by Meg Cabot
And she’d said yes.
The only problem was, the more passionately he kissed her, the louder Jack Bauer’s growls grew. Finally, Meena had no choice but to draw her head away, and, glancing over at her dog, she said with some irritation, “Jack. Shut up!”
Jack Bauer let out a startled yip, stared at Meena with his ears tilted forward…then sneezed.
Meena couldn’t help but burst out laughing. She glanced at Lucien to see if he was smiling as well…
Only he wasn’t. He was staring down at her with an intensity she could only have described as…fiery.
Judging from his expression, she saw that he didn’t appear to find the situation the least bit amusing. Still holding Meena so that her feet dangled a few inches above the ground, he was looking deeply into her eyes.
“Spend the night with me,” he said in a passion-roughened voice.
Meena wasn’t shocked.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known he was going to ask. She’d felt the way their bodies had fit together. It was as if they’d been made for each other. She’d sensed the hunger in his kiss after the initial gentleness…it had matched her own. He wanted her every bit as much as she wanted him.
Still, the last thing she needed-the very last thing-was to fall in love.
And she was falling in love with Lucien Antonescu…and his kisses, which seemed to burn through her skin, down to her very soul.
She could feel herself slipping over the edge…that deliciously narrow precipice between admiration and friendship, and love.
It was silly-it was foolish. But it was true. She was falling head over heels, crazy in love with a man she’d only just met.
It didn’t make any sense. She barely knew him.
But how could she not fall in love with him, after what they’d been through together, after what he’d done for her?
And now she was helpless in the face of his kisses. They turned her to ash.
But what good was sleeping with Lucien Antonescu going to do her? He was just going to leave. He was in town for only a short time. She’d never had a chance to try one out, but Meena very much doubted she’d be any good at a long-distance relationship. He wasn’t going to move to New York.
And she certainly wasn’t going to move to Romania.
Or, to put it another way: she was going to try very hard not to follow him back to Romania.
So, the sensible thing was to say no to his invitation to spend the night with him. No. Two little letters. N. O.
She wasn’t a risk taker. Remember? “Okay,” she heard herself whispering.
What? What was wrong with her? Was she crazy?
Lucien, smiling, held her even closer-something she hadn’t thought possible-then swung her around in a circle until Meena, laughing, begged him to stop, while Jack Bauer barked. Lucien, laughing as well, put Meena down on her feet, his expression seeming almost triumphant.
“You won’t regret it,” he said sincerely.
Meena was by then kneeling down to calm Jack Bauer. She looked up quizzically at Lucien’s words.
She wouldn’t regret it? Of course she wouldn’t regret it.
Why would she?
Chapter Twenty-eight
3:00 A.M. EST, Friday, April 16
15 Union Square West, Penthouse
New York, New York
Lucien knew what he was doing was wrong.
But that didn’t mean he could stop himself.
She let him take her coat, then stood admiring the apartment Emil had found for him, a sleek, starkly decorated corporate penthouse with the most sophisticated security system available and a terrace that made Emil’s, on which twenty or so people could mingle comfortably, look like a postage stamp. The view, through UV-blocked windows-sliding glass doors to the wraparound terrace made up most of the walls-was of downtown Manhattan to one side, the Hudson River to another, Union Square Park to a third, and then the skyscrapers uptown, stretching out before them like brilliantly lit Christmas trees. In the distance, past the East River, one could see the red lights of planes flying low over Queens, landing at the various airports there.
“It’s amazing,” Meena Harper breathed, going to one of the glass doors and gazing out across the darkness at the bright lights and clear, moonlit sky. Her long slender neck, rising up from the back of her plain black dress, looked particularly vulnerable with her close-shorn hair.
She obviously hadn’t the slightest clue of the emotional maelstrom in which he found himself.
He’d known his behavior was reprehensible-quite possibly downright evil-from the moment he’d opened his mouth at Emil’s and asked the girl if he could come with her while she walked the dog.
Even the dog, who smelled what he was, knew what Lucien was doing was wrong.
He’d been berating himself for speaking the words even as they came out of his mouth.
And then when she’d slipped into her apartment, followed by the brother-whom Lucien had thought for a moment had gone to try to dissuade her from leaving with him-he’d thought, Good. Good for him. He’ll stop me. As a brother should.
But no. The brother, it turned out, was too self-centered to see what was actually happening. (Though Lucien supposed that was harsh. He’d been what he was for over half a millennium. The brother had been alive for only a little over thirty years. Lucien supposed he shouldn’t think so unkindly of him.)
Lucien had actually stood in the hallway telling himself to just go. Take the stairs, let her be. She was a good person, a better person than he was…someone who obviously tried to do the right thing. She didn’t deserve to have her life ruined by his kind. What was Mary Lou up to even getting her involved in the mess that was their lives?
Let Mary Lou make up some story about where he’d disappeared to. Allow Meena Harper to have her happy little life.
But he couldn’t do it. He was too intrigued. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been as curious about a woman, let alone a human woman.
Or as attracted to one.
