by Heidi Betts
He couldn’t explain the strange urge bearing down on his soul, pushing him to confide in this woman he barely knew. Scratch that—didn’t know at all.
He’d stumbled upon her, mistaken her for someone else, and now wanted to sit down and tell her his life story? Obviously, he was losing his mind. Or maybe her brain tumor theory was contagious.
But the need was so strong. She was beautiful, and already suspicious of his true identity, which meant she would be a rapt audience for his tale. And he wouldn’t mind spending a few more hours with her . . . being open with her, honest with her, having a genuine conversation in which he didn’t need to lie or resort to subterfuge to conceal his true nature.
He would have to remove any traces of their interaction later, of course. He might be feeling momentarily vulnerable and more affable than ever before in his existence, but he wasn’t stupid. And before he would allow her to walk away with her head full of true knowledge about him and his race—or worse yet, allow her to go home and write about him for her tabloid rag—he would turn into the monster humans thought vampires to be and do something dire, if necessary.
Tilting his head in the direction of the bedroom door, he said, “Come with me,” and then started in that direction, knowing that she would be too curious not to follow.
While she was still several paces behind him, he passed through the kitchen, grabbing two long-stemmed glasses and one of the bottles of wine she’d opened earlier. No sense letting it go to waste.
A small smile curved his mouth as she padded across the tile after him while he circled through and headed for the living room. Setting the bottle and glasses on the low glass table fronting the wide sofa, he took a seat before pouring them each a drink. Holding one out to her, he patted the cushion beside him.
She might be wearing layers of his clothes, with very little of her own figure visible beneath, but damned if her own innate femininity didn’t shine right through. He could make out the line of her breasts and the pebbled thrust of her nipples, which had his fangs pricking against his tongue. When she sat, she crossed one leg beneath her, revealing the shape and long musculature that had gotten her through three consecutive shows onstage, even though she apparently didn’t belong there.
He filed that away as something else to ask her about. Perhaps down the road. But first, he wanted an answer to his original question . . . and then he knew she would want answers to hers.
Taking a sip of the nearly black Chateau Margaux, he studied her, just as she was studying him. Like a bug under a microscope. Or maybe more like the slide of a deadly bacteria under a microscope—warily, but with a good dose of curiosity thrown in, as well.
“Now,” he said, “tell me why it is you believe I’m a vampire.”
He was careful not to flash his fangs as he spoke, otherwise her theory would be proven, and she’d have no reason to answer. He also didn’t want to scare her—and for some odd reason, humans tended to react badly to a man who revealed two long, razor-sharp incisors when he smiled. Maybe that’s why he didn’t do it very often. Go figure.
She swallowed hard. Her fingers clutched the glass in her hand so tightly, her knuckles turned white, but she didn’t bother tasting the blackberry wine inside.
“Well . . .” She paused, cleared her throat, and began again. “Powers of deduction, I guess. You’re very elusive. Even though you’re one of the wealthiest businessmen in Las Vegas—possibly the entire United States—you’re rarely seen out and about. And if you do go out in public, it’s always at night.” Her eyes narrowed as she met his gaze squarely, intent. “Always. To my knowledge, you’ve never been seen in daylight.”
She waited a beat, apparently expecting him to comment, but he remained silent, waiting just as long for her to continue.
“Well, you have to admit, that’s weird, considering that most ribbon cuttings and press conferences and everything else take place between nine a.m. and five p.m., not the other way around. And the number-one known trait of vampires is aversion to sunlight,” she pointed out, as though he might not be aware. Right.
With a tip of his head that might have been taken as a nod, he prompted, “What else?”
“You’re handsome and wealthy and could have a dozen beautiful women hanging on you, if you wanted, but you’re never seen out on a date. You’re not involved, not married, no children . . .”
He raised a brow, wondering if she realized she wasn’t describing the life of a solitary vampire only. “So you think I’m gay, too?”
Her eyes flashed wide and she sat back, startled. “No,” she responded quickly. “The thought never crossed my mind, actually.”
Since he didn’t particularly care what anyone thought about his sexuality, he shouldn’t be relieved by her admission, but oddly, he was. Supremely relieved.
And that relief grew even stronger when her brows knit and she downed her entire glass of wine in a single swallow before asking, “You aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not.” He raised his own brow, inquiring lightly,
“But why do you care?”
“I don’t,” she responded much too fast and with a shake of her head that was just a bit too . . . energetic to be believed. “I don’t care. It’s none of my business.”
“But whether I am or am not a vampire—an evil, vile, murderous creature of legend—is?”
It was more statement than question, but she answered just the same.
“I’m a reporter. It’s my job to sniff out leads and investigate stories.”
“Like alien abductions and Bigfoot sightings,” he murmured, recalling her earlier admission.
She looked at him askance, and he realized that she’d told him about writing for the Sin City Tattler while under his spell.
Well, shit, he thought with a cringe.
“More talking in my sleep, I suppose,” she said deadpan, and he knew she suspected something hinky was going on.
“Something like that.”
