A Vampire's Claim (61 page)

Her fingers twitched in his, a passing caress. “Romance is tenderness. Joy in just breathing together. Like this, when everything is perfect.” She slanted him a smile. “When you’re with a bloke who fancies you enough to hold your hand.”

“That’s not just romance, Danny. That’s love.”

When she stilled, he released her hand, stared down at his tea. “It’s a problem, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

Devlin looked back up. “You can see in my head, love. We’re a pair of odd birds, really. Just resisting the natural order of things.”

“And what’s the natural order, Dev?”

There was a tension to her now, as he knew there would be. They worked well together on so many things, seamlessly. But on this, the stitching was uneven, snarled. Most of the time they’d been too busy to do anything with it, though he’d suspected a few of the arguments they’d had were centered on this unresolved core. It was the elusive thing, the one that kept escaping his grasp when he looked too hard at it.

“I need to know what I am to you.”

“My human servant.”

“And what is that to you?”

At her look, he lifted a shoulder. “Church means something different to everyone, love. I want to know what it means to you.”

As she remained silent, he blew out a sigh. “Thomas thinks I’ve survived all these bloody challenges because his God knew you’d need me. My take on it is that He’s a bloody bastard. Or that He doesn’t think of me at all.”

Danny’s brow creased as she laid a hand on his shoulder. “I think of you.”

“Yeah. Like you think of them kids, the others on this place. The stray dogs you feed.”

Her eyes darkened. “Don’t be putting words in my mouth, bushman. I think of you, Dev,” she repeated. “There are the way things are, and the way I feel. You understand the difference.”

“I do,” he responded. “What I want to know is if you’re brave enough to say it yourself.”

When she didn’t respond, his jaw hardened. “Let me have a go at it, then. I know you can read it, but maybe you could stay out of my head and let me say it.”

She straightened, her blue eyes sharpening in that way that could slice at him with ruthless mockery, but she nodded. “All right. Say it, then.”

“Here’s what I think.” He set the tea aside and locked gazes with her. “I’m in love with you. You’re in love with me. And since I’ve been down this road, I’m pretty sure it’s the kind of love that lasts until one or both of us is dead.”

As he said the words, Danny saw his green eyes grow more intent, that sensual mouth going firm. When he looked like that, she knew his will was a match for hers, no matter what physical differences they had. Still, she hadn’t been prepared for the conversation, so she said the first thing that came to mind.

“We’re vampire and human. We can’t be equals.”

“It’s not about that, damn it, and you know it. It’s an understanding between you and me. That’s all that matters to me. I’ve no plans to take up missionary work and try to convert the vampire horde.” She couldn’t help a small smile at that, despite the flare of temper. His eyes glinted. “For one thing, it’s enough bloody work to keep this place running and deal with that menagerie of bloodsucking fiends you had to drag home like stray cats.”

“But they help with the rats,” she observed primly. She knew very well that he’d been wholeheartedly supportive of the idea, but now that he was working as her station manager, he had to gruffly disapprove of anything that added to the daily chores or costs about the place. It was one of the many enjoyable rituals she was developing with him. Which brought her back to the topic he was patiently waiting for her to stop avoiding.

“I’m not avoiding it,” she said mildly, putting annoyance in her tone.

“Thought I asked you to stay out of my mind.”

“I find your mind far more poetic. You’re speaking rough and plain tonight, bushman.”

Restless, she rose, moved down the several steps and stood in the yard, staring up at the sky, wondering how many stars might come out tonight. Stars that didn’t give a hang about vampires and how they were supposed to feel about human servants. It was a land that was so large that many found it overwhelming, a reverse form of claustrophobia that sent them scurrying back to the noise and comforting closeness of others in the cities, so that the stillness of so much open space couldn’t reach into the soul, unfold the things too large to be held inside.

A land that defied classification. According to geology, Australia had been unchanging, an island to itself, while the other land continents were still shifting for a few million more years, trying to sort themselves out. While the bulk of its people might be uncertain whether they were British or Australian, Australia herself apparently had no confusion on the matter. She was the one and only Oz. And that was what Danny liked about her. She liked a woman who knew her own mind.

