Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

on his ivory neck. The fly of his black trousers yawns open, revealing a flash of scarlet underwear. Still, he’s oddly delectable; Lucy wonders whether she’d rather scold him to zip up his fly or invite him back to her bedroom to investigate the slight bulge under his red shorts. She notes he looks much younger than his companion, and that warms her to him.
    “I’ll make you some chamomile tea, if you like. With honey and lemon?”
    “Sounds perfect.”
    The young man smiles. It transforms him from a pouting cherub into an archangel. Even with his dark glasses, he is impossibly beautiful.
    “Don’t bother with the tea,” the woman says. “Charlot will survive; he’s been hungover before. Besides, we won’t be long. We just stopped by to have a peek at the ‘Madame de Mortoise.’”
    “What?”
    Lucy’s heart lurches.
    “The ‘Madame de Mortoise.’ Rumor has it that you’ve got the only surviving plant.”
    “I … I’ve never heard of it.”
    “Please. You call yourself a ‘rosarian,’ and you’ve never heard of the ‘Madame de Mortoise’?”
    “No. I’m sorry. I assume it’s an heirloom?”
    The woman sighs. Her mouth droops in a moue of supreme boredom as she surveys the cozy garden, but her nostrils quiver, and her eyes, behind the shadowed lenses, rove back and forth. Lucy can feel her gaze through the black shades.
    Words swim to the surface of Lucy’s memory. She can hear a verse she hasn’t thought of in ages, lines written for a woman whom Lucy hasn’t seen in more than two hundred years. Marie, La Comtesse de Mortoise, was as famous for her erotic appetites as she was for her beauty, and there wasn’t a man or woman at Versailles who hadn’t been frozen—with longing, fear, or both—by her eyes:
    Behind her veil of ice
    Lives a murderous curiosity—
    Her eyes are restless mirrors
    Of devouring luminosity
    Lucy forgets to breathe. Marie … is it you? How could it be you?
    Impossible.
    By all accounts, the glorious body of the Comtesse Marie de Mortoise had been separated from her head by the smooth, swift hand of the revolution’s guillotine. How could a beheaded woman be standing here in Lucy’s garden, looking as sexy as she had two centuries ago?
    Does Marie remember Lucy when she was the young, heartbreakingly lovely Lucille d’Arlennes?
    If Marie has seen anything familiar in the half-robed woman standing in front of her, she’s hiding it well. Even if the countess had survived her execution, she might not remember Lucy among the hundreds of lovers who shared her bed. The boy with her is nothing but another of her dolls. He might as well be made of straw; once she’s done with him he’ll be no different from the princes who lost their birthright to her, or the poets who gave up their inner muses to devote their gifts to Marie.
    “The ‘Madame de Mortoise’ is legendary. I’m amazed that you haven’t heard of it.”
    “Believe me, I feel like an idiot.” Lucy’s laugh is weak.
    “Quite an interesting story behind that rose,” the Countess goes on. “Madame de Mortoise was a courtesan at the court of Louis XVI. She was quite a politician, had many lovers at the court. But when she discovered that revolutionaries make better lovers than royals, her tastes changed. Some say she grew quite … voracious in her hungers, impossible to satisfy. Those same revolutionaries finally had her executed. A dark red rose was named after her, in honor of her beauty.”
    “Perhaps the rose was named in honor of the Countess’s taste for revolutionary blood?” Lucy suggests. She tilts her head, waiting for the other woman’s reaction, but that face is as impassive as a porcelain mask under the dark glasses.
    “Who knows?” The red scythe of a mouth rises in a facsimile of a smile. That ruthless, mocking curve of the lips is so familiar that it wipes away any trace of doubt in Lucy’s mind.
    “It is true, Marie!” Lucy wants to shout. “Tell us how you and your