Serafina and the Virtual Man (21 page)

“Hello. I brought you these in return for mine.”

Jilly swallowed, trying to find her voice amidst the insane drumming of her heart. “Mine trump yours,” she managed.

“Well, you’re prettier, and you did more to deserve them.”

Fuck. I’m wearing old jeans, and I haven’t even brushed my hair.

Who cares? He’s seen me in worse states.

But this is real.
He
‘s real now.

According to Sera, he remembered everything that happened during his virtual reality adventure. Everything.

She took the flowers because she could do nothing else, and then, of course, common courtesy won out. “Coffee?”

He grinned, the same appealing, boyish grin she remembered, and her heart turned over. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Her legs showed an alarming tendency to shake as she crossed her tiny hall. Although she flapped one arm toward the living room on the right, he followed her into the kitchen.

Genesis Adam is in my kitchen. The
real
un-virtual Genesis Adam…
And she was more aware of him than she had ever been. Tall and lean, he propped one shoulder against the doorframe, seeming to fill the small, mundane room with his physical presence, with his sheer personality.

She’d had sex with this man.

Virtual sex.

Oh Jesus, what would it be like…?

Do
not
go there!

“Milk?” she said desperately.

“No, thanks.” He strolled further in and slouched into the kitchen chair Andy had so recently vacated. As she pushed down the plunger of the coffeemaker, he glanced around the room. “Looks different. Brighter.”

“In reality?” she said lightly.

“It’s all reality of a sort.”

She cast him a quick glance before pouring coffee into a fresh mug. Already awash with tea, she didn’t really want anything more to drink, but she needed something to do with her hands to stop them shaking.

What a ridiculous state to get into over one man making a courtesy visit! Pull yourself together, JK!

“You’re looking well,” she managed as she sat down opposite him. “Sera told me you were out of hospital.”

“I’d have told you too if I could ever get you on chat.”

Jilly had disabled her chat program just so she wouldn’t be disappointed when Exodus didn’t contact her. She swallowed a large mouthful of coffee. “Sorry. I’ve been busy.”

“Me too.”

“Of course. I hear the launch goes ahead as planned.”

“Got a bit more publicity than we bargained for there, but at least we’re still mysterious. Are you going to come?”

“To London? Don’t be daft.”

A smile flickered across his face and vanished. “No, Edinburgh. We’ve hired the Festival Theatre for a day.”

Jilly smiled. “You’ll fill it,” she said confidently.

“So are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Coming,” he said patiently, “to the launch.”

He put one hand in his pocket and drew out two tickets, which he laid on the table in front of her. “Bring a friend, if you want.”

Jilly closed her mouth. “Thanks.” She glanced up from the tickets and found his eyes steadily on hers. Under his gaze, for no reason she wanted to understand, warm blood flooded into her face. This was why she’d walked away from his hospital room, to stop what they’d had in VR crumbling into just this embarrassing, uncomfortable reality.

She stood abruptly. “I’ll put the flowers in water,” she mumbled and turned to find a good-sized vase. The best for the job, a large coloured glass one she’d picked up from a car-boot sale, stood on top of the wall cabinets. She reached up, but although she got one finger to the base, she couldn’t edge it near enough to knock down into her hold. She stood on tiptoe and tried again.

“Let me.” The voice so close to her ear made her jump. She dropped back onto the flats of her feet but found she couldn’t brush past him. Crowded into the worktop, she could only wait as he reached up over her head and grasped the vase. His hips brushed against her back, his chest against her shoulder, sending delicious little buzzes through her body. Memory, she thought desperately.

She half turned to snatch the vase from him and found him frowning down at her. “You’re shaking,” he said.

There was nothing she could say to that, so she kept silent.

“Is that because of me?” he asked seriously.

Vehemently, she shook her head, and he smiled a little ruefully. “Yes, it is. You remember, don’t you? What we did together.”

“Of course, I remember,” she snapped. “I’m not an imbecile.”

His eyes twinkled. “That’s my JK.” He laid the vase down on the worktop but didn’t back off. “I remember too,” he said softly. “What you did for me, what we did together.”

