The Reluctant Miss Van Helsing (32 page)

“It is quite beneath your dignity to flee to this perverse place. Even if the women do dress up as your bird of choice to feast upon. It is so… weak.”

“Don’t call me chicken for coming to Madame Saunders’s. And don’t try and turn this around on me,” Asher warned, his eyes an icy blue. He shoved her finger away.

“You naughty old Nosferatu, you fornicating fiend, you rutting old roue!” Jane accused.

Asher glared at her. “I am not an old roue!” He hated the image that came to mind: an older man of the ton, gouty knees, a corseted waist, thinning hair, trying desperately to seduce the young and beautiful. Why, he wasn’t even four hundred years old yet.

“Ha! You are older than the oldest old roue in London,” she snapped.

Asher opened his mouth to argue, but she spoke the truth.

“You are a libertine. A whoremonger who has a fetish for birds!” Jane yelled. Then she added curtly, “Particularly soiled doves.”

“I am a vampire with needs,” he shouted back.

“Which I would be more than happy to attend,” Jane responded. Then she wished she had bitten her tongue before revealing how much she longed to be his wife in every sense of the word.

Asher’s eyes took on a gleam as he recalled her enthusiastic response, screaming his name as she climaxed, and the sweet-tart taste of her blood. His plan had been to ignore his unwanted wife. But plans could change. A master vampire was nothing if not mutable. “Fine,” he said.

“Fine what?” Jane asked warily.

“You can attend my needs,” he stated offhandedly, not wanting her to see that the fires of desire were stirring once more to life in him. He glanced at the heinous decor of the bedchamber. Jane was right; the room was garish beyond belief. Odd, that he had never noticed before. He would need to speak to Madame Saunders about redecorating. That is, if he ever decided to return. He also would give notice to his mistresses.

“No more highfliers?” Jane asked hopefully.

Asher cocked a brow. “Not as long as you attend my needs as well as you have tonight.” Yes, he would definitely give notice to his mistresses tomorrow. He would see to it that his man of affairs got them nice sets of diamonds as a parting gift. Perhaps Jane would like a set of emeralds. They would go beautifully with her eyes. “I must admit you are quite spectacular. Beyond spectacular I guess.”

Jane blushed and, grabbing his cloak, she pulled it about her to hide her face from view. She didn’t want Asher to see the joy his words brought her. Somehow, against all odds, she had fallen in love with her roguish vampire husband.

“Here.” Asher shoved a handkerchief her way. “Wipe off that ridiculous make-up.”

Jane complied.

“Now, why are you here tonight?” Asher questioned, staring imperiously at her. “I want the truth, Jane. No more prevaricating. Can you do that?”

His words hurt her deeply. Of course she intended to tell the truth.

Eventually.

Hiding her pain, Jane concisely explained how her brother was looking for Dracul and why. Her husband scowled fiercely, admonishing her with dire warnings of Dracul’s black deeds. She sighed. She was a Van Helsing. She knew all about the count. There was no need to beat a dead but. After all, the Prince of Darkness hadn’t earned his title by delivering Easter eggs.

After a few minutes of Asher’s wrathful scolding, Jane continued, explaining to her irate husband how she had overheard his conversation with Renfield, and of her concern for him.

Asher was clenching his fists by the time his wife finished her explanation. His jaw felt hard as marble. His eyes were so icy that they actually caused chilblains to run up and down her arms. In minute detail, he lectured Jane about listening to private conversations, although his heart had skipped momentarily when she voiced her worry about him.

Finally, Jane concluded her story with meeting Colonel and Madame Saunders, the drugged wine, and running into him. Asher’s mood was as black as the night outside.

Jane tried to speak, but her husband shook his head. They exited the brothel under the cloak of darkness and secrecy. He thought he might strangle her if she said anything else. She could have been killed tonight! Or compromised. Or someone else might have tasted her passion…

Asher growled. He would kill anyone who tried to taste his wife. He would not be a cuckold. He would not tolerate any man, vampire or shape-shifter sampling what was his alone to taste, touch and plunder. He spoke few words as he loaded Jane into his carriage, and as the conveyance rolled away with a clatter, he sat in brooding silence.

