Kiss Me, Kill Me Page 18

  ‘So would I,’ said Greg solemnly. ‘I’d love to live in a villa in Tuscany with you.’ He stared into my eyes as if he was searching for an answer. It really did seem like it. I could just be paranoid. Or very slightly pissed. I couldn’t be sure.

  I blinked hard and changed the subject, discussing the wine instead.

  We didn’t return to Lorenzo’s villa until after dark. In our absence, the other couple had left again for a formal evening engagement. Greg and I showered and changed as soon as we arrived and then went downstairs to seek food.

  Maria didn’t let me down, having prepared pan-fried veal with roasted root vegetables and spinach fried in butter. There was a gravy boat filled with red wine sauce that had cranberries in it. While I was eating, Greg enjoyed a couple of glasses of red from one of Lorenzo’s anonymous donors. He didn’t bat an eyelid at my attempts to drain every last drop of sauce from the gravy boat. He’s aware of my affinity for sauce. Apart from love, sauce makes the world go ’round. Oh, and cheese, and bacon. Also, chocolate…

  ‘Tiramisu,’ said Maria, placing a glass bowl in front of me. I received pats on the hand and a smile for my excellent dinner-consumption effort.

  I managed to squeeze in the dessert. It was exquisite. I really was beginning to like Maria, despite our slightly rocky start. She was a culinary genius. And that made her A-okay in my book.

  ‘Taking one for the team?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Yep. That’s the only reason.’ I tongued the last bit of choc-coffee goodness off my spoon.

  Greg stared.

  I relinquished my spoon. Fiddled with my napkin.

  Lorenzo had selected a bottle of red wine for our dinner. It was a local Merlot and, of course, it was sensational. Greg finished his not-wine and switched to the real stuff. We sipped and admired the nighttime view from our dinner table.

  The back garden was lit with the warm glow of outdoor lights. Spotlights lit the trunks and foliage of each of the large trees from ground level. It was magical, sitting out on an evening like this.

  When the breeze picked up, Greg said, ‘I smell rain.’

  I sniffed. I couldn’t detect it, my enhanced-by-vampire-blood senses not being a match for actual vampire sensory systems. ‘Google said it hardly ever rains in July.’ All the golden grass had spurred me to check the weather patterns in Tuscany while we’d been driving that afternoon.

  ‘We’re getting rain for sure.’

  I trusted my vampire’s senses. There must be rain…somewhere. ‘By the way, that’s petrichor you’re sniffing.’

  ‘Oh?’ A raised brow. ‘Tell me about petrichor, Ana.’

  ‘It’s a combination of compounds. Some are oils made by plants, but most are due to Streptomyces—a filamentous bacteria that are found in the soil. It’s the gaseous compound called geosmin that’s released by the bacteria that you can smell.’

  Greg grinned. He always had that reaction when I told him bits of scientific trivia. Some people would assume I was trying to be a smart ass. That wasn’t the case; I simply liked sharing information. Because if I was speaking to someone who had information that was new to me, I would love to know all about it. I was in the habit of treating everyone as if they had the same thirst for knowledge. I had learned, though, that some people didn’t appreciate being told anything new. They preferred to go through life pretending they knew everything already. Those people were asshats, in my opinion.

  Greg understood me. He shared my knowledge thirstiness. He repaid my trivia sharing with all sorts of medical information. I lapped it up. I loved it, and loved him for it.

  ‘I like when you talk nerd-speak to me, Ana,’ he said now.

  ‘I don’t talk nerd-speak.’ I paused for an eye-roll. ‘It’s Nerdish, I’ll have you know.

  When I returned my attention to Greg, I noticed he was watching me intently.

  I gave him a quizzical look, and he asked, ‘You’re feeling all better now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I feel fabulous. All the good food, wine, fresh air, and vampire blood has fixed me right up.’

  He stared at me a while longer, then nodded. ‘Do you want to go for a walk? We can wander in the garden and smell the roses…and the geosmin if you’d like.’ He suppressed a smile.

  ‘Yes, that sounds nice. I love the smell of bacteria in the evening.’ I also bit back my smile. ‘We might get wet, though.’

  ‘I don’t mind getting wet.’ A pause. ‘If you don’t.’ He eyed me, all blatant desire and seriousness, any trace of humour gone.

