Red Grow the Roses (11 page)

Riding the flare of shock, Lilla felt the explosion of arousal burst, hot and wet, inside her. The rose fell from her fingers. ‘That's right,' she breathed; ‘that's Victorian values for you. We know all about the “gentlemen” and what they got up to: the brothels, the servants seduced and thrown out on the streets, the hundreds of “respectable” girls throwing themselves from river bridges because they'd been ruined. One in sixteen women in this city making their living by prostitution. Your Swinburne – he had a thing for being whipped, didn't he? Would you like to whip me, Mr Wakefield? Would you like to thrash my pretty white bottom?'

‘Be quiet,' he hissed. ‘You have no idea of the trouble you're getting yourself into, girl.'

‘Oh, I know,' she countered, nearly giggling. ‘I know exactly what you are.' Her lips shaped the terrible word that hung between them, though she gave it no sound: vampire. ‘I know,' she whispered, ‘you're just aching to bite into my cold skin and taste the hot blood beneath.'

For a moment his eyes, which had narrowed to burning slits, widened. Then he wrenched her around and pushed her backward, right off her feet, until she was slammed up against the great black barrel of the boiler, her back arched over its warm curve, and his hand was no longer in her hair but gripping her throat. Blood hammered in her head: she thought for a moment she would pass out.

‘That Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the National Gallery. That's where I've seen you. You were with Reynauld. You're one of his women.'

Lilla licked her lips and struggled for air: he let her breathe with some reluctance. ‘I was one of his donors,' she admitted. ‘Not any more.' She could feel his newly sprung erection grinding into her. And now she was horribly, helplessly aroused, wet in anticipation of his bite.

Robert grinned, showing fangs, which made her heart thump wildly. ‘He threw you out.'

‘Yes.' The anger was still there inside her, like a black stain through her lust.

‘Why?'

‘I upset him. I had the cheek to ask for too much. I wanted him to make me … like him. Like you.'

He stopped grinning abruptly. ‘You did what?'

She met his eyes. ‘I want to be a vampire.'

‘So you've come here – to me?' The dawning truth was visible in his face: the realisation of the way she'd inveigled her way into his house. Lilla decided that brutal honesty was the best tactic now.

‘You're as much use to me as he is.'

He shook his head slightly. ‘You could have drowned falling from that bridge, you do realise? What if I hadn't heard you? What if I'd taken no notice?'

‘Then I'd be dead.' That prospect seemed unreal to her now that she wasn't hanging over a cold river any more. She twisted her mouth, nearly spitting the words. ‘Better that than living like this. I've seen you people and I know what I want. I have as much right as any of –'

‘Don't be stupid!' he snarled, but then his next sentence sounded more weary and disgusted than angry. ‘You have no rights. Nobody has any
rights
.'

Lilla took a strangled breath. ‘I want to live in the night. I want to drink blood. I want to be immortal.'

‘Then no wonder he repudiated you. We don't make more of our own. That's Reynauld's iron rule.'

‘That's a lie!'

‘What?'

‘There are loads of you. Don't fob me off.'

‘What do you mean?' he asked softly, but there was nothing soft about the carnivorous teeth hovering inches from her face. His breath was cold. ‘There are six of us here. Neither more nor less in many years, by Reynauld's own interdiction.'

‘Six Master Vampires, yes, but loads of bloodkinder. Everybody knows that. Haven't you read StakeGirl's blog?'

‘I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. What in the name of all that is holy is a “blog”?'

That shocked her. For a moment he didn't look like a young man wearing antique clothes, but an old man trapped in a young man's body. ‘It's an online diary,' she said weakly. ‘On the Internet, you know?'

‘Ah. Yes. The Internet – I've heard of that. Well, I don't own a computer. But I assure you … Master Vampires? Bloodkinder?' He wrung the word out as if it were a filthy dishcloth.

‘StakeGirl's a vampire killer.'

‘What?'

‘She goes around taking out lesser vampires: the bloodkinder. There are dozens of them. She writes it all up and puts it on her blog. She's famous.'

Robert Wakefield blinked, and he let go of her throat and leaned back a little. ‘Truly, I swear I would laugh, if it were not so pitiful. There's no such thing as bloodkinder. The last human converted anywhere around here was sometime in the 1960s.'

