Can you?” she asked.

“Can I what?”

“Can you feel the ground moving?” she asked. “It is. It's always moving. Can you feel it?”

He rested his forehead against hers. There was a slightly swollen spot on the back of her head, but her skin wasn't broken and he didn't think it was anything serious. He thought about how to answer her question. “In a way, I guess. It's more like you can almost hear it. After the sun goes down, and the ground starts to warm up as it gives up the heat,” his hand curled around her head to trace the shape of her ear. She had the prettiest ears. Small, neat, delicate, terminating in petal soft earlobes.

“What does it sound like?”

That was impossible to explain. It sounded like nothing and everything, and it was as unique to the day as the tracery of tiny lines across the palm of a human hand. He had a solid grounding in the classics at Winchester. He had been enchanted by the power of ancient religions so deeply connected to the mysteries of the natural world. He had sat in the garden of his parents' home in London on the rare clear night and stared at the face of the moon and felt that he understood perfectly how it held the graven image of a woman's face, an object of veneration for thousands of years.

He felt the need to worship it. He saw that face in the outlines of Dru's face, raised to the night sky when he emerged from his own grave with the detritus of his coffin and the scattered bones of what he vaguely understood to be his infant sister scattered around him. It had made him pause, half in and half out of his grave.

He had never thought of himself as being preoccupied with death when he was alive, though looking back on it, he supposed that to a certain extent, he was. The deaths he remembered were of women. His sister, Caroline, who had lived less than two years, and his favorite aunt, Merry who had died Christmas day when he was thirteen, and his mother who had been dying for so long that she seemed, even now, poised at the cusp of life and death. Even to him, and he had killed her. His father's death when he was twenty-two had been a more significant event, freeing him from expectations he was bound to disappoint, and handing him responsibilities that he had accepted gladly because they afforded him the opportunity to be in charge of other people's problems.

He looked into the unfocused eyes of the woman he held, hearing her heart pushing blood through her body, and the sound of her breathing while she waited for his answer. “I'll listen to it for you sometime and try to describe it,” he promised.



The domed ceiling of the opera house had Drusilla's attention. In her lap, her needle flashed as she made a pattern of it with blue thread in a square of a white cotton handkerchief that she had snapped into an embroidery frame carried in Matilde's large bag. The handkerchief was one of William's that she had embroidered with a repeating pattern of their interlocking initials around the graceful branches of a weeping willow in a white on white monochromatic pattern in the corners. The work she was doing now was a pattern piece. She thought that the medallion of the domed ceiling would make a good pattern for a seat cover cushion on the shield backed chairs in the seldom used dining room, or possibly as a theme for a larger medallion on the center of a counterpane.

She paused for a moment as the curving sweep of the D representing her tried to find a space within the slanting bars of two Ws, becoming a bracket, a bowl, an arch, each image collapsing. A small, distressed sound escaped her and Angelus tore his attention away from the stage long enough to take the hand she had inadvertently pricked with her needle to squeeze warningly.

Daddy would be very unhappy if she spoiled his evening. Not unhappy in a good way, but in a go to your room alone way.

Darla was watching the occupants of the other boxes. She didn't need opera glasses for this pursuit, but she used them anyway. The opera glasses were like a domino in a masquerade party, disguising interest and expression. They were seated in the second tier of boxes that circled the opera house, on the left wing, which exposed a great deal of the gallery to her view, though it did not provide cover for her lack of attention for the action on the stage. She wasn't alone in her inattention. Half the assembled audience was similarly occupied.

Only Angelus, and to a lesser extent Lucius, were paying attention to the opera. Standing at attention at the back of the box next to a sideboard laid in with chilled champagne, Lucius felt almost dizzy. The music demanded his attention, but vampiric hearing being what it was, he couldn't quite block out the hum of human voices coming from the boxes and the floor below. A hundred whispers, hushed conversations, and the sounds of people breathing, their hearts beating in different time—it made his head swim.

Matilde was leaning against the wall. She had spent most of the last day and a half ‘enjoying' the attention of the four male minions. Her resentment of Lucius was growing. Darla, the oldest and most powerful of the four vampires they followed had turned her. William, who was clearly the least of them, had made Lucius and still Lucius was the favorite. She was slighted. Darla was slighted, even if she did not appear to acknowledge it.



