Chapter Fifteen
GEORGE WICKHAM WASN’T entirely surprised when he found Caroline Bingley in his tent in the encampment with the regiment that evening after midnight. Certainly, he hadn’t expected her to be there and he’d had no warning that she would be there.
But he had long suspected this woman would somehow appear in his life again, and been waiting for her in a way, knowing she’d arrive at some point.
Here she was.
He let the tent flap swish closed as he looked her over.
She regarded him. “Did I startle you?”
He had started, jerked in surprise, of course, but he hadn’t cried out or yelled or made any noise. “Not at all,” he said smoothly. She was seated on his cot. He sat down next to her. He touched her, bold, one hand on her thigh.
She lifted her chin, smiling at him, pleased. “It wasn’t easy getting myself here, of course. You have no idea what a trial it is traveling when one cannot bear the sun. You should appreciate that I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to find you, George.”
“Likely because you want something from me,” he said.
She clucked her tongue softly. “Now, now, you are far too young to be so bitter and suspicious.”
He laughed knowingly. “You are a demoness, however, are you not, madam?”
She shook her head. “No, no, of course not.” She showed him her fangs.
He remembered the last time she’d bitten him, the places she’d bitten him. He thought of her mouth fastened to his inner thigh, her hand wrapped round the base of his erect prick, and he felt lightheaded with the memory. “You are, though, madam. You truly are.” His voice was hoarse.
She chuckled softly. “Oh, no, no, I have a very mutually beneficial proposition for you, Mr. Wickham. I guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself. And if it is money you are after, I can find you money.”
He swallowed. “But shall I be alive? Or drained of all my blood?”
“I am not here to kill you. Hell and damnation, sir.” She scoffed, as if he were being foolish.
“You practically killed me before,” he said, for he remembered how it had gone.
She had stroked his cock and sucked his blood and he had spurted his release all over her hand and he’d never felt a thing like that in his life, never anything so very pleasurable, and she’d kept drinking at him, and that had felt like it simply extended his orgasm into something more pleasant than he could practically bear, and it felt too good to think or breathe or exist, and it went on and on.
And then a sweet and pleasant darkness had come up from below, enticing and tempting, and he had let it wash over him, and then awakened, hours later, trousers round his ankles, thirsty and with his head pounding worse than any time he’d overindulged in drink.
He’d been quite weak as he put his clothes in order, and his entire body had ached. It had taken him days to fully recover.
“This won’t be like that,” she said.
His mouth was dry. Was he disappointed?
“It’s about Darcy,” she said.
“Darcy,” he said, nodding.
“You don’t like him,” she said. “When we spoke before, you indicated you wished him dead.”
“I suppose,” he said with a shrug, because it was Caroline who had confirmed for him that Darcy was a vampire, that Darcy was essentially unkillable, that crossing Darcy was a sort of idiocy that even someone as willing to take risks as he might not wish to undertake.
“I wish him dead also,” said Caroline with a shrug. “I wish your help.”
“My help?” he said. “What can I do against him?”
“Well, you are human,” she said. “There are certain advantages you have against him.”
“What?” he said. “I am not as strong and I have no capacity to force people to do my bidding and I cannot drink blood and—”
“You can walk in the day,” she said. She covered his hand with her own, on her thigh, and she urged his hand closer to the apex of her thighs.
He sucked in a sharp breath, feeling the suppleness of her leg through her skirts.
His prick throbbed, and he knew that was going to be a bit of a problem, thinking clearly while he was aroused.
Damn this woman. He should send her on her way.
“If I say no, will you make me look in your eyes and force me?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “Charming is best only done in the short term. I could make you forget I was here, yes, but not if I come back every night. I could convince you to come with me now, but not over and over again, not if you are determined you don’t wish it.”
He nodded.
“Do you not wish Darcy dead?”
He sighed. Did he care? He had hated the thing that had taken the place of his childhood playmate at one point, but then, he’d come around to thinking it was all for the best. If the real Darcy had been alive, it might have given him pause to go after Georgiana in the way he had.
He was annoyed with the new Darcy, the vampire, who had put a stop to it, anyway, he supposed, but he couldn’t have expected anything different.
He had thought sometimes about trying to use Darcy’s secret to extort money, but he was frightened of the man’s ire. He could be frightening, after all, being a blood-sucking fiend. So, that scheme remained a scheme, never a reality.
“What do you want in exchange for your help?” said Caroline.
He thought about it. “Turn me,” he said finally. “Make me like you.”
She pressed her lips together, clearly not liking this request.
“I know, I know, you need me to be human for the scheme to work, you say. I can walk in the sun. But after he is dead, then you turn me.”
She brightened. “All right.”
He eyed her, because he wasn’t sure if she was simply lying to him.
It was a good deal for her, after all, because she would get what she wanted and then could renege on it once it was done.
He made a vow that, after she showed him how to kill a vampire, that if she would not uphold her end of the bargain, he’d use that knowledge to end her.
ELIZABETH REALIZED IT hadn’t worked.
She saw Colonel Fitzwilliam at a ball and her attraction to him, such as it was, had not disappeared simply because her husband had finally taken her virtue.
Indeed, the act itself, though quite pleasant and something they had repeated in various ways and in various positions and with his teeth in her skin and not, it had not transformed her in the way she had sort of hoped it would.
There was such talk of it, after all, such a furor about ruining and virtue and she had sort of thought she would be one person on one side of it and then a slightly different person on the other side. And it truly had not altered her in the way she might have thought it would.