‘But …' Lilla's mind raced, anxiety seeping in as the threat of violence receded. Robert's expression had slipped from anger to contempt, and she didn't like that. She knew that it would take a miracle for this to be anything but her last chance.

‘It is a joke, this blog of yours. Or a work of fiction you've been naive enough to take for fact.'

Lilla stuck her bottom lip out in a pout. ‘Make me into a vampire.'

‘Have you heard a word I've said?' he growled. ‘He's forbidden it.'

‘So?' She couldn't keep the desperation out of her voice.

‘So?' He was flabbergasted by her obstinacy – or perhaps by her ignorance. ‘Have you any idea what he'd do to us?'

‘Reynauld wouldn't hurt me. He doesn't hurt girls.'

‘Very true. And fortunate for you. But I am not a girl.'

‘Oh, I'd noticed that.' Lilla prided herself on her adaptability. Now she reached down and grasped the thick curve of his cock. If he'd had been a living human she'd have felt its heat through the cloth of his trousers, but he was cold as clay. It didn't stop his flesh heaving in response to her touch though, and when she spoke next she dropped her voice to a purr. ‘I never met a girl with one of these … Mr Wakefield. It's so big.'

His eyes darkening, he took her by the shoulders. ‘You think you can manipulate me?'

‘I think … that you want to fuck me.' She tugged at the bow at the neck of her chemise, untied the ribbon in one long, sensual pull and without hurrying – there was no hurry, he was fixated on the sight – loosed the cloth to better reveal the luxuriant swell of her breasts and their swollen needy nipples, poking out over the lip of her corset. ‘I think that you want to bite my beautiful big tits, Mr Wakefield.'

His eyes were wide now, but his mouth a hard tight line.

‘Aren't they lovely?' she whispered. ‘Aren't they all big and soft and juicy, just ready for you to stick your face in?'

With a convulsive movement he flung her away from him and she sprawled back on the bark-covered ground, breasts bouncing and the wind knocked from her lungs. Robert took a step forward, looming over her, his fists clenched as if in revulsion – but the bulge in his trousers betrayed him. Lilla raised herself to her elbows, but didn't try to sit up for the moment. This position suited her quite well: her legs had fallen apart and the crotch split in her capacious Victorian drawers was undoubtedly revealing her blonde snatch. And she had a very good view of Robert's erection, which looked like it threatened to split the worn fabric of his tented trousers.

‘I don't feed from humans,' he hissed, trembling.

‘That's what I heard. I just find it hard to believe.' Rolling on to her knees, she reached out across the bark, to the discarded rose he'd cut for her. ‘Nasty sharp thorns these things have got,' she mused, laying the stem across her bare breasts. With a twitch she drew it down, scoring her flesh with half-a-dozen needle-pointed thorns, shuddering as the pain burned through her. Pinpoints of blood rose on her pale skin and swelled, a string of rubies decorating the white flesh and the roseate nipples. ‘Ah,' she groaned.

Robert Wakefield seemed to grow taller; his hard-on bulged. She could taste the coppery tang of her victory.

‘Tell me, have you ever whipped a girl with your roses, Mr Wakefield?' Lilla began to crawl backwards from him on hands and knees, arse swaying, breasts wobbling. ‘Maybe one of your servants? The parlourmaid perhaps? You ever taken a bunch of roses and whipped their tits?' She put on a country accent for her next words, her voice suddenly breathlessly innocent but at the same time teasing: ‘Oh, Mr Wakefield, you wouldn't be thinking of doing that to a poor innocent girl? I couldn't bear that, sir – it'll hurt something cruel. You wouldn't want to ruin a helpless maid, would you, sir? You wouldn't want that on your conscience?'

Inhumanly swift, he lunged and grabbed the front of her bodice and yanked her up to slam her against one of the wrought-iron pillars. Eagerly Lilla extended her hands over her head and crossed them at the wrists, thrusting her breasts out so that he might feed. But he didn't, not right away. He looked down at her with a face hollow with hunger, and then he took hold of her long drawers at the waist and snapped the drawstring with one tug of his wrists. He tore the damp, clinging cotton from her thighs to bare her sex, and then he tied her wrists with the twisted strips and secured her to an ornamental bracket high on the pillar, hauling her up on to her toes. She said nothing, breath and words robbed from her by anticipation, lips parted about her shallow breaths.