His concession to smoking in her room was to open a window and to get a fire started in the fireplace. Willow watched the flames lick across the wood. She needed the cool, damp night air to clear the fuzziness in her head. The combination of wine and the headache powder had left her thirsty. William had brought another bottle of wine up from the kitchen while she had been feeding Mr. Buttons.

The dimensions of the bedroom were nagging at her. The room was wider than deep, and the fireplace was on the outer wall flanked by windows that faced the garden. It seemed misplaced to her. The fireplace should have been on the wall that was to the left of the bedroom door, or on the wall facing that wall. Placed as it was, with her bed facing it and the conversation area created by the settee and an armchair in front of the fireplace, it left a mass of furniture in the center of the room.

Her wardrobe and dressing table were to their left, when they probably should have been placed on the right, closer to the bathroom door.

Since the fireplace couldn't be moved, it made more sense to move the furniture, but she had never gotten around to it, being more preoccupied with sorting out the other rooms in the house. William's little used room across the hall from hers had the fireplace at the long end of the room, so while the bed was in a mirror image of her room in terms of placement, the furnishings were more balanced.

She sipped the wine. He had a piece of her hair between his fingers that he wound around his index finger, smoothing it with the pad of his thumb before unwinding it, letting it slip through his fingers before starting the process all over again. She was sitting on the floor, at his feet. He had taken off his boots and was slouched in the armchair with one leg propped on the arm. She could feel the shape of his other leg from the knee down against her back.

When he said earlier that they could go out or stay in, she hadn't expected a quiet evening as the outcome of either choice.

William let the section of her hair he was playing with slip from his fingers. Her eyes were half closed, lending a bit of mystery to her face as the firelight played across it, warming the ivory tones of her skin. She had a bit of a widow's peak that was obscured by the bangs that had come into fashion. He smoothed her hair back from her forehead to find it, smoothing his thumb over it.

“I can feel your head vibrating,” he teased. “What are you thinking about?”

“Rearranging the furniture,” was her answer. “This room is all out of balance,” she started to elaborate.

Rearranging furniture wasn't a topic that interested him, and he knew that she would go on about it at length given the opportunity. “That's not very flattering, pet,” he chided.

She looked up at him.

When she turned her head toward him he followed the motion, his fingertips ghosting over the contours of her face. She had always been pretty. Easy to imagine, despite her background, in the life she had left without a single regret. A pretty girl with a face too childishly rounded for a cameo against the carnelian of her hair. She had lost the lingering baby fat and the delicate bone structure of her face was more obvious. At times she looked almost plain, and then the light would hit her face in a certain way, and she was breathtaking.

He watched as she adjusted to the notion of shackling her mind to the business of pleasing him. She was giving up something in the process and it was there, easily read, a flash of disappointment and hurt that might have been overlooked. She didn't dwell on it, dismissing her own reaction without comment.

Pleasing him was her business. It was the coin of the realm that existed between them, by his design. Pleasing him was the roof over her head and the food in her stomach. It was the warm, pretty, expensive things that clothed her body. All of which he or Angelus, or Darla provided because it was what was expected. After she survived the first few months with him, nothing less would have done. It was nothing if not practical, and ultimately the only kindness she was ever offered. None of which moved her in the least.

She didn't care about the clothes. She had worn the pearl choker that he had brought for her from Vienna once because he had fastened it around her neck. She probably could have lived anywhere, if not very long or very well. Living long or well never seemed to inform her behavior. The coin she treasured was kindness and he offered it to her knowing that it was allowed because ultimately it was the greatest of all the cruelties that she would endure. He was kind and she made too much of that kindness.

She shifted around on the floor, kneeling at his feet, her hand coming to rest on his thigh, her thumb smoothing the fabric beneath her fingers in a caress that was a prelude to more intimate touching. He knew that he should let her do this, and he wanted it. He caught her chin in his fingers instead, holding her unfocused gaze. The medication and alcohol in her system were still effecting her.

He had no real notion of why she wanted to talk about rearranging furniture with him. It was a subject that Darla or Angelus might have taken unfeigned interest in and that Dru would have made into a game. His thoughts on furniture ran to ‘comfortable spot to rest my arse' and not much further.

