Must Love Vampires (3 page)

And what the heck was her body doing getting all turned on by a vampire, anyway? Didn’t it know that was a sure-fire way to become a human Slurpee? To be turned into a slobbering, brain-dead minion of the damned?

She didn’t want to become a bug-eating Renfro or a mindless Mina. . . . Not even if, as a Mina, she would get to experience life-altering orgasms at the hands—and other body parts—of this tall, dark, handsome, sexy, powerful, mesmerizing . . .

Oh, God, it was happening already! He was hypnotizing her into finding him attractive. Into wondering what it would feel like to have him nibble at her neck (literally) while he banged her into oblivion.

Get ahold of yourself, Charlotte!
she ordered silently. And as usual, the use of her given name caught her attention and snapped her back to reality.

Then Mr. Tall, Dark, and Most Likely Fanged had to go and confuse her all over again.

“Chloe,” he murmured in a low, mesmerizing voice.

Had she mentioned how freaking mesmerizing he was?

She blinked, caught off-guard at having him address her by her sister’s name . . . even though it meant her ruse was working.

“Chloe, look at me.”

She was looking at him—who could stop?—but his demand had her looking more closely, and directly into his eyes.

They were beautiful eyes . . . stormy gray around dark black pupils. She could see her reflection there, even in the lousy lighting of the shadowy backstage area, and so much more. They were like the ocean after a storm . . . like storm clouds drifting overhead . . . like swirls of smoke floating heavenward.

She was concentrating so fully on holding his gaze that her own vision began to blur. She didn’t notice his hand coming up until it was directly in front of her face.

Holding up two fingers, he placed them lightly over each of her heavily made-up eyelids. Glitter, apparently, was a lousy vampire repellant.

Drawing them slowly down . . . which wasn’t difficult, since she felt half-asleep already . . . he whispered, “Sleep.”

And she did.

Chuck awoke several seconds before she opened her eyes. It was as though she were waking from a long night’s sleep . . . and yet she couldn’t remember going to bed. She couldn’t even remember going home.

The last thing she did remember was surviving her ill-planned spin in her sister’s shoes—if the Godawful things could even be termed something so innocuous—and then tiptoeing her way offstage.

Oh! And she’d run into someone. Not another dancer. Someone tall. Imposing. She remembered being intimidated enough that her mouth had gone dry.

But who had it been? Eyes still closed, her brows drew together in confusion. Why couldn’t she remember?

Lashes fluttering, she pushed those questions aside for the time being and fought past the haze of grogginess that seemed to be fogging her brain to finally open her eyes.

Okay, she definitely hadn’t made it home last night. Unless home had miraculously become the most spacious, modern,
gorgeous
apartment on the face of the planet.

Even just looking up at the high ceiling and what she could see in her peripheral vision let her know that wherever it was, it was far beyond her pay grade at the
Sin City Tattler
. A cross between
House Beautiful—Vegas Style
and
Interior Design for the Modern Bachelor
, every surface was clean and crisp and sparkling, in chrome and glass and varying shades of ocean blues.

Chuck started to sit up . . . or tried to . . . but couldn’t seem to move. Oh, God, had she broken her neck, after all? Had she gotten all the way through the show only to trip and fall and paralyze herself on the way back to the dressing room? Was that why she couldn’t remember much of anything after stepping offstage?

Heart pounding in her chest, she told herself not to panic. First, she should check her extremities. If she could wiggle her fingers and toes, then she probably wasn’t paralyzed. Maybe she was just super-sore from contorting herself into angles that no human being without pretzel DNA should ever even attempt.

Slanting a glance down the line of her body, she noticed that she was, indeed, still in Chloe’s “Flames of Hell” costume, complete with fishnet stockings and sprigs of feathers showing here and there. She told her brain to tell her hands to wiggle her fingers . . . and exhaled a relieved breath when they did just that. Her feet were still in their black, rhinestone-studded torture devices, but when she told her brain to tell her ankles to move them up and down, they did.

Whoo-hoo!
She wasn’t a doctor, but she was pretty sure being able to move her hands and feet meant she wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down. Maybe just from the neck up, since her head seemed to be what she was having trouble with.

Getting really adventurous, she raised her arms to the top of her head and found her skull still encased in the nine-thousand-pound headdress she’d worn onstage. A second relieved sigh filled the silence. She hadn’t tripped and half-killed herself, she was just lying flat on her back, still pinned and stapled into her sister’s Chicken Little helmet. And because it weighed a ton and a half, it was keeping her from sitting up.

Working the dozen or so pins free that were holding the piece of costuming in place, she lifted it carefully away from her head and ran her fingers through the tangle of her hair. Just being free of the thing made her feel ten years younger and a hundred pounds lighter.

She sat up—finally, and much more easily than her first attempt—and took a better look at her surroundings.

Holy crap, she was in the belly of the beast. She’d been imagining this place so much the past couple of months, it was as though her intense desire to see the opulent penthouse for herself had made it materialize right in front of her.

Granted, crossing the barrier into Sebastian Raines’s private quarters at the top of the Inferno had been her chief, number one goal. The main objective of her Master Plan. But part of her Master Plan had also been to change into street clothes first and to have a clue as to how she’d gotten there.

And that was the Big Question, wasn’t it?
How the heck had she gotten here?

Okay, she’d traded places with her twin sister.

Check.

She’d gotten through the night’s performance at Lust without twisting her ankle, breaking her neck, or being found out.

Check.

And that’s where things got hazy.

Uncheck.

So had she tripped and fallen, after all, and perhaps been rescued by the mysterious casino owner himself? Chuck’s heart stuttered in her chest at the thought.

Holy alien autopsy, Batman! Was that who’d greeted her at the bottom of the stage steps?

