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Tiptoe or not, the butterflies were back, particularly when she left Katrine with a few more kind and companionable words, and saw the sun hitting the horizon, heralding the oncoming night. Throughout the day, to calm her nerves about anything that might happen over the next few hours, she’d returned in her mind to their trip from the airport. That illuminating car ride had reassured her, at least temporarily. So, knowing he’d soon be waking, she decided to give herself a few moments on the balcony overlooking that sunset and water view and revisit their conversation, hoping the combination of visual and memory would calm her anew . . .
It was odd to see him away from the island and his cats. Instead of his faded jeans and T-shirts, he wore a pair of slacks, a white dress shirt and a slender copper tie with a pewter tie tack. His coat lay over the seat opposite him in the limo. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and he had a knee propped against the door. Sleek and brushed, his hair was pulled into a tail at his nape, so it emphasized the strong bones of his face. He looked like a lean, powerful animal pressing against the bars of his cell, ready to leap out as soon as the door was opened.
He was very handsome in the suit, but she liked imagining the shirt pulled open to reveal the bronzed chest, the tails fluttering with the wind, the tie gone. Or perhaps the tie wrapped around her wrists and tethered to the hook above the car window, so he could pull her shirt open and nuzzle and feast upon her breasts, sitting up high in the lacy bra he’d insisted she wear.
She slanted her gaze upward. “That wasn’t my thought. That was yours.”
“You don’t seem to be objecting.” Reaching over, he captured a curl around his finger, let it go to spring back against her temple. “I’m beginning to regret getting you that bra, and that scrap of panties that go with it.”
“Why? You don’t like them?” She was crestfallen, because he’d seemed to like them so much when she put them on.
“I think you remember exactly how much I like them. It’s a wonder they survived my approval.” He sighed. “I’d prefer Lord Marshall not to notice you, but I want you to be as beautiful as you are. I don’t want other servants teasing you or being unkind.”
Elisa gave a snort. “Every household has a few of those, Mr. Malachi. People who think because they’ve been a servant for a certain length of time or because they handle the master or mistress’s arse-wiping, they can put on airs. They just do it because they know they really aren’t any better than anyone else, and won’t likely ever be. I don’t pay any attention to that. And I know vampire servants aren’t domestics, but I expect it works in a similar way.”
“Hmm.” He cocked his head. “Mr. Malachi?”
“I figure I better practice. I expect I’m not supposed to call you Mal in front of them, and with more than one of you in the room, sir might not be specific enough.”
“Master might be.” His eyes gleamed in the dark. It sent a swivel of sensation through her lower belly, helping to dispel the nervousness. Some of it.
“It might.” But when she laced her fingers together to foolishly try to hide her growing anxiety, his mouth tightened, mood changing.
“Tonight, we’ll likely both have to be what we’re not, Elisa. I can’t tell you how much I hate saying those words, for either of us.”
Maybe it was because it was still dark, the streets so empty at the early morning hour. There was something about the cloistered solitude of a car that made it feel more intimate, less formal. The driver, separated from them by privacy glass, only made it feel more like that. So as that familiar sadness stole into his gaze, she leaned over, laid her head on his chest. Giving comfort as well as taking it when he put his arms around her.
“We’re not pretending. You’re as much a scary vampire as you are a person who likes quiet islands and the company of cats more than people. You make me feel beautiful and wanton and exotic when you touch me, but I’m still just Elisa, a housemaid. We know what we are. That’s all that matters. If I have to go someplace I don’t want to be tonight, I’ll just send myself to a room in my head and shut the door. A puppet part of myself will do what it needs to do. Then, when that’s all done, it’ll come knocking and the real me will come out again.”
“Your hands are cold.” His gentle rebuke was spoken against her ear as he folded them inside his warm one. His other hand stroked her hair.
She heard that neutral tone in his voice, but now she knew enough about him to know it covered much stronger emotions. Laying her hand on his thigh, the smooth slacks, she spoke in a near whisper. “You won’t let anyone truly hurt me. It’s just buggering and being naked.” That thigh muscle tensed, but she pressed on, following instinct. “I’ve done that with men who don’t care anything for me except what my mouth and other parts of me can do for them, and it’s not so bad, as long as you have that room in your mind.”
“I don’t like it, Elisa. I truly don’t. And yet . . .”
