Midnight Harvest (50 page)

“Do you plan to?” Saint-Germain asked her, his compassion almost too much for her.

“I don’t know,” she said curtly. “It’s one of the many things I intend to do, but haven’t done yet; no specific plans yet.”

“Perhaps you’re getting ready to do those paintings,” he suggested. “Many perceptions take time to become clear.”

“That’s the attraction of your life, of course,” she said, impatiently pinching burgeoning tears from her eyes. “Having the time to do more.”

“But this troubles you,” Saint-Germain said.

“Yes. An artist’s style is always distinctive, if he or she’s any kind of an artist, and I’m afraid if I came to your life, I would eventually have to stop painting, or risk being found out utterly.” Now that she had actually said it, she felt a burden lift from her.

Saint-Germain gave a single nod. “Of course. It is a problem.”

“Do you have any solution?” She sounded precariously near weeping.

“I can tell you what I have done, and what others of my blood have done,” he said. “I don’t know if that would be sufficient.”

“All right; other than travel, what do you do?” she queried.

“Yes, travel, that’s the heart of it, and change. There are other forms of art you might pursue, and other applications of your talents,” he said. “For myself, to make that less cumbersome, I have a number of identities established in various places.”

“That is becoming more difficult to do,” said Rowena.

“Yes, and it takes a bit more caution, but it can be done. It takes time and a little thought, and the opportunity to … slip through the cracks, as it were.” He offered her a single-sided smile. “One of my blood always creates the impression she has a niece interested in following in her footsteps. She’s an archeologist, and that is a very small world; those in the profession tend to know each other by reputation, and most of them have closer contact than that. So far she has been able to continue her work, supposedly from aunt to niece, but she has said it isn’t easy.” He could not convince himself that Madelaine de Montalia’s methods would work for Rowena. “Others have had their own ways to deal with their lives.”

“And none of them have ever been found out?” The angle of her chin suggested she would not believe a denial.

“All of us have, from time to time, and paid the price for the lapse,” said Saint-Germain, recalling many of his own mishaps.

Rowena sighed. “This is what makes me hesitate. I don’t know how I could manage to live as you and your kind must do. What I want to do is paint. I would love to have decades and decades more in which to do it, but I don’t know if I can … I wouldn’t be young again, would I? When I became a vampire.”

“Circling back to this, Rowena?” he inquired, ironic and saddened at once. “Very well. You would stay the age you were when you died, as it is for all of us. Vampires do age, but very, very slowly, and some of it is the changes that happen around us, more than within us. I was a tall man in my breathing days—today I am short, although my height is unchanged. I was thirty-two or -three when I was killed, and now I appear to be in my mid-forties, or so I’m told. Whether I have changed, or the look of age has been pushed back, I cannot say. I haven’t seen my face since I became a vampire, although I have seen portraits, such as yours.” He had a distant memory of his features reflected in a mirror of polished copper, as foreign now as if they belonged to an utter stranger.

“That does alarm me, being the age of one’s death for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years,” Rowena admitted. “But what can I hope for, a woman in my fifties, getting older every hour? How long will I be a woman whom men will seek? What if I don’t die until I’m seventy-five or more? How will I manage in the world once I become a vampire? I’m going to ask you about this again, you know, until I work it out.”

Saint-Germain contemplated her pensively. “I can only tell you what others have done. What you decide to do is up to you.” She sighed. “You are the most provoking man! I want you to lay out a strategy for me, and you won’t do it.”

“Because I can’t,” he said. “To tell you otherwise would debase you.”

“I know; I am glad of it, inconvenient as your scruples may be,” she conceded, her confidence increasing. “And that’s why I haven’t been able to make up my mind. I haven’t yet decided what I must do.” She looked into his eyes, happiness softening her expression. “But I am sure that I want you to stay with me this evening.”

He took her hands in his. “As long as you want me, I am greatly favored, and I thank you.”

“You have nothing to thank me for,” she said.

“But I do,” he said mellifluously. “You have given me the gift of your self, and there is nothing more estimable in all the world. If only I could show you how highly I value you.” His dark, enigmatic eyes rested on her.

