But there was no way she was letting him chain her other hand. His face drew close to hers, a mixture of caution and determination in his dark eyes. She flexed her fingers, calculating the angle between Lore’s nose and the heel of her hand. With enough force, the right blow could knock him out. The squishy mattress would cost her momentum, but she was willing to give it—him—a shot.
Damn! He anticipated her move, his hand rising to block her, so at the last second she changed angles and went for his holster. Lore solved the problem by dropping on top of her, pinning her under his weight. Suddenly her nose was buried in his hair, her breasts crushed under his broad, strong chest.
“Get off me!” she hissed into his ear. His neck was right there, pulse pounding like forbidden candy. She’d heard some vamps liked demon blood.
Talia felt the strength in his body, the stretch and pull of muscle under cloth. She tensed, wanting the freedom to fight but only meeting a solid wall of hellhound wherever she moved. Lore grabbed her right wrist. Nuts! She cried out, the sound plaintive.
He stopped moving and simply held her there, their faces a breath apart. His eyes were so dark, there was almost no distinction between the iris and pupil.
“Are you going to be good?” he growled.
Talia squeezed her eyes shut. “Please don’t cuff my other hand. You don’t need to. I can’t break free.”
Her voice cracked, finally giving way to the terror of the situation. She was too young a vampire to break the silver cuffs, and not nearly as strong as a hellhound. She might as well have still been human.
Helplessness brought back bad, bad memories.
“Do you promise to be good?” This time the question was gentler.
She nodded, hating herself for her eagerness. “Yes. Yes, of course.”
She was lying. He had to know that. It was the first duty of a prisoner to escape—even if she had no idea in the world how she was going to do it.
He rose up on hands and knees. Talia was trapped beneath him, caged by his limbs. The feel of his warm hands still clung to her skin. His touch had been businesslike. Appropriate, if chaining up a woman ever could be described that way—yet now there was something in his expression as he stared down at her, the second set of cuffs still dangling from his hand. Something other.
The look pinned her like a stake.
She resisted the urge to curl into a ball, an instinctive urge to cover her vulnerable parts. He was looking at her as if he’d just decided she might be good to eat—in more ways than one. Worse, she wanted to respond.
Talia swallowed hard, putting all her defiance into her eyes. Refusing to cave.
“Bad dog!”
Chapter 7
Bad dog?
She had no idea.
Prophets spare me.
Lore banged into the stairwell and began running back to the fifteenth floor, taking the steps two and three at a bound. It had been a long night, but acute frustration made up for the bite of fatigue. His nerves were sparking like a faulty wire.
There was a human saying about heat and kitchens, and Lore was beating a retreat before he did something incredibly stupid. That vampiress—possibly murderess—was hot enough to set his fur on fire. When he’d had her pinned to the bed, every cell in his being had sat up and begged.
Definitely not something any hellhound should be thinking about, much less an Alpha. Hounds lived by a set of rules millennia old, and those rules said that no hound looked outside the pack for pleasure. They just didn’t. For one thing, if they did stray, they couldn’t lie about it afterward.
That was awkward, to say the least.
Lore stopped on a landing, breathing hard and glowering at the scuff marks on the wall. His skin felt prickly, as if he’d been standing next to a glowing furnace. Thinking about the vampire’s slender body made it worse. He’d had to walk away without even taking the time to put on the second set of cuffs. Feeling her struggle brought out the urge to pin her down. Taste her. Take her.
The memory turned the tingling in his skin to an outright itch.
Maybe he was allergic. After all, she was as different from him as another creature could be: a vampire, a rogue alienated from her sire, and on the run from a crime. The very thing orderly, family-driven pack structure despised.
Moreover, Lore was the serious, down-to-business leader, the one voted least likely to cut loose and have fun. Now, here he had gone and handcuffed a babe to his bedpost. Whatever seed of chaos had infected the vamp-on-the-run was apparently contagious, and now it was crawling through his system.
Bad dog. Who talked to a hellhound like that? In a very, very unwise corner of his soul, he found it hilarious. He started up the stairs again, more slowly this time. His footfalls echoed like a giant’s.
He should turn her over to the law. She wasn’t hellhound business. And how was he going to decide whether or not she had killed her cousin? He was an enforcer, not a detective. He had other priorities, such as Helver and whatever other whelps were digging their way into trouble. Furthermore, there was that something haunting the night and burning down buildings.
Something he thought might be the result of necromancy. That kind of sorcery required a death, and usually a violent one.
Maybe the murdered girl was part of it all. Maybe his pretty prisoner was guilty as sin.
Lore reached the fifteenth floor and cautiously pushed open the stairway door. He’d heard the sirens earlier and, for the second time that night, he found himself on the fringes of a crime scene. The hair on the back of his neck ruffled, his territorial instincts roused by so many strange males in his building.
Uniformed police officers stood outside suite fifteen-twenty-four. A knot of official-looking men crowded the doorway, backlit by the flash of a camera taking multiple shots inside the condo. Someone was asking for security tapes of the front door. Lore knew the man was out of luck. The building was old, and with few thefts there had been no need to add cameras—until now.
“Stop right there,” said one of the uniforms, holding up a hand. He was young and beefy, his features unfinished-looking.
Lore stopped, giving the cop the blank face hounds used with outsiders—except, for some reason, his vampire. She was like a sudden brain fever, making him behave in unusual ways. Perhaps keeping her in his bedroom was a really bad idea. He could almost hear Perry saying, “Ya think?”
“Crime scene,” said the uniform. “Move on, please.”
“What happened?” Lore asked, wondering how much the cops would be willing to say.
“Never mind. Move along.”
“Wait.” One of the other cops turned around. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Lore recognized Baines.
“Detective,” Lore said, erasing all emotion from his voice.
Baines hooked a thumb in his belt, narrowing his eyes as he walked toward Lore. His face was set, like someone had chipped it out of petrified wood. “Okay. I’ll bite. Why am I seeing you at two different crime scenes in one night?”
“I live in the building.”
Baines missed a beat when he heard that. A split second of surprise. “A hellhound? Here? This condominium is about as white-bread human as it gets.”
“I lease from a friend.” Who was a demon, but that was another story.
“Interesting.”
“I pay my utilities. I keep my TV volume at a reasonable level. I help the little old ladies put up their Christmas lights. There’ve been no complaints.” Lore let the slightest edge of annoyance creep into his words.
Baines recovered his cop face. “Uh-huh. Don’t play the poor-little-monster card with me. If a guy wants to spend part of his time running around on four legs, why the hell should the cops care? If that guy is dragging a dismembered leg in his jaws, then I’ll get excited.”