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“Are you sure you don’t want me to open it?” he asked, turning the key in the lock.
The detective tightened her grasp on his hand. “No, it’s not necessary.” She was clever and perceptive. “As you said earlier, it’s late. You should take Paige home.”
It was too late for that. The sun was just rising as he’d slipped inside the club moments earlier. “I can’t,” he said. “Can you see her home? Make sure she gets there safely?”
“But you said you were tired,” Kate reminded him. “Aren’t you going home? So that you can stay with her?”
“Just because I’m going to bed doesn’t mean I’m going home,” he teased with a wink at the obviously disapproving detective. “Besides which, she’ll be safer with you. You carry a gun.”
“I don’t need anyone to see me home,” Paige said, her chin lifted with pride and independence.
He suppressed a grimace over his pang of guilt and regret. Ben was right—he shouldn’t have involved her at all. She should have been the one coming to him for help—not the other way around—but he’d never been there for her like she deserved. She deserved so much better than to have him in her life…
“You don’t have a car, remember?” he called after her.
“Neither do you,” Kate reminded him with a faint smile.
He forced his cocky grin and stepped closer to the sexy detective. “But I never have a problem getting a ride.”
“You’re wasting your time flirting with me, Sebastian,” she warned him.
He only flirted with her because he knew she’d never take him up on his many offers. It wouldn’t take a woman like her long to learn everything.
“I’m too much for you to handle, Detective,” he teased.
She laughed but didn’t deny it. “I already have more than I can handle, Sebastian.” She turned to Paige, who’d stepped out of the office clutching her purse. Instead of joining them where they stood at the door, she headed off down the hall. “But the most important thing is to find who’s stalking your sister.”
“No,” he said.
She glanced at him in surprise.
“The most important thing is to keep her safe.”
Kate opened her mouth, as if she had questions for him. But then she only nodded and headed after her friend.
Sebastian leaned back against the steel door and exhaled a ragged sigh of relief. Then the metal creaked and the door opened. He shifted his weight forward and turned, so that he wouldn’t fall into the room.
God, he hated that room—hated the smell of death that clung to it. Ben had saved many people, himself included, but he’d lost many, too. Like the man who lay atop the table, the stake protruding from his chest.
This was Sebastian’s fault, too. He’d called in a favor to have Owen protect Paige—and the man had died carrying it out. Guilt and self-condemnation gripped him, tightening the muscles in his stomach.
Condemnation filled Ingrid’s dark eyes, for a moment crowding out the madness, as she met his gaze. “You’ve done it again, Sebastian.”
“I stopped them from entering,” he said, and he stopped himself now, holding back from crossing that threshold into the room of death. Blood stained the floor beneath Ben’s makeshift operating table. The surgeon was gone, but he’d been there, trying to save another patient.
“Those mortals wouldn’t have even been here if not for you,” Ingrid persisted.
“No,” he agreed. “None of them would have, including Ben.”
“Who is she—this new mistress of the Underground?” Ingrid asked, her usually husky voice even thicker with disdain.
“Someone important to me,” he said. “I don’t want her getting hurt. If you know who’s threatening her…” Or if she were the one threatening her…
Ingrid’s hatred of humans was well known. “And if I did…?”
“You’d be wise to let them know that I’m going to stop them,” Sebastian said.
“Stop them?” Her dark eyes widened with curiosity and amusement. “How?”
He glanced over her shoulder, to the body with the stake through the heart. “I will do whatever necessary to protect her.”
“So she is important to you,” Ingrid said. “She’s not your sister, as she thinks. Who is she really?”
“She’s my daughter.”
Frustration nagged at Paige as she jammed the key into the lock and opened the door…to her condo. She shuddered at the thought of opening that other door and having rats run out.
Maybe it was better that she didn’t learn whatever made her feel unwelcome—and out of place—at Club Underground. Catching sight of her reflection in the mirror above the hall table, she winced at the dark circles beneath her eyes and the lines fanning them and her mouth. She looked like her mother, not just because of her blond hair and fair skin, but because she looked older than she actually was—courtesy of all the stress and pain she’d had in her life. “Forty’s the new thirty, my ass.”
