Red Grow the Roses (34 page)

That's when the pager at my belt went off.

Swearing, I wriggled the little electronic tyrant from beneath me and brought it up under my nose to see who'd pushed their Nurse button. ‘Oh, hell. You'd better stop, Stefan. It's Mrs Freeman.'

‘Fuck her,' he suggested with a grunt, trying his best to do just that to me. His cock was already embedded in the airtight seal of my ring. It was with reluctance – and some effort – that I elbowed him in the ribs and rolled out from beneath him.

‘She's got a heart condition. I'll get back to you.' I yanked up my panties and hurried out, with only a reluctant grimace for poor Stefan, stiff as a flagpole but with no flag to run up it. I'm not a bad nurse, see. I put the patients first, even under duress.

I reached Mrs Freeman's room and found her gasping and flapping her hands about.

I jumped to the heart-rate monitor, interpreting the numbers. ‘What's up, Mrs Freeman?'

‘Oh, my dear, my dear – there was a man in my room!'

‘A man? Are you sure?'

‘Yes! I just woke up and he was there, leaning over me!'

My concerns blew away at once: she'd been having a nightmare and carried it through into waking. I had to force myself not to snap at her. I mean, she wasn't to know she'd interrupted my roll with Stefan – but
honestly
– how dumb can you get? There was no sign of any trouble on her monitor, though she was clutching at her chest and throat. I looked round the room to check there was no other occupant, but the pristine chamber was empty of course.

‘Well, there's nobody here now. Are you sure, Mrs Freeman? Are you sure you weren't just having a dream?'

‘Of course I'm sure! He pulled down my nightie!'

Frankly I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to pull down Mrs Freeman's polka-dotted nightdress and expose that big freckle-painted chest, leathery from years of ill-advised sunbathing. But I looked anyway, dutifully. To my surprise her gown was actually ripped; her gold crucifix gleamed up at me from her exposed breastbone. Mrs Freeman was a good Catholic and had had the priest in to see her on her first day of admission.

I frowned. Presumably she'd done it herself, in her sleep.

After helping her get changed into a new gown and reassuring her that there was absolutely no one there and that I'd check in all the adjacent rooms and set Stefan to watch over the corridor, I went to find the orderly in question. We had unfinished business, after all. I couldn't find him, to my irritation. He wasn't waiting in the unoccupied bedroom and he wasn't at his post in the front lobby. I paced through the corridors, wondering what he was playing at, until I reached the men's toilet at the end of the wing. The lights were off but I pushed open the door and flicked the switch and blinked as the strip bulb flickered into life.

‘Stefan?'

And there he was, lying against the wall, under the towel roll. He stirred groggily as I approached him, mumbling my name and trying to shield his eyes from the light.

‘Stefan? Are you OK? What happened?' I'm used to dealing with trouble, but my voice sounded too loud and too anxious in this echoing room. Stefan was my first backup if anything went wrong or needed dealing with: it rattled me to see him down like that. Kneeling over him I checked for wounds, sliding my hand round the back of his head in case he'd injured it in falling.

‘Joyce.' He gazed up at me, his pupils wildly dilated, his lips slack. My groping hand found no injury. Drugs, was my immediate suspicion – but he'd been fine a quarter of an hour ago. What had happened to him? With clumsy hands he fumbled at my breasts. ‘Joyce … Gi's a blowjob.'

He sounded drunk, he looked stoned, and there was a bulge in his pants that he was trying to get me to grab on to. But when I pulled my hand from his head, despite not having detected any swelling I found blood on my palm – two little smears. Knocking his groping hands aside impatiently I rolled him enough to get a look at the nape of his neck. There: two small shallow wounds, barely bloody. Just like the ones Mrs Smith had been inflicted with.

I took a deep breath. If I rang for backup now, Stefan would get the sack: this looked too much like getting wasted on duty. And I didn't think he'd been taking anything illicit. My suspicions were focused on someone else entirely. I was sure I knew who was involved.

You've no idea how hard this was for me. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic: I don't believe in any of this nonsense. Yet the dark certainty roiled in my gut, propelling me to my feet. Certainty, and anger. Fury that anyone had brought this madness into my ward, on my shift.

