Archer's Lady: Bloodhounds, Book 3 (4 page)

“Only to people who care enough to look closely, I think.”

Or to people who’d seen enough of the rougher side of life to recognize a fellow survivor. Grace shivered as she drew her braid over her shoulder and tugged the ribbon free of the end. “Do I really have to show him around?”

“It’s you or me,” Diana answered brightly, “and I’m fairly sure he’d prefer you.”

If only she could take the words innocently. “He could eat a sweet small-town schoolteacher alive.”

Diana grinned. “Yes, I imagine he could.”

“
Diana.
” Grace pushed back the curtain of her unbound hair just to glare at her friend. “It’s serious. I might be able to handle the man, but the lady I’ve been trying so hard to be surely couldn’t. What should I do?”

“Anyone who would care is gone, Grace. Be yourself.”

Excellent advice—or perhaps only exactly what she wanted to hear. Grace shook her hair back and nodded. “I can do that. Would you let him know I’ll be down within a quarter hour?”

“Sure.” Diana rolled off the bed and stretched. “Do you think he’ll go back and tell the Guild about me? Cecil thinks so.”

“I think…” Odd that, in such a short time, she already had a sense of the man. Or perhaps not so odd, considering how she’d once made her living. “I think he won’t, if you ask him not to.”

“Hmm.” Her friend turned for the door. “We’ll see.”

She let Diana put a hand on the knob before she asked the most important question. “Do you want him to?”

The woman turned, her back against the door. “It’s lonely, not knowing anyone else like you.”

“I know.” Which made Grace all the more determined to marshal her defenses where Archer was concerned. Perhaps he could be talked into helping Diana find a place where she could belong, where she could be who and what she was meant to be.

Diana deserved that more than Grace ever had.

If one more person clapped him on the back and called him a hero, Archer might explode.

He leaned against a hitching post outside the saloon and watched the people milling about. There were more this morning, no doubt emboldened by the destroyed vampires’ nest.

They had no idea what was coming for them.

Grace did. He could see it in her ice blue eyes as she freed herself from a knot of people and stepped off the wooden sidewalk, headed toward him.

She was dressed in nicer clothes today, but he wasn’t self-centered enough to think it was for his benefit. She wasn’t running away, for one, with an interminable ride in her future. No reason not to look her best. “Morning, Grace.”

“Archer.” She stopped a few paces away. “Diana indicated you needed my assistance today?”

“I need a guide,” he clarified. “Someone to show me Crystal Springs, tell me a little about the town.” Perhaps shed some light on why such a tiny hamlet would be important enough for local vampires to mount a three-month siege.

Grace nodded and turned to the right. “Shall we start at the east end? I can show you some of our resources. Plenty of the homes and businesses are unusually modern for the border area.”

“I was wondering more about the families in town. The ones still here?”

Her frown creased the spot between her eyebrows. “Farmers, for the most part.” After casting a glance at the gathering crowd, all of whom seemed far too focused in their attempts to eavesdrop, she took a step forward. “The sheriff and his wife kept track of everyone in town, as well as those who made their homes nearby. Looking at their books will refresh my memory.”

So she knew how to be discreet, then. “Show me.”

It wasn’t far. They’d passed the jail the day before, but now Grace drew to a stop in front of it, pushed open the boarded front door and stepped out of the morning sunlight.

It was the same as any of the dozens of jails he’d seen—two barred cells and a desk. The only thing that branded this one any different was the dead houseplant sitting on the edge of the dusty desk. “Did the sheriff leave or get taken?”

“I’ve never seen a wife as sweetly cherished as Bess.” Not quite an answer. Grace reached for the plant and brushed a trembling finger along one brown, withered leaf. “They took her. He followed.”

Suicide, nothing less. “The files are in the back office?”

“Mmm.” She shook herself and circled the desk, headed for the door at the back. “I believe she kept them in a lockbox.”

A safe. Archer’s hands clenched into fists. “Can you open it?”

Grace glanced back at him, and that spark of challenge he’d only glimpsed the previous day had taken up residence in her unwavering gaze. “I can open it. I know the combination.”

Not the sort of information anyone would have shared with her, either. “Good. I’d rather not have to dismantle it.”

She studied him for a moment longer, and her lips twitched into a half smile as she turned away. “I’m sure you could,” she murmured as she disappeared.

Following her afforded him a mouthwatering view of her ass in the air as she bent over in front of the safe, her nimble fingers working the dial. “Do they have a file on you in there, sweetheart?”

“Of course.” A final twist of her wrist, and she reached for the handle. “Are you asking how much of it is accurate?”

“Not much, I’d wager.” And he didn’t really give a damn.

“It’s my second chance, Archer.” The heavy metal creaked as she tugged open the door. When she straightened, she held several loose stacks of paper balanced on two flat, expensive-looking books. “If there’s something about me you need to know, I won’t lie to you. But I ran this far to forget my past. It’s neither pleasant, nor anything I care to dwell on.”

“I’m no threat to you,” he assured her. “Besides, it doesn’t work.”

“Second chances?”

“Forgetting.”

She dropped the heavy stack of papers on the desk, kicking up dust that spiraled upward, dancing through the narrow beams of sunlight from the shuttered window. “Perhaps I’m better at it than you are.”

No one was good at it—no one with half a conscience, anyway. Archer sank into the chair at the desk and glanced through the first few sheets of paper. “What do you think the vampires want?”

Grace leaned back against the desk, close enough that her skirts brushed his wrist. “They took the strong men first. Quickly. The women…” She drew a shallow breath. “They took their time before coming back for more.”

Judging from what Diana had told him, plenty of the bloodsuckers and ghouls had died during those raids. “Did you ever wonder why?”

