Her scent rose to drift into his nose and command his senses, a delicate bouquet of pastries and woman combined, a heady combination that tended to strip him of all rational thought.

His breath caught and held. He felt as he had from the first, that he could lose his soul in the eyes of this woman, his woman.

His woman. Mais quel cauchemar. A nightmare that would not end. The breh-hedden had done this to them both, bound them together when neither of them wanted to be bound.

“I’m going to baby Helena’s christening, Jean-Pierre. And that’s that. I will not discuss it further.”

He could not move her. Whatever her slavery had been, her recovery had been swift. From the withdrawn, despairing woman had emerged a vampire with a dedicated mind-set intent on rescuing all the remaining blood slaves and seeing Rith Do’onwa into the grave.

He applauded her determination but the sheer stubbornness that had arisen, the willfulness, was a thorn in his side, night and day. He would not call her reckless, but certainly fearless. His job would have been so much easier if she had been a wallflower that wilted. Instead she forged ahead, ignored his opinions, and was like an Amazon to the problems in front of her.

He served as her Guardian of Ascension and had from almost the day of her rescue. He was both grateful for and hated the assignment. Grateful because he could not have tolerated any other warrior being close to her. Yet if he was to have a chance to not feel so very bound to her, only distance would answer—and distance he could not get.

Worse, she had emerging powers, which meant that the enemy would soon discover her worth, and would want her very dead. For that reason, he had tried to persuade her not to attend the christening, which he had learned just a few hours ago, and much to his horror, was to be conducted in the open air.

Merde.

Seriffe commanded the room again. “We have another situation, people.”

“Oh, no,” Fiona whispered.

Without thinking, he moved in close behind her once more, something she allowed, and he was not surprised when she leaned against him for support. As much as neither wished to be close, a friendship had developed, and he knew that to some degree she relied on him.

Once more, he put his hand most carefully on her hip and worked at his breathing. This close, his arousal was only a thought away. But in the past five months, he had learned some new skills in tolerating the presence of his woman without constantly sporting, as the Americans liked to say, a raging hard-on.

Seriffe had a remote control in his hand. He aimed it at the large central monitor and clicked. “I recorded this a few minutes ago.”

Greaves came on the screen. Jean-Pierre could not restrain a soft growl. More than any other creature on the face of the earth, he wanted this vampire dead, set on fire, burned to ashes, then cast over at least five different bodies of water.

“My fellow ascenders,” Greaves began, “I have learned this very morning of a grave situation. My staff, in their ongoing efforts to better regulate a world that has fallen into massive decay under Madame Endelle’s unfortunate leadership, has uncovered the existence of several blood slave facilities. We are even now in the process of searching these facilities out and ending the reprehensible activity of procuring dying blood from enslaved females.

“I am hereby offering a reward for anyone who can locate the creator and director of these facilities, an ascender by the name of Rith Do’onwa, who has built over the past ten decades an entire black market for this truly heinous commodity.”

A picture appeared of Rith, and Jean-Pierre felt Fiona stiffen. He could only imagine how the sight of the vampire affected her.

Greaves continued, “The unfortunate circumstance of the highly addictive nature of dying blood is a problem that the scientific community, attached to the Coming Order, works on relentlessly day and night.

“I wish to set the record straight on one pertinent fact; many decades ago, I had a brief association with ascender Do’onwa, in which as a joint effort we attempted to create an antidote for the disease. When I saw that such efforts would prove fruitless, I ended the project as well as my association with ascender Do’onwa.

“So serious is the nature of this situation that I’m offering one million dollars to anyone who can provide information that leads to the capture of ascender Do’onwa.”

He ended the press conference, refusing to take questions, and left the staging area with the flash of lightbulbs glittering off his shiny bald head.

“Fucking brilliant,” Fiona muttered. “He’s set Rith up as the fall guy. Bastard.”

She was using one of his favorite words to describe Greaves.

Fiona continued. “But do you think the world is buying this?”

“He has great presence, and who would not believe those big, innocent, round eyes of his?”

“Yeah, he looks so sincere. I loathe him, Jean-Pierre. I never thought in the course of my life to hate anyone, but that’s all I can feel for him.”

“I understand,” he said. And he did. He truly did.

