“Many things make us who we are,” she continued, a relentless angel. Not the kind that you put on your mantle as Christmas decorations. The kind that fought Satan to the gates of hell. “Changes us, from year to year. But one main event shapes us, defines us. Tell me yours, Devlin.”

“I didn’t invite you there, love. I told you that.”

“You want past this gate”—she rubbed herself against him—“you pay the fee.”

“I didn’t take you for a whore, love.”

Her nails stabbed into skin, sending a shudder jolting through his spine. “You won’t play with me, Dev. Your soul knew what I was, the moment you walked into the pub tonight. Tell me. How did you lose her?” He closed his eyes. He wanted to tell her to go to hell, but he’d only be there waiting for her. He’d been there so long he should have forgotten the time before, when he wasn’t scorched in its agony, but part of the agony of hell was the inability to forget.

It was just a handful of sentences. In a book or film, they’d be thrown in to make an otherwise wretched bastard a sympathetic character. As a scholar, he’d done everything to those sentences in his mind. Diagrammed them, broken them down. As if he could scramble the tense or arrangement so it wouldn’t be true, would change the story after it was written, a quick redlining and destruction of those ill-advised pages.

In real life, speaking those sentences gave people something to talk about in their own blissfully mediocre lives . . . Heard about what happened to that bloke’s family, the one running a station outside Blackall? What a terrible thing . . .

So he’d never said them, though they ran through his head like a ticker tape on the stock market all day long, with no closing bell.

He’d studied business as well as literature, because a good business mind helped run a station. But in the end, he’d become this, a wanderer, belonging nowhere. Haunted by the ghost of the rare woman who’d loved the Outback as much as he had.

He couldn’t say the words. They represented the chasm in his soul that was always there, burning . . .

His family had ties with the aborigines, dating back to when his ancestor escaped from Moreton Bay in the nineteenth century and lived with the black fellas long enough to marry into one of the clans, become part of a tribe. Some of that blood ran in his veins.

Though it wasn’t much, not enough to show and cause him any problem in the white-run world, those ties still existed. He knew they could offer succor, paths to walk to heal his pain. Then there were the bars, with the temptation of gleaming bottles. Or he could lose himself in the dark corners of the world where opiates could be found.

Instead he’d chosen the Outback, for he couldn’t cope with anything that didn’t offer him honesty. And the bush told him, every day, that the world was cruel and beautiful both.

He’d left the green and fertile fields, the wild mountains of coastal Queensland, gone deep into Western Australia. What he sought in those lonely, wild areas was inside the woman before him now. Beneath the creamy skin and blue eyes, there was that same call .

. . something savage and violent, even deadly. Something like the Outback, requiring his full attention so there wasn’t time to dwell in the desolation of his soul. And if he plunged into her deeply enough, perhaps he would find permanent oblivion.

“They came to the station while I was gone. Raped and beat my wife to death. Killed my son when he tried to do my job. Tried to protect her.”

Her arms closed around him, holding him, but not to give pity, which he could not have borne. She lifted his chin, made him look at her.

“Give me your soul, Dev,” she murmured. “Sometimes it’s much easier to let someone else carry the weight of it for a while.” Her lips curled back then, so he could see the sharp canines elongate, become tiny, needlelike points. There was a weight on him, something that made it not matter that he was seeing something he’d never seen before, except in horror films. She was right. He had known the danger of her the moment he’d walked in tonight. And the feelings that rose in him now were acquiescence, the fierce desire to accept, to give her whatever it was she wanted. They raged through him, full of his lust and pain. It was nothing she was compelling or forcing from him. In the fight-or-flight scale of reaction to fear or great emotion, he’d always been a fighter. His lack of choice at this moment had to do with what his own soul was demanding, not hers. He had to have her. Take her. He’d accept whatever price she demanded. No matter what she was.

Her hand slid behind him, and the whip dropped to the floor with a heavy thud. “Do as you like, bushman. I promise you can’t break me.”

Obeying mindless, primal need, he tore the swatch of panties from her, found her wet opening with his broad head and shoved her down on it, a sword determined to fit into a small scabbard, even if he tore her open the way she was tearing him.

She sank her fangs into his throat, filling her mouth with his blood. Her cry at his penetration allowed some of it to escape and trickle down to his collarbone, leaving a drop on her breast right over the red mark he’d made with the whip. His blood slid down and stained the edge of the bra. Yanking it off her with the noise of ripping fabric, he filled his hands with her curves.

