Blood & Secrets: The Night Movers Vampire Series Book 2

by Helen Bright

  “Should we go to the next room?” I asked, once again placing my hand on her lower back and guiding her towards one of the sitting rooms.

  After taking her to four of the downstairs rooms, I led her back towards the front door. I had agreed to every colour and design she said for each room, trusting her choice, as her suggestions did seem to fit the criteria I specified for each of the chosen spaces.

  She gave me a rough estimate which I agreed upon as it seemed very reasonable and she was surprised when I also gave her another two hundred pounds’ contingency, in case she thought of anything else she could supply that would be in keeping with the decorative aspect of this old house.

  As she turned to leave, I took her left hand, and I noticed she didn’t have a ring on any of her fingers. I kissed the back of her hand and smiled at her.

  “Would you consider going out to dinner with me next week Chloe,” I asked.

  She looked at me as if she was trying to figure out what my motives were. Perceptive woman.

  After all, I did have a motive where this little goddess was concerned. I decided to put her at ease a little.

  “My friends and colleagues in the area all seem to be busy at the moment, and I find myself lacking good company. I know you are busy with running a successful business, but I would be thrilled if a beautiful woman, such as yourself could find a little time to have dinner with me,” I said, knowing all women like to be flattered like this.

  “I’m not sure, Gregor. Can I let you know when I bring the displays? I could let you know if I am available then.” Chloe smiled and then got in her car.

  What? Was she turning me down? This was a new experience for me. Chloe wound down her window and called me over.

  “Here are some suggestions for you to take a look at when I’m gone,” Chloe said, as she handed me a folded piece of paper from her notepad. Then she drove away.

  I unfolded the piece of lined paper and looked at her suggestions which read, ‘I’m free most nights after eight p.m. My mobile number is on the back of my business card. Oh, and Gregor, you are a terrible flirt.’

  I laughed so hard as I walked through the house that Keeley came to check on me. Chloe seemed shy and submissive but had an edge of boldness about her, a potent combination in my world.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Freya

  After tucking Daisy into bed and reassuring her that we could go to the beach again tomorrow if it were sunny, I finally managed to get her off to sleep.

  I made my way to my bedroom, pausing outside of the room where Dan slept on his first night here, but I didn’t hear anything at the door, so I assumed he was downstairs.

  I wanted a nice long bath and some chill out time after being so busy with Daisy today. She had loved the aquarium and was asking all sorts of questions about all the marine life we saw. She’s really forward for her age; you have to remember sometimes that Daisy’s not even five yet.

  I walked into my bedroom and knew he was there before I could see him. The pure male scent of him hit me hard, and when I turned to look at him, the view I saw didn’t leave me disappointed. Dan sat in my reading chair with a glass of whiskey in his hand. His chest was bare, and his dark jeans were open at the waistband showing the top of his boxer shorts. Dan wore nothing on his feet, and his hair was still wet, telling me he hadn’t been out of the shower long.

  “We need to talk about where we go from here Freya,” he said with a sigh.

  That didn’t sound too good at all. It was only yesterday that he told me he loved me. Was he having regrets already? I went to sit on the bed across from him, and he offered to get me a drink.

  “Why? Do I need one?” I asked, preparing myself for an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ scenario. He got up and poured me a whiskey, then sat back in the chair.

  “Just spit it out Dan,” I said preparing myself for the brush off. Obviously, Josh had been right all along.

  “Freya, I’ve been talking things through with Keeley today. She was telling me how she feels that she and Josh jumped the gun a bit and should have dated in the traditional way before they decided to get married. Obviously, I have my job, and home in Barrowfield and you live here. I work twelve hour nights which doesn’t help when you are in a new relationship, so I was thinking…maybe you could stay in my home with me a few days during the week and then I could come here on my days off. I will warn you though Freya, my flat is tiny, and I haven’t been in it long enough to decorate so don’t expect anything fancy.”

  I was stunned, and no words came to me at first. Daniel’s gaze drifted towards the floor.

  “Am I jumping the gun a bit her, Freya? Only, after yesterday, I thought you may want something more with me,” he said nervously.

  “I thought you were giving me the brush off,” I finally admitted. “When you said you wanted to talk, I thought you were going to say that you regret saying you loved me.”

  “Do you regret saying it back to me, Freya?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then why would you think I would regret saying it to you?”

  “I don’t know, Dan, I suppose I’m just wondering why someone as young and gorgeous as you, who can have any woman he fancied would want someone like me.”

  “You mean someone who I have wanted since I first saw her. A sexy blond haired, grey-eyed goddess, with the most tempting body I have ever laid eyes on? I mean, why would I ever want someone like that?” he said exasperated.

  “Dan, I may still look twenty-seven, but I’m near on nine hundred and fifty years old. I also can’t give you children, not your own children anyway.”

