But it was her obvious lack of hunger that caused a familiar stab of alarm to clench his heart.
“Shall I have the chef replaced, my love?” he demanded, his tone revealing he would happily go in search of a superior chef without hesitation.
“Good Lord, no. This food is heavenly.” Juliet dropped the candy on the tray as she regarded him with astonishment. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
He waved a hand toward the table that was laden with lobster in butter, braised ham, creamed potatoes, steamed asparagus, and fresh pears from the hothouse.
“You have not eaten more than a few bites.”
She gave a choked laugh. “Because I am still stuffed from the enormous meal you served when I first awoke. Are you attempting to fatten me like a Christmas goose?”
“You need food to regain your strength.”
Leaning forward, she offered a slow, wicked smile that sent a predictable flare of hunger blazing through him. Juliet had only to be near for him to be hard and aching to be buried deep inside her heat.
“I would say that I effectively proved that I have fully regained my strength,” she husked. “Or have you so easily forgotten?”
He reached to grasp her slender fingers, his gaze searing over her beautiful face.
“I will never forget a moment of our time together.”
“Me either,” she breathed, holding his gaze as she deliberately allowed him to sense her stirring arousal.
Over the past days they had rarely left the lair as they gloried in the explosive passion between them. Now he savored her ready response even as he glanced around the candlelit chamber, for the first time noting the hint of shabbiness.
“We shall need a larger bed,” he abruptly decided.
“It seems just the perfect size to me,” she murmured. “Besides, it is very old. You must have owned it for centuries.”
He shrugged. “I have no sentimental attachment to the furnishings. In truth, I prefer they be disposed of so you can choose what pleases you. We can begin tonight if you are feeling strong enough.”
Hoping to please his mate, Victor was disappointed when she pulled her fingers from his grasp and studied him with a wary expression.
“Victor, are you . . . perfectly well?”
“Why would I not be well?”
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Since we defeated the Jinn you have hovered and fluttered about as if I were as fragile as Venice glass. For God’s sake, you even allowed Levet to visit when I said I wanted to see him.”
He shuddered at the hideous memory. “Do not remind me.”
“Is there something you are not telling me?” Rising to her feet, she circled the table and settled her hands on his shoulders, covered by his brocade robe. “Did my spell to break the Jinn’s connection to this world do something horrible to me? Am I dying?”
He surged to his feet, shocked by her question. “No. You are perfect, Juliet.”
She tilted back her head to meet his narrowed gaze. “Then why are you behaving so oddly?”
With a grimace he accepted there was nothing to do but confess the truth. No matter how it might expose his vulnerable heart.
“I want you to be pleased with me and with this lair,” he confessed, his voice raw with need. “I want you to feel as if this is your home.”
Her eyes darkened with an unwavering love that instantly soothed his fears.
“Victor, this lair is merely a place where we are currently residing.” She pressed a hand to his chest, a smile of satisfaction curving her lips. “My home is here . . . in your heart. And nothing, absolutely nothing, could please me more.”
With a smooth motion, he swept her off her feet, headed for their bed. The cold emptiness that had claimed his soul centuries ago was melting beneath the tender heat of her gaze.
“You will never leave me?”
“I am yours, Marquis DeRosa,” she promised, “until the end of time.”
He tightened his arms around her. “Until the end of time and beyond.”
Immortal Dreams
KAITLIN O’RILEY
Chapter One
London, England
Fall, 1870
Grace opened her eyes with a strangled gasp, staring blankly into the murky darkness surrounding her. Fear gripped her entire body and she lay motionless for some minutes before realization dawned. Sweaty and shaking, she sat up in bed, wiping the tears that had spilled down her cheeks as her wild heart rate slowly returned to a more normal pace. With a trembling hand she lit the lamp on her bedside table, allowing the warm glow to comfort her, and sighed heavily.
The dreams. Another of those haunting dreams had awakened her.
Now that her bedroom was lit, she instinctively glanced at the small ormolu clock resting on the fireplace mantel, not that she needed to look. She knew exactly what time it was. As expected, the elegant hands indicated a quarter past five o’clock in the morning. She always awakened from these strange dreams close to dawn.
Knowing she would not fall back to sleep now, she rose from her four-poster bed and padded across the room to the large window. Lately she had been compelled to look out her window after one of those dreams, but she did not know why. Except she felt the answers to her questions lay somewhere beyond these walls. She pulled back the pretty rose toile curtains that reached to the polished wood floor.
The backyard of her London townhouse was shrouded in dark shadows, but she knew the grass was immaculately trimmed and the rose bushes and flower garden carefully tended. Her eyes scanned the lawn and moved upward above the trees. The last of the night stars were fading as soft fingers of light caressed the early morning sky. The world always seemed desolate and lonely to her at this hour, when the city was not yet awake and all was hushed and still. A sense of expectancy clung to her as she searched through the dimness, looking for a sign of movement. A sign of anything. She held her breath in anticipation. The eerie predawn light still held shadows but she could distinguish nothing out of the ordinary.
“Where is he?” she whispered impatiently to herself.
