Sophia Read online

  The elevator doors opened behind him. He didn’t turn around, but continued dressing, pulling a black long-sleeved t-shirt over his head. Her arms around his waist kept him from pulling it down further, her hands still chilled from outside.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up,” she said, kissing his bare back. “A big rig truck jackknifed, blocking the road. We eventually went off-road and around, but it took time.”

  “You weren’t involved in the accident?” he said, eyeing the ruffle of her dark hair over his shoulder, which was all he could see in the mirror.

  “No,” she said, looking around to meet his reflected gaze. “It happened before we got there.”

  He turned and kissed the top of her head, pulling his shirt down and tucking it into his denims before buttoning the fly. She made a small, exasperated noise at his cool greeting, then flopped down in a chair, watching as he sat on the bed to pull on his boots.

  “You’re changing clothes?” she asked, stating the obvious.

  “Duncan and I met with the others earlier. Maxime continues to examine the records on the local server, though she’s found nothing and I suspect she won’t. I’m breaking my people into three teams and letting them hunt in the old way for now. Each team will begin at one of the crime scenes and circle out, ending with the town itself. We can cover far more territory far more effectively than any human search team. My vampires are getting restless with this interminable waiting, and angry because of it. This search will give them something to do. I don’t suppose you and your friend Colin discovered anything useful?”

  He looked up and caught her eyeing him warily. He met her gaze with a questioning look, eyebrows raised, but she just rolled her eyes briefly and said, “Murphy’s put out feelers on the stolen electronics. That might turn up something. In the meantime, though, we questioned a few locals. It was pretty boring. I felt bad for Robbie, having to hang around. But it did give me some ideas to follow up on the computer tonight. You’re going out with the hunts?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should let Elke go with you. I’ll just get in the way out there, so I’ll stay here and work. There’s a lot of ordinance and equipment coming into this area. That’s going to show up somewhere. I just have to find the right thread and tug it.”

  Raphael stood, stomping his feet lightly to seat his boots. “I don’t expect much from tonight. The real hunt will begin when we have something more to go on, perhaps from Maxime’s work, or yours. But until then, we’ll hunt the only way we can.” He donned his long, leather coat and started toward the elevator.

  “Raphael,” she protested from behind him.

  He turned to regard her, noting the brightness of her eyes even in the dim light.

  “Aren’t you even going to kiss me?” she asked.

  He studied her silently, then held out a hand. He nearly smiled at the flash of stubbornness that crossed her face. But he kept his amusement to himself, waiting for her to come to him.

  She did so, sighing heavily. “Why I ever fell in love with a damned arrogant vampire lord, I will never know,” she muttered, coming into his arms.

  He hugged her, smiling against her silky hair. “I have often asked myself the same thing,” he said. “Although, my own question is somewhat different than yours.”

  She slapped him lightly and raised her face to his for the long-delayed kiss.

  “Good evening, lubimaya,” he said, then pulled her into a long, simmering kiss, putting just enough power into it to forcibly remind her of their lovemaking. Her nipples had hardened against his chest and her heart was pounding as she pressed her long, lean body against his.

  “Damn you,” she whispered when he lifted his lips from hers. “That’s just mean.”

  He chuckled softly. “It was you who asked for a kiss, my Cyn.”

  “How late will you be?” she asked breathlessly.

  “That will depend on many things.” He took her hand and headed for the elevator again. “Traffic accidents and such,” he added blandly.

  Elke was at her post in the hallway outside the elevator when he and Cyn emerged. He knew Cyn was right, that Elke would rather have joined the hunt tonight, but regardless of what Cyn might say about her intentions to remain tied to the computer, he didn’t trust her. If something caught her fancy, if her computer search turned up something intriguing, she’d be gone into the night without a thought for her own safety or her promises to him.

  He saw Duncan and the others waiting across the great room. Before he could head that way, however, Robbie Fields, the human bodyguard he’d entrusted with Cyn’s daytime safety, signaled him from near the dining room door. Raphael left Cyn to her teasing of Elke—she was engaging the female vampire in a serious discussion of which board game they should occupy their time with this evening—and joined Robbie, who had ducked into the dining room out of sight.

  “My lord,” Robbie said as soon as he saw him.

  “Robbie,” Raphael greeted him. “Cyn tells me you had an uneventful day.”

  The human’s surprise was obvious and all too predictable. “Not exactly, my lord.”

  “Ah. So, tell me then, what exactly did happen?”

  A short, but informative conversation later, Raphael left the dining room and headed straight to the couches where Cyn sat talking to Elke and some of the others. He’d already assured Robbie that he’d done the right thing, both in the performance of his duty and in reporting the details to Raphael. Not that there’d been any question of that last. Raphael had made it clear that he wanted a full report on Cyn’s activities, knowing well her tendency to gloss over the fine points. She claimed it was to avoiding upsetting him unnecessarily, but even she no longer believed he fell for that excuse.

