Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(23)

“No, but there was a time when that address would’ve made me proud.” Pushing a hand through his hair, he said, “I spent a month in his chateau in the Alps a long time ago. He was having a salon featuring a select number of the world’s best minds and I stumbled into it when I was tasked with delivering an important letter.” Eyes distant, he shook his head. “For some reason, he invited me to remain, though I was an ignorant courier with barely half a century of vampirism behind him.”

“You’ve always been smart.” It was a flame in him, the desire to grasp at life with both hands, absorbing knowledge in a thousand different fragments.

“I am happy to know you think so, cher, for your mind seduced me long ago.” The faint hint of a smile lay on his lips, Janvier a man who was never dark for long. “But I was out of my league there, the others around the fire scientists and artists, philosophers and explorers.” A sigh, his throat arched as he looked up at a night sky become hazy with clouds. “It could be those great men and women decided they needed an audience. It doesn’t matter—I drank in the knowledge they shared as if it were rain and my soul a thirsty plain.”

It was an image that tugged at her soul, made her want to lock herself in a room with him for days, weeks, months, just so she could hear of the roads he’d traveled, the places he’d been, the people he’d met. Time was running out from between her clenched fists, and she had so many things she didn’t yet know about him.

“Did Giorgio have cattle then?” she asked through the ache of need.

“Yes, and he has always had an eye for nubile beauty, but such is true of many men, mortal or immortal, non?”

Ashwini nodded, thinking of the septuagenarian who lived in her building, his companion a foxy redhead in her thirties.

“But back then,” Janvier continued, “Giorgio treated the older of his cattle with love and respect even after their youth faded—during my time in the chateau, I met one who was in her sixth decade. To her, Giorgio was family, and the feeling was reciprocated.”

Ashwini couldn’t get her head around the idea that the vampire they’d just left had once been such a different man, a sudden fear choking off her breath. “Don’t let immortality do that to you,” she whispered. “Don’t let it steal your soul.”

Moss green eyes held her own. “It is, others tell me, far easier to stay human if you split your heart in two and give one part to another to keep.”

Give it to me, she wanted to say. I’ll protect it with my life . . . and I’ll give you my heart in return. Folding her arms against the urge that would ultimately cause him pain so terrible it permanently scarred, she broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact to stare out toward the dazzle of Manhattan. “I guess Arvi might do a favor for a friend. He and Giorgio probably met at a charity gala or some other black-tie affair, became acquainted.”

Her brother was at home at such events, the perfect, urbane date. Because though Arvi was a man born to be the head of a family, the mantle sitting on his shoulders as if he’d been made to wear it, he had never married. A decade back, Ashwini had thought that was about to change, but the gifted female surgeon whom she was dead certain Arvi loved passionately had gone on to become another man’s bride. Since then, Arvi had played the field. It didn’t suit him, but she understood why he did it.

“You’ve never mentioned your brother before.” Janvier stroked strands of her hair between his fingertips.

The tiny tugs on her scalp reaching deep inside her, Ashwini looked up at a wash of wind to see a squadron of angels passing overhead on a low flight path. They dipped their wings as a unit as they passed, and she knew Janvier had been spotted. He raised his free hand in acknowledgment right as a fresh gust of wind blew his hair back from his face.

That face could never be called beautiful. It had too many rough edges. But sexy? Yes, Janvier was sexy in every way a man could be sexy. The curve of his lips, the dark shadow of scruff on his jaw that said he didn’t fuss about being pretty, the glint of sinful knowledge in his eyes, the lazy way he moved, it added up to a package a woman would have to exercise incredible willpower to repudiate.

Ashwini’s willpower was at an all-time low.

As if he sensed that, Janvier slid his hand down her back to hook one thumb into her back right pocket. It was pushing at her boundaries and it was what he always did. If he ever stopped flirting with her, a part of her would die. “Do you have to report in to Illium in person?” she asked, ignoring his implied question about her brother, unable to go there, to talk about the agony that both divided and united her and Arvi; she couldn’t forget his betrayal, and Arvi couldn’t forgive what he saw as hers.

“I can call in the information.” Janvier’s gaze was acute, but his words easy. “You?”

“I’ll do the same.”

Separating to opposite ends of the cliff, she rang Sara while he contacted Illium.

Ashwini updated the Guild Director on the details, then said, “My instincts are screaming that the dog is a harbinger of worse to come.” The feeling had nothing to do with her more unusual abilities; it was pure hunter instinct. “I’m going to keep an eye on the area, work my contacts to see if I can shake anything loose.”

“I’m not putting you on an active hunt for another two weeks at least,” Sara replied, “so take the time and keep me in the loop. No heroics.” It was a command. “I damn well don’t intend to watch the undertakers put another one of my people in the ground.”