A Time Apart: Book One of The Macauley Series Read online

  Nadia closed the few feet between them, sliding her bare arms up around William’s neck as she once again leaned into him. Bringing her face close, he could barely control himself and his fangs descended. Nadia snickered, and then licked the other side of his neck, lathing her way up and over his jaw and to his mouth. She kissed him and he didn’t fight her, but he also didn’t give in. When she bit his lip, William groaned. Leaning back, Nadia brought her finger to his mouth, rubbing his moist lips, urging him to let her in. Taking her finger into his mouth, William sucked on it, all the while imagining the other places he’d like to suck. Again, she chuckled that deep, throaty, sexy sound.

  “Fuck me, vampire,” she whispered against his mouth.

  And so he did, right there against his car, her black silk dress up around her waist, his cock ramming into her over and over again. William kissed her hungrily, not caring if anyone saw them. She pulled at his shirt, ripping at him, digging her long nails into his muscle, leaving rivulets of blood dripping down his chest. Afterward, she licked at his wounds, taking his blood into her mouth, savoring it like a fine wine. William ripped the front of her dress away from her body, taking her heaving, luscious breasts into his mouth, teasing her nipple with his teeth.

  “Yes, please. Oh god, please,” she begged.

  William knew what she was asking for but it had been over a hundred years since he’d sunk his fangs into a woman while in the act of pleasuring her. For sustenance, yes of course he would feed, but as a way to increase the gratification of making love with a woman? No, he’d always held back. While William was still in control and could own the situation, he continued to plunder her body while weighing his options.

  She knew what he was and yet she wasn’t afraid. In fact, she probably wanted him more because of what he was. He’d heard about women like that – vampire whores – who would go from one of his kind to the next, seeking the one that would eventually bring the change. That would never be him, but he could give her what they both wanted so desperately in the here and now.

  As William continued to lick and toy with her neck, Nadia was sobbing in his arms, begging him for what they both wanted. Lifting his head to look at her, never wavering from his driving thrusts, he made his decision.

  “I’m going to drink as I empty myself into you,” he growled, his eyes alight with fire.

  She threw her head back in ecstasy and he did as she begged. William felt his incisors break through the barrier of her taut skin, the blood rushing into his mouth, a heady mixture of spice, sweetness, and warmth.

  He groaned aloud and truly let go for the first time in over a century.

  Nadia wrapped her legs around him tighter, her orgasm rocking her body as he poured his barren seed inside and drank of her blood.

  As his own orgasm came to an end, he closed his eyes and felt fully sated for this first time in a very long while.

  * * * *

  William’s relationship with Nadia was good for a very long time. Because she knew his secret, he felt less guarded when he was with her, but it took more than a year for their association to become anything more than sexual. For months on end they’d meet at parties or other events – she always on the arm of someone else – only to sneak away at the end of the evening to the closest hotel for a night of passionate sex.

  She’d play the pursuer, William the pursued, a role reversal he found ironic. He tried to stay out of her mind, but he knew that she got off on dominating him, bringing the big, bad vampire to his knees. It made her feel powerful – in charge, a force to be reckoned with, something he knew she did not feel on a daily basis.

  While their assignations were exhilarating and always very physical, he didn’t drink from her nearly as often as she would have liked. The less William took of her, the more Nadia wanted him to do it. It wasn’t necessarily that she was desperate, but there was something about Nadia and her desire for the heady mixture of pain and pleasure that was always left unsaid between the two of them. If William accidentally bruised her wrists while holding her hands above her head as he took her from behind, she seemed to savor the experience all the more, her orgasms rocking her body to the point of exhaustion. They never discussed her predilections for pain, nor did William examine too deeply what was brewing between the two of them. For the longest while he told himself that it was just sex – albeit liberating sex – and that there were no strings attached for either of them.

  That’s what he told himself.

  A little over a year after they’d started their association, Nadia began to occasionally spend the night at William’s house in Dublin while he slumbered three floors below, locked behind heavy steel doors she could never have opened. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nadia in the regular sense of the word, but regardless of the connection they had in bed, he wasn’t uncomfortable with her knowing too much, getting too close.

  And he would never trust her – or anyone – with his life.

  William cared for her, certainly ... more so than he had cared for any human woman since his long-dead wife, but that caring was based on something other than love. Affection, fascination, and attraction, certainly, but to say that William loved Nadia would have been a lie, and after awhile she began to understand.

  William never gave himself to her – mind, body, and soul – as he had the very first time they had come together and she began to resent their relationship and him along with it. She hid it well, but William knew her biggest fears, her greatest hopes, and the heart’s desires she would never voice aloud.

  One night approximately two years after their first night together they had decided to skip a political fundraiser and instead stayed in for a relaxed evening together. The picture of domestic bliss, Nadia had ordered Chinese delivery for herself while William sat at the dining room table going over paperwork. Anyone looking through the windows would have thought them husband and wife and the image they presented in that milieu wasn’t lost on Nadia.

