Born to Bite (7 page)

However, whatever relationship developed between them in the meantime was going to make it harder to do, and painful as hell afterward. Unfortunately, it was difficult to worry too much about that when her body was humming and aching for what Armand could give her. And he could give her a hell of a lot. He could reawaken the hungers and passions that slowly died out for immortals when they were without a mate.

In fact, he already had, she acknowledged. From the moment she’d walked into that diner last night, her senses had wanted to focus solely on Armand. She’d found him attractive and interesting, and should have known right away that here was something different, but she’d been focused on the task ahead and relegated to the back of her mind her responses to his scent and body heat as he’d sat next to her. They were no longer at the back of her mind. The cat was out of the box, and they both knew what they could be to each other if they chose to accept it, and what they could experience with each other…and apparently they both wanted it. Certainly she did. Eshe was basically nothing better than a bitch in heat at that moment, and judging by the way Armand’s eyes were beginning to burn more silver than blue, he was feeling much the same way.

Damn, Eshe thought on a sigh. She’d forgotten how potent it could be. Had she recalled, she would have told Lucian to find someone else for this task and left last night before her senses could be fully stirred back to life. Too late for that now, though, she acknowledged. They were awake and roaring to be satisfied, and nothing was going to make her give up whatever time she could have satisfying them…whether it ended badly or not.

“Good, you both cleaned your plates.” Mrs. Ramsey’s cheerful voice sounded just before she appeared at the table next to them.

Eshe forced herself to look away from Armand and toward the woman. She even managed a smile, though there was a slight growl in her voice as she said, “Yes. Thank you. It was good.”

“Good. I’m glad,” Mrs. Ramsey said, sounding pleased as she retrieved both now-empty plates. “And it is nice to see you eating for a change, Armand.”

“Yes,” he murmured, and then stood abruptly, almost toppling his chair in his haste. “Eshe and I are going to have a word in my office, Mrs. Ramsey.”

It was all he said, and all he needed to. Eshe was on her feet at once and leading the way, moving as quickly as she could without running. She entered the office, heard the door close behind them, and turned at once.

Armand was there to meet her so that she almost bumped into his chest before stopping her turn. In the next moment she did bump his chest as he tugged her into his arms and claimed her mouth. There was no “Hello, how do you do?” The moment his mouth covered hers, her own was open and his tongue was doing a good impression of trying to tickle her tonsils. Eshe didn’t protest or pull back. She wanted it. It felt so damned good to be alive again, for her senses to be feeling and responding again.

Eshe gave as good as she got, her hands reaching up to claw through his hair, her body pressing into his even as he pushed against her. She was so consumed by the sensations exploding inside her, the only way she knew he’d backed her across the room was by the feel of the desk suddenly pressing at her back. Eshe sat on it at once and wrapped her legs around him too, embracing him with her entire body and pulling his hips forward until he was grinding against her.

The man had a weapon in his pants. He was as hard as steel, as hard as she was hot and wet, and she knew then that their first time was going to be fast, furious, and mind-blowing. It was going to be a battle toward that pleasure they both knew they could find rather than a slow build to it.

Eshe didn’t care. They could try the slow build the next time. Right then all she wanted was for his body to be pounding into hers as fast and hard as he could, and she reached between them to begin undoing his belt and jeans to accomplish that. The moment she set to work at the task, Armand broke their kiss to begin licking and nibbling a trail down her neck. When he encountered the collar of her overlarge T-shirt, he paused and reached down to grab the hem of it and yank it up. That’s when he froze. Eshe glanced down to see what he’d discovered, and saw that her leather pants were still undone from when she’d rushed downstairs after Mrs. Ramsey. The knowledge seemed to transfix Armand briefly, and then he swept the phone, papers, and other items littering the desk onto the floor and urged her to lie back on the desktop so that he could catch the waistband of the pants and begin tugging them down. Fortunately, he had just started when a soft tap came at the door.

“Mr. Argeneau? Is everything all right?”

