Were-Devils' Revenge [Were-Devils of Tasmania 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Simone Sinna

  Mitch took in a breath. “There aren’t enough of us to—”

  “Not a posse. Just me.”

  “Fuck off,” said Mitch. “You really think I’ll let you go alone?”

  Mac permitted himself a small grin. “No, but I wasn’t about to make you.”

  But there really was no decision to be made. They had waited too long as it was. The time for revenge had come.

  Chapter Two

  Queensland, Present Day

  “What do you think?”

  “She’s hot.”

  Mac frowned. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “We could sit around at Dream-maker until we get another lead,” Mitch suggested.

  Mac rolled his eyes. What Mitch had in mind had little to do with sitting. Or working for that matter. Trouble was, he was thinking it wasn’t such a bad idea and for the same reason. There was something special about Gabriella Vitali. He looked down at her card and wondered for a moment about the prophecy they had all grown up with. Not just the curse but the one that might break it. But it didn’t make sense. What could Gabriella possibly have to do with the were-devils’ curse?

  “We know they’re around here somewhere,” Mitch added helpfully. From Kate they had managed to ascertain that the Destroyer had in fact been after the Tremains and that Melody had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The brothers had gone south and spoken to Tilman and his sons Jesse and Jarrod. Mitch could sense the tension in the household, though whatever private issues they had, no one was saying. Even the human woman there, Becc, was blocking her thoughts.

  “There were two ghosts,” Jarrod had told them. “A woman called Lena, and a man called Zac.”

  “They told us they worked in Brisbane for Nature’s World,” said Becc, a stunning woman with honey-blonde hair who had eyes only for the Tremain boys.

  “I injured one of them,” Jesse added.

  Mitch and Mac had taken the first flight to Brisbane. Neither was especially surprised that no one by this name worked for the paper. But when Mac had described them, the woman on the reception desk, already smitten with Mitch, smiled.

  “Oh, I know who you mean,” she said. She rummaged around through earlier editions and gave them one. “That’s them.”

  Sure enough, Lena Magnussen and Zachary Karlssen.

  “They did it freelance,” the receptionist explained. “It was a while ago now.”

  The article was about a scuba dive company in Airlie Beach, on the north coast. This was where they went next, via plane and then bus. After a day of going to all the companies, they only had one lead. One of the older guys who’d been around for a while thought they did charters but wasn’t sure where they operated out of. Possibly Cairns or Port Douglas, farther north.

  The question now was, should they wait for a stronger lead or try farther north?

  Mac fingered the card. He was pretty immune to women since his childhood sweetheart had died of the devil’s curse. Why was this one affecting him now? Hadn’t they ended up being cursed because of their grandfather’s lust? But then he hadn’t given into it and maybe he should have. Perhaps lust was an instinct to take note of. He looked at his brother who was already smiling.

  * * * *

  “These resumes are very impressive.” Gabriella was sitting behind a desk where they couldn’t see her legs. Mitch was finding it hard to take his eyes off the curves of her breasts. Her dress was cut low, and the olive skin of her breasts was mesmerizing.

  “So tell me, did you lose your last job, Mr. Richards, because you ogled women like that?”

  Mitch obviously didn’t recognize the pseudonym they had adopted and didn’t seem to realize she was talking to him. Mac kicked him hard.

  “Excuse my brother,” said Mac. “I’ll make sure he’s well behaved.”

  Gabriella looked doubtful. “You really have got all these qualifications?”

  They had changed their surname, but otherwise the resume was accurate. They hoped she didn’t check them out though Mac had worded up the school principal and the gym owner.

  “You look like a resort sports center dream,” said Gabriella. “Every sport except sailing as far as I can see.”

  Mitch regarded her smugly. “Look later.”

  Gabriella turned to the next page and shook her head, laughing. “And personal trainer and teaching quals. Seriously there must be something wrong. Are you guys serial killers or something?”