She was still holding her wine glass in her free hand, half forgotten, the bowl of the glass tipping at a precarious angle. He leaned forward from the waist to take it from her. “Are you comfortable there, on the floor?” he asked, stalling. The windows were letting in a draft. “I'd invite you up here,” he gestured to his lap, “but,” he waved the cheroot he held between his fingers, “I know you don't like breathing my smoke.”

The gaslights were off, leaving the room lit only by the fireplace. “The fire is keeping me warm.”

Her hand moved up his thigh.

“What do you want to do with the furniture?” he asked. It was too abrupt. She blinked, looking startled by the question. He had a mental image of himself fending off her advances by indulging her desire to talk about furniture that was wrong and strangely apt all at once.

“You want to talk about the furniture?”

He flicked ash in the general direction of the saucer that he was using as an ashtray, feeling mildly irritated. He really didn't want to talk about the furniture, but she said it like it was mind boggling that he would want to talk about furniture. It sounded like something Darla would say, except that Willow hadn't managed to imply at the same time that he had been raised in a barn, which, in point of fact, he had not. Unlike Darla. God only knew what she had been raised in.

He took a drag on the cheroot, held the smoke in for a moment, and let it out in a slow stream, watching her the whole time. “I think you brought it up,” he said testily.

She sat back on her heels, reaching for the wine glass he was still holding. He relinquished it to her grip. “I was thinking about moving things,” she began. “Everything is bunched up in the middle of the room. If I moved the bed to that wall,” she gestured behind them, “and moved the wardrobe and the dressing table over to the wall by the bathroom, that would make it all fit better,” she explained, a slight frown appearing.

He followed all of it. “But, you'd have a big empty space along the hallway wall,” he pointed out, thinking that it was the reason for the frown, that she had figured that out.

“I didn't think of that until now,” she admitted, sounding like she was now annoyed with herself for bringing it up.

He could see the ‘never mind' forming on her lips, and laid his finger across them. “Move the wardrobe and the dressing table and then move the settee and the chair to the corner by the window. It will give you a nice place to read during the day,” he suggested. He frowned at the settee. Personally, it was not his favorite piece of furniture, failing his comfortable place to rest his arse test. A settee was essentially a bench, no matter how much you padded it or dressed it up in upholstery fabric. As soon as you found a position you could sink into, you were bound to sink into a hard surface that wasn't going to budge. The settee in the salon wasn't horrible—it was an inducement to good posture, but it was also reasonably large. The one in Willow's room seated two and its chief purpose seemed to be decorative.

“You should have something like a chaise lounge for your bedroom,” he said. “I'd have one, but it's too . . . boudoir-ish for me,” he claimed with a small smile. “I'll talk to Lucius about having the furniture moved,” he offered.



Darla folded her opera glasses and handed them to Matilde as Lucius opened the bottle of champagne. Now that the house lights were coming up, Dru was putting her embroidery hoop away, flexing her long fingered hands. Angelus handed Darla a champagne glass from the tray that Lucius was holding.

The intermission was twenty minutes long. Enough time for people to move around, stretch their legs, enjoy a drink, and mingle in the lobbies and concourses or visit friends in their boxes. Darla hated this part of the evening almost as much as she loved it. The moments between being in the box, without visitors, and the arrival of the first acquaintance made her feel nervous. Angelus came to the opera for the music. She came for the whole thing. The lavishly painted ceiling, the glittering chandelier hanging like a pendant, the costumes, the clothing, the jewels, the mingling at intermission and after the performance all pleased her. The orchestra played through the intermission while voices rose to fill the space under the domed ceiling.

Their first visitor was an English girl accompanied by her mother. They were the daughter and wife of a member of the British legation in Prague, met at a reception at the legation. The daughter remembered Dru, and greeted her warmly. Wolfaert Adorne, a Belgian representing his family's banking firm in Prague that Angelus was cultivating, joined them. Wolfaert in turn introduced them to Alesso Neri and his wife, Isabella, and the box was almost too full. Lucius filled glasses and offered a tray of canapés.




Willow tipped her head back to catch the last drop of wine from her glass. For a second William thought she was going to lick the rim of the glass. Instead she held it up for him to see. “Empty. More, please?” she asked sweetly.

“Don't you think you've had enough?”

“I'm still thirsty,” she argued. Thirst trumps potential drunkenness.

“Switch to water, then,” he suggested.

