Parts: 21 - 30
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~Part: 21~
Sometimes Marilyn Osborne wished that they never came to California. It was just a job and she could have refused the transfer, even if it did mean a promotion, but everyone said that it was career poison to refuse a transfer. So she took the job and sold the first house she had ever bought and pretended that it was hay fever that made her eyes run as she stood next to the dogwood tree they had planted on Daniel’s eighth birthday. He wanted to have his own tree, and he picked the dogwood because it was pretty.
It was on their way to California that they had stayed with her former sister-in-law, Linda. Crazy Linda, grown up with a family and children of her own. She was home schooling, and privately Marilyn thought it was because they could afford it and it was different. And sometime in the week and a half that they stayed with Linda, while the movers freighted their furniture across the country, Jordan bit Daniel and everything changed forever.
Her only son had shown up a little before mid-night looking like he hadn’t slept in days. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his head propped on his hand. He was picking at the black nail polish on his other hand, using the edge of his thumbnail to methodically scrape it away.
She could still remember sitting in the living room with the quiet, soft-spoken English librarian from Daniel’s school as he explained what had happened to her son. She didn’t believe it. She refused to believe it, even after Daniel patiently confirmed what Mr. Giles was saying. And then about a week later Linda called and asked in a strangely incurious way how Oz was adjusting to his new school, and then she knew, and if Linda had been in front of her, she might have killed her for what she had allowed to happen to Daniel.
She reached across the table, not quite touching him, just extending her hand, palm up. “You’re making a mess of it,” she said. “Let me do it.”
He put his hand in hers and she looked at his fingertips, the nails filed blunt, and her thumb ran over the backs of his fingers before she let go of his hand briefly to reach around to the corner of the counter right behind her to get her nail file and a bottle of nail polish remover. Placing those on the table, she dampened a tissue and started removing the nail polish. When she was done with the first hand, she got up to fill a shallow bowl with water and a few drops of dishwashing liquid. When she set it down in front of him and urged him to put his hand in the water, a ghost of a smile turned up the corners of his mouth.
“The deluxe manicure,” Marilyn joked. “Now you know how the other half lives.”
She rubbed the black polish off the fingernails of his other hand, trying not to scrub too hard. She hated the black polish. She knew it was just a fashion statement, but ever since she discovered what happened to her son when they came to California, the black nail polish seems to be more than a fashion statement. It was a badge of otherness that has leached into the ordinary days of the month.
He was home early, and she didn’t know what brought him home. Possibly they had run out of money or just tired of the grind of playing in clubs for little more than food money. The calendar in the kitchen showed the phases of the moon in a discreet corner, and she knew exactly when to expect him home. It wasn't something that they had talked about. She couldn’t talk about it. Thinking about it made her want to scream her rage and grief at the kind of God that allowed men who once were boys who planted dogwood trees to become monsters.
The silence had become habitual. It bled into other areas of their lives. When she realized that he was dating a local girl, she was thrown into a tailspin. There were times when she lay awake at night, agonizing over the possibility that unintentionally, her son might hurt this unknown girl. When she discovered her name, and looked up her picture in Daniel’s yearbook, she was haunted by her.
Willow Rosenberg. She looked the name up in the school directory and cross-referenced it to the tri-city directory, finding the phone number listed under the residential phone for Ira and Shelia Rosenberg. She flagged the address in case there were ever any deliveries to the Rosenberg home, with some crazy idea of taking the delivery herself. Marilyn finally made herself bring the topic up with Daniel, and he had given her an odd look and told her that Willow knew. Not only knew, but sometimes, when he was at the school library, locked in a cage to prevent him from hurting anyone, she stayed to make sure he stayed in.
The next time the full moon rose, and she found her son’s room neat and empty, she had made a couple of sandwiches and packed a bag with chips and soda, and she had gone to the school, to the library and found the girl in the yearbook.
The black and white photo didn’t do her justice. She was sitting on the floor in the library, in front of the cage, reading to him, her long auburn hair falling forward on each side of her face as she leaned forward, her body almost hiding the tranquilizer gun that was resting across her thighs.
They had their little late night snack at the library table, away from the cage while her son made snuffling noises, growling and whining with growing urgency. The only thing that kept her there was the tether of patient kindness that she saw in the girl’s eyes. She put some music on for him and he calmed down for a while before it started again, and then he was flinging himself at the cage, clawing at it, and she kept talking in her soft-spoken way, almost like they were in church, low and hushed. It was, Marilyn realized, a library voice, and that made her smile.
She took his hand out of the soapy water and he put the other hand in, looking bemused as she started to work on his cuticles with the cuticle stick. She looked at him, smiling a little. “I’m surprised that you didn’t go to San Jose to see Willow for a few days,” she ventured.
And he just looked at her, mute, pained, his throat working convulsively, and without thinking about it, she pushed the bowl away and took his face in her hands, pulling him to her shoulder, rocking him the way she did when he was small, her hand fisting into his hair as she felt the heat of silent tears soaking through her t-shirt. Something terrible had happened, and it would all come out soon enough.
She made soothing noises that probably sounded strange since she had started crying too, and she prayed, with everything that she had that the terrible thing that had happened to Willow was not her son.
~~~*~~~
Chris had left her two sleeping bags, a bottle of soda, and the first aid kit. Angel had left her with a cooler of pig’s blood in Styrofoam containers. She was torn by awe at his tolerance for the stuff and disgust at his willingness to subsist on it. She would drink it because she wasn’t going to starve. The demon wouldn’t let her starve, but it was like drinking Tab when you were expecting a Diet Coke.
She alternated between swigs of the Mountain Dew that had been left for her and the pig’s blood, and then was stuck with a really gross aftertaste and the caffeine high. Her sucky un-life had gone from bad to steadily worse. She was starting to get why vampires acted like Buffy was a big deal. She felt it, a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach that worked its way up her spine until she was vamped out and trying to figure out what was clamoring at her when the Slayer walked into the crypt followed by her boyfriend.
And that was weird too. Vampire. Not even the creepy crawly sensation that she was rapidly associating with the Slayer—not Buffy, she would never, ever just be Buffy in her head ever again—could completely mask what he was throwing off. There were times when she managed to get close enough to Spike that she could pick up the subtle scent that he gave off and she felt like she was mainlining him. Pete said it was because he was older and more powerful than the others, and he didn’t seem to be bothered by it in the least. With Angel it was even more potent. It made her want to do anything to know that she might be in the presence of that smell.
Anything except trade comments with a Slayer.
Eventually Buffy had withdrawn and it had just been her, with Angel. The faint, bitter reek of the Slayer still clung to him, but she ignored it.
The willingness to do anything did not include revealing that she had attacked Willow. Angel wanted to know how Spike had found her, and Harmony stuck pretty close to the truth, but it was Georgia that went to the bathroom with Willow, and Georgia who tried to kill her, and Harmony who saved her. By the time she had gotten done with the story, she was almost convinced that it was true.
Angel wasn’t, and she knew it the minute that she looked up into his dark eyes, going for flirtatious, and freezing, wondering if sheer terror could stick to her face like that. He held her gaze for several minutes, and then nodded.
“I think I understand what happened,” he said, and his tone was so mild, so soothing that she felt confused.
“Devon said that you wanted to help us,” he told her.
“Please don’t stake me,” she blurted out.
“It’s up to you, Harmony,” he looked at her for a moment. “How long were you with Spike?”
“Not long,” she hedged. She wasn’t exactly with Spike. Pete was with Spike, and Spike barely tolerated him. She was in the less that tolerated category.
“Everything Spike knows about being a vampire, I taught him,” Angel acknowledged. “Minions that don’t keep themselves, don’t get kept. Minions that don’t follow orders, don’t live to learn better. Minions—“
“I’m not a minion,” Harmony was indignant.
“You are sire-less and unclaimed by any Master,” Angel corrected her. “Right now, you are less than a minion.”
“B-but, it’s not my fault,” she said numbly.
“I was leaving a tavern, drunk when I died in an alley, Spike died behind a stable, you died fighting to get away from the Mayor at his ascension,” Angel pointed out. “It’s never anyone’s fault. If you are useful, you stay like this. You don’t kill to feed, and you live a little while longer. It wasn’t my call. I’d have staked you when you lied to me about Willow. Buffy’s not ready to do that yet. If you ever lie to me again, I won’t ask her for an opinion.”
Staring at the blank wall in front of her, Harmony wondered what she could do to be useful.
~~~*~~~
Willow’s Email (Unopened)
To: Rosenw@clangeek.com
From: drswooffices2@aol.com
Re:
Willow,
I’m not sure if you are getting any of our email. I tried to call AOL customer support and I’m sure that they will get through to me as soon as the problem re-solves itself and they will lure me into staying with another of their diabolical 90 days of free unlimited access. Your mother and I are going to Macedonia. You have the itinerary, but I’m afraid that we will be very difficult to reach with the time difference and our schedules. We will be observing therapy sessions at several refuge camps to work on a standard of care protocol.
Your mother is sanguine. You get that from her, in case you ever wondered. I’m remembering that we are practicing medicine, or in this case, psychology, and I want to get it right.
Your mother is reading over my shoulder. She says that you get wanting to get it right from me.
We hope that your job is going well and that you are learning a lot. Your mother reminds you to call your aunt Carol if you need anything.
We miss you!
Love,
Dad and Mom
~~~*~~~
One of the blessedly few characteristics that crawled out of Wiliam’s grave with him was the ability to wake himself at a particular hour with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Spike had fallen asleep with a waking time in mind, but that wasn’t what woke him up. It wasn’t the girl, either, though he conscious of her presence even in his sleep. She wasn’t draped over him. There was no cuddling. Ever since he had teased her about her inclination to seek him out in her sleep she had devised increasingly successful ways of keeping herself to her side of the bed. She had one arm wrapped around a pillow that she was hugging to her chest to keep herself from finding something else to grab onto.
It was, he realized, a housekeeping cart, in the hallway, and the sound of a door opening and closing quietly that woke him an hour and a half ahead of schedule. He could have gone back to sleep, but he wasn’t tired. He had gone to sleep just after dawn, which wasn’t his habit. He usually stayed up until ten in the morning and then slept away the height of the day. He made a conscious effort to adjust his sleep schedule since he had taken the girl, rising earlier while Georgia and Colin were still sleeping and sleeping earlier, while Georgia and Colin were still awake, just in case she managed to get out of the room without disturbing him. Two days ago he would have discounted the possibility. Today, he wasn’t underestimating her.
He smiled a little in the dark at the memory of her leaving the club without him. He would have given a lot to have seen that. It wasn’t going to go down in the annals of great escapes, but it wasn’t bad. She should have grabbed his coat, which would have given her his car keys and wallet. She had that figured out by the next morning when she made sure to get both before she tried to walk out of the hotel. There was a pattern to it. Left alone with her guilty conscience after they had sex, she was inclined to bolt. The deal they had struck probably would not out-weigh her flight tendencies, so he started thinking about how to curb that without going back to handcuffing her to the bed or a chair.
He wasn’t totally opposed to handcuffs or electrical tape on principal, but he didn’t want her to think that his range was that limited. He wanted to nurture the idea that he was a bit more creative than that.
Taking her clothes away would send a message. It was for her own good really. There was no point in allowing her to think that his guard was down because their present arrangement included sex. A little show of force outside the door would reinforce the point and give Pete something constructive to do other than follow him around and be annoying.
The cart stopped outside their door, and after a moment, and the sounds of something quietly moved around, he could hear it rolling down the hallway. He got up and pulled on his jeans, going to the door, flipping the safety lock hook to the inside of the door frame to keep the door from shutting completely and locking him out. There was, in the hallway, a conveniently placed, brass clad table top under a fluted brass sconce. A breakfast tray with a bowl of fruit, toast, a carafe of coffee, a neatly folded newspaper and a silver bud vase with a single white rose had been left there with a folded slip of paper.
He opened the note and saw that it was to Willow, from Georgia. He tucked the note in his back pocket and picked up the tray, carrying it into their room and setting it down on the table before going back to secure the door. Georgia was not going to be happy with him for spoiling her courtship ritual, he concluded after studying the tray of food.
He put the fruit in the small refrigerator. Returning to the bedside to retrieve his cigarettes, he looked down at his bedmate and changed his mind. A vampire version of breakfast coffee was right in front of him. He discarded his jeans and got back in bed, sliding over to the center of the bed. She was wearing the t-shirt she had on earlier.
He lay on his side, careful to keep his hand on the outside of the sheet and t-shirt covering her until they picked up some of her warmth. The slow, steady stroke of his hand from armpit to her hip drew a sleepy murmur from her. He adjusted the pillow his head had rested on while he slept between them and eased her back toward him. She set one of her warm feet against his leg, above his knee, her toes flexing a bit as she shivered and stretched, rubbing her cheek against the pillowcase.
He could feel her waking up. “Sssh, go back to sleep, baby,” he crooned to her as he lifted the hem of her t-shirt, using the pull of the fabric against her arms and shoulders to get her to give up the pillow and lift her shoulders a bit as he pulled the t-shirt over her head. She settled back, her head falling on the pillow he had moved, her hips shifting as she rolled to her back, one hand searching for the blanket and sheet covering her to pull them up higher. Her fisted hand came to rest next to her cheek and she started to roll back on her side.