“You don’t have to,” she said, shoving at his arm to make him shift. “I won’t hold it over you. It was a game.”

“A bloody good game,” he said without budging. She liked the way his lips moved when he talked. “I’d like to play again. If you would.”

In desperation, she dragged her gaze from his mouth back to his eyes. “Adam,” she began, and the rest was smothered by his mouth on hers in a smooth, gentle kiss that deprived her of breath and thought. Butterflies danced in her stomach, spread warmth where it had no business to be.

When he broke the kiss, she was clutching his upper arms and not, loweringly, to push him away.

“Adam, it wasn’t real, what we did. It was a game, and in real life, I don’t play like that. In real life, you don’t need or want me. Let’s not make that mistake.”

His brow twitched. His hands came up to cup her face, and God, they felt familiar and new at the same time—big and warm and tempting. “For me, that
was
reality. I think we’re both free to discover what we need and want. JK…” His thumbs flicked over her lips, and she parted them without meaning to, gasping. “I’m not saying we have to get married because of what happened in VR, but hey, we could have dinner, explore some possibilities.”

She caught his wrist in her fingers and yet didn’t try to pull his hand away. Instead, she clung to it and closed her eyes. “I’m a fucked-up mess,” she whispered. “I only slept with you because you
weren’t
real.”

There weren’t many unkinder things she could have said. And yet it was true. It just hadn’t stopped her loving it, loving
him
. She tensed, waiting for the ache when he let her go and walked away in angry disgust. Why hadn’t he just stayed away?

He said, “I know.” His lips brushed her forehead.

She wrenched her eyes open, staring. “You…know? Then what the
fuck
are you doing here?”

His lips quirked. “Because I’d like you to make love with me because I
am
real.”

Before she could speak, he kissed her again, longer this time, with more blatant passion. His tongue stroked along her inner lips, delved deeper, opening her mouth wider for his onslaught. And she couldn’t pull back because she wanted this so much, to be kissing him again, to feel his arms around her, holding her against his lean, hard body.

When he released her mouth, his breath was a trifle ragged.

“I can’t,” she whispered in anguish. “I can’t.”

He smiled and pressed tiny butterfly kisses across her lips and cheeks and back to her lips. “You danced with me in Paris; we fought gangsters naked in Chicago, made love in an ornate, bad-taste bed, to say nothing of the bath.
You
did those things. With me. And I think…” His hand brushed down from her neck to her breast, making her gasp. “I really think you want to do them again.”

She opened her mouth to speak, although whether to confirm or deny she had no idea. In any case, his lips were so close that she lost interest in words and kissed him instead, closing her eyes to savour the experience.

With a groan, he pushed against her, ramming her into the cupboards so that his erection pressed into her stomach. She gasped again, opening wider to deepen the kiss. When he began to move his hips, caressing her with his body, she moaned and flung her arms up around his neck.

“Choice,” he murmured against her lips and said the rest between quick, sensual kisses. “VR at my house. Lunch wherever you like. Or kitchen table.”

Laughter shook her. Without conscious thought, she lifted her leg over his hip to accept his still-covered erection between her thighs. Excitement burned, filling her with boldness, with the joy of risk that she’d only found before in games.

“Kitchen table,” she said into his mouth.

His lips stilled and left hers. He raised his head to stare down into her face. “Fuck. Do you mean that?”

“Called your bluff, did I?” she taunted.
Please don’t be bluffing.
The upsurge of lust was urgent and powerful. Between her legs was all damp, clenching heat. Every inch of her craved the touch of his wonderful hands, his lips…

Slowly, he shook his head. “I wasn’t bluffing. I just didn’t expect you to go for choice number three.”

“If it’s a problem, we can go for choice number two.”

“Lunch? Yes, I’d like that. Right after the kitchen table.” He swooped for her mouth, seizing it in his as he swung her around and backed her across to the table. He lifted her onto it, parting her legs with his knee so that he could wedge himself between, and pushed his erection against the hot, aching tenderness of her sex.

