Time Without End (The Black Rose Chronicles) (29 page)

‘Take me,” she pleaded, and hers was not one but a chorus of sweet voices—her own, of course, and Brenna’s, and Elisabeth’s, and Jenny’s. And more.

I refused to grant her such easy gratification, sliding down from her quivering, well-suckled breasts, over her smooth belly, damp beneath my lips. There was much I wanted to remind Daisy of, before our joining, and much I wanted to teach her.

CHAPTER
14

Daisy

The Vampire’s Lair, 1995

Daisy thrashed beneath Valerian, in a delirium of need, but he withheld satisfaction long after she had begun to plead. He tongued the peaks of her breasts until she felt her heartbeat throbbing in that taut flesh, and kissed her stomach and her hipbones, the insides of her thighs, the backs of her knees. She might have been a goddess, so thoroughly did he worship her, with tenderness and fire for his offerings.

She uttered a primitive, groaning sound when he burrowed through the veil of moist silk to take the hidden nubbin of flesh between his lips and begin to draw upon it, ever so gently. While he teased and nibbled and savored, at his leisure, Daisy writhed, soaked with perspiration, her hair clinging, in wild strands of copper, to her temples, her cheeks, her shoulders, and the upper swell of her breasts.

In desperation, she tore open Valerian’s shirt, as brazen and untamed as a she-wolf in her season, and spread her hands over his marble chest. It was as if Michelangelo’s
David
had come to life and was making love to her, so splendid was he, so soul-wrenchingly beautiful.

Mankind, she thought frantically, had never been meant to look as Valerian looked, or feel as he felt. Such magnificence could not be imprisoned in mortal flesh any more than lightning could be confined to a teacup or the music of a symphony to a single seashell.

Valerian groaned at her touch, and she slid her arms around him and stroked his perfectly sculpted back with warm palms. At the same time she murmured to him— softly, insensibly, for she was not capable of reason— and knew that her love was balm to his spirit as well as his body.

His clothes vanished with a mere blink of his hooded, sapphire eyes, and then Daisy’s were gone, too.

“May the Fates forgive me,” Valerian whispered, and then he found the entrance to her body and took her in a single deep, swift stroke.

Daisy’s arousal, already ferocious, convulsed her whole being in cataclysmic release, and she screamed, not from pain, but out of a pleasure that went beyond any conceivable agony or delight. Each time she reached a new peak, she was sent spiraling upward, toward another, until the last measure of response had been wrung from her. Throughout that sweet odyssey, Valerian whispered to her, stroked her face and her breasts, smoothed her hair.

When at last, with a faint whimper, she sank back to the sofa in exhaustion, he gave her a few moments to catch her breath. Then, at long last, Valerian was overwhelmed by his own passions. He reached beneath her to grasp her buttocks in powerful hands and raise her like a sheath to the sword.

Valerian’s strokes were long and slow and smooth; he plucked at Daisy’s senses, tuned them, like the strings of an exquisite violin, and soon she was playing a fevered rhapsody for him. They reached the crescendo simultaneously, with hoarse shouts of beleaguered triumph, and collapsed into the stillness that lay beneath their passion.

A long time had passed when Valerian broke the mystic silence with a low chuckle. “I didn’t plan for us to make love on the living room couch like a pair of teenagers,” he said. “Frankly, I had something a little more romantic in mind.”

Daisy nuzzled his neck, putting off the moment when she would have to tell him about her message from Krispin and the lifetime as Maddie Goodtree. “Don’t give it another thought. If that had been any better, I would have gone up like a campfire doused with kerosene.”

He laughed. “It was good, then?”

“It was better than good. It would be an improvement on ‘perfect,’ in fact.”

Valerian kissed her, but lightly, mischievously. He knew, without being told, that she had given him everything she had to give, and that she would need time to recover before they made love again.

“And what secrets are you keeping from me?” he asked.

Deep within Daisy, small muscles continued to contract as the last and strongest orgasm ebbed away, and she tucked her face into his shoulder. “I’m still coming,” she whispered.

“I knew that,” Valerian said with a smile in his voice. “We are yet joined, in case you’ve forgotten, and I can

feel you tightening around me. What exquisite torture it

is.”

Daisy whimpered and then gave a little sigh as the resonance grew softer, and more distant. “There aren’t any other—secrets.”

“Don’t lie to me, Daisy.” Valerian groaned and shifted his weight slightly, but made no move to withdraw from her. He was still hard, and she was exulted to sense a new tension rising quietly and steadily within him. This time she would be in control.

She taunted him with an almost imperceptible motion of her hips, and he threw back his head, the muscles of his neck corded with the effort of holding back.

“You will pay for that impertinence,” he vowed.

Daisy drew him deeper, and his majestic body flexed once, twice upon hers. He moaned, as if in pain, and spilled himself into her a second time.

“You will pay,” he repeated, but he was kissing her as he spoke, tasting her eyelids, searching out her mouth with his own.

Daisy toppled back into sleep, so sated was she; her muscles were limp, and it seemed her very bones had melted. When she awakened, she was lying in Valerian’s bed in the master suite, and he was standing at its foot, clad in his magician’s garb and just donning his cape. He looked gaunt somehow, and she wondered if it was her lovemaking that had sapped his strength, or some experience he’d had the night before.

“Why didn’t you dress by magic?” she asked, putting off the moment when she would have to tell him about Krispin.

His smile was slight, distracted. “I sometimes enjoy the mechanics of simple tasks.”

She sighed. Now or never, she thought.

“I need to tell you something before you go,” Daisy said bluntly, sitting up and drawing the linen bedsheets up to cover her breasts.

Valerian crossed to the bed and uncovered them again, and a shock of fresh desire sizzled through Daisy’s system as he looked at her with an expression of wry appreciation. “Your body is far too lovely to hide,” he said. “Besides, it’s a little late for modesty, don’t you think?”