She frowned at him. “Too far away,” she held onto his leg as she pulled herself off the floor.

“There is a tap in the bathroom,” he pointed out.

“Says the vampire,” she shook her head. “Dysentery.”

“Ah, Paris?” he placed the episode. He had no idea if tap water was safe to drink or not, but Willow was adamant that it was not. She drank the spring water from the pump in the kitchen. “The kitchen is downstairs . . . says the vampire that has to go out to drink when he is thirsty,” he took the bottle from her and filled her wine glass a little more than half full.

She gave him a sidelong look and thanked him.

When he returned the bottle to the table she handed him the replenished glass and went over to the wardrobe to pull out a blanket folded into a neat square. She unfurled it in front of the fire and settled back down at his feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“The rug is wool,” she pointed out. “It's scratchy.”

She reached for her glass, but he held it back, studying her upturned face. “Are you getting drunk?”

“Possibly,” she answered gravely, a glint of humor flashing in her eyes. “If I throw up, it will remove all doubt.”

That made him laugh and he let her take the wine glass from him.

“You could come down here too,” she invited, kicking off her slippers and pushing her bare feet into the blanket. He had picked up one of a half dozen cheroots that he had brought with him from his room while she was feeding the dog. “Or not,” she said hastily. “You look comfy up there.”

He rose to go to the fireplace, taking one of the long matches in the brass holder on the mantel to get a light. He eyed the long, thin seat cushion on the settee. Might be useful for something, he thought. He could feel her watching him. Having lost his leg to lean against, she had pulled her knees up and had one arm wrapped loosely around them. She sipped her wine, licking the residue off of her lower lip.

He had gone out earlier, right after sundown, while Willow was still sleeping. With no particular destination in mind, he had gone to the park. A sign posted at the gate noted that the park was closed between the hours of nine in the evening and six in the morning. At dusk it was largely empty. The park occupied a space that was the equivalent of two city blocks and in addition to the walking paths, paved in brick with a repeating diamond shaped pattern, there was a groomed trail for riding, and a spring fed pond with a pink sandstone pavilion that was probably modeled on the Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle.

He left the park by the north gate and caught a streetcar, seeking out a tobacco shop he was patronizing. The proprietor talked him into a pack of hand rolled Turkish cigarettes. They felt a bit odd in his hand, but they were easier to carry around than the cheroots he had been smoking for the last decade. He had passed the time with a bit of window shopping and made a quick meal of a prosperous looking bloke, relieving him of his wallet before making his way back to the house in time to see Dru off to the opera, looking utterly smashing.

Working one handed while he smoked, he unbuttoned the waistcoat he was still wearing and dropped it over the arm of the settee. Earlier that evening he had rolled his shirtsleeves up nearly to his elbows and gotten rid of the annoyingly stiff shirt collar that buttoned in around the neck of his shirt. When he had enough of the cheroot, which tasted too sweet after the Turkish cigarettes he had smoked earlier, the balance of the cheroot went into the fire. He took the cushion from the bench seat and placed it on the floor.

While he made himself comfortable, lying on the blanket she had spread out, his head resting on the cushion, Willow turned, sitting at a right angle to him, using the armchair, now at her back to rest against. Her feet were near enough to his hip that he could reach out and wrap his fingers around her ankle. He closed his eyes, listening to the wood hiss and crackle in the fireplace as his fingers moved over her ankle, finding the pulse there, under her skin. His fingers strayed, tracing the curving arch of her foot, feeling the muscles tighten under his fingers. She was ticklish. Her feet were especially ticklish. He could feel her resisting his light hold on her ankle and opened one eye to peer at her.

“I'm not tickling you,” he said. Technically, he was correct. He wasn't tickling her deliberately, but his fingers were colder than her skin and she was ticklish, so even his light, firm touch was tickling, and they both knew it.

He rolled over on his side, gesturing to her for the wine glass. She surrendered it and he lifted his head to drink from it before setting it down on the floor beyond the edge of the blanket and the fringed rug on the honey colored wood floor. His attention returned to her foot and he lifted it up, slipping it under his shirt to rest against his abdomen. Her toes curled a bit. He curled his arm under his head, lips pursing as he admired the bit of calf that had been exposed as her dressing gown parted around her legs. His imagination tracked up her leg, savoring the sense memory of her that was firmly entrenched after so many years. There wasn't a place on her body that he hadn't had his hands or mouth on at one time or another.

