So he’d found the kitchen, and the kitchen staff. Two men and three women. He didn’t know their relationship to Danny’s mother or Ian, but he brusquely relayed Danny’s commands about a bath and the blood. From their wary reaction, he could tell they realized the balance of power might be shifting, and it was important not to come down on the wrong side of it. Most were obsequious to the point of being irritating, with the exception of one young woman with a pretty, fresh face who simply studied him as he explained what was needed. She volunteered to take care of the bath and quickly disappeared from sight.

Another maidservant, attractive enough with neat brown hair coiled on her neck and a voluptuous form beneath her dark uniform dress and starched apron, retrieved a container from the shelf and left for the porch from the kitchen exit. Mindful of Danny’s advice about monitoring what she was going to be putting in her mouth, Dev followed the woman. When she knelt by the first body, she calmly grasped his hair and lifted his head, studying the bullet wound.

“You need to cut him and drain it into the container. I’ll hold it.”

It was certainly not the most terrible thing he’d ever done or seen, but it was unsettling, her matter-of-factness about squeezing a dead man like an orange for his fluid. It made him feel a twinge of shame for the act, a long-dormant need to say a prayer.

Instead he nodded, drew his knife and squatted next to her. A cooling dead man gave her a meager flow, but she pulled the container away after only a small sampling. Since she was far more accustomed to preparing tea for vampires, he wouldn’t argue.

As she rose, Dev rose with her. Some of the stockmen were still about, and he met the gaze of the nearest man, holding the dark look with one equally intimidating. But he could feel it as much as they all could. A sense of anticipation had descended on everything human on the station. Nobody was going to fuck around with anyone else until the vampires decided how things were going to be. That made things a little easier on him, at least, though he didn’t envy Danny. It was good that his sheila appeared to have nerves of steel. She was going to need them.

When he returned to the kitchen with the woman, she put the blood into a teacup and poured Earl Grey over it. She prepared a tray with sugar, cream and a couple biscuits. Handing it to him with a short curtsy, she returned without another word to her duties, preparing dinner. He found the biscuits odd, but then he remembered what she’d said about vampires enjoying food without consumption. Well, the biscuits did look good. Maybe Danny would balance them on his nose and, if he performed the trick well enough, let him have them. He was getting hungry himself.

He shouldered his swag, the sum of their belongings, and headed for the stairs to the second level. As he did, he glanced in at the rooms he passed. The décor was the dark furniture and overly formal look of an English estate, down to an ostentatious painting of hunting hounds over one of the fireplaces. The dogs stood against a lush hill-side that looked nothing like this part of Australia, or any part of the country he knew. These had to be Ian’s choices, for Danny had implied her mother had a bond to the land that she herself possessed. Thank God.

When he reached her room, he knocked.

Come in.

It reassured him, the voice in his head, which probably proved he’d turned the corner. As he stepped in, he found he was right about who’d chosen the interior for the rest of the house. The first thing he saw when he stepped in was a series of Outback watercolors, small, quaint landscapes. The room had rustic furniture, a large quilt on the bed. Because this was the part of the house buried in the hill, it was blessedly cool, and a group of candles gave it a light that made him think again of the solitude of their cave, with more creature comforts.

When he set down the tray and turned, she was emerging from the washroom. He could see the bathtub behind her, water ready.

She’d stripped out of the T-shirt she’d borrowed from him. Wearing brassiere, trousers and bare feet, she came to him, took the cup and downed the contents in several swallows, a look of ferocious satisfaction crossing her face before she tossed the delicate porcelain aside, letting it shatter on the floor. Seizing the back of his head, she drew him down to taste the blood on her lips, the taste of her beneath it. Struggling to catch up, he gripped her hips, as much for anchor as to return the pleasure, and she growled, moving into him. Her breasts pushed against his chest, her flat abdomen sliding along his cock as her leg insinuated between his.

If he touches you again, I’ ll kill him, I swear it.

The sheer raw possession in her thought took him by surprise. He sure as hell didn’t like Ian touching her, or thinking about how many blokes Danny might have chosen to touch. But this twisted something unexpected in him, all the way down to his balls. It was beyond jealousy. She viewed him as belonging to her, and had taken great offense at Ian manhandling him, not just with the suggestion of violence, but sexual violence.

“He’s not my type, love, no worries,” he managed against her mouth, trying to lighten things. Though his voice was hoarse, and the look she flicked up at him didn’t even register as human.

