Into the Spotlight (3 page)

She might have, once upon a time, when the world of the Arcana Royale remained fresh and euphoric. But the high lasted only a short time, and the hangover she woke up with had lasted for nearly five decades.

“You’ve left me.” Malcolm’s voice trod through the muddy water of her darkening thoughts, tugging her back to the present.

Heat suffused her face. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all.” His hand crept across the table and hovered close to hers. The heat of him rolled across her fingers, teasing them, a request and a demand. Jeannie turned her left hand over and lifted her fingers to meet his. Electricity tingled through her arm as he captured her fingers, threading his neatly between them.

“I meant what I said, that I don’t do this often. I’m afraid I’ve long since forgotten the art of small talk.” The churning in her belly stilled, despite the warmth wrapping her hand. The drink was a bad idea. She should return to the basement and the cells. It would be safer. It would be simpler.

It would be a sacrifice.

His grip tightened as though her urge to flee had communicated itself to him, but his words hung unspoken in the air between them when the waitress returned. The succubus delivered the drinks with careful efficiency, avoiding touching or inserting herself between the couple. Jeannie watched Malcolm. His gaze held no rebuke or sense of warning as it had earlier, but the chill in the air sharpened until the vetiver scent retreated.

She knew the succubus couldn’t help her natural instincts. The menace Malcolm exuded was not cruel, far from it, but it also brooked no argument. Fascination curled through her belly.

“Would you care for anything to eat?” Malcolm stroked the back of her hand with his thumb, sending arcs of electricity skittering over her flesh.

Jeannie shook her head, not quite trusting herself to speak as a chaotic mass of need burned through fifty years of numbness, leaving her insides aching with desire.

How long has it been since someone touched me? Me? Jeannie?

The touch of his thumb was a mixture of soft and rough whorls. Awareness flashed through her, each gentle stroke an act of intimacy. The need for more trembled through her hand.

“You don’t have to stay if this is uncomfortable.” The thoughtful words were nearly her undoing. Kindness edged in warmth and the steel of stubbornness transformed his concession to a far more provocative comfort.

“You are very kind.”

“Far from it. But I don’t want you frightened or forced.” His words caressed her soul. “Share a drink with me or not. It’s entirely up to you.”

“Not entirely.” The words slipped free of the jesses of good judgment.

“No? You were ordered to come out here?” Displeasure tightened his mouth. Was that displeasure pointed at her? At the need to force her? Or that someone had done so?

“Hardly. I am compelled to perform, but they cannot make me visit with the audience if I do not choose to.”

“So you
chose
to join me.” The grooves around his mouth deepened with the pleasure kindling in his voice. Hot, smooth butterscotch coated in dark chocolate.

“Yes.”

“Then I am even more grateful for the attention.” His hand continued to cradle hers, smoothing caresses over the flesh between her thumb and forefinger.

The silence that stretched between them wasn’t tense, but it wasn’t comfortable either. Jeannie found herself at a loss for what to say. She wanted him to keep talking.

But about what? How do people do it now? How do I ask him to keep talking? Do I ask him about him? His family? His work? Do I have to wait a proper length of acquaintance for such personal information?

“What do you want to know?” His words intruded into the checklist playing out in her mind.

“Did you read my mind?” Her heart chilled at the thought.

“Not at all. But your expression was far easier to read. You’re nervous. You’re uncertain. You seem to want to stay here and share the drink. But you don’t know what to do. Right?” Malcolm made it sound so simple.

“Yes. How did you do that then?” Curiosity kicked apprehension aside.

Malcolm chuckled. He picked up his glass and watched her expectantly until she took a drink of her own iced water. The drink bathed her aching throat, and she took another swallow gratefully. He watched approvingly, drinking some of his own, but never releasing her hand.

“I’m an attorney. I spend much of my time assessing my clients and the opposition. The body rarely lies, no matter what the mouth is saying.” His gaze dipped to her body briefly, a physical caress, before tracing a line of heat back to her eyes.

“Are you a good attorney?” Anticipation unfurled, slowly, a sail hungry for a hot breeze.

“It depends on how you define ‘good’, but I protect what’s mine and I win more than I lose.”

The breeze blew hard and hot, ballooning excitement inside her breast. “Are you here on business or pleasure?”

“Business.” Malcolm nodded once, but his lips quirked into a teasing smile. “Now ask me if I will be staying for business or pleasure.”

“Would you be offended if I hope for business?”

“Oh?” The ice clinked in his glass as he took another swallow. “Why is that?”

She squeezed the words past her throat before it could close up. “Because I need your help.”

Chapter Four

“I need your help.” The whisper of sound drizzled like honeyed gold from Jeannie’s lips.

“I beg your pardon?” Malcolm lowered the heavy crystal glass and studied the lush beauty across from him. He drank in her features. Her gilded skin glistened in the flickering of the candle’s flame. Pale hair, the color of pure flax, fell like a snowfall across golden shoulders revealed by the white silken top.

“Your help.” She repeated the words. “As an attorney.” Her eyes sparkled, hope-drenched intelligence kindled within them.

Suspicion. Curiosity. Desire.
A potent cocktail of slippery, smooth fire rolled through his veins. She would taste of light and dark rums, rich brandy and lime. His teeth ached inside his gums.

“What do you need?” Malcolm hated to ask the question. But he’d been raised in a time when chivalry meant something. One did not turn away a lady in need. Even if the last thing he wanted was to be her attorney.

“I can’t talk now.” Jeannie’s lips barely moved, the whisper of sound teasing even his sharp hearing. Her head remained erect with the barest of flickers toward her escort. The quiet man remained some small distance away, unobtrusive in his presence. His watchful stillness was enough for Malcolm to almost forget his presence. “Maybe you could come back tomorrow night?”

