Several onlookers laughed and the two women looked puzzled, until Sina got the sexual insult. She snarled and reached to pull a gun, stopping when her partner placed a restraining hand on her arm. But the woman's fingers held tight to the butt of a tiny weapon in a pocket holster.
"Her dress is a creation by Madame Melisende, Modiste du les Mithrans, not a vamp-whore. I believe that Jane has one of the designer's cards should you, or your mistress Adrianna, ever wish to dress well. Jane?" he asked as he took my little purse in hand, pulling the strap across my chest. I had forgotten it was there. "Ah, here they are." He extended a handful of cards over my shoulder at the little bullies, which brought his body in contact with mine. His other arm went around my waist, pulling me close against him. "Tell Adrianna the designer could make even her long, lanky body look sexy. To someone."
The twins behind me chuckled, and the laughter this time was more widespread. The two women glared at me as if I, rather than Bruiser, were the one who told them they and Adrianna looked dowdy. Brandon and Brian stepped up to either side of me, giving me a man on each side and one hanging over my back. Which felt rather nice, truth be told.
No one said anything else for a long moment. Almost in tandem, the two women turned on their heels and left the room.
"Sad," Bruiser said, dropping his arm to cuddle me, the cards still spread. "They really needed the fashion help."
The laughter was freer and the tension level in the group dropped dramatically. "I'll take a card," another woman said. She was only a bit shorter than I, muscular, with a wrestler's shoulders, and carried a semiautomatic holstered beneath her man-style jacket. "Jackie, with Clan Desmarais," she said to me, and shook my hand as she plucked cards from Bruiser's fingers. So she belonged to the one unaligned clan. "I could stand looking elegant. It isn't easy to look feminine with these shoulders. Thanks."
"You're welcome," I said, not quite sure what had just happened.
The twins pivoted to look at me and at Bruiser, who still hung across my shoulder. "You scent-marked her for Leo?" Brandon asked.
"Or for yourself?" Brian asked.
"Myself," Bruiser said easily. "But she's not falling into my arms as quickly I'd hoped."
I ducked out of Bruiser's arms and stepped next to Jackie, who had already shared Madame Melisende's cards with another woman. She looked at me through short bangs and said, "All they ever think about is sex. Take them to a museum and they stare at the naked statues; take them to a park and they ogle the joggers; take one to dinner and he thinks it's a prelude. Something about vampires pushes up their testosterone levels to a teenager's raging desperation."
"You trying to say you don't think about sex, Jackie?" Brandon said. "Because if you have trouble in that area, I could help you think about sex."
"Thanks for the offer, sugar, but I still prefer pure humans in the sack. It's the totality of the thing, you know? Human males think about sex only every other second. A male blood-servant wakes up thinking about sex and goes to bed thinking about sex and then dreams about it till it's time to wake up again."
"Not just sex," Brian mused. "There's fighting too."
"Hunting," Bruiser agreed. "Fishing. Fast cars. Making money."
"Fast cars and money lead back to dames, though," Brandon said.
"See what I mean?" Jackie said to me, and the small group laughed.
The laughter included me, which lent me an unexpectedly warm feeling; the emotion of inclusion wasn't familiar. And then the way she used the words "pure human" intruded into my thoughts. As if the blood-servants didn't think of themselves that way. Beast didn't either. They smelled . . . different.
"Why is Adrianna coming after me?" I asked, looking through the door where the two women had disappeared. "I have a feeling I'll be meeting her servants again soon. And it won't be for tea and crumpets." I was licensed to kill rogue vamps, not humans, or even blood-servants, no matter how annoying or dangerous they might be.
"I don't know, except that you carry Leo's scent marking, and therefore add to Leo's power base," Bruiser said. I noticed that he didn't add "I'm sorry."
A flush of anger pulsed through me. The forced scent marking, meant to protect me, had turned around and bit me, hard. My fists clenched against the urge to pull a stake and ram it into Bruiser.
Wary, the security types looked at the makeup of their own group, reassessing alignments. Three men turned and left the cluster. Silent, we watched them walk away. I pushed aside my anger for later. There were worse things to worry about right now.
"They've been listening to us chat," Brian said. "Not good."
"Taking info home to the new alliance," Brandon said.
"Lotta things keep coming back to old Rafe," I said, remembering him standing in the shadows, watching me, twice tonight. "Maybe I need to pay him a visit." And get a better sniff of him and his underlings, but I didn't add that. Nor did I miss the look Jackie shared with Bruiser, though I had no idea what it might mean.