“I need this now. To do the rest.” Before he could guess what she meant, she made it rather obvious, shoving him to his back on the bed even as she was tearing her trousers off her legs, along with her knickers, leaving her gloriously naked.

“Open them. Now.” She gave a short nod to his strides, staring at what was already straining beneath, as if she could command it to arousal with one demanding look, and she probably could. The air around here was rife with the idea that vampires could control and direct anything they damn well pleased. While he couldn’t very well argue that, not after Ian had knocked him into the dirt and held him there with as much effort as it would have taken to hold down an infant, Dev’s hackles rose.

“You going to make me if I don’t, like your friend down there?”

He fought her, but it made little difference. She was too damn fast. She didn’t take them off. He cursed her as she shredded one of the two pairs of pants he owned, tore the seams of the boxers beneath and ripped open his shirt, leaving it in strips on his broad shoulders. She didn’t touch the knife harnesses he wore beneath his clothes. A message that they were useless against her. She left all that on, but took everything else. As she straddled him, she held him down with one hand pressed hard against his throat. She was dripping and hot already, so he couldn’t help but groan as she sank down on him and began to ride. Even as his mind was spinning, his body was ready for her, hard and thick, making those cunt muscles of hers strain to take him, where she outmatched him physically everywhere else.

“You did this, Dev.” There was anger in her voice, warring with lust. “You stood up to him, you foolish, stupid man. You killed those two men because they tried to hurt me. You didn’t care about the consequences.” No teasing seduction. She rode him, ruthlessly using the lust of one body for another, something that couldn’t be denied. He didn’t know if this was punishment or desperation, but he gripped her hips, hung on as she bent, lithe and flexible, and sank her fangs into his throat, drinking deep, letting him feel the unnerving rush of blood from that major artery flow into her mouth. She swallowed against him, close enough the quiver of her breasts brushed his chest as she kept moving rhythmically, demanding his surrender.

She was still drinking when he came, crying out hoarsely, his hands digging into her arse as she made a noise of approval against his skin. Her body shuddered, an intense but short climax of her own that seemed to paralyze her for a moment, her forehead pressed hard against his jaw. Then, still impatient, she was sealing the wound with strokes and pressure of her tongue, her fingers burying into his hair, squeezing past the point of pain, her mouth still on the side of his neck.

But when she slowly rose, her lovely abdominal muscles contracting as she straightened without the use of her arms, he saw she wasn’t done with him yet.

She stepped away from the bed, their mingled fluids trickling down her thighs, the dark pink of her flushed and swollen sex visible to him. “Clean me, Dev.” She said it softly, but it was still a command. “With your mouth.” To do it, he had to leave the bed, go down on his knees before her. Technically, it wasn’t difficult, because he didn’t think his legs were quite ready to hold him and it made sense to give her that cosseting as a continuation of the passion between them. However, when he slid out of the bed, she moved back two steps, waited for him, brilliant eyes resting on his face. A taunt, making it clear she expected him to walk those two steps on his knees.

To hell with that, was his first thought. Then he looked at her. Her hair poured across her pale shoulders, her breasts high and proud. But beneath that, a tempest, so many things obviously swirling in her mind as she stood before him.

She was a garden behind a stone wall, protected by a dragon in a moat. When she let him into that garden, when he was deep inside her—God help him, he might be insane—he’d discovered rare and fragile blooms. He saw them in her eyes, in the tremble of her body, her response that couldn’t be feigned. And it wasn’t just a response to his body or what he was doing to hers. She was responding to him.

She was the dragon, the wall and the garden. So though her challenge brought forth an instinctive rebellion in him, he thought the dragon expected to be fought, maybe even relished it. But somehow, ultimately, it was surrender that would bring him over the wall, into that garden, her innermost self. Would bring both of them into it. Taming the dragon, at least temporarily. When he was in that garden, he never wanted to leave.

It was a strange mélange of thoughts, but he was at a loss to explain most of his reactions to her. He didn’t know why even this demand made his cock give an unexpected contraction, another small expulsion of semen that caused a gasp, a little bit of a forward pitch. Her hand was on his shoulder then, steadying him. She guided him as she put one foot on the bed, widening her stance.

“Every drop, Dev. Let me feel that clever tongue.”

Placing his mouth against her cunt, he closed his eyes, immersed in the scent of her. When he placed hands on her hips, her own landed on top of them, closing over his wrists, a light manacle. He began to lick, circling his tongue over the damp, still-aroused clit, goaded by the guttural sound that emitted from her lips. He kept going, kept his focus on actually cleaning her, which he understood was what she wanted. He was performing a task for her.