Jane was remembering in vivid detail the loss of her virginity. She felt like singing at the top of her lungs. She now knew what went on between a man and a woman—or a vampire and a woman—behind closed doors. It was just bloody marvelous!

Eyeing the fine figure of her husband in the deep shadows in their carriage, Jane noted he was staring out the window, a study in bleak anger. Still, even knowing this, some imp inside her made Jane comment, “Hmmm. Strange, but I see no flying elephants.” She stared up at the half-f moon in the sky.

Her husband’s look could have frozen over the hottest desert in the world. Jane hid her grin. After all, Van Helsings were renowned for coming out on top in every battle between vampire and mortal. Next time, she’d be sure to get some that way too.

Jane
laid her head against the cool glass of her balcony window, feeling the night winds blowing gently against her face. Below, the garden was thick with a soft, grayish fog, and the stars glittered ever-distant in the blue-black night sky.

It was midnight, the witching hour, or if you were a Van Helsing, it was time to pick up your old black bag of vampire tools and go out stalking. Jane sighed thankfully. Those days were behind her.

Moving sideways, she enjoyed the breeze cooling her fevered thoughts—erotic images of Asher thrusting into her, his head thrown back in ecstasy as he poured his seed into her body. She remembered the feel of his hard thighs against hers as he penetrated her, his lips licking and nipping her nipples; and she shivered. How she longed to feel him thus again. But it had been two long nights since her husband had made fiery love to her. It seemed that, on matters of lovemaking, her husband could be quite down to earth when he wasn’t actually in it. The stubborn lout was avoiding her once again.

No longer was she a virgin. Now she knew what delights awaited her in the marriage bed, and she only wanted more of the same. But Asher was remote as a marble statue, the silly vacillating vampire.

Jane had seen only a glimpse of him last night, when he had descended the stairs in his long black multilayered cape. He had glanced at her briefly, then left without a word of farewell. It was simply too much to be ignored again; she would not stand for it. She would devise a plan to seduce her husband again and again and again.

She smiled at the thought. She might not be able to have her husband in the day, or to share love’s delights in the afternoon, “But I will be bloody well damned if I’m going to give up the nights.”

If Asher would only trust her, open up and reveal his past. That would open the door to their future, Jane believed. Trust was essential in relationships. Love would be even better. But she would settle for what she could get. She would love Asher, and he must trust and respect her. “You neglectful Nosferatu, I won’t let you win this game of vampire and mouse.”

Feeling better, Jane lifted her head and let the breeze caress her face like a lover’s fingers. But when her wrist began to tingle uncomfortably, Jane had an inexplicable urge to visit the gardens.

She recognized that the feeling was daft; it was midnight and she was in her nightgown. Shivering, she felt a vague sense of evil as the tingling continued, compelling her to walk downstairs and outside into the fog-shrouded night. Restlessly she stirred, beginning to pace back and forth, resisting the compulsion, until a birdcall caught her attention. The sound was unmistakable.

“The nightingale,” she gasped, excitement catching her in its grip. The elusive bird was somewhere close. She had been right that first night when she’d trailed Asher to the cemetery. There was a nightingale in London, as impossible as it might seem.

Once London had abounded with the beautiful birds, but their numbers had diminished as the air grew fouler and smoke from factories had filled the winds. Now they were practically extinct in England, and were found only rarely in the North Country.

“What a discovery,” Jane murmured, quickly grabbing her robe and quietly descending the long marble staircase. She could hardly wait to tell the Audubon Society about it.

Outside in the garden, she followed the sound like a siren’s call from the sea. Foraging carefully between thornbushes and exotic roses, Jane examined the night sky and the dark outline of the trees, wherever the angelic singing might originate.

As she walked, the fog became thicker, a white-veiled mist among the dark shadows of the garden. Those shadows loomed menacingly, causing Jane to pause right before she entered an area clothed all in solitary blackness, a void where time ceased to exist.

To her right, she heard movement. Startled, she turned, her heart pounding and her fear escalating, leaving the taste of metal in her mouth. Someone was out here with her.

A loud “Ereek!” broke the night. The sound caused Jane to jump, then to laugh giddily. It was Orville’s greeting call.