Danny turned to look at Dev, sitting on the top step in his casual pose, his hat at a low-brimmed angle. The slope of his jaw, a dark shading from a day’s worth of stubble. He’d saved her life, but more than that, when he’d let her inside him, she found a man she wanted to keep close to her throughout her life. By her side, at her back. He was the type of man who’d try to be in front of her when there was danger, but he would readily turn around, let her walk into his arms.

She’d fought Ruskin, a purported nobleman. For a truly noble man, she’d needed to look no further than a dusty bushman she’d picked up in a pub. A bushman who’d avenged his family, stained his soul with blood. Had gone to war and tried to cleanse it with more blood, and then sought absolution in the damning silence of the bush. And he’d ended up with her, perhaps his penance, but perhaps her salvation, too. Maybe that was another vital element a servant provided—keeping Dev at her side was the key to keeping it in perspective, knowing right and wrong, the difference between power and enlightenment.

She took a deep breath and met his eyes, already seeing in that beloved crinkle around the green irises he could tell her answer.

She wanted him to see it in her face as well as hear it in her head, though.

I love you, Dev. I fell in love with you during that very first dance.

He smiled then, and that smile was like the sunset, stretching from one end of her existence to the other, lighting her way not by sight, but with a slow kindle inside she knew would never leave her bereft for the sun’s warmth.

As Lyssa said, may you serve me long and well, despite my bloody foolishness.

She moved back to the stairs, toward the embrace she was sure would always be there, and chose not to question that need in herself. As she put a knee between his feet on the step, his arms closed around her, strong and sure, bringing her in against the delightful planes of his hard body, his reassuring scent. Perhaps in the end, it wasn’t about vampire, human, or any other question of power or place. It was about finding the other half of the soul, in whatever vessel it rested.

Daft romantic nonsense,
he’d say, if she let him hear her thoughts.
Just like a sheila.

“Dev?” She spoke quietly.

“Hmm?”

“If it’s true about vampires and their servants being bound even after death, and if I have any say in it . . . I would release you. Tina and Rob had you first. They deserve to get you back.”

She felt the emotion fill him, thickening her own throat. “Ah, love,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect whatever’s running things on the other side will know the best thing to do. It may not be as simple as being with one or the other. Maybe it’s like falling into a marvelous treasure chest, made up of green hills, cooling rain, beautiful beaches and all the people you’ve loved.

You don’t have to choose only one treasure from it.”

Raising his head and drawing her chin up, he quirked a brow at her. “In fact, having both you and Tina . . . that might be heaven.”

And he gave her a vivid image of what he had in mind.

“Oh, you rat.” She managed to give him a smart smack on his head because of his bark of laughter. “That was from me
and
Tina.”

Despite her reproof, his laughter warmed her to her toes, for it was the first time she’d ever heard him invoke his family without pain. When he caught her wrists, and brought her smile to his mouth, she thought he might be right about one thing. The treasures of love were bottomless, because she thought she’d found that treasure here, even outside the gates of Heaven.

She was sure of it a moment later. In the midst of the kiss, the beauty of the Outback closing around them, she felt the sense of home envelop him, within and without, making her heart rejoice.

He was truly hers.

Turn the page for a sneak preview of

the next sensual novel by Joey W. Hill,

BELOVED VAMPIRE

Coming in August 2009 from Heat Books.

THE Sahara had once been green. Lush, a verdant land supporting civilizations. Then the earth’s orbit changed, the sun came a little closer and the land altered, becoming a desert that swallowed armies. It had happened three or four thousand years ago, barely a blink in the nine-billion-year life of Earth, but in that blink, Heaven and Hell had switched places. Had it been boredom, a need for a different perspective? Life giver, life taker.

Jessica wondered which face the Sahara preferred. Since she’d come here to die, it was a point of interest. Barely two years ago, her body had been vigorous and fertile as well. Now it was a barren skeleton that repelled most sensible life forms, so she felt almost at home here.

