THE MORIBUND CLUB ADVENTUREby
Susan-Marie Horne
Chapter One
Demetrios wanted Aurelia as soon as he saw her. Pretending to be a merchant, he trundled into the outskirts of the bustling sea port of Ostia, on his ox drawn cart. This was a disguise he’d used literally hundreds of times before and, as usual, no one was suspicious of him. A merchant was nothing unusual, not in that town, not in any town. The local men eyed him without interest; every female eye followed him. He was a handsome figure – quite a stereotypical Greek god. He showed little or no interest in anyone, until his eye fell on Aurelia.
In his mortal day he would have set out to seduce her, and he would have succeeded - he always had with every woman who had ever interested him - but he didn’t want to be her death as well as her lover.
Her beauty moved him more than anything he could remember in the past four hundred years - she reminded him of a statue of Aphrodite that he vividly recalled from a temple in his native Athens. As he looked at the delicious young woman, he was transported back in his mind to his carefree days in Greece.
He estimated that she was a teenager of perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age, yet such personality and strength of character radiated from her. He knew then that they would be together - he had to have her; every fibre in his body yearned for her.
His admiring glances had not escaped unnoticed. She blushed as she returned his gaze and smiled slightly, almost coyly. He recognised in her large dark eyes the interest shown by every woman.
He passed without another glance at her, but he knew that she watched him; he almost felt her eyes follow him. For a few moments, he wished with all his soul he could have been a man again, to love her without leaving her a corpse afterwards. He hadn’t been with a woman he cared about for centuries. Since the night the vampire had made him into the creature he was, each woman he had made love to had ended up a mere husk of a creature, as he’d quite unconsciously taken every drop of her blood during the sex act.
Soon after his transformation he’d met Celena, and she had trusted him. His blood-drinking nature had taken over during love-making - the pulsing of the blood in her veins had been too much for him to resist. He had buried her, cursing his maker, and swearing that he’d only use whores from then on. He’d found the loneliness an unbearable burden in the long years since the night when the vampire had ended his life - his life that had once been so full of promise, dreams and hopes - and he knew there was no hope of being able to turn back. He had never even known why she had chosen him.
Published by Turner Maxwell Books
Copyright © Susan-Marie Horne 2009
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