by Lisa Childs
“I will swear out a complaint.”
“If we hadn’t been interrupted,” he said, trailing his fingers down the bare skin of her shoulder in a caress, “you would have no complaints.” And then, despite the damn chiming clock and doorbell, he leaned down and brushed his mouth across hers.
Damn. Like honey and caramel and all the sweets that had always been his weakness, she tasted just as good as he had known she would. Too good for him to resist deepening the kiss. With gentle pressure, he parted her lips with his and dipped his tongue inside her mouth.
She closed her eyes and pressed her body against his. But he stepped back so that only their lips touched, clinging. He didn’t want to break the kiss. Didn’t want to leave her. But the damn clock chimed again.
*
Lips tingling, breath coming in ragged pants, Kate finally opened her eyes. But he was gone. Cool air chilled her skin from the breeze blowing through the open window. Had she left that open? Or had he opened it?
Or had he ever really even been there? She still couldn’t believe that the man she had shot, the man she’d watched die, had been in her bedroom. It wasn’t possible. But then, his dead body disappearing wasn’t possible, either.
Fists pounded at her door, her visitor having abandoned the bell and whatever patience he or she might have possessed.
Kate couldn’t blame them; she had kept them waiting for a long time. But hell, it was midnight. Who would visit her so late—except him?
Had he actually been there—or had she dreamed it all? No, impossible.
She could still taste him on her lips—as dark and dangerous and rich as his eerie topaz gaze and gleaming black hair. Another knock and the twelfth chime of the clock pulled her to her senses.
Still holding the gun, she thrust her arms into the sleeves of the robe draped across the foot of her rumpled bed and one-handedly secured the belt. Then she rushed to the front door before her crazy visitor woke the whole damn apartment complex. “What the hell—”
Palms lifted up, Paige stepped back from the doorway. “Don’t shoot.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t,” Kate challenged her blond-haired friend.
“Because we’re your friends,” Paige replied. Their other friends stood behind her. Brown-haired Elizabeth “Lizzy” Turrell, the red-haired assistant DA Campbell O’Brien, and Dr. Renae Grabill, the trauma resident with her short, dark hair and haunted gaze. Like Kate, Renae saw too much tragedy on the job.
“You woke me up,” Kate said. That alone had to be a shooting offense, especially when the dream had been as real and erotic as the one she had been having. But if it had been a dream, it had been the most vivid one she’d ever had.
“Looks like you were having one hell of a night,” Campbell perceptively remarked, lifting an auburn brow above one of her green eyes. “Is he still here?”
Lizzy snorted. “When’s the last time you saw Kate with a man?”
“Yesterday, but she was handcuffing him,” Campbell admitted. “Maybe she’s into that kinky stuff, though.”
“I’m into getting my sleep after a shift,” Kate said and feigned a yawn. “And you know why I was cuffing that guy—I was on duty.”
“You’re never off duty,” Paige said.
“You need to take a break once in a while,” Lizzy added.
“That’s what I was just trying to do,” Kate pointed out, “when I was sleeping.”
“Sleep sounds good,” Renae agreed. As a trauma surgeon in a crime-ridden city, she never got enough herself. “But you were supposed to meet us at Club Underground.” She had agreed to meet them this Friday since none of them had to work the next day.
Kate shuddered.
Even though Paige owned the place, Kate hated it for so many reasons. When Paige had first bought the club, someone had relentlessly stalked and terrorized her at the place.
That had been years ago. Paige’s stalker was gone now, but Kate still didn’t know the whole story. She just knew that her friend was safe and happier now than she had ever been. The investigator in her wanted to find out exactly what the hell had gone on at the creepy underground club. But because Paige was her friend, Kate hadn’t pressured her for details. She hadn’t wanted to disturb Paige’s happiness.
Now Kate had her own worries. Her own stalker.
