He heard her sigh in relief, and noticed how her shoulders relaxed. “Thank you, signore. I’m pleased to know that you understand. I’m sure with this obstacle out of the way, our marriage will be an agreeable one.”
Nico shook his head lightly, realizing that she had clearly misunderstood his words. “Agreeable? It will be more than that. And the obstacle that you speak of has not been removed. It has merely been pushed to the side for tonight.” With two long strides, he crossed the distance that separated them. “Because I promise you, when I take you to bed, you won’t feel shame or pain, you’ll feel pleasure and desire. And you won’t refuse my advances, because you’ll be begging me to drive into your sweet body and make you mine in every sense of the word.”
Oriana’s face turned ashen. “Oh God!”
Taking her hand, Nico brought it to his lips and placed a soft kiss on her knuckles. “For tonight I’ll let you rest, but tomorrow, I’ll show you how a husband treats his wife properly. And I promise you, when your married friend visits again, you won’t have any complaints to share with her. Whether you’ll want to confide in her how your husband makes you scream with pleasure, is for you to decide. Maybe, if she’s a good friend, you would want to give her details she may pass on to her husband, so she too may experience pleasure instead of shame.”
Then he bowed and left her chamber, pulling the door shut behind him. Leaving her tonight was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, but he knew it was necessary, because his wife had to be seduced—thoroughly. And in her current frightened state, she wouldn’t respond to him. He had to catch her off guard.
5
Oriana tossed and turned half the night. Her husband’s words had shaken her. He wasn’t at all what she expected a husband to be like. First of all, he seemed utterly unconventional, repeatedly calling her by her given name and asking her to do the same. She’d refused and stoically continued to call him
signore
, even though she’d wanted to try out his name on her tongue.
“Nico,” she whispered now that she was alone and nobody could hear her.
But the words he’d said to her, his promise to take her to bed and that she would even beg him for it, were outrageous. She couldn’t allow this. From Ilaria, her friend, she knew how humiliating the experience was, and how painful at the same time. She wanted no part of it. And for certain he was hallucinating if he thought she would ever beg for it!
Tonight she would lock her door as well as the connecting door between their chambers so he wouldn’t be able to gain access to her. Surely if she continued this long enough, he would give up and pursue his pleasures with some trollop he found in a tavern. But she, Oriana, would never allow him to touch her that way, despite the fact that he was neither as old nor as ugly as Ilaria’s husband.
Having formed a plan, she fell asleep, but woke early. Like every day, she rose and performed her ablutions. Then she dressed herself without calling for the maid—she would put her corset on later—and snuck out of her room to find her way downstairs, carrying a candlestick with a lit candle to help her along in the darkness. Through a hidden door in the first floor hallway, she entered a secret corridor. It smelled musty and stale in the dark space, but Oriana had gotten used to it. It took her only seconds to reach the only room in this hidden part of the house.
She entered it and lit more candles in the room. They reflected in the mirrors she’d collected over the years and aligned along the walls. She’d acquired a large amount of scientific knowledge during her years of study and understood the principles of most disciplines. Since light reflected in mirrors, she’d decided to brighten the room with their help, thus using only a minimal number of candles.
It had helped her hide her activities from her father, who would have noticed if she had used up more candle wax than he believed she should. Nevertheless, he’d discovered her activities one day. That was when he’d decided to rid himself of her by way of marriage and make her another man’s responsibility—and problem.
For quite a while now, she’d been working on an apparatus that would make it possible to detect supernatural beings. Even before her chance encounter with a vampire, she’d been interested in science and had tinkered with it. Later she’d taken everything she’d learned about physics, chemistry, and biology, and combined it with the knowledge she’d gleaned from myths and legends. Thus she had come up with the formula of what would identify such a creature.
She was constantly fine-tuning her equipment, then testing it again and again out in the dark streets of Venice. She was no fool of course, knowing that if she ventured out on her own, she could fall victim to some cutthroat, so she’d let the second footman, Giuseppe, in on her secrets and found him to be not only a great protector when out on Venice’s dangerous streets, but also a talented assistant in her clandestine lab.