His face mask-like, his eyes burning, he plunged his cold fingers between her thighs and up inside her, breaching the gates of her sex to take the measure of her heat, the slick of juices, the yielding sucking flex of her tight hole. Lilla writhed on his hand, twisting helplessly with each thrust of his wrist, and he watched her breasts jiggle and bounce, their pink points dewed in red. His teeth were so extended now that his upper lip did not hide them.

‘Oh, please,' she gasped.

‘Shut up,' he snarled. ‘You've said quite enough already.'

Then he walked away.

Lilla's exposed skin seemed to crawl under every tiny movement of the air. The bite-marks of the rose burned. She watched in terror as he cut himself half a dozen long-stemmed roses without even looking at her and methodically stripped off the leaves. The crimson buds seemed to blaze on the tips of the stems as he turned and swished them experimentally.

Oh, God, thought Lilla, her mouth dry and her pussy running wet. The dread and the desire for pain were part of her wiring as a vampire's donor: for the icy stab of the incision followed by the rush of the bite itself, the magical whatever-it-was in their saliva that made being fed upon even better for the victim than for the devourer. She craved being eaten almost as much as she wanted to eat, and far more viscerally. Her whole body was inflamed with arousal now at the sight of a few droplets of her blood, with the anticipation of hurt. Reynauld himself had never whipped her – the bastard had such a poker up his arse that he would never stoop to indulging such a kink – but she wasn't new to the pleasure of pain. She knew how well her body responded to a good spanking or to the bite of a crop, and roses were just a new variation on an old theme.

When Robert Wakefield came back he had eight stems bunched in his hand. He took his stance on her right and used his left hand to push her head back, gripping her jaw and part-covering her mouth. Then he brought the whip flat across her breasts with a loud and stinging slap. Lilla convulsed, feeling the pain stab her with scores of tiny teeth. He struck again and again – not hard, but then he didn't need to because the thorns did all the work for him, biting and tugging at her skin. She began to shriek, because she needed to and because she knew he wanted to hear it too, her screams breaking the seal of his cold fingers. Her whole body writhed and jerked, utterly helpless but cold no longer, burning now and wet with perspiration.

After a dozen blows he stopped, breathing hard. He kept her head forced back so that she couldn't see what sort of mess he'd made of her, but she could feel something damp trickling down between her tits and she didn't know if it was sweat or blood. Stopping, he licked her breasts, his tongue cold and smooth and leaving a wake of prickling pleasure as he lapped and sucked. Even his tongue, for God's sake, she thought, as he stirred her nipples and their buds burst into what felt like multi-petalled blooms of ecstasy, making her groan.

‘Bite me,' she begged. ‘Please. Bite me.'

He lifted his head to glare into her face, his mouth and chin smeared. But it was punishment she read in those pale eyes. He lifted his flail again and struck at her – this time harder, and across the tops of her thighs and her sex. Rosebuds broke, the petals falling. Lilla screamed. Each blow felt like sparks of fire landing on her skin; each sent a jolt through her sex straight to the nub of her swollen clit, stoking its own heat. Pain made pleasure. As the whipping continued, her legs, which had kicked out in protest and tried to escape the first blows, grew stiffer and began to tilt her pelvis forward, that whole area of her body transforming into a zone of arousal. Even those slashes which scored her legs and lower belly seemed to add to the accumulating wave of need. Her squeals of shock became staccato cries urging him on, and as the measured slaps he dealt her became crueller and swifter she broke down suddenly into heaving thrashing orgasm, drinking the pain that was no pain, nearly pulling her arms from their sockets. Robert Wakefield paused, watching her intently as she spiralled down from her orgasm.

She curled a lip. ‘Bite me. Bite me, you fucker.'

‘You need to learn some manners,' he snarled. Reaching up over her head he tore her bonds apart and then pulled her forward, right off her feet, throwing her down on hands and knees in the soft bark at his feet. She stared dumbly at the shredded cuffs around her wrists that were the remnants of her knickers, lying between his cracked leather boots. He grabbed the corset at the small of her back and hoicked her arse up, then he stood deliberately on her wrists, one foot on each. Lilla bit her lip and burrowed her wrists into the soft path to ease the pressure: she was pinned to the ground now. He didn't want her escaping. He was going to hurt her some more.