by Ann Jacobs
He had no reason to be so certain, yet he was. Although she showed none of that fear now as she enticed him and every man in the place to fantasize they were fucking her, he sensed a desperation beneath her smile, the come-on sway of her hips to the beat of that Latin tune. She wanted something, needed something beyond a few dollars tucked into her G-string.
He wanted something from her too. Steamy, sweaty sex. Sex the pretty Latina was blatantly peddling from a few feet away on the stage. Swirling lights made her sequined pasties and G-string sparkle, inviting his gaze. He ached with anticipation when he looked beyond the glitter to her full, firm breasts. Her dusky, silky mound. Around him equally attractive women in similar states of undress offered lap dances to the patrons, dances he imagined would be delivered in the privacy of the VIP rooms every strip club had.
But it was the woman dancing onstage who intrigued him, the soft look of innocence barely visible in dark eyes that belied her blatant come-on when she rolled her hips his way to the sultry beat of a conga drum. Claude gasped when the delicate tip of her tongue wet her painted lips. He could practically feel those full lips surrounding him.
He wanted to sip the glistening sweat from her brow, her ass, her flat, tanned belly. His fangs itched to penetrate the creamy column of her throat and sip ever so gently from a vein he saw pulsating there. What was it about this woman, this night, that made him desperate to have her . . . to taste her blood while he claimed her?
Her musk swirled in the air, the aroma tempting yet elusive across the distance between them. Though he’d felt instant lust before, he’d never wanted a stranger so strongly, never felt compelled to have her, master her, give her the pleasure she silently requested with each sultry move of her hips, every come-on gesture. Each upward curve of her blood-red lips tempted him and every other patron in the club. It was as though destiny had brought him here, to her, on this night in this place in time.
A nearly naked blonde sidled up to his table, a huge smile on her stunning but too heavily made-up face.
“Buy me a drink, honey?” she asked, bending until her cleavage was in line with his face so he got a good look at her naked breasts—breasts so perfectly round and firm they had to have been created by a plastic surgeon’s skilled hand.
She straightened, giving him an eyeful of her sex, naked except for a jeweled G-string that helped display instead of hiding her considerable charm. “Like what you see?”
Unfortunately for her, she reminded Claude of the blonde Reynard had killed in Buenos Aires, and that did almost as much as an icy shower toward squelching his libido. “You’re very pretty.” Wanting to let her down easily, he smiled. “I’ll buy you a drink if you’ll take a message to the dancer who’s onstage now. Tell her I’d like to see her when she finishes her act.”
He pressed a folded bill into the woman’s outstretched hand. “Marisa? Ha! If you’re looking for a good time, better pick me instead, handsome. The best you’ll get from the Madonna’s a half-assed lap dance.”
A ten-minute lap dance from her would be worth an all-night fuck with you. Claude liked to do the hunting rather than being the object of such blatant pursuit. “No offense, but I’ll take my chances.” Peeling another bill off the roll in his pocket, Claude tucked it into the blonde’s G-string before she pivoted and headed off in search of a more promising customer. “Thank you.”
He leaned back in the chair, imagining how Marisa’s firm, shapely legs would feel around his waist. His balls tightened. Hell, he didn’t want a lap dance, he wanted to fuck her until they both were spent. Then he wanted to fall asleep with his head pillowed on her full, lush breasts.
His mouth went dry as though he needed to feed, although he’d partaken less than a day ago of life-sustaining blood. Maybe one of the prefab pizzas he’d seen at some of the other tables would take the edge off. Quickly he denied that temptation; since his injury he’d practically lost his taste for mortals’ junk food. Sighing, he took another sip of his cola, now watered down with melting ice. Thankfully the club didn’t serve alcoholic beverages—an oddity, he’d learned, that resulted from an ordinance preventing the sale of booze in clubs that featured nude entertainers. If it had and he’d given in to the temptation to drink, his head would be spinning even more now. He was painfully hard already, and his sex began to throb insistently as he watched Marisa toss her sparkly pasties into the audience. He managed to raise a hand in time to catch the tiny G-string he’d imagined tearing off her with his fangs.