But that didn’t mean he deserved to have her. Especially since everything he touched, he defiled.
That was the way of his kind.
He didn’t take his own advice. Even when he reminded himself that he couldn’t afford the distraction. There were too many other things that needed his attention at the moment: the fact that someone was draining young women of their blood and then leaving their nude corpses scattered across Manhattan like used tissues.
The fact that someone was trying to kill him.
The fact that possibly these two people were one and the same.
In any case, he needed to keep his head.
He’d been turning toward the stairs, determined to let her go, when her apartment door opened, and she came back out into the hallway.
And he knew he was waging a hopeless battle with himself. He wasn’t going anywhere. She looked as fresh as a newly wrapped gift.
And he wanted to be the one to open that gift.
The worst part was that it wasn’t merely a sexual attraction. There was also the puzzle of her mind. The cacophony he heard in Meena Harper’s head wasn’t, he’d figured out, due to the fact that she was insane. No. She was hiding something. Something she didn’t like to think about, something she’d become expert, over the years, at hiding from everyone…even from herself.
It was something, he could tell, that haunted not only her dreams but her waking hours, as well. He could barely read the mental pictures that streamed through her consciousness because she’d buried certain painful memories so deeply within it. And so her thoughts came to him only in fits and starts, like a radio station, fading in and out.
He had never made a habit of using his powers to discover the true feelings of a woman in whom he was romantically interested. That was neither gentlemanly nor sporting.
But in Meena’s case, he couldn’t help it. Her lively interior monologue-what he could understand of it-shone like the lights over on the Empire State
Building, too bright to ignore.
And yet the view was obstructed.
This made her all the more fascinating. It was hard to imagine that beneath her vivacious personality-her flirtatious teasing and her love of happy endings-lurked something so dark that she could hardly stand to allow herself to think of it.
Yet it seemed to be the truth.
And he knew this very darkness was what drew him so inexorably to her.
Was it possible he had met a woman who could understand the monster within him…because she was hiding a monster of her own?
And if this was so, why did he also get the feeling that there was a sweetness about her in which he could somehow find his own redemption?
It wasn’t possible. Man could find redemption only through God.
But God had forsaken his kind centuries ago.
And yet Lucien couldn’t deny what he’d been feeling all night as he’d gazed into her dark eyes…the growing conviction that Meena Harper might be his salvation.
Or was he asking too much of one person…and a human being, at that?
He didn’t know.
But he was desperate to find out.
It had taken all of his self-control at the museum to keep his hands off her. He realized now that he’d been trying, in his own clumsy way, to give her fair warning, showing her the portrait, trying to make sure she knew what she was getting herself into. Stupid.
But true.
And for a split second, he’d been certain she’d known…something. Not everything, of course, or even as sympathetic as she was, she would have fled in terror.
And there’d been other times, as well, like by the painting of St. Joan…
Lucien had lived long enough to know there were no such things as angels or saints-despite what Meena evidently wanted to believe regarding Joan of Arc. Or if there were, he’d never encountered any. Obviously, or he and his kind would have been wiped out long ago.
But how else could he explain Meena Harper…and the aching need he felt to make her his own?
On the other hand, he was a vampire-something her own dog had been at great pains throughout most of the night to warn her about, though she seemed perfectly unaware of the fact. Even now, as she was walking slowly around the penthouse, taking in the view, she had no idea of the danger she was in.
Lucien felt he had to say something. It was only fair to give her a fighting chance.
It was the gentlemanly thing to do.
“You mentioned the vampire war earlier,” he said. He’d switched on the sound system when they’d come in; a string quartet played softly overhead. Now he went to the glass and chrome wine refrigerator and selected a bottle. Something light, he thought, like her. She wouldn’t like anything too heavy, too dark.
“Oh,” she said with a laugh. “That. Yeah. Work.” She gave a shudder. “Let’s not talk about work. Kind of a mood killer, you know?”
He found a pinot noir Emil had stocked. Perfect. “I’m sorry,” he said with a smile. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s pretty bad,” Meena said, coming over to where he was standing by the bar and slipping onto one of the chrome and black-leather stools beside him. “I lost a promotion I really wanted, and channel four is killing us in the ratings, all because they have this horrible monster misogynist story line that people seem to love.”
Lucien paused midpour. “Monster misogynist?” he asked, one eyebrow raised quizzically.
Meena held up both hands like they were claws. “You know. Vampires.” She bared her teeth and hissed like a vampire in a movie.
Lucien nearly dropped the glass of wine he was holding out to her, just as her dog, standing a few feet away from them, barked with impressive ferociousness for such a small animal.
“Jack Bauer!” Meena dropped her hands and turned on her stool. “You have to relax!” To Lucien she asked, “Do you have any hamburger or something in the fridge?”
Lucien froze. If she opened the refrigerator, she would find his latest black market delivery from the New York Blood Center. “I don’t think I-”
“Oh, never mind,” she said, interrupting. Fortunately, she’d begun looking through the purse she’d hung on the back of the stool. “I might have something in my bag. Oh, here. Some dog treats. I’ll just lure him into the bathroom and lock him in there, and then maybe we’ll have some peace.”
