Darker Nights
Darker Nights
ISBN #
978-1-78430-705-9
©Copyright Nan Comargue 2015
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright August 2015
Edited by Sarah Smeaton
Totally Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Totally Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Totally Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2015 by Totally Bound Publishing,
Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN
Totally Bound Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a
heat rating
of
Totally Burning
and a
Sexometer
of
2.
DARKER NIGHTS
Nan Comargue
Lawyer Delia Darker’s world becomes very dark when two new clients turn out to be immortal vampires—and her long-time fantasy.
Delia Darker works at her family’s law firm, serving vampires and other immortals, but she has long ago gotten over her own lust for vampire males after being hurt and abandoned by one. When her colleague forces her to take over a meeting with two of his clients, she’s suddenly thrown into the night-time world of music, partying and incredible sex. How can she resist spending the night with Mark Lyons and Caleb Jennings?
Caleb has been searching for his and Mark’s one true mate, the ideal match prophesized for immortals. However, Mark is skeptical. Immortality just doesn’t seem to go with a committed long-term relationship. It doesn’t matter how attractive Delia is, he just doesn’t think it’s going to work—but he’s willing to give it a try for his best friend’s sake.
When that first wild night turns into a series of sexy encounters, Delia starts worrying that she might be falling for Mark and Caleb—and that certainly wasn’t the plan. She isn’t sure she wants to become an immortal. Sleeping with both a vampire and a werewolf might be a crazy experiment that’s all right for a little while, but the two males couldn’t want more than that, could they?
Chapter One
‘This business is all about repeat clients,’
Delia’s father had once told her, and she’d realized this was true the first time she’d handled a vampire divorce case.
The vampires were wealthy—all of them. At least, all of the ones who got divorced. It was a function of interest rates and the upward trend of the stock markets. Her father again. Except Delia couldn’t quite believe that the restless, beautiful creatures who came to see her at the office checked their margin accounts or even knew what a margin account was. Even less could she picture them once poring over newspapers or ticker tape.
They were too modern. Relentlessly so. A vampire never wore last year’s fashions, much less stuff from the eighties or nineties. It was almost as if they tried to hide their immortality in the styles of the day.
Her new client, Rosa Linden, was dressed in haute couture. More incredibly, she managed to pull it off, as so many wealthy women were unable to. It helped that her body would have made a supermodel weep in envy.
That was the only way a normal woman could get such a body, Delia reflected with a healthy dose of self-mockery—to never eat. To never have to eat. Delia didn’t think she could give up the pistachio macaroons from La Table, even for the black-and-white graphic sheath Rosa Linden was wearing, which must have cost what Delia made in a month. She would rather her boring gray suit—and the macaroons.
Rosa made Delia nervous and she seemed to know it, if the half-smile etched on her exquisite face was any indication.
“Where’s your father?” Rosa asked. Again.
Delia smiled with her teeth alone. “Retired.”
Actually her father was in respite care for his advanced stomach cancer but she didn’t see the need to tell her client. Vampires exhibited two reactions to the subject of death—relish or pity. Delia wasn’t in the mood to deal with either.
“He was such a good lawyer,” Rosa said, as if she knew exactly where he was and figured it was the equivalent of actual death. “He handled my last two divorces and my takeover of my ex-husband’s company. Do you practice corporate law as well?”
Delia looked up from the figures on her computer screen, figures that were making no sense. “What? No, I don’t do corporate.”
Rosa nodded with that same irritating suggestion of having known the answer beforehand. “No, I can’t imagine it would suit you, not like it suits your colleague.”
Delia had more than a dozen colleagues, but she immediately knew which one Rosa meant. To the female patrons, there was only one who mattered.
Henry Merrill.
God’s gift to women. Young and old. Mortal and immortal.
“Henry is competent in a lot of areas,” Delia agreed, meaning to point out that her own specialty was the exact type of law Rosa seemed to require most often.
“Indeed, he is,” Rosa murmured with another half-smile. “I’m just wondering how you would possibly know.”
Her bright stare moved over Delia just slowly enough to be insulting.
Delia felt her face color but she did not give way to her first instinct, which was to meet rudeness with rudeness. She was too much a professional. The blood running through her veins was shot through with lawyerly caution, several generations of it, and that caution told her never to insult a customer—no matter how aggravating they could be.