The question startled her, not only because she had said it aloud but also because of what it meant. She shook herself at her odd query, for she did not know whom she was looking for, but she could not get over the feeling that she was waiting for someone. A man. A certain man. The same man who haunted her strange recurring dreams. Who was he? She was quite positive she did not know anyone remotely like him. In her dreams she loved him. Even when she was married she had not loved Henry with the same passion with which she loved the stranger in her dreams. This love was magical, intense, and wildly passionate.
Afterward the dreams always left her in a melancholy mood, and this one in particular had been more vivid and detailed than usual, and filled her with a sense of anguish and sorrow.
She had had the dreams for as long as she could remember, all her life, although they had occurred with more frequency in the past year. While they always left her with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness, she could not deny the indescribable joy and deep love she experienced within the dreams. Nor the aching loneliness she felt when she awoke and faced her real life.
Grace shivered and dropped the rose toile curtain back into place. Moving back to her bed, she gathered her soft robe around her and donned her slippers. It was too early to ring for a servant, but she desperately wanted the warmth of the fireplace, for the first days of autumn chilled the air.
Grace walked to her elegant writing desk, unlocked a small drawer, and retrieved a familiar book, indulging in the memory of her dream for just a few more moments. She curled up on the overstuffed rose chintz armchair with her journal. Flipping through the pages, she noted that her last entry was dated less than a week earlier. The dreams were becoming more frequent, more intense. It was after Henry died that she first began recording in a journal the recollections of the strange dreams that had haunted her life. Never had she spoken to a soul about these dreams, not even
to her husband.
For these dreams were special and quite unlike ordinary dreams. She had often tried to find words to describe them and could only come up with “lifelike.” These dreams were not flights of fancy, nor the vague processing of the daily events. These dreams did not fade as the day wore on. They did not become wisps of memory or flashing impressions of feelings as her other, more ordinary dreams did.
These dreams of him were lasting and vivid, as real as if the events happened while she was awake and living them in reality. In truth it was as if she were visiting another person’s life during another era, yet somehow they were about her.
She had begun transcribing her dreams to keep track of them and over the years she had discovered that she lived another life when she slept. She could not shake the suspicion that it had been her life, if such a thing were possible. For the details were too intimate, too private, and too intense to belong to anyone but her.
Last night’s dream in particular.
She had been naked with him in this dream last night again. Her cheeks growing warm, Grace closed her eyes, remembering the deliciously sensuous and passionate nature of the dream.
In the dreams she called him Phillip. He was tall with black, wavy hair, very fair skin, and deep dark brown eyes. His face was beautifully sculpted, his handsomeness almost startling in its perfection. He possessed a seductive voice, smooth and cultured. And he loved her. Or at least he loved the woman she was in the dreams. He called her by a strange name. Gráinne. His love for her was evident in every word he whispered to her, in the way he caressed her cheek, in the way he gazed adoringly at her. In the way he kissed her lips. Oh, the way he kissed her! The emotion and intensity between them was overpowering, all-consuming.
Never in her own life had Grace experienced anything like it.
Henry had kissed her, of course. Yet Henry’s kisses never left her feeling the way she felt after Phillip kissed her.
A sharp rap on the bedroom door startled her, causing her to drop her journal on the floor. Before Grace could rise from her chair, the door opened and Mary Sutton stormed in.
“What in God’s name are you doing up at this hour?” her sharp voice snapped.
“I . . . I couldn’t sleep,” Grace began to explain to her mother-in-law, her heartbeat increasing. With a furtive glance at her dream journal lying on the floor, she frantically wished she had had a chance to tuck her journal behind her before Mary entered.
With eyes like a hawk, Mary spied the journal and snatched it up. “What is this?”
Grace’s cheeks flushed red and a sense of panic welled within her. She was always very careful to keep the journal well hidden. She would surely die of mortification if Mary read her journal now, knowing she would never be able to explain to Mary’s satisfaction any of what was written within its pages. A tall, wide-girthed woman with steelgray hair and permanent frown lines around her thin lips, Mary Sutton carried herself as a queen and expected others to treat her as such.
“It’s nothing important. Just some thoughts.” Grace held out her hand. “Sometimes it helps me to sleep if I write down the thoughts in my head first.”
“Your thoughts!” Mary ignored Grace’s obvious request for the return of the book. With a disapproving frown, she thumbed through the handwritten pages. “Of course you can’t sleep. How could anybody sleep when they are awake composing such drivel instead of in bed where they are supposed to be? Dream journal indeed!” She scoffed and flung the book back at Grace, who fumbled to catch it.
Grace breathed a sigh of relief, realizing that Mary could not read without her spectacles, so she could not see what Grace had written. She held the book close to her chest.
“God will be judging you on what you do, and I don’t believe anything you’ve written in that book would be deemed as godly.”
Grace remained silent. No, she doubted anything she had written was godly, but it was heavenly. She would not argue that point with her mother-in-law. She and Mary had always had differing views on God, and Mary’s overzealous religious leanings had only become more intense since her son, Henry, had died.
