LITMIR.BIZ

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      I adore single-mindedness in a man at the appropriate time, but I consider the appropriate time for male single-mindedness to be when he’s doing something exquisitely tantalizing and I can feel waves of shuddery ecstasy rising to a crescendo in me. Since the only thing rising in me right now was pure terror, Rawls’s inability to move on struck me as a major drawback—one that I realized would take drastic action on my part to overcome.

      All this went through my mind as I got off him and turned to his car. “I don’t have the foggiest notion of what you’re talking about, sweetie,” I said tensely, not caring that I was giving him a Dita Von Teese-like view of my bottom as I bent over the front seat of his vampmobile. My fingers closed around the handcuff key I’d tossed there after securing him. “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning for doing this, but two against three is better odds than one against three. Besides, if this doesn’t convince you we’re on the same side, I don’t know what—” I turned to face him as I spoke, expecting to see him lying where I’d left him and found myself staring at the business end of the stake I’d dropped earlier.

      “We’ll never be on the same side, vamp,” Rawls said with another of those cold smiles that looked like the grimace a Doberman would wear just before it lunged. “I told you, I’m not interested in playing for Team Dead. Maybe I won’t be able to fight off all your pals, but I’m taking out as many as I can, starting with you.”

      He thrust the stake toward me with the speed of a striking snake, and I reacted with equal speed. My sideways leap wasn’t as fast as a vamp’s, but it took me out of the path of the pointy piece of wood aiming for me. I didn’t have the opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief, however, since a split second later it was coming toward me again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the trio of vampires walking across the parking lot, and I realized that doing the life and death tango with Rawls was using up time we didn’t have.

      I squeezed my eyes shut against the sight of the stake plunging toward me and held the handcuff key in front of my face, fully expecting to feel yew wood entering me before my heart could take another beat.

      “I don’t get it.”

      At Rawls’s growled statement I cracked open one eyelid and peered cautiously through my lashes. He was staring grimly past the key to me, the tip of his stake frozen a hairsbreadth away from the skimpy pink satin cupping my left breast. Three thoughts occurred to me almost simultaneously. One: if I’d been a D cup instead of a nicely proportioned C, there wouldn’t have been even a hairsbreadth of space between me and my confiscated stake. Two: the vamps—they were all female, I could see now—were only about thirty feet away from us. And three: Jack Rawls might be a total prick, but he had the sexiest eyes I’d ever seen.

      Pure green, pure bedroom and fringed with thick, spiky lashes a covergirl would kill for. Not that any of that was relevant right at this moment.

      “You don’t have to get it,” I told him. “You just have to decide whether you want to try fighting those bitches off all by yourself or whether you want my help. The fact that I was about to unlock your cuffs before I knew you didn’t need a key to get free should win me some brownie points with you, no?” Approaching vamps or not, I was unable to hold back my next words. “Just how did you release yourself?”

      He stared at me a moment longer and then lowered the stake with a quick, smooth movement, as if he’d come to a decision he wasn’t thrilled about. “This fell out of your hair while you were giving me a free lap dance.” I recognized the small object he tossed aside as one of the bobby pins that had held my now ruined chignon. “And this fell out of the heel of my workboot,” he added without cracking a smile. One-handedly, he closed the gleaming steel of a switchblade and shoved it into his jeans’ pocket. “I used it to cut the ropes around my ankles. Catch.”

      He tossed Megan’s loaner stake to me as carelessly as he’d thrown down the bobby pin. I grabbed at it but missed, although that turned out to be a good thing because as I bent to retrieve it I saw one of my Manolos under the MINI. I slipped it on, spied the other lying on its side a few feet away, and speed-hobbled toward it.

      I can hear some of you now—God, girl, why waste time over shoes, even if they are Manolos? All I can tell you is that as soon as my heels were elevated to their accustomed four inches above the ground I felt like Wonder Woman with her bulletproof bracelets on. I was even able to face the approaching vamps with something like resigned bravado.

      My surface calm vanished as Rawls took his place at my side, cradling the nail gun like an M-16. Before I could ask him what the merde he thought he was doing, he aimed it at the ground.

       Thunk-whap!

      “It’s not broken,” I said unnecessarily.

      “These things are built tough,” he said without looking at me. “I’ll take out the brunette and the blonde, you concentrate on the redhead.”

      I hadn’t disabled his weapon. He’d managed to pick the lock of the cuffs I’d secured him with and access a wicked-looking switchblade I hadn’t even known about. Under the circumstances, the three vamps whose unexpected fly-in had interrupted Rawls’s and my personal tussle might be the nearest thing I had to Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers.

      If Flora, Fauna and Merry weather had recently had an extreme makeover and now looked like Linda, Claudia and Naomi, that is.

      All three were clad in leather. The redhead in the middle wore a bondage-tight pink leather catsuit with pink Christian Louboutin stilettos. The brunette had the whole decadent-schoolgirl thing going on, complete with teensy black leather kilt and thigh-high black stockings. But it was the blonde’s outfit I immediately coveted. Her white leather dress was deliciously do-me, plunging outrageously in front to show off her creamy cleavage, and diamond-encrusted spaghetti straps glittered over the milky skin of her shoulders.

      I was suddenly all too aware that my own look was less do-me than been-done, consisting as it did of blood-flecked undies, rat’s-nest hair and a recently nailed right hand. With the I-don’t-get-out-of-bed-for-less-than-$10,000-a-day arrogance of supermodels, the three of them came to a dead stop ten feet in front of Rawls and me just as Rawls aimed his nail gun at the blonde and pulled the trigger.

      She shimmered sideways. That’s what it looked like, anyway—as if her image faded and then took form again a few inches to the left of where she’d been. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vampire move so fast that she seemed to blur, and I knew it was a bad sign. That ability only came with practice or by being turned by a powerful vampyr, and it meant Claudia and her girlfriends weren’t going to be easy to dust.

      “You missed, Chack.” Her purr was thickly Teutonic. “You are losing your touch, nein?”

      “Either that or we caught him at a bad time,” the stunning redhead beside her said, flaring perfect nostrils. “Who’s your Frederick’s of Hollywood hottie, Jack?”

      “Who bloody cares?” The English-accented brunette curled her top lip, her canines dazzlingly white against flawless mocha skin. “Let’s fucking rip them apart and get this over—”

      A stuttering stream of nails flew from Rawls’s weapon, cross-stitching its deadly way across the three vamps at chest height—or at what would have been chest height if they’d still been standing in front of us. But they’d levitated upward before the first silver missile could reach them, and as I jerked my gaze up I got a momentary glimpse of their faces, no longer supermodel-perfect, but ugly with fury.

      Although Rawls hadn’t seemed to recognize them, from their expressions they obviously knew and hated him. I felt justified in taking that as a second bad sign.

      They swooped down at the exact moment that the stuttering of the nail gun coughed and died. I saw Rawls trying to clear the jammed weapon before he was hidden from my view by three leather-clad bodies, and I stood there for a split second, paralysed with horror. Then I turned to run.

      The memory of my turning from Rawls and the vamps swarming

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