Dark Studies (Arcaneology) (7 page)

“Steffen?” she rasped.

“What do you want?”

He settled the tip of his cock between the lips of her sex, just resting there.

“Please take me!”

Her lover chuckled. He teased her a moment, then pushed inside to the hilt. Bending over her again, he whispered into her ear, “Don’t hold back.”

Grace rolled her hips and rocked against him. His growl encouraged her. When he reached around to pinch her nipples, she let out a strangled sound, and as she moved faster Steffen found her rhythm and met it. Muscles tensed as she concentrated on the building pleasure, reaching for it, and at last she screamed her release.

It had barely begun to fade when his fingers left her nipples and slipped between her legs to flick over her bud while he continued to slide in and out. The orgasm flared again, higher this time, making her writhe so hard he had to press in deep and stay there or else risk slipping out altogether. He held still until she began to settle down. Then he started again, not letting the orgasm end.

Grace turned her head to one side and choked, “God, Steffen, please!”

“Please what?”

She had no idea what she was begging for. Did she want him to stop or to go on forever?

“Tell me what you want.” He slowed so she was conscious of every inch moving inside her.

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

He let out a startled laugh. Straightening, he grasped her hips with both hands and pulled her in counterpoint to his quickening thrusts. He pushed deep, almost hard enough to hurt, and suddenly fell still as his cock twitched in release.

When he withdrew, she crumpled and made a soft, purring sound. Steffen chuckled as he climbed onto the bed, stretched out, and gathered her to him. Warm and limp, she snuggled in to his body.

Afterglow fogged her mind. Grace was content to drift, but Angie needed to think. This was not what they had negotiated. Sometimes, in the middle of a session, the client discovered unexpected desires and veered off course. The trick was to know whether to guide the scene back to what was originally intended or to follow the client’s lead and see where it went. What should she do in this case? Steffen had asked for a certain type of woman. Perhaps she should continue to be that woman and react in character to what had just happened.

With one fingertip, Grace drew meaningless patterns over Steffen’s chest. He stirred.

“You’ve never done that before,” she said.

He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “Didn’t you like it?”

Her face flushed. “You know I did.”

“Then…?”

“Is that what you want? All the time?”

He was quiet for a while. She waited as he considered the question.

“No,” he mused, “I just needed it tonight.”

“Maybe…,” she began. He raised his head to give her a questioning look, and she hesitated, suddenly embarrassed. “Maybe we could do it again. Not always. But…sometimes.”

She heard the smile in his voice when he answered, “Yes.”

After that, they talked about other things. Idle, intimate conversation. The night went by before they knew it, and at last he said what she least wanted to hear.

“It’s almost dawn.”

Grace turned her face and pressed it against his shoulder to stifle a protest. It would do no good. The dawn could not be stopped, and with it he would leave her. His life would fall away to wherever it went when darkness fled the sky. Steffen eased her out of his arms and got up long enough to put on a pair of jeans, then returned to the bed.

“I’ll stay with you a while,” she told him. He had rented the room for two nights so he wouldn’t have to hurry to his own stronghold at the rising of the sun. “But I won’t be here when you wake. My flight leaves at noon.”

“You and your gallivanting,” he murmured.

“If you’re going to write books on travel, you sort of have to do it.” They had decided Grace would be a travel writer, to give them a reason for meeting so infrequently.

“I know.” He touched a kiss to the top of her head.

As the life drained out of his body, Grace stretched up to whisper into his ear, “Dream of me.”

Two days later, Angie received an e-mail. Just one word:
Perfect
.

Chapter Six

Some people just won’t take no for an answer. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes it’s psychotic.

—Dick O’Rourke, radio talk show host

Professor Benotti’s office was barely more than a broom closet, so cluttered with books and souvenirs of his travels that navigating to and from his desk nearly always resulted in a minor avalanche. Perched on the one chair she was able to excavate, Angie waited for her adviser to finish looking over her latest dissertation proposal.