With a shrug, she leaned forward and poured herself a couple more inches of wine. “It’s true, writing for the Tattler gives me a chance to stretch my imagination and make up all sorts of weird stuff. In case you were wondering, though, some of it is at least loosely based on fact,” she added, as though she was used to defending her occupation.
“I’m sure,” he replied in the same flat, serious tone. “Why, just last week, I had the ghosts of Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean over for dinner, and all three of them mentioned hoping no one would find out or they’d end up on the cover of the Tattler.”
“Ha-ha, very funny,” she said with a twist of her mouth that told him she was definitely not amused. “Look, all I’m saying is that I’ve seen grilled cheese sandwiches with burn marks that do bear a remarkable resemblance to Jesus. And I definitely believe Bat Boy exists.”
“Bat Boy?” he repeated, although he was almost afraid to ask.
She nodded enthusiastically. “I totally think I saw him in a mall once. Seriously, this kid had pointed ears and giant bug eyes.”
“Maybe he was part elf.”
He expected her to scoff at his obvious joke—it had been obvious, hadn’t it?—but instead she leaned toward him, an intent expression spreading across her features.
“Do elves really exist?” she asked in a low, inquisitive tone.
“How the hell should I know?” he snapped, lurching back in surprise.
She shrugged her shoulder. The one left bare by the sagging neckline of his undershirt.
The sight shouldn’t have aroused him quite so much, but it did. His gums and his dick throbbed, and he found himself toying with the sharp edge of one fang with the tip of his tongue. Worse, he was picturing her tonguing his fangs, and later his cock . . . and that was not good.
Though he knew better than to think she could read his thoughts, her gaze went unerringly to his mouth and he both saw and felt the hitch in her breath.
Dammit, how did she do that? Why did she do that? It was as thou
gh every time he had an erotic thought about the woman sitting next to him, she had it, too. Which was impossible, of course.
When she seemed to have her breath back, she lifted her face to meet his eyes rather than staring almost wantonly at his lips and teeth.
Her words, when they came, were airy and unfocused. “I just thought that since you’re a vampire . . . if you’re a vampire,” she added in case that wasn’t entirely a given, “you might know about other preternatural beings, like werewolves or fairies or—”
“Elves?”
She inclined her head.
“Sorry,” he said softly. “I don’t have an Encyclopedia of Paranormal Creatures.”
Her brow lifted, and a small smile played across her lips. “I do. Of course, as far as I know, it’s complete fiction.”
And then she fell serious, those violet eyes darkening as they drilled into his. “But you aren’t, are you? Fiction, I mean.” Her attention flicked back to his mouth and the overly long incisor she’d spotted there earlier. “You really are a vampire.”
Straight
Chuck couldn’t believe it. She was sitting on the sofa beside an honest-to-goodness vampire. A vampire!
She was almost giddy with excitement. Sure, there was a fair amount of trepidation roiling in her belly, too, but mostly she was just too darn pleased with herself.
Even if Sebastian went all feral and ate her for his supper, she figured she’d die happy in the knowledge that she’d been right! She wasn’t crazy, and she hadn’t let the wild imaginings of her previous stories for the Tattler get her all whipped up over nothing. Sebastian Raines was definitely something.
Whoo-howdy, was he ever. Was it wrong to be sitting here, drinking his wine, silently writing up bullet points for her article, and lusting after him like a sailor on shore leave? Well, like the female version of one, anyway, whatever that might be.
“I want to interview you,” she blurted out suddenly, bouncing up on her knees on the soft sofa cushions.
It had never occurred to her before—probably because she’d never intended to actually come face to face with him. Follow him around his own casino, dig into his past and present, and sneak through his penthouse looking for clues to his otherworldliness, sure. But actually sit down with him and ask him questions directly? It was an underpaid tabloid reporter’s dream come true.
Careful not to spill her wine in all her sit-up-and-shake puppy dog excitement, she asked, “Would you let me?”
His dark lashes fluttered over his even darker eyes. “I’ve never been interviewed,” he replied slowly. “Get more requests each week than you can imagine, but I’ve never granted a single one.”
“I know.”
And she did; she’d scoured the Internet, old newspapers and magazines, even microfiche, for God’s sake, for any hint of something personal about Sebastian Raines in Sebastian Raines’s own words. She’d found nothing. Oh, there had been plenty of articles written about him—about his properties, his multimillion dollar corporations, even a few with a where-did-this-guy-come-from? tone—but always from an outsider’s perspective.
With a small inclination of his head, he said, “I told you I’d tell you everything, so I will. But my frankness comes with a price.”
Chuck’s heart leapt. Whatever it was, she would pay. Did he want actual cash? Probably not, since he had about nine thousand, sixteen trillion more dollars in his bank account than she did, but she was still willing to offer.
If he was more in the market for a live-in maid, or even a live-in mistress . . . well, she was up for that, too. She’d already been drooling over him from afar, so putting herself out there like that (ha—putting out) for the story of a lifetime wouldn’t exactly be a hardship.
As for the other . . . well, she could scrub a toilet as well as anyone, she supposed.
“You won’t remember anything once I finish.”