“Another notion peculiar to vampires, all this valuing?” she proposed, enticing and defensive at once.

“Not peculiar to us, no, but necessary to us.” He lifted her hand to his lips, kissing the back and then the palm; her mercurial state of mind did not trouble him, for he was aware of her growing passion, and her increasing yearning for coalescence.

“You are perplexing,” she said, attempting to sort out her many emotions; she moved in the chair with unconscious sensuality, graceful and voluptuous. “But I don’t want to give up what you provide me; you’re too sensitive to me for me to reject you—it would be like shutting off a part of myself.”

“That is the nature of the Blood Bond,” he said.

“You’ve tried to explain that to me before, and I still don’t entirely understand it. Perhaps I can’t so long as I’m one of the living.” She pulled closer to him, as if willing herself to absorb his understanding by touch alone. “I may not decide to come to your life, but I don’t want to turn you away from my life, or my bed. For now, I want you to continue to be my lover.” The bluntness of her statement surprised her, and she blinked in confusion. “There should be a better way to say all this, but I—”

He bent to kiss her mouth, saying as she ended their contact, “It was a wonderful way to tell me. I don’t mind if fondness isn’t wrapped in respectable phrases.”

She touched his leg that rested on the rolled back of her chair. “I am so happy to have this time with you. I was beginning to think that there was nothing left but work and the long, darkening path toward death. You restore my aspiration as the psychiatrist could only struggle to do, on his terms, not mine.”

Saint-Germain laughed softly. “Hope is as necessary to life as blood: believe this.”

She moved in her chair, rising onto her knees so she could press herself against him. “Then I hope we have a wonderful night tonight”

He took her face in his hands and kissed her tenderly, taking all the time they needed to feel the kiss to its full extent, to let it work its magic on them both. Slowly he slid his hands down her neck and over her body, his touch light and stirring. “You are sweet as honey and wine, nourishing as bread,” he murmured.

“My blood?” she asked, intrigued.

“No, you, Rowena; you.” He bent to kiss her a second time, and felt her arousal as he moved back from her.

She took a deep, unsteady breath. “Then let me be both to you.” As she rose to her feet, she put her hands on his chest. “My room is ready, the sheets freshly changed. We have until seven-thirty tomorrow morning to ourselves.”

His eyes were lambent, his voice was stirring. “You are the riches of my living, Rowena; never think otherwise.” He ran his fingers down her face, his touch light and evocative. “How much you offer in your self.”

“Come with me,” she said, catching his hand in hers and drawing him after her toward the stairs leading to the second floor. “I’ve wanted to lie with you since we left Lincoln Park. And so I will.”

Saint-Germain followed her up the stairs and, as they reached the top, stopped as she swung around to embrace him. “Nothing is urgent, Rowena. We have all night” Their kiss went on for some time, growing increasingly complex. When she finally took a step back, he brushed her lip with the end of his finger. “Why rush?”

“Because I’m afraid it will all be gone too soon, not just you, but everything—my work, my life, all of it; I’ll be an old woman with nothing to show for my life but a nice house and a generous bank account to leave my nephews, and no one will know or care that I lived and painted,” she said, starting toward her bedroom. “That policeman being here reminded me that you, because of what you are, cannot stay anywhere for very long.”

“No more than twenty years at most,” he said, following her through the door. “And often far fewer years than that.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” she said somberly, stopping at the side of her bed and confronting him. “If matters become too difficult or too perilous, you will depart, possibly with nothing more than a telephone call, if that. Then I’ll have a letter from Venezuela, or Hong Kong, or Timbuktu, and that will be the end of it.” Her expression dared him to contract her. “Well? Can you tell me it wouldn’t happen?”

“No,” he said calmly. “But it is unlikely.” He paused. “And I doubt I would go to Timbuktu. I have spent very little time in Africa.”

Momentarily distracted, she asked, “Why?” her curiosity outstripping her need.

“I have found it useful to be able to fit into the population around me: in Africa that is impossible.”

“But you have traveled to the Orient” she pointed out.

“So have many from the Occident I am an oddity but not an obvious one.” He watched her consider this.

