Deal

By the time Chuck followed the other dancers offstage, she was sweating like a pig and breathing like a cow in labor. She felt like a cow in labor, too.

She might go through Chloe’s dance routine with her almost every night for the sheer calorie burn, but knowing the moves and actually doing them onstage with a dozen other girls . . . under blazing-hot lights . . . in full battle regalia . . . were two totally, totally different things.

Never again would she scoff at her sister’s choice of occupation or play into any of the stereotypical beliefs that showgirls were nothing more than high-priced strippers. And never again would she concoct any ridiculous plans that even remotely had her stepping into her sister’s rhinestone-dotted, five-inch heels.

She was lucky to be alive! Lucky to have made it through Chloe’s three-in-a-row performances without either passing out or fracturing something vital. There had been some close calls, too, and she was sure Chloe’s fellow dancers were wondering what the hell was wrong with her tonight. She just kept smiling, pretending to be her sister, and was ready to pull out the “inner ear infection” excuse, if she needed to.

Still huffing, Chuck fell back to the end of the chorus line as they tick-tick-tacked their way across the stage and down the short flight of stairs. She needed to get out of this getup and into street clothes, but knew from Chloe and her own after-show visits to Lust’s dressing room that it tended to be a bustle of sequins and feathers and loud, boisterous girl talk for about an hour after a show.

Not something she was opposed to normally, even if her life wasn’t nearly as exciting as some of the dancers’. She might investigate Elvis sightings—which in this town, Elvis Impersonator Central, was a job and a half—and hang out in trailer parks where seven-hundred-pound women grew around their living room furniture, but that was a snoozefest compared to some of the things Chloe’s fellow dancers had experienced. Being propositioned by honest-to-goodness mobsters . . . dancing—and more—in Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong. One of Chloe’s friends had even done a tour with the Hell’s Angels.

Tonight, though, she had things to do, and sharing war stories—of which she had very few—wasn’t one of them.

She minced her way down the steps leading offstage, being very, very careful not to twist her ankle (or worse) only to draw up short when a long, imposing shadow fell across her path. Jerking her head and twenty pounds of headdress up, she found herself staring into a pair of dark, mesmerizing eyes . . . set into the face of the very man she’d been following for weeks now. The very man whose apartment she’d been planning to somehow break, slip, or finagle her way into later tonight.

Eep.

Had he found out about her sloppy attempts at stalking him? Somehow learned that she’d been digging into his past? Or maybe he’d figured out that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be tonight.

If any of those turned out to be true, this could be very bad for her. Very, very bad.

Getting on the wrong side of the richest man in Las Vegas—a man who likely owned the ground you were standing on at any given moment, if you were standing within the city limits—was never a good thing. Getting on the wrong side of the richest man in Las Vegas who just happened to also possibly be a bloodsucking creature of the night . . .

She was a writer, and even she didn’t have the words to describe what a cluster fuck that could turn out to be.

She swallowed hard, mind racing as she tried to come up with an excuse for why she’d been following him, checking him out, why she’d switched places with her sister. Nothing came to mind, which made her sweat even more than the past three hours of hoofing it under the thousand-watt stage lights.

“Um . . . hello,” she squeaked when he showed no signs of moving out of her way.

How would an employee of the Inferno greet its rich and powerful owner? Would there be obeisance? Groveling? As a showgirl, would she bat her overly glittered lashes and cock an inviting hip?

She shifted around awkwardly, raising a hand to the back of her head, thrust her breasts forward, and fluttered her lashes until one of them got stuck, rendering her blind in her right eye.

When she reached up to pry them apart, she lost her balance and flailed wildly on her platform ice-pick heels, frantically attempting to stay upright.

Sebastian . . . Raines . . . Dracula reached out and grasped her upper arms just as she began to topple, effectively stopping her from falling on her keister.

Well, how embarrassing to be rescued from certain doom by the very person she intended to “out” as a bloodsucking fiend. But doubly embarrassing was the fact that when he touched her, a zip of electricity ran all the way down her spine and into her girly places from where his fingers gripped her bare arms. That hadn’t happened since cell phones were the size of lunch boxes.

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.”