  “I had the strangest conversation with Bridgette, Tom’s wife, today when I ran into her at Brown Thomas.”

  Given that the comment seemed to come from out of nowhere, William could have looked into her mind to see where the conversation was going, or let it play out like a normal man would do when in the company of a beautiful, cultured woman he’d been seeing for years. He chose to play the regular man.

  “Well, Bridgette is a strange woman,” he replied almost absently.

  “Not so strange as all that,” she responded. “You know, we have been seeing each other for quite awhile now. People are starting to wonder … well … what comes next for us.”

  William ran his hands through his hair – a tick he’d never quite lost – and placed his palms face down on the table. He counted: one second, two seconds, and then three.

  “Nadia.”

  Here it was then. The conversation he’d been forestalling, and the one he knew would ultimately break her.

  “There is no next for us,” he said, harsher than he’d meant to. Calming down, he continued, “You know what I am. Our relationship is not normal. I’ve never led you on or made you believe this was going somewhere it can’t.”

  Nadia sat on William’s couch, curled up in his cashmere robe, a wine glass twirling in her perfectly manicured hands.

  “I want you William.” She looked over at him, eyes plaintive, and said nothing more.

  “As I want you. As you have me. But this is all we can be,” he explained.

  “Do you love me?” she asked defiantly, broaching the subject for the very first time.

  “Please do not ask of me what I cannot give you,” William whispered in response. “I am not worth this.”

  Nadia got up from the couch, set her wine glass down on the coffee table, and walked over to stand next to him. William could hear her heart beating faster than normal, the sound of her blood whirring through her veins.

  “Let me love you,” she implored. “I’m good for you. I can give you everything. If you
only you would give yourself to me,” she said, circling behind him, leaning over and running her hands down his chest, then down into his lap where she could feel exactly what part of him he longed to give her.

  As she stroked him through his wool trousers, she proceeded to kiss her way down his jaw. William could have refused her but they’d always been very good together in this regard. He reached around and pulled her down to straddle him, the cashmere robe she wore parting to reveal her perfect breasts, taut belly, and that tiny patch of jet black curls he knew so well. She was extraordinary and her beauty was undeniable. But still William did not – could not – love her.

  Saying nothing in response to her plea, he freed his aching, swollen shaft and eased her down on top of him as she slowly, deliberately, took in the only thing he had to offer. Steadily she rode him so that one second they were barely touching and the next he was buried to the hilt in her tight, fiery sheath. Over and over, slow and excruciating, so that every other second he was gliding upward, deep inside of her, while she attempted to prove to him with her body that they were so right for one another. She rode William harder, speeding up her pace, and just seconds before she came, Nadia threw her head back in abandon, screaming his name with a soul-shattering intensity. Her undoing was his own. William exploded inside of her as he simultaneously sank his fangs into her neck and took his fill of everything she had to give.

  As he left her just before sunrise, Nadia groggily grabbed his hand, hoping to keep him by her side for just a little bit longer. William stopped, and looked down at her, heavy-lidded and sated from a night of pleasure.

  “Turn me, William,” she whispered.

  One heart beat. Two heartbeats. Three.

  “No, Nadia.”

  He walked to the door, took one last glance back at her body wrapped in his sheets, her long limbs peeking out in invitation. In that moment William wished he were truly a normal man so that he could give her everything that she wanted in life. No, not what she wanted – what she needed. Instead, with his next word, he unknowingly put the final nail in her coffin.

  “Never.”

  He walked out of the room and left her forever.

  Rumors circulated months later that Nadia had killed herself in an apartment overlooking the Seine. The police reported that the situation in which her apartment had been left was suspicious, and the Parisian police suspected foul play. William had heard whispers about what had really happened and he had no doubt that he’d see her again someday – only, she’d come to him as a vampire. Who it was that had turned her, he didn’t know and couldn’t say, but he knew in his non-beating heart that the one thing Nadia had wanted of him more than she wanted his love was to be one of them – a vampire. He was convinced that she had finally found another to give her the immortality she had so desperately craved.

  CHAPTER 10

  Every now and then William had returned to Dublin to resume his role as bachelor playboy so as not to arouse any more suspicion than necessary. While stories about his supposed conquests and escapades circulated among both business associates and Dublin society alike, in truth he had mostly retired to his ancient pile of rubble to live his life – or rather, his death – in a sort of solitary quiet.

  But then, for some inexplicable reason, things had begun to change for him over the past six months. Frequently he would wake in the middle of the day, remembering bits and pieces of a life he’d long laid to rest. While some vampires would cling to their mortal memories in a vain attempt to retain their humanity, William had run away from his, locking that part of him away, knowing that nothing he could ever say or do would change what had happened.

