Free The Dark's Mistress (The Saint-Pierres) by Michele Hauf

to show it to you some day.  But not this morning.  Okay?” 
    She tilted up on her tiptoes and kissed him, finding an ease at his mouth that he devoured in more ways than physically.  She’d opened some part of herself to him and had grown confident in his arms.  He cherished that.
    “ Bonsoir ,” she said, “or rather, bonjour .  Will I see you tonight at the club?”
    “The devil won’t be able to keep me away.”
    She gasped, and quickly turned from him.  Not sure what he’d said to stir such a reaction, Johnny traced his fingers over the back of her lush hair and to the tips where he lingered, teasing the ends against his palm.
    “This was the best date,” she said, still not looking at him.  “Ever.  Thanks, Johnny.”  And she punched in the code and slipped through the doorway without looking back.
    Johnny caught his hand over his heart and spun out onto the sidewalk. Yeah, it had been some kind of heart pounding, universe thumping best. 

     
    Chapter Six
    Casa Hawkes was a quiet little limestone chateau capped with pepperpot turrets about a half hour drive out of Paris’s most western suburb.  Rhys Hawkes owned a hundred acres, mostly wooded, which was excellent because it served the werewolf half of him, which liked to wander free.  His vampire half would argue the jaunts through the prickles and trees, but that half didn’t get a vote when it came to fulfilling the wolf.
    Johnny stopped in to visit his grandparents every week, usually on Wednesdays when his grandmother Viviane was alone because her husband, Rhys drove in to the city to supervise the Hawkes Associates office.
    Johnny loved Viviane and was probably the only one in the family who didn’t walk on tiptoes around her.  So the woman was crazy—literally.  Being buried alive in a glass coffin for two hundred fifty years will do that to a person, even a vampiress.  She’d given birth to twins nine months after emerging from that hell.  Boys, each fathered by a different man.  Trystan was Rhys’s son, and he was all werewolf.  Well, mostly.  Vaillant—Johnny’s dad—had been fathered by Rhys’s evil vampire half-brother, Constantine de Salignac.  Only when her children had lived for decades had Viviane finally been able to rip out Constantine’s heart to show him how much she respected the asshole. 
    Vaillant had grown up in Faery, due to a deal Rhys had made with a faery regarding handing over his firstborn (the deal was made way back in the eighteenth century).  Presented with twins, the faery’s unfortunate choice had been Vail.  The sidhe preferred half-breeds to procreate with their own kind.  Full-blooded vampires didn’t cut it.  Vail had come to the mortal realm for the first time when he was in his late twenties, nursing a nasty faery dust addiction.  But Vail had met Johnny’s mother, Lyric, and the rest, as they say, was history. 
    Or so Johnny hoped.  He’d called his mom this morning.  Vail had found his way home and he’d confessed to Lyric about the faery dust.  She was keeping a close eye on him, and Vail was cool with that.  He understood the implications of even one more hit of dust. 
    Only a little relieved, Johnny couldn’t help but wonder what his dad had meant last night when he’d said he wanted to dance with the devil.  He was too smart to fall into addiction again. 
    “How’s the little biter?” Viviane asked. 
    She sat beside him on the couch, paging through a book.  Always clothed in gorgeous gowns with diamonds and elaborate stitching, she embodied goddess.  And sensuality.
    “She’s not biting yet, G-ma.  Summer is a usual one-year-old.  She doesn’t walk either, but she does run.”
    Summer was Johnny’s little sister by a few decades.  He loved that little bundle of giggles and spitup, and suspected she would forever have a twist upon his heart with those springy blonde ringlets that bounced when she toddled through a room.  He couldn’t imagine her