The memory of that fantasy flooded her mind with erotic imagery, and Reggie buried her face in her hands with a groan.
Chapter 15
For the first time in her life, Reggie experienced Monday morning with a sense of profound gratitude and relief. She could hardly wait to get to her office and discover the deluge of paperwork and crises that awaited her. At least maybe then she’d be able to think about something other than Dmitri and the stupid Fantasy Fix.
As it turned out, she couldn’t. Oh, she had a hell of a day. The small ad agency where she worked had gotten word on Friday that they’d landed a major new account with an up-and-coming electronics retailer, and on Monday morning, Reggie found out she’d been assigned to manage their first project, putting together a new logo and corporate look. The sales and management team were high on the success, and the art department was reeling under their impossible new deadline. That left Reggie to smooth all the ruffled feathers and coax a miracle out of her design team.
But even while she fielded phone calls, reviewed meeting notes, composed e-mails, and even talked a temperamental graphic artist out of quitting on the spot, her mind kept straying back to Dmitri. She felt a little like a new junkie who’d only just discovered her high and couldn’t get the memory of it out of her mind. Only, in Reggie’s case, the memories were also in her mouth, on her skin, and hovering in the air around her.
She had barely slept last night, too caught up in her discovery that Dmitri’s scent had lingered in her bed. She wrapped herself up in the sheets that bore his distinctive, intoxicating fragrance and wrapped her arms around the pillow he’d lain on. Her pussy had throbbed and ached and felt empty after two nights of erotic excess, but she hadn’t wanted to chance Dmitri watching her again while she made herself come. She’d had to lace her fingers together around the pillow she held to keep them from straying between her legs.
In any other situation, she would have been embarrassed by her obsession, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d felt she would go crazy if she couldn’t have at least the scent and the memory of him to wrap around her. She’d fallen asleep with the echo of his hands stroking against her skin.
And she’d woken up terrified.
She’d never in her life acted like this with a man. Even in her few and failed relationships, she’d seen her lovers as partners, as men she would share her life with. They had complimented her, but she’d been complete without them. With Dmitri, his absence from her life, even for one night, had been hell. She’d missed him like an amputated limb, with the same ache and disbelief and the phantom feel of his presence. She needed him, and the thought scared the crap out of her.
“Yoohoo! Earth to Regina.”
Reggie snapped back to reality with an audible pop and tuned in to Sherry’s voice while the other woman tried to get her attention. “Sorry, Sher. What’s up?”
The administrative assistant, whom Reggie shared with the two other project managers, rolled her eyes. “I hope you had a nice mental vacation there, because Banks is saying he needs to see the Alien Entertainment annual report draft five minutes ago.”
Reggie sighed, pushed her chair over to the metal filing cabinet beside her desk, and pulled out the appropriate folder. Charles Banks always wanted something five minutes ago, but since he owned the agency, she figured she could humor him.
“Here.” She handed the thick folder to Sherry. “Tell him the photography is in the lab as we speak. Mike promised we’d have it by three.”
“Cool. Thanks.” Sherry turned to leave, remembered something and paused in the doorway. “Oh, I almost forgot. You’ve got a call on line four. Some guy.”
“What does he want?” The last thing Reggie needed to deal with was an unknown artist hawking his talents.
“I asked, but he said it was personal business.”
Dmitri.
For one fabulous moment, the idea made her heart race and her stomach jump. Then reality set in, and she realized he had no way of knowing where she worked and so no way of getting her number. Giving disappointment and relief a chance to slow down her pulse, she took a deep breath and prepared her standard “Send us a portfolio and we’ll get back to you” speech.
“Hello? This is Regina.”
“Hi, Regina. This is Marc Abrahms. Ava Markham gave me your number.”
Yikes, he must be the Fix. “Oh. Um, hi.”
“Listen, I know you’re at work, so I won’t keep you,” he said. Well, he gets some points for manners, at least. “But Ava mentioned you’re an opera fan, and I was able to wrangle a private box for Turandot on Thursday night. I hoped you might join me.”
Join you; fuck you. Why quibble over semantics? At least he was being delicate about the whole thing, even if that didn’t keep Reggie’s face from turning a peculiar shade of magenta. He could have just gotten right down to the bottom line and asked how many condoms to bring. “Um, well…”
“Ava’s told me a lot about you,” he offered in his pleasant, mellow voice.
Yeah, like the fact that I’m a guaranteed score.
“I’m really looking forward to meeting you in person.”
I’ll bet. His comment only made her blush harder, but there really was no graceful way out of the situation. Tightening her grip on the receiver, Reggie took a deep breath and said, “Sure. Thursday sounds fine.”
“Great.” He actually did sound happy that she’d accepted. After what Ava must have told him, did he think she had a choice? “If I pick you up at six, we can have dinner before the show. Does that sound all right?”
Reggie nodded, realized he couldn’t see her, and hastened to reassure him. “That’s perfect. I’ll look forward to it.” Like a root canal.
“Me too. It was nice talking to you, Regina. Take care.”