Benotti leaned forward and tipped his head to look at his computer screen through the bottom half of his bifocals, then drew back and ducked his chin to look through the top half. Every so often he would switch again. Finally, he took the glasses off and sighed.

“It’s still too broad. You want to compare four different species—human, vampire, elves, and the Fallen—but in order to effectively make a comparison, you have to have mastered each subject. You’ve got enough material on humans and vampires, but there simply isn’t much information out there on elves and the Fallen. You’re going to have to do some field research.”

Angie frowned. “Ethnographic research is out of the question, for the Fallen, at least. For one thing, they would make me forget all about the dissertation. For another, I would only be able to study one at a time. From the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, they don’t interact with each other much.”

“Elves are a possibility. Not in their world, of course. If you spent a couple of weeks there, a couple of hundred years would pass here. I doubt the university would extend your time limit that long.” He chuckled. The university only allowed doctoral students ten years to finish before booting them out of the program. “But that wouldn’t be a problem at one of the elfhaemes they’ve established in our world.”

“It would be vastly different from how they live in their own world.”

“True. However, it would be more than we know about them now. And you can at least interview them about their own world.”

“I thought of doing that,” Angie admitted. “But how would I get access? They don’t have much contact with humans, and it’s almost always through the federal government. I tried reaching out to congressmen and senators who have supported elven causes, but I couldn’t find anyone who would negotiate on my behalf. I got the impression they would only consider it worth their while if I was someone well known, or at least a published author in the field.”

“You’ll have to do corporate fieldwork, then.”

Corporate fieldwork did not require living among the subjects. It involved interviews and possibly shadowing someone for a short period in order to observe their day-to-day life. There were a few elves who spent a lot of time among humans. If she was lucky, she might be able to convince one to give her a day or two. Angie nodded in agreement. “I’ll try the senators and congressmen again. Maybe they’d be more willing to help set up interviews.”

“Good. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be as difficult as finding some of the Fallen. There are far fewer of them, and most manage to pass for human. And interviewing them will be tricky. It’s hard for them…er, I mean, they get too distracted for prolonged interviews.” Benotti blushed. The Fallen’s constant hunger for pleasure made it difficult for them to focus on anything else, and they spread that hunger to anyone who got near them. Talking to one at length was almost impossible.

“Finding one may be easier than you think. A friend of mine has contacts among the Fallen. Also, I’ve heard one of them left some journals behind when he passed on.” This phrase, “passed on,” was not exactly a euphemism for death. The Fallen passed out of what humans understood as reality into another one they would not, or could not, explain. It took them thousands of years to reach the point at which they were ready to move on, and it was not a conscious choice. “Rumor has it the journals showed up at a private auction a couple of years ago. If I can track them down…”

“If.” He closed the computer file and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his chest. “Let’s see what luck you have setting up interviews and getting other source material, and choose whichever species provides the most opportunities.”

“I’ll work on it,” she promised.

“All right, get out of here.” Benotti waved a hand. “Unless you want to read a pile of sophomore term papers and grade them for me.”

“Hah!” She hopped out of the seat so fast a stack of books teetered. Angie managed to catch them before they fell. “Consider me gone.”

“I had a call from Evan Samuels, the human companion to the Monarch of the Great Basin Territory,” Lynette said.

Angie had booked a room for the weekend at a boutique hotel on the Seattle waterfront. Tonight, she and Lynette looked out across Puget Sound while sharing a bottle of Bordeaux and going over business matters. Scheduling didn’t take long since she only worked a few nights a month, but planning what was needed for each session was another matter. Once Angie had researched everything down to the last detail, it was up to her manager to arrange for props, costumes, and any number of other things that might be required, depending upon the fantasy.

Angie frowned. “What did he want?”

“Her Majesty wants to give the Monarch of the Rocky Mountain Territory something special for his nine hundred and fiftieth birthday.”

“Me?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You know I don’t work that way. The client has to do his or her own negotiation, and I can’t promise in advance I’ll agree to a session.”

