One Bite with a Stranger

by Christine Warren

  Beep. “We checked with the bartender, since no one has heard from you, and he said you left with a man named Dmitri, who he guaranteed was not a psycho axe maniac. He’d better be right, and you’d better call as soon as you wake up.”

  Reggie rolled her eyes at the machine and hit the delete button. She knew her friends only wanted to make sure she was okay, but their attitude rankled, especially after they had gotten her into the situation to begin with. If not for their Fix plan, Reggie would never have gone to that club, let alone have left with a total stranger. Godlike sex appeal or no.

  She glanced over at the clock and did some quick calculations. Saturday at eleven meant Missy would be at the park with her niece and nephew and would check her cell for messages in precisely half an hour, just before she took the kids out for lunch. Telling herself “prudent” sounded better than “cowardly,” Reggie dismissed the idea of calling Ava and dialed Missy’s cell. When the message ended and the voice mail program beeped at her, Reggie spoke.

  “Hi, it’s me. I got a bunch of messages from Ava on my machine. I just wanted to let everyone know I’m fine. I had a great time last night, but I’ve got a ton of chores to catch up on today, so I might not talk to y’all until Monday. Give Nicky and Beth hugs for me. Bye.”

  After she hung up the phone, she pushed Ava from her mind and focused on the really important things. Like food.

  An hour later, fortified with an omelet and coffee, and decently dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a knit top, Reggie made good on her lie and got down to cleaning her apartment. Not being a total slob or an unmarried man, she found it went quickly.

  When the phone rang an hour later, she almost missed it over the dull roar of the vacuum cleaner. As it was, she barely got to the receiver before the machine picked up.

  “Hello?” She knew she sounded breathless, but that’s what happened when someone called on cleaning day. They’d have to deal.

  “Reggie?”

  Okay, what higher power have I pissed off this week? Reggie wondered while she sank to the arm of the chair beside her and took a deep breath. “Hello, Greg.”

  “I was hoping I’d catch you at home. How’ve you been?”

  You mean, since I caught you debriefing your administrative assistant on your lunch hour? Or can you not debrief someone who’s wearing a thong?

  “Just fine, thanks.”

  “That’s fabulous news. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately, you know.”

  Reggie pulled the phone away from her ear for a second and stared at it incredulously. Was he honestly using his AM radio voice on her? The one he generally reserved for kissing the asses of his biggest clients, and for charming young secretaries out of their panties?

  What gives?

  “Listen,” she heard him schmooze as she returned the receiver to her ear. “I know you probably aren’t all that thrilled with me these days—”

  Gee, do you think, Einstein? “Don’t be silly.”

  “But I’d really like to see you. I feel terrible about the way we left things. Really terrible.” His voice dripped with counterfeit sincerity. “Do you think there’s any chance you might consider meeting me for a drink somewhere?”

  Whoa. That brought her up short. Gutless Greg the Wunderjerk wanted to see her again? For what? Did he really think she wanted to hear his lame explanations all over again? Did he think it would make the slightest bit of difference if he finally apologized? If he begged for forgiveness? If he got down on his hands and knees and groveled before her feet like the immoral dog he was?

  Okay, so maybe that last bit would help. She sure enjoyed the imagery. “When did you have in mind?”

  “Tonight?”

  Reggie scowled. What? Just because she didn’t have other plans on a Saturday night was no reason for him to assume her life was as pathetic as it was.

  As it had been.

  Greg spoke into the silence of her hesitation. “Unless you already have plans.”

  “Well, I do have something planned,” she lied, her tone purposely cool and bored, “but I might be able to spare you twenty minutes or so if you could make it early enough. Say, seven-thirty? Let me check my calendar.”

  She made a big production of flipping through the calendar she kept beside the phone, hoping the sound of the pages turning would carry over the phone lines. She scrolled her finger down the list of errands she’d recorded there and tried to sound breezy.

