She turned her head in silent acquiescence and Val traced down her jugular, to the base of her throat.

"Your heart beats wildly, Violet-of-the-Night." He sank his fangs into her and she screamed at the delicious, deep pain-the delirium that preceded death.

Then, in her last moment of life, she felt him plunge his c.o.c.k into her, using it as an anchor as she plunged down into darkness...

She awoke, slowly, languidly and stretched. He was sitting on the side of the bed, dressed in her purple robe. She laughed at the contradictions he presented. He raised her foot to his mouth and nibbled her big toe.

"Death becomes you," he said, looking down the length of 12 eXtasy's Collective Mind her leg. He smiled and sniffed. "But my queen desires me in her first moment of life...I can smell your s.e.x-it's hot and it's all for me."

"Then you'd better come to me," she said.

"Better, we'll come together."

"Promise?"

"A vampire is always true to his word, Violet-of-the-Night."

13.

Violet Visions DAMSON RAPTURE.

by Evelyn Starr t's edgy, Twila. It's Soho."

oI "It's terrible!"

"It's..."

"Have you lost your mind, Bishop McBride?" Twila Greaves fixed him with the most furious-eyed glare she could manage under the circ.u.mstances.

And what circ.u.mstances they were...terrible circ.u.mstances!

He stood back. Several paces back, regarding her reflection in the viewing room mirror with beautiful dark eyes lit from within by some kind of strange and wild light she didn't want to contemplate because...Bishop's eyes might be asparkle with some kind of perverse, pleased amus.e.m.e.nt she didn't want to consider. Not when the circ.u.mstances were so...well, terrible.

"I should sue. That's what I should do."

Something definitely flickered in Bishop's eyes that time.

14.

eXtasy's Collective Mind "You wouldn't."

"Watch me." She started to get up.

Immediately, Bishop stepped forward. To hold her gently down, gently against the quilted lavender cushions of the viewing room's large and circular, almost bed-like divan.

Alarmingly bed-like divan.

And once he succeeded, only after he succeeded, he touched the creation he'd wrought at the top of Twila's head. Not to disa.s.semble or to alter in any way that might make the thing less...outrageous.

No, indeed.

Bishop touched her hair in a way that seemed to want to possess it. He touched it in a way that expressed in no uncertain terms his admiration of it and all he'd done with it. He touched it quite possibly with full intent of enhancing it. Though Twila thought even the most fevered imagination of the most deranged madman would have to concede enhancement was scarcely possible.

"I thought you, of all people, would appreciate." Bishop sounded like he thought he should be starting to sound aggrieved. Though he didn't actually sound aggrieved yet. If that made any sense at all.

Twila guessed it did.

She guessed everything Bishop had said so far made perfect, inarguable sense, in a perverted kind of way.

Under normal circ.u.mstances, any other circ.u.mstances, she would no doubt have been the first to exclaim in delight at the magnitude of his creation. There seemed no doubt at all that she would have been the first to flaunt it boldly and openly. To every gawking stare and disbelieving gaze she encountered.

It was edgy.

It was Soho.

15.

Violet Visions It was her.

Under any other circ.u.mstances.

But not today.

Dear G.o.d, not today!

"What am I going to do now, Bishop? I'm supposed to meet my soon-to-be in-laws in a few hours at Tavern On The Green.

For the first time. Ever."

"You want to make an impression, don't you?"

She wasn't mistaken that time. She saw a definite twinkle...wicked and self-serving, mixed with more of that strange and hot delirium she didn't want to examine too closely...in Bishop McBride's eyes.

Not that kind of impression.

"What have you done to me?"

He opened his mouth. For a minute Twila felt certain she knew everything he was about to say.

She'd heard it before. All of it. All too painfully often. From just about everyone she'd ever considered a friend or an acquaintance. She'd even lost a few of those friends, those acquaintances over it, including one or two she'd previously counted among her best and most faithful.

All over the issue of Bob Larson.

More commonly and widely known to her circle of friends and acquaintances as 'Beige Bob' or 'Bland Bob'. Or quite often 'Boring Bob'.

'What the living h.e.l.l do you see in that man?' had to be the most commonly asked question of the past year. Of any year.

Followed usually, very closely, by 'why the h.e.l.l are you so d.a.m.ned determined to rush into this? You, who could do so much better than Beige-and-Boring?'

Twila snorted. Aloud.

She actually did.

16.

eXtasy's Collective Mind Around the side of her decidedly Soho-and-edgy new hairdo, Bishop's dark gaze met hers in the steel-pipe framed viewing room mirror.

He smiled. A little. A little knowingly.

She, who could do so much better?

Now, wasn't that a laugh?