Under the blanket, his hand rode the curve of her hip before moving over the peachy softness of her abdomen. That woke her up with a startled sound that was abruptly cut off as she remembered where she was and why he was touching her.
He lifted his head, rolling his shoulder toward her, seeking her lips and she turned her head away from him to dodge the kiss. His lips grazed her cheek instead.
“Um . . . I haven’t brushed my teeth,” she said awkwardly, clearly perturbed by the idea of kissing prior to cleaning her mouth.
It was so guiless that he found himself smiling even as he kissed the corner of her mouth, using his tongue to coax her into opening her mouth for him. She tasted like Chambord and something slightly bitter, but not wholly unpleasant.
“You don’t need to,” he told her. Her upper lip was damp from his tongue. “You taste like raspberries.”
“I do,” she insisted. “I need to brush my teeth and . . . other stuff.”
The embarrassment clued him in to the ‘other stuff’ humans needed to do upon waking. He kissed her again, sucking on her upper lip, his hand moving up to cup her breast, and then he backed off. “Go on, then,” he said, turning to the bedside table to reach for his cigarettes.
She sat up, holding the sheet to her bare chest, looking for something to cover up with for the trip to the bathroom, and then gave a small sigh of defeat, unable to see the t-shirt at the foot of the bed. She glanced over at him, and he made a show of being preoccupied with shaking out a cigarette and reaching for the lighter that she took advantage of by slipping out of the bed, her slender, pale body glowing in the dark as she hurried into the bathroom.
Once the door was closed behind her, he grabbed the t-shirt and dropped it on the floor on his side of the bed. He was stabbing out the cigarette when she emerged from the bathroom in the robe, cheating him of the anticipated sight of her returning to the bed naked. He watched her, wondering if she would stall. She left the bathroom light on with the door ajar, and he half expected her to go to the table to get a cup of coffee, but she came back to the bed. Before she could get in bed with the robe on, he gestured to it. “Loose the robe, pet.”
She hesitated, probably working out the logistics of removing the robe and diving under the covers. His surmise was confirmed when she came to the bed, turning her back to him, resting one knee on the mattress as she untied the sash and slipped the robe off one shoulder while sliding under the sheet like a strip tease in reverse.
Lying down with the sheet pulled up snugly under her armpits an arm’s length from him, she cast him one of her wary sideways glances and he laughed at her expression and her overdeveloped modesty.
Anger and something that hinted of hurt flared in her eyes before she looked away, her chin firming up in a resolute way. She didn’t like being laughed at, he realized. No one did, but she really didn’t like it.
“What was all of that about?” he asked, genuinely curious. “I’ve seen you naked.”
Color climbed in her cheeks, “So?”
“So? Why the robe and the scurrying under the sheet?”
She looked at him for a long moment, clearly trying to decide how to answer him. He thought the answer was that parading around naked for his entertainment was not going to happen.
“I’m not used to anyone seeing me naked,” she said in a tone that suggested that it was not a topic she wanted to explore.
“Really? Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought you would go for dog boy flipping your skirt up and—“
“Please don’t do that,” she stopped him.
There was a desperate, fragile dignity to the request that was oddly compelling. Spike found himself nodding. “Fair enough,” he allowed. He leaned back against the headboard. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of,” he began and as soon as the words left his mouth he knew it was, from her point of view, a ludicrous statement. Ignoring the obvious part of that since it had nothing to do with the point he was making, he plowed on, “You have a nice body, Red.”
He watched the color wash back in her cheeks. “Nice is a bit of understatement. You’re desirable. Sexy,” he waved in the shape of her. “Seems like you either don’t know it, or you don’t believe it, or—“
“I don’t think it’s very important?” she suggested tartly.
He raised an eyebrow, “Actually, I was going to say that it frightens you, but go on. It’s not important? Why not?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen the pictures. I wasn’t a pretty baby.” She was practically bald until she was three years old and then the explosion of red hair. “I wasn’t a pretty child,” she added. “I had braces, and freckles, and bad hair, and that’s okay,” she said in a tone that suggested that it had not been okay at all. “I’m a lot of things. I’ll always be a lot of things,” there was more conviction there, and a hint of pride.
His gaze drifted a little as he thought about that. “Yeah, you are,” he agreed, realizing for the first time that part of what he was attracted to was not found in her hair or her eyes, or her creamy ivory toned skin, or the delicate, elegant shape of her body. She was also smart and stubborn and loyal as hell, and he liked those qualities. She had a quirky sense of humor and though he had forced her to bend to his demands, she wasn’t broken by her capitulation. There was a streak of hard-headed, almost ruthless, pragmatism to her that made her seem older than she really was.
He found himself thinking about what he was doing, picking at it for the flaw that he hadn’t found in the plan. It wasn’t a detailed insert evil slot A into evil slot B kind of plan. The lack of specifics worked better for him anyway. He liked to improvise. Boredom with the evil slot A into evil slot B type of planning and his tendency to go off on a spur of the moment tangent was something that had spoiled some of his other schemes. The plan for today was to keep the pressure on the Scooby gang with another phone call. He had mailed his packet of Polaroids before they had left for San Francisco, but he considered that moot at this point given her little escape attempt. They would be expecting proof that she was still alive.
He had to do something about his current entourage. Pete was annoying, but not a problem to manage. The surviving minion was too intimidated to do anything but follow orders. She survived because she wasn’t too intimidated to follow orders well. Eventually he was going to have to cut Colin and Georgia in on what he was after. He sized up Colin as being too lazy to try to undermine him or double cross him. Georgia, he wasn’t so sure about, but without Colin to back any move she made, she was no real threat to him.
In his post Gem of Amara life, they would be useful. They were mature and stable enough to appreciate the benefits that would be theirs if they accepted his leadership. He knew that that would change the instant Drusilla came into the picture. Minions would accept Dru unquestioningly; the age and power of a century old vampire left an imprint on the more susceptible members of their kind. Her instability was too off putting for either Colin or Georgia to tolerate, and Drusilla would not abide them. She was too territorial to allow a pair of mature vampires to co-exist with them.
Not that it was a sure thing that Drusilla would come back, he admitted to himself. Her instability made that hard to judge, but for over a century his understanding about his future was predicated on her presence in his life and the habit of thinking that she would inevitably be at his side was too strong to break.
All he had to do was stay low, keep himself off the Slayer’s radar, and complete the trade. He felt a relatively small stab of regret about placing the Slayer and her friends off limits. As desperately annoying as Buffy was, he also had a grudging admiration of her. She had fought him to a draw more than once and she hadn’t let her attachment to Angel to keep her from doing what she had to do to save the world, and as loathsome as that attachment was, he knew it was real. The girl had stones. Taking her down, one on one, in a level fight would have been a memory worth cherishing, but killing her after he had the Gem of Amara, after he had an unbeatable advantage, would not be nearly as satisfying.
So, life would go on for the Slayer and the Scoobies as long as they didn’t come after him. The girl lying next to him, under a sheet and a blanket, trying not to breath too loud and draw his attention back to her, her eyes just starting to drift shut as she sought to escape her current situation in a few more hours of sleep, would go back to whatever life he had interrupted. She had mentioned starting college in the fall. He wondered how long her conscience would allow her to keep from trying to curse him. Vampires had a certain amount of innate magic resistance that increased with age. Would the Gem of Amara increase that to a degree that would render any attempt on her part null?
He was sure of two things. As long as she was living, this Slayer was going to keep him on her list of things to do. He knew his own curiosity would move him to come back to find Red. Not necessarily for any reason other than to see what she made of herself. The longer Drusilla stayed away the more attractive Willow might become. No one could replace Dru, but he could see himself assigning some significance to the girl he was with right now once she had some miles on her to add some texture to the more interesting aspects of her.
Her eyes had closed. She wasn’t asleep, but she was willing to go to sleep if he would let her. He smiled at that. Unfortunately for her, he wasn’t sleepy.
He slid down on the bed, moving back to the center as her eyes opened to assess what this meant. Reaching out, he drew her to him with one hand on her hip, nudging her to get her to roll over on her side so he could spoon in behind her, arranging the pillow to support her head and smoothing her hair down as he tucked her in closer, her back to his chest.
She had tensed when she felt him behind her, his growing erection nestled against her ass. He stroked the arm outside the sheet down to her fingertips before threading his fingers through hers.
“What—“
“Sssh,” he rubbed his cheek against her hair. “I’m starting to get used to how warm you are,” he said, pitching his voice lower. “It feels kind of odd, but nice.”
She didn’t say anything about that, but she made a little sound that was probably as close as she was going to come to disputing the observation. He could tell by the twitchy way that she was moving her fingers that she wanted him to let go of her hand. He obliged and promptly moved his hand under the sheet to rest against her bare skin. He tucked her hair behind her ear to give his lips access to her ear, feeling her shiver as the tip of his tongue traced the outline of it.
His tongue bathed the back of her earlobe before he pulled it between his lips, sucking lightly before setting his teeth against her skin and tugging just hard enough to drag his teeth over her earlobe before reclaiming it. He felt her heartbeat speed up the tiniest bit. Pressing up against his chest, he could feel it against his skin.
Under the sheet his hand moved up, following the centerline of her body to rest on her breastbone for a moment with the slight weight of one breast pulled down by gravity to fit neatly between his thumb and index finger. He kissed the hollow under her ear while his thumb stroked the underside of her breast.
“Your skin is so soft, right here,” he said, peppering her neck with tiny kisses. “And here,” he repeated the motion of his thumb and then rubbed his hardening cock against her ass, “and here,” he kissed the underside of her jaw.
When he started playing with her nipples, he returned to her earlobe, flicking it with his tongue as his thumbnail scraped the hard peak of her breast, rolling it between his fingers as he sucked on her earlobe. Tugging it lightly away from her chest as his teeth scraped over her earlobe and repeating the process until she was unselfconsciously stretching her neck to give him better access to her, her eyes half closed, her lower lip between her teeth, probably to keep quiet.
He pushed the sheet away from her. “I need to see you,” he kissed her shoulder, opening his mouth over it, looking over her shoulder at his fingers, his chipped black nail polish stark against her skin. “You have the prettiest tits,” he pinched one nipple, twisting it just enough to make her flinch a little. “Look down. Look at yourself,” he coaxed. “Can you see it? Look at these nipples. They’re perfect. So hard and rosy against your skin,” his thumb flicked at her nipple and he took it between his thumb and index finger again, pinching it, tugging it until he felt her back tightening. He twisted it harder this time, wringing a startled gasp from her.
“Too much?” he guessed, lifting her arm to guide it around his neck. His hand moved to her other breast as his tongue tenderly laved her abuse nipple. For a moment her hand rested awkwardly on his shoulder. His tongue circled her nipple with little cat like licks. He blew on it and felt her hand tighten and then move hesitantly to the back of his neck, her fingertips gingerly moving into his hair. He drew her nipple into his mouth, licking it, sucking, the suction tugging on her nipple as his lips slid over the distended flesh, kissing the curve of her breast pulled down by her position on her side, and returning to her nipple to repeat the process.
Her fingers slid into his hair, a little awkwardly. She was still far to aware of her own reservations about what she was doing with him to be at ease about touching him, but her back was arching and he could feel the change in the way she was breathing as she shivered and flinched as he continued his oral exploration of her, savoring the warmth and the sound of her blood rushing through her pumping heart. Leaving the breast he was fondling, his hand moved back down her smooth abdomen, finding the indentation of her navel, leaving his thumb there as his fingertips brushed over the nest of curls between her legs. “Open your legs for me, Willow,” he said, lifting his head.
Her eyes opened slowly. She looked torn between obeying him because it was more or less required of her and obeying him because she knew that she was going to enjoy what he would do if she opened her legs.
And then he realized that it wasn’t just that. It was the awkwardness of doing what he wanted while she was lying on her side, and figuring out how to make that work that made her look a little uncertain. He slid his hips to the right to make room for her to shift her hips to lay on her back and saw an unmistakable flash of relief as he solved the problem for her. He kicked the sheet and blanket away from them, wanting to see her, feeling her move her leg closer to the edge of the bed. Seemingly unable to help herself, she looked down, her eyes fixing on and then skittering away from the sight of his cock.
Was this more modesty or awareness? He smoothed her hair back before bending his arm at the elbow to rest his chin on his hand. Her hand started to slide out from behind his neck and he lifted his head to catch hers before she could move it away from him, leaning in to kiss her, watching her eyelids drop as he got closer to her mouth. A flick of the tip of his tongue over the seem of her lips was all the prompting required to get her to open her mouth and let him in. She was just letting him kiss her, letting him slowly thrust his tongue into the warm cavern of her mouth. He backed off, frowning a little. Her mouth tasted strongly of cinnamon flavored mouthwash masking the more familiar taste of her. His more highly developed sense of smell made the mouthwash taste almost overwhelming.