That was another reason she hated Club Underground. Him. She had shot him in the alley behind the building. But she hadn’t killed him, like she’d thought. It wasn’t his ghost haunting her; it was him—gaslighting her.
“Hey,” Paige said with a chuckle. “That’s my place you’re disparaging.”
“Not disparaging,” Kate said.
“Just avoiding?” Paige probed, her blue-eyed gaze narrowed with concern. “You’re lucky Sebastian gave up on waiting for you to open the door. He took off when you didn’t answer the bell. He’d be quite upset that you’re not patronizing the club anymore.”
Sebastian, Paige’s younger brother and the long-time manager of Club Underground, had talked his sister into buying the place after she’d given up the law profession years ago. With his movie-star good looks, he could talk anyone into anything. Usually he talked women into his bed.
“He probably realized that waking up a detective is not a good idea,” Kate said, tapping her lowered gun against her thigh.
“He probably realized that there was somebody more welcoming waiting for him,” Campbell said.
“Since you wouldn’t come to happy hour, we brought happy hour to you,” Lizzy said.
Paige held up a bottle of white wine, and Kate snorted in disgust. Then Campbell raised another bottle, of liquor nearly the same amber as the man’s topaz eyes. Whiskey was Kate’s drink—when she drank, which wasn’t often. Just during happy hour, which was whenever the busy women managed to get together.
“You’ve been so busy the past couple of months,” said Renae who was equally, if not more so, busy but always made time for her friends, “that we’ve missed you.”
“So let us in,” Campbell said.
“Sorry,” Kate murmured as she stepped back so her friends could enter her messy living room. She had one couch, which was littered with clothes and newspapers, and a coffee table that was buried under plates and fast-food containers. If she’d known she was having visitors…she still wouldn’t have had time to clean up. Not with the shifts she worked and not with all the time she spent off duty trying to solve a case nobody believed was a crime—because they hadn’t seen the body.
But she’d seen the body. That night and again in her bedroom.
“Kate?” Lizzy asked, her soft voice full of concern. She was the mom of the group—having raised four kids on her own. She tended to mother them, too. “Are you sure everything’s all right?”
Kate nodded and lied, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Her place was small, hardly enough room for herself. But she picked up and tossed stuff aside, making room for her friends just as she had made room in her life for these women; their friendships were vital to her sanity. She had never needed them more than now.
Renae and Campbell dropped onto the floor while Paige and Lizzy squeezed together on the couch, making room for her to join them.
“I’m really glad you guys came over,” she said with gratitude for their friendship and their concern.
But she dare not tell them about her other late-night visitor, or they might think her as crazy as she already thought herself. He couldn’t have really been in her bedroom—in her bed. She couldn’t really have kissed him.
He was dead. She’d killed him.
*
Warrick hit the ground on all fours then glanced over his shoulder at the leap he’d taken off the fire escape outside Kate Wever’s fourth-floor apartment. “Damn…”
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself,” a deep voice murmured.
He tensed and cursed. He couldn’t be discovered. Not like this…not after he had already turned into the form he took every night fro
m midnight till dawn. But the man was too close for Warrick to disappear, unseen, into the shadows.
“But I already know that you don’t die easily.”
Finally recognizing the voice, Warrick whirled around, claws drawn—teeth bared as he uttered a warning growl.
“And neither do I,” Sebastian Culver reminded him. “So you can put those away.”
Warrick had just been messing with the other guy. He felt no hostility—only gratitude. He sheathed his claws and grinned at the dark-haired man. Well, actually, Sebastian wasn’t a man—or not just a man. Either. “I’m glad to see you again.”
“I can’t say the same,” the vampire replied, his voice and pale blue eyes cool. “I thought you would have left Zantrax by now.”
“I have unfinished business here,” Warrick said, tensing at the other man’s unfriendly tone. Why was the guy hostile toward him now? Had Reagan gotten to him somehow?
“She,” Sebastian said as he gestured toward the bedroom window four floors up, “better not be your unfinished business.”