Reggie hung up the phone with a knot the size of Brooklyn twisting her stomach. The last thing she wanted was to spend Thursday night with a stranger, but she needed to exert her independence, to show herself she didn’t need Dmitri, no matter how her mind and heart and body screamed for him.
She wasn’t altogether sure she could bring herself to act out the opera fantasy with this Marc person. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more the idea made her uncomfortable. Her skin almost crawled, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Her unease was that strong.
Shifting in her chair, she neatly penciled the date with Marc onto her desktop calendar. As if she were likely to forget it.
She waited for her discomfort to ease, but if anything, writing down the date only made her illogical sense of foreboding worse. Reasoning with herself didn’t seem to help, since even her conscious mind couldn’t quite shake the idea that seeing any man other than Dmitri counted as some sort of betrayal, as if she were cheating on him.
“Ugh! Don’t be ridiculous,” she muttered to herself, tossing down her pencil and reaching for the stack of ad proofs she had to review. “I didn’t promise Dmitri a damned thing, and he didn’t even have the decency to call after he disappeared in the middle of the night again. This is not cheating. Get rational, Reg.”
But there was nothing rational about the feeling telling her that although her speech might be logical, it was also very, very wrong.
The taste of her haunted him. If he could have dreamed of it, he would have, but instead he staved off sleep as long as possible in order to preserve her flavor on his tongue. Dmitri knew he would never have enough of her.
He had dragged himself from her bed that second night, his head spinning and his cock aching. She intoxicated him, and he knew he would never be able to let her go. Regina was his mate, the one woman he could spend an eternity with and never grow bored.
The knowledge astounded him and echoed through him when he slipped into his rest just before dawn. She filled his last thoughts until he slept, and her image appeared to him the instant he fought back to awareness. His Regina. His woman. His mate.
He thought of her when he left his bed a
nd made his way downstairs to his study. Not going to her immediately became an exercise in discipline. His fangs and his cock stretched and hardened at the thought of her, but he’d spent most of the weekend wrapped up in her, and even vampires had work to do. Besides, if he cleared off his desk tonight, Regina would have time to recover from his demands of the last two nights and would be rested and ready for him again soon.
Settling behind his desk, he logged on to his computer and got down to business. Over the course of his long life, he had developed a talent for financial matters, and with little else to occupy him through the years, he began to look on business as a game. Like chess, it all boiled down to strategy and to warfare, two concepts with which Dmitri felt very comfortable. He substituted corporations and mergers for pawns and checks and moved everything along according to his plans and to his whims. It had made him an extremely wealthy man.
Tonight he used business as a distraction. It kept him from butting yet again into Regina’s mind, a habit he knew she hated, but which gave him so much pleasure. He adored listening to her thoughts, appreciated her sharp sense of humor and the overwhelming core of honor and love underlying everything about her. She fascinated him, and he was not a man given to easy fascinations.
Already he had let his discipline slide for her. For two days, she had been all he thought about, and tonight he had discovered the results of his inattention since that first meeting. Any man who commanded an empire as large as that of Vidâme International could not afford to take unexpected vacations. He’d had a lot to do in order to catch up. He had even done a little advance planning in order to free up more time to spend with Regina.
Thankfully, while he had paused a few times to stretch, he had not felt the need to eat. The blood he had taken from Regina the night before sustained him longer than any ever had, and he savored the additional proof she was meant to be his mate. She could sustain him indefinitely, nourishing both body and soul.
Though his energy flagged a few hours after dawn, the time when he normally would have been fading into sleep, he worked until he had completed all his pressing business. A short nap and his mate’s blood refreshed him well enough that he woke again a couple of hours before sunset and finished the last of his correspondence in little more than thirty minutes. Finally, desk and conscience clear, he gave in to temptation and reached out to her.
He kept his touch light this time, knowing his intrusion had angered her the other day. He slipped into the edge of her mind, keeping his presence veiled from her while he simply sat back and savored the contact. At least until he discovered what she’d been up to that morning.
With ruthless precision, Dmitri caught the edge of her memory and reviewed her conversation with her friends, as well as the phone call she’d taken at her office just an hour ago. When he discovered the result of those conversations, his expression hardened, and he removed himself from her mind, taking one last piece of information with him when he went.
Regina had agreed to a date with another man.
I will kill him, he decided. I will kill him while she watches, and then I will throw his body to the jackals and lock her in the tower of the castle I will purchase on a remote island in the North Sea, and I will take her so often that she will never forget the consequences of dating other men.
And as for Ms. Markham, he reflected grimly, his earlier warning had clearly been insufficient to teach her not to meddle. If she thought he would stand for anyone coming between him and his mate, she was very sadly mistaken, and Dmitri would be more than happy to illustrate for her the error of her ways.
Grabbing the telephone, he dialed information, requested a number, and waited while he was automatically connected.
“Thank you for calling M, the Agency. How can we help you?”
“Ava Markham. Please.”
“Who should I say is calling?”
“Dmitri Vidâme.”
“One moment, please.”