She blinked, slamming on her brain’s brakes and laying rubber until she could pull a mental U-ie. Wait. What?
“What?” she repeated aloud, knowing she was blinking like a camel in a sandstorm.
“That’s the deal, Char—Sorry. Chuck.”
He said her name as though he didn’t particularly like it, and definitely wasn’t used to calling a woman by a man’s name. She got that a lot.
“What does that mean?” she asked carefully.
Was he telling her that he wouldn’t allow her to use anything he told her when they were finished? An off-the-recordtype interview. Or was he telling her she wouldn’t remember the interview when they were done in a Mafia boss, you’llsleep-with-the-fishes sort of way?
She honestly didn’t know which made her feel more sick to her stomach. Swimming with the fishes would be bad, but not being able to use the most coveted interview on the planet would be devastating. Heartbreaking. Even if he didn’t put her in cement shoes and drop her to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, she would probably take a voluntary dive off the Hoover Dam, anyway.
“It means that I can answer your questions. I can tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know. But when we’re done, your memory of this evening will be completely erased and you’ll remember nothing.”
“How . . .” When her voice squeaked on the word, she paused, collected herself, and tried again. “How exactly will that happen?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up in a self-deprecating grin. “Come now. Do you think all vampires do is drink blood from unsuspecting victims?”
Inside her chest, Chuck’s heart was ka-thump-ka-thumpka-thump ing to beat the band. Holy hell on a hamburger bun. That was as good as an admission that he was, indeed, a vampire.
Granted, he hadn’t come right out and said, “Why, yes, ma’am, I am a bloodsucking fiend of the night. Wanna see my fangs?”
But she’d seen the fangs, hadn’t she? No full-on, double-fang action, but there for a second, just a minute or two ago, she’d definitely seen . . . more tooth where most people had less tooth.
And though she hadn’t asked him directly whether or not he was a vampire, she’d certainly made it clear that’s what she was after, and nothing he’d said so far led her to believe his answer would be no.
The glass in her hand trembled, and her lips started to go numb. Was she having a heart attack? Was this what one felt like? Or maybe she was simply on the verge of a panic attack.
Either way, this was IT. Big I, big T, nothing was ever going to top this in her entire life. If she one day gave birth to a litter of porcupines and got into the Guinness Book of World Records, she would still look back at the night she’d sat across from an honest-to-goodness vampire and gotten the story from his very own bloodstained mouth, and consider it the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.
But could she go through the most exciting event of her life, get all of her nagging questions answered, know she’d finally proven that vampires really did exist . . . and then consent to having it all wiped away as though it never happened?
She thought about it for all of about a millisecond. The time it took for her fingers to flex more tightly around her wineglass and her gaze to once again zero in on Sebastian’s impressive, almost Romanesque profile as he reached for the bottle to refill his own glass.
Yes. Yes, she could. She had to know. Wanted it more than her next breath or her daily, top-secret Snickers bar.
It killed her, absolutely killed her to think that when she woke up the next morning, she might not remember a single thing about tonight, but it was a risk she was willing to take. Who knew, maybe his vampire mojo or whatever it was wouldn’t work. Maybe she would wake up not only remembering the events of this evening, but as far back as having her ass slapped by the doctor when she’d been born.
A frown crossed her face as one last thought occurred to her. “This whole . . . erasing my memory thing,” she murmured, nibbling at one side of her bottom lip. “It doesn’t involve any sort of electro-shock or frontal lobotomy-type stuff, does it?”
He chuckled. “No, I assure you it’s entirely noninvasive. Except for the loss of recent memories, of course.”
Of course.
Taking a deep breath, she nodded, and forced the words past a throat closed tight with anxiety. “All right. As long as you promise not to leave me a drooling vegetable staring at Phineas and Ferb all day, I’m in.”
“Who?”
She waved off his question with a flip of her wrist. “It’s a cartoon. For kids.” Something she knew only because she spent way too many hours awake when she should be asleep, with only the Disney Channel for company.
“No, I will not leave you drooling over this Phillius on Verb, or anything else. You’ll be perfectly fine, except for a few missing hours of your life you’ll probably wonder about. After a while, you’ll even forget that they ever went missing.”
“Then I want to know,” she told him, making her voice strong and sure in hopes of convincing herself, as well.
He inclined his head. “Where would you like to start?”
Well, shoot, she wasn’t expecting that. Her brows crossed. Where did she want to start?
She already knew he was a vampire. At this point, that was a given. He’d never come right out and admitted as much, but . . . yeah, it was a given.
And she assumed he drank blood, couldn’t go out in sunlight, and had been around since the invention of the wheel or soon thereafter. The whole nine undead yards.
She wanted to know more than just the everyday minutia of an immortal’s existence. Although, yes, she was sure that was all fascinating. She’d come back to it later. But for now, she wanted to dig deeper, learn something a little more substantial than whether or not he slept in a coffin or had to carry dirt from his native land in his pants pocket twenty-four seven.span>
When she thought about it, what she wanted to know most was really pretty simple. And probably what had driven her to go after Sebastian like a pitbull with this “there’s a vampire living in Las Vegas” theory in the first place.