Both of them froze at Mrs. Ramsey’s gentle query from the hallway and then turned to peer at the unlocked door. They were both panting heavily, and Eshe suspected equally shocked by the realization that they’d been so caught up in the moment that they hadn’t considered the possible ramifications of their satisfying their needs right there and then with the woman in the house.

First of all, it wouldn’t have been a quiet coupling. The clatter of the desktop’s items hitting the floor would have only been the beginning of it. Eshe suspected that if they hadn’t been interrupted she would already be howling like a wolf and urging Armand on. Secondly, when immortals reached completion, it was generally followed by both parties passing out, overwhelmed by the pleasure assaulting them. That would have been a very vulnerable position to be found in, and sweet as she seemed to be, Mrs. Ramsey was just nosy enough that Eshe wouldn’t have put it past the woman to come walking in to see what was what. She certainly would have gotten an eyeful.

“Mr. Argeneau?” Mrs. Ramsey called again.

“Yes, Enid. Everything is fine,” Armand said this time, pulling away from Eshe and letting her T-shirt fall back into place as he moved to do up the belt and jeans she’d just gotten undone. “I just knocked the phone off the desk.”

“Oh. Okay. I was just coming to tell you that when you asked me about a good place to shop for women’s clothes this morning when I got here, I forgot to mention the Bay. It has some nice things and it’s in White Oaks Mall in London, which has a lot of clothing stores in it. It might be the best place for you to take Eshe. Or there’s Masonville Mall on the other end of town. It has some nice stores as well.”

Eshe raised an eyebrow at Armand, but he was concentrating on the task of doing up his belt and didn’t catch the silent question. He simply said, “Thank you, Mrs. Ramsey. We’ll be heading there right now actually.”

“Oh, that’s nice. You should take Eshe to dinner while you’re in town. Moxie’s is nice,” she added cheerfully, and then said, “I’ll probably be gone when you get back so I’ll say good-bye now, but I’ll be back on Friday.”

“Yes. We’ll see you Friday, then. And thank you for the shopping advice,” Armand called, finishing with his belt and reaching out to offer Eshe a hand to get off the desk.

Eshe met his gaze, smiled wryly, but shook her head and got herself off the desk without touching him. She was afraid that even that innocent touch would break the control she was slowly regaining over her body. It seemed they were going shopping. Probably a smart move, she thought on a sigh, though smart wasn’t always satisfying. Still, it would give her a chance to reconsider this path she’d chosen and perhaps give her a chance to set them on a new one if she could. Eshe was starting to think that letting Armand know that she couldn’t read him and that her other appetites were awakening might have been a bad one. Lucian had warned her to watch her back last night before leaving…which was hard to do when she was lying on it.

Four

“So what are we going to do?”

Armand glanced toward Eshe in the passenger seat of his pickup, for one moment thinking she meant about the fact that they appeared to be life mates. Of course that was only because it was the elephant that had been sitting in his mind since they’d left the house and headed out for the city and the malls awaiting there. Eshe was his life mate. After all these centuries, he’d been fortunate enough to find a second one. It was a hell of a surprise. The problem was, he wasn’t sure if it was a pleasant one yet. That being the case, he was trying to decide how to answer her question when she added, “I gather we’re going shopping for clothes for me, but why?”

“Oh.” Armand forced his eyes back to the road and his mind to the question. It took him a minute to do so, however, and he was frowning over that fact as he said, “Lucian said you needed clothes for your stay here. He said to take you shopping and gave me the company card to buy them on.”

Eshe made a disgusted sound and then sighed unhappily. “I suppose my leathers don’t exactly blend in out here.”

“No,” Armand agreed, his eyes straying from the road to her leather-clad legs. She really had quite shapely legs, he thought, and then acknowledged that everything about her was shapely. The brief glimpse he’d had of her upper body before being distracted by the sight of her undone pants had been a rather revealing one. Eshe didn’t have very large breasts, barely more than a handful each, but they were round and perfect for all that. Besides, who needed more than a handful?

“Okay, I’ll get some jeans and T-shirts,” Eshe said suddenly in a voice that was almost rebellious. “But I’m not buying any flowery dresses or anything like the one Mrs. Ramsey was wearing today.”