Dmitri drummed his fingers and reviewed two or three dozen ways to strangle his mate’s interfering friend. He’d reached number thirty when the hold music clicked off.
“Mr. Vidâme?”
Dmitri scowled. The voice belonged to the same woman who had answered his call, not to Ava. “Is there some problem?”
“I’m afraid Ms. Markham is unavailable.”
“And I am afraid she will have to make herself available,” he gritted out. “Get her. Now.”
Surprisingly, the receptionist did not quail at his command. Her voice firmed as she said, “Ms. Markham is unavailable to you. I suggest you not waste time calling back.”
The line clicked in his ear, leaving Dmitri staring at the receiver in disbelief. How dare she refuse his call?! Of course he hadn’t planned to make it pleasant for her, but she should at least have had the decency to listen to him harangue her before refusing to listen.
Replacing the receiver in the cradle with restrained force, Dmitri narrowed his eyes and set his jaw. “So you want to play it this way, do you?” he murmured. “Well, remember, Ms. Markham, that you made this choice.” Putting a tight leash on his fury, Dmitri exhaled a long, slow breath and reached once more for Regina’s mind. Because he had no real connection to Ava, he doubted he would be able to find her in the sea of consciousnesses that peopled Manhattan. The only way to get to her without being in her presence would be to track her using her link to Regina. He just hoped the women had a close enough friendship for her to leave that kind of mark in his mate’s unconscious mind.
He touched Regina’s mind lightly, taking care to keep his anger behind a thick mental barrier and his psychic presence unobtrusive. His luck held well enough that work had her thoroughly distracted. He could feel her irritation at someone, knew she resented the fact that it was after six and it would be at least another hour before she could leave, because someone else apparently hadn’t understood the meaning of the word “deadline.” He made note of the offender’s name, then delved deeper.
Several feminine paths called to him, each one twined with the others so tightly it took a moment for him to sort them out. He had to double- and triple-check her memories before he got them straightened out.
The brash, intelligent, passionate one who said all the things Reggie was afraid to voice, that was Danice. Nicie, his mate called her.
Another felt calmer, lived more in her head, and a very stubborn head it was. She stood no nonsense and had the kind of biting curiosity that would often get her in trouble, but equally often lead her to the truth she relentlessly sought. Corinne.
The softest path, that was Melissa. Missy. She was all kind words and warm hugs, and Dmitri would have dismissed her as a piece of pretty fluff—pleasant but empty—had he not detected a strong core of steel beneath the surface. She would never be the one to start a war, he realized, but after all the others around her had fallen or surrendered, this woman would be the one who outlasted the enemy. Her mind stirred his respect as he set her path aside and reached for the last.
Ava.
This path stood out from all the others, equally strong, but rough and snarled, as if it could never quite tame itself enough to fully entwine with the others. The woman it led to, it indicated, was cool and collected, prickly and possessive. She would kill or die to save her friends, but she would never quite open herself to them fully. This was a mind apart, and as Dmitri grabbed hold and began to follow it, his respect for the woman it led to grew. When he finally slipped inside her unconscious, he marveled at the complexity he found before he set down to business.
At another time, her mind would have fascinated him. He’d observed at the bar the other night how much more Ava resembled the women he’d involved himself with in the past than the mate he had recently chosen. Now he could see the truth of that observation mentally, as well as physically. Regina’s friend possessed a brilliant, creative mind and the iron-willed determination of a military dictator. No one had ever managed to dig up so much information on him in such a sho
rt period of time. Her acumen impressed even him, and he made a mental note to include her agency among his investments.
Monday had been a very good day for Ava, Dmitri learned. She’d stolen a very hot new model away from one of her competitors and signed him up to her agency. She’d negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with a notoriously stingy parfumeur that her models would be the exclusive reps for his new ad campaign, and she’d heard from Marc Abrahms that Reggie had agreed to their date.
She had also found out some very interesting things about Regina’s new friend, things Dmitri knew were not secret but that very few people before her had fit together so well. She had learned that Dmitri Vidâme owned a billion-dollar corporation called Vidâme International that had its fingers in an awful lot of pies. That he had no recorded family, even though his ancestors had supposedly lived in New York since the early eighteenth century. Every little thing she had found out made her more suspicious about him, and she was determined to uncover all his secrets before he could hurt her friend.
Her intentions were noble, Dmitri acknowledged, but that did not mean he intended to let her continue her meddling. If anyone were going to protect Regina from now on, it would be him.
He almost hated to shatter Ava’s happy little illusions, but she meddled in affairs that were none of her concern. She needed to learn a lesson, and he would be the one to teach it.
While he sorted through her mind, the unfamiliar feel of her made him realize how profoundly his life had changed in only two short days. In his lifetime, Dmitri had touched thousands of female minds, some simple, some wonderfully creative, but each one had held his interest, even if only for a few moments.
Now, everything felt changed. Knowing the thoughts of another woman only deepened his hunger for Regina. Ava, as complex and beautiful as she might be, left him cold, while Regina set him on fire.
One Bite with a Stranger Page 14