“You owe me, Christian.”
“I don’t owe you shit,
Naomi
.”
It wasn’t so much his language as his unabashed hostility that had Grace sucking in her breath. The sound wasn’t loud, but Mr. Durand spun around like lightning on hearing it.
He was facing her then, and his eyes went wide. Grace’s heart slammed into her ribs, but he seemed more shocked than she was. Knowing pretty well how she looked, she was used to men reacting to the sight of her. This man’s response took the cake from them all. His head jerked back like someone had popped a knuckle sandwich into his chin.
He bit out a word she thought meant
shit
in German.
“Well,” Miss Wei purred, her gaze shifting back and forth between them. “Isn’t this interesting?”
Grace’s brain recovered enough to realize that Mr. Durand’s face was movie-star gorgeous, which probably accounted for why her pulse was pounding like a jack-hammer. Oh, he didn’t resemble James Dean or Marlon Brando, but he had their can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him charisma. She judged him about Dean’s age, early twenties or thereabouts, a little lined from working outdoors but still young enough to pass for eighteen. His coffee dark eyes smoldered with hypnotizing hints of gold. His lips were thin, it was true, but a girl could slice her heart on those high cheekbones. Even his arms were sexy, the muscles graceful as they hung loosely at his sides. And, by golly, he was
tall
—six feet and change, she was willing to bet. Neither the recently departed Dean nor the still-rising Brando could pretend that.
Best of all, from the toes of his cowboy boots to the dashing widow’s peak of his hair, Christian Durand screamed
dangerous
.
“You’re right, boss,” Grace said, before she could worry how it would sound. “Every red-blooded American female
is
guaranteed to sigh over him.”
C
hristian couldn’t wrench his attention from the woman who’d traipsed uninvited into his barn with Nim Wei. She was the spitting image of his Grace, lost to him for—
Christ
—nearly five centuries. This female was a little older, but every year had given her a blessing. Her face had character to go with its prettiness: a shadow to make her glow shine brighter, a stubbornness to her peach-soft jaw.
Her tidy outfit of pedal pushers and crisp white blouse was ridiculous, of course, a girl playing dress-up as someone far more serious and less sensual than she was. Her figure was precisely the sweet temptation he remembered: a buxom, narrow-hipped torso set atop a pair of showgirl’s legs. This woman’s hair was shorter than Grace’s, waving only to her shoulders, though it
was
the same deep, dark red.
Movie actress hair, he supposed. Had to come in Technicolor.
Vampire that he was, with all the knee-jerk responses that went with that, he’d started hardening the instant he saw her.
Hardening
wasn’t the word for what he was doing now. Running his eyes up and down her very warmblooded beauty had his prick screaming for mercy inside his jeans.
It didn’t care that she couldn’t be his lost beloved. It was chomping at the bit to burn down this barn with her. On the bare floor right in front of him sounded fine, with his pike shoved up her pussy as far as it would go. He winced as his cock struggled harder against his fly, but the erotic images wouldn’t stop. It had been too long since he’d cut loose with a woman. He had too little trouble imagining this one’s ankles around his ears.
“This is Grace,” Nim Wei said in that insinuating voice of hers. As distracted as he was, he marveled that he made out the words at all. “She’s my close personal assistant. If you agree to star in my movie, you’ll be seeing her every day.”
The girl seemed startled by her employer’s promise, but she stuck out her hand gamely.
“Grace Michaels,” she said. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Durand.”
The name belatedly registered.
“
Grace?
” he repeated, abruptly hoarse. His normally cool palm turned fiery where she clasped it.
“Michaels. But please call me Grace if you like.”
He couldn’t release her hand. Her name was Grace, and her eyes were as clear and green as a peridot. All the times he’d stared into them rushed back like yesterday. He remembered these very fingers touching him with such kindness he’d feared he’d cry, remembered the way her spectral energy could tingle straight up his cock. The nerves there were tingling now—jangling, really, like a telephone ringing off the hook. Grace wasn’t a ghost anymore. She was as solid as the ground under him. Lord help him, if she brushed against him, his dick was going to erupt.
“Christian,” he said, having to push his name past the constriction inside his throat. “My name is Christian. Please call me that.”
“Christian,” she agreed nervously.
When she attempted to tug her hand back, his fangs punched down from his gums, reacting precisely as if she were prey fleeing. Her accelerated pulse was lub-dubbing in his ears, a siren song he wasn’t certain he could resist. Alarmed by his out-of-control responses, he let her go and stepped back.
Grace massaged her palm as if he’d hurt it.
“So?” Nim Wei said to him.
He looked at her, and he had no idea what she was asking. He wasn’t even certain what he felt. However it had happened, this seemed to be Grace, the same Grace who’d promised him forever and then abandoned him in his darkest hour. His face flashed hot and then icy. Did he hate her? Did he love her? Did he simply want to fuck her without stopping for the next ten years?
The painful surge of blood to his groin told him the answer to that was affirmative.
“Christian?” Nim Wei said, her lithe little arms folded. “Are you going to help me make this flick or not?”
She doesn’t know,
he thought.
Not who Grace was. Not what she means to me. All she knows is that her assistant has my cylinders running hot.
Grace couldn’t have remembered Nim Wei, either, or she wouldn’t have been trotting after her like a faithful girl Friday. Hell, the prissy sweater she’d tied around her shoulders was the same shade of powder blue as Nim Wei’s scarf. The witch of Florence was Grace’s goddamned mentor, as if Nim Wei weren’t responsible for half the trouble that befell them both back then.
All of which boiled down to Grace not remembering him.
He stared into her wide green eyes, his immortal heart contracting in his chest with an emotion very much like terror. She wasn’t putting on an act. He saw no recognition in her expression. She
was
flushed; attracted, unless he was mistaken, and embarrassed because of it, but only in the way—how had she put it?—any red-blooded American girl might be.