The drumbeat accelerated. Totally nude now, she straddled the pole at center stage, humping it to the quickening beat of the music. The small hoop in her clit sparkled against her glistening flesh, beckoning Claude as clearly as a whispered invitation. Hopefully he was managing not to show his fangs, but he wasn’t certain.
He felt need in the air—his own for her, but more. For scant seconds she met his gaze, and behind the façade of sensual abandon he sensed her desperation, her need not only for sex but for help. A need he’d be damned if he’d let another of the ogling customers fulfill.
• • •
Once again Marisa eyed the dark, gorgeous, prosperous-looking customer who stared at her from a front table as she writhed against the pole at center stage. He was a tourist for sure, probably a European or South American, like many of the strangers who came to Miami Beach for sun and fun. But this one looked muy macho. Even tougher than the mob goons the patron had sicced on her. The customer’s white teeth gleamed when he smiled, his very prominent incisors giving him a menacing look.
Menacing but oh so sexy. This man would be able to take care of himself with the likes of the patron’s enforcers. Sí, this man was the sort she’d want to have as her protector from those thugs—the sort of man she’d want to fuck for free if she didn’t need money so desperately.
She peeled off her G-string and tossed it his way. Totally naked now, she wiggled her ass so the little bell dangling from her clit ring swayed in concert with the ones colliding with the gold nipple shields she always wore beneath the tasseled pasties she’d discarded.
If he would take her bait, she’d give more than the lap dance he undoubtedly expected. Much more. Her sex clenched when she imagined the dark, delicious things the stranger would do once she’d enticed him to take her not to one of the VIP rooms upstairs but to his hotel room. Though she’d never laid eyes on him before, she sensed a connection—a pull that had as much to do with raw sexual attraction as with her dire financial situation. She also perceived an aura of power surrounding him, as though he could take on any mere mortal.
Who knows? Maybe he does possess supernatural powers.
The man with the intriguing emerald-green eyes definitely was no angel, avenging or not. And no one as beautiful as he could be a gargoyle. But maybe—yes, he could be a vampire. He certainly looked like some of the ones she’d seen in movies. If he were, he could . . . Marisa, don’t wish for the impossible. He’s just a man, not some supernatural creature. Hope only that you can please him.
But try as she might, she couldn’t let go the notion that this stranger might be not only her john but her salvation. In the fantasies and dreams she’d once had as a girl, her man had possessed special powers. He would have been strong enough to find and destroy the nameless, faceless drug lord who supplied the cocaine her brother had proved yet again he couldn’t live without. Her dream man would have destroyed the patron, erased Raul’s debt. He would even do the impossible—rid the Hispanic community in Miami of a scourge who’d ruined the lives of countless people. People who’d sought pleasure and found misery instead.
Dream on, Marisa. Think of the man as a customer, not the white knight of your wildest fantasies. Don’t delude yourself that he’s anything more than mortal.
As the music faded, she slithered down the pole and off the stage, moistening her lips as she strutted, unashamedly naked, toward the beautiful man. As she moved toward him, his gaze followed her, moving over her body like a caress. Suddenly t
he vulgar gyration of hips she’d intended became a languid dance of its own, a sensual beckoning, not just from desperation for her brother but for the desire in herself.
When she got to him, he rose and reached out his hand as if he were helping her down from a carriage. As he sank down into his chair, he drew her onto him, suddenly in control, guiding her actions. She’d intended to straddle his lap, but now he compelled her to do so.
Remembering her goal, she ground her pelvis against the hard bulge of his sex. “Let me entertain you, handsome. I can show you a real good time.”