“Are you afraid of all your clients? Or just the vampires?”
Afraid? What a thought.
Delia wasn’t afraid of vampires. She was turned on by them.
But she couldn’t exactly share that fact with the other woman, now could she?
Delia ignored the taunting questions and somehow made it through the rest of the meeting, but inwardly she was tumbling back years into the past to her first real interaction with a vampire.
* * * *
Eleven years ago
She was twenty-one years old, the youngest person in her first year law school class and the most serious. ‘Buttoned up tighter than a sample dress on a big girl’, was how one of her classmates had described her with that same look she often got from the other students—half tender, half mocking. As if she wasn’t quite worth the full force of their teasing.
Delia didn’t mind. She already knew what path her life would take. She’d known that pretty much since she’d been a child—university, law school, the firm. All she’d ever wanted to do was be like her father, a lawyer in the firm their family had started so long ago, in a country she’d never even visited.
Darker Law. It represented all her dreams of maturity, of strength and independence—of adulthood.
It made sense that her first hard lesson of adulthood also took place there.
Daniel was one of her father’s oldest clients, in every way. He was also a vampire.
He made Delia’s heart thud every time she saw him, which wasn’t often since she rarely dealt directly with clients. Her summer position consisted of organizing briefs, conducting research and doing the odd amount of fetching files to and from court for lawyers who had forgotten some crucial document back at the office.
“How is our pretty little summer student?” Daniel asked one day as she rushed into her father’s office with a pile of cases that he’d needed the previous day and she’d only just remembered.
His voice, low and raspy had startled her, exactly as if the night had solidified into sound.
She hadn’t seen him standing by the window, pulling back the heavy drapes to gaze out at the overcast sky. The sun’s rays could harm him, even on such dull days, even out of their direct path, but he didn’t seem to care.
Delia clutched the stack of papers close to her chest. “Oh, hello, Mr. Carton.”
Why is he there today?
She hadn’t seen his name in her father’s old-fashioned desk calendar and the business merger that had brought him to the office over the past few weeks had been recently concluded and the bill paid promptly, which was part of the reason her father liked him.
He smiled as if he knew the effect he had on her. He probably did. She was too young and inexperienced to hide it.
“I was filling this out.” He held up a form she recognized. A petition for divorce.
Her heart was beating in her ears, thick and slow. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He tilted his head and the dim light picked up the threads of silver in his dark hair. “Are you? I’m not. It was a long time coming.”
In vampire time, who knew how long he meant? Years? Decades? Centuries? But if it was the latter, he wouldn’t need a divorce decree, would he? There would be no record of the marriage.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He smiled again, a small pained expression. “Don’t be.” He shot the lock on the door then flicked his hand at her. His fingers were long and powerful looking. Everything about him was strong looking, from the clean hard line of his jaw to the lean body swathed in its usual black suit. He hadn’t been very tall or big, yet strength emanated from him like he was shot through with it.
“Come here.”
She’d obeyed. That voice. That terrible magnetism.
Delia had stood before him, trembling, as he’d plucked the case files from her arms and let them fall to the floor. The pages had fallen in drifts, like snow. She’d gone cold, her nipples had peaked like tiny icicles.
Everything about him had been so exciting, so exotic and dangerous—the way he’d talked, the way he looked, the way he moved, his head bending to hers to touch her lips with a breath of ice.
She moaned. That freezing touch, it fired her blood. And when he touched her mouth, the heat was everywhere, in every part of her.
“I’ve noticed you watching me, little Darker,” he murmured. “It is a dangerous thing to be a Darker and to crave darkness.”
She knew it. She’d always known it. Working among vampires, she had to tame her desire for them. Temptation would be everywhere for her.
Yet the danger was in him, in the dark pinprick of red she could see in his gray eyes, in the strained way he held himself. He was still holding the petition for divorce. He was so powerful and yet so vulnerable.
Delia yearned to comfort him.
“I want this,” she heard herself say.
He leaned closer, and she moaned at the kiss of frost from his breath. How old was he? Older than any of the other clients she knew. Her father held him in veneration. Daniel Carton. Just the name sounded mellowed with age.