Bloodspell (The Cruentus Curse, #1)(9)

He had long delicate hands, she noticed as he gathered the last of the papers before handing them to her. His mouth was wide, with beautifully shaped lips lending a brief softness to the rest of his face. Beautifully shaped smiling lips! Her eyes snapped up guiltily, flushing that he had caught her gawking like an adolescent girl.

"Here you go, this looks like all of them," he said.

Victoria must have imagined his eyes being cold before, for now they glinted a warm silver. He smiled and passed her the sheaf of papers. Every movement was smooth, unaggressive, yet something about him made her feel like prey that knows it is being hunted. Her pulse spiraled and she took a step back.

As he too stepped back, he looked at her with a slightly pained expression as if something had bothered him momentarily, but then he just said carelessly, "Well, see you around, Tori Warrick."

"Um, sure. Thanks for your help ... Christian," she responded, flustered. What was wrong with her? She watched his back as he walked away. Strangely enough, the further away he got, the less agitated she became. After several tense moments, she drew a long strangled breath and made her way out of the building.

AS VICTORIA EXITED the building's front doors, Christian Devereux turned around and stared, coldly appraising her. He followed her and watched as she drove out of the parking lot, dissecting their meeting methodically in his mind.

Despite her coltish appearance, from the minute they had touched, something had caught and held his attention ... something obscure but potent. Every instinct in him had been drawn toward her, a moth to a flame.

And that was before her scent had invaded his already strained senses, her blood racing under the surface of her golden skin and amplifying the scent of her a hundredfold. It had taken almost all of his concentration to maintain his composure and not to bury his face in her neck, losing himself in that bewitching fragrance. He'd stopped breathing instead.

Christian closed his eyes, savoring her lingering scent. It was delicate yet underscored by something thick and heady. It troubled him because he was drawn to it so desperately, yet something else warned him away from her. Self-preservation had become an instinct unfamiliar enough to be completely foreign to him. He found it curious, and unsettling.

He deliberated whether to place the call or not, taking the sleek cell phone out of his pocket and turning it between his fingers. Christian thought about how he'd reached out just before she'd driven off, feather-lightly, attempting to explore her unconscious, and how easily she had blocked him from her thoughts. Her response had been intuitive, in fact, he was sure of it. That could only mean one thing. She had no idea what she was.

Christian frowned. Better safe than sorry, they would find out about her anyway. They always did. He shrugged off the remaining tendrils of her scent and dialed the number.

"Lucian," he said, when the voice on the other end answered. "Witch, mild paranormal strength, blocked me." He could hear the derisive snicker on the other end of the phone and it infuriated him, but he remained calm. "I don't believe it was conscious. It may just be purely instinctive, no need for you to intervene at this point. I will ... appraise the situation."

"Anything else?"

"No, that's all."

The phone went dead. Christian fought not to crush it between his fingers as he closed it shut. "Au revoir, mon frère." Nothing like a warm brotherly conversation, he thought. Then again, he'd expected nothing more.

Christian didn't like surprises, least of all, his brother's underlings invading his privacy and disrupting the life he had so carefully built over the last few years in this remote Maine town. His preemptive call would take care of that for the moment. His brother's obsession with identifying sources of magical energy and finding paranormal threats had reached new heights, and although Christian thought Lucian was being overly paranoid, he no longer had a say in how things were run in the House of Devereux. That, by his own choice, was now Lucian's realm.

It was just a minor hurdle that Tori Warrick had enrolled at Windsor, one that he would assess for his brother's sake, if not his own. He got into his car and gunned the engine. There was something elusive about this girl; he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He only knew that he didn't want Lucian to interfere just yet.

Tori.

The name rolled over his thoughts like honey, and he ruthlessly squashed the memory of her. He wasn't an animal. He wouldn't let one girl destroy the perfect balance and independence he had defied his own world to achieve. He wanted a life of obscurity and quiet. The rules of the Devereux aristocracy no longer applied to him. Christian wanted to keep it that way.

As he drove along the narrow roads at over a hundred miles per hour, the thick forest on either side cloaking the way with long, dappled shadows, he briefly considered returning to Paris but he just as quickly discarded the thought. The urge to run was not his style. It wasn't that he was afraid of her, he was afraid of something far worse. The violent temptation that she had put him through had been momentary, more an accident of fate than anything, yet his loss of control had been staggering. It had taken every ounce of his discipline to hold himself together and not succumb to his darkest urges ... the secret that haunted his existence.

Christian Devereux was a vampire.

A vampire, whose mask after almost two centuries, was perfect. He was cultured, urbane, sophisticated. Yet for all that, he'd never been more afraid of what he was, than he had been at that single moment when he'd locked eyes with Tori Warrick.