Comrade Malkovich needed to be taught a lesson. Luckily, he’d handed me the perfect weapon for doing just that.
“Of course Heath’s had me, sweetie,” I said, channeling Kat at her most ball-breaking. I widened my baby-blues at him and gave my strawberry-blond curls a careless toss. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, seeing as how you say we’re fated to be an item, but he’s had me standing up, lying down and every which way in between. One thing puzzles me, though.” I tipped my head and scrunched up my nose adorably, as if I were struggling with a problem I couldn’t quite figure out. I felt Dmitri’s fingers tighten on my wrist, and hid my smile.
“What is this puzzling thing?” His tone was clipped. “Is it that you do not understand how you can find attraction to vampyr? Answer is easy. He uses glamyr against you to make you think you like being bedded by him. Is usual trick of undead to seduce—”
“Oh, he didn’t glamyr me into being bedded by him,” I said with a husky little laugh. “I practically threw myself at the poor man. I mean, he’s totally gorgeous and sexy and dreamy, so why wouldn’t I? No, what’s puzzling me is how in the world those Revolutionary War soldiers ever came to be known as Minutemen, because if Heath’s any example I think they should have been called Three-Hour Men. Or maybe All-Night-Long Men. Or—”
“Enough talk about vampyr who should have been dead two centuries ago,” Dmitri said hoarsely. “I show you what it is like having man with heartbeat make love to you, l’ubimaya!”
Okay, I know what you’re thinking and it goes something along the lines of, Girlfriend, how skanky can you get? You totally set up this situation so it would turn out exactly how it did, and to that my answer is, I did not. Not consciously, anyway, although I suppose somewhere in the murky depths of my mind I knew I was striking a match and tossing it into a big, exciting pool of gasoline. I will admit this: when Dmitri pulled me to him with a hoarse Russian oath and his mouth came down on mine, little Tashie Crosse sure wasn’t complaining for the first few minutes.
He kissed with the same single-minded determination he probably gave to bench-pressing small cars, and if that doesn’t sound all that sexy, just think about it. Here was this strapping hunk of blond male and every fiber of his being was concentrated on bringing me to miniorgasm with just his mouth and his tongue. And when I say his tongue, he didn’t use it merely to kiss me.
“First time I saw you, I thought you were warrior princess from Russian fairy tale,” he muttered against my lips. “You were staking vampyr during battle against Kane’s army. Your hair was like Siberian gold and that night you come to me in my dreams.”
He broke off to cover my mouth with his again, his tongue moving masterfully into me while his wide-spread hands slid over my arms to the buttoned vee-opening of my sweater. Before I could say, “Don’t snag the cashmere,” I realized he’d deftly slipped open the first three flower-shaped buttons and was using the same impressive sleight-of-hand to push the pink lace straps of my La Perla push-up bra off my shoulders. I broke off our kiss with a gasp.
“Tell me what happened between us in those dreams,” I said breathlessly, my knees turning to jelly and my top teeth sinking into my lower lip as a kaleidoscope of sensations swirled through me.
Call me psychic, but I bet I know what you’re thinking this time, too. Yes, asking Dmitri to get me all hot and bothered with the details of his wet dream about me didn’t exactly jibe with the fact that I’d been furious with him a few minutes ago.
Confession time, ladies…except if one word of this ever leaks out to Meg or Kat, I’m totally denying this conversation ever took place. So where was I? Oh, right—confessing. Well, the truth is that I’ve never really seen what the big deal is with sex.
And now I’ll give all of you a minute to pick yourselves up off the floor.
Everyone over their shock/hilarity/pity-mixed-with-a-smidge-of-revulsion? Good, because there’s an explanation for my lack of enthusiasm for the horizontal mambo, and that explanation can be covered in two words.
Word one: Todd.
Word two: Whitmore.
Okay, maybe it should be three words: Dr. Todd Whitmore, because even as I stood over the dust pile that had been Toddie on the night before Megan’s wedding-that-never-happened, holding the bedpost I’d just used to stake him with, I realized I’d never really been in love with him, I’d been in love with the idea of marrying an up-and-coming cosmetic surgeon.
And part of the reason I’d never been in love with him was that he was an absolute yawn in bed. He didn’t think so, of course. On the two dismal occasions we did it, Dr. Todd flailed away with all the spasmodic jerking of a landed small-mouth bass on a fishing dock until he sweatily collapsed on me. When he finally rolled off me he shot me a confident smile, told me I was one lucky girl and headed for the shower with an over-the-shoulder observation that he’d heard there were classes in oral sex for women these days, and had I ever thought of supplying myself with a couple of bananas and signing up for one.
Shortly after my second mind-numbingly boring encounter between the sheets with my fiancé, I informed him I’d decided our upcoming union was too sacred to be tainted by premarital sex. I realize now that he only let me have my way on that point because he was dropping his trousers for every nurse and female lab technician under the age of fifty in Maplesburg Hospital, and not getting it from me didn’t cramp his style in the least.
So anyway, with the late and unlamented Dr. Todd as my only experience with the wonderful world of carnal knowledge—I’m not counting the few inept episodes in the backseats of cars I had in high school—is it any wonder that lately my most fulfilling sexual encounters involved a vibrating bunny with purple vinyl ears?
Which brings me back to the epiphany I was having while Dmitri’s tongue brought me to the edge of something I’d previously dismissed as an urban legend, at least if we’re talking without Mr. Love-Bunny. That’s right, the Big O.
“Tell me what you did to me in those dreams, Dmitri, and don’t leave anything out,” I gasped. “I want to hear every X-rated detail.”
“X-rated is like Americanic movies with violence or sex, da?” he muttered as he bent his head to the hollow between my breasts. His tongue left a trail of heat where it touched me.
“Da,” I managed to say as I felt myself being swept closer to total surrender. With his head bent in front of me as it was, I could see the muscles of his back rippling beneath his hide like strong underwater currents. A smudge of something dark broke the even tan of his skin just past his hairline at the nape of his neck.
“I understand,” he said hoarsely, his breath against me sending minishockwaves through my nerve endings. “Increases pleasure, nyet? Is also same with me when I think of dream I had. You and I were in forest at dusk making love. I had taken off all your clothing and was standing over you…
“And then what?” I panted.
Dmitri lifted his head, his gaze like blue fire. “And then sun went below horizon and horde of vampyrs set upon us. I snatched up broken branch and used it as stake against them and when I had chance to look I saw you were doing same thing. Your hair was like gold crown around your head and your naked limbs were like palest Karelian marble, and you staked vampyr after vampyr with terrible mercilessness. You were magnificent, l’ubimaya. I woke up with sheets thrown off bed and great throbbing
