A Hidden Fire: Elemental Mysteries Book 1 (16 page)

Beatrice panted a little, and he could still feel the blood rushing through her veins.

“What?” she asked in confusion.

“Gavin and a few others.”  He swallowed, ignoring the low burn in his throat.  “They’re watching us.”  He closed his eyes, continuing his deceit.  “They think we’re together, remember?  We should leave now, but make sure we don’t give ourselves away.”

“Don’t give—oh,” she let out a sharp breath.  “Right.  They think…right.”  She swallowed and he tried to ignore the acid note in her voice.  “Wouldn’t want to give them the wrong impression, would we?”

He hesitated before answering, “No.”

He lingered at her ear as she calmed her breathing, brushing a kiss across her flushed cheek before he drew away from her.

Giovanni avoided her eyes as he pulled out his wallet, leaving more than enough to cover the drinks on the coffee table.  He stood, holding out his hand to help Beatrice up.  She took it and he could feel the stiffness in her fingers.  Nonetheless, he pulled her to him, tucking her under his arm as they made their way out of the building.

He felt her stiffen as he nodded toward Gavin in the corner, and he hoped that her expression didn’t give them away.  He couldn’t risk a glance.  She tried to pull away from him when they got out the door, but he still held her close.

“Watching,” he said.  “Someone is still watching.”

Giovanni held her small body under his for as long as he could, feeling the fleeting comfort of the contact he knew would soon be denied.  He opened the car door slowly, finally releasing her as she got in.  He walked to the driver’s side, anticipating her sharp rebuke as soon as they were alone, but she was silent as they pulled onto the main road.  After a few moments, her silence bothered him more than her anger.

“We’re not far from my grandmother’s house.  Could you just drop me off there?” she asked with careful nonchalance.  “I’ll drop by the house tomorrow and get my things.”

“Beatrice—”

“I’m sure my grandmother’s wondering where I am.  I’m usually not out this late, even on nights I work.”

His mind raced, trying to find something to say that would break through the coldness in the air, but he couldn’t.  Taking their kiss too far had been his mistake.

“Of course,” he said quietly.  “I’ll let Caspar know to expect you sometime tomorrow.”

She was silent again when he glanced at her profile.  Her face was impassive, and her eyes were shadowed as she stared into the night.

“The notes about the Lincoln documents are on the desk.  Since I found them, I’m going to take some time off.  I need to help my grandmother with some things.”

He pushed back the protest that sprang to his lips and gritted his teeth.  “Of course.  How many days do you need?”

She shrugged.  “I’ll let Caspar know.”

As they pulled up to her grandmother’s house, he saw her gather her purse and release her seatbelt.  She opened the car door and exited the Mustang as soon as it had stopped.  He looked over at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Beatrice…” he began, trying to forget the feel of her lips against his.

She paused, bending down to meet his eyes, as if daring him to protest.

He opened his mouth, but words escaped him when he met her dark stare.

“Good night, Dr. Vecchio.”

She shut the door firmly.  He watched her walk to the small house and go inside then glanced down the street, looking for the surveillance vehicle that was supposed to be watching.  Noting the license plate of the unobtrusive minivan parked down the block, he leaned his head back and sighed.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her lips against his and her sweet taste.  Her body fit against his perfectly; he indulged himself in the memory of her small breasts pressed against his chest and the feel of her hands stroking his jaw.  While he enjoyed sex with the women he usually fed from, he never pursued any sort of personal connection with them farther than a shared, fleeting pleasure. 

With Beatrice, he realized the lines were beginning to blur.  Reminding himself of his purpose in pursuing the girl, he shoved down the more tender feelings that threatened to surface.

Giving one last glance to the light that filled the room on the second floor, he revved the engine to a low growl and pulled away.

Chapter Twelve

Houston, Texas

February 2003

“
Y
ou’re sulking.”

“Am not.”

“Yes, you are.”

Her grandmother eyed her from across the kitchen table.  Isadora set down her book and looked at her granddaughter with a raised eyebrow.

Beatrice looked down at her toast.  “How was your date with Caspar?”

Isadora smiled.  “It was wonderful.  It would have been much more pleasant if we hadn’t spent half the night talking about you and Giovanni sulking in your respective corners.”

“Hmm,” she hummed.  She couldn’t suppress the satisfaction she felt hearing that Caspar said Giovanni was sulking, too.

She hadn’t seen him for two weeks.  Not since the night she was forced to face the hard truth that Giovanni, polite and cultured as he seemed, sucked on strange women’s necks for sustenance and probably did a lot of other things she didn’t want to think about.  The night she had been informed that she was viewed as a kind of property or pet in his world, no matter how he tried to sugarcoat that fact.

The night he’d kissed her.  And she’d kissed him back.

And what a kiss it was,
she thought with a sigh.

