A/N: I really have no excuse for this chapter. I apologize in advance ;) Y'all are awesome, and your reviews are pure love.

Nikola continued pulling books and tossing them into the quickly growing pile of boxes. He thought for a moment about following Helen to make sure she wasn't really angry with him, but then he realized that he knew her better than that. She'd be back.

Helen had gone to her office to work on paperwork for a few minutes. She couldn't truly be mad at Nikola; a hundred years of innuendo gave her plenty of warning regarding what she was getting herself into by getting involved with him. At the same time, she couldn't very well openly encourage his moral deviancy, so she decided the best option was to hide in her office and give him time to stew before she let him off the hook.

And then she thought of something…

"Nikola…" Helen said warningly from the library entrance, gun aimed in his direction as he closed up a box. He looked up at her and grinned, which infuriated her even more.

"How. Many." She demanded.

"Why Helen, I have no idea what you're talking about," Nikola cooed, stepping towards her making calming motions. She aimed the gun straight at his chest.

"How. Many. Tapes." She swore she was going to shoot that grin off his face.

"Just the one," he promised.

"You're lying," she accused.

"Am not."

"No, we are not starting that again," she said, thinking back to their last argument in which they fought like preschoolers. American preschoolers.

"So you believe me?" He asked, hopefully.

"Not remotely. But you are going to give them to me. All of them."

"Helen, if you wanted to see them all you had to do was ask." He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

"So help me God, Nikola…" He swallowed. She was really more angry than he had expected. The last time she had that look in her eyes she had actually shot him.

"Helen, what are you so worried about? Even if I did have tapes of every time we were…less than discrete…you know I would never let anyone else see them. I am entirely too invested in keeping you to myself." He had dirty in his eyes, and Helen was struggling to remember that she was supposed to be mad at him.

"That isn't the point," she sputtered. "The point is that it was a…a gross invasion of my privacy."

Nikola was trying very hard not to laugh. "Helen, you're really reaching. You could just let me off the hook, you know. I really do just have the one tape," he promised.

Helen suspected that he was telling the truth, and to be honest she shouldn't be wasting precious time on this nonsense. She wasn't sure why she was so upset. Then it hit her.

"You're sure you didn't keep one from, say, after we got back from Africa?"

"You mean after my resurrection?" He quipped. "Unfortunately not, because that was a good night…" Then he thought about it. "Or was it?" He asked gently, suddenly worried that Helen had been less than honest with him all this time. "Did I-?"

"No, no, it wasn't that," Helen cut him off. "It definitely wasn't that. It was…before. I was a mess."

And then Nikola figured it out.

It had been an excruciatingly long day. Honestly, by the time they got back to civilization, chartered a flight, and got back to the Sanctuary, it had been more like an excruciatingly long two or three days. Helen felt like she had been on an emotional roller coaster ever since they walked into that tomb. It started with the joy of being able to just get away with Nikola for a few days on an adventure—like old times—but that was soon followed by the gut-wrenching fear that she was going to lose him so quickly after they had started to figure things out. Followed by the relief that he was still alive mixed with the uncertainty of how his being a vampire again would change things. And then Afina had woken up…Helen just wasn't going to dwell at the moment. The fear, the anger, yes, the jealousy—it was all too much. She was tired and dammit, she wanted a long bath and to sleep for about a week.

She settled on a shower in the interest of being able to sleep sooner. She crawled into bed—alone, of course, because Nikola was undoubtedly off in a lab someplace taking advantage of his newly rediscovered energy—but, to her dismay, couldn't fall asleep. After almost an hour of staring at the ceiling, she gave up. Slipping on a robe, she padded down to the library to get a book, hoping that would put her to sleep. To her surprise, Nikola was in the library, as well, oddly enough reading the same book as the last time they had met like this.

"Helen," he looked up, surprised. "I figured you would be asleep. You must be exhausted."

"I couldn't sleep," she admitted, sitting down next to him. "I figured you would be in a lab blowing something up."

He smiled thinly. "I think we've blown enough things up for one week."

"Fair enough," Helen admitted. They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes before he finally brought it up.

"What's bothering you, Helen?" He tried to put his arm around her but she shrugged it off.

"Nothing, I'm fine," she insisted.

"Now, I don't know much about women, but I do know that when a woman who looks like she is about to cry tells you she's fine, that you had better have flowers or duck for cover." She smacked him. "See what I mean?"

"Why must you always do that, Nikola?"

"Do what?"

"Make light of everything. Even when you were-were dying in that tomb, you were making jokes." Her voice cracked at the word dying and Nikola started to realize what was wrong.

