“What?”
“I’m fairly smart. It’s not easy to pull the wool over my eyes. I spend an awful lot of time outwitting people who make the mistake of thinking they’re smarter than the average cop. It’s actually usually easy. Do you have any idea how stupid most criminals are?”
“I can guess.”
“The idea of a criminal mastermind is mostly the invention of fiction.”
“All right.”
“So anyway, I consider myself reasonably smart, street-savvy and not easy to delude. Yet apparently I’ve been living a delusion all my life.”
“Mmm.”
That was totally noncommittal, she noticed. It didn’t assuage her any. “And I don’t even have the excuse of not having been told all my life that there was a world invisible to most of us.” She paused gloomily. “Of course, before I became a cop there were other worlds that were invisible to me.” The night streets, the gangs, the drug runners, the prostitutes...a whole lot that hadn’t crossed her path in the neat little middle-class neighborhood her grandmother had raised her in.
Becoming a cop had been like a bath of cold water, pulling blinders from her eyes as she faced the real sleaziness of the world. She’d dealt with that. Surely she could deal with this.
After she remained silent for a while, he spoke quietly. “Has it occurred to you that that world you just discovered was careful not to reveal itself to you?”
“I suppose.”
They pulled into an alley not far from the warehouse district, the kind of place that put her on immediate alert for trouble. Her hand went immediately to the butt of her gun.
“I’m only here for a short time,” Damien said. “I had to take what I could find.”
“If you keep reading my mind, we’re not going to get along well.”
“I’m reading your scents. I can’t read your mind.”
“Neither can I,” she muttered, half wondering what her little rant had been about exactly, and mostly paying attention to all the shadows that could hide threats.
But nothing stirred. He turned a corner off the alley into a small parking area and switched off the car. “We can still go to Jude’s,” he said.
For the first time it struck her that he might be as nervous about her as she was about him. The big, tough vampire who had made a bold pass at her wanted to take her to Jude.
The thought actually made her smile. She’d thought she knew who had the upper hand. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
“No,” she said, turning that smile his way. “Let’s get this settled.”
That smile wasn’t comforting. Nor were the words
He already had the sense that Caro Hamilton could be a formidable adversary. Not only had she been toughened by being a cop, but she was a nascent mage who might at any moment discover the powers she’d been keeping buried in favor of the popular concept of reality. Now that he and that formless energy that pursued her had shattered her concept, something else was going to emerge.
From long experience, he knew he didn’t want to get into it with another mage unless he absolutely had to. And the most dangerous mage of all was one whose powers were uncontrolled and unfamiliar.
He grimaced as he led the way to the steel loading doors that provided his protection from the nosy. The building in which he had settled had been abandoned nearly a decade ago, left to rats and insects and rot.
Nothing like his comfortable place on the outskirts of Koln, even though he’d wasted a little time and money to fix it up. Not much, though, since most of the hours he spent here were in the sleep of death. He
It wasn’t much, and he watched her look around, taking in the mattress on the floor with a quilt covering it, a rickety table with two chairs, and a couple of oil lamps.
“It’s cold,” she remarked, keeping her coat on.
“I don’t feel the temperature.”
She eyed him. “Not at all?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable for you here. Let’s go somewhere else.” How careless of him to have even suggested they come here. He should have remembered she needed warmth. In fact, he rarely overlooked such things, and the oversight was so uncharacteristic that he knew a moment of uneasiness.
He had stayed here too long simply because he was enjoying the company of another of his own kind for the first time in too many centuries. But in staying, he had been reminded that he could no longer run on automatic.
“This is sad,” she said.
“What is?”
“That you live like this.”
“Trust me, I don’t live like this all the time. I have a home I’m sure you would find quite comfortable. This,” he said with a wave of his hand, “was intended to be only for a few weeks. I simply lingered longer.”
She faced him, standing with her feet apart, firmly planted as if ready for anything, and her question was almost a challenge. “Why?”
Then he smelled it, ambrosia in the air. Her sexual scents overpowered everything else, at least for him. He could no longer smell the dankness of the room, or the lingering odor of burned oil from the lamps. He listened to the throb of her heart, its rhythm of need unmistakable. He could hear the soft swoosh of the blood slipping through her veins, but more important, he smelled the desire in her.
The scent was growing. When she had parted her legs to challenge him, she had freed it, signaling him as surely as if she had spoken.
He hesitated only briefly, aware of what had happened the last time he had approached her. Now he knew what she wanted to settle. She hoped by giving in to the hunger they both felt, she could dispel it.
And maybe she could. There was only one way to find out.
He walked toward her, taking care not to approach faster than she could see. She took one step back until she leaned against the brick wall. Her gaze, though, remained steady, and she evinced no desire to move away.
He preferred better ambience for this, more grace and foreplay, more time to enjoy and savor. That could not happen in this cold, nearly empty room, yet she was choosing here and now.
So she wanted it to be as bald and unadorned as it could get.
He smiled faintly, knowing she was going to get more than she anticipated was possible under these circumstances. With the experience of centuries behind him, he could enter any woman’s mood, play any woman’s game and delight her in whatever way she demanded.
She was trying, though, to make it as difficult for him as possible. Ah, but for him nothing was too difficult.
When he stood just inches from her, she tilted her head a little to look into his eyes. He read defiance and determination in her face and posture, along with passion.
She wanted a cure. That was one thing he wasn’t going to give her.
“No blood,” she said throatily.
“No,” he agreed. Her game, her limits. To a point.
Then, utterly without warning, he slipped his palm between her legs, drawing it upward until he nearly lifted her from the floor. It was a bold, demanding, controlling gesture, and he half expected her to resist. Instead, all that happened was that a delightful groan escaped her and her eyelids fluttered. Her thighs clamped around his hand, but his strength was such that he could still move his fingers and palm, pressing, stroking, titillating. He used the seam of her jeans to taunt her more.
Even through her jeans, he could feel her damp heat, a pleasure of the greatest kind for him now that the