  Mitch feigned looking hurt. Gabriella ignored him. “Here’s your keys. You can share a room in the block at the back. The big keys are for the sheds on the beach. You’re on a month’s trial.”

  Mac took the keys and, as he did, brushed her hand. He felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time, and as their eyes met, he knew she felt it, too, and had found it just as disconcerting.

  “And try and stay out of trouble,” she said, but she was already looking away.

  * * * *

  “I think I’m in heaven.”

  It was their second day on the island, and Mitch was clearly getting the hang of the lifestyle. Mac couldn’t rid himself of concern over Melody’s plight, and he found the heat unpleasant. The nights made him particularly uneasy as he watched the sky blacken with the flight of the fruit bats from the rainforest that covered most of the island. He knew they weren’t ghosts, but their chatter put him on edge. It was only thoughts of Gabriella that made the day worthwhile, though he’d seen little of her.

  The island as advertised was certainly a paradise, if long, golden beaches, crystal clear water, and discreet huts in the dense rainforest were your idea of paradise. The main cluster of buildings provided dinner in an elegant restaurant with tables on the balcony overlooking the beach. Alternatively dinner could also be delivered to individual huts.

  When full, the resort took a hundred people, no one under the age of eighteen. Perhaps, thought Mac, this was heaven, remembering his annoying schoolgirls. Currently there were eighty guests. About half seemed to think that a walk to the bar was enough exercise for the day. The other half were intent of making use of all that was on offer. Sailing, diving, beach volleyball, tennis, swimming, flying fox rides, and walks in the canopies of the rain forest.

  Mitch took the morning aerobics class at 8:00 a.m. Gabriella had come in at the end to watch.

  “Seems I had a record turnout,” said Mitch.

  Neither had much time to themselves. The job was busy. Mac had two dive trips and a lunch walking group. Mitch ran the beach volleyball and was going on the evening sail trip. Gabriella was coming, too. Ostensibly to help serve the food.

  Mac squashed his feelings. Mitch had always been a ladies’ man. Of course Gabriella would be drawn to Mitch. He just didn’t want him to hurt her. Thoughts of the prophecy came to him again. The were-devils would only find salvation through overcoming their instincts. Just as not trusting the right ones had brought the curse down on them. Were-devils were notoriously protective of their women. He thought of Becc with the Tremain boys. The looks she had given them both were certainly not sisterly. Was that the tension he had sensed? Was this attraction to Gabriella there as a taunt? To perhaps distract him from the task he had set himself? Mac didn’t know, but he knew it would be a long, lonely evening when he would be wondering about Gabriella and Mitch.

  * * * *

  Gabriella didn’t usually go on the evening cruises—one of the junior staff did. But there was something just not right about her new recruits, and she needed to keep an eye on them. Particularly Mitch, who was about as trustworthy as a crocodile. Same damn big eyes and readiness to pounce. The sort of guy she normally had no time for. Yet despite her instincts screaming at her to run, she was drawn to him. Worse still, she was also drawn to his brother, though in a different and less tangible way. What was wrong with her? She hadn’t had a boyfriend or even any interest in one since her fight with Wilson had had half her family wading into her affairs. Now she was interested in two at once.

  The
evening sail had long been a highlight at Dream-maker. The boat, an ex–America’s Cup contender, could take twenty-five people. They started with champagne, sailed as the sun got low in the sky, and then docked on the other side of the island for oysters and Chablis. There was time for a quick swim before lobster salad and a sail home. A perfect evening.

  Gabriella wasn’t much of a sailor. Her cousins were right into it, but in general she liked to be either in the water or on the land. While she loved the feeling of the wind in her hair, making her mass of curls even more unmanageable, rough seas and rocking motions made her queasy. But she knew enough about sailing to recognize immediately that Mitch knew exactly what he was doing. She breathed a little easier. It had occurred to her that they might have lied or at the very least exaggerated their expertise, but she’d rung their referees and they had been nothing less than glowing about their physical prowess.

