“The butler.”
“Yes, he can give you a ride—”
“Oh, no, I’ll just get another cab.” When he cursed, she took his hand and got with the program. “It’s okay. And I understand—”
“Or you can stay here.” Before she could respond, he jumped in, “You’re safe in this house. Fritz loves company, and you could just wait a little bit until I come back? I really don’t want this night to end, but especially not like this, me all rushing out. So you could stay here—actually, please, stay here. I won’t be gone any longer than absolutely necessary.”
Anne told herself to say no, thank you, and no, she’d just call a cab, and no, she wasn’t going to wait, and no…
“All right.”
Darius’s expression eased, a smile replacing some of the stress. “That’s great—that’s just… thank you.”
The idea that her presence meant so much to him made her feel important. And then his lips were on hers, a warm brush.
“I’ll be as fast as I can.” He glanced back at the broken vase. “But you can’t stay in this room. Go upstairs while I change and Fritz cleans this up?”
“Okay, I will.”
She smiled a little and turned away—
Strong arms brought her back against a strong body, and Darius bent her off-balance, holding her weight easily.
“I’ll be counting the minutes,” he murmured.
And then he kissed the ever-living shit out of her.
When he finally set her back on her feet, they were both breathing heavily.
“As soon as I get home, I’m going to…” His voice trailed off, and his eyes raked her from head to foot, their intensity making her feel naked. In a good way. “You know what, I better stop that sentence right there.”
Anne pretty much floated out to the bottom of the stairs. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw him silhouetted in the open doorway—and she was never going to forget the way he stared at her: He made her feel beautiful, in a more-than-skin-deep kind of way.
For a sizzling moment, she wanted to say something alluring, something that might have come out of the mouth of, say, Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor.
Instead, she just smiled again and started her ascent out of the cellar. Maybe the mystery would be sexy enough. Then again… given how he looked at her? Maybe she was enough just the way she was.
And as Anne continued to put one foot in front of the other, and passed by the lanterns, and felt remarkably unweird about staying in the house of a relative stranger with the man’s boss’s butler…
… neither the vampire who had offered her his hospitality nor she herself, who had accepted the invitation, knew that her life had been saved by her decision to remain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Darius re-formed in a stand of bushes that had all the ocular appeal of a ball of scrap metal, he really didn’t want to hear one goddamn word from Vishous about his change of mind. He was currently in a mood that vacillated between nasty and murderous, and while that was helpful on the job, it was also an incendiary pendulum on a good night, a real frickin’ joy when you were working an induction scene with the likes of V.
Especially after you’d just left a woman you’d much rather be with back at home while your butler cleaned up a lesser mess.
Fortunately, as the brother materialized beside him, V didn’t seem to be interested in any off-topic conversation about U-turns, and what a blessing from the Virgin Scribe. Yes, Anne was important—too important, really—but the sight of that lesser blood on the floor of the chamber had been what shocked Darius back to his priorities.
And of course there was no way V would have gone and gotten Tohr.
Good thing Anne had been willing to stay.
“A hundred yards this way,” V said as he palmed two of his guns and started off through the brambles and trees.
Talk about your unnecessary directions. Darius could already scent the baby powder on the breeze, the stench firing him up, not that he needed much help with that. He was beyond ready to fight, and praying they’d find some stragglers—and unlike his fellow fighter, he had daggers in his hands, not guns. He wanted to get up close and personal to his prey.
Maybe he’d use his teeth, too.
Moving silently, they were draped in shadow, the heavy cloud cover working in their favor and blocking out the moonlight. About fifty yards farther in, the forest thinned and a decrepit two-story structure presented itself in the middle of a clearing. With a crumbling chimney, numerous broken windows, and siding that looked as if its paint had been sandblasted off in sections, the structure listed to the left.
So it wasn’t just cosmetically run down, there were issues with its very foundation.
Trying not to think about parallels to the species, Darius quickened his pace, aware that the pair of them were sitting ducks as they broke free of their cover. Closing in, the stench of lessers got louder and louder in the nose, until he had to rub things to keep from sneezing out his frontal lobe. And then they were right up to the rear of the farmhouse. Without any words, he and Vishous communicated using hand signals, one of them going right, the other left.
Circling around the flank, Darius monitored the busted glass frames of the windows, his hearing supercharged to pick up even the slightest movement inside. Around him. Above him.
As he came to the far corner, he put his back against the aged siding.
He waited long enough to be sure that there was no ambush. Yet.
Then he jumped out.
The front of the farmhouse had once sported a covered porch; now there was just a pile of vine-choked kindling on the ground and a collapsed roof section hanging off the eaves. The disintegration of the proverbial welcome mat hadn’t stopped people from going inside, however. The overgrown circular drive had been ripped apart by the tires of God only knew how many vehicles, the deep grooves carved through the tangled weeds and spotty dirt patches suggesting that, at least on the departure, people had been in a hurry to get the fuck out of Dodge.
Then again, the Omega didn’t exactly greet his new recruits with a handshake and a fruit basket—
A flash of movement to the left brought Darius’s head around. But it was only Vishous stepping free from the opposite side.
V held up two fingers, then tapped over his eyebrow. When Darius nodded, the male dematerialized to case the second floor.
Crouching down, Darius ducked under what was left of the porch’s overhang and did his best to navigate through the salad of rotted two-by-fours, framing beams, and flooring lengths. A couple of times, his boots splintered what he stepped on and his crotch nearly got spanked twice.
So much for the stealth approach. Any more noise and he could have brought a marching band with him—and in retrospect, he should have dematerialized through one of the windows on the side. When he finally waded through the morass, he found the front door lying flat on the floor of the modest foyer, as if it had fallen in—or been kicked in off its hinges. And oh, God, the smell of baby powder and fresh blood and new death was so thick, it felt like a fog in his lungs, like he shouldn’t be able to see through the air.
His eyes were working just fine, though… so he got a clear visual at all the drywall buckets stationed in the various rooms. They were filled with human blood, but the shit was also everywhere, splashed on the floors, speckling the walls… there were even spots of it on the ceilings.