Christian (Vampires in America: The Vampire Wars Book 10) (4 page)

Christian sighed. He looked over and exchanged a glance with Marc. “We don’t have time for this.”

Marc nodded. “I’m topped off, so if you want to conserve your energy for later . . .”

“No, I’ll handle it.” He raked his glance over the six men, noting the absence of the two who’d been idling among the vehicles. Apparently, they’d lingered to watch and had moved on when it became obvious that nothing exciting was about to happen. Unless one counted what Christian was about to do as exciting.

“Say good-night, Gracie,” he murmured. He pushed a little of his power at the humans, and watched dispassionately as they all slumped to the ground. And if he took particular pleasure in the fact that the leader’s head hit the ground a little harder than the others? Well, what did you expect from a vamper?

He smirked as the thought occurred to him, then turned at the sound of Marc’s chuckle.

“If that’s your idea of a brawl, we’re going to need a place to work out. Either that, or build a gym into the house.”

“We won’t be at the house long enough. By the time it’s built, we’ll be gone. But there must be a good dojo or two in this city, preferably with someone who knows Krav Maga. Texas is full of military guys, and the Special Force types typically endorse the discipline.”

“So we find a dojo, then.”

“I’ll probably be meeting Raphael’s rep, Jaclyn, tomorrow. I can ask her about a place, and there’s your friend Cibor. He’ll probably know, too.” Christian glanced around the parking lot, then down at the unconscious humans. “We should probably get out of here, before anyone notices these guys.”

“The bouncer saw—”

“He’s been taken care of. Let’s go.”

“ARE YOU SURE it was Christian Duvall who called?”

Natalie Gaudet rolled her eyes, thankful her back was turned so the other woman couldn’t see it. Anthony’s secretary, MariAnn, had asked this same question at least ten times in the last hour.

“All I can tell
you
is what the man told
me
. He said he was Christian Duvall, and he wanted an appointment. Lord Anthony was in his office, so I checked with him, and he said to schedule it for shortly after midnight.”

“But Christian’s never come to the office before. If I’d known he was—”

“Why the big fuss? They’re all gorgeous—he’s just one more in a long line.”

“But Christian . . . he’s, he’s . . . tall, dark, and delicious. Like an ice cream cone that you just want to lick all over.”

Natalie frowned. She liked ice cream as well as the next person, but comparing a vampire to an ice cream cone?

“Why don’t you go on down the hall and freshen up before he gets here,” she urged. “I’ll hold down the fort.” Anything to get the hysterical woman out of Natalie’s air space for even a few minutes. The girl had been running around like a chicken without a head ever since she’d heard the name “Christian Duvall.” Not in fear, mind you, but because she’d seen the vampire from across the room once and thought he was
so
handsome. As if every vampire who walked through that door wasn’t just as fine to look at as the next one.

“Thanks,” the overwrought MariAnn responded. “I’m going to run out to my car. I picked up my dry cleaning on the way in tonight, which must be fate, don’t you think? I have to change my blouse, and maybe this skirt, too. And I think—”

Nat tuned out MariAnn’s monologue on the wardrobe dilemma, something that had become a habit in the two months they’d worked together. The tuning out part, that is. Anthony had a tendency to hire secretaries more for their decorative properties than for their skills or experience. And with Natalie’s office less than fifteen feet away from whatever pretty face Anthony positioned at the reception desk, tuning out had been critical to getting her own work done.

She admitted a certain curiosity about MariAnn’s current hysterics, though. This Christian Duvall must really be something to drive the girl right up to the edge of hysteria like that. He hadn’t sounded like much on the phone. Oh sure, he’d had a nice voice. But he’d also been rather stiff and formal. The attitude didn’t exactly scream hunk-a-licious to her. It might have been a language barrier, though. English obviously wasn’t his first language, and he had a fairly strong accent. But he hadn’t seemed to mind when Nat joked with him about his formality. The very fact that he’d understood that she
was
joking told her he probably didn’t have a stick up his ass. Not like some of the old ones did.