  “First of all, you must have had really good genes because you don’t look a day older than I do,” he laughed. “Secondly, although I admit I would like to have kids one day, whether they come along naturally or not it makes no difference to me. Daisy’s biological father wants fuck all to do with her, yet Josh has always doted on that girl. Who should get to be called father? Certainly not Rick the prick. Josh will be her dad in all the ways that count. Sure they may have some issues when Daisy gets asked why her dad has a different skin colour than she does. But the thing they have on their side is genuine love, and that will overpower anything, even biology. Of course, I’m not against practicing making babies,” he said winking at me.

  “So you want me to be your girlfriend?”

  “For now.”

  “Are you sure you want to be done with the single life, Dan?” I asked, and he sighed heavily.

  “Let me tell you a little story Freya. Can you remember what I was like at fifteen years old? I was going on for six foot in height and had started to build muscle even then. I’d always been a good looking kid and had no shortage of girlfriends. I had played around with a lot of them; you know what it’s like with young lads, always trying to cop a feel of a girl’s tits and slipping them a finger or two. As long as I got a wank out of it, I didn’t care. And let me tell you Freya, you have always been the star of every wet dream I have ever had.”

  I laughed as I remembered Daniel as he was as a young teen.

  “Anyway, in the summer holidays that I turned fifteen, my best mate Aaron’s mum gave him and me a job painting all the woodwork throughout their home. He had started in his mum and dad’s room, and they had some cupboards in a built-in wardrobe that Aaron was painting. He moved some stuff so he wouldn’t get paint on them and some books fell out. They were all books about sex, eight of them in total. He shouted me in, and we laughed a bit over them at first as we looked through all the pictures.

  “When we looked at a few of the others, we realised we had stumbled on a goldmine of knowledge on all the ways to get women to have an orgasm. Like I said, being young lads we looked at all the pictures and diagrams first. We put the books back where we found them after an hour or so then went back to painting. The next day we got them out again and began to read more, this time. I wasn’t a big reader, never have been, but I read each and every one of those bo
oks front to back over the six-week school holidays. And I don’t even think Rainman could have memorised their content better than me.

  “We also found a lot of porn in the same cupboard, but although watching that was a serious turn on, it didn’t seem to us to match what we read in the books as far as giving women what they wanted. So when we went back to school, me and Aaron decided that we would put our new found reading to good use. The first time I got a girl off with my fingers on her clit was awkward and seemed to take forever, but when she came, I could have beat my chest with pride. Straight after she took my cock out and gave me a wank without me even asking.

  “Aaron and I soon found out that the more we got girls off the further we were able to go with them. By the time we left school and were going out drinking we both had become a bit of a legend with the ladies. I was over six foot in height by this time and getting more muscle by the day. The fact that I had a big cock helped as well. Women loved me and I found the better I got at giving oral sex, the more I got away with in the bedroom. I could pretty much fuck any woman, in any hole I wanted; sometimes I had more than one woman at once. In fact, one bank holiday weekend I ended up with three women in bed with me.

  “Over the last couple of years, I got bored with all that. To go out and pull was just too easy, and all the women wanted me because they knew about my reputation for being good in bed, and being well endowed. Even when we went out a few towns away, they didn’t seem to want to spend a few hours chatting and getting to know me or anything. When I was eighteen that suited me; and even up to being twenty-three that was okay.

  “Then I hit twenty-four, and although Aaron and I were still single a lot of our mates were settling down, and some were even getting married. They seemed happier somehow; and the thought of having someone special in my life really appealed to me. My shift pattern didn’t help with trying to establish a relationship, and because I had been a bit of a man slut, most women said they would find it hard to trust someone like me.”

  He stood up and walked towards the windows. Without looking at me, he said, “I was lonely Freya. When I had that last bust up with my dad, I went to stay with Aaron in his flat for a bit. I was sleeping on his sofa wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Two days later I rented the flat next door to him and decided that would be a new start for me. But although Night Movers pays well, I have to keep doing the better paid night shift so I can afford to keep my flat, make it a home, and run my car. That’s why I would need you to come and stay with me a few days a week because my job dictates my lack of normal couple time.”

  I walked up behind him, put my arms around his waist and rested my head against his shoulder.

  “I don’t mind coming to stay with you, Dan, if that’s what it takes. Although I have another proposition for you.”

  I turned him around to face me. “You could always come and work for me.”

  “What do you mean work for you? Freya I don’t know anything about fashion or fabrics, and I’m not smart enough to learn either,” he huffed and looked at me suspiciously.

  “It wouldn’t be in that capacity, not in the way you probably imagine anyway. My job involves a lot of travelling as you know. Lots of the places I travel to are filled with lovely people, some of whom I’ve known for many years. But there is always the odd one or two men that think it’s okay to take advantage of women, even those like me who have a strong managerial role and own the company.

  “There’s this one guy in France who I loathe. His company is the place to go for delicate lace works in Europe. The people who work for him are highly skilled and work the lace by hand, embroidering it onto any fabric, even the finest silk; and all with workmanship that is second to none.

  “I have a designer to whom I supply the finished product, and he pays me an extortionate amount to get this done for him in various hard to work on fabrics, so the French company is the only place I can go to that can get the job done. The owner is called Thierry, and he’s a true male chauvinist pig.

