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It was all starting to settle in. Enough that on this late afternoon, he found himself sitting on the porch in a rare undisturbed moment, staring out at a glorious sunset as he drank his tea on the top step, listening to the wind settle, the last call of birds and the hum of the flies.
If he’d been out in the bush, he’d have wet the billy and been taking a cuppa about now, watching the spread of color from one end of the earth to the other, nothing in his view but that sky and the low-lying scrub leading up to it. He’d have been alone, purposefully mindless. Now, he was a bit tired, a lot of things still running through his head. He supposed he hadn’t yet figured out how to take care of things during the day and be around when she needed him at night.
“That’s because you’re not going to delegate until you’re sure everything’s being done right, and you’re so head-over-heels about me you can’t stop fawning over me at night, whether I need you around or not.” He glanced back, saw her standing inside the screen door, watching that sunset from the safety of the shadows. “Think you’ve got me all figured out, do you?”
“There are flies swimming in your cup,” she noted.
“When you come out here, they’ll stop pestering me.”
“I think my chief value to you is as an insect repellant.”
“Well, it does make the evenings far more enjoyable than they used to be. Can even wear my shorts despite the mosquitoes.” She made a face. As the sun cracked on the horizon, spreading out and then disappearing quickly, as it was wont to do this close to the edge of the earth, she slid out the door and took a seat next to him. She was as female as they came, but out on the station he knew she had little patience for anything but her moleskins or jodhpurs, combined with some soft, flowing tucked shirt that always made his fingertips itch to follow the line of her bra beneath the pale fabric, tease the cleft of her breasts in the neckline. Her eyes smiled at him, a slow, sensual response, picking up his thoughts, but she leaned back against the opposite post and comfortably braced the sole of one boot against his hip.
“You said you’d tell me one day,” Dev said, “why you wanted to come back here.” When she made a noncommittal hum, he took another sip of tea, looking out at the spread of darkness over the flat terrain, the transition of the mulga and gums to intriguing dark silhouettes. The last rains had put a touch of yellow on the mulga, and he’d thought about cutting her a sprig, giving it to her tonight to put in her hair, but one of the kids had escaped and he’d had to help Willis corral her. They were going to have to come up with a safe way to get them out, let them stretch their legs.
“I always liked living out here,” she said at last, surprising him. She straightened and turned next to him, the snug stretch of her jodhpurs allowing him to feel the length of her thigh against his. “It never gets boring. I can hear everything. The whine of the mosquitoes, flies . . . the movement of lizards, a snake twisting through the sand.” She nodded into the darkness. “I used to sit here and look at the trees and saltbushes and tell my mother that they became something else at night. A tall stockman with one arm raised, an aborigine bending with his straw to find water, a two-headed roo with a wallaby’s head for an arse.” She pointed and it was a remarkable description for the shrub she indicated, such that he smiled.
“I like quiet, Dev,” she continued, giving him a speculative glance. “I don’t need a fast-paced life. I can sit on this porch for the next twenty-five years if I want, and I’m sure I’ll still see something new every day. When I left all those years ago, I traveled to all the busy places. Paris, London, Berlin, Beijing and Hong Kong. New York and Hollywood.” When he raised a brow, she nodded, humor in her gaze. “Places where you don’t have to put the feet of the safe in pots of water to keep the ants out of your tucker. But I don’t need fancy places like that. I have some reading I want to catch up on. Do you know how many hundreds of books are written every year?”
Her eyes lit up with the idea of it, and he couldn’t help but smile again. Seeing it, she nudged him with her shoulder. “I love to read, and haven’t done much of it lately. Now that I’ve got a scholar in residence, maybe he can recommend some things to me. Maybe I’ll even coax him to read aloud to me, listen to Yeats or Dickens in that drawling sexy voice of his.”
“You might get him to do that.”
She gave him an amused look. “One of my favorite things, when I was here before, was staying up long enough in the morning to tune in to the radio calls.”
“Hear the messages being passed up the line about births and deaths,” he remembered. “And all the local gossip.”
“Yes.” Her mouth curved. “When life is this simple, there’s a purity to it.” Looking at her then, Dev wondered how she might feel if he took her hand. Her gaze flickered to him. “I wouldn’t mind it,” she said. “You’re a bit of an old-fashioned romantic, you know that?”
“Pot calling kettle again, love. Does it bother you?”
“No,” she answered, with such sincerity he believed it. “Another thing about vampires. Innocence goes very quickly. It’s not something you lament, because pleasure is, by its very nature, something worth the sacrifice if done right. But sometimes I miss the sweet joys of romance. Think that’s a female thing?”
He shook his head. “I can only speak for myself. I like a woman’s body as much as the next bloke, but sometimes, when a sheila looks at you with soft eyes and says she wouldn’t mind if you held her hand, something inside you gets all coiled. It’s almost better than having her on her back. Though you won’t find me admitting that to any mate,” he added. “Just to girls with big blue eyes that I want to shag.”
He ducked the swat, but then she reached out, touched his face. “Sex and violence . . . sometimes they’re too close. Particularly the way vampires practice them.” Her eyes turned outward again, her hand resting in his, their fingers comfortably interlaced, sitting on his knee. “Maybe that’s why I like the tranquillity, the sense of something perfect unfolding right before us. It gets inside you, rests there as delicate and momentary as a butterfly. It’s a balance that can be pushed off by too much . . . force.” 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.
