When she finished, he adjusted his clothing and pulled her back up to her seat to kiss her, his dark eyes glinting in reflected stage lights. “Thank you, milaya.”
Suddenly shy—which was ridiculous considering what she’d just been doing—Reggie smiled at him and snuggled against his side. He wrapped his strong arms around her and held her close, resting his chin on top of her head while Turandot wept with joy at Calaf’s kiss.
Reggie watched the scene on stage and smiled against Dmitri’s lapel. Turandot might think her prince was hot stuff, but she clearly didn’t know what she was missing.
Chapter 20
Reggie had been so preoccupied with her thoughts—and memories of their intimacy—she’d lost track of the story on stage. When the house-lights came up, she started and sat up straight in her seat, blinking while her eyes struggled to adjust to the brighter lights.
“Come, milaya.” Dmitri rose and tugged her to her feet beside him. “Let us stretch our legs for a few moments.”
Reggie trailed obediently after him—how did he always manage to make her do that?—as he led her out of the box. They passed other attendees while they walked, women who eyed Dmitri’s lean, muscular form with avid appreciation and men who quickly averted their eyes from Reggie’s curvaceous figure as soon as they glimpsed Dmitri’s threatening scowl.
“Do you have to do that?” Reggie hissed when he dropped his hand to the small of her back to urge her into a reception room ahead of them.
“Do what?”
An opera employee greeted Dmitri by name when they passed. Misha acknowledged the young man with a nod and attempted to sculpt his features into an innocent mask.
“Your dog-in-the-manger routine.”
“An inappropriate analogy,” he dismissed, accepting two glasses of red wine from the bartender and handing one to her. “While I may have warned a man or two to keep his distance, I assure you that I have no intention of doing the same.”
Reggie gazed up into his deep, black eyes, and her stomach flipped. She’d managed to convince herself during the first half of the performance that Dmitri’s failure to make her pay for accepting a date with another man meant he no longer felt a need to make her pay for her poor decision. But if she were to judge by the heat of his gaze, she’d have to reassess her conclusion. Rapidly.
Hastily, she raised her glass to her lips and sipped the crisp, dry liquid. Dmitri responded with a smile, but let her enjoy her strategic retreat. He seemed content to watch her take in their surroundings.
As she watched the glittering crowd around them mill about the room, it occurred to Reggie that these weren’t your average a-pair-of-tickets-once-in-a-while opera-goers. Come to think of it, she felt pretty sure they weren’t your average season-ticket opera-goers.
Oh, my God! Was that a Rockefeller?
Dmitri gazed down at her, clearly amused. I believe it is. In fact, I’m sure of it, because he is great friends with the Vanderbilt and the Kennedy you see him speaking to.
She almost choked on her wine. Swallowing quickly, she took another, more searching look around her and felt a little light-headed. Unless she missed her guess, not one person in the room with her possessed an annual income with less than seven digits. Before the decimal point.
The sound of a woman’s rather braying laughter drew her attention, and Reggie looked over to see a well-known television personality conversing with a communications tycoon and two heirs to a real estate fortune. When she examined the quartet in a new light, she realized the tuxedos were definitely not rentals, the gown was a designer original, and the rocks around the TV personality’s neck had about as much in common with paste as she had with the people in this room.
Suddenly self-conscious, she glanced down at her hunter-green gown and simple silver jewelry and felt woefully underdressed. She clearly ought to be down in the penny pit with the other peons and not breathing the same rarefied air as the debs and celebs up here at the private bar.
“Do not be silly. You have no need for shame. You look magnificent,” Dmitri murmured, leaning down so his breath tickled her ear when he spoke.
To the other people in the room, he probably looked like a doting lover, she thought.
“Is that not what I am, milka? Your lover?”
Chimes interrupted their dialog and signaled the end of intermission.
Taking her empty glass, he set it alongside his on a small table and returned his hand to the small of her back. Your luck and your timing never cease to astound me, he drawled into her mind. I begin to wonder if you have some strange powers of which I am not aware.
