The Merzetti Effect (A Vampire Romance) (12 page)

The suite was in near darkness when Delano entered, but he had no difficulty picking out Eli’s form reclining on the couch. Damn. He should have known Eli wouldn’t sleep until he was safely in before sunup. He should have called. Or come home sooner.

Delano keyed in the alarm code, then turned to his friend. “I see you’ve got security under control.”

Eli stood, stifling a yawn. “The basics. More to do tomorrow.”

“Today, you mean. Go to bed, Eli.”

He scratched his chest. “Don’t mind if I do.”

“And don’t set the alarm too early.”

“Did you round up lots of Nosferatu? Nosferati? Oh, hell, vamps?”

Delano laughed. “More than enough for our clinic.” He glanced around. “How’s Ainsley? Gone to bed, I take it?”

“I think so.” Eli rolled his shoulders, and cricked his neck, first one way, then the other. “She was restless, roamed around a while, but I haven’t seen her since we shared a nightcap an hour or so ago.”

Delano raised an eyebrow. Eli never drank alcohol. Ever.

“Okay, she had a nightcap. I had a coffee.”

“A decaf, I hope.”

“Decaf?” Eli yawned, which ruined the offended look he was trying to project. “It was an espresso, thank you very much. But don’t worry. It won’t keep me up. ’Night, boss.”

“Goodnight, Eli.”

As soon as Eli moved off, Delano headed for his own windowless rooms in the center of the penthouse. Five steps from the door of his suite, he halted.

Someone was in there.

A light burned inside, casting a dim glow into the corridor, but that’s not what alerted him. Eli always left a small lamp burning for him. But he could feel a presence. He stood stock-still, and listened. There it was! Someone breathing. Quiet and regular. He flared his nostrils and caught the scent of sandalwood and vanilla.

Ainsley.

His heart leapt. Oh, hell. Had she crawled into his bed to await him, her imagination fired by the look that passed between them in his study earlier tonight?

Feeling disembodied, almost as though he were watching himself from above, he pushed the door to his bedroom open. It swung inward silently on well-oiled hinges, and there she was. Not in his bed, thank God, but in his chair. Specifically, the antique French wingback chair beside his bed. And she was sleeping soundly, bathed in yellow light from the 40-watt bulb in the bedside lamp.

A fierce pang, as sweet as it was painful, pierced his chest. God, she was beautiful. She slept slumped to one side, her head resting against the chair’s upholstered wing, hair swept to one side to keep it out of her face. Her cheeks bore the faintest of flushes, and her mouth had a softness about it he’d never seen while she was awake.

Unable to help himself, he drifted closer until he stood not a foot away from her. At this range, he could almost feel the moisture of her respirations, see the fine blue veins in her eyelids and the dark sweep of lashes against her pale skin. With her lids lowered like that, veiling the strength and determination that normally blazed from her eyes like fire, she looked deceptively fragile. Ephemeral.

He closed his eyes against a new onslaught of yearning. Heart, mind, body, soul‌—‌oh, Christ, it all ached. All he wanted to do was sink to his knees on the fine old Persian carpet and bury his face in her lap. He wanted to feel her hands tunnel into his hair, skim his shoulders, slide down his back… He wanted her naked. He wanted to glide his hands up the outsides of those slender thighs, skim his mouth over the inside of her thigh, letting his own heart beat match the pulse of her femoral artery…

Merciful Jesus.

Step back
, his mind ordered, but his limbs refused to comply. He swayed, balanced on the exquisite knife-edge of temptation.

Don’t do it.

Silently, grimly, he fought the gravitational pull, the inexorable force that demanded he bend his knees and pay homage‌—‌

“Delano?”

His eyes sprang open.

Her voice was husky and sleep-thickened, but she sat up abruptly enough.

Spell broken, he stepped back.

“What are you doing here?” The question came out sounding harsher than he intended.

“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.” She leapt up, and something hit the floor with a soft thump, something that must have been lying in her lap as she slept.

They both reached for it at the same time, narrowly avoiding knocking heads. Ainsley pulled back at the last moment, and Delano came up with the object. As soon as his hand closed on it, he knew what it was.

A new pain flooded in, pushing out the other.

Gitta.

Ainsley watched as Delano’s face lost all expression.

There was no other way to describe the transformation. She’d awakened to find him looming above her, his eyes closed, jaw clenched, his whole face wreathed in a torment of sexual need. God help her, her heart still banged against her ribs from the memory of it. But now his face was carefully, scrupulously blank.

“I see you’ve been exploring.” His voice was as bland as his facial expression.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I was restless, and I didn’t want to inflict myself on Eli any longer. I was keeping him from his work.” She realized she was plucking at the sleeve of her sweater and forced herself to stop. “I just ventured in here for a minute. I was curious about where… I mean, I wanted to see‌—”

“My coffin?”

An almost smile touched his lips, but his eyes were … what? Cold?

“As you can see, I make use of a bed, like everyone else. Just not much of a view.”

Flushing‌—‌because yes, she had expected a coffin, or at least something like the affair he’d climbed into on the helicopter‌—‌she glanced around the dim, windowless room.

“Cosy.”

He elevated an eyebrow. “Disappointed?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know… I just thought your bedroom would be different.”

He made no remark, but she knew he was angry. Possibly
very
angry. Not that she blamed him; she’d invaded his privacy shamelessly. It had seemed like a smart idea earlier tonight, when her brain was teaming with paranoia about what he might yet be hiding. Now, it just felt unforgivably rude.

Her gaze dropped to the pewter-framed black-and-white photograph he held in his hands. The one she’d been studying when she decided to just rest her eyes a moment. An old photo, judging by its graininess and by the high-necked gown the woman wore. The subject herself was an older lady, probably close to sixty years old, but with warm, laughing dark eyes and an aura of youthfulness that belied the marks time had left on her face.

