It meant she was fresh. New blood in United Washington. Untried, uneducated, and unaware of the world she’d been lured into by the slimy fuck who borrowed more money than he ever intended to repay.
Luis liked to think that he had a supernatural sense for innocence, and it saturated the very breath in her lungs.
It’d all started there. With that feeling, and that scent, and the way she arched a brow at him so fearlessly when she asked,“So, are you going to let me mop or what?”
It’d been a treat, for a time, to talk to someone who didn’t know who he was or what he was capable of. He looked forward to it, and had begun to drop into his penthouse whenever she was scheduled to clean it. Having someone be so comfortable around him was rare outside of the family. He’d been loath toruin it by telling her even his first name, but a part of him had been silently bracing for the day she’d find out on her own.
When it never came up, he assumed she either hadn’t been warned sufficiently about the dangers of associating with him or that she just didn’t care.
Now he knew it was neither. She was just… innocent.
Gently pinching her chin, he told her, “You’re going home. Now.”
Tearing her chin out of his hand, she used one wickedly pointed elbow to get around him. Bare feet stomping across the floor, she snatched the doorknob and gestured sharply toward the sitting room.
“Out.”
Astonished, Luis could only stand there. “What?”
“Get out,” she commanded, unbothered.
“Why?” It was a ridiculous question, but all he could manage under the circumstances. He’d never had someone so beautiful and so veryhiskick him out of a bedroom before. It was a novel and deeply upsetting experience.
Speaking in a strange voice he could only describe asmanaging,she began, “I’m going to need you to listen very carefully now. I don’t know who you are. I don’tcarewho you are. I only care about the contestants downstairs, and since you aren’t one of them, I don’t have to evenbeginto entertain this entitled, condescending, superior,vampirebullshit.”
Oh,he thought with a low, pleasurable groan.She’s got claws.
His eyes narrowed. “Do you have any idea what kind of people you’re dealing with? They aren’t good.”
She arched a brow. “Their money is.”
Jaw clenching, he took a moment to try and keep his grip on that recently regained control.
Vampires were naturally possessive. It was a survival strategy to jealously guard the wellspring of life that was their mates, theiranchors.Even someone they were passingly interested in often became the focus of that intensity, which Dahlia had dryly called resource guarding behavior.
“You know,”she’d teased,“like a dog who won’t let you near a food bowl.”
He’d experienced passing fits of it in the past, but nothing like what he felt when he thought of this exquisite, misguided creature throwing herself in front of the monsters downstairs.
Breathing didn’t do much good. Neither did running his fingers through his hair. He still ended up marching toward her, grabbing the door, swinging it shut, and looming over her until her spine hit the wood.
“How much?”
She blinked. “What?”
“How much do you want from me to agree to leave right now?”
She balked. “You’re not serious.”
Luis did a rapid calculation in his mind. If Easton was selling entry tickets to the Games at one hundred thousand a pop and the standard contract promised a minimum of thirty percent of the fees, plus whatever stipend was included…
“Three hundred thousand,” he offered, heart pounding. It felt like he was running a race, or perhaps standing at the edge of a cliff. Either way, he needed to move or risk losing a prize unlike any other.
The money didn’t mean anything to him. Gods knew he had more than enough to spare. His mission didn’t mean shit, either. To a vampire, blood was life. It came above all things — money, pride, even safety. To want a mate, an anchor, was to want tolive.
And he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.
Not just because shesmelledgood. He wanted her because when she looked up at him like that, something wild in him screamedmine.