She started to move her leg back and his foot shot out to stop her. Her eyes opened. The corner of his mouth turned up as he shook his head and then returned his attention to her mouth. Her lips were kiss swollen and reddened. Probably from the medicinal sting of the mouthwash. He licked and sucked on her lips. The mouthwash taste was less strong though it stung his nose a bit. He nipped at her upper lip until she moved her head like she was chasing his lips, and then he slanted his mouth over hers, stroking her hot little tongue until it was curling around his.
His hand moved down between her legs, parting her, finding the delicate, sleek, wet folds that complimented the texture of her mouth. A sound vibrated in her throat as she felt his fingers stroking her apart. The sound was ambiguous enough that he wondered if she was sore until his dampened fingers reached her clitoris. The sound his stroking fingers drew from her was a throaty moan. He drew back to let her breath, kissing her jaw, her throat, scattering kisses over her breasts as worked his fingers up and down her slit, keeping his touch firm but gentle.
He took her neglected nipple into his mouth, feeling her squirm a bit as she resisted the impulse to push herself against his mouth and hand. Her fingers were back in his hair as soon as he let go of her hand and her head had fallen back, unwitting exposing her throat to him. Penetrating her with a single finger he heard her whimper something that sounded like, “oh, oh, oh, oh,” and his lips tightened on her nipple, pulling on it hard as his finger moved in an out of her. The sleek tissue lining her channel felt a little swollen to him, but she was wet and getting wetter.
“Feels good, doesn’t it,” he purred, “such a hot, tight, pretty pussy you have, kitten,” his voice has deepened. He withdrew from her warm, grasping cunt and pinched her clitoris between his fingers. “You’re so wet. Feel that? Feel how wet you are?” His lips stroked her nipple between tongue curling caresses. “I need to feel that under my tongue, all that hot, sweetness filling my mouth,” he tugged on her nipple feeling her hips rise beneath his hand as he scraped her clitoris with the back of his thumbnail, making her cry out at the sensation.
“You like that, don’t you? You like having my head between your legs. You like having my mouth on you while I’m fingering your hot little quim?”
His tone of voice confused her. The things he was saying were true, and they were feeding mental images to her from last night, but he wasn’t taunting her with her responses to him. The low, intimate purr of his voice was ardent and . . . appreciative. Almost as if he was savoring the same mental images he was feeding her. The muscles inside her thighs were still a little achy. He had done that last night, gone down on her while his fingers fucked her until she came. She and Oz had experimented with oral sex. They had talked about it a couple of times before they tried it and it had been a little awkward, like a science project or an experiment with sketchy directions. She hadn’t been sure what she was supposed to feel, and he had been more concerned about her embarrassment and discomfort.
It had become a part of their repertoire, usually as a prelude to intercourse. During sex they hadn’t talked about sex exactly, other than to point out what did and didn’t work and to express feelings that had more to do with why they were having sex than feelings that actually came from having sex. The idea of doing some of the things she had done with Spike with Oz made her heart race.
Her hips rose as the idea took root and bloomed in her mind. Spike pinched her clitoris again, and she heard herself making a mewling sound. She pushed his head down in an unmistakable way. “Yes, yes,” she chanted, keeping her eyes closed. Oz’s hair was always spikey and a little stiff with gel, but when it was just washed, before he put any gel in it, it had a similar texture that came in part from the dye that was in it.
A little surprised by her shift from passive participation, Spike laughed softly at her enthusiastic response and let her push him down. Without prompting on his part she opened her legs wider to him, making room for him to kneel between her legs. Her fingers clutched her his hair, and a sharp comment about the ‘no hair pulling’ injunction occurred to him and was discarded as her other hand closed around his wrist to press his hand down harder as her hips lifted sharply.
He sat back on his heals for a moment just to admire her slim body, his gaze lingering for a moment on her flat abdomen and her small breasts with their hard nipples begging for attention. She had her eyes closed and she was panting a little, her kiss swollen lips parted.
His fingertips slid downward to the gulf of her vagina, pressing against the opening without penetrating while she ground herself against the heal of his hand. He slid his other hand under her ass. “That’s it, pet,” he breathed. “What a beauty you are,” he slid two fingers into her, slowly. They could explore the pleasure/pain principal some other time. Right now he wanted to reward her for the pretty display.
She bent her knees, heals slipping a little on the sheets as she pushed herself onto his fingers. He bent over her, feeling her fingers twist in his hair as she fucked his hand with a delicious roll of her hips. Pressing kisses into the red gold curls that veiled her cunt, he made his leisurely way down to her clitoris, listening to her moan in frustrated anticipation.
It was a variation on the way he played with her nipples as his tongue circled and licked before his lips closed around the distended flesh, sucking gently at first while his tongue flicked back and forth over her clit. Oz had fingered her before, but not like this. Two fingers. It made perfect sense. If one finger felt good, two was better, and what he was doing with his mouth . . . oh, God. It felt amazing. The way he was tugging on her clitoris, his tongue, the tip of his tongue teasing it, the flat of his tongue soothing the tickle.
She was riveted, one part of her mind busily cataloging the ‘what’ of what he was doing to her. The other racing with the possibilities that it suggested.
His fingers slid out of her and she moaned a protest at the loss as the hand under her ass urged her up higher. “I just want a taste,” he murmured, his tongue following the path that his fingers had, stabbing into her without any warning in a hungry way. His nose bumped against her clit as his tongue fucked her shallowly, curling against the walls of her vagina. She felt the hand under her ass moving down and his tongue was replaced with his thumb, forcing the cheeks of her ass apart as his thumb entered her.
He licked his way back to her clitoris, kissing it as his thumb slipped out of her. She wanted his fingers, and bent her knees, pushing her heals into the mattress, feeling an odd warm sensation in the soles of her feet.
His thumb, warm and wet from being inside of her pressed against her asshole, and the feeling of being touched there, where no one other than her gynecologist had ever ventured got her attention. “Don’t,” she choked, alarmed. “Please-“
“Sssh,” the sound vibrated against her clitoris in a wash of hot and cold sensations as the welcome bulk of his two fingers slid into her. “Not going to hurt you, baby. Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said roughly, nuzzling her. “Such a sweet girl,” his tongue swirled against her clit.
She could feel his thumb flexing as he started to push it into her while his lips clamped down on her clitoris and his fingers moved in and out of her. His lips slid over her clitoris as he tugged on it. “I’m going to make you feel so good,” he promised. “Just relax, and,” his tongue flicked over her clit, “let me fuck you. Fuck your sweet cunt and your--,” his thumb pressed deeper, and his smooth, hard teeth scraped over her clitoris, making her body jerk once as his thumb pushed deeper. His fingers moved a little faster and harder and his lips seized her clitoris, his tongue hard and demanding as he lashed her clit, forcing his thumb deeper into her.
Her orgasm seemed to start in her feet. She had a last second of clarity as an icy sensation prickled her skin from her scalp down to her feet and then her head fell back as she jerked convulsively against the pressure of his mouth.
Feeling her clamping down on his fingers, Spike opened his eyes, looking up her body, wanting to see her when she came. Her skin was damp with sweat and her hair was tousled, and when she came, her mouth opened on a silent scream, eyes flying open, unfocused and unearthly, a view that was lost to him as her back arched. He hardly had to hold her while she shook and the strangled sound of her pleasure sent a bolt of lust down his spine.
He let her fall back on the bed before sinking inside of her luxurious heat, feeling her spasming cunt grab at him. The sensation made him close his eyes and grit his teeth against the gathering knot of pressure at the base of his spine that proceeded an orgasm. When he was completely buried inside her, he carefully rolled them to the center of the bed, putting her on top, feeling her gasp for breath and shudder as the little aftershocks that were gently milking his cock worked through her. He ran his fingers through her hair and stroked her back, waiting for her to recover.
She made no effort to keep her weight off of him, and it felt good despite how damp and hot her skin was. When she started to catch her breath, he tipped her face up to him, running his thumb over her lips.
Her eyes flew open, a frown wrinkling her brow. “That isn’t the thumb that you—“
“Fucked your ass with?” he smirked, and rubbed the thumb against her lips. “No,” he said, amused by the disgust that made her small nose scrunched up. He brought his hand to his mouth, licking the fingers that had been inside of her. “These are the fingers that I fucked you with,” he closed his eyes, moving his hips under her. “God, but you taste good,” he said.
She was looking at him like she didn’t quite believe him. “C’mere, pet,” he urged her up higher in his arms, his mouth seeking hers. “Taste yourself on my lips,” he whispered before kissing her.
The smell of her own arousal on him hit her just before he claimed her lips and she made a choked sound. His fingers in her hair kept her from pulling back from his lips as he leisurely explored her mouth.
She could taste herself on him and tried to decide what it tasted like. Not bad, or good, but different than she expected. His free arm snaked around her hips, holding her as his hips moved beneath her.
He kept kissing her, barely allowing her to breath, his body rocking under hers, changing the depth of his penetration. “You’re so warm. I can feel you all around me, quivering inside, so hot and wet,” he murmured between kisses. “You’re going to do that for me, soon. Fuck me with your warm mouth. I can’t wait to see these lips--,” he kissed her again, his tongue slipping into her mouth.
He rolled them over onto her back, easing almost completely out of her body before slowly sinking back into her. “Open your eyes, witch,” he ordered.
Her eyes opened, reluctantly, heavy lidded. The earlier orgasm had taken a lot out of her, and she was tired. He could feel that too in the slight tremor in her thighs. He studied her eyes, solemn, sleepy, and pleasure dazed. He watched her eyes as he withdrew again, just the head of his cock inside of her, and let himself sink into her again slowly as she drew an unsteady breath, blinking as muscles in her face tightened and relaxed in a reaction to his slow penetration.
He rested his forehead against hers, holding her eyes. His gaze flicked briefly to her lips, damp from kissing, parted as her breath left her in time to his cock’s slow in and out stroke. He reached down to move her leg, slipping his arm under her thigh and bringing it up high watching her eyelids drift down as she absorbed the difference in the depth and angle of his penetration.
He kissed her the space between her eyebrow and the bridge of her nose. “Open your eyes,” he insisted. “I want to see it in your eyes when you come,” he said.
She shook her head. “I’m not going to,” she predicted. “Too . . . orgasmed out,” she explained. When she took in his skeptical expression she was almost tempted to tell him that she had been thinking as much about Oz as responding to him when she came before, but that seemed to be a potentially stupid thing to do. Her expression cooled. “But, I can make some really good sounds if that helps,” she said with a hint of sarcasm.
He chuckled at that. “I’ve heard that performance, and it’s not convincing.”
To her surprise, he lifted himself off her, slipping out of her body in a way that made her shudder. For a moment, he just hung there, balanced on his arms, engorged cock bobbing slightly drawing her attention as she recalled with a sense of foreboding his insistence that reciprocal oral sex was in her future.
Her eyes flew to his face. “Remember when I said that you might find that this isn’t the best deal for you because there are things that I haven’t done? Did I mention haven’t done well? I think I should have—“
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbled. “This is the result of nearly universal birth control. Back in the good old days when girls went to their husbands with their hymen intact for fear of getting pregnant a good hand job or cock sucking was a lot easier to come by.”
Natural skepticism made her wonder if he was serious, even as he was pulling her back against his chest, directing her leg over his hip, the head of his cock bumping against her ass, and then her thigh before it brushed against her damp curls.
“You made that up,” she accused. “Which old days?”
His hand moved between her thighs to grasp his cock, lining himself up. He held her still as he slid into her with a happy sigh. “All of them, pet. If people ever got tired of this, you’d cease to exist,” he pointed out. His fingers found her clit. “Now, you were saying something about making good sounds?”
He kissed her shoulder, scooping her hair away from her sweaty neck, blowing on it when he noticed how hot she was. That made her get all goosepimpely again and she shivered feeling his fingers stroking her as his cock moved in and out of her. He kissed her shoulder and her neck and sucked on her earlobe until the sounds she was making were an indication that she was winding up to another orgasm.
“Are you almost there, baby?” he crooned to her, kissing her throat. “Such pretty sounds you make,” he said. “Give me some more,” he coaxed, his tongue pressing down on her neck, roughly licking the spot, then returning to suck on it, and lick again.
Neck. Vampire. “No!” she shouted, twisting her shoulders, as she tried to get her arm between his face and her neck.
He grabbed her wrist and pinned it to the bed over her head, eyes narrowing as the position she had twisted herself into tightened the muscles that were already squeezing him. He sped up his thrusts, pushing her down into the mattress. She saw his face change and tried to get away from him. His arm wrapped around her waist as he drove into her hard and fast, his head thrown back as he came with a shudder, jerking against her as he held her in place.
She could hear nothing but the sound of her own harsh breathing and a kind of purring sound that was rumbling in his throat as his head dipped and he rubbed his ridged brow against the exposed side of her breast, almost like a cat would. The purring increased in volume slightly, and then started to taper off as he rubbed his face against her, occasionally kissing her.
“Spike?” Willow whispered hesitantly. He was still inside her and his fingers were still rubbing her clitoris.
“Ssssh,” his tongue stole out between the fangs to lick her breast from the underside to the nipple.
