The Vampire Affair Page 6

  Jessie’s eyes widened. “Why? I mean, why would they be interested in me?”

  “They know you’re connected somehow to us,” Michael explained. “The one who got away probably scurried right back to his superiors and told them all about what happened, including the fact that you were here. Even if they don’t know what the connection is, they might grab you just on the chance that they could use you against us.”

  She came to her feet now, clearly concerned. “Then Ted could be in danger, too.”

  Clifford said, “Don’t worry, Ms. Morgan. The clinic has an extremely high level of security.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m just glad you guys didn’t try to stick me in that clinic. It sounds like a good place to keep somebody incommunicado.” She must have caught the glance that passed between Max and Clifford, because she exclaimed, “Oh my God! You did consider it, didn’t you?”

  “You’re staying here,” Michael said, brushing aside the question. “Anything you need can be bought and delivered here.”

  “You can do that?” Jessie made a face as soon as the words left her mouth. “Never mind. Of course you can. I forgot, you’re rich. You can do anything you want, buy anything—or anybody—you want.”

  Michael thought about all he had lost over the years and said, “No, not anything…or anybody.”

  The look of pain that flashed to life in Michael Brandt’s eyes and then just as quickly disappeared took Jessie by surprise. She would have thought that someone with as much money and power as he possessed would be immune to such things.

  Logically, of course, she knew that rich people had problems just like everybody else. But logic had nothing to do with it. When three hundred bucks was a major expense, it was difficult to sympathize with somebody worth millions.

  Oh, good Lord! she thought. Nana Rose! She had promised to wire the money to her grandmother the next morning, and now she was stuck here in this luxurious prison. She had forgotten all about that.

  Mixed in with her concern about Nana Rose was a twinge of regret for the discomfort her comment had caused Michael. Even though she wasn’t sure she fully trusted him yet, she didn’t want to hurt him. His quiet words indicated that he had lost something or somebody that he couldn’t get back. A woman?

  Unlikely, Jessie decided. In the decade or so that he had been in the public eye, Michael sure as heck hadn’t been hurting for female companionship. She had seen dozens of news photos that showed him with some spectacular beauty on his arm. Most of them had probably graced his bed, too. Even if he wasn’t involved with Angelica Boudreau, as current rumors had it, his track record with the ladies didn’t show anything to be sorry about, unless it was the lack of any serious, long-term relationships.

  Whatever it was, for a second there her instincts had cried out for her to put her arms around him and comfort him, to drive away whatever ghosts haunted him with the warmth of her embrace. But of course she couldn’t do that. And anyway, he was already back to normal, which in his case meant steely eyed and determined to get his own way.

  The sound of a computer’s e-mail chime came from one of the other rooms. Clifford got up to go check on it and Max followed him, both of them looking a little relieved to be getting out of the somewhat awkward atmosphere in the living room. That left Jessie and Michael alone. He sat down in the armchair near the fireplace again.

  “I have one small problem….” she began.

  “What is it?” Michael asked. “We’ll deal with it.”

  She told him about the promise she’d made to her grandmother.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Michael said with a shake of his head. “Give Clifford her name and address, and he’ll see to it that the repairs are taken care of. Is there anything else?”

  “I’ll need my laptop—”

  “We’ll get you a better one,” Michael said. “Unless you need some specific files on it.”

  “No. There’s nothing that won’t keep.”

  “All right, then. You’ve got your cell phone and your camera, and we’ll get you another laptop. I assume you’ll want some other clothes?”

  Jessie glanced down at her jeans and blouse and leather jacket. “These will get a little dirty after a while,” she said. “Unless you want me to go naked.”

  She didn’t know why she said that. The provocative words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She felt her face warming, even though she usually didn’t blush. She looked away from Michael, not wanting to see what his eyes might reveal now.

  In a cool and noncommittal voice, he replied, “I don’t think that will be necessary. I have a personal shopper at Neiman-Marcus. Just tell Clifford your sizes and we’ll get you fixed up with everything you’ll need.”

  “All right. Thank you.” She made herself look at him and uttered a short laugh. “I’m starting to feel like a kept woman.”

  “There’s no need to feel like that,” Michael assured her. “You wanted to be one of us, and we take care of the people on our team.”

  That was all well and good, she thought, but that unbidden image of standing naked before him still lurked in her mind. She had worried that she was going crazy as she listened to Michael’s story about fighting vampires and being descended from a vampire who had been cured, but now that she had accepted, at least for the time being, Michael’s explanation, the feelings he aroused in her crept insistently to the forefront once more.

  Quite a while had passed since she’d been involved with anybody, and never anybody like Michael. Normally, getting mixed up with somebody that rich would have made her feel like a gold digger. But undeniably, her body responded to Michael Brandt’s presence in the room. It didn’t help that he sat next to a crackling fireplace that threw shifting shadows over his face so she couldn’t read his expression. What would he do if she stood up and peeled off her clothes? He had been with some of the most beautiful women in the world. Surely he would judge her harshly and find her lacking by comparison.

  Even though she might want to deny it, a part of her wished she could find out.

