As he said, she didn’t let her emotions rule her. She wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But she knew he’d take her hair out by the root. She wasn’t dealing with a male who obeyed civilized laws. The words he spoke when his lips were near her temple proved it.

“I have no particular claim on you, Raina. But I have one particular rule. However long I decide to be here, you won’t be mentioning other men you’ve had. If you do, I will be required to drive every one of them out of your head.”

She bit down on a gasp. With the shift of his wide shoulders, he was blocking the view of the end of the table. He’d slid his hand beneath her gown, finding her sex with unerring accuracy. The tissues had been so well used in the late hours she was still slippery, even after a morning cleaning. Or perhaps being around him kept her in a state of such readiness. Two of his fingers slid into her, his thumb massaging her clit with slow, expert precision. Her body tightened, spiraled up like a balloon cut loose on a storm front. She dug her nails into the chair arms, squelching the sexual energy that wanted to waft off her like an exotic perfume.

“I will play your game to a point, Raina.” His eyes held hers. “But in the end, I set the rules. The more you spit fire at me, the more you’ll find how cruel I can be. And I know you crave that roughness.” He withdrew his fingers then, brought them to his mouth to taste. “Even better than the crepes,” he said in a husky tone.

With that, he returned to his paper and another piece of bacon on his plate. She picked up a croissant, pulled it apart, ate a couple bites as she eyed him. He appeared to be back in his own world again. She threw another blueberry at him.

He caught this one as well, but this time she saw his eyes warm with fire and something that resembled amusement. He rolled it back to her with the casual push of a finger, then returned to an analysis of the town’s fiscal budget and the question of whether taxes would be raised.

He was the oddest combination of things. Brutally honest in his analysis of Isaac but emotionally detached. Whereas his attitude toward her was fully engaged, not in the least detached. The former gave her hope that if she proved him wrong, he would accept a different theory and back off Isaac. The other kept things in her stomach swirling, and her stomach didn’t swirl.

He’d put his foot back up on the edge of her chair, under the fall of her robe. Now his toes found their way to her bare buttock, then farther beneath. His words had made her traitorous body even wetter, and he discovered those secretions now. As she bit her lip in reaction to his firm prodding, those intriguing eyes flickered. “Send them away,” he said.

When he’d tethered her to that banister, if he’d taken her while she was bound and helpless, it would have cracked something open in her, good and bad. Yet he’d pulled back, recognized her anxiety, the dangerous edge of emotions playing inside of her. By taking her to the bed instead, it put her a step closer to wanting today what she’d been afraid to want last night. She knew he knew it.

With no encouragement at all, he’d spread her on this table and feast on her. She wanted him to do it, badly enough it scared her. So instead, she gave him a practiced smile, one that could make every cock within a hundred-foot radius harden, even while she promised nothing.

“This is their one meal together. I’ll do no such thing. Have you met the rest of my staff?”

After a long, heart-pounding moment, that intent look eased, telling her he’d let her off the hook. For now. “No, they filled their plates and slunk to the opposite end of the table. Which seemed an optimal situation.”

“You can hardly blame them, knowing what you are. Most of them came to me half-starved victims, and they’ve seen others run down by your kind.”

“Stories I’ve heard a thousand times,” he said dismissively. “But Marisa likes to watch late-night reruns of Desperate Housewives. Li sings AC/DC songs in the shower, and Ana hordes food in her mattress. Saltines, which I thought was an odd choice, because she likes sugar and you have graham crackers in your pantry. But she knows Saul enjoys those with peanut butter. I think they’re coping.”

Raina felt that coldness return, a fist in her lower abdomen. “Are you mocking me?”

“No.” Now there was an edge to his voice, a hint of impatience. “I’m telling you that you don’t need to beat a dead horse. Life isn’t supposed to be fair, Raina. This is a testing ground, and the choices we make determine whether we have a weak character or a strong one. Your demons have made good choices, and you’ve helped strengthen them. It’s admirable what you’ve accomplished with them. But all that’s obvious.”

He set the paper aside once more, crossed his ankle on his knee and hooked a shoulder around the back of the chair, another lazy lord of the manor pose, all the more damnably appealing because of its unconscious authority. When was the last time he’d felt out of place, uncomfortable, embarrassed…nervous?

“What’s not so obvious, and therefore intriguing, is you. You’re not one of them, because you’re a half-breed and a witch. But even if that wasn’t the case, a protector is never fully part of the group. It’s the price you pay for the responsibility. It’s also why you’re sitting with me. In the end, you have a greater connection to who and what I am than you do to them. Which is also why you’re fencing words with me, rather than spitting in my face and trying to kick me out.”