“Spike?” she tried again, striving for a soothing tone of voice.
He responded with a dry laugh. “Oooh. The extra reasonable voice,” he said in a voice that sounded a little strained. He let go of her wrist and clumsily patted her hair. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked.
“N-no,” she stammered. “Spike?” she reached down to curl her fingers around his wrist. “Please stop,” she said softly.
“Said I’d make you feel good,” he muttered stubbornly, suddenly opening his mouth over her breast. She felt the tips of his fangs breaking her skin and tried to push his head away. The shallow puncture wounds oozed blood in two thin, bloody rivulets, the lower one dripping to her breastbone, the upper mark flowing downward to her nipple.
He licked it off, pulling out of her with a wet sound, leaving a smear of semen on her thigh as he bent her back to get at the rest of the blood on her chest. Then he bit her again on the upper swell of her other breast. It was another shallow bite, just breaking her skin. This time his tongue was there almost immediately, milking the small punctures, his fingers plucking at her clit, tugging on it.
He nuzzled her stomach, nicking her on the upper edge of her belly button and catching it on his tongue with a groan as he held her hands down, using his body to keep her down, under him. She tried to close her legs, but he only laughed at her efforts. Her face was pink with exertion and her eyes were luminous with unshed tears, and when he hungrily licked her clitoris she made a sound like a cat in heat. He sank his fangs into the incredibly tender skin of her inner thigh, feeling like he was sinking into butter. Blood filled his mouth and he swallowed it all, pushing her thighs apart to get at her, licking the swollen folds of her cunt, tasting her and him on her, tormenting her swollen, blood engorged clit with the tip of a razor sharp fang. The temptation was almost too much for him, and at the last minute, he turned his head to suckle the bite on her thigh before shaking off the game face entirely and applying himself to making her come again.
~~~*~~~
In a moment that reminded him of their aborted tryst in the club, Willow was on her side, her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around herself. After she had come, he had licked every lingering trace of blood from her skin, savoring the taste of her, rich with the hormones flooding her blood. When he was satisfied that he had gotten all that she had to give without biting her again, he got up and went to the bathroom to soak a washcloth in cold water.
She didn’t put up a fight when he used the washcloth to wipe off the lingering evidence of his orgasm and her arousal or protest the cold cloth pressed against her swollen labia. When he was satisfied that he hadn’t done any real damage to her and removed the washcloth she had glared at him bitterly.
He poured a cup of coffee for her, adding sugar and cream until the coffee was the muddy brown color she seemed to prefer. Feeling like a bit of a ponce, he brought her the coffee. Sensible creature that she was, she accepted the coffee, and refrained from dashing the contents in his face. She just stared at him with angry eyes, her hair a wild tangle around her face and called him a bastard.
That got a crooked smile out of him before he went to take a shower.
When he emerged from the bathroom, the half empty coffee cup was on the bedside table and she was under the blankets, hugging her pillow to her, curled up in a ball around it. He got dressed, leaving her alone for the time being.
She was nodding off when he sat beside her on the edge of the bed. “You need clothes. Do you want to go shopping with Georgia?”
“And spoil her vampire Barbie Doll fun?” Willow was sarcastic.
His eyebrows rose. “I’ll take that as a no, then,” he said coolly.
~~~*~~~
Willow woke up a little after eleven in the morning according to the clock beside the bed. She was alone, as in alone. No Spike in bed beside her. No Spike in the bathroom. Alone. She looked around the room for her pants and t-shirt, left on the floor last night. They weren’t on the floor, or in the closet, or in any of the drawers. With a sinking feeling, she checked behind the bathroom door, and then in the hamper, and swore under her breath.
He left her alone, without clothes. Even the robe was gone.
With nothing better to do, shewent to the bathroom and started to get ready to take a shower. Her collection of bruises courtesy of Georgia had faded and now they had friends, on her hips and thighs. The bite marks and her breasts, stomach and thigh had stopped bleeding before she wentback to sleep, and were already scabbing over.
She got into the shower. The soaps had changed from honeysuckle scented to lilac since the last time she had bathed. It was probably a thing. The fragrances were rotated or something. Or maybe Spike liked lilac. She made a face at the thought, hearing him say ‘you need clothes’ like she was some cheap Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman wanna be who would be swept away by a lot of fancy clothes purchased with money stolen from people he had killed or stolen from stores staffed by people he killed, or removed from the bodies of people he had killed.
She shuddered at the last thought and made a mental note not to wear anything that arrived without a tag.
Assuming that she was going to be supplied with clothing at all, she thought a few minutes later as she gazed in bewilderment at the hand towel she had pulled off the rack. It was the third towel she had pulled out. They were all hand towels, or washcloths, and the robe that had been hanging on the back of the door was gone.
She half expected to find that while she was in the shower, the bed linen disappeared, but when she came out it was still there, tangled up from having been kicked aside and tugged up, and balled in her hands. She yanked the flat sheet loose, folded it lengthwise, and made herself a halfway credible toga before tiptoeing to the door to look through the peephole into the hallway.
Pete and Jeannie were out there with a card table between them playing what looked an awful lot like Boggle.
Kicking the trailing edge of her toga hem, Willow paced. When she got tired of pacing, she looked in the refrigerator and found that the salad left there last night had been supplemented by more yogurt, a bowl of cut fruit covered in cellophane, and a few cans of Diet Coke. The plastic fork left with the salad and the metal in the Diet Coke safety tabs constituted the most lethal threat in the room.
She had the fruit and drank a can of Diet Coke before cracking open a second can and settling into the chair at the table, angling it to see the TV. The remote had been moved from the bedside table to the rectangular table that also served as a desk. She flipped channels, glaring at the television, hefting the remote thoughtfully. It was your standard plastic remote, but there were batteries in it that gave it a little weight on the butt end. She looked at it for a moment, staring at the buttons with a frown.
Then she looked at the buttons. Really looked at them, and then at the television, hardly daring to believe. Her thumb hovered over the round yellow button on the base of the remote, and she depressed it. The television screen flickered and then scrolled up blue with the message, “Welcome to The Hermitage Internet TV”.
It went on to say that a charge of $9.99 per day would be added to the room for 24 hours of Internet access and that additional charges might be applied for pay per view movies or games.
She hit the OK button to order now, and set the remote down to look for the keyboard, half suspecting that Spike had removed that too in his quest to strip the room of anything remotely useful. She was about to give up when she grabbed the swivel base the television was resting on and gave it a tug. It slid out a few inches and something fell with a clatter that made her heart leap in her throat while she watched the door to see if the noise would bring Pete or Jeannie to investigate.
When no one came after several agonizing moments, she reached behind the television, feeling around until the slim rectangular shape of a keyboard took form. Gingerly, careful not to make a lot of noise, she pulled it out and did a very abbreviated Snoopy dance that almost ended badly when she stepped on part of her toga and stumbled.
Victory dance later, she decided, eyeing the door. There was nothing to keep her from throwing the safety lock from the inside. It would slow anyone down who was trying to get in.
She went to the door, peered out at Pete and Jeanie again, and slammed both of her hands on the door, watching Jeannie jump and Pete glare at the door. With a cautious glance over her shoulder to make sure that the Internet access screen was not visible from the door, she opened the door. She didn’t have to manufacture ire. “Where is he?” she demanded.
Pete leaned back in his chair, smirking. “That’s a good look for you,” he told her.
“Beats shrieking ‘fire, fire’ and slapping at myself like a girl,” Willow shot back. “Right. I get it. You aren’t going to tell me where he is. Or when he’s coming back, or where my clothes are.”
“That just about covers it,” Pete agreed. “Now, shut the door, from the other side,” he ordered.
Willow slammed it shut. Unfortunately for her, the dramatic gesture fell short when her sheet got stuck in the door. “Crap,” she muttered, rolling her eyes. She tugged the door open, yanked her sheet back in, grimaced at Pete who was chuckling at this, and shut the door, threw the inside bolt and the safety lock for good measure.
“Fine,” Pete muttered. “Lock yourself in you silly bint.”
Jeannie cocked her head to one side. “What’s a bint?” she asked.
~~~*~~~
It took a bit of trial and error to get the wireless keyboard and the television lined up well enough to work with an acceptable degree of success. Willow had it balanced on her knees as she typed, working her way into her email account. It had taken her a few nail biting minutes to remember how to do this since it was not a web based account, but she figured it out.
The hotel Internet system went down while her mail was downloading, and she almost screamed in frustration before doggedly working her way back and restarting the process. Quickly scanning her email titles and addresses, she spotted several emails from her parents amongst emails from her boss, Sara Engstrom that went from lower case, “Willow, Where are You?” to upper case, “PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME FIRE YOU!”, and back to lower case, “Notice of Termination of Employment’.
Most of the email addresses were familiar to her, and then there was one that stood out. B.summers@uscs.edu. Buffy. She opened it and scanned the note. Buffy had set up her computer and sent her an email. Without a mouse, she had to use the up and down arrows to get to the Reply button. She started composing a message, packing in as many pertinent details as she could think of. They were in Sacramento, in a hotel. Called . . . . she had seen it on a notepad, on the screen, what was it? Hermitage! She kept typing steadily.
When she got to the end of her pitifully thin amount of hard data, she chewed on the tip of her pinky nail and considered what questions the email might raise as well as answers. The first question would be authentication. She closed her eyes to think of something that would prove it was her, and started typing again.
Shutting down the Internet connection and tucking the keyboard away was the hardest thing she ever did. Preserving the fact that she had access to the Internet was critical.
She shut it down.
(Buffy Summers’ Email, Unread)
To: b.summers@uscs.edu
From: Rosenw@clangeek.com
Re: You-hoo!
Buffy,
I’m in Sacramento. We are staying in some kind of hotel called The Hermitage. Ask Angel if there are Hyatt Hotel’s for vampires, because I’m thinking with the lack of windows, this is one. When we left San Francisco Spike was with eight vampires, including Harmony—long story. In the last day I’ve only seen four.
I’ll keep updating you as long as I have the Internet access.
Willow
~Part: 22~
With every quarter hour that crawled past after she logged off the Internet TV, Willow cursed her lack of nerve and the unpredictability of Spike’s movements while she watched television with her back to the door and an ear cocked for any attempt to open the door. She wanted to figure out how much time she had between someone trying to get in, and actually getting in, which would require her to disengage the safety lock, and possibly the bolt she had thrown. Once she had that timing down, she would be able to figure out how much time she had to log off the computer and get to the door as well as an opportunity to determine how annoyed Spike was by her locking the door.
Nibbling on her pinky fingernail, Willow thought about how to play that. Angry? You lock me in, you steal my clothes, so yeah, I’m going to lock you out, you jackass, she thought. It helped that she was angry. She was angry at Spike. She was angry at herself for the position she had placed herself in. She was angry about loosing precious time to her uncertainty about when he would return.
She made herself think constructively about her next on-line time. She would check her email first. If Buffy had not responded, she would start emailing other people who regularly checked their email to get them to call Buffy and Giles. Then she would look for a web site for the hotel, to try to narrow down her location, hit MapQuest for more information on Sacramento, and then find local law enforcement web sites.
Her mind wandered to her parents' email. The last one hinted at some frustration at her lack of response, which was put down to AOL, and not good old reliable Willow. Her father had once asked her opinion about AOL and her comments had not been flattering. He adopted the attitude, but he kept the service for the very reasons Willow wouldn’t have. AOL was for people who were casual users and browsers. It was reliable and the interface was easy to navigate. To her it was an irritating layer of program between her and the Internet.
Her parents always sent her notes every few days when they were on the road. The personal tone of the email in the impersonal medium of email irritated her. It was a glimpse into their mind set that she found unsettling, like at her parents' anniversary party, where she met her parents’ friends and colleagues. One of her Dad’s older graduate students had said something about how he felt like he knew her already because her father talked about her so much, and as gratifying as that had been it was also irritating and a little painful because she had no idea what he would say about her.
She should have known. You should know what your parents think of you without a stranger telling you.
She closed her eyes, forcing herself to stop the self-pitying train of thought. She didn’t have time for it, and as a practical matter, her parents were not only too far away to be any help, they were too out of touch with what went on in her life to understand what kind of help she needed.
She was reviewing her plan when Spike came in through the forgotten connecting door to the room with a smirking, “Lucy, I’m home,” that was probably meant to be funny.
Willow settled for a withering glare and returned to the somewhat hypnotic charm of David Venable on QVC.
Georgia brushed past him, bearing an armful of clothing on hangers that she dropped on the unmade bed while admiring the channel set ruby ring that was being shown. She cast a sidelong glance at Willow, staring blankly at the television screen, before looking at Spike and smiling sweetly.
Spike read the smile as something along the lines of ‘serves you right, you greedy pig’. He smiled back.
He walked over to the table behind Willow, emptying his pockets of the cell phone, his cigarettes, lighter, and keys before turning back to her, trailing his fingers over her bare shoulder, brushing the back of his hand over her cheek. She went utterly still, and then she very deliberately tilted her head a fraction of an inch away from his touch.