Remembering it was enough to raise her temperature.  The way his lips had moved against hers, and the barely perceptible shiver she’d felt from him when her tongue touched his fangs.  His arms.  The heat.  His hands on her back ...she shook her head and tried to push back the memory, but she could feel herself blushing as she sat at the table with her grandmother.

She cleared her throat.  “I doubt Giovanni is sulking.  Caspar just likes to pester him.”

“How long as he worked for Gio?  Caspar talks about him like he’s known him his whole life.”

She didn’t know the whole of Caspar’s story, but she knew Giovanni said they’d been together since Caspar was a boy.

“You’d have to ask him.  I think he may have worked for Gio’s family.”  There, that was vague enough.  She’d let Caspar fill in whatever details he wanted.

While her initial promise to set Caspar and her grandmother up on a blind date had been in jest, the more Beatrice had thought about it, the more it made sense.  When she’d asked Caspar about it, he’d been enthusiastic at her attempt at matchmaking.  They’d gone out the night before and Isadora was glowing.

“Well, he’s lovely.  And has such a wonderful sense of humor.”

“Unlike his boss,” she muttered as she drank her coffee.  She may have said it, but she knew it wasn’t true.  Though he had a dry, acerbic wit, Giovanni’s humor was one of the things she liked most about him.

And she couldn’t deny she liked him.  Though she had been attracted to him from the beginning, the more she learned, the more she was drawn to him.  He could be so aloof, but she was beginning to see the “opposite of frosty” side Carwyn had told her about weeks ago.

That kiss, she thought again as her grandmother chattered on about her date.

“Beatrice, you should go back to work.  You’re avoiding him.  Does this have anything to do with feelings you may have developed—”

“Nope,” she lied, cutting her grandmother off.  “No feelings.  He’s my boss.  I’m just taking some time off.  I have some projects that need my attention, Grandma.  And I don’t want you and Caspar gossiping, okay?  I’m just…taking some time off.  That’s all.”

She gulped down the rest of her coffee, ignoring the almost laser-like stare she knew her grandmother was giving her.

“Well, aren’t you full of shit!  Also, Caspar and I will gossip about anything we please.”  She smiled sweetly at Beatrice, who finished up her toast and stood to leave.  “Working tonight?  It’s—”

“Wednesday.  Yeah, night hours.”  She had taken the previous Wednesday night off like a coward but refused to avoid it any more.  She’d just suck it up and ignore her conflicting feelings for the man…vampire…whatever.  After all, she was a professional.

“Have a nice day, Mariposa.  I’ll see you tomorrow.  I have a date with Caspar tonight.”

“Cool.  Have fun.  Don’t do anything…you know what?  I don’t even want to know or imagine.  Bye!”  She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and walked to the door.

She spotted the minivan parked down the street as she backed out of the driveway.  It followed her down the street, always keeping that careful distance she’d become accustomed to.  At first the ever-present family car had freaked her out, but when she noticed Giovanni giving them a satisfied glance when he saw them one night, she knew it had been his doing. 

First, it had pissed her off.  Then, it had freaked her out.  But the more she thought about how many things had changed in her world, and the danger that Giovanni and Carwyn had hinted at, the more the thought she could get used to having someone keeping an eye on her safety.

She glanced in her rear view mirror as she took the exit for the university. 
Yep,
she thought,
still there
.

She wasn’t dumb; she’d known Giovanni had an ulterior motive for hiring her, but she was also willing to put up with it if he could really find her father.  It wasn’t until the letters had arrived that the gravity of the danger she was in began to sink in.

If her father had been killed because of something he found out about these books, who was to say her life wasn’t in danger, too?

“What the hell kind of mess did you get me into, Dad?” she wondered for the thousandth time as she pulled into one of the crowded lots.  She wondered if her father even knew he had put her in danger.  She wondered if he thought about her at all.

Every time she asked about her father, Giovanni simply said he was still waiting to hear.  From who or what, she didn’t know. 

By the time she walked to the library for her shift, she had successfully managed to shove all thoughts of Dr. Giovanni Vecchio from her brain.  This was immediately ruined when she got up to the fifth floor and saw Dr. Christiansen and Charlotte bent over a now familiar shipping box she knew would have a return address from the University of Ferrara in Italy.

Dr. Christiansen looked up with a smile.  “Another letter arrived!”

“Of course it did,” she muttered.

She set her bag down behind the reference desk and walked over to look.  She glanced at the parchment, but quickly grabbed the notes that accompanied them.

“I’ll go make a couple of copies for the next flood of professors,” Beatrice said as she took the notes—which
she knew would include a translation—back to the copy and imaging room.

Hours later she sat in the empty reading room, perusing the translation of the fourth Pico letter.  Word of the new document hadn’t spread yet, so the reading room was deserted as she looked over her notes.  It was another letter from the scholar, Angelo Poliziano.  He talked more about the mystical books in Signore Andros’s library, some trip to Paris Pico was taking, and asked after the little boy, but it was the third section which caught her attention.