  “But are they safe?” asked Gabriella.

  “Well, Mitch likes the girls,” the gym owner had said. “More’s the pity really.”

  “Does he harass them?” asked Gabriella pointedly.

  The gym guy laughed. “Loves them and leaves them, if you call that harassment. But always leaves them wanting more and with roses and chocolates. I don’t think he ever lies to them.”

  Gabriella watched Mitch sailing the boat. There were five single women there in the right age group, the rest older or couples. They gravitated to him like a magnet.

  “Can I do that? Please let me,” said the plump girl who looked no older than fifteen, but Gabriella had checked her driver’s license and she was actually twenty.

  Mitch grinned at her, for a moment eyes for no one else. The girl all but swooned as he put his arms around her to show her how to manage the ropes. But he also pulled back quickly enough, talking to the others, trying not to show favor.

  “Where did you learn to sail?” This one was thirty-five and trying to look ten years younger. Her hand ran down Mitch’s arm, making Gabriella squirm. Mitch was taking it in his stride.

  “The Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.”

  That got him a captive audience for the next fifteen minutes. Gabriella went to ensure her older clientele were enjoying themselves.

  The boat made good time, a wind picking up as they got out of the sound. Mitch was temporarily off the social scene as he maneuvered the sails. He brought them into dock ahead of schedule.

  Gabriella served up the oysters and, to her surprise, found Mitch by her side, uncorking wine and serving with expertise.

  “I didn’t see sommelier on the resume,” she said lightly as they went down into the galley.

  “There’s a lot more that can’t be put on paper,” said Mitch into her ear.

  Shit. Gabriella felt her knees almost buckle. She had clearly been too long without a man. She turned to the glasses and started rinsing them, careful not to look at Mitch.

  “Are you guys planning on sticking around for long?” she asked.

  “All depends.”

  “Depends on what exactly?”

  Mitch put more dirty glasses and plates on the sink. “If we find what we’re looking for.”

  Gabriella looked up quickly. We. This wasn’t a pick-up line. What did he mean?

  Mitch seemed to understand his mistake. “Though I’m a lot easier to please than Mac,” he said with a grin. “Or rather I have my eyes on the hottest woman around, so he’ll have to make do with second best.”

  “Just keep your eyes on the job,” said Gabriella, keeping her voice steady.

  The kitchen was cramped, and when she turned to look for a dishcloth, Mitch was in the way and showing no inclination to move. She was five foot two in heels, and he towered over her. Right now he was enjoying her cleavage.

  “I’m your boss,” she said curtly.

  “Great,” said Mitch. “Then this can’t be sexual harassment.”

  Gabriella glared at him. He laughed and stepped back, hands in the air. “Okay, it’s good. I’ll wait to be invited.”

  “Then you’ll be waiting awhile,” said Gabriella, thinking that inviting him to kiss her sounded a delicious option.

  After sorting out dinner, they went up on deck. The evening was cooling, with a gentle breeze taking the edge off the earlier heat. All the guests were on the beach, though the plump girl was eyeing Mitch from a distance.

  “Have you always lived here?” asked Mitch easily as he leant over the boat’s side and looked deeper into the forest beyond.

  “All my life,” said Gabriella. “My grandparents moved here when my mother was a baby. My father’s family came after the war from Italy.”

  “No plans to move?”

  “None any time soon,” said Gabriella. “Where are you boys from?”

  “South,” said Mitch. He watched the trees rustling and stiffened. There was a good deal of squawking as the fruit bats started to move.

  “It’s just the bats,” said Gabriella with a laugh. “We have thousands of them. I’m not sure where they go each night, but I pity anyone with an orchard.”

  Mitch seemed to suddenly lose interest. “Looks like they’re heading back,” he said as the plump girl started walking toward the boat. “Shall we get dinner?”

  * * * *

  Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, 1939

  “Angie, can you keep a secret?”