“You don’t need dresses,” Armand said with amusement. “Jeans will do just fine.”

Eshe gave a small, appeased “hrrumph” and then fell silent again, leaving Armand to his thoughts. He was deep into a silent debate as to whether he should call Lucian and have him take her somewhere else when she suddenly said, “I’m not your first life mate.”

The comment set him aback briefly and he took a moment to gather his thoughts before acknowledging, “No. I have had a life mate before.”

“So have I,” she said quietly, and then added, “I was fortunate enough to meet my first life mate while still quite young, only thirty. I got to spend eight lovely centuries with him before I lost him.”

“How did you lose him?” he asked curiously.

“He died in battle,” Eshe said quietly. “He was a fierce warrior, but luck was with the other side that day and they took his head.”

“Were there any children?” Armand asked after a hesitation.

“Yes. Eight. Six still live,” she said simply, and then said, “I know you have three. All of them were not your life mate’s children, though, were they?”

“No,” he said on a sigh. “Susanna, my first wife and life mate, she and I had only one child, Nicholas. Thomas was born to my second wife, and my daughter, Jeanne Louise, to my third.”

“But your second and third wives weren’t life mates to you.”

Despite the fact that it was a statement rather than a question, Armand said, “No, they weren’t.”

“Then why did you marry the other two women?” she asked simply.

It wasn’t an unusual question, but the explanation was complicated. Grimacing, he finally simply told the truth. “I was lonely, and my second wife, Althea, looked very like my deceased life mate, Susanna. Even so, I didn’t plan to marry her, but she became pregnant, and single women were ruined by such things in those days.”

“So she tricked you into marriage,” Eshe said dryly. Immortal women didn’t become pregnant accidentally as could happen with mortal women. The nanos in their bodies were programmed to keep them at peak condition, and having babies used up a lot of nutrients and blood so that the nanos apparently saw the baby as a parasite to be flushed from the body. An immortal woman had to consume extra blood to get pregnant and then had to continue to consume extra blood for the next nine months to keep the child to term.

“Essentially, yes, she did,” Armand admitted quietly. “But I didn’t mind very much. As I said, I was lonely and the idea of another child pleased me.”

“And the idea of another wife?” she asked.

Armand frowned at the question. There was something in her voice that made him glance at her, but her expression held mere curiosity and he decided he must have grown a bit paranoid over the centuries and answered, “Althea was the daughter of a friend. I had great affection for her. And I blamed myself for not realizing what she was up to.”

“What do you mean what she was up to?” This time it was definitely curiosity in her voice.

“Althea had had a crush on me since she was about twelve. The fact that she couldn’t read me convinced her that I must be her life mate. Her parents explained that she simply couldn’t read me because I was older and that I could read her, but she didn’t want to hear that and decided they were wrong. I was the man for her.” He grimaced at the memory. “It was adorable when she was young, but then my ten years at the farm near her father’s ended and I hired on a manager and moved on to one of my others. I didn’t see much of her after that. While her parents visited me often, they left her at home, afraid to encourage her crush. She was a bit obsessive with it even as a teen,” he admitted unhappily. “Anyway, several years later a young immortal woman arrived at my farm in search of a job as maid. She said her name was Alice, and she looked a hell of a lot like my Susanna.”

“It was Althea, of course,” Eshe guessed dryly.

Armand nodded. “She didn’t really look that much like Susanna in reality. They had the same blond hair and not completely dissimilar features, but that was about it. However, she had seen portraits of Susanna and styled her hair the same way, and then dressed in a more modern gown of a similar fashion to the one Susanna had worn for her portrait. It was enough that when I first opened the door I thought Susanna had risen from the grave and come knocking.” He grimaced and then admitted quietly, “I suppose I wanted to believe it was her. Or maybe even just pretend for a little bit.”

Armand sighed at the old memories. “She happened to arrive at a weak moment and I bedded her that very night. She was more than willing. Of course, it wasn’t the same as with my Susanna, but it was nice and filled a little of the ache in my heart…until I finally gathered enough sense to read her thoughts and realized who she was.