Oriana looked up from her work bench when she heard a sound coming from the corridor. As always on such occasions, she tensed until a soft knock sounded at the old wooden door.
“Come,” she answered, already knowing who asked for entry.
When Giuseppe entered, lowering his head as he stepped through the low door, he bowed briefly.
“I didn’t expect you to be down here so early, signorina, or I would have come earlier to assist you.”
She smiled, but didn’t correct him when he still called her
signorina
, when now she was a
signora
, a married woman.
“Where else would I be?”
He shuffled closer, embarrassed about something. “Your wedding, signorina, I mean signora. I would have expected . . . ” His voice died, then he cleared it loudly. “I wanted to let you know that cook has prepared breakfast.”
“Is it that late already?” she asked, surprised, since she hadn’t noticed the time pass.
“Indeed, signora. And cook delayed it by two hours already, given the fact that this is the morning after you wedding n-n-night.” Whenever he was nervous, his stutter was more pronounced.
“Well, then I’d better not disappoint cook. Has my husband risen?” The word
husband
sounded so foreign in her ears that she wondered whether she was still asleep and merely dreaming.
“He hasn’t rung for any assistance yet.”
Good. At least she could have breakfast in peace and quiet before returning to her lab.
“And, uh . . . ”
She looked at Giuseppe when he didn’t complete his sentence. “Yes, is there something else?”
He nodded quickly. “Do you remember when I mentioned a fortnight ago that I’d heard of some group who’s equally interested in the supernatural as yourself?”
Curious, she froze. “Yes.”
“It appears that this group is very interested in exchanging information with you. In fact, they would even be willing to pay money for seeing your research.”
Her heart stopped. “They know about my research?”
Giuseppe dropped his head, and his fingers played nervously with a button on his livery. “Well, the thing is, in order to find out what they know, I had to tell them a little bit about what you know.” He raised his eyes quickly, uncertainty about her reaction to this news written in them. “I didn’t say much, but I alluded to the fact that you may know how to identify preternatural beings.”
Frantically, the wheels in Oriana’s head began to spin. Had her footman put her in danger by revealing something about her research to strangers? Or could these people help her further her work?
“Do you know what specifically they’re looking for?” she asked.
“Vampires, just like you. They are interested in finding out how to detect one.”
“Have you told them about my machine?” she asked, raising her voice and stepping closer.
Instinctively, he shrunk back from her. “No, not really. Not specifically.” He hesitated, shifting his weight from one foot onto the other, while she stared at him intensely. “I may have said you have a way of knowing.”
“What
exactly
did you tell them?”
He swallowed visibly, his Adam’s apple jumping. “I may have said that you’re working on an apparatus . . . ”
Oriana sighed in frustration. “I don’t even know if this machine works yet. I’m still tinkering with it. It’s too early to tell anybody about it. If it fails, I’ll be the laughingstock of all of Venice! Giuseppe!” she cursed.
“I apologize, signorina, uh, signora!”
“Never mind that now. You’d better go back to them and tell them that I’m still testing the equipment and I’m not ready to reveal it yet.”
Giuseppe scratched himself on the back of his head. “I don’t really know anybody of the group directly. They seem to be very secretive.”
“Then how did you relay information to them?” she asked, confused.
“There’s this footman I know; he knows one of them.”
“Well, then talk to him and tell him what I’ve told you: I’m not ready.”
Then she brushed past him and left her laboratory, calling for her maid to help her put on her corset, which was one piece of clothing she couldn’t lace herself into. Once dressed properly, she headed for the dining room to partake of her breakfast.
6
Nico was awakened by the various sounds in his new home, and had risen despite the fact that it was still daytime, and by the looks of it, even before midday. He could say with certainty that in his entire time as a vampire, he’d never been up this early.