She looked up in time to catch the flash of MariAnn hurrying out of the office, her heels tapping down the hardwood floor of the hallway. She hoped the girl hadn’t said anything important before she rushed out, but then she shrugged. Whatever. It wasn’t her job to run this office. She was the accountant. Or more to point, the
forensic
accountant, brought in to unravel the twists and turns of old Jabril’s sneaky finances. As an honest woman, she was appalled by the blatant theft the dead vampire lord had been perpetrating against the two young Hawthorn heiresses. But as an accountant, she had to admire the cleverness of it all. It took some real talent to manipulate books like that. Although a goodly amount of simple document forgery was involved, too.

In any event, it was her job to figure out what belonged to the Hawthorns and what was legally part of Jabril’s estate, which was now Anthony’s estate. Although, with Anthony having decided to give up the territory and return to New Orleans, it wouldn’t be his estate much longer. Everything would be transferred to the new lord, whoever that was. She only hoped the new guy was honest, and didn’t try to keep what wasn’t his. Between Jabril making Mirabelle Hawthorn a vampire against her will when she was only eighteen, and sending the terrified Liz Hawthorn into hiding where she almost lost her life, the Hawthorn girls had suffered enough.

CHRISTIAN STRODE down the second floor hallway toward Anthony’s office. He’d passed through checkpoints at the gate and front door, but security inside the building was remarkably light. Anthony ran his household as if he was still the Master of New Orleans, not Lord of the South. It was obvious that his heart was back in Louisiana. The only real question was why he’d taken on the South in the first place. Raphael must have been very persuasive, and Christian wondered what exactly had been promised.

But this empty hallway disturbed him on a level he couldn’t quite pin down. It made the back of his neck itch, despite the absence of any apparent threat. Casting a faint probe behind the many closed doors, he found several humans, but only one or two vampires. Anthony’s location was obvious, but he didn’t have a single vampire with him. No lieutenant, no security. It was all very odd.

Christian sensed Marc’s arrival downstairs. He’d stopped outside to answer a question from a vampire he knew from the previous week’s socializing, and was just now entering the building. Christian hadn’t protested the delay, because there had been no obvious danger. Despite his itching neck, he couldn’t see Anthony scheming to ambush him in his office. It made no sense. It wasn’t as if the vampire lord was being forced aside; he’d chosen to step down. And he’d never met Christian before, so there was no personal animosity between them. If anything, this total absence of security might be Anthony’s way of delivering a subtle slap of insult, telling Christian that he was so insignificant that the Southern lord didn’t even bother to guard against him. If so, he was in for a surprise.

Christian’s steps were muffled on the hallway’s wooden floor, but only because he was making an effort not to stomp like an elephant. He drew closer to the open double doors. There was no sign indicating this was Anthony’s office, but Christian didn’t need one. Anthony wasn’t the most powerful North American lord by far, but he
was
a powerful vampire, and by virtue of carrying the Southern mantle, his power and presence were enhanced. It was all the juice coming in from the hundreds, or even thousands, of vampires who called the South home. Christian didn’t know for sure how many vampires lived in the territory. A decent briefing on the territory had been one of the things he was hoping for from tonight’s meeting. It wasn’t an ordinary request, but then, this wasn’t exactly an ordinary situation. Vampire lords did not retire. They were assassinated and replaced.

He stepped inside the office, and glanced around. He could sense Anthony behind a second set of double doors, directly in front of him. But those were closed. There was a receptionist’s desk, but no one was there. The computer screen was lit up, however, which suggested the occupant hadn’t been gone long. A second office door stood open to the left, and he could hear the quiet sound of computer keys being typed from somewhere inside. Christian didn’t bother to announce his presence. Anthony knew he was here, just as he knew Anthony was there. If the Southern lord wanted to play games by making Christian linger on the doorstep like a petitioner, he was welcome to it. But Christian wasn’t going to participate in his games by seeking Anthony out either.

He strolled around the office casually, studying the numerous photographs and framed documents on the walls with some amazement. A vampire’s near immortality was both a blessing and a curse. When one lived for centuries, one witnessed incredible, sometimes earth-shattering, events. Christian had fought in and survived more wars than he could easily remember, including two world wars, and several smaller conflicts that had encompassed his entire world at the time. And the technological leaps that had been made in the last hundred years still astounded him sometimes.