Giggling foolishly, she walked back to the gate and opened it to pet her ostrich, who leaned down to rub his head across her shoulder.

“So, we meet again.”

Gasping, Jane whirled. A tall, lean figure emerged from the shadows and fog, making a dark passage, his long black cape flowing out behind him. She could see his fangs glistening in the the moonlight. He was evil personified, the dark, soulless mirrors of his eyes a dark hazard.

“Jane Van Helsing Asher,” the figure said formally with a heavy Eastern European accent. “I have been waiting for you.” He bowed mockingly. “You might say that you have become my obsession.”

“Dracul, I presume,” Jane managed to say, her throat very dry. She recognized the voice from the night at the Birds of Paradise Club. This was the blond man who was not a man, who had frightened her when he had tried to drag her off. She had felt a strong threat from him that night. She had not been wrong in that, but he was a vampire and not a werewolf.

“You did not know me last time,” Dracul bragged, his voice filled with both menace and laughter, a strange combination. “I was quite disappointed to find that a Van Helsing could be so obtuse.”

“That is an unjust accusation. I was drugged. Now, what do you want?” she asked, cautiously backing away. This was the monster of nightmares, the Prince of Darkness!

“Why, you’re not dark at all,” she noted. In fact, he was fair, with hair as golden as the sunlight—which of course hadn’t set upon Dracul’s head in over six centuries. Why hadn’t she told her husband of what happened to her in the smoking parlor? Lust! That’s why, she thought critically. She had been so wrapped up in her husband’s lovemaking, she had pushed the strange meeting with this supernatural creature to the back of her mind.

Fool! she chided herself. Foolish, lovesick female, worrying about Asher’s lack of interest when she should have been worrying about Dracul’s.

The evil count laughed. “Dark enough, my little Van Helsing.”

Staring at him, her eyes wide with fright, Jane saw that Dracul was quite handsome—a fact she found chilling. He was a vicious monster hiding behind a mask of perfection. “What do you want?”

“Why, I want you, my dear,” he replied, his voice slippery-smooth.

“Why?” she questioned, her heart beating a staccato dance, threatening to pound right out of her chest. She had no stakes with her. She was alone, with no one to step in and rescue her. No father, no cousins, no brother—not even her husband, who was probably out carousing with that overblown neck-biting hussy Lady Montcrief. Really, the man was insufferable.

“Did you kill all those prostitutes?” she asked.

“Not all.”

“And what of Lady Veronique?”

“She caught the eye of my cronies.”

Jane shuddered. “She’s a vampire now?”

All my training was for nothing, she thought hazily, gazing into the grisly hellfire in Dracul’s eyes. She was going to die, and Asher was more than likely sleeping with some tart of the walking dead.

“Of course,” he answered. “And soon you will be, too. Don’t you see that there is a dreadful beauty in decay?” Dracul asked, his eyes full of dark insanity. “From destruction comes rebirth. As you will see. And even better, you are a Van Helsing. The major will be most distressed to find his daughter my eternal vampire bride.”

Jane shook her head, backing away. “I don’t intend to follow in Lady Veronique’s footsteps.” She came up against Orville’s large feathered back. This was even worse than she feared. Dracul wasn’t going to kill her: he was going to make her one of his infamous brides. Brides who drank the blood of little children, draining them and then throwing their small bodies into gutters or off castle walls, while the count cheered them on to new heights of depravity. She would spend eternity throwing up.

It was a black contrast to the thought of eternity with her husband. That would be a different matter, a marvelous thing as they explored the wonders of the world and each other’s bodies. As they watched time pass and new inventions change the world, as new thoughts changed the values of the world, as new art changed the esoteric qualities of the world. Perhaps they would discover a new bird species, fly as vampire bats among them, soaring high and free. It would be a never-ending adventure.

Reality brought her back to the ground with a thud. Asher would never ask her to be his eternal bride.

He didn’t love her, she reminded herself.

“You have no choice as I can see,” Dracul said, glancing around him.

“Don’t you have three wives already? Wouldn’t one more be a bit gauche?” Jane asked, her voice shaky. She took another small step away from the fanged fiend.