  I knew that look.

  OMSG! (Oh My Sex God!) My lusty vampire’s back. I am so gonna get lucky. I stood up so fast, my chair almost toppled backwards. Take me, I wanted to scream while tearing my dress off. Instead, I grasped the outstretched hand of my now-standing boyfriend and said in my best sultry voice, ‘I don’t mind getting…wet. Not at all.’

  In response, there was a blink of eye, flex of jaw, rise of cock.

  PS: Why the hell are we hanging about, holding hands and staring? Wanna get wet. Pronto!

  Greg must have heard what was going on in my head, loud and clear, because suddenly he was moving and pulling me along in his wake. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to hear my internal thoughts since they’d been screamed out by my inner sex goddess. Whose name is Qetesh, by the way.

  My sex goddess made herself known to me soon after I met Greg. I believe she’d always been there but had been dormant. Like a model who wouldn’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars, Qetesh hadn’t gotten out of bed for anything less than Greg. And then she’d promptly fallen back onto the bed, legs splayed, screaming, ‘Take me!’ While squeezing her own nipples.

  I’d named her Qetesh, after the goddess of sex from Chaldean mythology. Depicted as a naked woman standing on a lion, holding snakes in one hand (representing the penis), and lotus flowers in the other hand (representing the vulva), she was perfect. My Qetesh was also a crude/foul-mouthed nymphomaniac who, in the past, would have happily sacrificed my life for wild, hot sex with a wild, hot vampire. That kind of stuff didn’t happen anymore. Because Greg was in control of himself and didn’t have the overwhelming urge to suck me dry (of blood) each time we did the horizontal mambo.

  Right now, if Greg was a new vampire who was consumed by both bloodlust and sex lust, Qetesh would have thrown me under the bus.

  She was a bitch. But I loved her.

  We moved at a fairly rapid pace along the path. We did not stop one time to snuffle roses. It wasn’t necessary anyway; the air was redolent with their perfume. The scent wafted over to us on the breeze even when we veered down the hill and away from the flower gardens.

  When the rain started falling (Google was a big fat liar), we were quite a distance from the house. It was only a light drizzle. Greg didn’t change his pace or direction.

  Soon, the rain started falling more heavily. Just as I was beginning to wonder if Greg had misunderstood my double entendre, believing I was quite excited about the prospect of getting soaked to the bone in a deluge of water, he stopped.

  He stared.

  Freeing myself from his grip, I wiped water out of my eyes and raked my hands through hair that was plastered to my head.

  I gave him a smouldering I-wanna-fuck-you stare. Because if I was rocking the drowned-rat look, I’d be doing it all sexy-like, thank you very much.

  Some water, containing styling product, dribbled from my hair and made contact with my eyeball. I scrunched up my face ’cause that shit stung. Scrubbing at my eye, then blinking vigorously, I managed to refocus on the object of my desire.

  He didn’t seem fazed that my smouldering had turned to scrunching, scrubbing, blinking and quite possibly a bright red eyeball. He stared for a long time, looking me—and my now mostly transparent, white halter dress—up and down.

  Hello, goose bumps, my old friends.

  If he didn’t stop that staring, I would get wobbly and need to take a seat on the park bench he’d stopped be
side.

  ‘Come sit down with me, Ana,’ Greg finally said. There he went, reading my mind again.

  He sat down and dragged me on top of him, so I was facing and straddling him.

  Yeeha! That was Qetesh. She was wearing chaps (assless and crotchless by definition) and a cowgirl hat. She was also twirling a lasso over her head.

  Greg pulled my hips forward, and the moment our bodies crushed against each other, we both groaned. Or moaned. Maybe a combination of the two. We gromoaned. Loudly. It felt like we hadn’t been intimate for eons.

  Ten bullshit-soaked years! yelled Qetesh.

  She was a bitch who was bad at maths and also prone to exaggeration.

  Greg ferociously crushed his lips against mine. I opened immediately for him. His tongue probed, hot and insistent.

  We licked. We kissed. Sucked. There was violence in the way we mouthed each other. In the way I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled him against me. The way his strong fingers grasped my hips and pulled me against his erection.