But the point was that every vampire who survived beyond his first century coped with the same problem of wanting to chronicle and remember one’s history when that history encompassed centuries rather than decades. And each of them had ways of dealing with it. Some, like Raphael, gathered histories written by others—ancient books and texts—while still living very much in the modern age.

Others surrounded themselves with mementoes of a long life—photographs, art, letters.

But here in Anthony’s office, there was no sense of history at all. Nothing in this office—not a photograph, a document, a memento—was older than twenty years. It could as easily have been the office of a human politician or CEO. Endless photographs of a smiling Anthony, shaking hands with what Christian could only guess were local politicians and businessmen. And scattered among them, framed documents commending Anthony for charitable donations, for work in the community, for building a fucking hospital wing.

All very admirable and up front, but . . . whom exactly did Anthony hope to impress with these credentials? Vampires wouldn’t give a shit about any of this. Was it possible that this was only Anthony’s public office? That somewhere in the bowels of the huge estate there was a private office more suited to a powerful vampire? If so, then greeting Christian here, in this very human office, was part and parcel with the subtle slap of Anthony’s dismissal of him as a threat.

“You must be Mr. Tall, Dark, and Delicious.”

The woman’s comment wasn’t a surprise. He’d known she was there, had detected her heartbeat from the hallway, heard the soft whisper of silk when she’d moved into the office doorway, and the snick of her heel catching on the deep pile carpet. But that didn’t stop his gut from reacting to the sound of her voice. It was Natalie from the phone call. He smiled and spun to face her.

“SURELY NOT,” THE vampire said, turning with the controlled grace of a dancer, his eyes flashing wickedly as he ran strong fingers through the loose length of his dark blond hair. “You’re thinking of my lieutenant perhaps. His hair is much darker than mine.”

Natalie had been watching him for a while, waiting for him to turn, wondering if this was the ice cream-lickable Christian Duvall that MariAnn had been going on about. Though she wouldn’t have expected him to be blond, even it
was
a dark blond. She’d been admiring the breadth of his shoulders in the elegant suit, and his really nice butt. But despite MariAnn’s gushing assessment still ringing in her ears, she wasn’t prepared for the impact of that smile, or the spark of intellect in those deep blue eyes.

She blinked, trying not to let him see how he affected her, working so hard at it that it was a moment before she realized he hadn’t disputed the tall and delicious part of her description. Vampire ego, there was nothing like it in the world. Although, in this case, she had to admit he had a point. The tall wasn’t in any question. Christian Duvall—because who else could he be?—was three or four inches over six feet. And the delicious part was just as obvious.

But he wasn’t the ice cream kind of delicious. He was too huge, too hard, with those big shoulders beneath a dark gray suit that had to be custom-tailored to fit his broad chest as well as it did. A square jaw, sensuous lips, and dark blond hair just long enough that it would hang in his navy blue eyes when he was on top of her, muscles flexing as he pumped . . . oh dear God.

Okay, so maybe MariAnn had a point.

Natalie whipped her computer glasses off and fought against the desire to put a hand to her hair, to make sure it was properly brushed. Nothing she could do about it, if it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry, that was rude,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t notice the flush spreading down her neck and across her chest. Wishing she’d worn something with a higher neckline, but really, how could she have known? “Can I help you?”

The smile spread across his face, slow and easy, turning incredibly handsome into something . . . just fucking amazing.

“Christian Duvall,” he said smoothly, and held out his hand, as if offering her a handshake.

Natalie responded automatically, and his huge hand dwarfed her slender fingers.

“We spoke on the phone,” he added.

Natalie found her voice. “We did,” she confirmed. “I’m Natalie Gaudet.”

He shifted her hand in his grip, and lifted it to his mouth, touching the back of her hand to his lips, his eyes never leaving hers. “Natalie,” he repeated, and her fragile wits scattered all over again. Okay, so he was uncommonly handsome, and she loved the way he said her name. NAH-tah-lee. And, yes, his accent was beautiful—even to someone brought up with the lyrical rhythms of Cajun country. Still, it wasn’t as if good-looking men were hard to find around here. Maybe it was the way he was looking at her, as if he’d found an exotic treasure that he’d been searching for, and never expected to find sitting outside Anthony’s office.