Passion's Prey

pay total attention to her and what she was giving them.

This gave her power. It made the Goddess exactly who she was. She commanded the attention of every male and female in this room; their eyes could not focus on anything or anyone but her. It was like a drug, and tonight Caprise was flying higher than a kite.

As she grasped the pole and pulled herself up, flipping effortlessly until she was upside down, she wondered fleetingly about the first man to throw money on the stage. It was too dark for her to see his face, but she knew he was there. She’d heard his panting as he’d made his way as close to the stage as he could get before tossing the bills.

Where did he work? What did he do? Was he married? Did he have children? A boy and a girl maybe? Did he fuck his wife while thoughts of her ran rampant through his mind?

That question stuck and Caprise slipped from the pole, moving her hips to the rhythm, easing her body down so that her legs were spread wide, her palms touching the floor. She leaned forward then, using her fingers to simulate a crawling motion as she stretched out on the stage. Rolling over to her back had the crowd roaring again. The music did things to her, rubbed along her like the fingers of a lover. A lover she didn’t have.

With the feeling of appreciation and a gentle tug of lust pushing her forward she stood, danced around the pole for a couple more notes, then stripped away her boy shorts, letting the strangers in the dark see what she’d been blessed with. Inside she laughed: They really couldn’t see her at all.

When her breasts were all but bared she could hear the crowd getting more excited. The sound of money moving through fingers grew louder. The scent of lust, need, sex, tinged her nose. Damn the senses of a shifter. In one minute she hated them. In the next they were second nature.

They loved her, the crowd out there. Even though not one of them knew her name, the day she was born, her favorite color, her most detested food. They loved her. The Goddess and the myth she created for them.

The song came to an end too soon, her body still humming with energy, with a need still unfulfilled. She picked up her cash, although she didn’t need it. On her way back to Havenway she’d have Zach stop her at the local House of Ruth to make her nightly contribution.

Stepping off the stage put her into a different atmosphere. The temperature changed, and she shivered. Where was Norm with her robe? Norm was the stagehand, a young boy with glasses as thick as a beer bottle, eyes so small she almost didn’t know they were there. His body looked like he suffered from malnutrition, his face the victim of a total acne attack. But his voice was soft and always layered over the Goddess like warm rain after her performance.

Tonight, he wasn’t there.

She was just lifting her arms to wrap them around herself and preparing to walk down the hallway to the dressing room when she was grabbed.

Warning alarms rang with persistence throughout her body. Every nerve standing on end as if she’d touched a live electrical wire.

“Don’t say a word.” His voice was deeper than she’d ever heard it before, deadlier. When she looked up at him his cat’s eyes pinned her for two seconds, totally stealing her breath and any smart retort she otherwise may have come up with.

“Not one fuckin’ word!”

He cut his eyes from her after that order, dragging her behind him down the hall until she almost tripped and fell.

This, Caprise thought with exasperation, was not going to end well.

Chapter 3

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Lips of a medium thickness spread into a smile, a leering and maniacal one. Cool blue eyes stared back at him in a way that said it knew who it was speaking to and didn’t give a damn. Sabar felt a tiny bit of pride at the shifter, but an even bigger part of him was pissed the fuck off that these creatures thought it was okay to roll up on him, on his turf, whenever they got the damn urge.

“Payback,” he said simply. “A concept I’m sure you’re familiar with, jaguar.”

Sabar moved forward in his chair, letting his arms rest on his desk. His body still hurt, damn that bastard Faction Leader. Shifters had the ability to heal thirty times faster than humans, but there were still some injuries that could be lethal. Especially to a shifter who was being treated by a human medical researcher instead of a doctor trained to deal with the shifter anatomy. But he was alive; that was a good thing.

“Spit it out, I don’t have all day.”

His guest’s response was to laugh, his upper and lower incisors clearly visible. He was a killer. Sabar could see it in his eyes. And he was on a mission. Game recognized game, he thought with an inner chuckle.

“When I get what I came for I’ll be gone.”

“And what did you come for?”

“It’s who.”

Sabar figured as much. “Then who?”

“She’s here. I followed her scent. Her name is Caprise.” He passed Sabar a picture.

Sabar took it, rubbing his fingers over the face of the female. She was a looker. Beside him, Darel stood. His second-in-command had healed from his own wounds, probably because his weren’t as extensive as Sabar’s. Or at least that’s what Sabar chose to believe.

“She works at the club,” Darel said.

“Get me inside and I’ll do what I need to do then get out of your hair.”

“Oh, yeah, you need to hurry up and get out of my hair,” Sabar said. “What’s she to you?”

His hands came up from his lap, fingers clenching together as he bent them back, cracked his human knuckles. “My business.”

“My fucking town!” Sabar yelled. “Now, you tell me what your plan is or we kill you right here, right now. Your choice.”

He sat back in his chair, rubbed a hand over thick waves of hair, cut short on the sides, left to curl on the top. “She is my companheiro,” he said simply.

“And who exactly are you?” Darel asked. “You’re not from around here—I’d know you if you were. Where are you from?”

“You people have many questions. My name is Rolando. I am from India. That is all you need to know.”

* * *

Athena’s was Darel’s territory. It was where he could be the boss without any interference. He’d thought, as he lay on that fucking table across from Sabar, bleeding like a stuck pig, that he’d never stand here in the glass- encased tower room that overlooked the stage and the entire first floor of the club again.

Yet here he was. In his rightful place doing what he was quickly coming to love.

Lifting a glass of vodka to his lips, he took a slow sip. He looked down into tonight’s crowd, feeling the energy in the room. He scented the lust and the greed and the slovenly nature of the humans who walked through the door paying their twenty-dollar cover charge to get in. Inside the pockets of the men were wads and wads of cash that they’d happily dump into the hands of each scantily clad female who graced that stage. Yandy, the female who had been in charge of the ladies when Darel took over, would collect 50 percent of whatever the strippers walked off stage with. Those were his terms, and they were non-negotiable. The fact that the majority of the dancers were also fucking his shifters gave them incentive not to balk about the money they were losing. The sex was a welcome substitute. Stupid humans.

Tonight, Darel wasn’t alone in the tower. It was normal to have Thunder and Black with him, his two newest backup shifters. They were both mean-ass, fresh-from-the-jungle jaguars with a penchant for Italian females and cocaine. The combination could prove dangerous sometimes, but always entertaining for Darel, who after his last brush with sex had taken to voyeurism. That doped-up chick Sabar had told him to watch had gone buck wild, trying to kill Darel as if he’d been the one to give her Sabar’s savior drug—which coincidentally was now making them a shitload of money. So no, Darel had decided to keep his dick in his pants or in his own palms for the