I left Stefan. Yes, I know it sounds callous, but I didn't think he was in danger any more. I walked back down the corridor to the guest rooms and threw open the door into Mrs Smith's and marched straight in.

Mr Smith was sitting on the bed with her, cradling her against his chest. Her oxygen mask was off; I would have protested, automatically, except that one fundamental thing had changed: she was conscious. I could see that because she was holding his forearm to her face, and her lips were pressed to his wrist. My mouth fell open and no sound came out.

Slowly, he turned his face up and locked his gaze on mine. That look was enough to douse all my hot indignation and turn my insides to ice instead.

‘Oh,' I managed to say. Then I turned and headed for the door.

He was there in front of me. I've no idea how. He was standing in the doorway, his fingers resting lightly on the frame either side, and from the wound in his wrist the black blood oozed down toward his fingertips. He smiled, very faintly, and with no warmth.

I cast a terrified glance over my shoulder; Mrs Smith was kneeling up in bed, bereft and groping blindly. Her mouth was smeared with the dark blood.

‘I am sorry.' His voice was smooth; it held none of the broken and desperate sincerity of his earlier plea for forgiveness, the one I'd overheard him whispering to her. ‘Normally I'd try not to be so brusque. But she needs to feed.' He caught the front of my uniform in one hand and pulled me up against him.

All the air left my lungs – I mean, Christ, I hadn't fully realised until now how much he
loomed
over me, how physically dominant he was. My brain went completely blank. I'd always prided myself on being able to think and act fast in threat situations, but right now his eyes seemed to drain all the volition out of my limbs. All I could think of was the incredible hardness of his body, the way mine had squashed against it as our frames collided. The speed and the strength in him.

He showed that strength by taking the front of my uniform in both fists and tearing it open to my waist, without the slightest discernable effort. Only the fabric protested. He looked down at me, pleased: my breasts are big and firm, full of bounce. Stefan loves them, the poor guy, and this man seemed equally appreciative. His mouth hooked up at the corner. I said before he was handsome, didn't I? Handsome like Satan. My insides were turning to butter and it was running out down between my thighs.

He snapped the front of my bra and let my breasts tumble out. My nipples ripened from soft berries to hard nuts at the touch of the air, tingling.

‘No,' I said weakly: the first word I'd managed to utter. It didn't seem to come from anywhere – certainly not my conscious mind, which had melted into a soup of unbelief. It was a leftover; a reflex protest.

‘Shush.' One cool finger brushed my lips gently, sealing them. He reached behind him to close the door, but his gaze never left me.

Tears welled into my eyes

‘The thing is,' he said as if confiding in me, his hands gripping my waist, ‘her new teeth have not come in yet. So I think you'd prefer it if I took the lead.' Then he lifted me bodily – right up, to bring my breasts to his face. And he took my right nipple full into his mouth, and bit me.

There was pain. Then it was gone, and something else was there in its place. Goddamn – I've been on a diamorphine infusion once, when I broke my leg: I'll tell you now, that had nothing on this. That bite turned my nipple into a clit and my whole body into one giant sexual organ, wet and trembling and receptive. I was aware of my hands grabbing his head and of being carried over to the bed, but my concentration was all on the pleasure; the almost unbearable pleasure of his sucking mouth. It was overwhelming and irresistible and so wrong I have no words for it.

I hated him so fucking much, even as I writhed in his embrace.

He laid me out across the bottom of the bed, and his woman came crawling down to me, brushing the tubes and the monitors off her as if they were grass-seeds. When he released my nipple from his mouth I could see there was blood welling up and running down my breast, into my cleavage, toward my throat. I tried to shut my eyes, but I couldn't. I seemed to have no will left, no power over my own body.

‘Amanda,' he murmured, cupping her head in one hand and guiding her down to me. Her eyes were as empty as an animal's, betraying only hunger. My hips bucked and my thighs parted as she settled, kneeling as if at prayer, sucking my flesh between her black-stained lips. Pleasure burst and danced in my nipple all over again as she slurped at me. Her pale hair flooded my breastbone.