Lifting her head, she looked into his face. “I understand. I’ve seen the way of it, with Danny and Dev. It’s scary, and he’d probably not like admitting it, but Dev enjoys it because of that unexpected part of himself. The part that likes pleasing her. I have that, too, don’t I? You’ve said so.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll be there with me, every minute.”
“Count on it. Inside and out.” He gave her a direct look now. “Have I ever given you cause to do that? Go into that room and close the door?”
She smiled. “You’d just follow me in there, wouldn’t you? So what would be the point?” At his look, she laid her hand on his jaw. “This will be apples; don’t worry. Will you be okay?”
“You really do ask the most inappropriate questions for a servant. I’m a vampire. I’m invincible, like Superman.”
“Oh no.” She made a dismayed face. “I forgot to pack your cape and tights.”
“Well, I’ll have to beat you for that.”
Suppressing a smile, she settled back on his chest. But as they continued to drive through the night, she wondered if he’d ever had a room like she’d described, a place to hide when he was little. Somehow, she thought he hadn’t. However, while she thought he had lost some of himself because he couldn’t hide that boy safely away, she also thought he’d rediscovered some of it when he created what he was now. A whole new person, formed out of the good, the bad, the remembered and the forgotten.
Realizing from his stillness he was reading her mind like a picture show, she flushed, pressing her hot cheek against his crisp shirtfront. Her fingers curled against his strong thigh as he spoke, a velvet rumble under her cheek.
“You are a remarkable human, Elisa. So deferential, and yet you’re an ocean tide. You’re unstoppable, even though you’re just a recurring lap of water on the toes, nothing threatening or aggressive. It’s extraordinary.”
“And frustrating. I heard that thought, even if you didn’t share it.” She tilted her head up, seeing the gleam in his eyes, confirming it. “Would you tell me how you became a vampire? If it doesn’t upset you too much.”
He shook his head. But he looked out the window a few extra minutes, gathering his thoughts, before he spoke again. “I worked for a family in Boston, as you knew. So much noise and too many people. There were others there, like me. Black, Indian, Asian. We were bonded by our bitterness. One night, hanging out behind a bar with brown-bag bottles, I was drunk enough to say I hated being an Indian. Hated it with every fiber of my being, every drop of my hated blood. I demanded from them, from the sky, from anyone who would listen to an obnoxious drunk, what I’d done to deserve being born a member of such a miserable, fragmented group of people. I’d forgotten my mother, the way she sang to me, the meals she cooked for me. How I’d lain with her in our cabin at night, the two of us anticipating my father’s return from his trap lines. I was young, furious and stupid.”
Elisa stayed silent, watching his expressions as he faced his past, his regrets. “A woman walked out of the darkness that night, a beautiful woman with cream skin and red hair, blue eyes. Drunk or sober, all of us knew about the type of women fascinated by men of different colors, who liked the thrill of taking them to their beds, of ‘wallowing’ below their station.” His lip curled. “It didn’t matter. We were men, and life was hard. We’d take pleasure where we could get it. She told me she could make me something different, something powerful and eternal. All I had to do was agree to it, and to stay with her until she tired of me.”
“She was a vampire.”
He nodded. “Just as she promised, I became something entirely different from what I’d been. I was with her twenty-five years, and I wasn’t the only one. She liked collecting. She had an African prince, a Buddhist monk . . . even a circus performer who fascinated her because he was wholly covered in tattoos. She wasn’t unkind, not as vampires go. She just thought of us as pets. She could be cruel if we got out of line, and she was powerful. But eventually she moved on to new oddities, releasing me from her service. She told me I was welcome to stay as part of her household until I decided what else I wanted to do. I stayed, too used to being her toy to want anything else, nursing my selfish angers under the façade of the bored urbanite.”
Elisa regarded him with frank astonishment. “I can’t even imagine you that way. It’s like a whole other person.”
“I was.” He paused, shifting. “Then one day I attended a Wild West show that advertised ‘real’ Indians, including a bona fide chief. Part of the show was a mock battle between cowboys and Indians. Of course the cowboys won, and then the chief was paraded out to surrender and become their prisoner. People responded as they were supposed to do, with boos and catcalls. He was silent, dispassionate, in a magnificent headdress of feathers.”