“Mr. Samuels says she is…insistent.”

“How insistent?”

“Very.”

“Who referred her?”

Angie’s business spread by word of mouth only. If a client thought someone might meet her criteria, and would enjoy her services, that client discreetly gave the person Lynette’s number.

“Hope Ashworth.”

The second in command to the Monarch of the Great Lakes Territory, Ashworth had employed her three times, and Angie was inclined to trust her judgment. “Very well. Set up a meeting with Her Majesty. Perhaps her gift could simply be to introduce us. If she isn’t satisfied with that, she’ll have to find some other way to impress him.”

Lynette made a note in her calendar. She pursed her lips as though debating something, then said, “I see you’ve set up another session with Scott. I take it he was satisfied with your performance?”

“It was perhaps my finest work to date.” Angie eyed her and cocked a brow. “You still disapprove?”

“Not any of my business.” Rising, she gathered her papers into a briefcase and slipped on her coat. She looked back over her shoulder before letting herself out. “Be careful, would you? I don’t want to lose my golden goose.”

“Careful as I can be in this line of work.”

A scowl, and Lynette was gone.

Chapter Seven

It is impossible for a human to traverse the inner landscape of a vampire’s mind.

—Tan Xiao-Ping, philosopher and poet

“I wish I could travel with you,” Steffen murmured.

Grace snuggled next to him on a nest of fake-fur blankets in front of a fire that had died down to flickers of flame and orange coals. Its smoky scent hung in the air. Snow lay thick and white outside the cabin in the Cascades he’d rented for the weekend. Every now and then, the weight of it would snap a branch on a fir tree and slide down with a whoosh. The occasional noise accented an otherwise silent night.

Shifting, she draped herself across his bare chest and rested her chin on her forearm. She’d put on a thick bathrobe against the chill when they’d finished making love, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold. She reached up to play with a strand of his bloodred hair. “I wish you could, too. I’d love to hear what you remember about the places I visit. When were you in Florence?”

“Mmm.” He thought a moment. “Just after the turn of the sixteenth century. That’s where I first met James.” He had mentioned his close friend to her before. “There were a couple of painters working on two murals commissioned by Machiavelli. James knew him through some sort of business deal, and when he learned I was interested in art, he arranged for me to see them. Humans were doing the most amazing things at that time, works of beauty I’d never imagined.” His eyes lost focus, and his expression softened.

“Is that when you realized we might be good for something besides breakfast?” She grinned.

“Maybe.” He grinned back, but it was tinged with another emotion. Sadness? Regret? She couldn’t tell. “I did wonder what Michelangelo would taste like. Too bad I never got to have a bite.”

“Do people taste like their personalities?”

Steffen blinked. “You ask the oddest questions.”

“I wonder about these things. Do they?”

“Not exactly. What they eat affects their flavor. And whatever they’re feeling at the moment.” His tone deepened with that last sentence, as if he remembered those flavors and liked them. The sound made her heart beat faster.

“Really?” she asked. “What does anger taste like? Or fear? Or—”

“That’s enough questions for now.”

Grace raised her eyebrows. “Are you telling me to shut up, Lord Scott?”

“What if I am?”

“I think”—she pulled back and folded her arms across her chest—“you’re going to have to make me.”

“Is that so?” Steffen brushed his fingers along her cheek.

“Uh-huh. Because I’ve got lots more questions where those came from. I want to know everything about you.”

His smile vanished, and he lowered his hand. “No. You don’t.”

He closed his eyes and turned away.

“Hey.” Grace stared at him in surprise. “I was just teasing.”

How had the mood changed so fast, and why? Things were going well enough that Angie had submerged herself more fully into her role than usual. It took a moment to start thinking properly. Reviewing the last of the conversation, she saw the clues she’d missed because of Grace’s ignorance. Obviously, there were things he didn’t want her to know, and he was right. If Grace did learn everything, she would be horrified. Best to steer this session away from such dangerous waters.