He crossed the room to hang up his coat. Was this a version of the unsuccessful silent treatment tactic? He had no doubt that finding that she was confined to the room without clothing had irritated her. It was meant to. He was making a point. Their arrangement was not predicated on trust.
“Hang your clothes up, pet,” he said.
She set the remote control down and got up from the chair to pick the clothes up and carry them to the closet. The only sound was the metallic click of each hanger as it was hung on the metal pole, and slid down with a whisper of plastic from the clothing bags. He watched her for a moment. She hardly looked at the clothing she was hanging, and didn’t ask where it had come from.
He went back to the table to get a cigarette, and leaned against the table, watching her with a small smile as she completed the task and returned to her chair, sitting stiffly. The wrinkled sheet she was wrapped up in had a certain charm. Her tousled, towel dried hair looked messy and it was an unintended reminder of what it had looked like after he had had his hands in it. The angry flush in her cheeks—he wasn’t sure if the novelty of her blushes would ever wear off—drew his eye.
She had taken a bath or a shower. He could smell the soap, but wrapped up in the sheet for hours, she smelled like them, a sweet, musky scent. He couldn’t resist playing with the ends of her hair. When she started to pull away, he though it was time to remind her that they had a deal.
She turned her head to look at him, the angry glitter of her eyes subdued. “Next time you go out, could you bring back something for me to read?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, a little surprised by the request. “Make a list,” he started to smile. “No reason why you can’t catch up on your summer reading list,” he teased.
“Thank you,” she said, turning back to the television.
He raised an eyebrow at that, picking at his chipped black nail polish. “We’ll be having drinks and dinner in the hotel,” he told her.
Georgia sat at the foot of the bed, watching them like they were a tennis match. She had already picked out Willow’s clothes for the evening and was looking forward to seeing how she would look in them. Spike hadn’t filled her in on the precise nature of the arrangement that had been worked out. He had simply told her that, for the time being, Willow was off limits.
Georgia examined her fingernails. “Did you get anything to eat, sugar?”
Willow looked at her. “Yes. Thank you,” she said.
Spike eyed the back of her head. Extra polite, with the please and thank you, and they unstated ‘bugger off’. He caught Georgia’s eye and nodded to the door. She made a face at that, her attention returning to Willow. “There’s more,” she told her. “Underwear and accessories and shoes. I thought of everything. Before dinner, I’ll do your hair,” she promised.
Willow gritted her teeth. “I imagine that this will come as a huge shock to present company, but I have been dressing myself since I was five. I can manage.”
Georgia just grinned. “Someone is in a bad mood,” she teased. “I’ll leave you two alone and pop in later,” she said, going through the connecting door and shutting it behind her.
Spike threaded his fingers through her hair, tugging her head back. “Is Georgia right, pet? Are you in a bad mood?”
She didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer, feeling his fingers twist in her hair, exerting just enough pressure to tug her head back another half inch. His lips grazed her temple. “I didn’t handcuff you to the bed or to a chair,” he tilted his head away from her. “That was a courtesy.”
Pushing off the table he was leaning against, he gave her hair a slight tug and let go of it and her. Now that she had given up being agreeable, he didn’t know what she thought was left for her to do. He was leaning toward pulling off the sheet and providing a demonstration of how unpleasant he could be if she didn’t start thinking more clearly.
He plucked the remote control from her hand and changed the channel, looking for something to watch.
“Why are we going anywhere for dinner?” she asked. “You don’t eat.”
“Food?” he glanced over at her before reaching up the unmade bed to grab a couple of pillows to wedge behind his shoulders. Propping one booted foot on the low footboard of the bed, he continued his channel surfing. “I eat.”
He glanced over at her and saw that she was looking at him, a slight frown on her face. He tried to decide what it was. Puzzlement. Curiosity. A spark of reluctant interest? Ah, the social anthropologist was rearing her head.
“I like food,” he decided to indulge her. “I get cravings for things. Like peanut butter and carrots.”
The frown deepened. “Together?”
“Yeah. It’s good,” he insisted, going back to his channel surfing. Taking her clothes had been deliberate. Leaving her without anything to do had not. It probably was not a good idea. God only knew what she’d think up with enough spare time.
“What were you up to while I was gone, pet?” he asked.
The question was unintentionally abrupt, and she was looking directly at him. There was no hiding the reaction. The increase in her heart rate would have tipped him off, but she couldn’t quite control her flinch.
She covered by rubbing her arms as if she was cold. “Shower. TV. Yelled at Pete,” she summarized with an unconvincing lack of detail. “And, you?”
He decided to let it ride for the moment and gestured to the closet. “You needed clothes.”
“You went shopping? With Georgia? In the middle of the day?” she was frowning again. “How?”
“Hotel boutique,” he told her. “You would have loved it. They had these Hobbit reject demons scurrying around. Smelled funny, but they found everything Georgia wanted.”
Willow looked at him like she suspected that he was on to her, and then she got up and walked over to the closet, taking a sudden interest in the clothing. He leaned back against the pillows, one arm behind his head, savoring the signs of her nervousness.
Willow made herself look at the clothes. He caught her off guard with the question and she was afraid that she looked as panicked as she felt when she realized that she had looked too startled. She found herself staring at a pair of Capri pants in royal blue that was on a hanger with a sleeveless white sweater. There was a giant blue chrysanthemum on the front of the sweater that almost looked like something she would have chosen for herself.
He watched her for a moment longer before rising from the bed in a predatory, back arching move, that she saw out of the corner of her eye. He walked over to her, running one finger down her bare arm.
“Anything you’ve forgotten to mention?” he prompted. “You’re an industrious sort of girl, aren’t you? Idle hands are the devil’s work shop, and all that?”
She backed up and found herself up against the open arch that framed the closet when he smoothly followed, not crowding her exactly. “No?” he mocked. “Is it more, I am what I do? Is that why you worry about your reading lists and your summer job and your lost opportunities to for earnest do-gooder activities?”
Her hands curled into fists at her sides. He had figured out that she was up to something and he wasn’t going to let go of it until he figured out what it was. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get dressed,” she said, keeping her voice as even as possible.
“And, if I do?”
She gritted her teeth. Crap. “I—“
He reached out for her, hooking his fingers into the sheet where it covered her breasts. “You?” he prompted, and then he laughed. “The look on your face, Red. Free advice? Poker is not your game.”
Without a mirror to check and see what her expression was betraying, Willow wanted to touch her face to see what it was doing that was so unsubtle. She wasn’t stammering. Stammering was usually her give away when she was lying. Damnit! Was he just fishing, or was she really throwing off an ‘I’ve got a secret’ vibe?
She considered testing out a condescending look at the hand buried in her cleavage and a ‘do you mind’ but this was Spike, and he didn’t mind, so that seemed like a bad idea. Instead she blurted out a reminder. “You hit me, I hit you, remember?”
He tugged on the sheet deliberately. “I rip your clothes off, you rip mine off?” he shot back. “I’m shocked, but game. Wasn’t thinking about beating you just yet, but give me a moment. I could get in the mood for it.”
She stared at him. There was just the tiniest hint of a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He was joking.
He sighed, and shook his head. “Yes, that was a joke,” he confirmed. “This is glib repartee, pet. When I’m not playing, you’ll know it.”
To her relief, he let her go, and unearthed the cell phone, flashing her a conspiratorial smile. “Time to call the Scoobies and find out what they are up to,” he explained. “Stick around. They’ll want to talk to you this time.”
She briefly debated about refusing to talk, just to spite him, and then decided not to. She started wondering how she could make talking to them work for her. Maybe slip in something like, read any interesting emails lately?
Too obvious. She frowned as Spike dialed a number, holding the phone to his ear. He strolled across the room to get another cigarette.
She frowned at the chrysanthemum on the sweater. Emails. Computers. It was sort of what she was known for. How to mention that? Ask about her computer? Ask where it was? If anyone had been using it—or her newsgroups and links. She looked at Spike. “Can I really talk to them?” she asked.
“Hmm?” he held up at hand. The phone was answered on the second ring. He recognized Angel voice. “Watcher.”
“Spike,” Angel gave it the menacing growl. Giles would have at least sounded bored, or weary in his aggravated Englishman talking to his favorite vampire kidnapper voice.
“Meant to call you. Just hadn’t gotten around to it.”
“We’re going to stop digging unless we know Willow is alive,” Angel told him.
Spike chuckled. “Really? So, you’re in charge of this little operation, eh? Reminds me of the good old days. You, thinking you were in charge, Darla, cracking the whip and bringing you to heal like a puppy. Speaking of which . . . according to Red, here, in some other version of Sunnyhell, you’re Red’s bitch. Makes you think about all the wonderful possibilities that she has, doesn’t it?”
“Shut up, Spike. Put her on the phone.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Spike drawled. “Because, you aren’t in charge, are you? Did they bring you in because they thought you knew how I think, or some other rot? Did you remember to point out that in recent history, I’ve beaten you on your ground twice? I beat you to cure Dru, and I beat Angelus on his wacky mission to destroy the world. Try not to chip a fang grinding your teeth, Peaches,” he advised.
“Where is Dru?” Angel asked.
There was a tiny pause. “Fuck if I know,” Spike answered.
“Left you? There’s a huge surprise,” Angel twisted the knife.
Spike responded with a harsh bark of a laugh. “Oh, right! You care? Don’t make me laugh. It’s all your fault. You, confusing her, messing with her head, ruining her. We were just fine without you and you bloody well couldn’t stand for that, could you?” he retorted.
“You’ve got issues with me, Spike? Let’s settle it. You don’t need Willow. You and me. We fight, we finish it. Last man standing walks away,” Angel offered.
Not even remotely tempted, Spike rolled his eyes. “Let me explain something to you, Angel,” he began, “your Slayer? You are probably thinking that if I get the Gem of Amara, her days are numbered, and you’d be wrong. Taking her down without it, that would be something, but once I have it, what’s the point? She’s no longer what she’s been. A worthy adversary. You, on the other hand? Piece of advice. Buy your sweetie an urn.”
He could feel Willow watching him, one hand at her throat. She looked like she was trying to plan what to say. “Put the Watcher on, or the Slayer, or Xapper—you know, someone that actually has a say in what happens?”
The winner was the Watcher. Giles came on the line a moment later while Spike silently relished the notion of the brooding one relinquishing the phone. It probably galled him to no end. Good.
“I’ll reiterate what Angel said. We want to talk to Willow and we will stop digging unless you prove that she is alive.” Giles was cool to the point of curtness.
“That’s workable,” Spike agreed. “Making good progress?”
“Willow,” Giles insisted.
He sighed, “Fine,” he gestured to her. “Pet? Say hello to the Watcher. He thinks you're less than alive,” he told her, holding the phone out to her.
She walked over to him and took the phone, holding it to her ear as one hand crept up to rest between the top of her makeshift toga and her neck in a gesture that smacked of maidenly modesty, as if the Watcher would be able to infer her mostly undressed state over the cell phone.
“Giles?”
Several hundred miles away, Giles pointed to Angel in the loft of his apartment and he quietly lifted the receiver of the phone there. “Willow,” Giles said, his tone softening unselfconsciously. “Are you all right? We’ve been very worried.”
Was she all right? “I’ve probably been fired from my summer internship, and I’m behind on my reading list, but other than that and oh, yeah, being kidnapped, I’m just . . . fine,” she said, sarcastically.
Spike threw his head back and laughed. Willow glared at him and he laughed louder. Then she frowned. “Um. Sorry! You just caught me off guard,” she began again, sounding contrite.
“No need to apologize,” Giles assured her, though he had been taken aback at the snide retort. “I’m sure it has been very difficult for you, and I want to assure you that we are doing everything to . . . effect your safe return.”
The little pause made Willow pause, at least mentally. There was something that Giles wasn’t saying, some doubt that he wasn’t expressing. Willow eyed Spike. “I know,” she said softly. “Um . . . research? You’ve probably got that covered, but if anyone thought to get my computer. I’ve got newsgroups and links that might be helpful with the research. And—“
Spike smiled and reached for the phone, “That’s enough for now,” he told her, taking the phone back.
“Satisfied?” he asked Giles.
Giles looked up at Angel, who nodded. “For time being,” he said.
“Get back to work then,” Spike suggested. “Oh, and if someone has a cell phone, you might want to give me the number.”
“You can always reach someone here,” Giles told him.
“But I don’t want to reach ‘someone’. I like talking to you, Watcher, and yanking Peaches chain is a treat, but I don’t have much to say to Xapper.”
Angel spoke, rattling off a cell phone number that Spike made himself mentally repeat three times until he was satisfied that he had it memorized.
“Ta, then, back to the salt mines. The faster you dig, the faster you get Red back,” he reminded them before disconnecting.
Willow watched him as he took a deep drag on his cigarette with an air of creamy satisfaction.
“You enjoy this,” she accused.
“I do,” he agreed. “It’s fun. More fun for me,” he rubbed his chin, “and that makes it more fun.”
He finished the cigarette while casually disrobing, which made Willow wish that she had managed to get dressed. She went back to the closet, half expecting him to tell her not to bother, but after he was finished undressing he strolled past her into the bathroom and a few minutes later she heard the shower start. She used the time to put on the sweater and pants outfit from the closet.