  “Yes, I think I could squeeze you in around seven-thirty, but I have to—”

  The words caught in her throat when her finger reached the bottom of the page and slid across the unfamiliar handwriting. Written in bold strokes across the white, lined page, she read, “Captain Jack’s, eight P.M. Wear the red.”

  Dmitri. She didn’t need to recognize his handwriting to know who had written himself so matter-of-factly into her schedule. Into her life.

  “Seven-thirty is perfect,” Greg said, shaking her out of her stupor. His voice sounded excited and sleazy all at the same time. Which really should have surprised her less. “I could meet you at that place right down the street from you. Captain Morgan’s?”

  “Captain Jack’s,” she corrected, dazed.

  “Right, that one. I’ll see you there at seven-thirty.” He paused. “Thanks for agreeing to this, Reg. I appreciate you making the time to talk to me after what happened.”

  Reggie muttered something even she didn’t understand and hung up the phone with numb fingers. Her mind had already evicted Gregory and busied itself with unpacking Dmitri’s suitcases and tucking his slippers under her bed. Apparently her gut feeling in the shower had been right. She would be seeing Dmitri again, and sooner than she’d thought. Like tonight.

  Wear the red.

  Feeling uneasy, as if someone watched her from the corner, Reggie dropped the vacuum and headed for her closet. Reaching inside, she rummaged into the very back and pulled out a sealed garment bag. Her hands ripped open the dark plastic covering and smoothed over the velvet material of the dress it concealed.

  Short, tight, and unrepentantly crimson, it was a dress she hadn’t ever actually worn. She’d bought it for the holidays last year, planned to wear it to spice things up with Greg, but that was B.L.—before Lisette. Instead, she’d had it cleaned unnecessarily and sealed it away in the back of her closet like another bad memory. She’d forgotten she owned it, until Dmitri reminded her.

  Wear the red.

  He meant this dress; she didn’t own any others in red. With her auburn hair, she tended to think the color clashed, so she avoided it as a general rule. The contents of this garment bag were the exception. But how had he known about it? The bag had been sealed and still hidden where she’d last put it.

  The man reads your mind, and you wonder how he knew you owned a red dress? she asked herself, then answered with a frustrated, I was trying not to think about the mind-reading thing.

  Collapsing onto the bed beside the red dress, Reggie groaned. She used to live a nice, ordinary life. Honest. She worked at an ad firm, she hung out with her friends, she had dated a financial analyst, and she had never let anyone tie her up. But then her boyfriend turned out to be a cheating scum sucker, her friends lost their minds and turned into sex-yentas from hell, and she hooked up with a man who read her mind and persuaded her to reenact the Pornographic Perils of Pauline.

  At least the job’s still normal.

  “Yeah, I’m the one who’s losing it.” She sighed, finally admitting it out loud. She should probably resign herself to life in a padded cell.

  Nothing so drastic. Perhaps merely velvet-lined handcuffs.

  The purring voice inside her head sounded so familiar and so impossible, Reggie offered the only logical response. She screamed.

  Hush, milaya, or someone will think you are being murdered.

  His voice, impossible as it sounded, laughed at her from inside her mind, and Reggie wondered how this was meant to convince her of her sanity?

  Tho
ugh perhaps they will just think your companion from last night is visiting you again.

  “Very funny,” Reggie snapped, glaring into the thin air that Dmitri most definitely did not occupy. “Where are you, and why are you trying to turn my life into an episode of The Twilight Zone?”

  He chuckled. It felt like her brain vibrated.

  I am at home, milaya. And I am here with you. Have you missed me?

  “Not as much as my sanity.”

  You are not crazy, Regina, just a bit too focused on what you believe to be real and imaginary. I will enjoy opening your eyes to new…possibilities.

  “Will you stop that? Enough with the double entendre. Or was that a triple entendre?”

  It was a promise.

  Reggie rolled her eyes, jumped up off the bed, faced thin air—since Misha was still not anywhere near her—and growled, “That’s it, buddy. Get out of my head and stay out! We are going to lay this down in person, using noises and vocal cords and all sorts of wacky social conventions. Whatever you had planned for tonight can wait until you give me some answers. Now, go away!”

