Their voices trailed off when Nikola marched up two flights of stairs and turned down the wing that housed the family rooms. He passed first the lord’s bedchamber, then the one belonging to his late wife, pausing at the door just beyond it.
“Open it,” he commanded.
A small figure with red hair straggling out of her mobcap dashed toward the door, only to be stopped and pushed to the side. “I am the footman most extraordinaire. You are only the maidservant,” Robert told the redheaded maid, scowling at her as he wiped off the hand he had used to stop her. “It is my duty to open doors. Begone you and your so bent arm.”
“I can open a door if I wish to,” the maid named Elizabet answered, squaring her thin shoulders, one arm, smaller and more emaciated than the other, clutched just under her nearly nonexistent bosom. “The master said I can do anything anyone else can do. He said my arm is nothing to be ashamed of, and that in some foreign places I’d be revered as a god because I’m different.”
“You’re just a woman,” Robert said with another of his superior sniffs. “You cannot be the god. Only a man like me can be a god.”
“That’s not what Master says. He says I could be a footman if I really wanted to be one.”
“You would not be a footman, then,” Robert argued. “You would be a footwoman. And no one wishes to have a footwoman. It is not done. Let go of the doorknob!”
“I will not! Master says—”
“Master says that if you think it’s easy hauling a deadweight upstairs and all around the house,” Nikola interrupted loudly, “you’re bloody wrong. I don’t care which of you opens the damned door just so it’s opened before my arms break off from the strain, leaving me with the need to learn how to feed myself with my feet. And given the fact that I have never been able to do so much as pick up a quill with my toes, learning to eat with them is not going to end well. Open. The. Door.”
“Papa, I still want to know who this woman is—”
Luckily for Nikola’s sanity Robert managed to wrest Elizabet’s hand away from the door, and flung it open with a glower at the little maid, saying as he did so, “The monseigneur rescued me from the so lecherous Count d’Orville when he attempted to do wicked things to me with parts of his person that I will not mention in front of Mademoiselle Imogen. Me, and not you. Therefore, it is I who will open his doors when he has upon his hands the dead women.”
Nikola, for what seemed like the hundredth time, wondered why he put up with the odd group of servants that seemed always to find him. “I could have normal servants, you know, ones who knew their places and acted accordingly. At one point in my life, I did have normal servants. I wonder what happened to them, and whether they’d be willing to return.”
“But they would be so boring,” Imogen said, following him into the room.
He laid the woman gently on the bed, staring down at her for a few moments. In the lamplight, she seemed to be sleeping, nothing more, and the logical jump in thoughts from a sleeping woman to a woman in his bed giving him more pleasure than he could humanly conceive had him aware that his breeches were growing tighter by the second.
His gaze played along the length of her, lingering on the highlights of her attractions—small but perfectly shaped breasts, rounded hips, and supple-looking legs. Just the thought of those legs wrapped around his hips while he buried himself in her left him in a state that might have been best described as “full to bursting.”
It was not a pleasant experience.
“Wake up,” he told the woman, tired of her just lying there demanding that he ogle her. He hated being bossed around, and if this woman of ill repute thought she was going to twist him around her long, sensitive fingers—fingers that he suddenly could imagine doing so many things to him—she should start thinking again.
To his surprise, her eyelashes fluttered a few times, then squeezed tightly shut for the count of three before they parted to reveal eyes the color of the stormy North Sea.
“Hrn?” she asked, her gaze on him, her expression filled with confusion. “What…uh…who are you?”
She spoke English with an accent that he couldn’t place for a moment before realizing it was one that he had heard from a colonist. How on earth had a colonial prostitute traveled to Austria? And why would she go to all that trouble? Were there no customers in the colonies with whom she could ply her wares? He allowed his gaze to wander over her again. If he were at all the sort of man who had to resort to a courtesan, she would most definitely fit his needs.
“Hello? Eyes up here, buster.”
Nikola straightened up when the woman snapped at him, giving him an annoyed look. No one had ever snapped at him before. He did not care for the experience, and said with frosty dignity, “I beg your pardon?”
“You were staring at my boobs,” the woman answered, a defiant tilt to her chin that seemed to warm him despite his irritation with all the untoward snapping. “That’s seriously over the line, and even if I didn’t just turn in my boss for sexual harassment, and thus have become very familiar with what does and does not constitute inappropriate ogling, then I still would have an issue with you eyeing me like I’m a slab of meat and you’re a hungry wolf.”
“Sexual harassment?” Was she mad as well as heedless? “I am not a wolf. I am a Moravian.”
“What you are is a damned ogler.”
Imogen and the others in the room gasped in surprise at her use of profanity.
He flared his nostrils at her in a manner that had, in the past, never failed to intimidate those who had the audacity to irritate him, although now that he thought about it, there weren’t very many people who deliberately attempted to try his temper in the manner of this annoying, delectable woman. “Madame—”
“Io.”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “What did you say?”
“Io. My name is Io.” She pronounced the name “eye-oh,” as if that were perfectly ordinary. Which was ridiculous, because no one he knew bore a name with only vowels. It had to be something indigenous to the colonies. “It’s actually Iolanthe, but no one calls me that but my tax accountant. Who are you?”