Once she was dressed, she went to the refrigerator to retrieve the salad that Spike had brought back last night and the second to last can of diet Coke. She was sitting at the table when he emerged from the bathroom with a towel loosely draped around his hips. He picked up the sheet she had left on the floor in passing and tossed it on the foot of the bed before going to the refrigerator and getting a beer.
He sat across from her at the table, picking up the room service menu. He ate real food, probably more than most vampires did. Breakfast foods didn’t do much for him, though he liked bagels and certain cereals. Eggs, which he preferred poached with bacon on a toasted English muffin, did not mix well with whatever passed for a digestive system. He liked the way any kind of bread smelled, but outside of bagels, bread never tasted as good as it smelled.
The dinner menu looked bland, but the appetizers were promising. He suspected that there was something more to this make nice dinner with Colin’s contacts than making nice. Colin had looked a bit cagey about that when they had talked earlier. Spike’s mind drifted over that conversation while he scanned the appetizers. Vampires were not the most trustworthy of creatures. This is where he differed from most vampires he knew. He was trusting. He trusted what he knew. Spike trusted his impressions and his instincts.
He had Colin sized up. He was lazy and willing to be led. As long as his illusion of independence was maintained and he was allowed to be useful in ways that reinforced his ideas about himself, he was manageable. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t reasonably alert, curious, or trying to figure out how to turn things to his advantage. He was lazy, not stupid. He made good decisions and he had raised in Georgia, an equal partner, which suggested a craving for order and stability. Keeping Colin focused required sharing a certain amount of information with him. Enough to reassure him that Spike hadn’t dragged him out on a limb with his childe.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with Pete and the little fledge that was Pete’s new shadow. His gut instinct was to stick and move. The longer they stayed in any one place, the more likely it was that someone would find them, or that the girl genius, apprentice escape artist picking at her salad would figure out some way to make a break for it again. He looked at her for a moment, watching her assemble a forkful of salad with all the salad food groups represented, drenched in salad dressing.
The concentration she could bring to bear on such a simple thing was interesting. He set aside the menu. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he told her. “Turn the television on, if you want, it isn’t going to bother me.”
She looked at him warily. “Thanks,” she said after a moment.
“Or, feel free to join me,” he invited, just to see how she would react.
He could almost see her on the verge of saying that she wasn’t sleepy, and then mentally reviewing that and deciding that it wasn’t a good idea. She sipped her diet Coke. Her tendency to blurt out the first thing on her mind was something he was going to miss.
“Do you want me to wake you up at a certain time?” she asked instead.
“Not necessary,” he told her. “Pete’s outside the door,” he reminded her. “Georgia will be back with the rest of the crap she got for you.”
She understood what he was getting at. Now was not a good time to escape. She gave the bits and pieces of salad a swirl with her fork, looking for croutons, while he tipped his head back, throat working as he drained the beer. There were little drops of water that clung to his shoulder, probably having fallen there from his hair, combed straight back in his familiar minimalist hair style.
He reminded her a little of Oz, though a day ago she would have said that it was impossible to even imagine a resemblance. They had a very similar physicality, though Oz was shorter. They were more lean muscle, competent but not extravagant grace, and at ease with themselves when naked. Oz had been more aware of her initial embarrassment and more considerate of it where Spike was aware of it, but he either didn’t care at all or he thought it was amusing. She had slept with exactly two men under vastly different circumstances and comparisons were inevitable, and even comforting as the contrasts she identified sharpened her appreciation of her boyfriend.
~Part: 23~
The hotel had a dining room and a lounge. The man playing piano reminded Willow of her great uncle Sheldon. His wife was her mother’s aunt Nina. They lived in Miami and they looked like they had gotten stuck in the 1950s. Sheldon wore hand tailored shirts and summer weight wool trousers that were always immaculate—perfectly pressed, falling in a break against his wing tip shoes. He had a collection of hats, all fedoras, mostly in browns and grays. When she was little, and they would visit, Uncle Sheldon would take her to the beach in her bathing suit and one of his t-shirts to protect her fair skin. They were always clean and neatly folded, smelling of cedar, soft against her skin.
He was playing a song that she recognized without knowing the name.
They were sitting at a table, Spike, Colin, Georgia, and three humans, a woman and two men, dressed in suits. Willow was dressed in clothing Georgia had picked out for her. She was wearing a fitted, sleeveless black dress that fell below the knee. A pair of low healed, pointy-toed pumps and a double strand of opera length pearls completed the ensemble. Spike had taken one look at it and rolled his eyes.
Georgia was all vampire chic in leather and spandex.
She was leaning against the arm of Willow’s chair, one hand resting on her arm, her fingers stroking the soft inside of Willow’s arm.
Pete and Jeannie were at the bar. Willow wondered what they were thinking. Was it was like being relegated to the kid’s table at a holiday gathering?
She had spent the last twenty-four hours bargaining with her body to save her friends, having sex with Spike, sleeping, having more sex, scheming to trip him up and most recently fending off Georgia’s notion of bonding over girl talk in the bathroom while Spike slept, or pretended to sleep.
Georgia chose to view her arrangement with Spike through a particularly skewed prism that was an odd echo of Buffy’s supportiveness about her crush on Xander and her relationship with Oz until Willow had been moved to point out the obvious. Spike wasn’t her boyfriend. They hadn’t eloped. This was not a honeymoon, vampire version or human. She had been standing in a bra and a half-slip at the time, and Georgia had just smiled at the collection of visible bite marks on her body.
Color crept into her cheeks and she looked down at her lap where her hands rested. She used her thumbnail to pick at her cuticles, welcoming the distraction. The muscles in her thighs felt kind of quivery and achy. Georgia had dressed her from the skin out, so she was wearing a black bra that looked like a lacy cobweb against her skin, a thong, and stockings. Her underwear drawer at home was full of practical undergarments. In the back, wrapped in tissue paper were her laundered undergarments from prom, also black but nowhere near as sexy as the things Georgia had picked out for her.
She was glad that that he had hurt her. She wished that she had bruises to go with the bite marks—more evidence of the willful and intentional infliction of harm. The choices she had made had not, in her mind, precluded the possibility that he would hurt her. Somehow it made it easier to accept what she had agreed to since he had.
~~~*~~~
Spike was bored. Face time with the humans who owned the hotel and had some connection to Colin’s mum was Colin’s gig. He had never trusted his business to humans. If he needed expertise in an area, he’d find someone to turn to provide it before he would deal with humans. The palpable lack of fear and anxiety from the three suits annoyed him to some degree—mostly, he thought they were incredibly stupid. Vampires were evil. Humans were neutral, being all soul having, they could go either way, but the ones who chose to be evil didn’t interest him particularly.
He wasn’t sure why that was so. He considered the woman with the two men briefly, objectively. She was a knock out. Tall and model thin in her tailored black suit with her graceful, swanlike neck exposed by the open collar of her blouse. Her gaze was direct, calculating, even a tiny bit amused. She had one of those accentless American voices, betraying nothing of her origins.
His gaze flicked to Willow. Georgia was playing dress up with her again. She looked absurdly demure, with her averted gaze, and a riot of hectic color rising in her cheeks. Her discomfort was obvious in the way she was trying to stay still and go unnoticed. He’d spent hours shagging her rotten, adjusting his inclinations to meet her on the relatively tame ground of her inexperience. He had all kinds of plans for her. She was interesting and amusing, and fascinating, and charmingly unaware of it, providing a nice diversion in the midst of his boredom.
The smart money said chose the evil, sexy lawyer bint, but where was the fun in that? Right now he wanted nothing more than to shed their present company and spend a few more hours between Willow’s soft thighs, fucking her senseless.
“As much as I enjoy seeing Colin and Georgia,” the older man spoke, his tone oddly soothing, “I’m here, tonight, to meet you, Spike. You are resourceful, intelligent, and your exploits are,” he smiled warmly, “legendary.”
One of Spike’s eyebrows rose. He rested his hands on his abdomen, his attention seemingly divided between the old man and Willow.
He didn’t seem remotely mollified or pleased by the . . . flattery? Willow’s hands moved restlessly. She found herself smoothing her skirt, touching the pearls she was wearing, rolling them between her fingers before her hand dropped to the skirt again, pinching a pleat.
Spike tilted his head. Her fidgeting brought his attention back to the dress. It had set him back a pretty penny, maxing out one of the credit card he had nicked the other night. The color really didn’t suit her, he decided, but he liked the cut of the dress. It left her throat and most of her back bare. The long, graceful line of the dress emphasized the delicate elegance of her body. She was a bit on the short side, but slender and gracefully proportioned. She had a smoky black scarf draping her throat, obscuring, but not entirely concealing his bite mark. She looked demure, with her eyes cast down and a hint of color staining her cheeks. Pretty, demure, innocent, and expensive.
His lips pursed at the thought. “Right,” he said slowly, his gaze flicking to the old man, a hint of contempt creeping in.
“We are aware of your . . . connections. You are part of the Order of Aurelius,” the old man continued smoothly.
Willow’s chin lifted a bit at that. Curiosity flickered in her eyes.
Spike leaned forward, picking up the leather bound lounge menu. “What of it?” he asked, sounding disinterested as he scanned the menu.
“We know enough about the Order of Aurelius to know that there is a vacuum that exists. No one has assumed leadership since the Master was . . . eliminated.”
Spike’s gaze flicked over the lawyer. “No one is likely to,” he told him curtly. What this guy knew about vampires could have been written on the head of a pin. Last of the Order of Aurelius, my arse, Spike thought. Maybe in North America where it had never counted for as much in the first place. In London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, and Venice you could find older, smugger members of the Master’s line. His one introduction to Darla’s sire had not gone down well with anyone. The Master had found nothing in Drusilla to appreciate or admire, stupid old bigot. Drusilla, and Spike by extension, were treated like Angelus’ embarrassing bastard stepchildren, an attitude that Darla did nothing to alleviate.
He had spent decades perfecting a don’t give a toss what you think attitude married to a staking on principal follow through that tended to make anyone cautious about taking that attitude with him. He wasn’t stupid, though. He knew it persisted. Fill the void of leadership? Hah. On a cold day in hell, assuming they would have him, he would delight in telling them to piss off.
He read the menu and gestured to a waiter. “You should eat, kitten,” he told Willow, sounding like some overly solicitous prat. He ordered the appetizer sampler, the chicken in peanut sauce with grilled vegetables, and more of the tea with apple and pear juice that she was already drinking for her, and a medium rare steak and a pint for himself.
Willow flashed him an uncertain look. “Guinness,” he elaborated with a wicked grin, leaning forward to run his knuckles over her soft cheek.
He sat back in his chair, having ignored Hollis or Holling, or whatever his name was to his satisfaction.
“If you find that you have need of our services,” the lawyer said, unruffled, “give us a call.”
The girl on his left took this as her cue. “We represent a large and varied clientele, including the owners of The Temple in San Francisco.”
Spike wanted to tell her to find a point and make it. He glanced at Colin, who was listening to all of this with the slightest hint of tension. Spike picked up Willow’s hand from her lap. “Dance with me, pet,” he demanded.
Without a word to the others he stood up. Her eyes went to him automatically and he smirked, pulling her out of her chair. He guided her over to the small, empty dance floor, his arm sliding around her waist, drawing her in against his body. He felt her heart speed up.
“Put your arms around my neck, Red,” he instructed, his hands moving over her ribs when she complied. “That’s a good girl,” he mocked, his mouth close to her ear, his voice pitched for her alone. “You look so pretty. Like a good little girl, all dressed up,” he husked.
“I would have thought you were less ‘Strangers in the Night’ than ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’” she observed.
His fingers splayed, feeling her through the dress. “Relax,” he shook her a little. “You’re so tense.” He listened to the music for a moment. “It’s Cole Porter, anyway. You’ve got your curious face on. What do you want to know?”
“Would you tell me if I asked?”
He shrugged. “Might. Ask. If I don’t want to answer, I’ll tell you.”
“Who are these people?” she asked. “They are . . . people, aren’t they?”
“Lawyers,” Spike’s lip curled. “And, yeah, they are people. More or less.”
“So, if we go back to the table and I say, excuse me but I’ve been kidnapped and I’d appreciate it if you could help me . . .”
“They’ll smile politely and maybe laugh,” he told her.
She frowned at little at that, but it conformed with her general impressions of the first people she had spent any time with since she had come into contact with Spike. “And you would?”
“Not have to kill them, so knock yourself out,” he suggested. “Or not.”
“They want something from you,” she guessed.
He nodded. “That’s the way of the world.”
“Do you know what they want?” she asked.
He smiled. “Don’t care,” he told her. “I please myself.”
When the song finished, he asked for another one, and they danced until their appetizer was served. Spike mentioned going for a walk, outside, after dinner and she wasn’t really surprised to find that she was looking forward to being outside, to having some point of reference beyond the blandly comfortable hotel.
