LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t have a car, remember?” he called after her.

      “Neither do you,” Kate reminded him with a faint smile.

      He forced his cocky grin and stepped closer to the sexy detective. “But I never have a problem getting a ride.”

      “You’re wasting your time flirting with me, Sebastian,” she warned him.

      He only flirted with her because he knew she’d never take him up on his many offers. It wouldn’t take a woman like her long to learn everything.

      “I’m too much for you to handle, Detective,” he teased.

      She laughed but didn’t deny it. “I already have more than I can handle, Sebastian.” She turned to Paige, who’d stepped out of the office clutching her purse. Instead of joining them where they stood at the door, she headed off down the hall. “But the most important thing is to find who’s stalking your sister.”

      “No,” he said.

      She glanced at him in surprise.

      “The most important thing is to keep her safe.”

      Kate opened her mouth, as if she had questions for him. But then she only nodded and headed after her friend.

      Sebastian leaned back against the steel door and exhaled a ragged sigh of relief. Then the metal creaked and the door opened. He shifted his weight forward and turned, so that he wouldn’t fall into the room.

      God, he hated that room—hated the smell of death that clung to it. Ben had saved many people, himself included, but he’d lost many, too. Like the man who lay atop the table, the stake protruding from his chest.

      This was Sebastian’s fault, too. He’d called in a favor to have Owen protect Paige—and the man had died carrying it out. Guilt and self-condemnation gripped him, tightening the muscles in his stomach.

      Condemnation filled Ingrid’s dark eyes, for a moment crowding out the madness, as she met his gaze. “You’ve done it again, Sebastian.”

      “I stopped them from entering,” he said, and he stopped himself now, holding back from crossing that threshold into the room of death. Blood stained the floor beneath Ben’s makeshift operating table. The surgeon was gone, but he’d been there, trying to save another patient.

      “Those mortals wouldn’t have even been here if not for you,” Ingrid persisted.

      “No,” he agreed. “None of them would have, including Ben.”

      “Who is she—this new mistress of the Underground?” Ingrid asked, her usually husky voice even thicker with disdain.

      “Someone important to me,” he said. “I don’t want her getting hurt. If you know who’s threatening her…” Or if she were the one threatening her…

      Ingrid’s hatred of humans was well known. “And if I did…?”

      “You’d be wise to let them know that I’m going to stop them,” Sebastian said.

      “Stop them?” Her dark eyes widened with curiosity and amusement. “How?”

      He glanced over her shoulder, to the body with the stake through the heart. “I will do whatever necessary to protect her.”

      “So she is important to you,” Ingrid said. “She’s not your sister, as she thinks. Who is she really?”

      “She’s my daughter.”

      Frustration nagged at Paige as she jammed the key into the lock and opened the door…to her condo. She shuddered at the thought of opening that other door and having rats run out.

      Maybe it was better that she didn’t learn whatever made her feel unwelcome—and out of place—at Club Underground. Catching sight of her reflection in the mirror above the hall table, she winced at the dark circles beneath her eyes and the lines fanning them and her mouth. She looked like her mother, not just because of her blond hair and fair skin, but because she looked older than she actually was—courtesy of all the stress and pain she’d had in her life. “Forty’s the new thirty, my ass.”

      Her age was probably why she felt so out of place at Club Underground. Everyone else, patrons and staff, including Sebastian, seemed so much younger and more beautiful. Kate was wrong; no one was stalking Paige. No one would want to….

      Then she tilted her head, listening…to the sound of running water. The walls were thick in the old warehouse that had been converted to condos; the noise could not be coming from an adjoining unit. It had to be coming from her bathroom. Her pulse raced with fear. She should have had Kate walk her to the door, as the detective had wanted. But Paige had insisted that no one would have gotten past the doorman in the lobby or her security system.

      She glanced to the alarm panel near the door. The lights were off; someone had already disabled it. How? Only she and Sebastian knew the code, and he’d remained back at the club.

      She fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. She could call Kate again; she might not have left the parking lot yet. But why would someone break in to use her bathroom?

      She dropped her purse onto the hall table and reached instead for one of the bottles on the wine rack beneath it. As she had back at the club, she intended to use it as a weapon. She lifted it, like a bat, over her shoulder as she stepped inside her bedroom. When she crossed the hardwood floor to the open bathroom doorway, the water sputtered and cut off. Steam billowed from the room.

      Paige tightened her grip on her weapon of choice. Her intruder would need another shower after she broke the bottle over his head.

      But then the man stepped out, water sluicing over his naked skin—all that naked skin. And she dropped the bottle onto the floor. The neck spun until the cork pointed toward him.

      “So today’s game is spin the bottle?” Ben asked.

      “Game?” she repeated, her eyes wide as her gaze traveled up and down his body.

      Ben tensed, every muscle taut with desire at her blatant interest in him. He would have figured he was too worried—and too tired—to want her again. But none of that mattered now. He would want her even if he was dead, which since he’d learned of the secret society had become an inevitable fate.

      “Is this a game,” she asked, “your breaking in here and scaring me again?”

      “I didn’t break in.” But had it been necessary he would have, so that he’d been able to secure the place before she’d come home.

      “Sebastian’s not here,” she said. “He didn’t let you in.”

      “He didn’t need to,” he explained. “He gave me a key.”

      “He gave you a key?” she repeated. “To my place? And he gave you the security code, too?”

      “I guessed the security code.”

      Color flushed her face, making her blue eyes even brighter. “It…it’s just easier to remember,” she sputtered.

      While she was embarrassed that she’d used the date of their wedding as the code, like they had at the home they’d shared, Ben was encouraged that there might be hope for them. At least he had been until he reminded himself that he had nothing to offer her but secrets and danger.

      “Of course,” he agreed, “it’s easy to remember.”

      “So you just let yourself in,” she remarked, then gestured toward the bathroom, “and helped yourself to my shower?”

      “I needed it.” He’d needed to rid himself of the blood and the scent of death that always clung to him when he went to the Underground.

      “Why didn’t you use the showers in the locker room?”

      He turned away and reached for a towel. He ran the terry cloth across his skin before wrapping

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