I will not linger in this letter, but hope to hear a response from you soon regarding the matter of G.  Do not think that your unsigned correspondence has gone unnoticed.  Your sonnets have been read in the very rooms of Lorenzo’s home.  While they are beautiful work—some of your best—I beg of you to be more discreet in your admiration.  You are fortunate so many ladies share the fair skin and dark hair of your muse, as their generality may yet prevent you from becoming embroiled in another scandal.

She shook her head, scribbling nonsense in the margins of her notebook.

Was this truly Giovanni?
she asked herself as she finished the letter.  Friend of Lorenzo de Medici?  Philosopher at age twenty-three and contemporary of some of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance?  A poet who longed for another man’s wife?

The man who seemed so cold and yet kissed her with such passion?

She closed her eyes and forced herself to think with her brain instead of her hormones.

When Beatrice had gone through her darkest teenage years, she had turned to almost anyone who seemed to offer a little warmth.  Now, she shuddered to think how foolish she had been and how self-destructive.  She had forced herself to take a break from the opposite sex since she decided that dark and destructive weren’t nearly as attractive as she had thought they were at seventeen.

But she didn’t like being alone, and she had the same desires that most twenty-two-year-old women had.  A part of her thrilled at the idea of her interest in Giovanni being returned, but the other part of her had the cold realization that a relationship with a five hundred-year-old vampire, who probably wanted to drink her blood more than he wanted to cuddle, was the textbook definition of unhealthy.

On second thought, she was pretty sure most textbooks didn’t cover that one.

She heard the door to the reading room open, tucked the notes in her bag, and braced herself before she looked up.

And Carwyn stood in front of her.

“Surprise!”

She glanced at the smiling vampire before her eyes darted to the doors he had just walked through.

“Oh, Count Stuffy della Prissypants is not with me.  He had to venture to the fair city of New York to negotiate purchase on a certain prize his awesome assistant found.”  Carwyn clucked his tongue at her and winked.  “And you didn’t even tell me.  I would have taken you to a horror movie, a really bad one.”

She mustered up a smile.  “It's good to see you.  I wasn’t expecting—”

“No, I expect you weren’t from the sad, little look on your face.  But cheer up!”  He pulled a chair over and sat next to the desk.  “I’m all yours for the night.  And I won’t even pretend to transcribe an old book so I can stare at you longingly from the corner of my eye.”  He kicked his feet up on the desk.  “Thank God none of the boring professors are here.”

“Carwyn,” she said with a smile.  “Have I told you lately that you’re kind of awesome?”

He winked.  “No, but I’m always game to hear it.  Forget the Italian, darling Beatrice.  Run away with me.  We’ll go to Hawaii.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’ll make us a cave by the sea where the sun won’t touch me and we’ll spend every night swimming naked and drinking fruity drinks while we make the fishes blush.”

She giggled and shook her head at his mischievous grin.  “You…are something else.”

His grin suddenly turned sweet as he looked at her.

“As are you, darling girl. As are you.”

He opened his mouth again, as if to say something, and she felt a faint stirring in the air, but finally, his grin returned and the tension seemed to scatter.

“Could you really make a cave?”

“What?”  He looked surprised by her question.  “Oh, yes.  Of course.  Volcanic rock is very soft.”

She shook her head.  “That’s so crazy.  I wish Gio would tell me about that stuff.” 

“Well, what do you want to know?  No one here but vampires and crazy people.”

She snorted.  “Well,” she thought, “what can all the different vampires do?  There’s four kinds, right?  Like the four elements?  You can make caves, Gio can make fire—”

“Well, strictly speaking—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved a hand, “static electricity, manipulation of the elements, got that part.  So, it’s probably the same with all of them then.”  She frowned.  “How do you know what element you’ll be?  Do you get to pick?  Is it something that happens right away when you get…”

“Sired?  Or turned.  Those are the proper terms in our world.”  Carwyn sighed and leaned back in his chair.  “With my children—”

“Your children?”

“Yes, I call them sons and daughters.  It depends on the sire, but immortal families can be very much like human families.  We just tend to look a bit closer in age,” he said with a laugh.

“How do you—I mean how do you become…”  She paused, unsure of how to phrase her question.

“Most of the common myths are true about that,” Carwyn said.  “When I sire a child, almost all of their blood is drained, either by me or someone else.  The important thing is that the majority of the blood is replaced with my own.  That is what creates the connection.”

“And what
is
the connection?  Do you…control them or something?”

“Sadly, no,” he laughed.  “I can’t compel them to do my bidding.”  Carwyn paused for a moment and a wistful look came to his eyes.  

“It’s very much the way I remember feeling about my human children, to be honest.  Only much more…intense, as everything is.  It’s not an easy decision, choosing to make a child, and it has such long-term consequences.  If nothing violent happens to myself or my children, we will be a family for eternity.  It’s a very strong commitment to make to another being and, as a consequence, I do have quite a lot of influence over my children.  We’re very close.”