Free The Passion by Donna Boyd Page A

imitations of the marvel I've witnessed."
     
    She stopped, her heart racing with remembered awe, and was afraid she had said too much. But his expression remained merely interested. "A partial truth, at any rate," he observed. And he must have seen the startled flash of guilt in her eyes, because he gave a negligent turn of his wrist and added,
    "You wonder how I know. I can hear the change in your heartbeat and smel the uneasiness on your skin. You may lie to me if you wish, but I'll always know it."
    Then he demanded, "What causes you to believe now that I am not a monster? Why have you changed your mind?"
    Tessa summoned al her courage and met his eyes boldly. "I have not said that I've changed my mind, monsieur. I want to believe, I wish I could believe, that you are not the monster I took you for. But—I must be cautious."
    He looked startled for a moment and then let forth a shout of laughter. "You are the most peculiar girl!"
    He circled her once again, glass in hand, examining her from head to foot. He resumed his seat at length, sipped his wine, and frowned. "What you have done is no minor thing and I don't want you to take it lightly. Never in my days have I been so offended, and by a perfect stranger to whom I've done no harm. I should probably be a great deal angrier with you, but I can't put aside wondering how the devil you did it—and, perhaps more to the point, why."
    Tessa was afraid when that question was answered her interview would be over, as would her chance to understand this wondrous, terrifying creature. So instead of replying, she inquired earnestly, "Why didn't you kil me when you had the chance? You had the knife in your hand, yet you tossed it aside.
    And later, when you stood over me… the hunger to kil was in your eyes. I could see it."
    The brief narrowing of his eyes reflected surprise at her perception, and then a kind of regret, a reliving of the moment. "Yes," he murmured, "it was."
    He made a dismissive gesture with his wrist. "We do not kil humans. It goes against our deepest moral code—and besides, it's a waste of energy. We don't use weapons, either. We never learned to, we never needed to, and you'll find none in this house—
    except those, of course," he added with another fierce frown, "that you invent."
    "Then am I the only—that is, the others in this household, Gault and the rest, are they al —like you?"
    "There is no one," he replied with a disdainful arch of his brow, "like me."
    And just as she was about to sink limp with relief, he laughed.
     
    "Many of my servants are human," he told her; "the senior staff is not—Gault, Poinceau, Mme. Crol iere, Lavalier, and others. It would be impossible to find humans capable of performing their jobs with the efficiency I demand. Humans, while amusing, are not very bright and are oftentimes lazy."
    He seemed to enjoy watching for her reaction to his words. Tessa was far too overwhelmed with al that had happened—was stil happening—to know whether she gave him one or not.
    Once again the words flew out of her mouth before she stopped to think about them. "But—your servants. How can they not know what you are?"
    Only when it was spoken did she realize how foolish and irrelevant the question was. Yet, rather than mocking her, he seemed to consider the matter, as if it were a subject with which he had never concerned himself before. "Perhaps they do," he decided with a shrug. "What difference can it make?
    They are servants."
    The careless autocracy of the statement rankled, and she returned, "Then you won't mind if I tel them. Perhaps I'll tel the newspapers, too, and the Comtesse de Crele, who was your guest the other night, and the Prime Minister of England and anyone else I please!"
    A spark of interest caught his eyes, although his expression remained mild and barely amused. "Tel whomever you wish," he invited. "Of course, then I'll have to cut out your tongue. As for the Comtesse…"
    He sipped his wine, watching her.