He sleepwalked his way through his morning ritual, nevertheless taking great pains to wash with the cold water that a servant had left in a pitcher the night before. He would call for a bath at a later time. For now, he was eager to find his wife and reassure himself that the face he’d dreamed of after returning home in the early hours of the morning was as beautiful as he remembered.
After Oriana had refused him access to her chamber and her enticing body, he’d left the house, knowing full well that staying while she slept in the room next door would make it impossible for him to sleep one wink. Besides, he was a creature of the night and could be found in a bed during night time for only one reason: to bed a woman.
With stealthy steps that were second nature to him, he stalked downstairs and inhaled deeply, taking in the different scents of the house that was now his home. One scent among the many different ones tickled his nostrils, eliciting the same reaction as when he’d first smelled it the night before: Oriana’s pure scent.
He followed it as it carried him toward the dining room. When he approached the door, he heard the faint tinkling of cutlery. Oriana’s scent was strongest here. Filling his lungs, he opened the door and let himself in, closing it silently behind him.
Knowing he only had a second to take in the lovely sight, before his wife would be alerted to the intrusion, he looked his fill: her lips were red and plump, her fingers holding a fork ever so delicately, her back straight, and her eyes fixated on something in the distance.
Despite the two windows, the room was rather dark because the house backed onto another, slightly taller building, which robbed this side of the house of sunlight. He appreciated this fact, because it made it easy for him to move around. In fact, many Venetian homes were rather dark, since they were only separated from other houses by narrow alleys that didn’t allow much light to penetrate.
When he pushed himself away from the door and took a step into the room, Oriana’s head suddenly whipped in his direction. Her eyes widened, but within a split-second, she had herself under control again, hiding her outraged expression. She could have fooled any man and made him think she was indifferent to his presence, just not Nico, because at the same time he could hear her accelerated heartbeat as it beat a frantic tattoo against her ribcage. Her bosom heaved in concert with it.
“Good morning, Oriana,” he greeted her and approached as slowly as a tiger its prey.
“Good morning, signore,” she answered and turned to look at her plate, stabbing her fork into a morsel of biscuit, before she brought it to her lips and chewed longer than was necessary.
Clearly a ploy so she wouldn’t have to converse with him. Little did she know that he hadn’t come to talk.
“I trust you slept well,” Nico continued and took a seat opposite her, reaching for a biscuit and putting it on his plate even though he had no intention of eating it.
He’d long ago mastered the art of moving food around his plate without anybody noticing that he never actually ate any of it. He distracted those who watched him with conversation and by cutting the food into smaller pieces, then rearranging it on his plate so that it looked as if he’d eaten some of it.
Not that he would even make a pretense of it today. He had, after all, more important things to do: he had to seduce his wife.
“Yes, very well. And you, did you sleep well?”
Her voice was a soft trickle, and he wondered how she would sound when she lay in his arms, panting in ecstasy. Would her voice be even more breathless? Even huskier? Or would she still pretend that he didn’t affect her?
“I slept terribly, my sweet wife, and I hope to remedy this situation very soon.”
When he lifted his lids and looked straight at her, he noticed a pink blush spread over her cheeks, but she didn’t raise her eyes to meet his gaze and instead stared at her empty plate.
Then she removed the napkin from her lap and folded it, placing it neatly next to her plate. “If you’ll excuse me. I have things to attend to.”
She rose swiftly, but he was faster. Before she could make two steps away from the table, he had her cornered between it and the paneled wall.
“Signore! If you’d please let me pass,” she requested, her voice tight.
“My name is Nico.” He took another step closer, bringing his body flush with hers.
“Signore . . . ”
He shook his head.
Finally she seemed to understand. “Nico, please, would you let me pass?”
“If that’s what you truly want, Oriana.” He closed the distance between their heads, allowing his lips to hover mere centimeters above her mouth. His action had caused her to press herself against the wall behind her, leaving her nowhere else to go.