  “You must be tired,” he went on after uttering that stale platitude about being a member of the team. He hadn’t been able to think of anything else to say after she said the word naked. All he’d been able to think about was how she would look standing there with the light from the fireplace playing over her smooth, faintly coppery skin and striking reflections from her long, midnight-dark hair….

  He wondered what it would feel like to run his hands over her bare skin and stroke his fingers through her hair. He wanted to pull her close to him, to have her body molded against his, to press his mouth to hers and fill his senses with the taste, the feel, the scent of her.

  A growl of desire tried to work its way up his throat, but he closed it off.

  Was that why he had gone against the advice of his friends and his own better judgment and not only told her the truth about their crusade but asked her to join them? Because she aroused him and touched something inside him that no other woman had since Charlotte?

  “Yeah, it’s been kind of a long day,” she said, breaking into the wild dreams and devastating memories that cascaded through his head.

  He seized gratefully on her words and got to his feet. “I’ll show you to one of the spare bedrooms.”

  “How many rooms do you have here?” she asked as she stood up. “The place isn’t that big.”

  “It’s bigger than it looks. It sort of sprawls around, and you can’t really see all of it because of the trees. But it’s the largest of the lodges here at the Chateaux.”

  “Nothing but the biggest and best for Michael Brandt, right?” she asked lightly.

  “You could say that.” He forced a smile onto his face and matched her tone. “I’ve got that millionaire playboy image to live up to, remember.”

  “It’s hard to forget.” She frowned a little, as if she disapproved of his wealth even though he tried to use it for the best cause he could possibly think of.


  He led her down a deeply carpeted hall and opened a door, then reached inside and flipped on the light before stepping back to let her precede him. “Oh, my,” she said as she walked into the lavishly furnished room. A king-size bed covered by a lush, burgundy-colored comforter dominated the room, but a large desk with a computer on it, a couple of comfortable-looking armchairs, a deeply upholstered love seat and a mahogany armoire with a plasma TV and a DVD player mounted in it competed for a guest’s attention.

  Michael pushed open another door and turned on another light. “The bathroom’s in here,” he pointed out.

  Jessie’s eyes went wide as she looked at the large bathroom with its granite-topped vanity containing twin sinks, a spa bathtub with seemingly enough knobs and controls for an airliner and a separate walk-in shower. She walked into the bathroom and touched the fluffy white towels, running her hand over the soft fabric.

  Michael leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and watched her in the mirror. He recalled the veiled comments she had made about her hardscrabble childhood growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma. She might never have been in surroundings like these before, no matter how commonplace they seemed to him. He found himself admiring her not only for her beauty but also for her drive and determination to better herself and to take care of her grandmother.

  Jessie turned toward him. “You said this is a spare room? What’s your room like? Versailles?”

  As a matter of fact, he had claimed the smallest bedroom in the lodge. He didn’t need much space. Not that he lived like a monk or anything. His room was comfortable enough. He didn’t do anything in it except sleep.

  He didn’t respond to her question with an offer to show her his room; that would have sounded tacky. Instead he said, “I think you’ll be fine here. I’m sorry we don’t have any nightclothes on hand, but by tomorrow night you should have everything you need.”

  She smiled. “What, you don’t keep a nightie on hand in case Angelica Boudreau drops by and wants to sleep over?”

  “You believe me when I say that I spend most of my time fighting vampires, but you don’t believe me when I tell you that I’ve never even met Angelica Boudreau?”

  “I just think the two of you would make a cute couple.” She was eyeing that massive tub. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I could use a nice, long, hot soak in that bathtub.”

  “Of course.” Michael stepped back from the door. “Just let one of us know if there’s anything you need.”

  “You or Max or Clifford.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think I’ll call you. Although Clifford is awfully nice. Max doesn’t like me, though.”

  “Max is just protective of his territory. Like a big dog, I guess.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jessie started to swing the bathroom door closed, then paused. A serious look came over her face as she said, “Am I still free to go if I want?”

  “Of course.” He could tell that her freedom meant a lot to her, and he wanted to reassure her.

  “You won’t hit me on the head and pack me off to some so-called hospital where I’ll disappear and never be seen again?”

  “Good Lord, no! I’m hoping you’ll want to stay here, though. If you’re going to be one of us, we need to get started on your training as soon as possible.”

  Her finely arched eyebrows went up. “Training?” she repeated.

  “If you’re going to fight vampires, you have to know what you’re doing. Otherwise…”

  “I don’t really know what I’m getting into, do I?” Jessie asked in a small voice.

  “People usually don’t,” Michael said. “They just have to hope that it works out anyway.”

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  Chapter 6

  “A nything important going on?” Michael asked as he came back into the living room and found Max and Clifford there.

  Clifford stood in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back. He turned toward Michael and said, “An encrypted report from Duncan. Rendell is on the move. He and his entourage flew out of Heathrow on a private jet about an hour ago.”

  Michael didn’t forget about Jessie; as he was leaving the bathroom he had heard the water running as she filled the tub, and he couldn’t quite shake the mental picture of her slowly lowering her nude body into a tub full of steaming, soapy water.