“You are too far away,” he complained, running his hand up the back of her calf. His fingers tightened when he reached the back of her knee, exerting just enough pressure to send a message. She had her head back against the seat of the chair, her eyes open. She turned her head toward him.

“Come here,” his tone was wheedling, and in the firelight his blue eyes were dark and nearly impossible to read.

He offered her his hand, and she stared at it for a moment before she lifted her hand to place it in his. His palm slid over hers and his fingers tightened on her wrist. One hard tug on his part, and she would end up sprawled across his chest. She mimicked his hold on her, wrapping her fingers around his wrist, locking their arms together at the wrist. It felt a little strange to hold his wrist like this, it was too much like how he held her wrists, sometimes above her head, sometimes just like this, like his hand on her wrist was a flesh and bone manacle.

Tethered, he pulled her towards him, slowly, giving her time to get her knees under her. His shoulders shifted as he rolled onto his back, lifting his hips to keep the blanket from moving under him, settling back down. He loosened his hold on her wrist, a little amused by the fact that she had quietly forced him to by refusing to let go of his wrist. She held on to his wrist a second longer before relaxing her grip. Pushing himself up on one arm, he brought her hand to his mouth, kissing her fingertips. Her hand was cool, but her fingertips were cold.

Despite the fire, it really was too cold for her with the window open. He gave her wrist a lingering kiss and rose to shut the window. He started to draw the drapes over the view of the bleak garden below when movement in the dark caught his eye.

It was too quick to be anything natural, at the edge of the garden wall. “Love? Those wards that you cast? Are you getting anything?”

She turned at the waist to look at him, her hands hovering over the buttons of her dressing gown. “Around the house?” she rubbed her face with both hands, sitting back on her heels, a slight frown drawing her eyebrows together. She felt a slight tingle over her scalp that spread.

“I don't know,” she shook her head, rubbing her hands over her arms. She was cold and the tingly sensation could have come from that or the combination of medication and alcohol, or from the awareness of him.

“I'm kind of in a fuzzy sensory place,” she admitted.

It made him smile. A fuzzy sensory place. “Should I be flattered?”

She didn't answer him. His gaze left the garden for a moment, taking her in, looking serious and intent, on her knees in the center of a blanket on the floor. He let the curtain fall to cover the window and went back to her, cupping her face in his hands. “Your hands are like ice,” he told her. “Why don't you get in bed? Warm up under the covers. I'm going to have a look around outside.” He bent at the waist to kiss her mouth. Her lips were cold in contrast to the heat of her mouth.

“I won't be gone long,” he promised.




Andreas could tell by the way the lead horse was leaning into the harness that the animal had dozed off despite the occasional foot shuffling of the other horse in the harness. If the lead horse was disturbed, he would grunt and bump the other horse or make a soft neighing sound to settle his harness mate down. Horses were unexpectedly interesting. The coachman who had survived the night their masters had arrived had not worked out as a coachman after he had been turned. Either he didn't much like horses or he loved them the way only a vampire could. His attention had been devoted particularly to a gray palfrey that was meant for a lady's hack and a big rawboned bay mare with a lazy disposition. The palfrey had been destroyed. The bay mare was still alive, the left side of her face marred by healing scar tissue.

The coachman was no more. Anything that vicious was useful, but destroying the Master's property was not permitted, so Andreas was driving tonight.

He discovered that he liked the horses. They were uncomplicated and very social. His presence in the stable doors made them all peer out at him. He was too strong now to be concerned about being in close quarters with large animals. He made a clucking sound to settle the more fractious of the pair down and watched the horse's ears swivel back at the sound, then forward again, then back, finally flattening a bit before he tossed his head, jerking on the reins looped loosely in Andreas' hands. His hands tightened on the reins, not pulling on either horses' mouth, but feeling the way they were handling the bit.

The lead horse clamped down on his bit, suddenly alert. Andreas looked down the long line of coaches outside the opera house, standing a bit in the box to see down the road. The doors of the opera house had been flung open and people were just starting to stream out over the stairs. Coachmen were moving along the line of coaches to return to the vehicles from where they had been visiting during the performance.

