The Vampire Narcise (Regency Draculia 3)

Traveling to Wales with Giordan Cale?

Narcise would have run back to Cezar first.

London, a week later

"You're a very unusual vampire, to be sure, Giordan Cale."

He looked up from where he'd been casually feeding on Rubey's warm, creamy shoulder as a bit of foreplay and withdrew his fangs gently. Swallowing the last essence of sweetness, he smiled slightly and soothed the marks with his tongue and lips.

"In what way?" Giordan replied, settling back against the arm of the divan.

Rubey, who was half reclining on the opposite end of that furnishing, made a fetching picture. She had strawberry-blond hair that curled around her face when not restrained, and where one could occasionally find a thread of gray. Tonight she wore it in a loose tail gathered at her nape, little curls flirting with her temples and ears. Her lushly curved but slender body reminded one of a peach in color as well as in taste, and Giordan fancied she even had a permanent hint of peach brandy in her essence. It was, after all, her favorite libation, and he kept her supplied with an excellent selection of it. Her face was more striking than classically beautiful with wise green-gray eyes that tipped up at the sides and very high, sculpted cheekbones.

He'd never seen her in anything but the most expensive, fashionable clothing, and tonight was no exception. She wore silky pale green with darker green and yellow ribbons that gathered up the bodice of her dressing gown. Thanks to him, said bodice was loosened, exposing a vast expanse of breast and one marred shoulder, where thin trickles of blood gathered in the hollow of her collarbone.

"Why, and how long would it take me to count the ways," she replied with a woeful shake of the head and the lilt of the Irish. Her eyes sparkled with wit and intelligence.

Giordan gave a brief smile and thought about loosening those ribbons at her bodice even more, but realized he wasn't all that interested in pursuing that avenue tonight.

"Perhaps I could trouble you to name just one way," he replied mildly, his thoughts slipping from the conversation to...other topics that, generally, he preferred to leave alone in the darkness. Where they belonged.

He rose from the divan, clad only in shirtsleeves and the current male fashion of pantaloons, and went to the cabinet. But of course they were in her private apartments, in a separate building from the pleasure house and the rest of her staff-most of whom were otherwise privately engaged as well.

"Very well," she replied, and he felt her eyes on him as he poured a glass of whiskey.

There were two small decanters of ruby-fresh blood from which he could add to the drink, but he wasn't certain where they'd originated, and he dared not take the chance.

Ever since what he'd come to think of as the After Hell, he'd had to be very careful about where and on whom he fed.

A lot of other things had changed as well.

"You switched the mousetraps," Rubey mused as he poured her a small glass of the peach brandy.

"And that makes me unusual? The poor creatures were being crushed in the neck by the springs of the traps," he replied, handing her the drink.

"Aye, and why should it matter to you? The mice don't belong in my place, and I'm going to see that if they trespass, they pay the price," she replied tartly.

"A bit bloodthirsty, are we?" he asked, aware of a niggling discomfort with her choice of topic. He was different now, and even Dimitri didn't know about it all.

He just thought Giordan's feeding preferences had changed...but it was so much more than that.

"But now the new traps, they let the little bastards just get captured until they're set loose," Rubey said. "To weasel their way into someone else's house."

"Better that than yours," Giordan replied, and considered that it might be a good diversion to loosen those ribbons at her bodice after all. He settled back down on the divan much closer to her this time, his thigh lined up along where her skirts angled off the sofa.

"And then there's the way you feed," she said, eyeing him closely. "Sure as the day's long, you're not like any other vampire I've ever met. Excepting Dimitri, of course, but he don't feed on anyone anyway."

"I am discriminating in my choice of libation," Giordan agreed, sliding his fingers up to the ribbons and filtering his fingers through the loose knots. "Aren't you?" he asked with a smile.

But of course, Rubey didn't cast up her accounts if she partook of a piece of steak or a chicken leg....

He could still remember those black, bleak days when he hadn't realized what was happening, and he hadn't understood why he'd feed and then no sooner had he finished than it all came furiously, violently back up again. His mouth and throat had been scorched dry, his belly sore and weak from the constant purging. The taste of bile-laden blood, rushing back up through his throat and burning into his mouth and nose, was a disgusting, degrading sensation he'd never forget.

Thank the Fates for Drishni and Kritanu, helping him understand how he'd changed. How he must have answered the voice that said in his head: Choose.

How he'd found light after all the darkness. Soothing, peaceful, warm...after so many years of darkness.

If it hadn't been for them, he'd have gone mad.

More mad than he'd already been, after Narcise.

Rubey made a moue of distaste. "Sure and it's ironic, the way I run a house of pleasure for them who drink blood when the very thought of a bloody steak or the leg of a hen makes me ill. My pappa couldn't ever understand why I was happy with only potatoes and greens."

Giordan might have replied but his shift toward the ever-expanding exposure of her bodice was interrupted by a knock at the door.

"Blast it," Rubey said, disappointment clearly in her tones. "What is it?" she called.

The door eased open and one of her servants-a large brute of a mortal man named Eduardo, whom Giordan didn't wholly trust-stepped in holding a small silver tray. "A message has just arrived for Mr. Cale," he said.

Giordan took the note, which was marked with Corvindale's seal, and broke into it. "Meeting here tonight with Wood-more. Voss still in city. Come."

He closed it up, a myriad of emotions running through him-the foremost and strongest being pain. Darkness. But Giordan drew in a deep, steadying breath and after a moment, his red vision and the pounding, trammeling feeling eased. His fingers relaxed.

There was a time when he'd have had no qualms, no hesitation about snapping the neck of someone like Woodmore-particularly since, several months back, he found the man in the rooms Giordan had let in London, preparing to hang his heart on a stake. Some sort of gray-black smoke was trickling from the fireplace and Woodmore was caught off guard by Giordan's wakefulness during the day and, he learned later, a malfunction of some sort of smoke explosion.