Handsome Bastard by Kate Hill Page B

I keep you around? Guide the horse. When we arrive home, bring warm water and bandages to my cubiculum.”
     
    “Ah,” Sextus smiled, revealing the tips of his tiny fangs, “that’s more like the Cyprian I know. Bring her right to bed.”
     
    “It’s usually a good place to begin getting the truth out of a woman.”
     
    “I know several husbands and lovers who might not agree with you.”
     
    “That’s because they’re stupid.”
     
    Cyprian mounted his horse and kicked it toward his villa. Yes, women spoke lies in the bedroom, but their bodies and expressions were quite another matter. Gaze into a female’s eyes just before her moment of crisis and a man could see through to her very soul.
     
    Of course, Cyprian was more gifted than most when it came to sensing lies in both men and women. As a rule, blood-drinkers possessed keen mind control but even among his own kind Cyprian was known as a master of thoughts. He sifted through thoughts like grains of sand on a beach, easily pulling out perfectly shaped shells and either handling them with the utmost delicacy or crushing them to powder. Mortals and immortals, women in particular, found him almost impossible to resist. Even in his mortal life, his mind powers had cried out to the blood-drinker who changed him, allowing him the means to grow beyond his unfortunate beginnings.
     
    Approaching his spacious villa, he couldn’t help smiling when he thought what an unbelievable existence he now had. It was quite a change from when he’d been nothing more than the bastard son of an Etruscan soldier and a Roman farm girl. Over the centuries, many had tried to take this powerful life from him. Jealous blood-drinkers. Mortal hunters. Many of the latter he’d easily lured into his world. Some still remained loyally in his service. They had learned he wasn’t the monster they thought him to be. The ones who refused to cooperate, however, had met the beast they feared. He’d crushed them without a blink and would continue to do so for eternity if necessary.
     
    At the villa, a boy slave took their horses. While Sextus went to carry out his master’s orders, Cyprian carried the still unconscious woman to his cubiculum and placed her on the bed.
     
    He could have taken her elsewhere and summoned a female slave to look after her, but his curiosity got the better of him, as did that uneasy feeling he could not ignore. He peeled off her soaked garment, careful not to touch her in the manner he longed to. Regardless of who she was or what her motives, she was still unconscious. Rape in any form had never appealed to Cyprian. Though his carnal tastes ran toward the rough, he liked his partners wet, willing and begging for his cock and fangs.
     
    Moments later Sextus arrived with warm water, cloths, herbal ointment and bandages. Cyprian dipped a cloth into the water and began cleaning blood from her face.
     
    She jerked awake, her heartbeat quickening, and stared at him with large blue eyes.
     
    “Who are you? Where am I?” she demanded.
     
    “We’re asking the questions here,” Sextus stated. “Since it was my master’s land you chose to collapse upon.”
     
    “I didn’t choose anything,” the woman snapped, glancing from Sextus to Cyprian. Suddenly aware of her nudity, she reached for the blankets, though she didn’t appear nearly as embarrassed as he would have expected. That told him quite a lot. “My former master is a cruel man. He no longer wanted me, so he had me beaten and tossed into the road. I walked as long as I could then I must have lost consciousness.”
     
    Cyprian said nothing, merely continued staring at her, sensing the lies that fell so easily from her pretty lips.
     
    “Most likely a runaway,” Sextus said. “We should throw her back on the street where we found her. Or try to find her master.”
     
    “You don’t believe me?”
     
    “Silence, woman. Isn’t it enough that my master soils his hands tending a slave like