my breasts practically spilling out of my push-up bra into his face—and still he was treating me as if I was something he’d scraped off his shoe.
I decided that Jack Rawls was beginning to piss me off just the teensiest bit.
“Its last owner being a vampire like you think I am, I suppose,” I said, my patience at an end. “How can I put this so you understand? I’m not undead, I’m a real live female.” A thought occurred to me. “You’ve seen me in the daytime,” I reminded him, clinching the ridiculous argument. “What does the fact that I didn’t burst into flames tell you, sweetie?”
“Fuck all.” If anything, the hatred in his gaze intensified. “I’ve never seen you exposed to the sunlight. Far as I can tell, no one has in a while. Yeah, you’ve shown up here a couple of times in the late afternoon, looking as sick as a dog and wrapped up in scarves and wearing dark glasses. I’ve known a vamp or two in my time who can rise before dusk if they had to and if they take the kind of precautions you do. That hasn’t stopped me from killing them.”
“Then we’d better hope you never run into Tara Reid,” I shot back, pissed by his “sick as a dog” observation, which didn’t take much effort to translate into “skanky wreck.” “News flash, Jack—when a girl’s partied a little too enthusiastically the night before, sometimes she finds jumping out of bed at the crack of dawn and singing ‘Oh, What a Wonderful Morning’ a tad beyond her. She might even reach for the Ray-Bans and be a smidge tardy getting into work. Admittedly, most hangover cures I’ve choked down could better be classified as hangover punishments, but a stake through the heart is going too far, no?”
He didn’t respond. I leaned closer to him, my arms braced on either side of his shoulders. “Okay. If I’m a vamp why haven’t I bitten you by now? For that matter, why did I defend myself with a stake?”
Just as I decided he wasn’t going to answer this time either, he spoke, his jaw clenched. “I don’t pretend to know why you creatures do any of the things you do. My best guess is that you’ll bite me when you’re good and ready, but right now you’re getting a charge out of this.”
“A charge out of what?” I demanded. “Getting nailed to my car?”
His words ground past his teeth. “Out of sitting practically on my face and leaving nothing to the imagination while you’re doing it. Out of seeing if you can make me hot for you by using your glamyr.” He exhaled tightly. “Out of knowing it’s beginning to work.”
I’d had enough. He’d used a nail gun on me. He’d shot my car, destroyed my dress and ruined my whole evening…but all of those were nothing compared to the fact that he’d somehow discovered my greatest fear and dragged it into the light. I still wanted answers from him, but what I wanted more right now was to do to him what he’d done to me.
It was obvious what his greatest fear was. It would be pure pleasure making him face it.
In one smooth movement I pulled my dress over my head and let it drop to the ground. I shook my hair out, looked at Rawls through my lashes and moistened my lips.
“Is it hot out here or is it just me, sweetie?” I purred. Arching my back and squirming my hips against him, I tipped my neck back and began to trail the fingers of my left hand down my body, giving loving attention to the curve of my breasts in my barely there bra. I let my fingers wander slowly toward the lace of my panties. “’Cause all of a sudden I just feel so—”
My throat closed and my words dried up. I pushed a sex-kitten strand of hair out of my eyes and looked across the parking lot at what had caught my attention.
I found my voice. “About running over your nail gun,” I croaked, not taking my gaze from the pool of illumination shed by the farthest parkinglot light. “That might have been a teensy bit rash of me, Jack.”
I heard the tremor in my tone, and all of a sudden I couldn’t keep up the act anymore. I looked down at him. “We’re fucked,” I said flatly. “Three vamps just flew in and landed beside the club. They’re heading our way, Rawls.”
Chapter 4
“I should have known this was a setup,” Jack muttered. “Your undead friends sent you out as bait to catch me off guard, and now the fun begins.” I saw a muscle move at the side of his jaw. “Before the four of you start killing me inch by inch, tell me something, vamp—how long have your kind been tracking me? From the start, or was my trail picked up in Pennsylvania when that son of a bitch insurance salesman got away from me?”
I adore single-mindedness in a man at the appropriate time, but I consider the appropriate time for male single-mindedness to be when he’s doing something exquisitely tantalizing and I can feel waves of shuddery ecstasy rising to a crescendo in me. Since the only thing rising in me right now was pure terror, Rawls’s inability to move on struck me as a major drawback—one that I realized would take drastic action on my part to overcome.
All this went through my mind as I got off him and turned to his car. “I don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about, sweetie,” I said tensely, not caring that I was giving him a Dita Von Teese-like view of my bottom as I bent over the front seat of his vampmobile. My fingers closed around the handcuff key I’d tossed there after securing him. “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning for doing this, but two against three is better odds than one against three. Besides, if this doesn’t convince you we’re on the same side, I don’t know what—” I turned to face him as I spoke, expecting to see him lying where I’d left him and found myself staring at the business end of the stake I’d dropped earlier.
“We’ll never be on the same side, vamp,” Rawls said with another of those cold smiles that looked like the grimace a Doberman would wear just before it lunged. “I told you, I’m not interested in playing for Team Dead. Maybe I won’t be able to fight off all your pals, but I’m taking out as many as I can, starting with you.”
He thrust the stake toward me with the speed of a striking snake, and I reacted with equal speed. My sideways leap wasn’t as fast as a vamp’s, but it took me out of the path of the pointy piece of wood aiming for me. I didn’t have the opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief, however, since a split second later it was coming toward me again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the trio of vampires walking across the parking lot, and I realized that doing the life and death tango with Rawls was using up time we didn’t have.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the sight of the stake plunging toward me and held the handcuff key in front of my face, fully expecting to feel yew wood entering me before my heart could take another beat.
“I don’t get it.”
At Rawls’s growled statement I cracked open one eyelid and peered cautiously through my lashes. He was staring grimly past the key to me, the tip of his stake frozen a hairsbreadth away from the skimpy pink satin cupping my left breast. Three thoughts occurred to me almost simultaneously. One: if I’d been a D cup instead of a nicely proportioned C, there wouldn’t have been even a hairsbreadth of space between me and my confiscated stake. Two: the vamps—they were all female, I could see now—were only about thirty feet away from us. And three: Jack Rawls might be a total prick, but he had the sexiest eyes I’d ever seen.
Pure green, pure bedroom and fringed with thick, spiky lashes a covergirl would kill for. Not that any of that was relevant right at this moment.
“You don’t have
