Nocturnal Urges (Nocturnal Urges, Book One) by Elizabeth Donald Page B

walls or smaller shots on a table or on the mantelpiece. None of them showed people—only landscapes and views of natural beauty. She stopped to look at one, a misty shot across a lazy river toward an ancient stone building that looked like a castle.
    “Kylemore Abbey, in Ireland,” Ryan said, following her gaze.
    “And that one?” Isabel asked, pointing at a dusky picture of a still body of water, reflecting the darkening sky above it. “Loch Ness?”
    “Loch Rannoch, actually. Fewer dinosaurs,” Ryan said.
    Isabel smothered a giggle. “When did you go back?”
    Ryan shook his head. “I have not returned since the potato famine,” he said. “These are photo prints I have purchased over the years, not photos I have taken myself. They remind me of places I have not seen in hundreds of years.”
    “What is it about you?” Isabel said, and suddenly the words were falling without conscious thought. “You make me laugh, you make me warm, and yet there is so much sadness in you. What are you hiding from, Ryan? Why are you here?”
    Ryan looked down at his feet. “I do not believe you came here for my life story.”
    “What if I did?” Isabel challenged. “I want to hear about you, about the things you’ve seen and done. I want to understand you.”
    “Surely your consort would not appreciate your curiosity,” he replied.
    It was Isabel’s turn to look at the floor. “That’s…not a factor anymore,” she said.
    “Indeed.”
    She looked back at him. “You don’t seem surprised.”
    Ryan kept his distance, hovering near the fireplace. “A man who believes he owns a woman, body, soul and mind, will not keep her long,” he said. “Perhaps one must live a few hundred years to understand women, and if so, I have a few more centuries to go.” Isabel stifled another smile. “But I know enough to know that women own their own minds, bodies and souls. To take her freedom from her is the one way to lose her. One such as you will not permit yourself to be owned for long.”
    Isabel stared at him, and despite herself, felt a sting of tears in her eyes. Ryan immediately looked contrite, and withdrew a cloth handkerchief from a nearby chest of drawers. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is none of my business.”
    “I love the way you see me,” Isabel said, sitting down on the couch and dabbing the few stray tears away. “It’s like you see me as someone other than I am, someone strong and beautiful, more than I am, and I want to be what you see.”
    Ryan sat beside her and rested a hand on her shoulder. “I see only what you have shown me,” he said gently. “You have been kind to others, warm and giving, and it is easy for one like you to be taken advantage of. The night you came to the club, I knew you were not a mark. Those who come to us do so for their own selfish pleasure and it feeds us, so we do not complain. But you are not one to simply take pleasure for yourself and give nothing in return. You share, giving of yourself fully, and that’s why…” His voice trailed off.
    “Why what?” Isabel said. “Why it went wrong that second time?”
    Ryan looked at the fire. She loved the way the warm light danced over the angles of his face, the slight curl of his hair, cut too short for his face. She was reminded again of her thoughts the first time she saw him, that he seemed out of a sepia-toned photograph, something not from this time of ugly sordid fluorescent garishness, but from a time of gentleness and quiet.
    “There is more to the bite than the simple pleasure we give,” he said slowly. “It is—can be—a melding of minds and souls as well. It is that preciousness that Drew and his people wish to preserve. They forget that a true melding of body, mind and spirit is a brilliant, rare beauty, something that happens only once in a lifetime.”
    He turned to face her. “Or twice.”
    Isabel stared up into the dark azure of his eyes, and this time they did not swell black and suck her in. This