Born to Bite (2 page)

“I’m going to tan her hide,” Lucian growled as she walked past their window toward the entrance of the diner.

Armand couldn’t help but think he wouldn’t mind volunteering for the job as his gaze automatically dropped to the hide his brother thought needed tanning. The woman had a perfect body, with a nice round rump he suspected it would be a pleasure to touch for any reason…and he was contemplating the various reasons for doing just that—none of which included tanning her hide—when she opened the diner door and stepped inside, ending his view of her behind. It forced him to shift his attention to her front as she paused inside the door to undo her jacket and peer around. It was quite a nice view too, he had to admit. She still wore her helmet, so he couldn’t see her face, but everything else on display was lovely. Black leather pants stretched tight over long, lean legs, but she also wore the black leather jacket now open to reveal some sort of black leather corset that left the upper curves of her breasts and her upper chest and throat on display. The woman had rich, mahogany skin that seemed to gleam under the diner’s fluorescent lights as if she’d powdered herself with some sort of shimmery powder.

“I told you to make yourself inconspicuous.” Lucian glared at the woman as she spotted them and approached.

“You said to make myself
less
conspicuous,” she corrected in a calm voice. As she removed her helmet, she added, “And I did. See?”

Armand didn’t know what Lucian was supposed to see, but he was seeing what he considered the finest-looking woman he’d seen in a long time, since his life mate had lived even. Eshe d’Aureus had huge, beautiful eyes that glowed golden with black flecks, a straight Egyptian nose, and the most seductive lips he’d ever seen. He found her heart-stoppingly beautiful…and nowhere near inconspicuous.

“Eshe,” Lucian growled with little patience. “Dying your hair hardly makes you less conspicuous when you’re on that carnival bike of yours.”

Armand’s eyes shifted to her hair at those words. She wore it short on the sides and a little longer on top, and was presently running her long fingers through it in an effort to repair the flattening influence of the helmet, but it looked a perfectly natural dark brown, almost black to him. Although there appeared to be a fleck of lighter color at the ends in some places. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What does it normally look like?”

“She normally dyes it a combination of red and blond on the end halves of the top strands so that it looks like her head’s on fire,” Lucian informed him dryly, and then turned to Eshe and added, “You did a piss-poor job of dying it. There’s still some color at the ends.”

Eshe rolled her eyes with exasperation and began to slide into Armand’s side of the booth, forcing him to shift over to make room for her. “God, you’re never happy, Lucian. Honestly! It’s not like I had time to make a hair appointment and get it done properly. I had to do it myself and I am
not
a hairdresser. This is the best I could do in the time you allotted me.” She set her helmet on the table in front of her and rested her chin on her hands on top of it as she grinned at Lucian. “So it’s all your fault if you aren’t happy with it.”

“Couldn’t you at least have come out in your car instead of that damned motorcycle?” Lucian said irritably.

“Oh yes, because a red Ferrari would be so much less conspicuous down here in hicksville,” Eshe said dryly, and then glanced to Armand and murmured, “No offense.”

“None taken,” he assured her, and then cleared his throat and forced himself to turn away when he realized he was grinning at her like an idiot.

“Ferrari?” Lucian asked with surprise. “What happened to the convertible?”

“I sold it,” she said with a shrug. “The Ferrari was prettier and I only have the one parking space at the apartment for both the bike and car, so the convertible had to go.”

“A Ferrari?” Lucian looked horrified. “It was bad enough when you had the Mustang convertible, but a Ferrari with all the power it has under the bonnet? You’re a speed demon. You’ll kill yourself with it. You had better be following the speed limits.”

Armand stared at his brother with fascination. Lucian had never been much of a talker, mostly grunting and glaring at everyone, but Eshe appeared to exasperate him into speaking. He’d never thought he’d see the day. His thoughts were distracted when Eshe said dryly, “Of course…Daddy.”

Armand’s eyes widened, but she wasn’t done. Smile widening as Lucian grew grimmer, she commented, “I hope Leigh pops some babies for you soon, Lucian. Maybe you’ll stop daddying the rest of us.”

“Daddying?” Armand asked doubtfully. He could think of a lot of words to describe Lucian,
bossy
and
bullying
among them, but
daddy
just wasn’t on that list.