  “I worked on and off with his father Jean-Claude for years, and he was sweet. If you’re wondering how I got away without him noticing that I hadn’t aged, well…we use mind control to place images in the minds of people we need to have long-term relationships with other than family and friends, who know and understand what we are. In Jean-Claude’s mind, my mother passed away suddenly, and I took over the business. Of course, he knew what my mother (or I) looked like. So, as we normally do, I planted seeds of doubt in his mind. This convinces him that, although I look like my mother, the person he had been dealing with for years, I have things about me that are very different.”

  “Such as?” Dan asked.

  “Well, he would say, ‘my dear Freya you look so much like your mother.’ And I would say, ‘Yes I do, but my mother had the prettiest blue eyes you had ever seen, and mine are so grey.'”

  “And that would work?”

  “If your mind control is strong enough and you put many seeds of doubt in their minds, it can create a somewhat different picture than their own memory has stored away. For instance, Alex, Josh, and Nik have known Mr. Singh in the post office in Barrowfield for years. Whenever Mr. Singh comments to Alex that he looks just like his father, Alex says, ‘Yes I do, apart from the terrible squint you remember my father having.’ Then the next time Mr. Singh sees him, he says to Alex, ‘If it weren't for that squint your father had you would look just like him.’

  “Josh says his father was a lot shorter and stuttered. Nik always says like I do, different coloured eyes and I’ve heard him say something about a limp too. Before we did this, we had to move around a lot so your immortality wouldn’t get found out, but when you like an area and want to stay, you have to come up with different tactics. That’s where I think the old legend comes from. You know the one I mean, where vampires don’t have their photographs taken because they have no reflection. Obviously, that’s untrue.

  “As you well know, I have lots of photographs all around my home with all the family and friends I hold dear. But if you can avoid public photos then there is no public record of your likeness available for people to exploit. You must have noticed that it’s always your Aunt Maggie who gets photographed by the newspaper at Night Movers charity events.”

  “I have never thought about it before, but yes you’re right. Not one of the Night Movers bosses are ever in the local paper even though they sponsor a lot of stuff.”

  “Anyway, getting back to Thierry. When his father Jean-Claude passed away suddenly after a heart attack, he took over the business. He’s a handsome man, I suppose, but he is well aware of it and had previously used his family’s wealth and status to help gain his playboy reputation. But he’s also nasty and cruel. He thinks nothing of trying to undermine women who have important roles in this industry. Thierry tried it on a couple of times with me, and I had to fend him off. I hit him so hard in the chest that he collapsed on the floor struggling to breathe.

  “I used mind control to convince him that he had just collapsed with chest pain, but unbeknown to me a large amount of coke he had been snorting, combined with the mind control I had used had scrambled his perception of what happened even further. Thierry doesn’t know exactly what happened, but he is extremely wary of me. That hasn’t stopped him making sexual advances towards me, but he does it when his bodyguards are present. They are paid to turn a blind eye to whatever misdemeanours he commits, but unless I use mind control on all three, there is nothing I can do but accept his lewd remarks and inappropriate touching, as he steers me to my seat for instance.

  “My contract with the designer has another eight months to run and then I’m done with Thierry’s company. It’s a shame because all the hard working people he employs will suffer. I am an extremely wealthy woman and could afford to take the loss, but I have several up and coming young British designers who are working with the French and Italian fashion houses I supply, who need me to keep going until they are established. So I do need to
see the eight months out. It’s all very complicated and cut throat as the fashion business often is, and I have never enjoyed that side of it. The fabric buying side I love, but getting to the end product is something else entirely.”

  “What would you want me to do? He asked.

  “Work as my bodyguard so I have protection against men like Thierry.”

  Dan ran his hands through his still damp blonde hair and sighed.

  “Freya for a normal human bloke I am big and strong, I get that, but you could wait for these men somewhere dark and snap them in half if you wanted. And if this slime ball is as bad as you say then maybe you should think about that.”

  “You think I should kill him?” I asked incredulously.

  “No, I didn’t say that. But maybe you could break his legs or something. Make sure he’s on his own and just jump him. I would want too. I bet Alex and Josh would do it without hesitation, and your Russian friend Gregor.”

  “You mustn’t tell them, Dan. They would be furious to know my staff and I have had to put up with the likes of him. Things are different now. There are camera’s everywhere, and if any retribution were ever caught on camera, then it could spell the end of our kind.”

  He held me tightly, his chin resting on the top of my head.

  “Freya, will you be honest with me when I ask you this next question?”

  I think I knew where this was going, but I would answer him truthfully. If he didn’t want to be with me afterwards, then I would have to accept that. As long as he knew, he would never have anything to fear from me.

  “Other than your father, have you ever seriously hurt or killed someone?”

  “Yes,” I said simply, and I felt his whole body tense for a few seconds, then he relaxed again.

  “I know you wouldn’t hurt m, Freya, so I won’t ever be scared of you. But I do want you to tell me about your answer.”

  I moved out of his arms and sat down on the bed again. I gestured for him to sit on the chair once more. I needed to look into his eyes when I told him. I needed to see that he held no fear.