Reggie walked sedately at his side as they joined the crowd leaving the bar area. Meanwhile, she mentally used a whip and a chair to subdue the emotions he had wrought inside her. “I think you’re just too spoiled and too used to getting your own way.”
“Ah, but I do always get my way, dushka, and I see no reason to let that change.”
“You wouldn’t,” she murmured, keeping her eyes on the crowd. It was the only way she could resist sticking her tongue out at him.
To keep her mind otherwise occupied, she took one last opportunity to goggle at the crowd as they passed through the bar and into the hall. In the brighter environs of the passageway, one particular head reflected the glare of the lights off a smooth, silky curtain of pale golden blond.
Lisette, the Limber Latvian.
Reggie froze in place and stared. “Holy crap!”
Startled, Dmitri looked down at her, his brow creased in concern. “What is it, dushka? Are you ill?”
“No, I’m just—” She shook her head and pointed discreetly. “Do you see that blonde over there? Talking to the balding man with the potbelly? That’s Lisette Lesaius. She’s the woman Greg cheated on me with. The one I caught in the act with him anyway.” She blanched as a terrible thought struck her. “Oh, no. I wonder if she knows? I wonder if anyone told her that Greg is dead?”
Just when Dmitri had begun to enjoy his night away from business, with his mate at his side (Well, all right. He had already begun to enjoy it before the intermission, when Regina had knelt before him and turned him into her willing slave), fate struck an unexpectedly cruel blow. One moment he was humming along peacefully in the back of Regina’s mind and the next he was flooded with images of Gregory Martin intimately entwined with a blond woman atop a disarranged office desk. Both had lost at least half of their clothing, and Martin had a dark crimson smear that stood out boldly against the fair skin behind his loosened collar.
At first the haze of Regina’s perceptions clouded his own judgment of the scene. The smear wavered in his sight, first taking on the waxy, grainy appearance of a lipstick smudge, then glistening thick and liquid like fresh blood. Once the truth clicked, the image stabilized and Dmitri knew at once that Gregory had been bitten by a vampire. Turning his attention to the woman, he followed the pale curve of her arms to where her hand clutched the edge of the desk. On her left wrist, she bore a similar wound, fresh and shining, and Dmitri saw a trace of blood in the sheen on Martin’s lips. It was the woman who had turned Martin. Dmitri felt certain that he had never seen her before, and yet something about her face seemed vaguely familiar.
Dimly, Dmitri heard Regina speaking, but he couldn’t focus on her words. He was too caught up in the scene that played behind his eyes. It wasn’t until she squeezed his arm and began to walk away from him that he realized what she had told him.
I have to find out if she knows, and if not, I have to tell her. I’d hate for her to learn about it from someone who didn’t even know him.
She was halfway across the space before Dmitri could stop her.
Chapter 21
Fixing a smile on her face, Reggie made herself a solemn vow that she would be pleasant to Lisette no matter what the other woman said to her. This wasn’t the time or place for old grudges, and she had no desire to create a scene.
She left Dmitri near the entrance to the bar just as the second go
ng sounded and the hallway lights flickered to indicate that the second act of the performance was about to start. Since she had already missed a good portion of the first act, Reggie didn’t figure it was all that important to rush back.
Neither, apparently, did Lisette. As the hall emptied of people, the blonde continued to stand where Reggie had first noticed her. The man she’d been speaking to had deserted her, but she seemed content to stare at a small, framed piece of art that hung on the wall beside her. She gave no indication that she sensed Regina’s approach, but as soon as Reggie got within a couple of feet of her, she spoke without prompting.
“It isn’t that I mind talking to you, Reggie,” the blonde purred in her sex-kitten voice. Or maybe sexy, man-eating-lion voice described it better. “After all, we have so much in common. But I didn’t stay out here to talk to you.”
Confused, Reggie eyed her warily. “What do you mean?”
“I think she means, dushka,” Dmitri rumbled from just behind Reggie’s shoulder, “that she was waiting for me.”