“Yes, daddying,” Eshe said with a friendly smile his way. “He’s forever telling everyone what to do and where to go and so on. He’s like a big old grumpy daddy.”

“Your father—” Lucian began, but she cut him off.

“My dad asked you to look out for me and my brothers and sisters should anything happen to him and you’re just trying to live up to that promise, yada yada,” she said in a bored voice that suggested she’d heard that argument a thousand times at least. “That argument carried some weight back when I was a kid, Lucian, but jeez, more than a millennium later it means nothing. You’re only a hundred years older than me for cripes sake. Get over it already. I’m sure my father didn’t mean for you to play guardian
forever
.”

“You’re only a hundred years younger than Lucian?” Armand asked with surprise. “You seem a lot younger.”

“Why thank you!” She turned and beamed a smile on him that had Armand almost sighing, and then she stuck out her hand, “Hello, I’m Eshe d’Aureus and you’re Armand Argeneau.”

“Yes.” He took her hand and shook it, smiling at how small and soft it felt in his own. “So why aren’t you as grumpy as Lucian? I always thought it was his age.”

Eshe snorted at the suggestion. “Not hardly. Father Time over there just likes to carry the weight of the world—not to mention passing time—on his shoulders like a vampiric Atlas. Me? I enjoy life to the best of my abilities and leave Lucian and others like him to be the grump masters.”

“There are others like Lucian?” Armand asked with doubt.

Eshe raised her eyebrows. “Not traveled much in Europe? Because there are a ton of them over there. Especially Britain; even the mortal males when they get older are grumpy and bossy in Britain. I think it’s a law or something.”

Armand was just smiling at what she said and trying to think of something to encourage her continued disrespect of Lucian—which was incredibly fresh and exciting in a turning-him-on kind of way to Armand—when his cell phone began to chirp its funeral dirge. Grimacing, he slipped it from his pocket, flipped it open, and pressed it to his ear, wincing when Paul, his manager at the farm, began to squawk in panicked tones about Bessy’s labor. When the man paused to take a breath, he took the opportunity to say, “I’m on my way. I’m only at the diner. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Trouble at home?” Lucian asked dryly as Armand snapped the phone closed and slipped it back in his pocket.

Armand nodded and began to slide out of the booth as Eshe got out to make way for him. “One of my dairy cows is calving and there’s a problem with the birth.”

“I thought you had a wheat farm?” Eshe asked, glancing up with surprise in her eyes as he straightened beside her.

“I do, but we have a couple of dairy cows too and a few other animals; chickens, goats…” He shrugged. “Most farmers keep them to save on groceries.”

“And what do you do with them?” she asked curiously, assuming, correctly, that he didn’t eat.

“My manager takes some of the goods, but mostly we supply meat and eggs and milk to the diner here.”

“We’ll follow you home,” Lucian announced, eating more quickly.

“Take your time. I’ll be down at the barn, but make yourselves at home. The front door is always unlocked.” When Lucian raised an eyebrow at that, he said wryly, “It’s the country. No one bothers anyone out here and crime is pretty rare.”

He waited just long enough for Lucian to grunt an acknowledgment and then smiled and nodded at Eshe and strode out of the diner. He could feel her watching him as he left and wished he could watch her too. She was a beautiful woman, and he was looking forward to her company at the farm. His manager handled things during the day and had the evenings off, and Armand was usually alone there when awake. It would be nice to have someone to talk to for a change, especially someone he found attractive. It had been a long time since he’d found anyone attractive in more than a passing-fancy kind of way. Even his second and third wives hadn’t been that attractive to him. His affection for them had been based more in friendship and companionship than in pure animal lust. Armand suspected it was going to be difficult to keep his distance from the lovely Eshe d’Aureus…and wasn’t even sure if he really wanted to anyway.

Eshe watched Armand walk out of the restaurant, her eyes sliding from his broad shoulders to the narrow waist and then down over his behind and legs. He had a confident walk with a hint of a swagger that was purely unconscious, she was sure, a natural rolling of his feet and shifting of hips as he moved. His broad shoulders remained straight, his head high. With his rugged features and silver-blue eyes, she hadn’t been able to help but notice that he was a good-looking man, but then she hadn’t met an Argeneau male who wasn’t. They weren’t all classically handsome, but they had a certain something. Armand seemed to her to have been gifted with a little extra helping of that certain something.