Her age was probably why she felt so out of place at Club Underground. Everyone else, patrons and staff, including Sebastian, seemed so much younger and more beautiful. Kate was wrong; no one was stalking Paige. No one would want to….
Then she tilted her head, listening…to the sound of running water. The walls were thick in the old warehouse that had been converted to condos; the noise could not be coming from an adjoining unit. It had to be coming from her bathroom. Her pulse raced with fear. She should have had Kate walk her to the door, as the detective had wanted. But Paige had insisted that no one would have gotten past the doorman in the lobby or her security system.
She glanced to the alarm panel near the door. The lights were off; someone had already disabled it. How? Only she and Sebastian knew the code, and he’d remained back at the club.
She fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. She could call Kate again; she might not have left the parking lot yet. But why would someone break in to use her bathroom?
She dropped her purse onto the hall table and reached instead for one of the bottles on the wine rack beneath it. As she had back at the club, she intended to use it as a weapon. She lifted it, like a bat, over her shoulder as she stepped inside her bedroom. When she crossed the hardwood floor to the open bathroom doorway, the water sputtered and cut off. Steam billowed from the room.
Paige tightened her grip on her weapon of choice. Her intruder would need another shower after she broke the bottle over his head.
But then the man stepped out, water sluicing over his naked skin—all that naked skin. And she dropped the bottle onto the floor. The neck spun until the cork pointed toward him.
“So today’s game is spin the bottle?” Ben asked.
“Game?” she repeated, her eyes wide as her gaze traveled up and down his body.
Ben tensed, every muscle taut with desire at her blatant interest in him. He would have figured he was too worried—and too tired—to want her again. But none of that mattered now. He would want her even if he was dead, which since he’d learned of the secret society had become an inevitable fate.
“Is this a game,” she asked, “your breaking in here and scaring me again?”
“I didn’t break in.” But had it been necessary he would have, so that he’d been able to secure the place before she’d come home.
“Sebastian’s not here,” she said. “He didn’t let you in.”
“He didn’t need to,” he explained. “He gave me a key.”
“He gave you a key?” she repeated. “To my place? And he gave you the security code, too?”
“I guessed the security code.”
Color flushed her face, making her blue eyes even brighter. “It…it’s just easier to remember,” she sputtered.
While she was embarrassed that she’d used the date of their wedding as the code, like they had at the home they’d shared, Ben was encouraged that there might be hope for them. At least he had been until he reminded himself that he had nothing to offer her but secrets and danger.
“Of course,” he agreed, “it’s easy to remember.”
“So you just let yourself in,” she remarked, then gestured toward the bathroom, “and helped yourself to my shower?”
“I needed it.” He’d needed to rid himself of the blood and the scent of death that always clung to him when he went to the Underground.
“Why didn’t you use the showers in the locker room?”
He turned away and reached for a towel. He ran the terry cloth across his skin before wrapping it around his waist. “Locker room?”
“At the hospital. You had to leave me at the club to treat a patient, right?”
He hadn’t given her much of an explanation when he’d had her lock herself inside the office to wait for the detective. But while she’d been looking at the damage to Sebastian’s car, he had seen the mortally wounded vampire and had known someone needed him more than she had.
“Your patient is stable now?” she asked with her usual concern and compassion.
He flinched and shut his eyes on the image of Owen lying there with his chest open, the stake protruding from his savaged heart. “I wouldn’t say that….”
“Then you should go back to the hospital,” she urged him, “and take care of your patient.”
“There’s nothing more I can do for him,” he said with a sigh. The society of undead buried their own dead. “I wanted to get back to you…to make sure that you’re all right.”
“I’m fine.”
“I wish I believed you,” he said, “but you don’t look fine, Paige.”
She lifted a hand to her face. “I got caught in the rain.”
He glanced around her to the bedroom window; rain ran in rivulets down the glass, but the sky had lightened as there were only a few gray clouds. As always, he breathed a small sigh of relief during the day. The undead didn’t need him then—unless they’d been out in the sunlight. But the undead were not his only patients; he had other ones—human patients at the hospital, to which he’d often been called away from Paige.