She squinted her eyes, concentrating on the fuzzy vision filling her head, trying to zero in on the person’s facial features as they floated around the outskirts of her memory. It had definitely been a man; no woman would have been that tall, that broad, that . . . menacing? Had he been menacing, or just overwhelming?

He’d also been wearing a really nice suit . . . designer and silk would be her guess . . . which added to the unlikelihood that it had been a woman.

She also remembered silver eyes, a wide, sumptuous mouth, hair as dark as midnight....

So . . . yes, it very well could have been Sebastian Raines standing at the base of those stairs, waiting for her. The question was:
Why?

Had she screwed up onstage—either the dance steps themselves, so that he felt he needed to reprimand her, or her role of pretending to be her sister, so that he was prepared to call her out?

And why did she feel as though she’d thought all of these thoughts before? It was like that movie
Groundhog Day
, where Bill Murray had gotten stuck living the same day over and over and over. Chuck felt more like a hamster, though, running and running on its little wheel, but getting absolutely nowhere.

Regardless of Raines’s reason for meeting her as she came offstage—if he truly had been there—it wouldn’t have required a trip to his penthouse, would it? Unless she’d done something truly humiliating like swooning at his feet.

If that was the case, she was
so
going to claim dehydration, exhaustion, and overexertion. Because admitting that the stress of her very own ruse to switch places with her sister for a night had caused her to faint was just
too
freaking humiliating.

Since no one seemed to be around to answer the myriad questions swirling around in her brain, she shifted slightly on the long, midnight blue sofa where she’d been . . . passed out? sleeping? drugged into oblivion? . . . and tried to decide what to do and how to handle her current situation.

Adjacent to the sofa was a matching armchair, and she realized suddenly that she
wasn’t
alone in the giant penthouse. A beautiful, regal black cat sat there, blinking bright yellow, slitted eyes at her.

If there was one thing Chuck couldn’t resist, it was a furry, adorable little animal. Cats, dogs, birds, rats, ferrets, hamsters . . . she was just a total sucker for critters of nearly every kind.

“Hello, sweetie,” she said in a soft voice, immediately going down on her knees in front of the chair and reaching a hand out to stroke the cat’s sleek fur. “What’s your name?”

Of course, it didn’t answer, but at least she felt like she had one friend in the otherwise near-empty room.

“I don’t suppose you know what I’m doing here,” she went on, half to the cat and half to herself. “Or how I can get myself out.”

No response. Not even a low rumble, which was sort of surprising, since animals tended to love her as much as she loved them. Cats usually began to purr the minute she touched them, and just got louder as she continued to give them adoring, undivided attention.

“Well, even if I don’t know how it happened, I wanted to get into Sebastian Raines’s penthouse, and here I am. So maybe I shouldn’t look a gift-swoon in the face.”

Climbing back to her feet, she put her hands on her still-sequined hips and glanced around, wondering where to start in her search for evidence of Raines’s vampirism.

“I sure could use a change of clothes, though,” she muttered. “This outfit is starting to get a little breezy.”

High Card

The first thing Chuck did was get out of the bear trap shoes that were well on their way to cutting off her circulation and sending out an engraved invitation to gangrenous amputation. It took some major unbuckling, and then major prying that would have gone faster if she’d had a shoehorn. Or a crowbar.

Once she had them off, she began to pace along the length of the low, chrome-and-glass table in front of the plush, L-shaped sofa. Thankfully, she’d ensured that all of her toes still wiggled and possessed feeling, which made pacing easier.

So where should she start? If she were a true investigative reporter instead of one who simply wrote up the details of stories that someone else handed her—or that she pulled out of her more-than-vivid imagination—what would she do? Where would she start her search for proof that Sebastian Raines was sporting a pair of razor-sharp fangs?

Her gaze swept the room. Well, since she was here . . . She hurried over to the bookshelves and cocked her head to peruse the spines. It was an odd collection of well-worn paperbacks and older, leather-bound editions.

Interesting. The Inferno’s intrepid leader apparently appreciated the classics, as well as more modern mainstream fiction. But there was nothing incriminating here. No
Guy’s Guide to Being a Modern-Day Bloodsucker
or
Embracing Your Inner Immortality
.

The few DVDs neatly arranged near the giant plasma television were no more illuminating. They were, however,
boring
! No
Hancock
or
Die Hard
or even the
X-Men
quartet, just documentaries on everything from the two World Wars to the Wright Brothers’ invention of the very first flying machine.

The rest of the room was nothing but expensive paintings, vases (pronounced
vah-zez
, she was sure), and even a couple of small sculptures displayed on their own Grecian—possibly left over from his days in actual Ancient Greece—pedestals. One of them probably cost more than she made at the
Tattler
in a year.

But it wasn’t the pricey bric-a-brac that bothered her, it was the fact that none of it seemed like
vampire
bric-a-brac. Weren’t the undead supposed to live in crypts, sleep in coffins, and decorate with things like chains and swords and suits of armor? Not to mention spider webs and wax-covered candelabras.

Then again, Sebastian Raines was a modern-day vampire—if he truly was a vampire at all—so maybe he’d adapted. Maybe he kept all of his booty, acquired over the thousands of years of his life, somewhere else. A storage facility, maybe. Or a mausoleum at the local cemetery.

She should have checked for something like that while she was trying to dig up dirt on him, she realized belatedly, wishing she still had Chloe’s torture shoes on so she could kick herself in the butt.

But even here, in this amazing apartment where Sebastian probably hosted dozens of fancy parties and upscale soirees with all of his wealthy and influential human friends—human, most likely, but maybe a few fellow vamps, too—there had to be some sign of his bloodsucking tendencies. A pint of blood in the refrigerator . . . a box of soil from his homeland . . . a complete and total lack of mirrors.