“You too. Have fun in jury duty.”
He chuckled and closed the office door behind him.
THREE
SINJIN
If I closed my eyes, I could hear the blood thundering in her veins as her heart beat fast with anticipation.
“Will it hurt?”
“I will put an influence on you to take away the pain,” I replied.
Still with my eyes closed, I traced a finger up her throat, following the line of her carotid artery, feeling the flow of blood with only a thin layer of skin separating me from it.
“Oh, Sinjin…” She moaned my name, and it was the voice of my beloved tempest.
Unable to wait any longer and spurred by the sound of that deep and sultry voice, I sank my teeth into her throat, taking the pain from her as I did so.
“Sinjin…” Without the pain of being bitten, the sensation of being drunk by a vampire could be wonderfully intimate, and her voice—the voice of Bryn—was thick with pleasure.
But the taste spoiled the illusion.
I opened my eyes to try to recapture the moment, for the woman (Denise—a name I had never liked) looked as much like Bryn as she sounded like her. Of all the women I had found who physically resembled my lost love, Denise was the one who most sounded like the wildcat who had stolen my heart years ago, adding another important piece to the puzzle with which I was fooling myself. But the blood was always a giveaway. No one tasted like Bryn. No one I had found yet, at least. I supposed I would keep searching as there was no other option.
It is something that always seems to surprise mortals, but to a vampire, blood is blood. There is no gourmet selection, no hemoglobin-friendly wine list, no vampires saying, ‘Do you have the AB negative? The ’53 I think’. Such does not happen. I am afraid you all taste quite the same to us.
Except for Bryn.
Perhaps it was owing to the fact that she was an Elemental—though I had sampled others of her kind and found them to be nothing special. Perhaps it was simply because I loved her and the exquisite taste of her blood was all in my head. No, such could not be the case because her blood had also allowed me to go about in the daylight. Whatever the reason, the realization remained the same—no woman could compare to Bryn. Try though I did to find one who could.
I should, at this point, stress that, for all this talk of ‘lost loves’ and so on, my hellion was not dead. She was very much alive. But, quite unfortunately, I was dead to her. Of course, to be tiresomely literal, as a vampire I am always dead, not only to her but to everyone. But such is not what I meant. I meant the phrase in a much more metaphorical sense. I was dead and I was dead to her.
Bryn and I had parted company some ten years ago. Her choice, not mine.
I pulled back from the woman’s throat, licking my lips clean of her blood.
“You don’t have to stop, Sinjin.” Some humans have a positive fetish for being drunk by vampires. It can be very unhealthy for them (in fact fatal) and it requires a certain amount of self-control on the part of the vampire.
“No. I do not want to hurt you, Bryn.” The word was out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
“Denise,” she corrected me.
“Of course. My apologies.” I got up from the couch on which we had been lying together, turning away from her, not wanting her to see the sadness in my eyes. Or the weakness.
“You can call me Bryn if you want.”
“That would be ridiculous, would it not?”
“You can call me anything you like.”
I turned back to find that she had, with impressive swiftness, disrobed and now stood naked before me. No wonder I had lighted on this young woman. She really did look like Bryn; the honey brown hair; big blue eyes; athletic, honed body. Well, she was almost like Bryn, but not quite.
“You can have me, if you want.”
I nodded. “That is accurate.”
It was sweet of her to offer, but having drunk her blood, I could now exercise some control over her, and she would do as I asked. If I were to ask. But, I would not.
I will not say the thought did not cross my mind. Vampire I may be, but I was still a man, and standing before me was the most desirable woman I had ever seen. More accurately; standing before me was a facsimile of the most desirable woman I had ever seen. This Denise looked like Bryn, sounded like Bryn, for all I knew she would make love like Bryn. But she was not Bryn.
“Get dressed.”
There had been no one since Bryn. Not for ten years now. For a vampire, ten years can seem like the blinking of an eye, but let me assure you that, vampire or not, ten years without sex, without love, does not seem like the blinking of an eye. So many times I had gone out with the express intention of picking up a woman and screwing her brains out—such would not be difficult; I was unnecessarily handsome, charming, charismatic, physically superb and stallion-like where it counted. So many times I had considered taking the next logical step with one of the parade of Bryn-a-likes I had found in the last decade. Most, like Denise, had made their own feelings on the subject clear. I wanted to (part of me really wanted to), but something always held me back.
It was foolish. It was not as if Bryn was living in austere celibacy (the thought of her with another man made red rage flash through my mind), but I could not see myself with a woman other than my tempest. Even in her absence she had gelded me.
But I could have it no other way for the truth was that from the moment Bryn and I had come together, there was no other woman for me. And that had not changed just because we had parted.
I would drink from other women—yes. Such was a necessity for a vampire, but drinking blood for my survival was as far as I would go.
In this self-restraint, I was very much at odds to my surroundings. As Denise and I left my state room and walked through the corridors of the cruise ship, I could not help being aware of the suffusion of sexual activity all around.
Vampire senses are particularly potent and I could hear, through the cabin doors, the rhythmic breathing, the moaned names, the growls and grunts of lust and the fierce smack of flesh on flesh. In fact, because there was little around here in the way of propriety, I also caught sight, through open doors, of writhing bodies, each room seeming to detail a different page of the Kama Sutra; one on one, one on two, two on one; three, four, five to a bed. One room seemed to have an open-door policy; join in if you happened to be passing.
Such sexual promiscuity was not confined to the rooms; we passed a couple who had apparently been too impatient to find a bed and decided the wall would suffice, while a couch in one of the lounges was hosting a tangled three-way. The air was thick with the smell of sex; the scent of pheromones blended with sweat and massage oil. You could taste the arousal in the back of your throat. With me going through the longest period of abstinence in my adult life, it was a miracle I did not burst. Instead, I quite wanted to weep.
But this was day to day life onboard my flagship.
Yes, my days living upon the seas were a far cry from the life I once led in the stately home of Kinloch Kirk upon the Scottish coast, when the Queen of the Underworld was still alive and still keeping the peace. Now things were… different.
When Bryn demanded I leave Kinloch, I was at a loss as to what to do with my life. I had never been a man well-suited to inactivity, but I had become accustomed to just that once Bryn banished me from my home, my love and my daughter, Rowan. Just the thought of my little one made my heart feel as if it were in a vice.