  How often had Angel Karlssen heard this? Though the younger sister, she often felt that she was the parent. Larissa was at best irresponsible. At worst, Angel didn’t want to think about. This latest request came when she was already holding more of Larissa’s secrets than she liked, and it worried her. She sensed her normally calm sister was agitated which worried her even more.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Oh bugger. This was much worse than Angel could have dreamt up. At seventeen she was the one who had had a steady boyfriend for a year. Her family wasn’t exactly enamored of him, but they tolerated him. Human was better than what Larissa’s lover was, and no one except Angel knew that Larissa was seeing anyone.

  “Does Edmund know?” Angel wasn’t sure how she’d managed to get the words out.

  “Not yet.” There was a dreamy quality to Larissa that was almost as worrying as the news she had. How could the same family turn out someone as vague and romantic as Larissa and the practical Charles and Adam? Even Angel, for all of her reading and wondering, had a practical streak that seemed to have completely bypassed Larissa.

  “Larissa,” said Angel slowly. “You know this is going to cause big family problems.”

  Family problems that were going to make the Montagues and the Capulets look like a small family tiff.

  The Karlssens had been amongst the oldest of the white settlers, a hundred years earlier. In Launceston they were almost royalty. They had money, status, and owned the biggest winery and the brewery that kept most of the local men in work. The Karlssens had one of the largest houses on the city’s outskirts, a two-story, elegant verandahed building with an expansive, well-kept garden, complete with maze, lake and boat house, rose-covered gazebo and wisteria over the eaves. Edmund Mortimer on the other hand came from Tarrabah in the northeast forests of the state. A hardworking community, they didn’t take kindly to the interference of outsiders and thought a lot of the city folk were fancying themselves a good deal too much. His family had been there far longer than the Karlssens, but only the Indigenous people with whom they lived side by side with knew just how long.

  It had started when the white settlers had first arrived. Angel and Larissa’s great-great-grandfather, Eyolf, had helped build the penal settlement at Port Arthur. It had been his family that had first realized that the Mortimers and the Tarribah group were different. Different in a way that the Karlssens were different to the other white settlers. Eyolf had decided that only one of the groups could survive.

  Because they were separated by a hundred miles, the tension simmered and little more. At times the children of Eyolf and Zedakiah, Edmund’s great-
great-grandfather, would meet. Social and sport functions, where always the level of competition would escalate until either the meeting would be stopped or the tension would escalate to a fight where blood was drawn and death was in the air. The tension ultimately was over which of the clans was the better.

  Before Angel had left school, the fight had still been raging. The Karlssens were the smartest, the Mortimers the strongest. Whatever, thought Angel for the millionth time, had possessed her sister to think she could mate with a Mortimer?

  Edmund, in Larissa’s class a year ahead, had been the best-looking guy, and he’d known it. Six foot, broad shoulders, and thick, dark hair with the familial white streak. Compared to their more willowy-built brothers Charles and Adam, he looked all man, yet there had been an appealing lack of confidence about him, probably through frequent chidings from his altogether too-arrogant brothers.

  Edgar, one of Edmund’s brothers, had tried to come on to her, and Angel had very swiftly told him where he could go. He was hot, too, but this much trouble Angel didn’t need. Larissa though had swooned. She’d been lost from the first moment Edmund had told her she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

  “Charles and Adam will kill him,” said Angel, suddenly feeling panicked. Their father may have been more considered, but she wasn’t sure he still had control of his all too self-confident sons.

  “I’m going to marry him.” Larissa sounded more certain, but there was still an air of unreality about her. Neither she nor Edmund were twenty-one, and even if they could get around this, they would need to apply for a marriage license, which took time.

  Larissa seemed to read her mind. “You know they expedite marriages for our boys.”

  Angel felt her heart sink. She’d forgotten. Or rather wanted to forget. They were all leaving within the next month. To Europe. To fight for England. What could she say? She squashed her qualms and hugged her sister and prayed for her and her unborn child.