She’d thought her affection for the lean stockman was one-sided. But when Danny had taken in the seven children that the previous Region Master had unnaturally turned into vampires, Willis had volunteered to serve with Elisa as a blood source to them. She’d known it wasn’t one-sided then. Not the way he met her gaze, sending heat prickling over her skin, a flush rising to her cheeks.
He’d been such a good man, too. Spoke little, but there was nothing on the place he couldn’t do. When Dev traveled, Willis served as station manager. She could watch him all day long and never tire of it. Working with the sheep, mending fencing, riding a horse. Willis put her on one of the brumbies, sat her in front of him to teach her how to ride. He wouldn’t let her get scared. That was where he’d kissed her the very first time. Making her lean her head back on his shoulder, he’d placed his lips over hers, giving her the taste of sun and tobacco, sweat and man, the press of his thighs on the outsides of hers. A man who was integrated into the world around him, the earth, air, wind and blazing heat of it.
She expected him to coax her to raise her skirts that very night, maybe in a corner of the stables. She might have done it, for the earlier ones had simply taken what they felt she owed them. Coated with courtesy or not, their demands had been implacable. Willis was the first who could make her heart pound up in her throat, who obsessed her with the way his brown, callused hands moved over a horse’s reins or handled everything from a fence post to a bucket. She’d been quite mad over him, like a girl with her first crush, and maybe it had been. The first time in her life she’d had that luxury.
Lady Daniela had marked her, so of course Danny could read her thoughts at will. When her feelings came to light, Danny surprised Elisa with her protectiveness. Dev was sent to give Willis a thorough talking-to, reinforcing that her maid was not a simple tumble. But Elisa knew it wasn’t that not-so-veiled warning that made Willis deal honorably with her.
He didn’t find a stable for her after that first kiss, or even the second. The third time he kissed her, though, it was with more urgency, but he broke away first, his hands flexing on her shoulders. She would have done for him then, but he’d given her a little shake, a fierce look.
“Value yourself more than that, girl. I want you bad, I do, but I want you to take me as the man you love, not the man you expect no better from. When you think that’s the case, then I’ll make you mine. For keeps.”
An incredible thought. For keeps. Man and wife.
But that dream was gone, lost in blood and savage animal grunts, the echo of her painful screams.
Thomas was there, with a handkerchief for the overflowing tears. With the right timing, when the need to flinch was overwhelmed by the need to cling, he eased his arm around her. Turning into his chest, she buried her sobs there as he held her close.
She felt safer with Thomas than most, because he was a monk. A monk who also happened to be a third-marked servant. He belonged to Lady Lyssa, a powerful friend of Lady Danny’s. It wasn’t Elisa’s place to pry about it, but she certainly wondered about him. A resolute celibate, he emanated the care and compassion a true man of God could offer. She took it now, seeking no answers where there were none, giving in to another bout of the endless grief.
He really was the biggest idiot in the world, Mal reflected. Just because he owed Danny a favor didn’t mean he owed her a bloody pound of flesh. The trouble with women was they had a serpent’s ability to coax and persuade a man to do unlikely nonsense. Like taking in six fledgling vampires who should have been exterminated as mistakes of nature. He guessed it could have been worse. It had been eight.
One of them had died before Danny could ever get the creature back to her place. Apparently unable to handle the transition from predictable brutality to unprecedented kindness, the fledgling had so lost herself in a bloodlust attack she ran up against a wooden pin used to hold a saddle and staked herself. The other one had been executed by Danny herself.
She should have done them all at the same time.
Malachi eyed the lights of the plane coming in for a nighttime landing on his airstrip. Every vampire in the world knew you didn’t turn children. But when Lord Charles Ruskin had done so to cultivate his unique and diabolical pack of “hunting hounds,” Danny hadn’t had the heart to dispatch them the way she’d dispatched their sire.
Of course, the Vampire Council didn’t want to be involved, because they had the typically European attitude that Australia was the ass-end of the world, the least of their concerns. While Mal wasn’t any fonder of the Vampire Council than Danny was, their heavy-handed attitude might have taken care of this problem before it ever got to his door.