He took a deep breath, determined to take charge of the situation. “My name is Nikola Czerny.”
“Nicole? I thought that was a girl’s name.”
Imogen gasped again. Frau Leiven clutched her throat and staggered over to a chair. Robert studied himself in a mirror that hung on a wall, and adjusted his wig to a rakish angle.
“It’s Nikola, and it is not a female name,” Nikola answered in an even tone, despite the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to throttle the woman. Or kiss her. He wouldn’t mind doing both, to be honest. “It is my name, and I am a man. It is nothing uncommon, not like a name that contains nary a single consonant.”
“My name has consonants!”
“I-O,” he said with much portent.
“Well, that part is just vowels.” She looked grumpy now, as if she did not like having the flaws in her reasoning pointed out. “But there’s more to my full name than that. Just don’t call me Yolanda. I hate that.”
“Very well, Iolanthe.”
“Dammit, I just said don’t call me that!” She sat up, frowning and rubbing her head.
“No, you said not to call you Yolanda. I called you Iolanthe, which is a name that has proper syllables and consonants.”
She punched his arm. “It sounds the same!”
“It’s not. The ‘the’ at the end sounds rather like a ‘da’ when pronounced in German, but—”
“Oh, for the love of the five and forty virgins, just give it up! Call me Io. Yes, just the vowels, I know, you don’t need to point it out again. Nikola, you said?” Her nose wrinkled slightly as she thought. “Oh, with a k in the middle, like Tesla? That’s actually a pretty cool name.”
“Thank you,” he said gravely, making her a little bow. “Were my parents alive, I would pass along to them your appreciation of it. I do not know this Tesla, but I have no
t met all the people in the valley. Now, if you would be so good to tell me what you were doing running into Heinrich. Were you fleeing your proprietress? Or a customer?”
“A what, now?” Io winced as she continued to rub her forehead. “Man, I have the headache to end all headaches. What happened? Do I know you? You sound Austrian—are you one of Gretl’s friends?”
Nikola refused to notice what an endearing picture she made when she blinked up at him with those smoky, mysterious eyes.
He did not like mysterious people. They were often annoying. “I was born in Moravia, not Austria, although I have lived here from the time I reached my majority. For whom do you work?”
“No one, not anymore.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, gripping the blankets and wobbling just enough that Nikola put his hands on her shoulders to keep her from toppling over.
The feel of that tanned, freckled silken skin under his fingers made his blood tingle with desire. He told both his blood and his desire to cease acting inappropriately. He had better things to do with his time than stand here and touch this woman, his fingertips positively burning with the need to stroke that flesh, to lick it, to bite and drink his fill in the warmth that he was suddenly certain only she could bring him.
What the deuce was he thinking? He did not want to lick or bite or drink from this prostitute. He did not want to lay her in his bed and sate himself on her over and over and over again. He did not want to watch her eyes go dark with passion, or to feel her body tighten around him….
“Hey, are you all right? You look funny, like you’ve got a painful gas bubble or something.”
“Hrn?” With an effort, Nikola dragged his attention from the erotic mental images that gripped him, and blinked down at the woman. “Painful gas bubble?”
“My mother used to get them a lot. She said they were a real bitch when she was around others.”
He was aware of more horrified gasping from the servants and his daughter, but the amusement in the woman’s eyes seemed to hold him in thrall. Who was she? And, more important, why did she affect him so strongly?
“Mind you, she also had a tipped uterus, but I really don’t think that has anything to do with the matter.”
Had she cast some spell over him?
“And of course, that’s not a situation that would affect you, either.”
It had to be a spell. He’d never before reacted in such a manner to a woman.
“My mom used to say that drinking water helped a lot. The painful gas bubbles, that is, not the thing with her uterus.”
He would simply demand that she remove the spell. Once she knew that he was aware of her trickery, she would be ashamed and would take her desirable, tempting person away from him.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
And then life would return to normal, and he could continue to be a martyr to his servants. He nodded to himself. That was what he’d do. He’d demand she remove the spell.
“Nikola?”
Io was asking him something. He rummaged around in his memory to find whatever it was she’d been babbling about. “No,” he finally said. “I am not afflicted by painful wind in bubble or any other form.”
“That’s always good to know,” she said pleasantly, a little smile curling the edges of her mouth. “So, anyway, I got fired from my last job by a boss who was Mr. Grabby Hands. Thanks, you can let go of me, I’m OK now. I was just a bit dizzy for a few seconds. Is Gretl here? I assume I had some sort of an accident, but I’ll be damned if I remember just what happened to me.”
He released his hold on her shoulders, stepping back a foot in order to better pin her with a look. “I wish for you to remove the spell you have cast upon me,” he told her with a firmness that he felt brooked no opposition.
“You want me to what?” Her forehead scrunched up, her nose wrinkling in such an adorable manner, it almost brought him to his knees.
More gasps sounded around the edges of the room, but this time they were less shocked and more fearful.
“She’s a witch!” he heard Frau Leiven cry. “She’s cast a spell on the baron! Where’s the witch finder? Someone get the witch finder!”