As he glanced at the clock next to the monitor, his heart tightened. It was past eleven at night. His woman worked long hours and so did he. Fiona needed her rest and he needed to get into the field. But he did not want to leave her. As hard as it was to be around her most of the time, this was the hour he despised the most: Until he met with her again the following morning, he would be separated from her and unable to get to her if she needed him.

So, shit.

“You must go home now,” he said, leaning close and dipping down to smell her neck. He took a long sniff and heard her swift intake of breath. “May I see you home?”

She stepped away from him as a strong roll of her delicate croissant scent struck his nostrils. Oui, they were both trapped inside the breh-hedden. He also knew she was a woman quick to experience the little death, the place of ecstasy. He did not understand the why of it, but he could bring her with just a kiss. The first time had occurred the day she was in the hospital just after her release from the New Zealand blood slavery facility.

She turned to face him and he watched her swallow hard. She had a beautiful long neck. Her vein pulsed. He held back a groan. He longed for this woman in every way. He craved her. He wanted her blood.

She shook her head. A wisp of her hair had come loose. She pushed it behind her ear. Even the shape of her ears was beautiful—as if everything about her was designed to torment him.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jean-Pierre, do you?”

He shook his head as well but his heart tightened a little more. He did not understand all that he felt. Was he experiencing love or was this just the terrible lure of the breh-hedden?

From his side vision, he saw Seriffe move in their direction. Seriffe would fold her back to his house, where she lived with his family, in a guest suite all her own. That had been the one piece of grace that had come out of Fiona’s enslavement, that when the Warriors of the Blood rescued her and brought her to Metro Phoenix Two, she had discovered that the daughter she had lost so long ago, because of her abduction, had ascended in 1913 and was now married to Colonel Seriffe and had birthed three small boys.

But as Seriffe drew closer, Jean-Pierre’s heart rate increased. He did not want to leave Fiona. His instincts kicked into high gear and he stepped in front of her, his chin lowered, his gaze fixed in a hard stare on the colonel.

Seriffe shook his head. “You’re still going to do this?”

Fiona pushed at his back. “Jean-Pierre, this isn’t necessary.”

Fuck them both, he thought. How could either of them know what he experienced right now? “You must promise me this night that you will watch over her and let no harm come to her. You must promise, Seriffe, or by God I will tear your heart out.”

Seriffe sighed. He put a hand on Jean-Pierre’s shoulder. “By all that I hold sacred, by the lives of my wife and my children, I do so promise.”

It was the best Jean-Pierre could do.

He turned to Fiona and though feeling that his heart would break, however absurd, he caught up both her hands in his and kissed her fingers. “Tomorrow, chérie.”

She had tears in her eyes. “À demain, chéri.”

He loved her for that. She showed him such kindness. Whatever else she might be, however stubborn, however obsessed with finding Rith, Fiona Gaines was kind.

* * *

The following morning, Fiona stood before the mirror in her bedroom. Colonel Seriffe and Carolyn had given her a suite in their sprawling home where she had lived for the past five months, from the time she learned that her daughter had ascended.

Dressing to go to the christening, she contemplated changing her clothes one more time. The woman she was before her captivity would have had no trouble selecting an outfit to wear. Though she’d adjusted to many things about her new world and her new life, she couldn’t quite seem to find the right kind of clothes for herself. She despised the quandary and saw it as a weakness, something left over from her century-plus of living under Rith’s thumb.

She needed to be patient with herself, but sometimes she wanted to scream her frustration.

She wore pearl earrings and a cream silk tailored blouse tucked into a navy pencil skirt that had a small slit up one side, topped by three covered buttons. Around her shoulders she wore a light blue cashmere shawl.

The baptism ceremony was being held in mile-high Prescott Two and this time of year, in early March, at ten in the morning, the outdoor ceremony would be on the cool side of fifty, as opposed to the perfect seventy of Phoenix right now.

Still, she worried: Was she overdressed, underdressed, too matronly, too young, was the slit too much? She was uncomfortable in these clothes but she wasn’t certain why exactly, except of course that her back itched like crazy and there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Except …

She turned away from the mirror and moved to the nightstand on the far side of her bed. She drew the deep drawer open and took out … a ruler. She hated doing this because it made the wing-apertures weep but she needed some relief … now.