Daisy clung to her resolve, but decided to start small. She would save the news about Krispin for last.

“Kristina was here, while you were sleeping today. She gave me this.” She held out the antique pendant for him to see.

“I noticed that, as it happens,” Valerian said.

Daisy blushed. He’d been up close and personal—of
course
he’d noticed. “She’s worried about you. Kristina, I mean. So is her mother.”

He was straightening his elegant string tie. “She has always been a perceptive child,” he replied evenly. “Likewise, Maeve.”

Daisy dropped the bomb, blurting out the words in a rush. “There’s something else. Krispin’s been tampering with your television set. He played a few stirring scenes from what I assume was one of my past lives and said I belonged to him then and I would again.”

Valerian’s hands fell to his sides, and he stood utterly still. His expression was cold, and his eyes seemed to pierce Daisy’s very soul. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked evenly, and with ominous softness.

“We were busy,” she reminded him, refusing to be cowed.

‘Tell me what you saw.”

“Myself, running away from what was probably the London Fire—1666, I think it was. My name was Maddie Goodtree, and I didn’t look anything like I do now.”

Valerian frowned ever so slightly. “Maddie Goodtree?’

It was as Daisy had feared; Valerian had not known about that particular lifetime. He might even hate her when he learned the truth, and believe she’d betrayed him by loving Krispin.

“I don’t know much about her,” Daisy said bravely, “except that she was involved with your brother.”

There followed a towering silence, much more intimidating to Daisy than any that had gone before it.
“She was what?”

Daisy gulped. “In love with Krispin,” she said miserably.

He turned away, but his rage was like a swell of heat, filling the room, pushing at the walls and the ceiling, glimmering and undulating all around him, mirage-like.

“There was a message on my machine when I called home, too,” Daisy went on, wanting to finish, to get it all out in the open so they could go on from there. “He—Krispin—said he would kill again if I didn’t come to him.” A decision she had not consciously made rose to the surface of her thoughts. “I can’t let that happen, Valerian—I can’t let someone else die when it’s me he wants.”

Valerian turned to her again, and his face, though as beautiful as ever, was terrible to see.
“You will not go to him,
” he decreed in a furious undertone.

“It’s my job,” Daisy insisted, equally angry. “And blink me up some clothes, will you please? I’m tired of running around naked, like some sultan’s personal plaything.”

A black formal materialized on her body, fitted, with a pleated flair at the bottom and diamond clasps holding the bodice together.

“Very funny,” Daisy said. “I want jeans, damn it, and a T-shirt.”

Valerian complied, but grudgingly. The gown disappeared, replaced by Levi’s that were two sizes too big and a lime green T-shirt with the name of a fertilizer company emblazoned across the front.

She folded her arms. “You can do better.”

Scowling, he made the jeans fit and changed the shirt to a plain red one, tucked in at the waist.

“Thank you,” Daisy said wearily, rising at last from the bed and looking down at her magic clothes. “I could have used your help when I was in high school. It took me forever to dress, and I was late for everything.” Valerian was seething, and he glared down at Daisy as she moved close to him and laid her hands lightly on his chest.

“Listen to reason,” she pleaded quietly. “I’m a cop. Before I made detective and was assigned to the Homicide Division, I worked Bunko and Vice, and I was the bait in every kind of sting. I was damn good at what I did, too.”

Valerian’s frown deepened, and Daisy felt his fury and his fear coursing beneath her hands. “Do you honestly think you—or any other mortal—could prevail against a monster such as my brother surely is?”

“Not by myself,” Daisy conceded. “I was counting on you to help.”

Reluctantly, with a sound like a sigh, but deeper, and seeming to rise from his soul instead of his lungs, he put his arms around her. “I shall deal with Krispin alone, Daisy, and in my own way. With no interference from you. It is hard enough to concentrate now, when you are in such danger. I could not bear to take the risk you are suggesting.”

“I might just do it on my own, then. I have the pendant to protect me.”

“The pendant,” Valerian scoffed, giving her a slight shake within his embrace. “It has no more power than a prize from a second-rate carnival.”

“That isn’t what Kristina said.”

“Kristina is a fanciful sort, given to wild imaginings. Stay out of my way and let me handle this, Daisy, or I vow I will lock you up somewhere.”

Daisy knew he meant what he was saying. She also knew she couldn’t stand back and let more innocent people fall victim to Krispin’s madness. ‘Take me with you,” she begged. “At least that way you’ll be able to protect me.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Daisy, I must feed. And the places I go are unfit for a mortal woman.”

“Well, I won’t stay here. I don’t think I could handle another one of Krispin’s impromptu television productions, and besides, I’m not a vampire. I get hungry for real food, and even though I pull my share of late shifts, I’m not used to sleeping during the day.”

Valerian smiled sadly. “This has ever been your flaw, Daisy—you are stubborn beyond all reason.” He drew her very close, and his black silk cape encircled her like a whisper from another world. “Close your eyes and hold on tightly.”

She looked up into his magnificent face. “Could I fall?”

“No,” Valerian replied. “The request was strictly lascivious.”

Daisy laughed despite her grief, and the sound had barely left her throat when she found herself standing in Valerian’s dressing room, behind the stage of the main showroom in the Venetian Hotel. She was still safely cossetted in the magician’s cloak, but she was alone.

“Valerian!” she yelled, letting the cape fall into a shimmering, inky pool at her feet and resting her hands on her hips. “You come back here, damn it!”

After fifteen minutes there was still no sign of him. Muttering, Daisy let herself out of the casino by a back way into the warm night, walked around front, and boarded one of the gondolas ferrying tourists back and forth to the hotel.