A TASTE OF HEAVEN

HIS STUDY

As Elaine walked away, she could feel ten pairs of eyes on her back. She wondered what the other women were feeling. Were they terrified for her, or were they relieved that they hadn't been chosen? As she followed the woman in gray up a grand staircase, she could hear the party come back to life below her. No one looked up at her. No one followed. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, the sound of the party had faded to silence.

The woman in gray opened a pair of heavy oak doors. She ushered Elaine inside and immediately stepped back out into the hallway. Before Elaine could turn around, she heard the doors close behind her. The sound of the lock turning felt like the only honest sound she had heard all night.

The study was massive, lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of ancient leather-bound books. A fire crackled in a beautiful stone hearth, but it did nothing to warm the room. The air felt eerily still, heavy with the scent of old paper.

"You have remarkable courage for a woman whose heart is pounding out of her chest." His voice came from behind her. Elaine spun around toward it.

He was sitting behind a large mahogany desk. He poured himself a glass of dark, thick crimson liquid from a crystal decanter. He didn't drink it. He swirled it, watching the liquid coat the glass.

"Sit," he said, pointing to the chair across the desk from him.

Elaine swallowed hard. "I'm more comfortable standing."

He paused, his obsidian eyes piercing into hers. Slowly, a dark and dangerous smile spread across his flawless face. "As you wish. Let's discuss the terms of your sponsorship." He stood up, stepping around the desk with that same terrifying, liquid grace. "Your debts will be entirely erased by tomorrow morning, but in exchange, you must live here and you will belong to me. Completely. You will not leave without my permission, and you will never deny me when I call for you."

She let him lay out the rules, letting him believe that he was the one acquiring something. "And what is it that you want from me?" she asked, clenching her hands together to hide the tremor. "Men with money want a mistress. You haven't looked at my body once." Elaine knew the answer to this question, but she wanted to hear him say it. She wanted confirmation that the job she was sent here to do was necessary.

"You are very observant, Elaine." He knows my name, though I never gave it. "The men downstairs are beasts of the flesh. They want playthings. I'm a beast of a different..."

He stopped. He was close enough now to breathe her in, and whatever he found in her scent stole the rest of the sentence from him. For a moment he just looked at her, not at her face, not at her throat, but at something past both, something he seemed to be listening for. His stillness changed; before, it had been the stillness of a predator choosing when to move. This was the stillness of a man who had walked into a room he didn't remember entering.

Something about her had reached him in a way she hadn't planted and couldn't account for, and for the length of a single breath, the practiced ease had gone out of him and left something almost like hunger and alarm wearing the same face. Then it was gone, and the cold, smooth surface returned. She wondered if she had imagined it.

File it, she told herself. Understand it later. Tonight she was filing many things away to understand later.

He reached out and pressed one ice-cold thumb to her throat, over the pulse she still couldn't quiet. She felt his hand go rigid at the contact. "You run hot," he murmured, and it did not sound like a compliment. It sounded like a question he was asking himself.

His free hand rose and gently drew the loose strap of her gown back onto her shoulder, covering her. An almost kind and courteous gesture.

Technique, she told herself. A creature with centuries would learn precisely how to mentally disarm the thing it meant to eat. She filed that thought away for later, too. It wasn't something she wanted to think about now.

"I don't care about your body, my dove." His voice had dropped, gone rougher at the edges than a man in full command of himself would allow. Two ivory fangs slid down from his gums, and his eyes turned from obsidian to a glowing, predatory crimson. "I only care about what runs through your veins."

He watched her face for terror. The instant prey realized there would be no escape was the sweetest part of the hunt.

The terror didn't come. What came instead was relief. At last, certainty. He was what she'd been sent to kill. Her fingers twitched toward her hidden dagger before discipline stopped them.

Not yet.

He looked at her like a starving man staring at a locked door. Hunger made predators reckless, but it also made them fast. He could still tear her apart before she landed a single blow. No. She needed him comfortable. Careless. She needed him to believe she'd already surrendered.