  But the news that Jefferson Rendell was on his way to America pushed even that tantalizing image to the back of Michael’s mind. He hadn’t expected the vampire overlord to be headed this way quite so soon.

  The sun hadn’t risen yet in England. No doubt Rendell’s jet would be fast enough to stay ahead of it all the way to his destination in the States, wherever that might be. Rendell had numerous business interests on the East Coast, so he might stop in New York or Boston for a few days before heading on to Texas. A tentative date had been set for the summit, but it couldn’t get under way until Rendell arrived from England and Escobar came in from Colombia and Takahashi made the trip from Japan.

  “If Rendell’s on his way, we may not have quite as much time as we thought we had,” Michael said.

  Clifford nodded. “That’s right. We need to finalize the resort deal as soon as possible. Although I suppose we can go ahead without it.”

  “Be a lot easier if we could wrap that up,” Max put in.

  Michael didn’t waste a lot of time reaching a decision. “Up the offer another one point five million,” he told Clifford. “No, make it two. And e-mail it to Barton right now.”

  Andrew Barton was the attorney Michael had visited earlier in the day, the man who represented the ostensible owners of a large corporate retreat and resort about a hundred and twenty miles west of Dallas. What Barton didn’t know about his clients—and Michael did—was that they were just a front for the true owner, Warren Spaulding. Spaulding had built a reputation as a Texas oilman and rancher back in the oil boom of the eighties and had increased his fortune even more by going into real estate. A well-known figure in business and economic circles, he had a secret.

  Warren Spaulding was a vampire.

  Earlier Jessie had seemed shocked that vampires used e-mail. She had no idea how well they had adapted to the modern world. The Englishman, Jefferson Rendell, controlled a communications and media empire that stretched across most of Europe and across the Atlantic to North America. Hiroshi Takahashi occupied a similar position in the Far East and had made major inroads in buying up real estate in Hawaii and California. The two of them, along with Warren Spaulding and several others in the States and overseas, were legitimate businessmen, protecting their interests within a labyrinthine maze of corporations, holding companies, tax shelters and off-shore accounts.

  Nor were the vampire overlords concerned only with legal enterprises. Juan Antonio Escobar headed up a huge drug cartel stretching from South America through Central America and on into Mexico and the U.S. Human drug kingpins had a reputation for ruthlessness, but they were nothing compared to Escobar, who could never wash all the blood off his hands even if he wanted to, which he didn’t.

  The only thing Michael could compare this worldwide network of evil to was the old-fashioned Mafia, now a mere shadow of what it had once been and even at its worst only a fraction as powerful and bloodthirsty as the organization run by Spaulding, Rendell, Takahashi, Escobar and their cohorts.

  And trying to hold that bloody tide at bay were the scattered members of the Brandt family and their allies. Michael and his relatives fought against the vampires not only by physical means, but through financial and technological ones, as well. The odds were stacked against them, though; in the end, no matter how hard they battled, they might lose the war.

  But they would go down fighting. No one among them ever doubted that.

  And if Michael could manage to destroy some or all of the overlords gathering at the “castle,” that corporate retreat owned by Warren Spaulding, that might just change the odds. Of course, Spaulding would never sell the resort
to one of the Brandts—if he knew about it. By moving quickly, though, Michael hoped to complete the purchase before the news of it filtered all the way up through the layers of concealment to Spaulding. Most of the people who worked for Spaulding, like Andrew Barton, had no idea of his true nature. They just took care of his business dealings to the best of their ability. Michael had offered too tempting a price on the resort to turn down. They would make the deal.

  In the process, Michael would obtain what he really wanted: all the blueprints and specifications of the resort, which had been built to resemble a European castle. He had seen photos of the place, its crenellated battlements thrusting up from the rugged Texas hills that surrounded it, and knew that it wouldn’t be easy to get inside. Anything he could get his hands on to help would be worth it.

  But either way, he had to get in. Because not only could he strike a blow against the vampire hierarchy, this was also his best chance at Rendell in a long time. The man hardly ever left his isolated estate in the English countryside, which was guarded by what amounted to a small, private army.

  Michael had a special score to settle with Jefferson Rendell, one that had all but consumed him for years now.

  “If Barton bites on the offer, we can have the deal concluded by tomorrow night,” Clifford said, breaking into Michael’s thoughts. “He won’t think it unusual for the buyer to request all the computer files he has pertaining to the resort.”

  “And that’ll give us the blueprints and the other intel we need,” Max said. He clenched his right hand into a big fist and smacked it into his left palm. “Those bloodsucking bastards’ll be surprised as hell when we bust up their little party.”

  Michael nodded. They could proceed without purchasing the castle; they had already mapped the place fairly well with infrared and other imagery gathered by a “communications” satellite owned by the Brandt family. It actually carried a state-of-the-art surveillance payload that would be the envy of some national intelligence services around the world. But the prospects of the attack succeeding would increase greatly if they could learn more about the inside of the castle.