Page 60 of Bought for Blood

“Okay.” She stands and starts gathering the bowls without being asked, the way a person does when they need somewhere to put their hands. “You have business. I understand business.”

I’m nearly at the door when I stop.

She’s at the table, stacking bowls that don’t need stacking, and I realize something I should have known all along: she is not going to sit around here being patient. She spent a year being patient in a cell. She doesn’t have another year of it left in her. Not for me, not for anyone.

I have kept women before. I have never had to consider whether they were content. It was never part of the arrangement, because the arrangement was never quite like this.

What is this?

I have no idea. But I’d better start finding out.

“Serenity.”

She looks up.

“Thank you for…helping Marthe today.” It isn’t what I meant to say. She smiles anyway, small and real, and the drive out of the estate feels like the wrong direction before I’ve reached the car.

Crowe’s man drives too fast down roads he clearly doesn’t trust, and I spend the whole of it turning over a problem I have never had to solve before.

Her happiness.

I have never had to think about it before tonight, because I have never kept anything whose unhappiness could touch me.

By the time we reach the gate, I’ve already decided what I’m going to do about it, and it has nothing to do with whatever Crowe is about to brief me on.

Chapter 22

Bastien

Odile arrives an hour early, which is how she tells me she’s come to look at something.

“She let herself in, my lord.” Yves is at the drawing room door with her coat already over his arm. “I did offer to announce her.”

“You’ve offered for thirty years.”

“I have, my lord.”

She’s at the mantel before he’s out of the room. Pale blue silk, gray eyes going over the furniture before they get to me, one finger already down on the clock.

“This is running,” she says.

I look at it. The pendulum is going. Somebody has put a key in that clock and turned it.

“So it is.”

“Bastien.” She says my name the way she’s said it for two centuries. Flat. She takes the chair by the fire without beingasked. “Wine. And tell me who I’m meeting, since your note didn’t say anything except come.”

“Rouvel. Tavora. And you.”

“You don’t like Rouvel.”

“He’s discreet, and I don’t dislike him enough to matter.”

“That’s worse.” She takes the glass and rests one fingertip on the rim without drinking. “And the fourth place?”

“The fourth lives here.”

Her hand comes off the glass. Her eyes settle on me. Then a laugh gets out of her, short and surprised, and she picks the glass up properly.