by Tina Folsom
There was longing and promise in his kiss, as if he’d opened his heart and invited her in. And there was something else she hadn’t felt before: the feeling that he needed her, not to satisfy his carnal need, but to fulfill his emotional need. She responded to him with her own brand of passion and need. Her head filled with images of bliss, of the two of them dancing in the sun, in a sea of flowers.
Samson pulled back and suddenly gave her a short break to breathe. “I can’t get enough of you. Don’t leave on Wednesday.”
“But, I have to go back when the audit is done.” Her protest was weak. She didn’t want to leave, but she couldn’t just stay either. She had a life in New York, well, she had an apartment. “I have no reason to …” A rented apartment. Really just a place where she kept her belongings. A tiny place, something her German ancestors would call a Wohnklo, a tiny studio with an equally tiny bathroom.
“I can give you a hundred reasons to stay.” He took her upper lip between his and sucked gently. “That’s one.” His tongue swept over her lips. “Here’s another. We’ll talk about it tonight. But right now …”
He flipped her masterfully and brought her underneath him, gazing into her eyes for a long moment.
Samson took what was his, and Delilah surrendered to his mouth, his tongue, his hands, and his body. His lovemaking was more tender than he thought he’d ever be capable of. There was no rush to join his body with hers. They would have plenty of time to explore each other.
This time all he wanted was to feel her, experience her body’s heat, feel her heart beat against his lips with an excited rhythm. Under his hands and his mouth, he felt her come alive and open up.
Delilah arched toward him every time his hands stroked from her neck down to her navel. Like Magellan, he circled her breasts and sailed South, only to detour before reaching the South Pole. He navigated the small channel between her breasts like the Bosphorus, not being able to decide whether to lavish his attention first on Europe or on Asia. Both looked equally enticing.
What perfect mountains with rock-hard peaks. His tongue lapped at her engorged tips teasing a strangled moan from her throat.
“Sweetness, I haven’t even started yet.”
Her breath caught. “Oh, mercy.”
Mercy wasn’t what he had in mind. No, he was headed for the lush canopy further South which sheltered a treasure beneath—one he was determined to reacquaint himself with.
His searching fingers found the hooded nub and brushed over it. Delilah’s pelvis bucked toward him instantly, pushing his hand onto her moist petals. Unable to resist, he slipped his finger into her welcoming sheath.
“I want you now.”
Samson had never heard her voice with such a husky undertone.
“You have me.” He underscored his statement by plunging his finger deep into her. She had no idea how she owned him – body and soul. He would tell her, soon.
The urging of her body became more intense, her hips moving in synch with his hand, riding him, like he knew she wanted to do with his cock. And she could ride him whenever she wanted to: he would never be able to deny her.
With slow movements, Samson eased himself above her, centering his aching cock. And inch by inch he descended until he was deeply lodged inside her. Every thrust made their joining deeper, connected their bodies more until they moved as one.
They weren’t only connected by his erection impaling her, but also by their legs entangled, their arms intertwined, their lips merged. Her body fitted perfectly to his, as if someone in heaven had molded her for him.
Samson had never felt closer to any woman than to Delilah at that moment. He could feel as her excitement built, as her pelvis started grinding against him more urgently. He responded in kind, moving in the rhythm she demanded. He realized how it filled him with joy, knowing he could pleasure her.
Samson held himself right at the edge, denying his release until he could be sure she was close. Her urgency took over, demanding he’d thrust harder and deeper, and he complied all too willingly despite the strength it cost him to hold back his own climax.
“Don’t stop.” Her wish was his command.
“Not a chance.”
Her heels around his backside dug in deeper, and her fingernails on his back would have drawn blood if he’d had the fragile skin of a human. Then her orgasm hit him—as if her body was about to shatter into a million pieces. And like a row of dominos it reached him, taking him with her, igniting his own release, making him spread his seed in her.
But it wasn’t over. He kept moving inside her, rocking back and forth, kissing her lips, holding her until he felt the last of her spasms subside.
As he locked eyes with her, he couldn’t speak. And didn’t want to break the magical moment of complete and utter bliss. He rolled to the side, taking her with him, unable to release her from his embrace, unwilling to leave her body.
When he finally spoke, his voice echoed in his ears: hoarse, colored by passion and desire, and something else he hadn’t felt in a long time—affection.
“I can give you a million reasons not to leave.”
And he would draw on every single one to convince her to stay.
THIRTEEN
It happened frequently that Amaury spent time in a bed which wasn’t his, but generally for other reasons than on this occasion. By the time he and Samson had looked up from their work helping Delilah, it was too close to sunrise to risk him going home. As much as he hated to intrude on the two lovers, he had no choice but to stay in the guest room.
Which, unfortunately, shared a wall with the master bedroom.
His sensitive hearing picked up more than he wanted to know or be part of, so he fashioned some makeshift earplugs out of cotton balls he found in the bathroom. It helped somewhat. At least he couldn’t hear their voices anymore. It was another matter for the barrage of their emotions that hit him. They made it virtually impossible for Amaury to switch off. It appeared make-up sex was going well.
