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He inclined his head. “Understood. I can tug my forelock and ‘marm’ with the best of them.”
“If only it were that easy,” she muttered. At his askance look, she shook her head. “Just follow my lead,” she repeated.
A couple miles from the property, Dev stopped the vehicle for the last time. He holstered his pistol, put his rifle within reach so he could feed it down his back sling when he got out. His full complement of knives was already firmly strapped at his ankle, thigh, waist and back as well. Danny said little, watching him adjust the weaponry, then asked his assistance to check her own unique arsenal.
Before they’d started off, she’d used their water and cloth to scrub her face, and he’d helped comb her hair and French braid it.
She’d worn a wrinkled but clean T-shirt from his pack, tucked into her belted daks. Those were filthy, but her bearing pulled them off as merely a trifling inconvenience. He inclined his head. “You’ll do. You look fine.”
“Not that we have one handy, but my inability to look in a mirror is unbearably irritating.” Despite himself, he grinned. “Well, next to me, love, you look as if you could go to tea with the Queen.”
“You’re supposed to look scruffy and dangerous,” she informed him.
“Scruffy is hardly intimidating.”
“It is, if it implies an overbearing stench.”
He gave her a narrow glance, but put the vehicle in gear. A few minutes later, they pulled through the pole fence surrounding her childhood home, which backed up to the dark shadow of low hills. It was a good setting for a sheep station in a country that ran more to cattle. Dev stopped a moment, letting the engine idle. It was a nice-sized home, a two-story wood frame with a wraparound porch, secure weatherboard and corrugated iron roof. There was a handful of outbuildings that he identified as a couple bunkhouses for unmarried stockmen, a cottage or two for a foreman or married blokes. A stable, sheep-shearing shed and storage for equipment. It also had a diesel engine, likely for powering the generator for the house and well pump as needed. A windmill.
However, it was the house that reclaimed his attention. Though it was silhouetted in darkness, it appeared that the rear half of the home was embedded into the hills that folded back into the low mountain range behind it.
“That’s where the bedrooms are,” Danny explained at his intrigued look. “A study and alternative parlor. It works wonderfully for vampires.”
As they drew closer, the skeletal remains of what used to be watered perennials lined a front walkway, made up of crushed shards of termite mounds. Unkempt, tougher scrub would close in on them in no time. Dev noted Danny’s eyes touching upon those dried-out plants. He didn’t need access into her thoughts to recognize lingering evidence of her mother’s presence in what was obviously now an all-male domain.
There were men standing on the porch, as well as in front of the bunkhouse. In the open doorway of the barn, two more men stood, watching their approach. One had a cut on his eye. The other looked as if he’d recently been burned.
“Two of my attackers apparently made it away before we got them,” she noted. “I’m surprised they’re still alive, if they came back without proof that they’d done their job. God, I wish there’d been somewhere for us to stop to clean up.” He found it remarkable that was her primary concern. He’d noted three other men who’d come out of the stockmen’s quarters, giving them the same unfriendly once-over, as those two from the barn started to make their way to the porch. He also suspected there were reinforcements hidden elsewhere in the buildings. Five Rovers in excellent condition were pulled up front, suggesting Ian had additional visitors.
“How many vampires did you say are in your territory?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Probably about twenty. In all of Australia, there are less than two hundred, and like the humans, most live in the cities on the coast. There’s only about five thousand in the whole world. That we know of,” she added.
A pack of dogs had come out of the shadows and were milling, yipping. Danny, unconcerned, started to get out of the vehicle, when Dev put a hand on her arm. “Why don’t I get the door for you?”
She blinked. “Guess I need a reminder about appearing all uppity, don’t I?” He offered her a smile, because in that brief moment, the mask of calm slipped, and he saw some of her nerves. “I’m here, love.
Least if we get torn to pieces, we’ll have each other for company.”
“A comfort,” she said dryly, and gave him a steady look. “Dev, whatever else happens tonight, whatever I have to say or do, however I make you feel, I want to say thank you. You’ve been a true friend these past few days, and I’ve met precious little of them in my life, vampire or human.”
He nodded, meeting her eyes in a perfect understanding, for at least that moment. Then he opened his door. Whatever was going to happen tonight, she apparently expected him to be so horrified by the end of it that he’d need what he suspected was a high compliment. For her kind.