Lucius would be out on the stairs at some point, looking for the coach. They were a block and a half back in the queue. Once he reached the block the opera house sat on, Lucius would let Angelus know that the coach was there so he could collect Darla and Drusilla. He hoped that they weren't going to be long. Paulus was hunting under the Charles Bridge tonight and Andreas hoped to catch up with him. The lead horse shivered, no longer leaning on the harness, but ready to go to work, probably thinking of the hot bran mash that would be his reward at the end of the evening.

He straightened his hat and gloves, sitting up a bit straighter as he released the brake. There was a man standing at the intersection in a uniform, signaling the coaches to move up as space opened in front of the opera house. Andreas spied Lucius, waiting patiently as he approached. When it was his turn to cross the street, Lucius turned on his heel, like a little Prussian soldier, and entered the opera house. Andreas found it amusing. Paulus and Mathilde thought that Lucius was a bit full of himself, and he was, but Andreas wasn't moved to resentment.

By the time he pulled to a smooth stop in front of the opera house, Lucius was there to turn down the step and open the coach door while Angelus handed Darla and Drusilla in, leaving Mathilde to Lucius. He secured the step and the door and climbed up to take his post beside Andreas. He took something out from underneath his coat and laid it on the bench seat on his other side. He felt under the center of the bench seat for the large pistol that was holstered there, and then straightened, nodding to Andreas to signal him to drive.

“How was it?” Andreas asked, reverting to Czech. The ‘family' spoke English when they were being intimate. Lucius had led them in speaking Czech when they were being private. German was the only language that they had in common.

Lucius shrugged. “A lot of noise, and pretty costumes. It was in Italian,” he added.
“Am I driving them home?” he asked.

“Yes. Home,” he agreed.

It wasn't until Lucius jumped down to assist at the door that Andreas saw what he had dropped on the seat. It was a handful of blood red peonies wrapped in ribbons. It almost made him smile. He could guess whom the flowers were for.




William let himself out the kitchen door. The house was built on the upper end of a rectangular lot that was bounded on both sides by a five-foot wall. There was a covered walkway on the side of the house that ran back to the stables, built at a right angle to the house. The garden was an L shaped space with a long, narrow end on the side of the house where Willow and Dru's bedrooms were. A path bisected the open square of the garden behind the house and was further divided by a path that veered right to the stable and left to an arbor. The center of the intersecting paths featured the only viable piece of landscaping, a sundial on a pedestal surrounded by a bed of scarlet tulips that were black around the edges from frost.

His family's money came from tulips, or at least speculating in tulips in the seventeenth century when a single bulb from a rare or exotic variety could fetch three thousand guilders a bulb. The ancestor that made the killing was Sir Christopher Mordaunt, de-frocked priest, failed playwright, and would-be privateer who had made a fortune selling unharvested bulbs, getting out of the trade before the tulip crash of 1637. Most of his friends and business partners lost everything, while he managed to avoid the market collapse.

He walked to the access alley behind the house. The carriage house double doors were closed, and the alley appeared empty. He backtracked and let himself into the stables connected to the carriage house from the garden door. Looking into the carriage house, he saw the Brougham was in its place. The coach was gone, which was expected. He stood still for a moment, listening to the animals.

Horses were creatures of habit. The larger coach that Angelus had taken tonight required two horses. That left two horses and the two hacking ponies. They were a little unsettled by the absence of their stable mates, but not exhibiting any signs of fear or distress that he would expect if anyone had been prowling around in the stables. One of the ponies swung his head towards him, more curious than alarmed. He tossed his head, sniffing loudly, and then settled back down.

He checked the garden again, looking around in the area where he had seen someone moving. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a someone, and that they had been watching the house. His appearance at the window had startled them into motion.

Satisfied that no one was lurking about, he returned to the house, bolted the kitchen door and took the back stairs up to the second floor. He hadn't done much more than pull his boots on and grab a crossbow from his room before he had gone out to investigate. He put the crossbow away and got rid of his boots before returning to Willow's room.

She was in bed, as he had suggested. She had picked up the blanket from the floor and wrapped it around herself before getting in bed. He eyed the blanket wrapping. “I can only hope that you are naked under that.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Was anyone out there?” she asked.