All the while she kept mulling over ‘I please myself’. It sounded odd to her, like he believed it, but that maybe he wasn’t sure that it was true. There was a hint of belligerence in it. Her mother liked to say that everything she believed about behavior was predicated on the notion that people behave in ways to achieve the things they want and need, and that the reason that she had a career was that sometimes people needed help figuring out what they wanted or needed or help modifying their behavior to get it. Using the Shelia Rosenberg litmus test, which side of that did Spike fall on?
Once they were back at the table, Spike’s chief interest appeared to be the appetizer. The female attorney restarted her spiel about representing the owners of The Temple, only this time, she did get to the point. They were upset about the damage done to the club, and the bouncer he had killed as well as the vampire that had been left behind.
Harmony, Willow realized.
“How is Harm?” Spike asked, coming to the same conclusion at the same time. “Baby,” he dipped a coconut shrimp into a dip that smelled spicy. “Try this,” he suggested, blue eyes dancing with humor at his overtly distracted attention to her.
His amused gaze invited her to join whatever game he was playing. “Don’t baby me,” she retorted, and he smiled back at her.
“Pet,” he crooned.
She refused to be subjected to the indignity of being handfed, taking the proffered shrimp from his fingers.
The question about Harmony was as much as distraction as the interaction. “She’s fine. Some people she knew arrived the next morning and she left with them,” the female lawyer told him.
Spike was mildly surprised by that. People she knew? Someone from Sunnyhell that Angel had sent to check up on him? That was interesting, and potentially useful information. He could see Willow arriving at the same conclusions and made a note to ask her about it later.
The coconut shrimp was good, though the sauce was spicy enough to make her eyes water and her nose run.
“The Temple is seeking compensation for the damage, as well as the employee that you killed,” the female attorney continued.
Seeking compensation? Spike let that bland phrase roll around for a second. “How’s the calamari?” he asked Willow.
“Chewy,” she picked up a blue corn chip and stirred it in the warm artichoke dip that was just starting to separate a bit, scooping up an artichoke heart. It tasted like a fancy variation on her aunt’s hot and spicy chipped beef dip.
If the game required him to ask what kind of compensation the owners of The Temple wanted, he was not playing. Unfortunately Colin was not clued in to this. “What do they want?” he asked, taking this seriously.
“There was several thousand dollars of damage done to the club, and there’s the matter of the dead employee,” she said. “If the damages were paid, they would want compensation in the form of a new bouncer and an acknowledgement of fault.”
Colin looked at Spike who was looking at a misshapen deep fried lump of breading with a deeply skeptical expression. Giving it a pass, he moved on to the omnipresent potato skins.
Georgia shifted in her chair. She held her glass up so that the light from the candle filtered through watered down whiskey in her glass. “I never feel like I know enough about this stuff,” she said with a smile. “I knew this girl back in high school. Her family didn’t have a lot of money, and they weren’t really southern, but she read a lot. Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Kathleen O’Brien, and Eudora Welty. We didn’t run with the same crowd in high school, and after high school, she went off to college at the University of Charleston. She came home after graduating from college and was going on to graduate school at Emory—“
“The Harvard of the south,” the older attorney said with a small nod to her, his hand resting briefly on the younger woman’s arm beside her to keep her from saying something in her impatience at the drift off topic.
“Is it? I didn’t know that,” Georgia admitted. “She was working that summer at Pier One, and we went out for drinks after work one night at one of those chain restaurants, where they have the margarita drink, or theme drink specials? I ordered something blue. She asked for Wild Turkey and water. It just sounded like something, you know? Wild Turkey and water. Like, I know whiskey and I like the way it tastes without hiding it in a silly drink poured into a glass that could double for a fish tank.”
She silently toasted the older attorney. “Wild Turkey and water,” she noted. “I still don’t know what it means, but it sounds the same in my head.”
Willow’s chicken and peanut sauce had arrived and she pushed around medallions of chicken in the caramel colored sauce. Colin had relaxed a little. He was leaning back in his chair with his hands folded over his chest. The tea with pear and apple juice had made her thirsty, and she drank more of it feeling the odd sensation of pressure that she associated with an unanswered question posed by a teacher.
What the hell . . . she started to open her mouth to throw out her non-sequiter to cap Georgia’s. ‘Excuse me, but I’ve been kidnapped . . .’
But Georgia wasn’t done. “We’ll discuss it and get back to you,” she said.
That seemed to mollify the older attorney, who nodded to her and admitted that he knew very little about whiskey, but he had a wine cellar and collecting wine had become a hobby that he enjoyed.
While she picked at her entrée, Spike finished the appetizer sampler. Their waiter returned to freshen drinks and to remove the plates and Spike announced that he was going out for a smoke, motioning to Willow to join him. A few minutes later they were crossing the marble floored lobby, her heels tapping on the marble. The lobby was, she realized, the renovated lobby of a bank. The old-fashioned teller windows were still intact.
Spike held the door open for her, a remnant act of politesse that was rendered meaningless when he curled his fingers around her wrist as she walked through the door. He already had a cigarette clenched between his lips, and he lit it, pocketing the lighter as he took a deep drag. Willow found her skin prickling from the sensation of leaving the air conditioned hotel for the balmy Sacramento night, a feeling that was almost as disorienting as the streetscape that lay before her. Between the moment in the gas station and waking in the hotel room, she had seen nothing of where they were and she still wasn’t sure where they were. Colin said Sacramento, but she didn’t entirely trust that.
Tethered to Spike by his light hold on her wrist, Willow followed him as he walked for two blocks. The silence was not companionable or uncomfortable. For Willow it was simply convenient as she made herself take in street names and features of the street and its occupants that might be useful. She had taken Spike’s keys when she tried to get out of the hotel room the other day, thinking that she would take the car, not that it would slow him down. She didn’t know where the DeSoto was parked, so in retrospect, that hadn’t been such a great idea, except that it might have slowed him down, and that was a better idea.
Getting out of the hotel during daylight was her best chance at getting away. It would give her time to slow down and plan her next move.
They walked past a restaurant. Behind plate glass windows in low lighting she saw her reflection, a ghostly figure moving without reference to the still life images of people at tables or the vampire whose cool fingers were wrapped around her wrist. It made her feel not quite real, which really started at the table in the mostly empty hotel dining room where she was nothing more than an appendage.
He brought her to the wharf. The throaty wail of a saxophone drew his attention. There was a young black woman with a mane of silky braids playing a saxophone with the instrument case open at her feet in a timeless appeal. Sitting at a park bench, listening attentively was an older couple with a sleeping baby in a carrier between them. A clutch of teenagers were having a loud, multi-part conversation that seemed to be an argument about what they were going to do, and a discussion of a break-up that involved someone named Jan and Mike and that skank Tina.
Light from the wharf skipped like stones off the rippling surface of the river, turning blue-white in spots, suggesting a fast current.
“Anything you want to do?” Spike asked.
Willow twisted her wrist free. “Play scrabble, sharpen stakes, have a movie night . . . go home? That kind of thing.”
His smile was almost fond. “Stroll around, go clubbing, shag me senseless. That kind of thing.”
Her shoes weren’t selected for comfort and Willow could already feel a blister forming on her right foot where the narrow shoe was pinching the ball of her foot. Her toe, with the split toenail, was starting to throb in an unpleasant sort of way. Her left foot was only slightly better. If she put too much weight on it there was a sharp stabbing sensation that made her wonder if she had gotten all of the glass out. In the distance she could see a wide paved walk towards a park. Without commenting on her paucity of choices, she started walking towards the park and Spike fell into step beside her, finishing one cigarette and lighting another.
“Sure you don’t want to go clubbing?” he asked. “There’s a place not far from here, not as much a hole as Willie’s. There’s a juke box with anything you could want to hear—“
“Another demon bar?” she guessed.
“More or less.”
“Pass,” she said, determined not to limp. The park was looking farther and farther away and she realized that it was because the wharf was in a slight bend in the river while paved riverbank landscaping redrew the curve as a straight line. Ordinarily she would have admired the effect, but now she was thinking about having to cover the same expanding distance to return to the hotel.
Returning to the hotel meant returning to the room and an unavoidable repeat on last night and this morning. Or would it? She looked down at herself, not really seeing the attraction, at least from his point of view. The dress was nice, but it didn’t alter anything. There were no optical illusions that it achieved to make her look more voluptuous or alluring, and her few attempts at alluring in the past had mostly fallen flat. She had to concede that no matter how painful, the shoes made her feet look pretty, but that wasn’t something anyone else would notice.
Georgia had insisted on doing her makeup, and Willow suspected that the mascara was already smudged or flaking. The cream based eyeshadow Georgia had used was irritating her eyes and she knew that she had probably rubbed them without thinking about it. How many times had she sat on the counter in the bathroom in the Bronze while Buffy reapplied lipstick only to find herself subjected to a good humored blotting of smeared mascara by Buffy? A wave of homesickness swept over her.
Willow’s internal dialog of, ‘My feet hurt. I had sex with Spike. I’m overdressed for everything. I liked having sex with Spike. I’ve been kidnapped. I’m probably going to have sex with Spike again,’ was circling around the same thought. Which was probably why she was thinking that he was thinking the same thing, though it wasn’t necessarily so, because again with the improbability factor insofar as the idea that Spike was actually attracted to her for some really bizarre reason. She was pretty sure that Oz was attracted to her because she was nice, and that seemed an unlikely positive as far as Spike was concerned.
Her heel caught on an uneven spot on the pavement, causing her to step down heavily on her right foot, wrenching a gasp of pain out of her even as Spike’s hand shot out to steady her. She jerked her elbow away, hopping on one foot to keep her weight off her abused toe, aware that she probably looked ridiculous.
He watched her for a moment, and then nodded to something behind her. “There’s a park bench,” he pointed out. “Why don’t you sit for a few minutes?”
For a moment, he thought she would refuse, just because he suggested it. She had a stubborn streak that wasn’t the most obvious thing about her until you peeled back some of the outer layers of her carefully constructed cheerful, helpful, trustworthy, and loyal sidekick persona. There was a bit of bitch buried in her that probably scared her, which might have explained why she worked so hard at covering it up.
Her feet hurt. He could tell by the way she was shifting her feet inside the heals she was wearing. Inside the hotel, on carpet or the hardwood dance floor, she wouldn’t have noticed it, but on concrete, the thin-soled shoes weren’t giving her feet any protection and she had torn them up in her barefoot race through San Francisco. Her decision to walk rather than go clubbing or back to the hotel took on a slightly martyr-ish aspect.
“You made beating off limits,” he pointed out. “If it will make you feel better, we can put it on the menu. Think you might feel less guilty if I knock you around a little bit?”
She looked him in the eye. “My parents are psychologists, Spike. If I want to be analyzed, I’ll find a professional.”
He raised an eyebrow, took a long drag on his cigarette and squinted at her through the smoke that he exhaled. “Feel a little like a lab rat sometimes, pet?”
The question was so on target that a laugh escaped her. She used to read her mother’s case studies and wonder if parts were about her in a queasy kind of way. ‘Patient X is a twelve year old girl who presents with anorexia. She is an honor’s program student, and is active in sports. High achiever with typical anxieties associated with feelings of inadequacy. Denies stress, and is defensive about eating habits . . .’ Not that Willow ever had anorexia. Before she ever worried about whether she was thin or fat, she knew about anorexia and its cousins, and understood that they had very little to do with weight and everything to do with control.
Did her parents know that she struggled with feelings of inadequacy? It embarrassed her to think that they might.
He sat beside her on the bench, one arm resting on the back of the bench behind her. He smoothed the hair at the nape of her neck in a touch the tickled a little. “I used to worry a bit about it,” he told her. “Dru’s mad as a hatter, and she’s my sire, but Angelus acted like her madness was the normal thing, and I couldn’t do anything that pleased him even remotely. He had this way of looking at me like there was just something I’d never come close to being.”
Willow frowned, wondering why he would tell her something like that. He wasn’t drunk, or angry. “How did it make you feel?” she asked, and then winced inwardly at the question.
He shot her a sly sidelong glance, catching the slip. “That had to be pretty bloody annoying,” he said. “And, my ‘issues’ with Angelus or Angel, or whoever we are pretending Peaches is or isn’t at the moment, are pretty well established. He was a sanctimonious prick without the soul, and having it made him worse, not better.”
“And what are you? If Angel is sanctimonious, then what are you?”
He looked across the water, and shrugged. “That’s kind of the point of living or un-living, isn’t it? Figuring out what you are. Not because of what someone else is, but because of what you do about it.” He glanced over at her and then down at her feet. “Tell you what, we’ll sit here a bit and then go back. Colin and Georgia are going to want to chat, so you’ll have a bit of time to yourself. You can have a nice soak in the tub,” his fingers stroked her neck as he moved closer, slipping his arm under her knees and lifting her legs to rest on his. “It will help with the swelling,” he explained when she started to draw back as much as she could while keeping the skirt of her dress covering her legs. He eased one shoe off and handed it to her and then the other, pausing to examine her damaged toenail.
Willow closed her eyes for a moment, absorbing the sheer relief of being barefooted again. The only thing better might have been the fuzzy kitty slipper socks Xander gave her last year for her birthday. Or a wading pool. Or cool fingers working little circles into her instep. Her eyes flew open. He had a distant expression on his face, like he was thinking of anything other than massaging her feet on a park bench on a public wharf, and she wasn’t sure that bringing the intensity of his undivided attention to bear was a good idea.