She counted to ten. To twenty. Then leveled her most contemptuous gaze on him and raised her voice. “Everyone? I want to make a formal introduction. This is Mikhael Roman. He’ll be staying with us, very briefly.”

6

HIS GAZE NARROWED, BUT SHE KEPT HER FOCUS ON HER attentive staff. “I expect you to treat him with courtesy. Our schedule will be the same as always. Isaac will also be with us, though for a less defined amount of time. Trouble is following him. We’re going to try to help him with that. The protections on this place have been reinforced by Mikhael’s presence here, but if you notice anything unusual, even if it’s minor, please bring it to our attention, whichever one of us you can reach the fastest. Understood?” She glanced at Li, waiting until her senior staff member gave her a subtle nod, telling her he’d make sure of it.

Isaac had tensed, as if expecting castigating looks for bringing trouble to their midst. Instead Isabella slid closer to him and Luke put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, caressing his nape. “We all brought trouble with us when we came,” Marisa said, her brown eyes crinkling with humor. “Though none of us brought a Dark Guardian, so you get top bragging rights for that one.”

She darted a look at Raina, then an even quicker one at Mikhael, to make sure she hadn’t caused offense; then she beamed at the incubus. Isaac blinked, unsmiling. He appeared baffled by his surroundings, overwhelmed. For an incubus who’d never learned to trust, being in a place where trust might be possible was more frightening than being chased through the swamp by a Dark Guardian.

It squeezed her heart, but she put the emotions in check. Isaac was a far cry from the others at this table. Though they’d come from bad circumstances, almost as dire as Isaac’s, they had something missing from Isaac’s experience. At some key point in their lives, before they came to her, they’d been exposed to hope, a glimpse of how life could be better. Even more important, something in their makeup had allowed them to believe in that vision. Isaac had never had that, or he’d let the opportunity pass him by due to chronic skepticism or some vital weakness in his character. It made her even more determined that Mikhael’s prediction for him wouldn’t come to pass. If she couldn’t save one like him, what hope was there in the world?

“More females than males on your staff,” Mikhael noted casually, but she saw his significant look as her staff returned to their conversations, again dividing the room into two distinct sections. She told herself it didn’t underscore his point. Mikhael’s presence had disrupted the normal order. If he wasn’t here, she’d be joining their conversation. Or at least listening amusedly and throwing in her part. Just because he’d embraced the comic-book propaganda about the lone warrior didn’t mean she was buying into it. Sounding authoritative on every damn subject didn’t mean he really knew everything.

“Do you have trouble keeping the males fed?” he asked. “Your client base in this neck of the woods would be mostly hetero males.”

That was true. In fact, she could easily call four of her good-ol’-boy redneck regulars and give them a case of Budweiser to quarter Mikhael on her front lawn with their four-wheel-drive pickup trucks. Dark Guardian blood would make a wonderful fertilizer for her roses.

However, his question appeared to be motivated by sincere curiosity, and, of course, no purpose would be served by her snubbing him. Again—emotions weren’t going to rule her.

“I’ve increased marketing efforts to encourage female clients, so between that and a handful of openly gay or bi regulars, the males stay suitably fed.”

Her monthly tea parties on the back lawn, with her staff doing the serving in tasteful but sexy apparel, had bumped up the female clientele. Women were comfortable in social groups, less inhibited about ogling and flirting with what she had to offer. Particularly when the four males flirted right back with romantic hand kisses and sexy smiles. They also didn’t discourage the occasional bold, wandering female hand. The women enjoyed themselves thoroughly, but, more important, the incubi had their fill of appetizers at such events. When stimulated, female sexual energy offered itself in bite-sized pieces.

Many of the women who subsequently came into the house for services had their first experience with one of the succubi, to gain confidence and security. After that, they moved to the males. For all their initial caution about visiting a bordello, women were far less inhibited about crossing gender boundaries than her male clients, likely because they weren’t as concerned about being categorized for doing so.

Aside from nourishing her charges and increasing her profit margins, there were practical reasons for increasing the female client base. The more Raina’s house was utilized by the women, the more intertwined she was in the community, taking momentum away from those who didn’t like having sex-for-hire in their county. Law enforcement was easy to handle. Her energy, carefully disseminated, distracted them from any investigation attempts. She’d had the pleasure of entertaining the sheriff’s men on her front porch, offering them her lemonade and encouraging them to bring their wives to one of the coed tea parties.