Venice Dusk

Vampires don't fall in love. Until they do.
She seeks solace in her art… Portia Kepler had always dreamed of spending a season in Venice, even if it’s with a broken heart. Alone in a foreign land, she plays tourist by day and artist by night, waiting in Piazza San Marco for the mysterious stranger to pass by. The moment he’s in sight, her pen sets to work, capturing the outlines of a man she could never have.

He protects Venice from a killer on the loose… Each night, he walks, searching for the rogue vampire threatening the tourists of the city. But when the redhead who sits at the café distracts him from his duties and tempts his affections, Massimo Brunelli, Vampiric Doge of Venice, will use all the power of his crown to secure Portia’s safety, even if it cost him his heart along the way.

Can she bring light to his world of shadow? As a vampire sovereign, Massimo knows his love brings danger to his beloved. The currents pushing them together are too strong to fight, however. Portia longs to give in, but loving again is a leap of faith she may not survive. And with an ancient enemy closing in, what she needs from Massimo may be the one thing he can’t give her: time.

Bells rang the hour from high atop the Campanile, but it was the arrival of the mysterious stranger and his silver-tipped cane to the Piazza San Marco that signaled the time.
Portia hadn’t been so infatuated since middle school. Twenty-five years later, she found herself using the same tactics she had with Billy Martin in seventh grade: observe from afar, quickly avert your gaze when he turned your way, and practice writing Mrs. Billy Martin in the back of your notebook. Except that she wasn’t thirteen anymore. The act she had undertaken for the last three weeks had a name: stalking. She didn’t need to fake disinterest, because the sex-on-a-stick man never looked at her. At least, not after that first day. And as for writing Missus anything in her sketchbook? She’d need to know his name first.
Which was why she was sketching his portrait instead, because that was the refined, adult way of living out your romantic daydreams. Also, not a bad way to spend a six-week stay in Venice celebrating the anniversary of your debilitating divorce. From a distance, Il Reboundo (as her best friend had christened him from afar) could be anyone she imagined. Why ruin her fantasies by getting to know him? One of the best ways to be disappointed was to hold expectations. If you never expected anything, you were never let down.
Yes, six weeks stalking handsome Italian men and sketching their portraits without their knowledge like a foreign weirdo was just what the doctor ordered.
Oh, she did other things in the ancient city, too. Days passed in the museums or seated with a view of one of the city’s bridges and a cup of espresso or gelato in hand. But one evening, as she drank tea like a proper citizen of the Realm and watched Americans, Germans, and Chinese tourists let the omnipresent pigeons in the piazza crawl all over them, she’d seen him. The gentleman. It was really the only way to describe him because he wasn’t a tourist, and he certainly wasn’t something as common as a waiter or a store clerk. Not that there was anything wrong with being either of those things, just… He couldn’t be.
He walks with a motherfricking cane. Not because he was old or feeble, but because it increased the sexy. That’s what she attributed it to, anyways.
The gentleman appeared each evening without fail, entering the square from the far end, under an archway housing the tourist-trap shops, before strolling at a leisurely pace down the center, as though waiting for the fall of shadows cast as the sun set to proceed him like some kind of majestic, moonlit carpet unfurling. Like royalty. Women (and some men) gawked, and it hadn’t slipped Portia’s notice that she wasn’t the only repeat attendee to his daily performance. The fact that he looked like he’d just walked out of the opera, wearing a full suit, silver tie, and a finely tailored, heavy wool coat meant he didn’t exactly blend in among the tourists with their selfie sticks, gelato served in a cone (an abomination, if ever there was one), and blue jeans. One time, Portia watched with amusement as two young women proved bold enough to broker an approach. One look and half-cocked smile had sent them into hysterics, however, and the photo they’d probably been hoping to get never came about.
Portia was not bold, but she was an opportunist. She wasn’t about to let a male muse keep vigil through the middle of her evening routine and let it go to waste.
Their eyes had met that first night and only that first night, and when they did… Wow. Over the eight years of her marriage to Richard, not a single thing they’d done in or out of the bedroom had quaked her knees in quite the same way. Il Reboundo hadn’t smiled or made any gesture to encourage her then. Portia only had herself to blame for the obsession she’d developed, because he certainly hadn’t acknowledged her existence since.
Her pencil went to work the moment he stepped into view. The majority of the sketch was finished, but the eyes and the shape of his mouth still gave her trouble. They held a quality difficult to render in two dimensions. As her Nana might have said, Il Reboundo had the eyes of an old soul, ones which had witnessed both joy and sorrow beyond their years. Then again, Nana had also claimed that Portia had such eyes. Richard had scoffed. “I don’t know, Port. They look like plain old brown to me.”
The trench coat brushed the sides of his legs as he promenaded, eyes forward, silky ebony curls jostled by both his gait and the salty breeze coming in off the sea at dusk. The omnipresent pigeons flew from his path, adding to the façade of his bigger-than-life presence. As typical, women old enough to recognize the appeal swooned as the statue of Adonis-brought-to-life passed, a modern masterpiece of genetics.
Portia wondered what it may be like to eat gelato off him.
The pencil made way for her eraser. Again. The cheekbones—high, but not as symmetrical as she’d first drawn them. She looked down, correcting the mistake, even though it meant she’d miss his exit under the arches of the basilica, and… Wow, if he was pleasant to look at from the front, he was twice as nice from the rear. The coat hid some of the view, but its swish and sway allowed one to take in the defined outlines.
Her pencil leapt all over the page, scratching memory made graphite. Portia set down her tools after a few more minutes of work and held up the piece for closer inspection.
“As the locals say… è perfetto.”
The beauty of her sketch lay not on the talent of the artist but in the magnificence of the inspiration behind it. When she’d leave Italy in two more weeks “Gentleman in Piazza San Marco” would go with her, an eternal reminder of this glorious time in her life, when she’d left it all behind and had run off to Italy for a season like she’d always dreamed.
But as her stomach rumbled, Portia reminded herself that, even when living one of your life-long dreams, reality required a budget. Venice came with a price tag. The café had a great view, but her daily cup of latte was really the only thing her pocketbook allowed. Time to get back to the flat and yet another bowl of homemade minestrone. Portia stowed the sketchpad in her side bag and left a few euro to cover the bill, just as she’d done every evening for the past month.
She’d only gotten six steps from the table when someone called out behind her. “Signora, you forgot this.”
She spun, already taking a mental inventory of what it was she could have left, when every cell in her body electrified.
It was him. But how? He’d already passed through the far end of the square and out of sight. How could he have had time to… Why was he grinning? Was he speaking? Yes, his lips were definitely moving.
His lips… mmmm.
“Signora?” His eyebrows rose as he jerked his hand before her, drawing her attention down.