She pushed back, trying to tug down his leather jacket, but it seemed he was in too much of a hurry for that. Jilly, who’d imagined that if she ever got to this stage with a man—an
actual
man—it would be after the many hours and days and weeks of buildup she’d need, was totally enchanted by his urgency. She pushed against him, loving the grind of his rock-hard bulge, wondering desperately if she could come from just this.

He didn’t let her find out. His hands were at her jeans buttons, wrenching them open, shoving them down her hips with one hand while he tore at his own fastening with the other. All the time he kissed her as if his life depended on it, and in fact she felt as if hers did. Trembling, she sucked his tongue into her mouth, grasped his hair in her fists.

She cried out at his first touch on her desperate clitoris. Breathlessly, he skimmed his fingers along her folds to her clenching entrance.

“Wet,” he whispered. “So wet for me… Thank you…”

She wanted to laugh at that, to be thanked for what she craved more than life right now. But his hands were busy elsewhere, tearing open a foil packet he’d found in his pocket and rolling the condom over his cock—big and blue-veined, it looked just as she remembered it. He swivelled his hips, bathing his shaft in her moisture, and then it nudged and slipped just a little inside her. He was trembling now, with his need, she thought, to hold back, to make sure she was still with him.

But nothing could have stopped her. She pushed onto him with a gasp of pleasure, and he let out a groan of bliss. His eyes closed, and he buried his face in her throat, kissing and nibbling, while his hands pushed up over her covered breasts, stroking and caressing the hard peaks of her nipples. He began to move, gently at first, giving her time to adjust to the sheer size of the thing filling her, and then, as if he couldn’t help it, he thrust harder, and she matched him.

Driving into her, he slid his hands down to her waist and up under her top, seeking and finding her bra fastening; then, with another groan, closing his hands over her naked breasts.

And God that felt good, so good she writhed on him, squeezing, and abruptly he pushed her backward and fell on her, arching so that he could latch his mouth to her breast and still fuck her. And she loved it.

Cradling his head to her breast, she wound her legs around his hips, pushed against his mouth, and thrust wildly with him. As one, they rushed headlong for what they couldn’t stop, panting, their bodies grinding and grasping for release. It took them together, hurling them into orgasm. He collapsed on her, shouting out, and somehow the full weight of him pinning her to the table intensified her joy. Her legs went slack, drooping off the end of the table like a rag doll’s.

She hung on to him, listening to the gradual calming of their breaths as orgasm faded to sweet, gentle contentment. Adam lifted his face from her neck, propping himself up on his elbows, and although he smiled down at her, he was scanning her face for signs, she thought, of hurt, or regret.

“All right?” he murmured.

She began to laugh softly, tightening her grip around his neck. “Mr. A, you have a gift for understatement.”

Grinning, he eased himself off her and out of her, stripping off the condom before refastening his jeans with a mocking flourish. Only then did he reach down to pull her upright and then sat down with her in his lap.

He dropped the condom with its wrapper into the nearby bin. “Sorry. I planned a much more romantic and gradual seduction. You do things to me, JK.”

“Are you really?” she asked uncertainly.

“Really what?”

“Sorry.”

His eyes widened. “Fuck, no,” he said and kissed her mouth.

Chapter Twenty-one

Edinburgh was having one of its glorious moments. The sun shone down on the city from a bright, cold, blue sky, as if spreading Jilly’s unexpected new happiness to the world at large. After a long pub lunch with wine, when they discussed everything and nothing, Jilly and Adam strolled hand in hand through Prince’s Street Gardens. She’d seen so many couples doing this over the years and yet never imagined she’d be one of them.

The castle stood out with sharp clarity, dark but unmenacing in its ancient familiarity. Jilly gazed up at it, wondering how many such miracles it had seen as this closeness, this contentment she felt in Adam’s company right now. She felt like she had in Chicago when neither of them wanted to leave the game, only more so. The contrast to her acute
dis
comfort when he’d first walked into her kitchen could hardly have been greater.

“You came to the hospital,” he observed. “The first day I was allowed to see anyone. But you never came in to see me.”

“I got as far as the window to your room,” she confessed. “You already had a visitor.”