“Earlier? Yes. They've gone now,” he didn't sound concerned about it. He was busy pulling his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it and unfastening his trousers. His clothes were discarded casually. She had picked up the blanket, returned the seat cushion to its place, finished her glass of wine, and hung her dressing robe and rinsed her shift in the sink while he was prowling around the garden.

Nude, he walked over to the fireplace to put another log on and rearrange the burning logs around it to ensure that the fire would burn long and evenly. When he was satisfied with that he came around to what Willow thought of as her side of the bed, near the door, and turned back the sheet and blanket, getting in beside her. He only unwrapped part of her blanket, enough to include himself inside of it until they were wrapped up in it together.

Willow wasn't sure what to make of it when he got settled. He smoothed her hair back from her face. She moved a little, trying to find a comfortable position in relation to his body and the blanket that was wrapped around both of them. He untangled his left arm from the blanket, tugging it up, higher, around her shoulders, his hand moving down her back as his right hand, under the blanket found her knee and guided it over his abdomen so that she was held snugly against his side, his shoulder available to rest her head on.

It was probably because he didn't breath that she never had a sense that she was too heavy, laying on him. There was no reminder in the rise and fall of his chest that his body was working against her weight. His hand on her back kept moving, from her shoulder to her raised hip, dipping into the vale of her waist, tracking it upward, over her rib cage, lightly squeezing her shoulder before smoothing her hair and repeating the motion, following her spine. If it was meant to be comforting, and she couldn't imagine that it was, it was failing. The blanket was woven in a windowpane pattern. The yard was soft, and the shifting of the textured pattern over her skin was bringing up gooseflesh.

She lifted her arm over his, curling it under her against his shoulder to prop her chin up on her hand. Her hair fell over her shoulder, pooling on the pillow beside his head, the two colors mixing, his ashy brown mingling with her natural light auburn. There was something smug and amused in his expression. He held her gaze as his hand moved down her spine, pausing briefly to press her into his side when he reached her hip, moving up, following the curve of her hip. She found herself holding her breath, anticipating the skin-tingling brush of his hand over her ribs.

“What is this?” she asked, curious, wary, not really trusting the mood he had been in since they had fought in the kitchen.

She found herself on her back. He shifted his weight, rolling her off of him, pulling the blanket that joined them off his shoulder as it became trapped beneath her. The hem of it fell half across her and he caught the edge of it in his fingers, shifting it teasingly against her skin.

“Seduction,” he explained with a small smile that acknowledged that seducing her was unnecessary. His eyes were on her body, giving serious attention to the pebbled texture of her skin, as he pushed the blanket away and ran his fingertips lightly over her breast and ribcage, his index finger tracing a line to her hipbone. The back of his hand grazed the curls at the juncture of her thighs.

“I would know you anywhere,” he said. “You could change your name, change the color of your hair, and I could pick your heartbeat out of a crowded room. You could douse yourself in perfume, and I'd still be able to smell you,” his head bent until his nose was touching her breastbone and he breathed her, eyes closing as he inhaled, his hand moving down her thigh, nudging her legs apart.

He turned his head to press his lips against the upper swell of her breast, dragging his lips over her skin, his tongue following. She tensed, recognizing the intent behind the caress. His tongue felt slightly rough. He was palpitating the blood vessels under her skin, stimulating the flow of blood. She understood that he probably wasn't thinking about hurting her, at least not hurting her a lot. His hand was moving up her thigh. She closed her eyes, waiting for the stinging sensation of his fangs sinking into her skin as his fingers parted her, dipping into the warm gulf where she was already wet.

Sometimes she reminded herself that the moisture that came from her body was a form of self-defense. It did not necessarily spring from desire, but simply from sufficient warning of imminent penetration. It was one of the things that she had discovered in Bristol. That desire wasn't necessary to produce the substance that eased the passage of a body part inside of her. His fingers collected the moisture, and he made a sound, deep in his throat that vibrated over his tongue against her skin, mocking her attempts to rationalize the sensation between her legs. His fingertips reached her clitoris with a caress that was enough like what his tongue was doing that the two were connected.

The lower half of her body was still tangled in the blanket. The texture of the yarns against her back and legs was a firm caress. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist, fighting the blanket to open her legs wider, to bend her knees to gain the leverage to press herself against his hand. His mouth left the upper swell of her breast, leaving the skin there a little numb. His hand slid under her neck to the back of her head, tangling in her hair until she opened her eyes.