In all his years as a vampire he’d never met a woman who had stirred him the way Delilah affected Samson. Amaury was quite a bit older than his friend, by almost two hundred years, and he’d tried them all. How he had survived that long, he really wasn’t quite sure, especially since he’d made enough enemies amongst humans and vampires alike.
He’d lived through difficult times in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds in his native France, before he’d felt it was time to get a fresh start on a new continent where his reputation as a scoundrel and philanderer didn’t precede him. Plus, he’d gone through every woman aged from fifteen to fifty, and he was slowly but surely running out of willing bedmates. He was more prolific than Don Juan or Casanova, even though his name didn’t quite make it into the history books. Just as well – he didn’t need any publicity.
The guest room was comfortable enough, but his own personal nightmares woke him too early, an hour before sunset. The nightmares were familiar and hadn’t changed much in the last few hundred years. Despite working with Dr. Drake on the guilt that plagued him, he couldn’t rid himself of the images which tormented his sleep every night.
There was no need to stay in bed if he couldn’t get back to sleep. A quick shower was refreshing, and so was the blood he found in the fridge in the pantry, the combination of which was no secret to him. He’d stayed at Samson’s often enough to be familiar with all supply cabinets, and for now he didn’t have enough time to go out hunting for a fresh meal. How Samson could live off the packaged stuff was beyond him.
Amaury preferred the warm and tasty red liquid pouring straight out of a breathing human. Preferably a female with whom he could satisfy two desires at once—two birds with one stone. And frankly, his carnal desires would need some major soothing soon. He rarely went a night without it.
Amaury wasn’t in a relationship with any particular female. Instead he took whatever he could get from whichever willing female was available. Thanks to his good looks, there were always sufficient fem
ales interested in a roll in the hay with him. Well, these days, it wasn’t in the hay anymore, since he actually preferred a soft mattress with high-thread-count Egyptian cotton. Mainstreaming did have its luxuries.
He poured over the newspaper Oliver had brought in earlier in the day. There was no sign of him in the house now; instead, Carl would be reporting to duty soon after sunset.
Minutes after delving into the paper, he heard steps on the stairs. It wasn’t Samson’s heavy footsteps, but Delilah’s much lighter ones which approached. She appeared in the kitchen seconds later, a warm glow about her.
“Morning,” she greeted him with a smile.
“Evening, Delilah. Samson up yet?”
“No. I let him sleep. He seemed exhausted.”
He grinned. “No surprise.”
The house had practically shaken like an earthquake, with the epicenter right in the master bedroom. Or maybe it was just Amaury’s sensitivity to emotions, his special gift—and painful as hell—which had made him feel like San Francisco was in for another big one.
Delilah’s resulting blush would shame a ripe tomato. She would get used to it. If he had read their emotions correctly last night, she would become a permanent fixture in this household.
“I’m starving. Shall I make you a sandwich while I’m at it?” Delilah opened the fridge and started taking out some bread, cold cuts, and salad items.
“No, thanks; solid foods after I’ve just gotten up don’t quite agree with me.” It wasn’t a lie. Solid foods didn’t agree with him, but not just for breakfast. Not that he wouldn’t have liked eating a juicy steak if he could. As a Frenchman the loss of good food after he’d turned into a vampire had hit him the hardest.
Delilah went about washing some tomatoes. “You know, I’ve found something in the transactions last night.”
“Go on.” Amaury had a more than basic understanding of accounting and was a good partner to bounce ideas off.
“So, imagine you want to get past the internal controls to move valuable assets out of the company—what would you do?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at. You can’t just move assets out of the company without signoff from higher sources than this John was. I’m sure you know that as well as I do.”
“Agreed, but John had signing authority for other things. Like if he wanted to scrap an old computer, he’d sign off on it, and it went to a vendor who recycled old electronics,” she explained as she buttered a slice of bread.
“Sure, but you’d have to scrap a lot of little things to make a dent in it. And besides, whatever you scrap probably has very little value left anyway, so what’s the point? I don’t see how you can move a large amount of assets out of the company like that. You’d be busy for years,” Amaury rebuked her idea.
“That’s what I thought at first, too. But what if the true value of the asset isn’t just scrap value, but much more?”
“How?”
“Depreciation.”
“Depreciation?” Amaury didn’t quite understand. Of course he was familiar with the concept of depreciating an asset over its useful life to reflect an accurate value on the books and claim the expense on the profit-and-loss account of the company. But that’s where his knowledge ended.
“Yes. John was authorized to scrap old assets below a value of $2,500 without getting any other signoff from HQ. He accelerated depreciation to reduce the value of these assets to below the threshold he could sign for, thus eluding internal controls.”
This sounded promising, he had to admit. “And then?”
“Then he would transfer the asset to somebody outside the company, who in turn sold it for what it was truly worth. He’d give the scrap value back to the company and keep the difference for himself.” She bit into her sandwich and chewed.