“Your hands are going to smell like feet,” she blurted out.
He grinned to himself. Right, then. Trust Willow to address her obvious discomfort with him massaging her feet with a commonplace observation delivered in a tone that was disproportionately dire.
“Do you think it could become permanent?” he teased. “I’d hate to think that I’ll be going through unlife with the other vampires saying, I smell feet. Spike must be around here.”
Her eyes narrowed as she wondered if that could be arranged. It wasn’t a really good gypsy curse with a happiness clause, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. She wriggled her foot. “Stop it,” she said. “I’m pretty sure whatever I agreed to do, it didn’t include feet.”
“I can work feet in,” he assured her.
“Don’t put yourself out,” she grumped. “And quit being . . . foot massaging, park bench sitting, just your friendly kidnapper and coercive sex partner Spike. It’s no longer confusing. It’s just irritating in a ‘how stupid do you really think I am?’ sort of way,” she told him, getting her right foot back and sliding the shoe back on as her skirt slid down now that she was less worried about it covering her than putting a stop to whatever he was doing.
He kept her left foot in place by holding her ankle. Now that she had the one shoe on she pushed the skirt back up, not before she was flashing the lacy band of her thigh high stockings. Of course he saw that, and was looking at her like he was looking forward to seeing it again.
“I didn’t pick my clothes out,” she snapped, feeling self-conscious and a little alarmed by the lingering look.
“You let Georgia do it for you,” he retorted. “That was your choice.”
He had a lot of gall. “I’m getting tired of having my nose rubbed in the latest crappy choice between crappier choices.”
He gave her ankle a little squeeze. “Good for you. Just because we have a deal doesn’t mean you have to take any shit off of me,” he let go of her ankle and she slid her leg off of his, straightened her skirt again and slipped the shoe back on.
“In a hurry to get somewhere?” he drawled as she paused with her hands braced on either side of her on the park bench.
That was it. She had had it. Her fingers tightened on the wood slats under her hand. “Understand this. I’m not confused. I know who you are, and I know who I am, and I know what I’d choose for myself, and if I can’t chose it because it isn’t one of the crappy choices that are left to me, I still know who I am, and what I really want.”
He shook his head, laughing. “Try ‘piss off’” he suggested, standing up and offering her a hand to help her up. She ignored it and got up on her own, grimacing a little. “You start off strong, but then it’s all noise, and what the bloody hell is she ranting about now?”
“Fine,” she said. “The whole time this morning, when you were having sex with me? I was having sex with Oz, and wow! It was great,” she smiled sweetly, but her eyes were savage. “Thanks.”
He pretended to wipe a tear away. “That was cruel, pet. I don’t know if my ego will survive the crushing blow inflicted by your childish infatuation with a teenage boy. Why would I give a fuck? I’m going to have you naked later. Maybe use those pearls,” he flicked the necklace with one finger. “Push them inside your hot, wet cunt, and listen to you moan while I tease your sweet clit with the tip of my tongue,” he leaned down until they were more or less eye to eye. “If you want to delude yourself by pretending the idea of your teen crush violating you is what is really getting you off, that’s your kink, baby. It’s still my fingers, my mouth, my cock.”
Somehow he had managed to get the last word. It wasn’t fair. “Then we understand each other,” she managed to grit out.
His expression was slightly derisive. “Yeah, we understand each other,” he made it sound like it was a lot more one-sided than she thought it was.
~Part: 24~
Willow had the room to herself when they returned to the hotel. She decided to make the most of the time, flipping the hook on the safety lock on the hallway door. The connecting door didn’t have an obvious locking mechanism, which was puzzling, until she opened it and realized that it was a double door arrangement and there was a sliding bolt on the other door. It was just a thin piece of metal sliding into a slot, nothing that would really slow a determined vampire down, but she bolted it anyway after pressing her ear up against the door to see if she could hear anything.
She jumped back, heart pounding when a hand slapped the door, and then she hastily stepped back and shut the connecting door on her side, wondering who had heard her at the door.
She waited to see if anyone would bother to investigate, kicking off her shoes and checking the re-stocked mini refrigerator. Housekeeping had been in the room while they were out and the bed was remade. The refrigerator had been refilled with diet soft drinks in a wider selection. She found a can of Fresca amidst the diet Coke and diet Sprite, and diet Mountain Dew.
Concluding that her eavesdropping attempt was not going to be explored further as a few more minutes ticked by, Willow decided to risk logging back into the hotel’s TV Internet service. She got herself settled into a chair at the table with the wireless keyboard and the remote control and logged back in. The keyboard was frustratingly sticky, and she worked out the remote’s point and click utility, using the keyboard only when she had to type the URL, user name, and password to access her email account remotely.
There was no new mail from Buffy. Digging into her remote access options she looked for something that would allow her to change her email set up to notify her when her mail was read. She reset the option when the Internet connection died, taking her back to the main log in screen. She took a deep breath, fighting for calm. It was a crappy, unstable, Internet TV connection. She kept getting an Internet Service Not Available message as she tried to reactivate the connection. On the third try, she was back on line at the home page, and she tapped out the URL for her remote access again.
Finding Buffy’s last email in her in-box, she hit reply and started a new note, focusing on her observations of the lobby, elevators, and the area outside the hotel that she had seen. With that note sent, she opened Sara Engstrom’s last email and started a new message asking her to call Buffy and tell her to open her email.
Before she could hit send, she heard the lock on the door disengage and her hand moved to the direction keys on the keyboard to scroll through the buttons on the screen at a crawl while her heart pounded in her chest. Belatedly she remembered that the remote was faster, and switched to it, scrolling the cursor to the send button and hitting the select button in the center of the remote. As tempting as it was to just turn the television off, she made herself scroll through more navigation to log out even as the safety lock caught, preventing the door from opening more than a few inches.
“Red!” Spike drawled, “Open the door.”
Crap! She shoved the keyboard under the bed, where it hit something solid, a platform. The bed skirt hid it though. “I’m not dressed,” she answered, stalling.
Fumbling with the zipper, she yanked it down and it stuck, forcing her to squirm out of the dress, the half-slip and the hated thong panties, while scratching her hip with her thumbnail.
He rattled the door. “C’mon, Red. Open the damn door,” he sounded impatient.
She left the bra on and darted into the bathroom to look for a robe, yanking the robe off the back of the bathroom door. She was holding it around her as she hurried to the door to release the safety lock.
Spike watched her pull the robe tighter around her as he walked in. The belt had been threaded through the loops and was dangling unheeded down her back where the robe was bunched. She didn’t seem to be aware of it as she went to the table to pick up a can of soda, drinking from it, and her heart was racing. His eyes raked the room, looking for clues, finding nothing but a pile of discarded clothing on the floor between the entertainment center armoire and the bathroom. Her shoes were near the table. He would have let the door shut behind him, but Georgia was there, pushing it open before it closed.
It was an unwelcome distraction.
Dropping her clothing on the floor like that was off. She was unthinkingly tidy. When they were on their trek through northern California he had bought her a cheese burger and fries at a McDonalds, and after she had finished both she had stuffed the wrapper and soiled paper napkins into the empty French fry container, tucking it all away in the bag before adding an empty, crumbled pack of his cigarettes he had left on the seat to her garbage collection.
Georgia wasn’t picking up on any of this; she was too intent on the argument that he considered over. “What they want is not that big of a deal,” she was saying in a tone that was probably meant to mollify him.
The argument that they were about to have was entirely for Willow’s benefit, and he had a feeling that it was entirely unnecessary. Colin would deal with the fall out from what he was calling ‘the incident’ in San Francisco. It wasn’t on Spike’s radar, even as an annoyance. He shot Georgia a warning look, and walked over to Willow, who was still standing with her back to them, like if she wasn’t looking at them she could make herself disappear.
She flinched when he straightened the back of the robe and brought the ends of the belt around to tie them at her waist. He left his arms around her, loosely.
Georgia watched them with a puzzled expression. This wasn’t part of the plan, so she was at a loss.
He could feel the tension in her neck when he kissed her there. “Haven’t had your bath, yet?” he asked, as if there was nothing else to notice.
The soda can in her hand gave a tinny burp as her fingers tightened and loosened on it, compressing the soft metal and then releasing it. The sound made her aware that she was holding the can and she set it down on the table. Her hand, wet with condensation from the can, brushed his arm. “I was just about to,” she lied. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t in the bathtub,” she tried again, “with the door and the lock, and,” her voice was wavering a little.
He kissed her throat again. “Right,” he said, smiling a little. “You should go have your bath, then,” he said, not letting go of her.
She had no idea what to do. She knew that she needed to calm down and act normal, except that there was nothing normal about any of this. She made herself push at his arms. “I will as soon as you let go.”
His hands tightened briefly on her waist, and then they were gone, and he stepped back. Relief made her legs shake a little and she put her hand down on the edge of the table to steady herself, noticing for the first time the leather folio resting there. It looked like a mate to the room service menu. She stared at it, certain that it hadn’t been there before they had gone out, which meant that it had been placed there recently.
She made herself leave the room for the bathroom, wondering if she could get away with not quite closing the door. Not that it would matter. With the water on, she wouldn’t be able to hear anything in the other room. Filling the tub for a bath would take too long, and she had already taken a shower earlier in the day. She took off the stockings and sat on the side of the tub, rinsing them in the water as her feet soaked. She had gotten a look at the clock before she had gone into the bathroom. It was almost three in the morning. Sara would be at work by eight in the morning. If she called Buffy right away, then her email messages would be read by nine.
She squeezed the water out of the hosiery and laid it over the side of the tub to dry, resting her head in the palms of her hand, unselfconsciously rocking herself as she tried to figure out how to keep Spike from suspecting anything for the next twelve hours. It couldn’t take much longer than that for Buffy to come up with a plan to rescue her and get it underway. Or could it?
~~~*~~~
“What was that all about?” Georgia asked while Spike walked across the room to pick up Willow’s discarded dress. He stuffed the filmy scarf into one of his pockets.
Georgia walked over and took the dress from him, shaking it out to hang it up before going back to pick up the half slip and panties. “Talk to me, sugar,” she coaxed, folding the half-slip and tucking it into a drawer with the underwear.
Spike was looking around the room, still trying to figure it out. There was no phone. His cell phone was in his pocket. Just to be sure, he checked, and it was where he left it. He found his cigarettes and took one out, rolling it between his fingers as he studied the room. “She’s up to something,” he told Georgia. “It’s something in this room,” he went on, eyes narrowing as he sifted through her reactions.
Georgia looked around, and then grinned. “Bet she’s whittling a stake,” she said in a tone creamy with malice. “You’ll be a asleep and she’ll stake your ass.”
He had made a fairly thorough pass at the room to make sure that anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, but housekeeping had been in, so that was a distinct possibility. He went to the desk to check the drawers for pencils, or cutlery. Georgia went to the bed, flipping back the bedspread to run her hands under the edge of the mattress. She went through the drawers in the bedside table while Spike copied her on the opposite side of the bed before going to the closet and methodically checking the clothing hanging there for anything that might have been concealed in a pocket.
Georgia sat on the end of the bed for a moment and then started going through the drawers in the armoire and the dresser.
“Does this change anything?” she asked him.
The plan had been to use the conversation with the lawyers as a pretext for a dispute with Colin. Spike wasn’t sure if Colin was subscribing to this plan because he was going along for now, or because it presented an opportunity to split up. He was prepared to deal with either contingency. Colin, Pete and Georgia had their parts to play, all useful, but not critical in the long run. The critical piece was trading Willow for the Gem of Amara, and he was keeping that for himself. All Colin and Georgia knew at this point was that he was planning to trade her for something very, very valuable, and that their cut in this was pretty much whatever they wanted.
Before Colin could test that theory, Georgia named Willow as their price, and the beauty of it was that after he traded her for the Gem of Amara, that worked for him. He wouldn’t be breaking his word to Red in any way that counted, and he didn’t have to come up with something that would satisfy Colin and Georgia. He could enjoy the benefit of having her around on what would no doubt be a long term, un-dead basis without the annoying responsibility attached to the care and feeding of a baby vampire. It was almost too perfect. He’d agreed with only a show of irritation, knowing that Georgia wouldn’t care if he found her demand more than acceptable but that Colin would feel like they had been had if he didn’t appear to be a little put out.
He thought about it for a moment. “A bit,” he allowed. “I don’t want her to know why we are splitting up,” he said. “It might distract her.”
Georgia looked at him. “Do you really think she’s up to something? Maybe she just set the locks to annoy you and then realized that annoying you is stupid.”
It was the simplest, most obvious explanation for her behavior. He thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head. “I’m not counting her out,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “You sure that you want her? She’s going to be a handful,” he warned her.
Georgia grinned. “Jealous?” she teased.
“Hardly,” he scoffed.
“Just a tiny bit?” she pushed.
Spike stuck the cigarette he had been holding in his mouth and searched for his lighter. “I give it a decade,” he said. “By then she might become something I