"I didn't die, Helen."

"But you damn well could have!" She yelled, angrily brushing tears from her face. "And when you survived-"

"Because you beat at a vampiric stasis chamber with a rock"

"And when you survived, you went after that-that-"

"Stuck-up, inbred bitch?" Nikola supplied.

"Yes. You went after her like a fish to water." She stopped, realizing how ridiculous she sounded, and wiped away more unbidden tears.

Nikola smiled softly. "Well, it looks like the great Helen Magnus is human after all."

"So that's it then?" She asked, resigned.

"Okay, now I'm just confused," he admitted.

"You're going to leave again. You don't have a reason to stick around; you have all the time in the world to continue your plans of global domination."

Nikola tilted her chin with one of his hands, forcing her to look him in the eyes. "Do you want me to leave?" He asked, uncertainly. She hadn't signed up for a relationship with a vampire and all that entailed but with a mortal, aging human.

"What I want is irrelevant if you are going to do it anyway."

"Helen, I've spent two lifetimes wanting you. Now that I have you, I'm not stupid enough to give it up over some crazy scheme. Besides, if that is what global domination does to a person, then nothankyou." She thought briefly about answering him, but settled for launching herself at his lips instead.

The kiss was rough—bruising and needy—and all thoughts of being tired were very soon gone as their hands started checking each other's bodies—just to make sure there were no lasting injuries from the blast. When they pulled apart briefly for air, Nikola's eyes were solid black, and Helen could tell he was fighting for his last shred of control. She shivered, partly out of a totally acceptable amount of human fear, but the larger part was definitely from desire.

Nikola saw her reaction, could hear her heart flutter, and knew that it wasn't from fear. That, the fact that she wanted even the part of him that he knew she considered to be a monster, was more arousing than anything she could have done to his body. Still, he needed to make sure.

"Do you trust me?" He asked, his voice deep and gravelly, on the very edge of transformation. Helen shivered again, and answered by drawing him in for another kiss. His lips left hers and trailed across to her earlobe and down the edge of her neck, pausing at her pulse. He kissed and licked and sucked at her neck until he knew if he didn't move on he would lose what little bit of control he had left. Especially the way Helen was clinging to him and making those delicious little moans.

He reached down and untied her robe and she shrugged it aside as he pulled it off her shoulders. She was wearing that red silk piece that he loved so much, and with ease he pushed the strap aside, pulling the top down and freeing a breast for him to turn his attention to. When he gently bit down on it, Helen's quiet moans became loud and wanton. She shifted so that instead of being beside him on the couch, she was on top of him, straddling his legs and rubbing against his erection.

She was going to be the death of him. He returned to her lips, moaning into the kiss. She undid his belt and pants, freeing him then moving to the buttons on his shirt. He shrugged out of it and tossed it aside, then pulled Helen's nightgown over her head, tossing it away as well. All that was left on her was her underwear. He ached to let his transformation take over and rip them to shreds, but he held back. Helen felt him still and looked at him, questioning. He was clearly about to go over the edge, and there was nothing Helen had ever wanted more. She leaned in and kissed his ear, following the same path he had on her earlier, landing at his pulse point where she sucked and then, without warning, bit down. It was just enough for Nikola to lose little bit more of his remaining control. Before she knew what had happened, Nikola had flipped them and was on top of her, and her underwear lay shredded on the other side of the room. She wrapped her legs around his waist and felt him press up against her. She needed to feel him inside her, to know for sure that he was alive, was still here. When he plunged into her, she let out something between a moan and a yell. There was no tender caressing, just the two of them working out a frantic need.

Helen couldn't get close enough to him. He was completely buried inside of her, their bodies pressed together, and it wasn't enough. Nikola's pace grew more frantic and Helen felt herself coming undone. In a last ditch effort to get him to do what they had both wanted this whole time, she reached up and bit him again, this time clearly drawing blood. That did it—he completely transformed, looking into her eyes only long enough to ensure that he didn't see fear but desire. As he sunk into her neck, both of them went over the edge…

"Let me get this straight: you're upset not because you think I have you on tape having kinky vampire sex, but because you think I have you on tape crying before the kinky vampire sex?"

Helen nodded, sheepishly. "It does sound rather silly when you put it like that."

"Yes. Now, will you put the gun down already?"

She had honestly forgotten she had been holding it. She set it down on the table. "So, you don't have any more tapes?"

"No. I promise," he reached for her and pulled her into a hug. She looked up at him, this time with dirty in her eyes. She pulled him in for a kiss, and then, well, as they say, history does repeat itself…..