“But how much money could he really have stolen like that? What if it amounts to fifty- or a hundred-thousand dollars? That’s peanuts. Not enough reason to send somebody after you to kill you. You saw yourself from the records we looked through yesterday that this has only been going on for about a year.”
“But this doesn’t change the fact that he was clearly defrauding the company. The transaction documents point to him. His signature was all over them. He initiated and then authorized the transactions. Yes, it wasn’t exactly the most sophisticated fraud, and it certainly isn’t new either, but maybe that kind of money meant more than peanuts to him. And maybe he wasn’t trying to kill me; maybe he was only trying to scare me away?”
“What for? The next auditor would just come along and continue where you left off. It would just be a temporary fix at best.”
“Temporary? Hmm.” She clearly gave it a thought.
“Maybe he had something else up his sleeve.”
She knit her brow. “You mean a better fraud?”
“Why not? At some point criminals get greedy. Trust me, I’ve seen plenty of greed in my life.” Amaury wasn’t exaggerating. He’d seen more than his fair share of greed in his long life.
“Greed. Hmm. It reminds me of something my teacher used to say to us in class. If you want to embezzle, you have to embezzle big. Get what you want in one big strike and get the hell out. Long-time embezzling schemes never work.”
“Interesting teacher. What kind of school did you go to?” Amaury gave her an amused smile.
“He was my accounting teacher in college. Believe it or not, accountants and auditors need to actually learn how to perpetrate a fraud in order to spot one in the books.”
“Like a security specialist who has to have broken into a few safes, huh?”
“Exactly. So, is that how Scanguards trains its people?”
Delilah had finished her sandwich and was putting the remaining food back into the fridge.
He gave her a sideways glance. She probably had no idea how close her question cut to the truth. Not only did Scanguards employ a majority of vampires, some less tame than others, a large number of their human employees were reformed criminals.
“I’m afraid I can’t disclose our methods of how—”
She interrupted him. “Amaury, that was a rhetorical question.”
He let out a nervous laugh and changed the subject. “You know what surprises me about John? He goes through this complicated setup to steal a little money, when it would have probably been so much easier to get at Scanguards’ liquid assets. You’re familiar with our balance sheet. We have very little in fixed assets, many of the buildings we operate out of are rented, the vehicles are generally leased. But we run a very heavy cash position. So why not get at the cash? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
Delilah pursed her lips. “Your internal controls around cash are pretty solid. Any cash transfers go through a double-approval process. I’ve read the procedure manual on it. He couldn’t have done it on his own.”
She placed the dishes into the sink and started cleaning them.
“I think we’re overlooking something. Let’s examine the facts. You audit the company. John gets nervous because he has been embezzling from us. He hires his brother-in-law to kill or …”
“… or scare me away …”
“… or scare you away. And just when we catch onto him, he is murdered. It wasn’t his brother-in-law, since we’d already apprehended him. It wasn’t a random killing. It was deliberate. So, what would John have told us if we had gotten to him earlier? Would he have confessed that he embezzled from us? Maybe. But that would only hurt himself.”
“Somebody clearly didn’t want us to confront him. John knew that person, and knew what he did, or knew what he’d let him do.”
“That’s right, because John helped him with it. There’s no other reason for somebody to want you dead than thinking that you’ll uncover what they did, and it has to be bigger than accelerated depreciation and selling off small assets. Much bigger.”
Delilah turned around to look at him, interest shimmering in her eyes. Seemingly unaware that she held a s
harp knife in her hand, she made an animated gesture. As the blade slipped out of her hand, she made an attempt to grip it, but only caught the sharp end between her fingers. It effortlessly cut into the soft flesh of her fingers before it landed on the floor. Blood immediately ran down her hand.
“Damn!”
“Oh shit!” Amaury exclaimed. That was all he needed – the scent of fresh blood on a virtually empty stomach. “Let me help you bandage it.” The faster he sealed her wound, the better for all of them.
He pulled open a drawer and grabbed a clean napkin. “Let me see.”
She held her good hand against her stomach. “Oh, God, I can’t look.”
“It’s just a little blood,” he assured her and couldn’t help but notice that she’d gone white.
Amaury took her hand to look how deep the wound was, as he held the napkin underneath it to stop the blood from dripping on the floor. He held his breath in order not to become overpowered by the utterly enticing smell.
***
Samson scented the blood as soon as he stepped out of his bedroom, freshly showered and dressed. There was no doubt whose blood it was and where it came from. His nostrils flared, and his body tensed.
Delilah!
He knew Amaury’s love for warm blood better than anybody and cursed himself for having let him stay while Delilah was with him.
As he flew down the stairs and burst into the kitchen, he was battle ready—to save his woman from his best friend. If Amaury had bitten her, he’d kill him. Fury shot through him as his eyes focused on the scene in the kitchen: Amaury bent over Delilah’s bleeding hand.
Without thinking Samson lunged at his best friend, and with a loud thud they both crashed onto the hard kitchen floor.