“Oh for the love of Mike,” Io said, peering around him to where the servants stood against the wall. “A witch? I’m not even remotely Wiccan.”
“Mike?” Nikola pounced on the word. “Who is this Mike? Is he your lover?” A sudden surge of hatred for this lover made his heart pound. He hated Mike. He had no idea who the man was, but he hated him with every morsel of his being. He had to curl his fingers into fists in order to keep from grabbing her and demanding to know where this wastrel, this Mike, was located.
Io was back to looking at him, as she should be, but he could have sworn there was real confusion in her eyes as she answered. “No. My last boyfriend’s name was Thomas, but he was a real dick, so I dumped him.”
“Dick?” How many lovers did she have? There must be limits, even for prostitutes. If nothing else, time must be a factor. If she serviced customers on average ten hours a day, at one hour per customer, with four days off per month, then that would make a yearly maximum of… He did the calculations in his head, didn’t like the answer, and decided his equation was faulty.
“Oh, sorry, it’s slang for—” She waved a hand toward the front of his breeches. “Penis.”
Instantly, he was hard.
More gasping ensued from the woodwork. “The witch speaks words of the devil!” Frau Leiven declared, her reedy voice ringing with righteousness. “She will bespell us all if she is not tortured to reveal the truth about her dark master, beheaded, and burned, her ashes scattered to the four quarters so she cannot resume life and bespell us all again.”
“Really? All that just for saying ‘penis’?” Io shook her head at the emotional woman. “I’d heard there were some uptight folks in this part of the world, but I thought it was all just a bunch of bullshi—er—hooey.”
“You will cease speaking of your many lovers in front of my daughter,” he said sternly.
“Many lovers? I’ve had exactly three boyfriends—”
“She is a gentle and unlearned maiden, and does not know the ways of men.”
Behind Io, Imogen snorted, then instantly schooled her expression into one of innocence.
“Look, I know you guys are more conservative here—although really, beheading? Scattering ashes? And I’m sorry about saying the D-word if you have a kid, but really, you’re overreacting. And it was you who asked about my last boyfriend, not that I see mentioning him is going to corrupt your snow-white daughter, but still, you mentioned him first.”
“Papa—”
“Silence.” He narrowed his gaze on Io, picturing her beheaded. The thought gave him no pleasure. Quite the contrary, such an idea greatly disturbed him. “Do you deny that you have put a spell on me?”
“What is with you people? Yes, I deny it!” Io slapped her hands on her thighs, a thought that sent his brain on a little mental trip that ended up with him clearing his throat and hoping the witch prostitute would not look toward his groin. “And you can just stop that right now, too,” she added.
“Stop what?” He wanted nothing more than to pounce on her, he really did, but he was never one to allow his sexual needs to drive his actions, and he’d be damned if he started now.
He smiled at the irony at the fact that he was already damned. What could a little more damnation hurt?
“That.” Io pointed at his crotch. “You’re getting all bulgy, and I resent your penis’s implication that I’m doing something to arouse you. Unless you’re some sort of weirdo who gets off by women saying the word ‘penis,’ which is frankly kinda sad.”
“Baron, you must stop her from speaking! It is the devil’s words that come out of her mouth!” Frau Leiven hurried around the bed to stand behind it, clapping her hands over Imogen’s ears. “She will bespell us all!”
“Baron?” Io stopped glaring at his admittedly bulgy breeches a
nd glanced up at him. “I thought you said your name was Nikola.”
“It is. I am also a baron. Frau Leiven, if you do not cease squawking, I will have you put out of the castle. Imogen, go to your room. This conversation is not suitable for you.”
“Wow, a real baron? Not one of those mall kinds that you become when you buy a square foot of land—Imogen?”
“But, Papa—”
“Leave!” he commanded, feeling that if there were fewer people in the room, he could get about to seducing the woman properly.
His mind did a double take. Chastising her, he corrected to himself, despite the nagging suspicion that the first would be infinitely more enjoyable.
Io got to her feet and turned around, gawking in surprise. “Imogen, it is you. Nice to see you again. What happened to me? I seem to be a bit wonky in the brain. I remember doing…something…but just can’t pin down exactly what.”
“You know my daughter?” he asked, frowning first at Imogen, then at Frau Leiven. “You allowed Imogen to consort with whores?”
“No, Papa—” Imogen started to say, but Io interrupted her.
“Whore?” she bellowed, then immediately slapped both hands to her head, weaving with pain. “Oh my god, someone get me some ibuprofen. I think my head is going to explode.”
He helped her to sit back down on the bed, his body warring with his mind. “I do not know who Ibuprofen is, but if he is another of your lovers, I will have to adjust my equation.”
“What equation? No, wait, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if you’re the king or emperor or whatever they have here in Austria now—you do not get to call me rude names.” Io stood up again, weaving only slightly before she squared her shoulders and shot him a look that should have enraged him, but simply went straight to his groin.
He really was getting a little tired of everything about her making his rod stiff with need and desire and wanting that all but left his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth.
A Tale of Two Vampires Page 5