Free Born to Bite by Lynsay Sands Page A

there with lists of immortal women looking for nanny jobs. And you can’t leave a child that young with an uninitiated mortal woman. He’d bite. Not out of cruelty or meanness, just because he was hungry and the nanny smelled like food.”
    “You could have initiated a mortal nanny,” Eshe pointed out.
    “You can’t spring something like that on them. It takes time to develop enough trust in a mortal that they can accept what we are. In the meantime, Thomas could never have been left alone with her and I simply couldn’t be inside watching him with a nanny twenty-four hours a day. I had a farm to run.” He shook his head. “I didn’t see any other option but to let Marguerite raise him for me when she offered.”
    Eshe was silent for a moment and then asked, “How did Althea die?”
    Armand heaved out a sigh, his gaze on the road ahead as he said, “A hotel fire.”
    “You escaped?” she asked, and his paranoia rose up in him again, making him glance at her uncertainly. He could have sworn there had been an inflection to her tone that…Armand let it go when he saw her expression was simply curious, and explained.
    “I wasn’t there. It was a busy time at the farm when I was outside more than in. William and Mary, Althea’s parents, had come to visit for a bit. When they left, they took Althea and four-year-old Thomas with them for a short stay. I understood they were going to their farm, but apparently they made a detour to the city for what was supposed to be a few days, but the first night they were there a fire broke out in the hotel. Althea must have been trapped or didn’t wake up to the shouts and noise in time. She perished in the fire.”
    “And yet little Thomas got out?” Eshe asked with a frown.
    “He was in Althea’s parents’ room. Althea had been tired after the day’s excursions and Mary liked to spoil the boy, so she took Thomas into their room with them so Althea could sleep undisturbed. They got out with Thomas. Althea didn’t.”
    Eshe was silent for a minute. When she spoke again, he could hear the frown in her voice and understood it completely when she murmured, “Nicholas once mentioned that his mother died in a fire too.”
    “Yes,” he said grimly. “Fire has been a plague in my life.”
    “How did she—?” Eshe began, but he interrupted, glad to be able to do so as he said, “Another time. We’re here.”
    Eshe turned to glance out the window as he turned into the mall parking lot, and Armand felt himself relax. He understood her curiosity but he didn’t like to talk about the past. Doing so had wound him up a bit. He, a man who normally hated shopping, was glad for the respite from talking about the past that it would offer.
     
    “You should probably go to the food court now,” Eshe announced as they carried her bags out of the last of the clothing stores, or at least the last of them she was willing to try. Eshe wasn’t much of a shopper. She liked what she liked, spotted it quickly, bought it, and got out, and this had been a particularly quick shop for her since all she had bought were a couple of pairs of jeans and half a dozen T-shirts. She had also bought a pair of black dress pants and a dressier top in case they went somewhere fancier than the diner—like this Moxie’s Mrs. Ramsey had mentioned—but that had taken only a couple of minutes.
    “The food court?” Armand said with surprise, and then asked, “Are you hungry?”
    “I am a little,” she acknowledged, surprised to find that it was true. It must only have been a couple of hours since they’d eaten. The drive in hadn’t taken much more than twenty minutes, and her shopping had probably taken an hour, but they’d also walked all the way around the mall checking out the shops available before starting the actual clothing shopping. That had been a rather interesting exercise. Eshe had been rather surprised to find that many of the things Armand had found interesting or attractive in the