Meena slipped off the stool and held out her cupped hand to the dog, who continued to bark…until he caught the scent of the treats.
Then his foxlike ears tipped forward and he trotted toward her until he reached the room that Lucien had indicated was the bathroom. After rinsing a soap dish she found there, filling it with water, and leaving it on the floor for him to drink from, Meena piled the treats alongside it, and as soon as Jack Bauer was too busy wolfing them down to notice what she was doing, she shut the door behind her.
Lucien tried not to show his relief over the narrow escape he’d had. Normally he didn’t do things as stupid as put his blood supply in the kitchen refrigerator, where any woman he brought home might discover it while casually looking for a snack for her little dog.
But he certainly hadn’t expected to be sleeping with anyone while in New York. He was there on business. It was only because Meena Harper was so completely unlike any other woman he’d ever met that he’d violated his own personal-and long-held-code of conduct.
And nearly ruined everything in doing so.
“There,” she said, resuming her position on the barstool. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what’s come over him. He’s usually really good with people. Except your cousin for some reason. And Mary Lou. Maybe it’s anyone who owns a summer castle. Jack Bauer obviously has Marxist leanings.” She laughed and raised her glass. “So.”
“To Jack Bauer, budding Marxist,” Lucien said, clinking the side of her glass with his own.
She laughed again, her large dark eyes bright over the wide rim of her wineglass. He hadn’t been flattering her when he’d made the observation that she looked a little like the girl in the painting with which she obviously felt such a connection in the museum. The actual truth was, she was much prettier.
Much prettier, and much more vulnerable looking. “So I take it you don’t like vampires?” he asked carefully.
Meena laughed. “Considering they’re basically ruining my life right now? Not much.”
“And monster misogynists are…?”
“You know,” Meena said, “how in horror movies and books and TV shows, the monster or the serial killer with the chain saw always goes after the helpless pretty girl. It’s so sexist.” She went on. “And vampires are the worst of all. That’s because, as Van Helsing points out in Dracula, vampires know the girl’s family is going to be all squeamish about cutting off her head-even if they know she’s a vampire now. I guess because it’s supposed to be easier to cut off your son’s head than it is your daughter’s.”
She gave a shudder, then added, “And what’s with vampires always wanting to make the pretty girl their undead girlfriend? Or worse, not wanting to make her his undead girlfriend. And then she talks him into it, to the thrill of the audience. Because being dead and with someone is apparently a happier ending than being alive and alone. Only how is being dead a happy ending?” Her eyes flashed. “Believe me. Being dead is never a happy ending.”
He studied her. There’d been a great deal of passion behind that last statement. He wondered where it came from and if that odd obstruction in her mind had something to do with it.
“But,” he said carefully, “you don’t believe in vampires.”
She choked on her wine. “W-what?” she stammered. “Did you just ask me if I believe in vampires?”
Lucien returned his hand to the stem of his wineglass, staring at the ruby liquid within it. He knew it was important to look everywhere but into her eyes. He was afraid of how much he might give away if he looked into those eyes that seemed to see so much…and yet so little.
�
�Forgive me,” he said. “I just thought, the other night, at the church…”
“Oh,” Meena said. She took another sip of her wine. Her glass was almost empty. “That? Aren’t you the one who keeps saying it was only a few little bats?”
His own words, thrown back at him. He supposed he deserved that. “But you believe St. Joan heard voices,” he said. “Voices telling her the future. How can an educated woman like yourself believe this and not in creatures of the night? Or”-he smiled-“do you prefer only to believe in happy things, like your preference for happy endings?”
The look she gave him was so sharp, it could have cut glass. “Joan’s story didn’t end happily,” she said, reminding him. “And I like a good horror story as much as the next person, so long as they kill off some men, too, and not just girls. But the voices Joan heard were real. There’s clear and substantiated proof they were real. She won battles that would otherwise have been lost because of what those voices told her in advance of them, allowing the French generals to strategize in ways completely different than they did before Joan came along. People’s lives were saved because of what those voices told her.”
“And,” Lucien said, his gaze still on his glass, “there’s no such proof that vampires are real.”
“There’s plenty of proof that some corporations are making a fortune off audiences who like to think they’re real,” she said. “Including Lust’s advertisers. Why do you think our sponsor is so adamant that we get in on the action? The money’s very, very real. But soulless undead who walk around biting people on the neck and drinking their blood, who can’t go out during the day or they’ll burn to a crisp and who have to sleep in coffins? Please.”
“Some of the mythology has been exaggerated over the years,” Lucien said with a slight quirk to his mouth. “Some authors-including your Mr. Stoker-may have taken liberties.”
“And who can turn into bats?” Meena added.
“And some haven’t,” Lucien said a little stiffly. He refilled her wineglass, which she’d finished off. “So, just to be sure. Even though you’ve never met one-because they don’t exist, of course-you want nothing to do with vampires?”