“You should get out of your wet clothes,” he suggested, intent on taking advantage of the time he had with her.
Her lips lifted in a faint smile. “Are you trying to get me naked?”
Even with clothes on, she was naked to him, her face vulnerable as it revealed all her feelings. All her pain and fear.
His heart contracted with regret for what his secrets had cost them both. “I came here to make sure you’re all right.”
She turned away from him, toward the window that the rain sluiced down as it had his skin earlier in the shower. “And I told you I’m fine. I reported the vandalism. I have a detective working on the case now. I’ve done everything I was supposed to do.”
Now he suspected she was talking about something else—something they had never talked about.
“I know,” he assured her.
She shook her head. “No. No, you don’t. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.”
“We’re playing that game again?” he asked. “Strangers?”
“We’re not playing,” she said with a slight edge, but then she sighed and shook her head. “You’re a burglar, and I’m the homeowner who found you in my shower.”
He hated the games, hated more that they actually weren’t playing at being strangers. But if playing the game was the only way he could stick close to her, he’d play….
He would do anything to protect her—even let her go, if he had to…
Chapter 8 (#ulink_956132d5-3a5a-5d3c-89ef-06b7fe2e4d60)
Warm lips brushed the nape of Paige’s neck, beneath the swing of her high ponytail. “You should have joined me in the shower.”
She shivered at his touch, or maybe she was just cold because the rain had left her sweatshirt damp, her skin chilled. “I don’t shower with strange men,” she told him.
The lips lingered, nibbling at the skin above her leaping pulse before curving into a smile. “So I’m not just a stranger, I’m strange, too?”
“Yes.” Even more so than when they’d been married. “I have no idea where you go—when you just suddenly leave me. Sebastian said the hospital, and I’ve always assumed that’s where. But you’ve never really told me.”
He tensed. “When we were married, did you think I was cheating on you?”
“I’m a lawyer.” Was a lawyer. “At a firm with divorce lawyers…” But it wasn’t just because of her career that she was cynical. She’d lived through all her mother’s heartaches over picking the wrong men, men who’d used and left her over and over again. God, she had become her mother.
His arms tightened around her waist, his fingers biting into her flesh. “I never—never—cheated on you, Paige, and I never would.”
“We’re not married,” she reminded him. She couldn’t expect him to be faithful to her. If only he could be open with her.
“Just remember, Paige, that I always come back to—”
She turned in his arms and swallowed his words with her mouth. She didn’t want declarations or promises he’d never be able to keep. She just wanted him. Linking their fingers, she pulled Ben along with her, her lips clinging to his as they stumbled a few short steps to the bed. The back of her knees hit the edge of the mattress and she tumbled down, alone, onto the rumpled blankets.
Ben stood above her, clad only in that towel tucked around his thin waist. She wriggled out of her jeans, kicking them down her legs. Then she pulled the damp sweatshirt over her head, baring her breasts. Ben’s dark eyes flared with passion as he stared down at her.
She ran her fingertips from her throat over the curve of one breast to the elastic holding her polka-dot satin panties up.
Something rose beneath his towel, tenting the terry cloth. He groaned, “Paige…”
Leaving the hand at the edge of her panties, she lifted her other one to her mouth, licking her fingers. Ben’s nostrils flared as his breathing grew harsh. His voice rough, he admonished her, “You’re bad…”
With one last lick, she took her fingers from her mouth and slid them down her body again. This time she didn’t skim over her breast, she cupped it, then ran her wet fingertip across her nipple, which peaked beneath her touch.
Her breathing caught as pleasure streaked through her. “Oh…”
“You’re very bad…” His towel dropped, pulled free of his waist by his jutting erection.
Her other hand edged farther beneath the satin, her fingers stroking over the curls visible beneath the thin polka-dot fabric. Then she parted herself, sliding first one finger, then two, into her damp heat.
“Ooh…” she moaned again, rising slightly off the edge of her mattress. She gazed up at him, beseeching him to help her, “Ben…”