“Honestly, Grace, I pray for your soul every day, but I worry that not even that is helping you,” Mary admonished sharply, pulling the ties that secured her robe tighter over the girth of her stomach. She gave her a pointed look. “Well, have you decided to accept Lord Grayson’s offer?”
Lord Grayson’s offer! Grace’s stomach clenched and she stared mutely at Mary.
She had completely forgotten Reginald Marks’s proposal to her last night! She’d been so consumed with her dream she had not given it another thought. After years of proper mourning and wearing black for Henry, Grace was finally socializing again. In the past months she had begun to attend balls, supper parties, and musicales. Last night Reginald Marks, Earl of Grayson, had made an offer of marriage to her. He was a wealthy widower with a grown son, and was a nice enough man. She had thanked Lord Grayson for his honor, declared herself overwhelmed, and begged for some time to think it over. Lord Grayson had not been discouraged by her hesitation and readily agreed to give her as much time as she needed to consider his offer of marriage.
Because Mary had been so instrumental in bringing this prospect to her, Grace could not summarily dismiss the man, as was her first impulse. She did not love Lord Grayson nor did she wish to marry him, but then again, she did not wish to marry anyone. After her husband’s tragic death she did not believe she could love anyone again.
But then, love was not necessary for marriage. That she already knew.
But could she marry the Earl of Grayson? He was kind and gentle with her. He would take good care of her. Perhaps she would have a child this time. That would be lovely and was the main source of her regrets with Henry Sutton. She had always longed for a baby of her own.
She could do worse than the Earl of Grayson. Reginald Marks owned a great deal of property and was well respected in society. Although he was older than Grace by at least twenty years, judging from the amount of white taking over his brown hair, he was not unappealing. The promise of leaving Mary Sutton’s home was also something to consider. Living with her mother-in-law had become more intolerable each year, as she had grown more intrusive and domineering in her ways.
With a mixture of fear and loathing, Grace stared at the large woman looming in front of her. Mary’s blatant look of scorn and condescension was the usual expression she wore. Grace’s relationship with Mary had been one of mutual dislike from the start, because Mary had not wanted her only son to marry Grace. When Henry died five years before, the only buffer between them had been removed and each year the friction between the two women only increased.
“Don’t be a little idiot, Grace. I’ve worked tirelessly to cultivate this relationship for you with Lord Grayson, in spite of your efforts to deter him. You might not get another offer this good. You’re thirty years old now and you are beginning to show your age. You’ve turned down every other offer you’ve received, but you would be a fool to refuse Lord Grayson.”
It suddenly occurred to Grace that Mary was as eager to be rid of her as she was to be rid of Mary. She grinned at the irony. Yes, Grace would accept Reginald Marks’s offer of marriage, if only to escape this woman.
Mary eyed her suspiciously. “You look like the cat that ate the canary, Grace. I don’t like that smirk on your face. It’s quite rude and disrespectful to me. Stop it this instant.”
Grace ceased smiling, her eyes downcast.
“Did that smile mean you’ve finally come to your senses and have decided to be thankful for this opportunity the good Lord has generously bestowed upon you, however undeserving you may be?”
Grace merely nodded.
“Speak up, girl!” Mary commanded. “You will accept his offer this evening, will you not?”
She glared at Mary, thinking how wonderful it would be to finally be free of this woman’s daily presence. “Yes, Mother, I shall accept Lord Grayson’s offer.”
>
Mary sniffed. “It’s about time. Not since you married my Henry have I seen you make a good decision.”
Grace said nothing. Henry was a sensitive subject between them, for she knew Mary blamed her for his death. And for the fact that she did not have a grandchild.
“Now that you are awake, you might as well get dressed and we shall begin prayers. Then you may help me sort through the linens to see which must be mended and pressed. Dolly made a terrible mess of that. But what did I expect, asking her to do something that required some actual thought?” Mary said, not waiting for Grace to respond. “Oh, we must call on Lady Dennis later today, so make sure you wear your dark blue dress. We shall leave for the Rutherfords’ ball at eight o’clock sharp, for Lord Grayson will accompany us. You can tell him when he arrives that you have agreed to be his wife. Now you had better get dressed.”
With that proclamation, Mary left the room. Grace stared at the door and released a breath, relieved to be free of her mother-in-law.
You have agreed to be Lord Grayson’s wife. Grace hadn’t told him yet. But she supposed she would.
A pang of regret filled her as again she thought of him. The man in her dreams. Phillip. Oh, if only she could feel a love like that in her real life.
It seemed, however, that a love like that was not in her destiny. For if it was, surely it would have happened by now.
Chapter Two
“Congratulations on your engagement, Mrs. Sutton!”
It was all Grace heard that evening while she stood in the crowded and overheated ballroom of Lady Rutherford’s London townhouse. Grace wished she could simply slip away from it all. She had smiled falsely at everyone and was exhausted from the strain of pretending to be happy as well as spending the entire afternoon in Mary’s company.
“Thank you very much,” she managed to utter in wooden response.
She had danced and waltzed obligingly with her new fiancé, who beamed at her with delight and pride at her acceptance.
Born to Bite Bundle Page 45