Warrick had been in Zantrax long enough to hear the underground gossip. Sebastian Culver was quite the playboy. Had he been involved with Kate? Or did he want to be? Warrick’s guts knotted, jealousy twisting them. “Why?”
“Because if she is,” Sebastian replied, “it’ll make me regret saving your sorry life.”
“I appreciate your help that night.” Warrick had wanted to thank the man for a while for pulling him into the underground passage to the club when Detective Wever had briefly left the alley after shooting him. Sebastian hadn’t brought him into the club but to a secret room between it and the passageway—and to a special surgeon. “But you can’t actually save a man who can’t die.”
“You can die,” Sebastian said. “Same as I can die.”
“But I wouldn’t have died that night.” The surgeon, Dr. Ben Davison, had eased his pain, though.
“But your secret would have been discovered,” the vampire pointed out. “And to men like us, that’s worse than death.”
“And will lead to death.” Someone’s death…
He glanced up to that dimly lit window, too. She hadn’t turned on any lights in her bedroom, so she must have left the door open to the living room. What was she doing in there? Maybe someone other than Sebastian had been ringing her bell. Who?
“She’s a smart woman,” Sebastian said. “She’ll figure it out.”
“Your secret or mine?”
Sebastian gestured at him—in his changed form. “Your secret is more obvious. You cut it close.”
“Cut what close?” he asked, feigning innocence.
“I saw you jump out the window,” the other man informed him. “You were with her.”
“Jealous?” he couldn’t resist goading.
Sebastian uttered a sigh of such weariness that it revealed he was much older than his physical appearance would lead one to believe. “I’m concerned.”
“For her or me?”
“I don’t know you.”
Yet the man had been compelled to help a stranger—a strange creature, no less. Fortunately one legend—the one about vampires and werewolves constantly being at war—was myth.
“How well do you know her?” Warrick asked, that insidious jealousy winding through him again. He hadn’t been a jealous man until the people he’d loved the most had betrayed him. But he’d been a fool then. Their betrayal had made him much wiser.
“Kate is a friend,” Sebastian replied. “A good friend.”
“Does she know your secret?” Warrick asked. “Does she share your secret?” He didn’t think so; he had felt no fangs when he’d kissed her—only softness and warmth.
“She’s human,” Sebastian said. “And unaware of the Secret Vampire Society.”
“For now,” Warrick said, worry joining his jealousy. “But if she’s as smart as you think, she will figure it out.”
“You’re not one of the society,” Sebastian said, his light blue eyes narrowed as he studied Warrick. He must have noticed his concern because he added, “But you know its rules.”
“Our pack shares many of those same rules.”
“If a human learns of the secret society, she becomes a threat that must be destroyed,” the vampire said.
Warrick sighed with regret. “That’s one of the rules we share.” A rule that was necessary to protect the pack.
“The society has an amendment to that rule,” Sebastian admitted. “If a human learns the secret, he or she can avoid death if they become a member of the society.”
“A human can only become a member of the pack by mating with one of the wolves…” He swallowed hard, choking down bad memories and a pain he had once thought he would never survive. It had been much worse than the bullets Detective Kate Wever had fired into his shoulder and his heart. “For life.” There was more to it than that, like with vampires—biting was involved. But it was more a brand than a feast.
“The society’s rule is supposed to be the same,” Sebastian said, “but too many exceptions have been made to it for it to be stringently enforced.”
“That might be the rule that the pack enforces most stringently,” Warrick said. That was why he had lost so much. The love of his life, his family, his pride, his trust…
And now, dallying as he had with Kate Wever, he must have lost his damn sanity, too. He hadn’t really wanted vengeance against her; he had only been telling himself that so he’d had a reason to stick around. He’d also told himself that Reagan might not have left. But he wouldn’t have known because after she’d shot him, all Warrick had been able to see was Kate.
She was beautiful, but there was something else about her—a strength and an integrity—that attracted him.