“So you ran away from Roxy?”

“Sera asked me the same thing,” Jilly remembered.

“Roxy said she liked you, that you got on well.”

Jilly shrugged. “As well as a rock star can with a mad woman who almost broke into her hotel room to ask impertinent questions. I wasn’t avoiding her. I wasn’t even jealous. Or at least not very.”

She glanced up at him and swung his hand with frustration. “The sight of her just made me realise some stuff, as if she was a symbol of your real life. She was so cut up, being here, facing up to your death… And when I saw her with you, I knew whatever we’d had just wasn’t real to you. That if we’d met in reality, you’d never even have looked at me.”

He stopped and turned her to face him. “JK. I’m looking.”

“Only because we met as we did,” Jilly insisted. “If you’d been alive and visiting Dale when Sera and I turned up to sort out his poltergeist, you wouldn’t even have noticed me, except perhaps as a mindless bit of skirt to ogle when your wife wasn’t looking.”

He blinked. “Is that what Dale did?”

She touched her forehead to his shoulder. “More or less. It’s what I set myself up for. Look, admire if you like but don’t touch. I told you, I’m totally messed up.”

He bent and kissed her lips. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured. He brought his hand up to cup her cheek and kissed her again.

****

Even something as mundane as food shopping turned out to be fun in Adam’s company. Then, weighed down by bags, they drove to Adam’s flat. Adam had promised to cook dinner for her—a novelty for Jilly. Jilly had offered to do a starter and was already planning it in her head.

Adam threw open the flat door to let her in first. “Dump it in the kitchen,” he said. “To the left…”

But Jilly was already heading there. She laid her bags with relief on the kitchen table and glanced at him.

“I’ve been here before, remember? It was on the market, and I wanted to see if it fitted with the nutter in the Ewans’ house.”

“Did it?” he asked lightly.

She nodded. “And it made me suspicious. They’d cleared away obviously personal things like photographs and notes to self pinned on the fridge. But I couldn’t understand why the rest of your stuff was still here: your war-games stuff, your music collection, your pictures. Only your work area was cleared out.”

He gave a lopsided smile. “Where would I be without you?”

“You
so
owe me,” she agreed. “This had better be one monstrously good meal.”

Adam poured them each a glass of wine and put some Spanish guitar music on for them to cook to. For Jilly, this was all new and oddly wonderful, working in harmony with him in this beautiful, big kitchen, dodging around each other, talking easily about things as they came up. And yet there was always that delicious edge of physical awareness, the memory of the wild moments across her kitchen table and the knowledge that something very similar would be repeated at some point. It was inevitable.

“Why now?” Jilly asked once.

He didn’t pretend not to understand. Why had he chosen today to contact her? He paused, his knife frozen among the onion slices as he glanced up at her with a deprecating twist of his lips.

“Partly, I suppose I still hoped you’d come to me. But mostly… I didn’t want to be the wimp you’d rescued. I wanted to be fit.”

“So you could do the kitchen-table thing?” she said wryly.

His eyes warmed at the memory, causing a fresh outburst of butterflies in her stomach. “Call that a side benefit. I have this urge to take care of you.” He held up one hand to ward her off, even though she suspected her expression was more stunned than angry. “Don’t yell at me that you can take care of yourself. I know you can. I’ve seen you with a room full of gangsters.” He frowned. “Why
did
we do that naked?”

Laughter gurgled up. “Fantasy,” she confessed, and his eyes grew distinctly lecherous.

“Got any more?”

“One or two,” she admitted breathlessly.

A smile played around his lips. “So have I. After dinner, if you’d like to stay, I might show you a couple.”

If you’d like to stay
. At last, a man who didn’t make assumptions. Jilly was enchanted. And suddenly vulnerable. Without really seeing it, she reached for the garlic crusher.

“Go easy on me,” she managed, trying to make it a joke.

And suddenly he was there, behind her, with both arms around her waist and his cheek against hers. “I had a lot of time to think about you, in the dull VR moments and then in hospital. I did a lot of lechering. But my favourite fantasy was just holding you in my bed for a whole night. And even that can wait. I can be patient.”