  I had a whopping sense of déjà vu. Was I remembering a dream I’d had? Then it dawned on me—this was Greg’s dream. The one he’d told me about not long after we met. The one I’d had so much time to fantasise about before we’d finally gotten to have sex, the dream had felt like my own.

  ‘Greg,’ I whispered as he kissed my throat. ‘This is your dream. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pulled away to sear me with his smouldering gaze. His smouldering was straight-up sexy without a hint of awkwardness. ‘It started with a dark and stormy night,’ he recounted. ‘We made crazy primal love on a park bench in the pouring rain.’ A shuddery exhale. ‘I’ll never forget the way I wanted you. But I always want you more. Always more with you, my beautiful Ana.’ A long lick up the side of my neck. Hot breath in my ear. A rough whisper. ‘Make my dreams come true, baby girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ I breathed. Oh, God. Yes, yes, yes.

  I lifted myself up. Greg’s hands went under my dress, and seconds later, he’d torn my panties and ripped them off me.

  Another couple of seconds and his zipper was down, his cock springing free.

  And then I was lowering myself onto him.

  Wet. I was soaking inside and out. The rain on our bodies was cool; his cock inside me, hot.

  The burning, wet, delicious slide had us both gromoaning like hell.

  When I was all the way down, I stilled. To savour the stretching fullness of him. To stare into his remarkable, mesmerising eyes. Touch his face, his lips. Kiss.

  My body, greedy for all of the feelings, began subtly rocking on him. Those small movements sent shockwaves through me. Those shocks were explosions of sensation in my breasts and lips. I let my body take over and take what it wanted.

  Its want for Greg was a wild and savage thing.

  Moving back and forth on him, I ground down, hard. Hands gripping his shoulders, I undulated faster and faster.

  Greg’s head was thrown back, neck muscles like steel, teeth clenched. He watched me as I moved on him, his gaze burning into me, eyes filled with so much love, it hurt my heart.

  I needed to hold on to this man. Hold him securely to me and never, never let him go. A tear trickled down. And then another. He wouldn’t know I was crying because my tears mingled with the water sluicing down my face.

  Or maybe he did, because the next moment his tongue brushed my cheeks, one then the other, as if tasting my tears.

  Greg’s own grip on me was almost punishing. Holding my ass in his hands, he pulled me harder onto him. He kissed me. My movements were so frenzied, it was impossible to remain lip locked. He kissed me anyway. Brief electric contact, with open mouth, tongue, teeth and panting breaths.

  ‘Greg,’ I cried against his lips as everything in my body seized up, locking down tight against the incoming storm.

  Greg surged upwards, pushing deeper into me. He did it over and over. Rapid thrusts that had guttural sounds bursting from my throat, my eyes closing and my face turning to the sky where I screamed as that storm broke wide.

  I was still clenching around his cock and crying out when Greg yelled his climax through gritted teeth into the side of my neck.

  * * * * *

  Later that night, Greg and I were soaking in a hot bath. Wet seemed to be the order of the day.

  ‘I hope Lorenzo, Claudio or Maria don’t find the remnants of my knickers somewhere in the garden,’ I said to Greg over my shoulder. We’d searched for my missing undies. However, they’d gone AWOL. I hoped they’d been blown far away and over the hills.

  ‘Do you mind that I tend to rip a lot of your underwear?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Umletmethinkno,’ I said without pause.

  He chuckled.

  ‘I like that you want me so badly, you can’t wait to take them off in the traditional manner.’

  ‘It does take some time to get them all the way down those extra-long legs of yours.’ I could imagine Greg’s predatory grin and hooded eyes just from the tone of his voice. He had a thing for my legs. And I very much liked that he had a thing.

  He grabbed a bath puff, poured some deliciously scented body wash on it and began rubbing it in long strokes up and down the legs—that were mine—that he loved. Yeah, baby!

  I made a contented sound, almost a purr.

  ‘Feel good?’

  ‘Mmmm, yes.’ Si, si, si.

  He leaned forward to lather the lower part of my leg. My butt and his groin said hello. His groin saluted. My butt pushed against that upstanding soldier.

  ‘Mmmm,’ I repeated.

  ‘Mmmm,’ he murmured at the same time. Then, ‘Woman, I feel like pleasuring you again. Do you think you can handle it?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll live. I promise.’