He didn’t understand what it meant. Had she been reincarnated like that crazy Bridey Murphy from the bestselling book? Could people come back looking just as they had before?
Without realizing it, he’d folded his arms in an echo of Nim Wei’s posture. He caught a flash from Grace’s mind of how he looked with his biceps bulging in the white T-shirt. That definitely didn’t lower his blood pressure. When Grace extended her hand to touch his bare forearm, her fingers were trembling.
“We’d both consider it a favor if you’d agree,” she said. “Miss Wei needs an ace in the hole to break out of making B movies.”
“And you think I’d be your ace.”
“Oh,
absolutely
,” Grace breathed, her enthusiasm momentarily teenagerlike. “I know you’re inexperienced, but we could coach you. A person’s presence is what matters for most films. Acting is something plenty of folks can learn.”
“And
you
could coach me,” he said.
Grace shot an uncertain glance at her boss before turning back to him. “We both could. Or we could hire someone. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”
Despite feeling more discomposed than he had in four centuries, despite loving the peaceful life he’d built for himself out here, Christian sensed a rare canary-eating grin rising up in him. Love Grace or loathe her, he couldn’t hate the prospect of having her at his beck and call.
As the grin spread across his face, threatening to bare his fangs, Grace tensed warily back from him.
“
You
coach me,” he said firmly, “and we might have a deal.”
“She’d be delighted to!” Nim Wei exclaimed before Grace could speak. “Now why don’t we drive to that two-bit town of yours and all have a drink on it.”
How much he disliked her answering for Grace dismayed him. After all this time, and certainly considering the way Grace had broken her promises, he shouldn’t have felt protective. His shoulders began to ache with the tension gathering there.
“Would you excuse us, Grace?” he said, his gaze locked firmly on Nim Wei’s, where he suspected it was safer. He noticed idly that the bitch queen had cut her hair. Because the black locks didn’t or wouldn’t curl, the feathery cut was boyish, giving the vampiress a disconcertingly modern look. Modern or not, he bet she was as devious as ever. “Your boss and I have a thing or two to sort out.”
He took his old nemesis by her deceptively slender elbow, pulling her to the shadowed privacy of his workbench—far enough that Grace’s human ears wouldn’t hear. He wasn’t consciously showing off his strength, but he knew he’d done so when Nim Wei rubbed her arm.
“Someone’s been eating their spinach,” she observed dryly.
“You’re not the only master vampire here.” He’d lowered his voice in order not to sound petulant. Nim Wei smirked anyway. They both knew physical strength was probably the only arena where he could match her—maybe the least important in an age that had advanced so far beyond hand-to-hand combat. Christian was relatively new to his elder status. Nim Wei had been queen among their kind for millennia. Add to that her mystic bent, and he doubted her drawing his long-lost lover into her orbit was a coincidence. Why Nim Wei had drawn Grace was a better question. She’d always been able to sense and pluck the strands of Fate for her convenience, including when she wasn’t aware of it.
Not inclined to help her become aware, he shielded his thoughts from her.
“You shouldn’t be offering that girl on a platter like she’s your possession.”
Nim Wei’s perfect black eyebrows rose. “Nonsense. Grace adores me. And rightly so. I saved her from a fate worse than death—or almost. You’ve no idea what indignities human waitresses put up with. Besides, don’t you want me offering her to you?”
Christian ordered his fingers to release the edge of the worktable, where they were threatening to crush the wood to sawdust. It was an effort to speak coolly. “If I wanted her, I wouldn’t need your help.”
Nim Wei’s smile exposed a quicksilver flash of fang. “Don’t be so sure. Grace already idolizes me. Imagine if I bit her. I doubt even your red-blooded manliness could override my thrall.”
His hand blurred up to grip her neck so swiftly that his better judgment took a moment to catch up. He might as well have throttled a statue. Unruffled by his attack, Nim Wei’s marble white fingers stroked the bones of his wrist.
“Temper, temper,” she scolded as he eased his hold and let go. “Really, Christian, this is a wonderful opportunity I’m offering you. A bit of a challenge to ameliorate your boredom.”
“I’m not bored.”
“A little birdie told me you resigned from X-Section.”
“Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts soured me on spying. Let the humans search under their own beds for Communists.”
She nodded knowingly. “You want to run your life, to shape it without answering to anyone. I remember being that age.”
Christian glanced past his maker. Grace was hunkered down beside his Harley, her fingers trailing curiously along the chrome tailpipe. Hers was a human posture: slightly awkward and off balance, but it seemed beautiful all the same. Her hair glowed like blood where the uncertain light touched it. His ribs tightened with discomfort. Could she be the symbol of what he wanted? A future such as mortals dreamed of when they reached adulthood? He snorted at the ludicrous concept. He was 496. He was never going to have two-point-five children and a rancher in the suburbs.
“I gave you this existence,” Nim Wei reminded him. “Without me, even the worms who ate you would be dust by now.”
“You seem to forget the less than idyllic circumstances of my change, the way you helped my father destroy my life until I had nowhere else to turn.”
“You’re the one who craved the sort of vengeance only an
upyr
could mete out. Got it, too, as I recall. In any case, if I worried about every vampire who harbored a grudge against me, I’d never ask for favors.”
“God forbid,” he muttered.
Nim Wei slapped his upper arm, the sting a bit too sharp to be friendly. “However little you like to acknowledge it, you’re my get: a city vampire. Moldering out here among the cows won’t ever be enough for you.”
“I like the quiet.”
“Please. You can be quiet when you’re dead. You know as well as I do the question isn’t how many years we
can
live; it’s how many we
want
to. Time has weight, Christian. I can see yours weighing on you.”