Read Online Romani Armada by Tracy Cooper-Posey - Free Book Online

going to insist, Rob. It’s your life, not your vocation the media want a piece of. I’ve been through that meat grinder myself. It’s not fun. But it’s not the Purgatory you’re thinking it is right now, either. It can be managed and it will help us, in both the short term and the long run.”
    “Then you’re asking, Ryan?” Tally questioned, her voice soft after Rob’s harsh interrogation.
    Ryan considered her. He nodded. “Yes, I’m asking. Please.”
    Rob and Christian exchanged glances and Christian straightened up. “Very well, then,” he replied. He glanced at Deonne where she hovered at the end of the table near Nayara’s side. “I hope your tactics for keeping them beyond the boundaries we choose are ironclad. I only ran media networks in my day. I sat behind a desk.”
    Deonne smiled at him. “You forget, Christian. We’ll be calling this conference. We have the ability to turn off the sound feed and go home whenever we don’t like the questions. Vampires already have a reputation for being closed-mouthed and peculiar, so shutting up and walking away won’t harm that reputation in the slightest. Anything you give them on the warm and human side will be a plus.” She crossed her arms. “You can’t lose on this one.”
    “We’ve already lost, remember?” Brenden growled. “That’s why we have to do all this silly theatrics and media pandering.”
    Deonne’s smile grew warmer and larger. “Then your score can only go up, can’t it?”
    * * * * *
    The meeting was creeping toward the three hour mark.
    Deonne understood that Justin would not openly acknowledge her in this room full of the most powerful vampires on the planet, but it was straining her patience to sit next to him for so long and not be able to touch him or talk to him or let down her professional guard and just relax against him. It had been so long since she had seen him. Weeks, by her subjective time line.
    The discussion around the room had moved on to Gabriel’s military and political objectives, which meant Deonne could relax just a little, the heat and focus off her. She slid back onto the bench beside Justin and let her thigh rest against his.
    What was it about him that drew her attention so powerfully? He was so utterly not her type of man. She had always considered her preference in men to run toward the sophisticated, polished, urbane man. She liked professional men who wore designer suits and high fashion clothes, who knew the difference between scotch and whiskey and cared. Men who had not just a career, but possibly a business or maybe even a small empire to call their own.
    In the last year, Justin Edward Kelly had turned that presumption upside down and inside out.
    He wasn’t even human and that right there, if she was keeping score at all, was something that her father would have a fatal coronary infarction over, if she had still been telling him such details…or talking to him at all.
    Justin looked anything but sophisticated, despite occasionally wearing designer suits. He wore them well, but he always looked at odds wearing them, like he would be far more at ease in the shirts and stockman trousers he favored. He was a rangy Australian, with broad shoulders, far-seeing grey eyes that in the right light looked silver, and dirty blonde hair that was almost brown, that sometimes Deonne suspected he lopped off with the wide-bladed knife he often kept tucked in the top of his boot.
    Despite working and living in Sydney, he seemed to exhale the countryside into any room he was sitting in.
    He was a walking portrait of rough, unfinished edges, so why had he even drawn her eye? Deonne was normally repelled by such uncouth men. They spelled trouble. Their attitude toward women were usually undeveloped and as unsophisticated as their palettes.
    Except something ancient lurked in the back of Justin’s eyes. She had seen it the first day she had met him and it had been enough for her to not dismiss him out of hand.