Serena Kelley was dying. Well, not literally, but it felt like it, what with the way the air was being sucked from her lungs by an extremely hot vampire who was kissing her senseless.
She wasn’t one to hang out in Goth clubs, but tonight’s nosebleed-Euro-Goth music at Alchemy had promised to bring in the vampires—both the wannabe’s of the human variety and the actual undead.
The music echoed off the walls of the old slaughterhouse so loudly it messed with her heart’s ability to beat, shocking her pulse into an uneven, chaotic rhythm. The smell of perfume, sweat, and sex was thick in the air, ratcheting up her libido. She moved with the crush of bodies on the dance floor, going with the tide as the vampire whose name she’d just learned guided her.
She sensed his hunger, his dark need, and yes, it was wrong of her to lead him on like this. Wrong to let him think he was going to get a meal and a notch in his coffin from her.
But what the hell. Every girl needed to flirt now and then.
Especially when flirting was as far as she could go with a guy.
“Come,” Marcus said, in that low whisper vampires could somehow make audible above any racket. “My table waits.”
Marcus was an old vamp, his formal, stiff speech part of his allure, and Serena’s hormones ran amok as he led her to a shadowed corner where several human groupies quivered like excited lapdogs at his approach.
Like so many older-generation vamps, he dressed in tasteful, conservative clothing beneath a midnight trench coat that helped him blend among the Goth and punk fashion in the bars. Glossy black, waist-length hair and ruby-red lips on a severe, pale face completed the look.
He waved his hand, and the lapdogs scattered, some of them cutting her jealous glares. She wondered how many knew he was a real vampire. Few who were deep into the vampire lifestyle actually believed in the undead. Those who did had a tendency to become Renfields—scraping, bowing hangers-ons who offered themselves up to be used in any way a vampire wanted.
Serena might have a thing for vamps, but she’d never stepped over the line to become a meal or a throwaway bedmate.
They sank into the booth, her black cargoes sliding across the faux-leather seats. Marcus wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her into him.
Perfect. Because yes, she had a vampire fetish her boss, benefactor, and personal Aegis Guardian, Valeriu Macek, would have seizures over, and yes, she liked to live on the wild side. But she also liked to mix business with pleasure, and at this very moment, her business as a treasure hunter involved stealing Marcus’s very valuable, very antique bracelet off his wrist.
Slowly, carefully, she slid her hand over his so her fingers rested on the ancient Macedonian bauble. Marcus didn’t notice—his heavy-lidded gaze focused on her throat, and his erection prodded her hip.
“Shall we go outside, or stay here?” he asked, and she wondered if he knew she was fully aware of what he was.
The way he kept his fangs concealed told her he probably didn’t know. Then again, after hundreds of years of being undead, keeping them hidden had probably become second nature to him. And really, vampire canines weren’t all that obvious unless the vampire became excited, and then they’d erupt from the gums, elongating, growing… so erotic.
Serena tilted her jaw, exposing her throat enticingly. Distractingly. “Here,” she purred, working the bracelet with one hand, and running the other up his chest.
Powerful muscles flexed beneath her palm, and for the thousandth time, she wished she weren’t celibate. Wished she could let herself do all the stupid, risky things humans did when they were in their twenties.
Marcus’s smile revealed just the tips of his fangs as he leaned in, wincing when his chest crushed her pendant between them. He frowned at the grape-sized crystal. “That’s one hell of a jewel.”
“Gift from my mom,” she said easily, even though the necklace was far more than that.
The bracelet slid free. She slipped it inside a leg pocket in her pants and glanced at her watch. “Oh, would you look at the time! I’d better go. Don’t want to turn into a pumpkin.”
Marcus’s hand squeezed her biceps. “I am not finished with you.”
She smiled sweetly. “Oh, but you are. I’m no swan,” she said, using the term for humans who offered up their blood or psychic energy to vampires, though they usually believed the vampires were of the breathing, human variety—what true undead jokingly called fakires.
Rage iced over his dark eyes, and his lips peeled back to reveal daggerlike canines. Any sane human would be terrified, but not Serena.
She had a little secret. She’d been protected by a divine charm for eighteen years, since the day it was bestowed upon her at the age of seven, and no harm could come to her.
Not so long as she remained a virgin.