• • •
Claude’s balls tightened. His fangs itched. His erection throbbed and hardened more each time the woman ground her satin-smooth mons against his fully clothed groin. Reflexively, he gripped the rounded flesh of her buttocks and began to move.
For a moment she moved with him, a sensual mating dance. Her mouth went slack, her eyelids fluttering shut against her creamy skin. Then, as though she suddenly realized where they were, she lifted her hands off his shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Not here, por favor. Whatever you want, I will give you, but we must go somewhere else.” Her voice wavered the tiniest bit, just enough to give Claude second thoughts.
“What’s your name, beautiful?” He knew because the blonde had mentioned it, but he wanted to hear it from the woman’s gleaming red lips.
“Marisa. Come with me, lover.” Reaching down with one hand, she cupped Claude’s erection. “You’re muy macho. You will give me a good time too.”
“How much?”
“All night? Two thousand dollars. I will give you whatever you want, however you want it. All night long.” Obviously Marisa wanted him—at least she wanted the money he’d give her. Beyond the come-on, though, he perceived the same desperation he’d sensed earlier while she danced onstage. And he could practically smell the fear that lay barely beneath the surface of her lush, naked body. Though she hadn’t said a word, he knew. She was the woman he’d seen in the alley. Though she hid it well, the fear those bastards had put in her an hour earlier had to be driving her actions now.
“My hotel is right across the street.” Although Claude wasn’t in the habit of paying for sex and found the prospect of doing so vaguely insulting, he wanted to wipe away the thinly veiled terror in her dark eyes, put an end to whatever threat it was she faced. He also needed release. From her, not from just any attractive female. Hell, he was about to burst out of his pants. He desperately wanted to bury himself inside this small, dark-haired woman with sun-kissed skin and a shy smile that seemed out of place with her blatantly seductive actions. “Come, little dove,” he said, lifting her off his lap and standing.
“Meet me at the stage door. I have to dress. . .”
“All right. Five minutes. No more. I’ll be waiting.” He hoped his painful hard-on wasn’t as evident to the customers he passed on the way out as it was to him.
Chapter Three
When Claude got her to his hotel room, Marisa didn’t bother wasting time.
“What do you like, señor? I will provide any form of pleasure you desire.” Slowly, as if she were stripping again but this time just for him, she peeled off the surprisingly demure pink dress she’d worn from the club and stood, her delectable body highlighted in the moonlight that flooded through the window of Claude’s oceanfront room. Half seductress, half innocent, she gave him a shy smile while undulating her body just enough to make the bells on the rings in her nipples make tinkling contact with the nipple shields she’d worn during her act and apparently left on for his pleasure.
Claude couldn’t take his eyes off them or the jingling bell on her clit ring. Couldn’t stop looking at her, wanting her. And though he knew he must be crazy, he couldn’t beat down the intuitive voice in his head that said this woman—a prostitute he’d agreed to pay two grand for a night’s fucking—was the soul mate every d’Argent vampire eventually encountered. His soul mate. The woman he’d love for the rest of his long, long existence. His injury must have thrown his brain off-kilter.
Fumbling in a way he hadn’t done since he’d been a child of fifteen years about to enjoy a woman for the first time, he worked the buttons of his shirt loose . . . shed it . . . tackled the fastenings of his slacks and shoved them down along with his underwear. Blood surged to his cock, leaving him lightheaded as he stepped out of the pants and stood there, aroused by her scrutiny.
Her gaze had settled on his raging hard-on, and her tongue was touching her lips again. The way she looked at him . . . damn, it made him feel ten feet tall. He grinned, not caring if she noticed his fangs. “Do you like what you see?”
“Yes. Do you want me to taste you now?”
Damn stupid question. What working girl wouldn’t know he was aching to feel the touch of those lips? But then maybe she wasn’t one. Maybe she wasn’t a hooker at all, only a desperate woman in dire need of the money he’d agreed to give her.