I looked up at his face from where I lay. He was smiling, but at her not at me. Proud, like a new father. And fearful: I saw it lurking in the corners of his eyes. I tried to lift my hands – to pull at her hair, to push him away or perhaps to pull him closer – but he intercepted my clumsy movements. To soothe my fretting he pulled up the skirt of my uniform and slipped his hand between my thighs. My panties were soaked through, and when he pressed the heel of his hand against them and began to rub with small circular movements, well, then I nearly left the planet. I could feel myself dilating under his fingers, the fabric being stretched as his fingers nearly pushed my gusset inside me. My hips lurched, pushing my mons up into his hand, showing him how open I was. He could have had me, easily, but he didn't want me. Not that way, anyway. Sliding down on the bed, never losing his hold on my sex, he took my other breast in his mouth and began to feed.

That was when I started to come, over and over and over, like waves falling on a beach. As they both squeezed and tugged at my breasts I could feel the bright orgasmic surges rolling up from my pussy to my nipples and streaming out of me, like light, into them. It didn't stop. I couldn't breathe. I started to black out between peaks, waking only to another tumbling spasm.

And then he released me. I blinked my eyes into focus just as he prised Mrs Smith – well, Amanda – from my right breast. ‘That's enough now.'

She didn't like that at all. She hissed at him like a cat defending its kill, baring red teeth and grabbing at his forearm to sink her nails in.

‘Amanda! That's enough!' I heard in his voice a rumble of that inexorable command he'd used on me and Stefan, and her eyes flashed wide. Then he touched her cheek in a caress and his voice softened. ‘All right, come on, talk to me, Amanda. Can you hear me?'

I'd almost say he sounded afraid.

She blinked, her expression crumpling. Face to face they stared at each other over my bare breasts, their mouths sticky, their eyes full of unfathomable emotion. She sat back first, wiping the blood off her lips with her fingers, glancing helplessly at them and frowning at him as if finally waking into consciousness.

‘Reynauld?' she whispered.

He blinked, biting his lip, and bowed his head. His shoulders sagged.

‘Reynauld,' she said again, more forcefully. ‘Where's Naylor?'

‘He's gone. Dead.'

‘You're safe?' she asked. Not “we” but “you”, I noted – and wondered blearily what sort of messed-up world they came from where he was the one in danger.

‘Yes. We're safe.' In his averted, uncertain eyes I read a strange dread. Then her hand stole out and clasped his face, wonderingly, as if to reassure herself he was really there. I saw his lips part; black tears glittered on his lower lids.

She didn't say anything else. She leaned in and kissed him, her smudged mouth trembling on his. For a moment he did not respond; I think he was still holding his breath in fear. Then his lips moved, seeking hers: quick, hard, hungry. I've never found desperation an attractive quality in a man; these were kisses of burning need and terror. He clasped her face in both hands like he was eating her breath. Then he pulled her to him across the bed – and across me as I lay supine, but I think they'd both forgotten I was even there – and rose to his feet so he could embrace the whole of her body and draw it tight against his. Pressing her face to his chest he buried his own face in her hair, and then he pulled away from her again so that he could hold her cheek in his hand and look into her eyes.

And all the time I was lying there, too weak to move, black roses blossoming behind my eyes as unconsciousness loomed; drowning in the heavy golden afterglow of their kisses.

‘I took your life,' he groaned.

Her arms slipped about his neck. ‘I gave it to you.' Her voice was weak and husky – but then she had no right to be talking at all, or standing up, after coming out of a three-day coma. She had bright-blue eyes, and they were wet with human-looking tears. ‘Do you not know love when you see it, Reynauld?'

He grimaced. ‘Love? I do, now. It's come closer to destroying me than Naylor ever did.' His fingers were infinitely tender on her face, in her hair, but his face was full of anguish. ‘Amanda … Oh, God …'

‘Shush. It's all right.'

‘But, you understand … you're going to be …'

‘It's OK, Reynauld. I can live with that.'

He laughed, bitterly. ‘For ever.'

The tears spilled over her lashes and ran down her cheeks, but she smiled. ‘Yes.'

‘I'll help you. If you'll stay with me.'

‘If I stay …?' she wondered.