Perhaps memories of his distinct
im
patience on that other kitchen table struck him at the same time as they did her, because he began to harden against her bottom.

She smiled with deliberate scepticism. “Really?”

He kissed her ear. “Really. It might kill me, of course, but yes, really.”

****

In the end, no words were necessary to ask or accept. They ate the dinner they’d cooked at the cleared kitchen table, discussing it and paying compliments where they were due. Then they repaired to his beautiful, comfortable sitting room with coffee and the remains of the wine and sat together on his sofa, listening to Chopin and Billie Holliday and Eva Cassidy.

The clock hands moved toward midnight. And Jilly made no move to go home. So, because Adam finally knew she wouldn’t, he stood up and set his glass on the mantelpiece. Then he simply held out his hand to her, and she rose and took it, and they walked together to his bedroom. He’d never felt such responsibility before, or the strange, sweet edge that came with his desire for JK. And so he made this the seduction he’d always wanted and intended for her, slow and tender and loving.

He didn’t even shy away from the word. Loving. Fucking her felt like loving her, and he was quite unprepared for the rush of emotion that shook him when she fell apart in his arms for the first time that night. He felt like a god for bringing her such pleasure, and yet amazed that he was the one to finally do it. And so he did it again, moving in her body with slow, aching need, and this time, they came together.

And God, yes, there was that “edge” again. That most basic of human pleasures that he’d always taken for granted and enjoyed, he’d thought, to the full, was somehow
more
with her.

I’ll keep you. If you’ll let me, I’ll keep you…

She was drifting off into sleep in his arms, murmuring, “I saw you like this. When I came here before, I imagined you just like this.”

“Naked?”

“Oh yes.”

“Making love to you?”

She smiled sleepily, her eyelids fluttering open. “Maybe.”

Still holding her, he eased onto his back and blinked as some kind of shadow seemed to whisk past toward the door.

He sat bolt upright. “What the fuck was that? Did you see something there?”

Jilly sat with him, holding on to his shoulder. “Yes, sort of.”

He stared at her, his heart beating like a kid’s when he’s just imagined the monster in the cupboard. He dragged his hand through his hair and gazed at her. “You saw it too?”

She nodded.

He took a deep, calming breath. “I saw something like that before, when you woke me up. I thought it was death, finally coming for my spirit. Only then there was you, and you were solid and real and smelled like heaven.”

She laid her cheek against his shoulder, rubbing his arm and his back. “It isn’t death,” she assured him, just as if she knew. “Or at least not exactly. We saw it in the cellar too. We think it’s checking up on us.”

Adam frowned, dragging his gaze away from the door where the shadow seemed to have disappeared, to glance down at JK’s face. “
What
is checking up on us?”

“We think it’s the Founder, the first ever vampire from whom all the others were created. We had to kill a lot of vampires last year. Plus, Blair’s broken some kind of unspoken rule by being with Sera, and this may have pissed him off too. And, Melanie, who’s a witch and insatiably curious, has been digging up information on him from all sorts of weird, wonderful, and forgotten places. I think he’s checking out all Blair’s human connections, although Blair thinks there’s no actual danger in that.”

Adam put his arm around her shoulder, took a clump of hair in his fist, and gently tugged her head back to meet his gaze. “Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”

JK smiled. “If you hang around with us, Genesis Adam, you’d better get used to things that sound insane. The really worrying thing about those is, they’re generally real.”

His breath caught on a half laugh as he dragged her back down onto the pillows. Whatever happened in his life now, it was not going to be dull around JK.

****

The “shadow” of the Founder paused against the front door of the flat. There was no threat there that he could envision. The man had come close to death, but he had a strong spirit, so strong that it had crossed the Founder’s mind for the first time in centuries to make a new vampire of him. If Blair didn’t. But he’d hung on to life, because of the girl.

Interesting. But only human emotion. And sex. There was nothing truly magical or paranormal about these two. Not like Blair’s human. Or Blair’s human’s friend, the curious witch. But even there, he’d found no active danger. He was content to leave them and move on.

For now.