When he offered her a hand out of the ute, she took it. He made sure his grip was strong, steady. He had a fleeting sense she wanted to hold on, but she released him at the proper moment, stepping away from him.
Stay about two or three paces behind me, Dev. It’s not a protection issue.
The front door opened, and a man stepped on the porch. Even without the slight stiffening of Danny’s shoulders, Dev would have known it was Ian. He hadn’t really been giving it much thought, but now he realized one thing about the lore of vampires was true.
They were all beautiful. Dev’s tastes didn’t run toward men at all, but he had to acknowledge the man would earn the stares of either sex. His hair was sleek as a show horse’s mane, and lying on broad shoulders. A trim coat with open-necked shirt beneath, along with polished riding breeches tucked into boots, gave him that careless lord-of-the-manor look, which Dev suspected was intentional. The eyes he fixed on Danny’s were green, like Dev’s, but Ian’s were as brilliant as the verdant farmland outside Victoria. No blemishes or scars, no lines of age. He looked like a young man of twenty-five, though from Danny, Dev knew he was looking at a vampire more than four hundred years old.
But despite that, there was something off about him, flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Danny flicked her gaze at the two stockmen from the barn who’d joined the men on the porch. Picking up her cue without even a thought to back it up, Dev hooked a hand on his belt, his smallest finger resting with import along the pistol. He kept his eyes moving among all of them, and of course they were studying him as intently, gauging his mettle. He recognized the coil in his belly as anticipation. A fight had long ago lost the ability to make him nervous, and odds didn’t worry him that much. However, it had been a while since it meant more than the opportunity for violence. Now he was mindful of his responsibility to protect and serve the lovely blonde ahead of him. While he logically knew she wasn’t threatened by these thugs, the natural compulsion to keep himself between her and the line of fire was strong, despite her command that he stay back.
Steady, Dev. A soft whisper in his head. “Your men need further instruction on how to take out a vampire, Ian,” Danny said coldly.
“You inconvenienced me greatly on this trip home.”
Ian shrugged. “If I inconvenienced you, then perhaps I also managed to impress you a little bit. Can’t blame a man for trying.” Danny studied him, her face impassive. “Your grieving period is short. Not that I’m surprised.” Smiling like a benevolent angel, Ian moved to the bottom step. His well-manicured hand curled around the post, the other lying on his thigh, drawing attention to the well-muscled column held in the snug stretch of fabric, the curve of groin. With one booted foot on a lower step, it was an attractive pose, an obvious display of what he might have to offer her.
In contrast, she hadn’t had a full bath in a couple days. Wore a man’s shirt—Dev’s shirt—tucked into her dusty trousers. Yet dirt couldn’t mar the fineness of her features, the direct courage of her gaze. The way she held her shoulders back. Pure class she was, up one side and down the other. No matter what she said about the pretensions of nobility when it came to vampires, Dev thought it was obvious she was aristocracy, the man before her little better than a gigolo, hoping to scheme or ingratiate himself to achieve what she would acquire by right.
Ian kept himself on that bottom step, towering over her, which would force her to continue to look up or come to him. Which, whether he realized it or not, made him appear that much pettier.
“If you remember,” he said at last, “I offered you a place at my side, while she lived. I was willing to cast her aside for you. It was you who walked away.”
Danny’s expression remained unreadable, cool. “I don’t try to take another woman’s possession. Nor do I care for her leavings.” His lips tightened, a flash of anger. But Danny turned, unconcerned, toward Dev. “Bring our few things inside. My bedroom is on the second floor, last room on the right. Instruct the servants to draw me a bath, and notify me when it’s ready. I’ll be in the parlor.” Turning back after a brief eye contact, she added, “I would enjoy taking tea, Ian. Is there any to be had in this nest of testosterone?”
“I can certainly provide you tea, my lady,” he said. While the anger was gone, there was a new note to his voice. Challenge. “But my servant, Chiyoko, has that room—”
“She will remove herself from it. Now.” Danny did not move, but her frigid tone caused an uneasy shifting on the porch. “It was my mother’s room. As mistress of this house, it’s now mine. I question what you have become if you are allowing a human to claim a vampire’s status.”
“You needn’t stoop to petty insults, Danny.” Ian’s expression was masklike, the genial smile strained enough that Dev was reminded of a dog on the verge of snarling. “She only stayed there to be available to my needs in the suite next door. We didn’t expect you so soon. I have already told Chiyoko to vacate the room.”