His eyes were nearly incandescent, unearthly, eating light in darkness. No words passed his lips. He wasn't quiet, or given to moments of introspection, and there was in the deliberation of his fingers, working her towards a climax, a certain ruthless quality that was not unappealing. He kicked the blankets and sheet back, gracefully moving to kneel between her legs, freeing them. In that moment when he was hanging over her, he could have done anything, tightened his fingers in her hair to pull her head back, exposing her throat while his cock slid inside of her or bent his head to her breast to finish what he had begun there.

He kissed her. That was all. He kissed her mouth, sucking on her lower lip until her lips parted for him, until she was kissing him back. His hand didn't tighten in her hair. It cupped the back of her head and then he moved it out from under her, catching a few stray hairs that clung to his hand as his fingers moved over her face, tracing the contours of her face. It wasn't an artful caress. His lips sought the spaces his fingers touched. Her hair was too tangled in his fingers, tickling where it brushed her skin, getting caught under his lips where he kissed her. She ignored it until a strand of her hair tickled her nose, and then she moved her head to avoid his lips, trying the brush the annoying strand of her hair away.

He brushed her hand away from her face, and then the strands of her hair, finding them and smoothing them away until she caught his hand, sliding her fingers through his as he braced on his elbow.

His head bowed to her, his nose brushing hers as his eyes drifted shut, and she felt her throat tighten as he breathed her again, until his lips were grazing hers between deep breaths, nipping at hers in soft lip-biting kisses. Her tongue stole out to touch his lower lip as he found a new spot to nibble on, and he lifted his head, eyes opening.

She turned her head just enough to reach the corner of his mouth, feeling his lips part for her as the tip of her tongue slid over that neglected corner. His fingers tightened on hers, squeezing lightly, stretching his palm and fingers inside of her hand. They kissed until they were both breathing hard, she out of necessity, and he from something as urgent as her need to breathe. He kissed the corner of her mouth and her throat, his fingers sliding inside of her, making her clutch at his shoulders and run her fingers through his hair as her hips rose to meet him. He kissed his way down to her abdomen, his tongue dipping into her navel in a prelude to a more intimate caress that made her stomach clench, and then he was lifting her to his mouth, his hands moving under her hips, slipping around to seek her breasts, and the rough stroke of his tongue across her clitoris had her arching up to grind herself against his mouth.

It felt wrong. The way he was touching her was at variance to her reaction. He was being tender and gentle and she was shoving her cunt in his face. The strangeness of the day was catching up to her.

He felt the change in her as she started to withdraw, emotionally, mentally, shutting herself in one of the spaces in her head reserved for bad moments when she couldn't cope with what was happening to her. He did the only thing he could to reach her, savoring the feeling of sinking into her as he covered her with his body, letting her take more of his weight, knowing that she needed the reassurance of him pressed against her. His thumb stroked her cheek as he moved over her, in her. “Stay with me, Willow,” he urged. “Be with me,” he whispered in her ear.

There was something in his voice that made her chest ache. It wasn't fair or right. She wanted to turn her head to the wall, to lose herself in the nothingness of a moment that she had the power to make one-sided. He was touching her face and whispering to her, and her mind, floating in a hazy sea of alcohol and headache medication, might have numbed her to his appeal. She only had to keep her eyes closed and let the dizziness that was lurking overwhelm her.

She could feel herself moving with his body and hands as he guided her. A touch on the inside of her right knee, adjusting the angle of her hips, lifting her knee until it was cradling his hip, her foot pressed into the slightly rough weave of the blanket that was under her body. He wasn't selfish when it came to pleasure, though she didn't necessarily see it that way. Sometimes he made her feel more like a doll than Dru ever did; a windup toy for his personal amusement. She was almost startled to find that he was outpacing her now. Her hands moved to his back, feeling the tension there as he drove into her more purposefully.

It brought tears to her eyes as he groaned, pushing his face into her hair, unwittingly trapping her hair, and pulling it enough to be distracting. She closed her eyes, kissing his throat because it was what she could reach, holding him as he stiffened in her arms, resisting his own climax at the last minute, as if it had just reached him that she wasn't there. But, she was. The knot of tension that released wasn't between her legs. It was between each shuddering beat of her heart.