  He left with a chuckle, but leave he did. Reggie experienced the removal of his presence from her mind like a physical withdrawal and clenched her teeth against the instinctive urge to call him back.

  “Jerk.” She snarled the insult and, lacking a certain arrogant Russian to clobber, slammed her closet door shut. “That tears it. Men are just pigs. All men. Every single sleazy, sex-obsessed, lesbian-fantasy-perpetuating, sports-show-watching, big-breast-ogling, secretary-screwing one of them!”

  Chapter 9

  For the first time in several hundred years, Dmitri Vidâme had trouble sleeping, and he knew exactly where to lay the blame.

  He had returned to his home as usual, just before sunrise, intending to ensconce himself in his study for a few hours of work at clearing some business off his desk. He’d spent forty-five minutes shuffling papers and staring into space before admitting defeat. There was no way he could concentrate this day. Not after the night he’d just experienced.

  Regina Elaina McNeill.

  His distraction. His obsession.

  His mate.

  Who would ever have thought he would find her? Here, now, after all this time.

  In spite of the pretty stories humans liked to tell each other about his kind, Dmitri was neither the victim of a curse, nor a tortured soul. He needed no woman to return light and joy to his life, nor did he require love to keep him from turning to evil as he aged. He had not been evil in his mortal life; he would not become so now.

  Dmitri, son of Rurik, had been born in the city of Novgorod in the year 1199 to a Slavic mother and a Viking father. Though his sire’s fortune had been made in trade, Dmitri had been raised to be a warrior, cutting his teeth and sharpening his blade on the steady stream of Mongol invaders who had overrun his homeland. He had fought countless wars, earned wealth and land of his own, and won the title of prince among his people before he turned twenty-five. As far away as the eastern steppes, men spoke of him as both fierce and just, and speculated that he must have made a pact with the devil to survive hale and whole into his thirtieth year at a time when a man of forty wore the mantle of an elder.

  There had been no devil, of course, merely a love of fresh food, cleanliness, and exercise long before the surgeons general got around to recommending them. It wasn’t until a beautiful serf offered him a gift in exchange for her freedom that Dmitri truly became immortal. To this day, he considered the exchange a fair bargain.

  It had taken a decade or two for Dmitri to adjust to his new life, but never had he regretted his choice. The adaptability that had made him so feared on the battlefield had stood him in good stead while he learned that vampires were not so different from humans, really. Oh, they drank blood, to be sure, and their strength and speed were unmatched by humans, nearly rivaling that of some of the more powerful shapeshifters. Vampires could read the minds of most humans and perform small tricks very similar to hypnosis, the way he had done to keep Regina near him in the bar last night. But mind control was something else altogether, both difficult and unethical, and to be honest, he had no wish to control Regina’s mind. He took too much delight in her wit and her stubborn streak of independence. Controlling her body beneath him in bed was more than enough for Dmitri. Provided he gained the right to do so often enough to suit him.

  To own the truth, Dmitri did not require a mate. Over the long centuries since his birth, he’d never lacked for female companionship. Female bodies held no secrets for him, and he’d never felt so captivated by a woman that he could imagine her in his life for longer than a few brief encounters. Never had he wanted a woman so badly.

  But by God, he wanted this one.

  Leaning back in his worn leather desk chair, Dmitri folded his arms behind his head and gave his mind free rein to travel where it wanted, knowing exactly where it would head: to tumbled curls the color of smoldering embers, to skin as smooth and rich as vanilla cream, to the tight clasp of a body perfectly molded to accept him.

  Regina.

  Just the memory of her stirred his desire to life, want curling in the pit of his belly like a hungry serpent ready for its feeding. Before the beast had a chance to hiss, the phone rang, dragging Dmitri back to reality with a frown.

  “What?”

  “Did I wake you? I was trying to catch you before you went to sleep.”

  “Had I been asleep, I would not have answered the phone. What do you want?”