“I’ve done little else.” She closed her eyes. “I can imagine four possibilities. They could need them for blood. Or information. To be used as bait. Or—or as sport.”

The first and fourth possibilities he’d already dismissed because of the inherent danger. Why would they risk themselves to obtain something they could easily get elsewhere? “Information, maybe, but what kind?”

She shrugged helplessly. “This town is wealthier than some others along the border. More than a few of the families struck gold, but no one’s found more than dust in the river in nearly fifteen years. Of those who are left, no one is at all unusual. Except Diana. And me, I suppose.”

“Diana told me her cover’s secure. She’s never left anything alive after a fight.” Besides, they couldn’t know about her, or they’d have torn the fucking town apart in a fiery rain of death to get their undead hands on her. “Would they want you this bad?”

“No.” It didn’t sound like a lie. She opened her eyes and met his gaze, her expression bewildered. “I angered men, not vampires. More than one, and a few with connections, but there would have been easier ways to get to me.”

That left bait, which was unlikely. “Then the answer has to be here,” he murmured, indicating the stack of papers and ledgers. “There’s someone or something here they want.”

Grace dropped her hand to her side, where her fingertips brushed his wrist in the lightest caress. “You’re so sure they’re not simply after entertainment?”

“I’m pretty sure, sweetheart.” Archer turned his hand and wrapped his fingers around hers.

She exhaled slowly and clutched at his hand. “It shouldn’t make me feel better. I’m sure they’d hardly be gentle, torturing me for information. But I suppose it’s a different sort of fear.”

“If you don’t know what they want or why, you can’t begin to fight them.”

“Of course.” The words straightened her spine, and she slipped her hand free of his and reached for the papers. “Who would you like to look at first? Those still alive? Or everyone, in case they don’t realize who has fled and who remains?”

“The living,” he answered immediately. “Then the rest, and we’ll see.”

She eased the stack of papers toward her and flipped through three pages before handing him the first one. “Farmers,” she offered, adding the next two to the stack clutched in her hand. “They take them when it’s convenient, but they seem more interested in the townsfolk.”

He set aside the papers she’d handed him. “Give me the files on the people they
are
interested in, Grace.”

“I’m looking,” she replied, her voice tight. “They’re scattered in with the dead, and there are more of those than I remembered.”

Archer closed his eyes. This was his job, but it was her town, her community, that had been torn apart. “I’m sorry. Give them to me. Maybe something will jump out.”

Pride stiffened her shoulders as she continued to flip through the pages, moving only a small percentage to the meager stack in front of him. “I’ll give you those who fled too. Some were rich. They could have had something of value, or some personal or political importance I don’t recognize.”

It felt wrong somehow, the notion that such scattered, messy attacks could have such a precise—no,
impersonal
focus.

Which brought him back around to the one thing vampires and their ghouls universally hated. “Is there a file on Diana?”

“I don’t—” Grace frowned and dropped the heavy pile of the dead on top of the safe. “Most often, families are grouped together,” she said as her fingers began to sort back through the stack. “I believe she’s… Yes, here she is. With Doc.”

He took them, along with a moment to explain. “Maybe they do know about her. And if it’s revenge they’re after instead of death, there isn’t much that would hurt your average hound more than watching everyone fall. Especially the people she was supposed to protect.”

“I see.” Grace looked away, her gaze falling on the files numbering the dead. “It’s hard to watch, even if there’s no good reason you should be able to protect them.”

He could take the papers and pore over them later. For now, he rose and touched her arm. “Grace.”

She shivered. “I’m not a sentimental woman. I don’t require comfort.”

He caught her chin and lifted her gaze to his. “You’re lying to me again.”

She jerked away from his grip and turned her back on him. “If you want a sweet little country schoolteacher to collapse in your arms and sob her foolish eyes out, you’ll find me a grave disappointment.”

He squashed the flash of irritation that rose. “I want to apologize. This isn’t something I should have asked you to do.”

“You had no reason to think—” Grace dragged in a deep breath and her hands lifted, as if she might be wiping her cheeks. “You needn’t apologize to me. I ought to apologize to you. You make me feel as if…” Another breath. A helpless laugh. “You make me
feel
.”

It was only human to care if she cried. Human and dangerous. “Not something I hear often.”

“Not something I say often.” She glanced back at him and smiled wanly. “I don’t want you to think I’m not strong enough to help you. I am.”

“Forget it,” he told her gently. Nothing in the former sheriff’s dusty files was going to help them.

“I didn’t lie.” She turned back to the desk to straighten the stack of paperwork, as if she needed an excuse not to look at him. “I’m not a sentimental woman.”

But she still needed comfort. Too bad he was the last person in the world qualified to provide it.

Chapter Four

The memory surfaced somewhere between sleeping and wakefulness. It seemed her head had only just touched her pillow when Grace jerked awake, her heart pounding a staccato beat in her throat.

Of course. Of
course
.

Her toes smashed into the side table as she scrambled from bed, and she bit back an unladylike curse and hoisted the tangled fabric of her nightgown out of the way. She wasn’t familiar enough with the room to navigate easily in the dark, but groping along the wall brought her fingers into contact with the twist-torch she kept on a shelf near her bed.

Twisting the cylindrical handle sent light spilling through the clear lens, enough for Grace to see her way clearly to the door. She eased it open, slipped into the hallway and knocked on Archer’s door. “Archer?”

He opened the door and immediately turned his face from the bright beam of her twist-torch. “Grace?”

For one stupid moment she simply stared at him, at his broad shoulders and bare chest, at muscles and bare skin and scars. He was massive and impressive, a virile man when she hadn’t touched one in years.