Lisette turned to face them, and the eyes Reggie remembered as round, blue, and rather vague were narrowed, and they glowed with an unearthly orange light. Reggie took an instinctive step backward.
Lisette laughed. “Timid little thing, isn’t she? I’m surprised at you, Misha. I thought you always preferred women with backbone, and from what Gregory told me, this one can’t have much of it. If she did, she would have broken things off when he fucked the caterer during their engagement party.”
Only the fact that Reggie could see how much Lisette wanted her words to hurt kept Reggie from gasping. She’d known Greg was a lowlife—well, she’d known eventually—but she hadn’t realized exactly how long he’d been screwing around on her. It wasn’t that she minded because she still cared about Greg, but no woman wanted to see herself betrayed.
Dmitri lifted his hand to rest it on Reggie’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “I find it hard to believe you know what I prefer, since we have never before met.”
“Perhaps not, but I have heard very much about you.” Dark marscaraed lashes swept down and the tip of a pink tongue swept out to moisten ruby-tinted lips. “In fact,” the woman purred, “I was instructed to convey to you the most particular regards of an old acquaintance of yours.”
Okay, the subtext here ran deep and thick, and even though she didn’t understand half of it, Reggie knew for sure that she didn’t like any of it. Especially not the way Lisette eyed Dmitri, as if he were something tasty and exotic. Even though that was the way Lisette eyed every man with a pulse as far as Reggie could tell, it still made her want to rip the floozy’s hair out by the roots. And choke her with it.
Of course, Dmitri was earning his own personal mark on her fecal-material roster. Not only wasn’t he smacking Licentious Lisette in the face as she deserved, but he was also gently steering Reggie behind him, as if he didn’t want anything coming between him and the buxom bimbo.
“Who?” Dmitri demanded. “Who sends me this message, Lisette?”
The smile that spread across Lisette’s face made Reggie think of knives and blood and thick, dripping acid. It did not inspire her to smile back.
“Why, my sister, of course,” Lisette purred. “Her name is Yelisaveta.”
All it took was that one revelation and the jumbled pieces of information in Dmitri’s mind filed into place like a column of soldiers. Yelisaveta Cherginov was behind everything, just as the paper they had found in Martin’s lair had suggested. While physically, she might remain safely confined in a prison in Russia, her influence could not be so easily contained. He should only be surprised that it had taken her this long to find a way to make trouble on the other side of the world. She had always been on a constant lookout for new playgrounds.
“I did not know that Yelisaveta had a sister,” he said, stalling for time. Now that he knew what kind of threat he faced, he needed a way to get Regina to safety in order to deal with it. “She never spoke of you.”
“Of course not. Why should she provide her enemies with a means of gaining power over her? I was born to another mother when my sister was barely sixteen. I was raised in France until Liza found me, only five years after she herself was turned. She brought me to Riga when I was ten, and when I turned eighteen, I begged her to turn me. She knew I would be safe and undetected across the border from the mighty Kievan princes.” Lisette scoffed. “Liza always had too much cunning for men like you.”
Dmitri raised an eyebrow. “If that is true, then why has she spent more than four hundred years in a prison designed and guarded by men like me?”
Behind him, he felt Regina start at his words. He cursed that he did not have time now to explain.
“I defy any of you to escape from a prison guarded every moment of every day for centuries,” the woman said, sneering. “You set an impossible task and then mock the one who cannot complete it. Hypocrites, all of you!” She spat at his feet.
“I do not find it hypocritical to punish one who has proven herself a menace to the society she claims to be part of. If your sister had not plotted to kill the master of a clan, she would still be free. She has brought about her own downfall.”
“My sister is not fallen! Even in her isolation, she has more power than you know, ublyodok! Or do you imagine someone else has been able to turn the screw over your Council’s thumbs from nearly five thousand miles away?” She sneered. “Did you think your own people had made such rogues as I made? The weaklings in this city are too concerned with playing by your rules to realize the potential of our people. They think the humans should be respected! Bah! I would sooner respect a sheep. Your people do not have the courage to destroy this Council of yours.”
