A flush crept up to darken her cheeks. “You really think you can buy me?”
“Five,” he immediately shot back.
Her eyes widened, but the reaction was shut down almost instantly. “This isn’t a negotiation,” she flatly informed him. “This is me kicking you out.”
“My money is just as good as theirs, and it comes with a lot fewer strings,” he growled.
It wasn’t entirely true, of course. His strings were just… different. More pleasurable, certainly. And made of silk, to safeguard her delicate skin.
Stretching up onto her tiptoes, she crowded in close to his face to hiss, “I wouldn’t take your money if my fucking life depended on it.”
“You wanted me yesterday,” he growled.
Gods, she was fearless when she lifted her upper lip like that. As if she had fangs to show off, and as if it didn’t make him want her more. “Circumstances change. Yesterday I liked you. Today I hate you.”
He grappled with the slipping threads of his patience to grit out, “You don’t hate me.”
Francesca’s warm brown eyes gleamed with malice when she replied, “I do. And more importantly, I already signed the contract.”
“With Easton.” His voice came out hard with bone-deep displeasure.
“Who owes you money, apparently,” she helpfully supplied. “Which he’ll get tonight. A win for everyone, don’t you think?”
He hadn’t felt much of anything toward Easton before then. Mild annoyance at most. Now, a deep, ugly feeling seeped through his chest at the thought of the other vampire using Francesca to pay his debts.
It didn’t matter that the Blood Games came with a sacred set of rules, of which consent was the most important. Vampires who’d tried to ignore the rules or circumvent them were punished in the harshest possible way, or else the entire society, which was built on the hard-earned trust of anchors sharing their blood, would crumble. To participate, Francesca had to be fully informed and amenable to whatever terms had been presented to her.
But he doubted there was any way to fully explain the danger to an outsider like her. She probably thought that after the term of her contract was through, she’d be able to walk away.
But once you entered the syndicate, the only way to escape it was death.
Palms sliding down the door to cage her in, he lowered his head so he could speak directly into her ear. “You’ve never been with a vampire before.”
A shaky breath left her. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he shot back. “Because if you had, you wouldn’t be here. No self-respecting vampire in the whole fucking world would let you walk away.”
The heat radiating off her was enough to make him want to rip the tuxedo from his body and rub himself all over her. And the way her scent spiked when he pressed his lips into that silken spot between cheek and earlobe… Luis swallowed a groan.
“If you go through with this, I can promise you that whoever wins your contract won’t give you up,” he warned her, lips skimming over the blush-warmed rise of her cheekbone.
Her breath quickened. The faint sound of her nails digging into the wood behind her made his cock stand at attention. He wanted those blunt little claws in his back. Urgently.
“It’s purely a blood exchange,” she argued, though the strength in her voice had gone rather squeaky. “No biting or— or anything else.”
Luis scoffed. The tip of his nose brushed hers as he drew closer to that ruby-red mouth. “You think that’ll save you?” Hetsked.“I can tell you now, it won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because if you won’t leave with me right now, that means I have to win you,” he answered, lips hovering above her own. “And I don’t give up my prizes, kitten.”
The urge to kiss her was almost impossible to resist. It proved not quite so difficult when, against any good sense the gods might’ve bestowed on her, shebithim.
A bolt of pain shot through his lower lip as her flat teeth gave him a vicious bite. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth as he reared back, astonished at her audacity.
Francesca looked up at him, her chest heaving. A dark curl fell in front of her eyes, which caught the light almost as much as the dark smear of blood mixing with her lipstick.
It was the hottest fucking thing he’d ever seen in his life.