Malcolm tossed back the last swallow of tonic and blood. The pedestrian ferric flavor heightened in Jeannie’s presence. “Tomorrow night?”

Her chin dropped in the barest of nods, and he wrestled with the desire to demand what she wanted right now. He was here to see to Frederick, not indulge in his fantasies.

No matter how exquisite the fantasy appeared. Still, he inclined his head slowly. “Tomorrow evening, if it pleases the lady.”

The dancer drained her drink and set the empty glass down. Her lips shimmered with moisture. He wondered what it would be like to caress the gleam from her fabulous lower lip. She stood and he rose immediately.

“It would please me. Thank you for the drink, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Call me Malcolm.”

She smiled, not a flirt, but almost shy and completely at odds with the delicate sensuality hovering around her. “Good night, Malcolm.”

He resisted the urge to take her hand and offered her a bow as she retreated, ascending the stairs to exit along the same path she entered. His gaze followed her until she vanished from his sight and only then did he sit down. His tongue pressed thoughtfully against the back of his teeth.

I need your help.

If she asked again. He would say yes.

“Frederick.” He waited most of the night for the meeting, unsurprised when it neared dawn before an escort showed him through the private hallways behind the glitz and glamour of the casino and its lounges to a holding area as gray and dismal as a stormy sea.

“Malcolm, I didn’t think you were going to show up.” Despite the faintly nasal quality of the words, Frederick wasn’t whining. Instead he exhaled the statement on a rush of relief. The younger vampire was long, lean and ropier in his build where Malcolm was broader shouldered and thicker across the chest.

He didn’t rise to give the younger vampire a hug, choosing to lean back in the chair, arms folded. His mouth turned down with disapproval, he appreciated Frederick’s healthy appearance from his well-manicured hands to the neat ponytail tied at the nape of his neck to the clean dress shirt and pants. The clothing didn’t fit well, but the pressed appearance suggested that despite his sentence, his cousin hadn’t been abused. That would be a relief for Aunt Ruth.

“Sit down, Frederick.” He nodded to the chair on the other side of the table. They were alone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t monitored. The institutionalized layout of the room with a single metal table and two chairs hardly suggested comfort, just practicality.

The chair squeaked across the floor as Frederick dragged it out and spun it around to straddle it. He behaved more like a twenty-first century teenager than a century-old vampire.

And whose fault is that?
Admittedly, Malcolm enjoyed the boy more when he’d been an actual “boy”. He’d taken to looking after him, but a century of cleaning up his messes wore thin against Malcolm’s patience.

“Tell me what happened.” He knew, of course. He’d spoken to the prince of New York after Aunt Ruth’s frantic phone call. Still, it never hurt to check the facts.

“You’re getting me out of here, right? We just have to fill out some papers, handle some formalities?” The younger vampire’s gaze skittered back and forth across the room, barely lingering against Malcolm’s more than a few seconds before flitting away again.

Dammit, Frederick. What did you do?
Malcolm squelched the urge to slam his cousin against the wall in a chokehold and shake the truth out of him. Seventeenth-century interrogation methods were out of fashion and he’d never regretted it more. Instead, he smoothed down the front of his shirt, giving the appearance of all the time in the world and repeated, “Tell me what happened.”

“Okay, I know it was stupid, but I was hanging out with Elizabeth and Belle, you know, the French twins?” Frederick punctuated every word with a hand gesture. Unfortunately, he inherited Ruth’s nervous tick.

“Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumber. I’m acquainted.” And how he wished he wasn’t. The bottle blondes were drop-dead gorgeous and barely shared a brain cell between them. They were appealing to every man who didn’t know them, because who didn’t want to sandwich between two highly sexed young vampires who loved to share their men? That is…until they grew bored and moved on to their next conquest. They’d left more than a few shattered vampires in their wake.

“Be nice.” Frederick’s hands flattened against the table. “They like sex. I like sex. It works out.”

“Anyway…” Malcolm urged him back toward the topic at hand. The less he knew about his cousin’s “sex life” the happier he would be.

“Yes, anyway. I’d been staying at the prince’s mansion near Montauk. He often holds court there in the summer, but he’s been in a blindingly bad mood for the last forty years and he gave us all the boot.” Blindingly bad mood was a mild understatement, but Malcolm let that go. The prince of New York was not the issue.

“So I heard, and…?”

“So, the girls wanted to come out here to the Arcana Royale. We’d all heard great stories about it, and you know that the prince of Las Vegas has an open-door policy for casino visitors, so we borrowed the jet and flew out.”

Malcolm refrained from backhanding the younger vampire.
Borrowed
translated to stealing the Reynolds private plane. Since he approved all requests for actual borrowing and none crossed his desk, he could only imagine that Frederick “persuaded” the pilots, the ground crew and more. But that migraine was a problem for another day.

“Continue.” He pushed the words past his teeth with a show of magnanimous patience.

Frederick paused, perhaps evolution warned him that he was treading on dangerous ground because his blue eyes narrowed warily. “You don’t sound particularly friendly at the moment, Malcolm.”

“You’re still breathing. That’s about as good as it’s going to get, especially if you don’t get to the point.”

The younger vampire nodded slowly and clasped his hands together, stilling for the first time since he entered the interrogation room. “We got here, we checked in and, no, I didn’t use the family suite. I figured they would call you if I checked into it, and I didn’t want you harshing our buzz.” The familiarity with common slang wasn’t Malcolm’s primary concern, but he understood the gist of “harshing a buzz” and Frederick wasn’t wrong.

“It was all going great,” Frederick hurried on, thankfully. “But the girls weren’t having a lot of luck at the tables, and I was barely breaking even and they were getting bored…so I persuaded one of the croupiers to throw a few my way.”