  Revisiting his human self was nothing short of torture and not even 350 years could lessen the torment William felt when those brief glimpses into who he had been, and the life he had led, would creep to the forefront of his mind when least expected. Over time the memories had become more numerous and assaulting – he’d be in the middle of a meeting and would suddenly be overcome by the exact smell of the flowers that had once lined the banks of the river down the hill from the castle, or he’d hear a woman’s laugh and Ceara’s face would come to mind. It got to the point where no female could wear lily of the valley perfume in his presence, lest it put him back there, hundreds of years earlier. Such a minor thing really, to have an aversion or allergy to perfume. Thankfully, people didn’t question his decree that no one would be allowed to wear that scent in his presence.

  The dreams were sporadic at first but over time they became William’s constant companion. After weeks of brutal torture, he was finally honest with himself about what was happening and why: he had unfinished business to attend to and he couldn’t rest peacefully until he’d made what amends he could for what had happened all those centuries ago. He couldn’t bring Ceara back, but he could at least bring back the home they’d shared – the place where they’d once been happy and alive. William felt that only by putting to rights what he had left behind would he be able to put his demons to rest.

  In order to make amends for what he had done to her – to them – the restoration of the castle became his obsession. Due to the years of neglect and harsh Irish weather it required at least three million euro to do correctly. Having had hundreds of years to amass a large fortune, money was the least of William’s worries.

  At first he tried telling the foreman and his crew what needed to be done whilst leaving the work to them. Unfortunately, as the dreams became true nightmares, he felt that he couldn’t leave the task for someone else to do in his stead. To atone for his sins, he needed to stand in the empty shell of rooms, move the weathered stones with his own bare hands, till the earth of his own accord, and acknowledge the precious blood that he had shed. William developed a sick fixation with making sure that everything was exactly the way it had been when he was still a mortal man living there with his wife. If a stone had been somewhere in his memory, it needed to be there now. If a wood beam had gone the length of a ceiling, it would do so again.

  Word among historians and antiquarians made the rounds and soon William was being hailed as a local hero. The recognition made him quite nervous as he didn’t want anyone looking too closely into the history of the castle lest they find out the names of the original and current owner were one and the same. To cover his tracks, he had concocted a story about being named for a long-dead ancestor and how the castle had been his family’s home before falling into disrepair decades earlier. He knew the lie was tenuous at best, but it was what he had to go on.

  While he could very likely handle any inquiry from humans that became too dogged, William didn’t want to pique the curiosity of his vampire brethren or encourage any questions or visits from them. To say that there was no love lost between William’s maker and he would be an understatement. In fact, William would gladly kill him if he could.

  Like any other race, Vampires are made up of a vast and varied group of personalities. There are those who cling to their medieval selves, living hidden in the shadows, while practicing their ancient customs and rituals; then there are the insolent and violent ones still in their infancy who flaunt their gifts, daring someone to tell them not to. Those are usually the ones who look like they’ve just stepped out of a horror movie, all black leather trench coats, eyeliner, and Gothic mannerisms and New Orleans is a favorite haunt, thanks in large part to Anne Rice. And then there are those like William who just lived their lives, doing whatever they needed to during whatever time they found themselves in order to simply exist from one day to the next.

  William found no joy in who he was, and yet there was also no sorrow. He had long ago accepted what he was and he did what needed to be done to survive.

  Vampires like him – and there were several of them in every major city in every country on Earth – tended to attract scorn and suspicion from other groups. Often those vampires carried with them a deep and unrelenting hatred for humans and they could not fathom why William and his like chose to live as the
y did. They could not grasp why he would live among the human race as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

  William could concede that they had a point. It wasn’t natural; he knew that. In fact, he used to struggle with it every day, the blood lust always there, the metallic, tinny scent wafting around him always. Over time he had become more adept at forcing his urges down until he could fulfill his desires privately. And now, the older he became, the longer he could go between feedings. While he never forgot who or what he was and what he could do, he had reached a place where those things did not define him. What he wanted to be – who he wanted to be – is what drove him, not the constant, overwhelming yearning for blood.

  But those other vampires feared that his carelessness, as they called it, would reveal his true nature to the rest of the world, and then the mobs with their pitchforks and wooden stakes would begin hunting them all once again. William found it all a bit paranoid and dramatic, but then again, the only person he’d ever been hunted by was his maker so what did he know of persecution?

  William hadn’t been prepared for how all consuming the restoration project would be and how it led him to have such a narrow focus day in and day out – the castle became his driving force, his reason for existing … not blood. When asked, there was no one he could explain to about why he was doing it all. “Because I want to” became his most common refrain in the telling of the story.

  And yet, when the night was quiet and he was finally alone, William would tell himself that it was some unknown force compelling him to recreate the home he’d lived in when he had been a mortal man of twenty-eight. But he knew he was lying even to himself. He wasn’t working to recreate his home; he was working to recreate their home.

  About two years into the project, he had built a safe haven in the dungeon away from light or potential intruders so that he never had to leave the castle if he didn’t want to. Soon thereafter he gave up his home in Dublin to spend all of his time in the country, and he began sending his long-time business associates to meetings in his stead. While one half of his existence – it couldn’t really be called a life – was wilting on the vine, another one was on the verge of blowing up.