But why would Reagan have stayed? If he was as smart as Warrick had always believed he was, he wouldn’t have stopped running yet. He was probably far, far away by now.
“You don’t have to worry about Kate,” Warrick assured the vampire. “I will be leaving Zantrax.” There was no reason for him to stay now. But he caught himself sneaking another glance up at her window.
“Going home?”
He shook his head. Just as he had no family, no mate, no honor—he had no home, either. “I still have unfinished business. I just don’t think it’s here any longer.”
Despite his usually exceptional tracking abilities, he had lost the scent that night. Reagan would have known to put distance—a hell of a lot of distance—between them. And Kate shooting Warrick had given him time to do just that. But his anger with her had cooled. If only his desire could…
Her scent filled him. She didn’t smell of flowers or some other cloying odor. She smelled like she tasted: sweet—sugar and vanilla and some spice. How could such a strong, fearless woman be so sweet?
Sebastian sighed, as if giving up a battle he had waged with himself. “You might be wrong about that.”
Confusion wrinkled the hair on Warrick’s brow. “I thought you warned me off her.”
“I did,” Sebastian said. “I’m giving you another warning now. The reason you came to Zantrax may not have left yet, either.”
“You’re saying…” His heart slammed into his ribs. “He’s still here?”
“The guy you tried tearing apart in the alley?” Sebastian nodded.
“How do you know?”
The dark-haired man grinned. “In addition to managing Club Underground, I fill in at the bar some nights. A bartender hears things…”
“Your surgeon friend treated him, too?” Warrick guessed. How else would he have known what Warrick had done to him? It had been just the two of them—and Kate—in that alley. Sebastian hadn’t come out of the passageway until Kate had left. She’d been getting him help; that was why she had rushed from the alley. But her paramedics wouldn’t have been able to help him—not when he had changed moments after she’d left him.
Sebastian shook his head, probably trying to protect his surgeon friend from Warrick’s wr
ath, because he wouldn’t meet his gaze. For Kate had let the murderer go and then the special surgeon had treated him…
Of course these people had no idea what Reagan had done—what kind of monster he was. Warrick must have injured the son of a bitch, though. Satisfaction filled him. But like Warrick, Reagan wouldn’t die easily, either. So he would have to try harder.
“Why do you hate him so much?” Sebastian asked.
“Because he took everything away from me that I ever cared about…” Until then Warrick hadn’t hated Reagan; he had actually been foolish enough to care about him, to love and respect him. But he had been an even bigger fool to trust him. It didn’t matter that they were brothers—at least, it didn’t matter to Reagan.
“Then I was right to warn you,” Sebastian said.
“Warn me?” Warrick considered it more good news than bad. He hadn’t lost Reagan’s trail, like he’d worried he had.
“Yes,” the vampire replied with a nod. “Sounds like this man you’re trying to find poses quite a threat.”
Warrick chuckled. “Hell, no. He can’t hurt me anymore.”
“But he could hurt someone you care about again.”
“There’s no one left.” And he had nowhere to go—because Warrick couldn’t go home again until he’d gotten justice for his father’s murder. The son of a bitch had really taken everyone and everything from him.
Sebastian Culver glanced up at Kate Wever’s window now. “No one left?”
Warrick chuckled again but this one was hollow. “The woman shot me. Why would I care about her?”
“I was wondering that myself,” the vampire said. “What the hell were you doing in her place tonight?”
“She shot me,” he repeated. “Her interference allowed him to get away that night.” But not again. Reagan would not get away again. Maybe that was why the murderer hadn’t left Zantrax, either. Maybe even Reagan knew that it was time to end this.
“So you were going to hurt her?” Sebastian asked, anger flashing in his eyes, as he stepped closer to Warrick.
They might not be able to kill each other. But if they tangled, they could do a lot of damage. Inflict a lot of physical pain…
Warrick uttered a weary sigh and quipped, “I’m all about revenge.”