“There have been white men in Africa,” she reminded them.

“Most of them exploiters, slavers and the like,” he added with an air of contempt. “I want nothing to do with that pernicious market.”

“But you have had slaves,” she said, sensing that this was crucial to understanding him. “Haven’t you?”

“Not since Heliogabalus was Caesar, and I always provided manumission for any slaves I owned. The Romans approved of that, at least for a time. Slaves were allowed under law to buy their freedom unless their slavery was a punishment under the law.” He loosened his tie. “I have been a slave, more than once. I cannot put another human being into that despicable state.”

She felt a rush of sympathy for him, and her ardor returned at full intensity. “You would not have anyone be subject to you that way, would you?”

“No,” he said, remembering Tishtry and Kosrozd, and Nicoris.

“But you are bound to me for as long as you live? Through the Blood Bond.” She stared into his dark eyes, wanting to sound the depths of him.

“I am, as I am to everyone who has knowingly had my love,” he said, taking care to make this last clear without inflicting pain.

“I don’t care about them—at least, I don’t care tonight,” she declared, and began to unfasten her hostess-gown with a pragmatic efficiency that was enticing. “For whatever time we have, I have you knowingly and I intend to make the most of it. Who knows when we’ll meet again, or under what circumstances?”

He sat down on the opposite side of her bed. “I hope this isn’t an act of desperation, Rowena.”

“And if it is, what then?” She was in her underwear now, and starting to shiver for the room was chilly.

“It will be of little value to you and me,” he said. “If you want me, let it be for love, or desire, or comfort, but not for desperation.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “I am not desperate,” she said at last. “I am lonely. And so are you.”

“Loneliness isn’t the reason I love you,” he told her as he removed his jacket.

“But it probably is for me, at least part of it,” she said, and reached around herself to unfasten her brassiere.

“Let me do that for you,” Saint-Germain offered, and wrapped his arms around her in order to work the hooks. The undergarment came away in his hands; he set it on the nightstand under the lamp.

She looked down at her body, and managed a little sigh. “I wish I were as young as when we first met.”

“Why?” he asked softly as he kissed her shoulder.

“Twenty-five years of wear-and-tear,” she said, indicating her breasts. “They were firmer before. All of me was.”

“It is only a quarter century,” said Saint-Germain, going on contritely. “For me, that is a very, very short time.”

She stared at him, struck by his words. “I suppose it is.”

He reached out and touched her breast. “Your skin is wonderfully soft.”

“Oh,” she breathed as the first quivering thrill promised greater rapture to come. She wriggled in an effort to get out of her garter-belt, stockings, and panties. “Clothes can be such a nuisance.”

“So they can,” he agreed, all the while caressing her breast.

“You’re distracting me,” she warned him, no hint of complaint about her remark. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“If you don’t mind, I don’t,” he said, continuing what he was doing.

“How good that feels,” she murmured as she finally struggled out of the last of her underclothes. “There. More.”

Saint-Germain bent to kiss her nipples, taking the time to lavish attention on them both while he slowly, deliciously, slid his hands along her flanks. He was unhurried, relishing her heightened arousal. “What would you like, Rowena?”

“I want my bones to melt,” she sighed.

“How would you like to have it happen?” He increased his ministrations, feeling her flesh mold itself to the movement of his hands.

“That’s … lovely,” she sighed, and opened her body more fully to him.

He increased his attentions to her breasts again while his explorations of her body continued.

“What more?”

“Anything,” she whispered. “Anything you want.”

“What you want is what I want,” he reminded her, gently fondling her thighs, gradually easing them open.

“You’ve been with me enough to know,” she urged him in an under-voice. “I don’t want to have to choose.”

He stroked the soft folds between her legs, then moved so that his tongue could take the place of his fingers; she sighed as he found the bud of her clitoris. As her craving for fulfillment began to gather in her body, he gradually made his way up her body to her throat, tantalizing and igniting her fervency to its utmost, and finally joining her in the sublime moment of her fulfillment, and for that ineffable time, knowing the whole of her, and embracing the entirety of her self as fully as he held her body.