It was the largest desert in the world. A place one could walk for days—if one had the constitution of a camel—and see no other human life. But one could see the history of the area still mapped on this wasteland, if one had eyes trained to see it. She’d done little else of importance but study this region for the past several years. She didn’t really count killing Lord Raithe as significant. The vampire who’d forced her to be his servant for more than five years, and who was the reason she was dying now, was relatively nothing in the scheme of things. Creatures lived, creatures died, and their bones became sand like this. They all walked over the remains of their ancestors. At least he’d never torment anyone again.
That
mattered, though in truth, she’d been so sick for so long now, she couldn’t even recall why that had been as important as it had once seemed.

But Farida had remained significant to her, from the very first moment Jess opened the ancient binding and discovered the written memories of the sheik’s daughter who had lived more than three hundred years ago.

In the midst of a life so horrible Jess often thought she’d already died and somehow deserved Hell—though she couldn’t recall her crime—Farida had given her a spark of light. It was amazing to find that the body’s desire to live was stronger than anything, even despair. Maybe that was why she connected with a woman who had chosen love and then lost it, as well as everything else, but who still spoke passionately and vibrantly in her memoir of a love worth any torment.

Once she’d killed Raithe, Jess had spent the time between running and hoping she had the strength to keep going the next day studying those words. Hiding in dank places that only society’s forgotten frequented, often there was nothing else to break her thoughts except the trickling background of an internal hourglass, the sands of her life running out. Her cells were being subsumed in that flow of sand, as if she were becoming part of a place like Farida’s Sahara. She was okay with that. There were those who believed that the Sahara would return to greenness, that the cycles of climate change would evolve again, the sun getting less hot and the rains increasing. A different way of life would return.

That was when she realized where she was going to go and what she was going to do with the short remainder of her life. It was no more fantastic than what her life had been for the past five years. And no one would look for her in the Middle East.

But when she arrived in the Sahara, she realized that those who wrote of it as a desolate place devoid of life didn’t know it. There
was
life here. Not just in the few people and creatures that called it home, but in the ghosts that whispered, finding voices through the movement of the sand, a haunting noise similar to blowing across the top of a soda bottle—something she’d done as a teenager as she clustered with her friends on the curb outside the Quik-Stop with soda and Cheetos, eyeing the boys who came in after school. Boys who eyed them right back.

God, that was a long time ago. She held those memories to her occasionally like a favorite doll, crooning to it, taking comfort in nurturing something that could never give back to her.

The three men she’d paid to accompany her this far thought her a madwoman, of course. But she’d paid them enough to indulge her, and there was nothing to lose, no liability. Take a crazy, dying woman out to a remote part of the desert that wasn’t on any map, and she’d either eventually tire of her fantasy of finding the marker for a dead woman’s grave or die. They’d be rich men, either way. She’d shown them the jewels, what would be theirs if they helped her. She thanked whatever capricious deity watched over fools that she’d had the foresight to return to Raithe’s home for Farida’s book and take what amounted to a full measured cup of diamonds while everyone was still out looking for her. Raithe had a hoard to rival a dragon’s, so they’d never be missed.

Now, as she rolled the comfort of familiar thoughts through her head, a reminder of where she’d been, where she was going, she looked over the endless stretch of dunes. The breathtaking artistry of the wind upon them rivaled the greatest sculptors of the ages, and the sun collaborated, providing a different view with each degree it descended. But even that beauty couldn’t distract her from the fact that night was drawing close. God, she hated darkness. But she fingered the compass in her pocket, reassuring herself. The stars would help her find Farida tonight.

Reading the words had made her feel as if she were in Farida’s silken tent, where they cuddled on the pillows, girlfriends pressed forehead to forehead. The Arab woman had confided through every page that, while everything in life could be taken away by forces unable to be controlled, there was always a choice left. Something overlooked, if one did not let fear overwhelm desire.