What the fuck? Why she was doing this didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but having her, absorbing her warmth, burying himself inside her and chasing away the loneliness that had been dogging him since he’d left friends and family in Paris on what was beginning to seem like a never-ending hunt for Louis Reynard.
Claude reached out, stroked her flat, taut belly. So soft, so tempting. She sighed when he drew her into his arms. “Yeah, I want you to suck my cock. I want you to suck it ’til you make me come. First, though, I want to taste you. Lie down, and let me show you how a Parisian vampire makes love.”
Her eyes widened as she looked up at him, even though he didn’t doubt she’d suspected, considering the way he’d been gaping at her in the club, fangs hanging out for all to see. He smiled, deliberately showing her those fangs, making them elongate enough so they grazed his lower lip.
“Dios mio.” For a moment she trembled, but she recovered quickly, squared her shoulders and shot him a dazzling smile. “I know I should be afraid, but—”
“You’ve no reason to fear me, for I fed only yesterday and have no need for sustenance—only for release of the ache you’ve caused in me.” Claude gathered her in his arms, retracting his fangs and wishing he hadn’t made her tremble. “I only want to devour your sweet honey.”
“It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t. Claude sensed her fear, fear incongruous with her stated intentions. Perhaps his instincts had been right, that Marisa was no prostitute. The thought made him unreasonably happy, even more aroused than he’d been before. He smiled, making a conscious effort not to bare his fangs this time. “Truly, my mother would be most angry if she thought I’d frightened a beautiful woman like you. She would tell you the vampires of our clan don’t make a habit of lurking in coffins or attacking unsuspecting mortals for sustenance.”
“I believe you. It’s only that you’re the first vampire I’ve ever seen, other than in movies. I—I wasn’t even sure vampires even exist, until . . .”
From the way she stared at his mouth, as though she expected him to grab her and attack her very tempting throat, he assumed the only vampires she’d seen in film were of the evil persuasion. He smiled, being careful to keep his fangs retracted. My name is Claude. Claude d’Argent. Come and let me show you how well a vampire can satisfy a woman.”
She bit her lower lip. The smile that followed looked forced. “It’s my job to give you pleasure, not demand it for myself.”
Scooping her up in his arms, Claude nibbled her earlobe, being careful not to break her tender skin. When she sighed with apparent pleasure, he moved lower to sample the satiny skin of her tempting, olive-tanned throat, the upper curve of her full breasts. “It will be my pleasure to seduce you,” he said, answering the invitation of the turned-down bed and laying her at its center.
• • •
Marisa’s heart pounded in her chest, whether from fear or desire she couldn’t say. Part of her wanted to run and hide, for a voice inside her warned this man—this vampire—would steal her will, make it his own. A st
ronger voice in her head urged her to stay.
She didn’t want to stay only because he’d promised to pay her. Deep inside, she wanted to savor the sensations of making love with Claude d’Argent. This sexy vampire bore no resemblance to any of the evil creatures Buffy had battled in the old series she’d seen in reruns on late-night TV, or any of the vampire villains she’d seen portrayed in movies. Instead he was the epitome of all the lovers in her wildest fantasies.
His touch was firm yet gentle, his voice mellow and seductive. Not threatening but promising infinite pleasure—and security. As she lay still, looking up at him sitting beside her, her fear receded, replaced by the beginnings of desire. She reached out, tracing along the length of a healing wound that marked the otherwise perfectly smooth, cool skin of his chest.
“How—how did this happen?”
He smiled. “A skirmish, some weeks ago. All but healed.”
“Then it’s not true that vampires heal instantly from their wounds?”
“From most injuries, yes, we heal quickly—but not quite as instantly as legend has it.” He placed his hand over hers, the contact somehow reassuring. “I had the misfortune to encounter another vampire—an evil creature from a clan that bears no love for the d’Argents.”
As Marisa held her hand still on his muscular chest, she realized she could feel no heartbeat. “Are you . . .”