“And why would Yelisaveta wish to destroy it? The council is not responsible for her imprisonment. It had yet to be formed when her sentence was handed down.”
Lisette’s laughter held a ring of madness, something besides her facial features she clearly had in common with her sister. “Durak! You understand nothing. The only interest Liza has in the council is that it is significant to you! You and your disgusting family who robbed her of her rightful place among the masters of Europe. A curse on all of you!”
Dmitri opened his mouth to respond, but Regina’s voice stopped him cold. As did the horror that welled up in him when she stepped out from behind his protective cover and gave Lisette a skeptical once-over.
“You know, I knew you were stupid when you let Gregory screw you,” Regina said, her tone reeking of disdain. “But I didn’t realize you were completely batshit crazy into the bargain. Do you have some little pills in your purse you’re supposed to be taking? Because, sweetheart, I’m about to call the white coats on you.”
Unpredictability, of course, was a madwoman’s greatest weapon, and Lisette sprang before Dmitri could even reach out to draw Regina back. He heard a jumble of sounds, the vampire’s cry of fury, his mate’s own instinctive grunt as the air was knocked out of her, the thud as the impact of Lisette’s attack sent both women crashing into the passage wall. He almost wished the noise would bring security running, but he knew the volume of the music in the auditorium would mask the noise.
Terrified and furious, he watched as Regina’s head slammed into the plaster and ricocheted back for a second solid blow to the skull. He saw the fight sap out of her, her eyes going dazed and unfocused as her attacker grabbed a handful of her upswept hair and yanked her head aside to expose the tender skin over her carotid artery.
He launched himself forward with a guttural shout of rage.
Catching Lisette by the shoulder, he jerked her backward before her fangs so much as grazed his mate’s flesh. Even for that, he vowed, there would be hell to pay.
Lisette screamed and released Regina, turning on Dmitri in a flurry of claws and fangs. She fought not like a woman but like a demon, intent not on winning or losing but on inflicting as much damage upon her opponent as possible. Her hard sharp nails raked across his cheek, lea
ving bloody furrows in his skin, but he ignored it. All that mattered now was keeping the bitch away from his Regina, his mate. His partner.
His love.
He turned to keep his own body between them, making himself into a shield for the woman who had accomplished the impossible—she had made him feel in a way he’d never expected to feel. She made him want to be as she perceived him, strong and noble and just. She made him want to keep her settled on a satin cushion, safe and protected, but more than that, she made him want to let her do anything she pleased, so long as the pleasure made her smile.
Except, of course, if she wanted to put herself in any kind of danger. That sort of behavior he could not allow. Which was why when he saw her rise to her feet, swaying and trembling, and shake off the effect of her fall, he saw his entire life—all eight centuries of it—flash before his eyes.
Reggie had thought she was losing her mind when she saw Lisette’s eyes glowing red, but when the woman came at her with nails like a Siberian tiger’s and canine teeth longer than an actual canine’s, a whole bunch of things suddenly made completely perfect sense—not only was her ex-fiancé’s tramp a bloodsucker; she was also a bona fide vampire.
The going-straight-for-the-neck thing only confirmed the worst.
What didn’t make sense to Reggie was when Dmitri grabbed the monster by the shoulders and hauled her away as if she were no more substantial than a Raggedy Ann doll. Or the way her previously mysterious but presumably human lover now seemed to be sporting some serious dental additions of his own.
Holy shit, she marveled. I’ve fallen in love with a vampire.
The psychic mind-reading thing made so much more sense now—in an intensely creepy way—and so did a lot of other things. She only saw Misha at night, he could make her melt with one touch of his hand, he’d even been able to glue her feet in place that first night they’d met. No wonder Ava had been so against Reggie hooking up with Dmitri. She must have known something Reggie didn’t. But why hadn’t she just said something? That’s what friends were for, right? To help pick out clothes, and to inform each other when one person in the friendship might be forming an emotional attachment to an inhuman, bloodthirsty creature of the night.
One Bite with a Stranger Page 18