“You should see if you can read him.”

Eshe glanced around with surprise at that comment from Lucian. He was halfway through his meal and eating quickly. She settled back in the booth to watch him, eyeing the food curiously. It smelled good, she noted, and asked in a distracted voice, “Why would I want to do that?”

“The real question is why haven’t you already done so?” he said dryly, scooping up potatoes and peas together onto his fork. “I have known you a long time, Eshe, and never known you not to try to read every newcomer you encounter…whether they were mortal or immortal.”

Eshe scowled at him as he popped the food into his mouth, mostly because he was right. She wouldn’t admit this to anyone, but she was eager to meet a new life mate and enjoy the peace and passion she had enjoyed with her first life mate for several centuries. Life was terribly drab and boring without the vibrancy a life mate brought to it. That being the case, the first thing she usually did on meeting someone was try to read him. Although
try
wasn’t the correct term since she hadn’t yet met anyone she couldn’t read. The only reason she could think that she hadn’t read Armand was that she had been too busy annoying Lucian. It was a pastime she’d enjoyed for centuries. After living so long, life could get a bit boring at times. A gal had to amuse herself somehow.

Still, it was unusual for her to not read newcomers, Eshe acknowledged to herself, and had to wonder why she hadn’t. The question, however, made her uncomfortable and eager to change the subject.

“So did he buy your story about me needing a safe house?” she asked quietly as she watched Armand Argeneau get in his pickup and pull out of the diner parking lot.

Lucian nodded without even glancing her way. “Why wouldn’t he?”

Eshe made a face. “I suppose. It’s not like he knows me. If he knew me he wouldn’t think I was willing to hide out anywhere.”

“Hmmm,” Lucian murmured, finishing off his food. “Well, do me a favor and try not to make that too obvious while you’re down here.”

“Right,” she murmured, and then when he pushed his plate away and stood up, she stood as well and asked curiously, “Do you really think he could have killed his wives?”

“No,” Lucian acknowledged, digging out his wallet to throw a twenty on the table. “But then I didn’t think Jean Claude could do what he did either.”

Eshe frowned at these words as she retrieved her helmet from the table. She followed him toward the diner door, asking, “Why don’t you just read him and see if he did it? For that matter, why didn’t you read Jean Claude?”

“Because I couldn’t.”

The words startled her so much that Eshe stopped walking. She could maybe understand his not being able to read Jean Claude who had been his twin, but Armand…“But you’re four hundred years older than Armand.”

Pausing at the door, Lucian glanced back and grimaced. “For some reason—which I’ve never been able to work out—there are some siblings and even one or two nieces and nephews in the family that I can’t read.”

“Really?” Eshe asked with interest as she finally began to move again and joined him by the door. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not something I advertise,” he said dryly, pushing through the door.

“No, I suppose not,” she murmured, trailing him outside. “So, why do you suspect Armand? It’s not just because you can’t read him.”

“No, it’s not,” he agreed, walking along the front of the diner to a dark van parked several feet past her motorcycle. “And it’s not that I suspect him so much as I don’t feel I can afford not to. As far as I can tell, his being their husband is the only connection between his three wives. And then Annie was his son’s wife.”

“And Nicholas wasn’t killed, just put on the run to prevent his discovering whatever it is Annie might have learned,” Eshe murmured thoughtfully. She knew the whole story. Armand Argeneau had lost three wives to “accidents.” Each more than a hundred years apart and each after marrying him and giving birth to one child. His daughter-in-law had also died in a tragic and somewhat freak accident after marrying his son. She had been pregnant, but hadn’t yet given birth to what would have been their first child when she died. Both had perished in that freak accident. More important to the situation was that it appeared Annie had been asking questions about the deaths of Armand’s wives before her sudden death, and while speaking to Nicholas on the phone the night before her accident, she had been rather excited and told him she had something to tell him when he got home. However, she’d died before she could tell him whatever that was, and when Nicholas had set out some weeks later to ask a friend of Annie’s if she knew what Annie had wanted to tell him, he had somehow ended up in his basement with a dead mortal in his arms, her blood in his mouth and a blank spot where the memory of killing her should have been.