  “Well, I was going to give you some news,” Graham said, sounding amused and arch on the other end of the line. “But now I think I’d rather ask how a man who ditched his friend at a club in favor of leaving with a heavily stacked redhead with a mouth that could raise the dead could possibly sound so cranky on the morning after. What happened? Did she turn out to be a lesbian?”

  Dmitri sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What is your news, Graham?”

  “I asked first.”

  “And I ignored you,” Dmitri growled, “which a man who did not lick his own testicles for recreation would have taken as a hint.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Your news, Lupine.”

  Graham heaved a theatrical sigh. “Fine. I can take a hint. You don’t want to talk about Miss Racktastic 2000. Does that mean you’ll pass me her number?”

  The growl lowered slightly in volume and raised considerably in menace.

  “Oo-kay. I’ll mark that as a ‘no.’ But don’t think I’m going to let this slide,” the shifter warned. “This is the first woman I’ve ever seen you go possessive over, and I’ve known you since the day my father told Mom she smelled nice in her new mini skirt.”

  Dmitri gritted his teeth. “I’m not getting any younger, Winter.”

  “But you’re not getting any older either, Mr. Grumpy Fangs.” Graham’s voice grew briefly muffled, as if he were clamping the phone between his shoulder and his ear to free up his hands. “All right. Here it is. After you and…well, after you left the club last night, I ran into one last person I thought it might be interesting to interview.”

  Relieved at the change of subject, Dmitri picked up his pen and scooted closer to the desk. “Who?”

  “Some kid named Charles. He didn’t give me his last name, and I didn’t want to spook him by asking.”

  “Did he seem skittish?”

  “You might say that. Personally, I’d say ‘paranoid.’ But then, I don’t have your experience in diplomacy.”

  Dmitri raised an eyebrow. The Lupine might be Alpha of his pack, but he was only in his thirties. He didn’t have Dmitri’s experience in anything. “What made you think the human was paranoid?”

  “First, the fact that he wasn’t human, and he’d been not human for such a short time, the skin behind his ears was still dripping.”

  “Vampire?”

  “Yup.”

  Dmitri frowned. He couldn’t be expected to know every vampire in Manhatta
n (there were hundreds of them, after all), but something about this story made the back of his neck itch. “Did you ask who had made him?”

  “Sure. And after I explained what being made meant in your circles, he told me he didn’t know. He said he’d just woken up on Monday feeling really, really thirsty.”

  Swearing, Dmitri turned to his computer and flipped on the monitor. Maybe the rumors about rogue vampires operating in Manhattan had some substance behind them after all. “I want you to e-mail everything you found out from him so that I have it in writing. Did you get his address? Some other way for us to get in touch with him again?”

  “Just an e-mail address,” Graham answered. “For some reason I seemed to make the kid nervous. It was like he didn’t want me to know where he lived.”

  Dmitri just grunted.

  “Of course, since I didn’t have a pen and paper, the kid was kind enough to use the napkin he’d been holding to write the address down for me.” Now the Lupine sounded smug. “Did I mention he was just barely turned? In fact, he’s so new, he still smells. Maybe enough to track him.”

  Finally, some good news. Lupines had an amazing sense of smell, so good that they ranked as the best trackers in the world, better than anything else on two legs. Or even on four. While most vampires didn’t produce an odor that the shifters could track, it took a while for the scent of the mortal human to fade, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. In the case of the mysterious “Charles,” his recent turning might work to their advantage.

  “I’ll try to trace the e-mail address,” Dmitri said, scribbling down the information as Graham recited it. “Doing that’s always a tricky bet, though. I might have to ask you to tail him anyway.”

  “How long before you know? He smelled last night, and his scent is still on the napkin, but there’s no telling how fast it will fade. If we wait too long, tracking him won’t be an option.”

  “Give me the day.”

  “Won’t you be sleeping?”

  “I can get started and leave anything I find for Justin to follow up on. He does things to my computer that make it embarrassing for me to even speak the word ‘Internet.’”