“Is that your mother?”

Delano stiffened. “No.”

“Your grandmother?”

“She was my wife,” he growled.

Oh.
Oh!

He crossed the room to place the photograph carefully back on the dresser from whence Ainsley had taken it. “It’s been a long night,” he said without turning. “Maybe we should both retire.”

“I’m sorry. Your wife … of course… Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Del. I didn’t stop to think‌—”

“Ainsley?” He angled his head, not so far that he was looking at her but enough so she could see his profile.

She moved a tentative step closer. “Yes?”

“Go to bed. Now.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

She took her leave as quickly as she could without actually appearing to flee. Oh, man, what an idiot she was. A minute later, she was safely in her own rooms, where she could castigate herself in private.

Why hadn’t she thought about the possibility that the woman in the photo could be his wife?

Well, duh, because she was old and he was young.

Except he wasn’t young. Not really. Vampires didn’t age, he’d told her, or not perceptibly. Dammit, she’d even speculated about his possible age while she’d waited for him to waken tonight, but she’d been too caught up in her own anger to dwell on it much.

How old was he? Judging by that dress his wife wore‌—‌God, why hadn’t she read more historical novels?‌—‌she’d say that photo was early 20th century. Like, way early. So give him close to a hundred years.

And his wife was probably younger than him when they married, maybe significantly younger. At least, that was the way of it in the romance novels, wasn’t it? So give him another … what? Forty years? So conservative estimate, he was probably 140.

A hundred-and-freaking-forty years old!

Of course, given her poor grasp of the history of fashion, that could easily be 150, 160. Who knew? Maybe 200.

God, that was so weird. He looked like a man in his prime. No, he
was
a man in his prime.

She peeled off her clothes and reached for the man’s shirt Eli had furnished earlier, tugging it on for sleepwear.

Lord, she must be tired. She should have figured this all out. It’s not like she hadn’t had time, having studied that woman’s picture for a good twenty minutes. But somehow, she hadn’t thought about Delano in connection with family, or at least not in the context of a continuing relationship. She’d presumed that after he’d been infected, he would have fled not just the light of day, but a society that reviled him.

But she was certain now that he had to have been the man behind the lens of the camera that captured that woman’s picture. She harbored still less doubt that he’d put that all-knowing expression in her eyes and that Mona Lisa smile on her lips. Envy, sharp and surprising, twisted in her gut.

Oh, God, Ainsley, could you be any more of a jerk? She buttoned the shirt’s buttons swiftly. Begrudge the poor man a conjugal relationship with his own wife. A long-dead relationship.

She raked her hair back. What had it been like for him, to watch his wife age while he himself stayed vigorous and youthful? And what heartache it must have been for her.

Did he think of her still? Miss her? How long could a heart ache?

She thought of the woman in the photograph, with her mysterious smile. And she thought of Delano, the way he held himself so still. The way his eyes lost their focus sometimes, as though he were looking at something across a great distance.

A long time, she decided.

A very long time.

Sighing, she drew the heavy curtains across the bedroom’s window to shield against the coming daylight and crawled into bed.

Take heart, she counseled herself. Tomorrow’s another … well … night.

A
INSLEY SLID THE
final ruby-red tube of blood into the last available slot in her specimen container and closed the insulated case’s lid. Another night, another thirty vamp venipunctures.

“All set, Ms. Crawford?”

She glanced up at the young man who’d been assigned to shadow her this past week. He looked just as fresh as he had four hours ago. She hadn’t checked a mirror lately, but she was willing to bet she looked considerably more wilted than he did. Of course, she had a few years on her young bodyguard. With that boyish face, he looked more like a junior executive than the highly-seasoned professional Eli assured her he was. She reached for her sweater. “Ready, Freddy.”

For about a millisecond, he looked as though he might smile, but he conquered the impulse. Man, there was just no fun to be had since Eli had flown back to St. Cloud to take care of business and Delano had locked himself in the lab on the floor below the penthouse.

Not that she felt abandoned.

She understood Eli had to get the reconstruction effort going back in St. Cloud, not to mention re-establishing a ready blood supply for the donors who’d become dependant on the clinic there. God only knew what other business Delano had charged him with.

Delano had accompanied her the first night to this new clinic, making sure she was comfortable with the clientele, so she had no complaints there. He’d also hired an amazing array of people to protect her. Fred Carstairs was just the most obvious fixture in the team.

A man, dressed like a derelict and reeking of cheap wine, took up position nightly just outside the door of the ageing, nondescript building that housed the clinic. From atop the tenement house across the street, a marksman kept watch with night vision goggles, or so she was told. She’d never caught sight of him. And when they pulled away from the clinic’s shabby address, a pair of headlights always fell into position behind their perfectly ordinary-looking SUV, to guard their rear.

Except there was nothing perfectly ordinary about the vehicle they traveled in. According to Fred, the windows were fashioned from ballistic glass, the body covered with an opaque armor comprised of ballistic nylon and steel. Who knew?

No, she didn’t feel abandoned. Not at all.

Okay, maybe a little bit. But she wasn’t afraid.

They made the fifteen-minute trip back home‌—‌yes, after the chaos of the past weeks, she’d actually started thinking of Delano’s high-rise penthouse as home‌—‌without incident. As was his habit, Fred accompanied her into the building. And as was also his habit, he insisted on accompanying her all the way up to the 29th floor. She’d tried to persuade him that she could navigate the elevator ride herself, given there were two separate levels of security before she even reached the penthouse door, but apparently he was an old-fashioned kind of guy. He refused to leave her until he’d either handed her off personally to Delano or until he’d assured himself the penthouse was empty and the security unbreached.