Darker Nights Read Free Page B

firm… Your life has been so linear. You could stand to branch out and take a detour once in a while.”
    Delia thought of the trust account reconciliations awaiting her that weekend and inwardly sighed. The rest of the lawyers didn’t know how much work went on behind the scenes. Meeting with clients and going to court was only the tip of the iceberg. Now that her father was out of commission, Delia and the iceberg were on a collision course.
    “It’ll be a chance to network, pick up some new contacts. Get some clients on board who aren’t thousand-year-old vampires with one-hundred-year-old ideas of how much to pay their lawyers.”
    She stared before asking, the words coming slowly, “You don’t like vampires?”
    Henry shook his fair head. “Not a chance. Give me a good honest demon or old world god any day. At least with them you know why they do what they do. With the vamps, shit, you can’t tell if they love you or hate your guts.” He smiled knowingly. “It’s not like that for you though, is it? You’re like your father. You get off on the vamps. You like that restrained power. You don’t go in for the flash.”
    They’d been called to the bar in the same year and worked together ever since—five years now. It made sense that he knew her as well as he did, yet Delia was uneasy. Henry always gave the impression of noticing—and certainly caring about—nothing other than himself. To hear him sum her up so assuredly shook her own confidence.
    “There’s a history there, I suppose,” he went on. “There usually is. Some ex-boyfriend of yours who liked to chomp on your neck? I don’t know how the human half of those relationships take it. All I want to feed off of is pussy and all I want to have any female feed off of me is c—”
    “I get it!” Delia got to her feet, realizing that the only way she would be able to get rid of him was to physically see him out of her office. “You’ll be late for your plane.”
    Henry looked at her with searching eyes. “You promise you’ll take my meeting?”
    “Yes, yes, I promise.”
    He grinned, stretching his arms over his head in a gesture that exhibited no inclination to hurry. “Good. It’s a private jet anyway. They’ll wait for me.”
    She could either scream at him or laugh. She laughed. That was Henry.
     
    * * * *
     
    The six o’clock clients were newly-made immortals. Delia had learned to tell the difference between them and the ancients Henry had complained of.
    The recently turned were impatient, restless and arrogant. They lacked all the subtlety and restraint that made her admire their kind. It took, as far as she could tell, at least a hundred years to acquire that maturity.
    But there was still something to be said for this pair. Their very presence in her office seemed to shrink it to a small box filled with sparks. Any moment now, she expected an explosion.
    Mark Lyons and Caleb Jennings were both tall and attractive but the similarities ended there.
    Mark was a werewolf, as dark as sin with black hair and eyes that gleamed wickedly, no matter what mundane words he was speaking.
    Caleb was only slightly less unsettling, a vamp with piercing light blue eyes and hair that was golden at the top and silvered at the sides. Premature gray, Delia might have guessed if he were human, but the act of turning did strange things to vampires, physically changing them in ways that were just as likely to be invisible as visible.
    She knew too much about vampires, Delia thought, not for the first time.
    She also knew that they excited her.
    Her body quivered in these two males’ presence, sensing danger but also all manner of delicious things. Wild nights under the stars and hot, hard sex on top of silk sheets.
    “Do you want to come to our club?”
    They signed the contract—it had been the work of no more than a few minutes since neither male seemed to have any questions—but they showed no signs of wanting to leave.
    The danger Delia sensed