Serafina and the Virtual Man

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 discomfort 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 impatience 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. F*cking 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 f*ck 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.