  “A moment, my Cyn,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her off the couch and back down the hall to the elevator. Vampire hearing was excellent and he didn’t want the entire compound to hear the coming conversation.

  She spun around as soon as they were downstairs, her mouth tight with irritation. “Robbie finked, didn’t he?”

  “Finked? Robbie did his duty, which is first to protect you, but second to inform me of any danger incurred during his watch.”

  “There was never any—”

  “Then why did I have to hear it from him instead of you? White supremacists? Vampire hate groups? You didn’t think this was relevant? And what about the clear threat to you made by a man with enough connections to know the men who savaged Mariane?”

  “I knew you’d freak out like this,” she mumbled.

  He looked down at her impatiently. “I am tempted to lock you in this room—”

  “You just try!”

  “But, as you so often remind me, you are who you are. So I will content myself with warning my security people to be extra vigilant.” He turned on his heel and entered the elevator once again, eyeing her dispassionately from within its depths.

  “I am disappointed, my Cyn.” The doors closed seconds before he heard something hard hit their surface. He laughed loud enough for her to hear as the elevator started upward.

  He was still grinning when he emerged upstairs, meeting Duncan halfway across the nearly empty great room.

  “My lord,” Duncan said somewhat warily.

  “We’ll be taking a short detour this evening, Duncan. Let the others go ahead.”

  “Yes, my lord. Juro will accompany us, of course. Will you want anyone—”

  “No others. We’ll join the hunt later.”

  Raphael strode out into the wet night, for once not noticing the weather. It was time these humans learned there was a price to pay for threatening that which was Raphael’s. And he intended to begin their instruction tonight.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sophia drove slowly down the narrow lane to Colin’s house. She’d nearly missed the turnoff, had only caught it at all because of the GPS’s melodious female voice urging her to turn right. As it was, she’d passed right by it and h
ad to back up to make the turn. The lane seemed barely wide enough for the luxury sedan Wei Chen’s people had provided for her, but she thought that might be due more to her lack of driving experience than anything else. After all, she remembered that Colin drove one of those oversized American alpha-mobiles, as if a man’s courage was somehow tied to the size of his truck. Or perhaps it was something else, something more intrinsic to being a man? She laughed out loud at the thought. As she recalled, Colin had no worries in that regard.

  All thoughts of laughter died as Colin’s house finally came into sight. She saw the lights first, shining through the ubiquitous trees which gathered closely around and above the narrow lane. Before too long, she entered a large clearing and saw the house itself. It was a big A-frame, all wood and glass, with light beaming from every one of the many windows, including the entire top half of the A itself. Short wings tucked out to the left and right, but only the one on the right had any lights showing.

  At least she could be fairly certain Colin was home. Either that or he didn’t like to come back to a dark house. But, no, his truck was there, parked off to the right in front of a detached garage.

  Sophia half expected him to hear her arrival. Not that the car she drove was noisy, quite the opposite, but it was so quiet here, especially compared to the cities she was used to. She turned off the engine and sat for a moment, waiting for the house door to open. When it didn’t, she opened her car door, closing it gently and walking up onto the porch. There was no bell, so she knocked . . . and knocked again. She frowned and sent a narrow thread of power past the door and into the house. There. A human heartbeat. And running water, which probably explained why he hadn’t heard her knock.

  There were few times that Sophia regretted being Vampire. This was one of them. Had she been human, she would have simply opened the door and walked in, surprising Colin when he finally emerged from his shower, or whatever washing up he was doing. Unfortunately, as a vampire, that wasn’t an option. So she waited until the sound of running water ceased, and she knocked again.

  Footsteps came from inside and she repeated her knocking. The footsteps drew closer, the heavy tread of a big man and her heart beat a little faster.

  The door opened and Colin stood there. He was only half-dressed, his broad chest completely bare, a pair of low-slung sweat pants hanging on narrow hips, revealing a flat abdomen ridged with muscle. He had a towel draped around his neck, and his hair was still damp.

  “Sophia. What do you want?”

  His voice startled her into meeting his sapphire blue eyes, so striking in contrast with his black hair, and she realized she’d been staring. But oh, he was so stare worthy. If anything, he was more delicious now than he’d been when she’d met him nearly a decade ago. He’d held the promise of a man back then, young and strong and fit. But now he was a man fully grown, with thickly muscled shoulders and arms and a man’s deep chest. A light sprinkling of dark hair across his chest arrowed downward, teasing her eye as it disappeared beneath the loose, drawstring waist. There were slices and puckers of shiny scar tissue across his torso and down his arms, but they only made him seem more fearsome, a warrior in his prime.