Blood. Pain. Release. Flesh and pleasure. Woman. He seized her buttocks then, gripping as he thrust against her against the wall, beating a tempo. She was so tight and perfect, all the way to her womb. She didn’t tell him to stop, didn’t make him back off, as he would if he’d had a mind to be the considerate lover he knew he could be. But at the moment he had no control.

It didn’t seem to matter. Her body rippled with desire against his as she undulated with lithe grace, keeping right up with him in ferocious urgency. Her hair caressed his face, the curve of his shoulder as she nourished herself at his throat. He felt her strength again in the unshakable grip of her arms, the resilience of her bones as he shoved her against the shabby wall. She didn’t seem to notice or care.

He maneuvered his hand in between them, lubricated his fingers in the slick fluids dripping around her opening, stretched impossibly by his cock. Teasing her clit until he won a gasp, he moved around to slide those fingers into her tight arse before she could deny him. He wouldn’t see her after tonight, but by the Devil, she was going to remember him for days afterward.

She bucked up against him. While she didn’t loose her clamp on his throat, he heard her whimper, felt her pussy muscles contract on him, her clit harden, ready to go. He loved a sheila who liked having her arse played with, almost as much as he enjoyed the wet heat between her legs. He wanted to fuck her, lick her clean, get her creaming again and start all over, until she was hoarse from screaming and unable to walk.

Until he was hoarse and unable to walk.

She was having a hard time keeping her mouth on him now. More blood was trickling down his chest and she was flexing her body into a crescent, lapping up the stream like an eager kitten, reaching his nipple, her nails raking over his shoulders, drawing blood there as well. Bending his head, he put his lips over the red mark he’d left on her plump right breast, as he’d first desired, and that stilled him for a moment, so he could almost stand outside his mind and feel the rushing urgency of their bodies. Their temples brushed, and he thought they might look like two strained curves of a heart, quivering with near explosion.

“Come for me, love,” he demanded roughly. “Let me hear you.”

She stiffened, resisting, but he withdrew and then slammed back in, letting her feel the length of him stroking against the outer lips, finding the dense spot within her and rubbing against it on the way back to her womb. That was the good thing about being cursed with an organ the length of a horse’s cock. He could make that feeling last a good . . . long . . . time. He withdrew, slid back in again. Moved his mouth to a nipple, scoring her with his teeth, sucking on her relentlessly.

“Give over,” he snarled against her flesh.

His wrists were burning where she’d bound him and he’d fought the restraints. Her skin was abraded by his whip. Small sacrifices of flesh to one another. They were both caught up in this, on sacred ground indeed. He’d never look at the dingy second level of this boardinghouse the same way again.

Swinging her abruptly from the wall, he crossed the short distance from the parlor to the small bedroom. He wanted to take her on her back. He needed to feel her legs high on his spine, her body open to his, pressed beneath him. It gave him the angle he needed, a friction against her clit she couldn’t resist any longer, though he sensed her scrabbling attempt, just as he sensed her aversion to the position he chose, as if she was used to or preferred to be on top. But when their eyes locked once more, it didn’t matter. Two puzzle pieces were two puzzle pieces, no matter what way you turned them. And when all was said and done, it didn’t change the fact they were still a puzzle.

He was a lost soul. She was a vampire. Everything was bloody perfect.

Her screams resounded through the building as he began to come with her, both of them finding their temporary release. He from the wasteland of his memories. She . . . Well, Dev didn’t claim to know any woman’s mind, let alone that of a supernatural one, but from the bite of her fingernails, the beautiful artwork of her pleasure-suffused face, he thought he’d served her well despite it all.

As his blood and seed were drained from him, as the orgasm ripped through him like bushfire, only one fleeting question remained to worry his mind. And that made only a negligible dent in his already battered shields as he drifted into a hazy aftermath.

What happened to a man after he handed a vampire his soul?

3

FROM the start, he’d warned her. He might not control himself. Might use her too hard, take her too rough. A halfhearted attempt to protect her from him.

What a fucking joke.

How much time had passed? Sometime during the early morning hours, she whispered something about how he’d persuaded her to take an extra day here. I’ ll punish you for that, bushman.

That threat, delivered in a soft breath of air against his ear, had left him wrung out and drained. Again and again. She had the stamina of a male beast in rutting season, and she didn’t take no for an answer. She didn’t even ask the question. He found himself servicing her mindlessly, again and again, however she demanded it. And when he flagged, her mouth, hands and body would drive his cock to obey her once more.