  Later, we were lying wrapped around each other in bed. I’d survived the bathtub. Barely. I hoped Maria didn’t understand the Italian translation for, Yes, yes, yes. Oh God, baby. Fuck me!

  ‘Goodnight, my beautiful lover,’ Greg whispered in the dark.

  ‘Goodnight my man…my everything,’ I replied drowsily.

  Greg’s arms tightened around me, and he pressed a kiss to the top of my head.

  I fell asleep, warm and safe and happy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  He ripped through my flesh with talons encrusted in dirt and filth. Laughing, he slashed again, tearing me open from thigh to ankle. The agony was searing hot and jagged. I needed to drag myself away from him. Get to safety.

  I couldn’t move. My arms were pinned to my sides. The female had her arms around me from behind. She was sitting on the ground with me, holding me like a lover. Her raspy laugh in my ear was a thing of pure evil. Insane delight. Madness.

  I fought in her grip, my legs kicking uselessly. Blood spilled from my wounds. It poured to the ground, pooling around me, bright and glistening. It flowed ceaselessly, slicking my body, covering everything in its path. So much blood.

  Pain was razors along my nerves, fear, an acrid taste in my mouth.

  The talons came towards my face. Pressed into the skin above my eye.

  I screamed. Soundless.

  I woke, bathed in sweat. I was shaking like a leaf.

  Thank heavens, it’s not real! Only a dream. Only a dream. Only a dream.

  My breath shuddered in and out of me. I concentrated on getting control of myself. Eventually, I stopped shaking and my breaths evened out.

  I didn’t want to close my eyes again. I couldn’t. Sleep was too frightening.

  I turned my head towards Greg. He was lying on his side, back to me, a pillow pressed to his ear with the crook of his elbow.

  He’d told me the nighttime sounds of nature sometimes drove him crazy. Last night, after the rain, it had sounded like ten choirs of frogs serenading at once. Sometimes vampire hearing sucked.

  I was aware that Greg hadn’t slept properly since our run-in with those who I would not think about just now. He’d been keeping his hands on me and jumping up at the slightest sound or
movement I made. He’d finally relaxed enough to get some rest.

  I got up ever so carefully and trod quietly to the door. I donned my light silk wrap, tying the belt nice and tight around my waist.

  Instead of using the ensuite, where any noise I made might wake Greg, I exited the bedroom and made my way to the bathroom down the hall. True to form, Lorenzo had packaged toothbrushes available for guests. Snaffling one, I brushed my teeth and then splashed some water on my face.

  The sky was lightening slightly when I opened the back door and stepped out. I stood on the patio for a long while, breathing in the fresh air cooled from the rains and untouched by the heat of the day. I drank it in deeply, clearing my head.

  The garden looked magical at this time of the day, too. The nighttime lights still illuminated the scene, everything lush and green and still and perfectly quiet. The frogs were resting after the evening’s cacophony, and it was a tad early for the birds.

  I stretched to work out some kinks. That turned into a lengthy yoga session. I did all the poses on my feet, not getting on the ground because I didn’t have a mat. Also, because I was nude under my wrap—not the best combination for lying on your back with your legs in the air. I must admit, the cool breeze caressing bare skin whenever the fabric gaped open was rather interesting. Invigorating, even. Naked yoga—something to try at a later date.

  The sky had lightened fully, and the garden lights were now off. I decided to walk, still feeling the restless energy I’d woken with, needing to burn it off and wanting to just soak up my surroundings at a time of day that I rarely experienced.

  Stepping into a pair of Croc’s left outside, by whom I did not know—certainly not Lorenzo (I couldn’t imagine that man wearing rubber shoes)—I set off into the garden.

  I walked around the garden beds, appreciating the last of the flowers that were defiantly clinging to the bushes. Last night’s downpour, as well as the wind, had taken a toll on the roses. Many flowers had been felled from their stems. Petals were strewn about the lawn and clumped in the flower beds. Being the end of the season, soon the bushes would be nothing but thorny branches. It made me a little sad to imagine the garden lacking the blowsy, fragrant blooms. Although, if I had to guess, Lorenzo would have some bulbs waiting beneath the soil to spring forth and beautify the garden in the roses’ absence.