  And suddenly Sophia remembered why she’d taken him as her lover. Men had always wanted her, some for the bragging rights of claiming her, others for the things she could give them. But no one had ever wanted her for herself. Until she’d met Colin Murphy. He hadn’t wanted Lady Sophia Micaela Angelina, her father’s only child and heir, or Sophia, vampire and favored child of Lucien. Colin had only wanted Sophie, a peasant girl from the Central American countryside.

  “Sophie?” Colin said again, his brow creased in concern. “Is something wrong? Did something happen?”

  “No,” she dragged herself back to the present, to this place of perpetual rain and towering trees. “I just wanted to talk.”

  He studied her for a few minutes, then stood back from the door, inviting her in. She felt a blush heating her face and neck.

  “You need to invite me in.”

  “What?”

  “You need to say the words,” she snapped, embarrassed and angry about it. “I’m a vampire, Colin.”

  “That part’s true?” he asked in disbelief. “You really can’t come in without an invitation?”

  “It’s true. And it’s cold out here.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “Come on in, Sophie. Or do I have to call you Sophia?”

  “Sophie will do,” she muttered and stepped into the warmth of his house.

  * * * *

  Colin closed the door, watching Sophie—no, Sophia, he reminded himself—scope out his home. She was polite about it—more polite than Leighton had been the other morning—sticking mostly to the front room, poking her head into the kitchen and glancing down the hallway. She lingered there and he could read in her body language that she was dying to explore further. But she didn’t, looking over at him, before walking back into the living room where he stood waiting.

  He didn’t sit. Didn’t invite her to sit. It was bad enough that she was here in this house with him, looking pretty much the same as she had when he met her ten years ago. In fact, she looked exactly the same tonight with her hair hanging loose and those tight denims hugging her plump thighs and that fine, high ass of hers that had once made him hard just looking at it and thinking about what they’d do later. He’d dreamt about that ass when he was out in the jungle, had awakened too many times hard and aching, and counting the days until he’d see her again. And damn if he wasn’t getting hard just thinking about it again.

  This was the Sophie he’d fallen in love with. He’d stopped kidding himself about that a long time ago. He’d loved her, had never loved anyone since and figured he never would. When she’d died—or when he’d thought she’d died—he’d mourned for a long time. And now he’d discovered it was all a lie. He had to remember that. That he’d wasted all those years mourning a lie.

  “So, what is it, Sophie?” he asked impatiently. “Why are you here?”

  She looked up at him, her chocolate brown eyes boring into his soul, searching. For what? What did she want from him this time?

  “You can’t have her, you know,” she said abruptly.

  He scowled at her in confusion. “Who?”

  “Raphael’s woman. Cynthia. She’s in love with him, and even if she wasn’t, she belongs to him. He won’t let her go.”

  “You’re out of your fucking vampire mind, Soph.”

  “I saw you with her at the compound tonight, laughing and talking.”

  Colin chuckled bitterly. “Jealous, Sophie? You’re a little late to that game, aren’t you? You’ve been dead for ten years.”

  She jerked a little at his words. He felt bad about hurting her and then immediately called himself twenty kinds of fool. She’d torn his heart open and left it bleeding on the jungle floor and he was worried about hurting her?

  “We’re working together,” he said finally. “She’s kind of like my partner. We watch each other’s backs. It’s a matter of loyalty. Something I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “What does that mean?” she demanded, bristling.

  “It means your idea of loyalty is letting me think you’d been burned to death in a fire instead of just telling me to take a hike,” he snarled. “If you wanted to end it, Sophie, you could have bought me a glass of chicha and just told me.”

  “I didn’t want to end it,” she said, still giving him those big eyes. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Sure you did. Everyone has a choice.”

  “It wasn’t that simple,” she insisted. “There was a lot going on back then, Colin. More than you know.”

  “And clearly more than you’re going to tell me. So why are you here, then? You working for Raphael?”

  “I am not working for Raphael and I never will. My master is Lucien. Raphael rules the west, but Lucien rules all of Canada. He’s the one who made me Vampire, which was . . .” She stopped
talking suddenly, giving him an almost frightened look.

  “What were you going to say?” he asked her intently. “This Lucien guy made you a vampire, which was what?” He was still staring at her, but she’d shifted her gaze away, refusing to meet his eyes any longer. He tilted his head thoughtfully, repeating her words in his head. The thought hit him and he jolted in surprise.

  “Not what, but when. Isn’t that right, Sophie?” He put his hand on her arm when she would have moved away. “When did you become a vampire, Soph? How old are you?”

  She raised her gaze to his, her pupils so big her eyes were nearly black. “I was born in seventeen thirty three,” she said defiantly. “Lucien made me Vampire just prior to my twenty second birthday.”