She never had done better, had she? Never once in twenty-eight and a half years, with her almost vampiric-pale skin that wouldn't tan to any decent degree of color. With her waif-slender young boy's build that made the old-time model Twiggy seem hefty in comparison. With her face that in some odd way was far too even-featured and regular to ever be considered anything but plain and, well, bland. No matter how edgy and outrageous her hair or her clothes.

In point of fact, Twila Greaves wasn't going to do better than Beige Bob. She knew it, and she knew everyone else had better accept it...that she just wasn't destined to attract anyone's devoted attention. Not anyone exciting and not even, when she got right down to it and got completely honest with herself, Beige Bob's.

She had no idea why she'd attracted him in the first place.

Other than the fact that Bob claimed condescendingly that she was 'amusing.' Or, maybe because she'd long suspected he wanted to shock his staid and boring rich-middle-cla.s.s parents with something they'd never expect him to bring home. Because Bob was forty, Bob was having some kind of only-son crisis, and Bob seemed to be...was almost certainly...lashing out against something.

And Twila, rapidly approaching that not-so-tender age of twenty-nine and the even more dire ages that lay just beyond it, that age when so many of her friends had married and settled down either happily or tolerantly, was frankly getting a little tired 17 Violet Visions of being all by herself. All the time. In all things.

She had indeed, and not more than a few minutes ago, believed Beige Bob Larson was the best she was likely to do. A large part of her still believed it. Except that in the minute when she stared into the no-longer-twinkly dark depths of Bishop McBride's exceedingly unwavering reflected gaze, her heart took pause. Her heart took a long and surprisingly honest moment to re-consider.

Was Bob Larson something she should settle for?

And why the deuce did she think she should settle at all?

With everyone else it had been easy to dismiss the protests. It had been incredibly easy to write every one of them off as jealousy. Because beige as he was, and bland-boring as he was, Bob had money. New money, big money, that he liked to spread around freely in his never-ending efforts to impress people and buy their admiration. And envy. Because marriage to Bob would be a decided step up in the cash flow department for a working-cla.s.s girl from Staten Island. And of course she'd thought there was plenty of meanness involved, because she'd had such a singular stroke of good fortune when so many of her friends had found themselves married to truck drivers, and bartenders, and cops, and found themselves barely eking out an unsatisfactory living.

But if Bishop thought she was making a mistake...

Something turned over slowly, dramatically, inside Twila's heart.

She'd always valued Bishop's opinion. Always thought of him with heart-quivering admiration.

"I designed it especially for you." He didn't sound put out or put off any longer...didn't sound aggrieved, or amused, or anything else she could easily put a name to. "I designed it to match that necklace you're always wearing." So saying, he 18 eXtasy's Collective Mind reached around Twila's shoulder and strummed his fingers lightly, repeatedly, dizzyingly, across the necklace she wore at that very minute.

It was spiky and deep damson-plum in color, a palm-sized slab of carved wood that appeared almost feathery, almost delicate, though in reality it was just slightly wicked-clawed in its enameled stiffness.

The necklace dominated the greater part of her upper chest, and she had not planned to wear it anywhere near the Tavern On The Green tonight.

Bob despised the necklace.

Bob called it 'grotesquely flamboyant trash,' and had expressly forbidden her to wear it in public again.

Bob did not approve, and that made Twila just the littlest bit angry.

Just the biggest bit angry.

Switching her gaze from Bishop's reflection to her own, Twila blinked. Hard. Any number of times.

Bishop had done a good job. A terrific one. Her hair was a dead-ringer, on a much larger scale, for the necklace. Its color was the same, that indescribable shade that was her special favorite, somewhere between the deep indigo-violet of a serious bruise and the acid-bright shade of the damson plums she loved as much as she loved their color. And the shape...multi-p.r.o.nged and wicked, like the venerable old Statue of Liberty on a bad, bad, exceedingly bad hair day...the shape was the same as well, right down to the apple-green oval puff of carefully rounded, carefully sprayed and stiffened hair directly above the center of her forehead. Matching exactly the necklace's center stone of polished jade, on her head the oval of hair seemed alive, somehow. Like an eye, staring back at her, challenging her a little malevolently to admit it all. Admit everything.

19.

Violet Visions That she might, just might, have made a mistake about Bob.

That she liked the Soho-edgy hairdo...adored the hairdo.

And did not at all like or adore Beige Bob Larson.

Bishop's hands lingered at her shoulders. They rested there now upon the net-covered and nude-lined top of her favorite body stocking...a garment she would never dare wear in Bob's presence...a garment that did nothing at all to hold back the heat or the electricity flowing from Bishop's hands. More than that, those hands had taken up a soft caressing motion that made her shiver. Made her shiver hard.

Tonight's dinner at the Tave rn, it seemed, might need to be called off.