She thought her husband seemed more altered by it than she had.
Not that he was different either, but that he seemed to be both more and less careful with her—he didn’t seem to be treating her as if she was about to break (or die as the case may be) at the drop of a hat, but he also seemed to treat her with a certain physical tenderness that seemed to have grown from their physical joining.
There was an echo of his being inside her when he took her hand, somehow, a tug low in her belly, a surge in the bond.
When he looked at her sometimes, she felt as if she were beneath him, crammed full of him, his in that way.
So, anyway, it had definitely brought her and her husband closer.
What it didn’t seem to have done is to make the colonel’s smirk any less appealing.
She danced with him at the ball, for that was only polite, and afterwards, Mr. Darcy asked her what was wrong, saying that he could feel something through the bond, and she was disgusted with herself and protested too hard and too loud that it was absolutely nothing.
She was not sure he believed her.
She said she was out of sorts because she’d been thinking about her last letter from Jane, and her husband nodded slowly.
Jane was still pining over Mr. Bingley, and she had written in her last letter that she was thinking about coming for an extended visit with their aunt and uncle the Gardiners, who also lived in London, but in a decidedly less fashionable part.
Jane wrote that she could visit her sister and that she might also perhaps call upon the Bingley sisters.
Mr. Darcy had been adamant that they must keep her sister away from Caroline Bingley, and Elizabeth had to agree that seemed prudent. She had broached the topic of her sister coming to stay with them, and Mr. Darcy had said he thought it a bad idea.
It was true that he locked her in with him sometimes, for the entire day, and they usually spend the day in bed, not wearing any clothes, pleasuring each other.
In truth, he seemed to have taken this as a substitute for biting her, something that sated him so that he did not need to sink his teeth into her body and drink her blood.
But if they had a guest for an extended period of time, they could not engage in this activity.
She had told him that she was lonely when they were separate, and that she could not spend every single day locked in his bedchamber, after all, and that she would like to see her sister.
He had not said no, of course, only that they would discuss it more later.
But that night, after the ball, and after she blamed her distress about the colonel on missing her sister, they did not share a bed and they did not make love.
She woke in her own bedchamber in the morning instead and prepared to face the day.
Around 11:00, Colonel Fitzwilliam himself appeared. She was flustered and blushing as she greeted him in the sitting room, having some biscuits and tea brought up, and trying not to look overmuch at him, especially not wanting to bring out that smirk of his.
“There is no need for any fuss, Mrs. Darcy,” he protested.
“I am only dropping off some documents for your husband that he asked me for last night, things that are to do with the Fitzwilliam family properties. I do wish you would find out what he wishes them for, though, for I cannot say I entirely trust the man, even now.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling even more embarrassed. “Why did I think you were here to see me?”
“I certainly don’t mind seeing you,” he said, smirking that smirk at her.
Her heart skipped a beat. She hated herself. Why was she drawn to this man?
He consented for her to make up his tea, (two teaspoons of sugar and a splash of milk) and talked to her for a quarter hour about the sounds of the carriages on the street coming in through the windows of her house, whether it bothered her or if she found the sound soothing, as he did.
It was a conversation about nothing, and the words weren’t important, but other things were.
How often their gazes met, how his body turned toward hers, how she leaned in as he spoke.
Eventually, he said, “What do you see in him?”
She raised her eyebrows. “What?”
“It’s a foolish question, I suppose.” He surveyed his tea.
“He is quite wealthy and quite old and quite powerful in his way, and I suppose that is something that women are always drawn to. It is only that you are so very fresh and young and alive, and he is so…” He licked his lips. “He is so very dead, madam.”
She drew in a disapproving breath. “My husband is not dead.”
“I think he is. I think he is an animated corpse who seeks only to devour you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “If he wished that, he has had enough chances. He tries actively not to harm me, though it is not easy for him. I don’t think that at all.”
“But he is taking it all from you, taking your youth and your beauty, and he cannot give you children, and he cannot take you for a walk in the sunlight, and you are trapped here, all alone, and it seems a waste.”
She didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She craved him, that was the truth of it. She could not say that it was wise or good to be with Mr. Darcy, but she would be miserable without him.
“I apologize,” said the colonel. “It is none of my concern. It is only…” He shook his head. “No, no, I should not say that either. I should take my leave of you madam, and cease to speak of things that I have no right to comment upon.”
“What should you not say?” she said.
He sighed heavily. “Do not press me, I beg you.”
She looked into her own tea cup. “All right,” she said, but her voice betrayed that she was not pleased with it.
He groaned. He set his tea down. “It is only that sometimes it feels to me as if there something here. With us.”
She jerked up her gaze to find his, alarm filling her. She was that obvious?
“If you were so very happy with him, it would be one thing, but—”
“I am happy, though,” she said. At least, she thought she was.
He drank some tea. “All right. You are happy.”
Her hands shook as she took her own tea cup from its saucer to drink. She set it back down. “I think you were right that you have no call to speak of things that are none of your concern, colonel.”
He nodded. “Yes, I should have kept my own counsel. I do apologize, Mrs. Darcy. I am likely imagining anything between the two of us.”
She nodded sharply.
Soon after, he excused himself. On his way out, he said that she should not worry, that there would be no renewal of this subject between them, that she should consider the matter closed.
“I don’t know what I was thinking anyway,” said the colonel. “You are a married woman, and your husband is a monster. I doubt he would like it.”
“Yes, sir, for your own safety,” she said softly.