might be in order.”
“First?” he asked, with just enough anxiety to make her smile.
She lowered her head to his nipple and licked it. “Probably.”
****
“How did you become a vampire?”
He’d thought she was finally asleep. He’d watched in fascination as her long, tangled eyelashes had flickered and fallen over her flushed cheek and she’d drifted into unconsciousness. He’d meant to watch her until she awoke, because this night of drinking and fucking that he’d finally achieved with her had done nothing to end his obsession. On the contrary, she fascinated him all the more: the brash, look-after-number-one and make-a-fast-buck attitude, which, of course, he thoroughly approved of, hid a far deeper, compassionate and touchingly vulnerable soul. She’d been hurt in her young life, physically and emotionally, but from sheer strength of character had dragged herself through it without losing who she was. And the fun and tragedy inextricably bound in her personality drew him like a moth to a flame.
Aside from which, she was a rather wonderful fuck. All that beauty and all that passion, excitingly eager and inventive—after they’d passed the first delectably straight bout on the living room floor—inflamed him with an intensity he couldn’t recall ever before. Or at least not for a very long time. She wasn’t the most experienced lover he’d ever had, but she’d been happy to try whatever he threw at her, and he’d made sure she knew exactly how much pleasure she gave him.
She’d even let him drink from her again, not once but twice. The first time, she’d been half hesitant, half eager as he’d asked silent permission, but the second time, there’d been no inhibitions at all. In the throes of orgasm, she’d simply turned her head to expose her throat to him, gasping out incoherently something that sounded very like “Please.”
He was a vampire. Of course, he’d taken what was offered, even though he knew it was too much, that she’d feel a trifle weak the following day. He’d taught her to love it, to associate it with the ecstasy of sexual climax. And that, he thought, was a damned good night’s work.
After so much enthusiastic sex and bloodletting, it wasn’t really surprising that she’d fallen asleep. And despite his vow to watch her and learn from her dreams, he’d begun to drift off into the semiconscious state that passed for sleep in a vampire of his age. Until she asked her question: “How did you become a vampire?”
She was looking straight into his eyes, her own exhausted, happy, but insatiably curious.
He said, “A beautiful vampiress bit me and made me.”
She touched his cheek, ran her hand slowly down his face to his shoulder and arm, as if trying to learn who he was from touch. Under her sensitive fingers, his body stirred yet again. “Ailis,” she remembered. “Who were you?”
“When I was alive? Nobody important. My father was a poor Highland farmer, fought and died with the Jacobite army in 1745. Afterward, in the oppression, my mother and I came south to Glasgow to get work. It was a rich city in those days—the height of the tobacco trade with America.”
Her eyes laughed, half admiring, half teasing. “You were a ‘tobacco lord’?”
He hesitated. He’d played the part so often over the centuries that sometimes he almost believed he’d been a rich merchant or a wronged aristocrat. He certainly never went out of his way to prove that he hadn’t been either of those things. He could look haughty and superior with the best, and she was already inclined to be impressed.
He said, “No, I was a low-paid factory hand until I discovered I could supplement my income by stealing from the tobacco lords. I was a pickpocket when I died.”
Her eyes widened at his stark words, but she looked more intrigued than disappointed. “What happened?”
He shifted restlessly, and she followed, fitting her body into his, and somehow his hand was full of her breast. “I was ill and too slow for the job that day, but I wanted the money, and some bastard stabbed me for my pains. I lay there dying in the darkness for what seemed like hours. Then Ailis came.” He smiled. “I thought she was an angel, wondered how come I was going to get to heaven rather than hell. And then she bit me and gave me back—not life, but existence.”
“Were you happy with that? Did you like being a vampire?”
“Sure. My mother was dead by that time, but I used to go and