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“What do you think you’re doing?”
“It was annoying you. He’ll watch it.”
“But how do you know?” she asked in an undertone as the bartender stowed her purse. “What if—”
“He’ll make more money watching your purse than he would stealing its contents,” he said as understanding dawned. An unlimited supply of money impressed most women. But not, apparently, Charlotte Harris.
“That’s just wasteful.”
He watched as she took another Charlotte-like sip of her drink.
“How very . . . predictable of you to say so.”
Giving him a look that would have established her dominance as the alpha in a pride of lions, despite the fact that she was very much female, Charlotte prepared to lecture him.
Torr could tell. He’d had enough of them throughout his life to spot them from a mile off.
“First, you kidnap me and abandon my car. Then you take me here, to a place I would never, ever have gone to willingly. My virgin eyes and ears will never be the same. And you keep ordering me about like some kind of caveman, paying off the bartender to babysit my purse just because it slipped off my shoulder. What is with you?”
He considered a variety of responses, tossed most of them out, and finally said, “Are you really a virgin?”
Charlotte opened her mouth to yell at him, closed it, and promptly burst into laughter instead.
“You are incorrigible.”
He’d been called worse, and at least she’d laughed.
Ordering himself another drink, a real one this time, Torr took the opportunity to watch his lovely companion without her noticing. She’d shifted her attention to the sights and sounds around them, including the couple at the end of the bar who were one step away from full-on intercourse.
Although Torr knew little about Toni’s friend, he suspected any woman who could waltz into a bar like this, on a night like this, and stand there as casually as you please hid a few secrets of her own. Her outwardly proper demeanor was, at least partially, an act.
Even though she wore more clothes than just about every other woman here tonight, Charlotte turned enough heads for Torr to feel the tiniest prick of jealousy each time he caught the longing in an admirer’s eye.
The same look of longing he was no doubt giving her right now.
Turning his attention to the drinks, Torr grabbed his whiskey and Charlotte’s new Death in the Afternoon and handed it to her.
“But I’m not finished with this one.”
He licked his lips, a habit he’d never quite broken. One that had a tendency to rear its head whenever he found himself staring into a beautiful woman’s eyes—just as he was now.
They said the eyes were windows to the soul. Just now, the pupils of Charlotte’s clear hazel eyes were not dilating in response to the light. She was aroused.
As was he.
Fuck.
Shrugging, she finished the dregs in her glass and took the new one.
“I guess I’m not driving.”
Torr smiled. He’d better slow down to keep up appearances. She had no way of knowing he could not get drunk. Hungry, yes. Thirsty, for water and whiskey and more. But drunk? Not if he tried. An odd side effect of his sister-in-law’s countercurse, he suspected—the one that had curbed their power. A drunk vampire would be more dangerous, after all. It was yet another unintended side effect.
It always stunned him to think of the power Isobel had commanded, without even intending it.
The end result of this particular quirk was that alcohol had a mild impact on them, much like it would on someone with an extremely high tolerance. It gave him the slightest of buzzes, nothing more. But Torr didn’t need absinthe and champagne or whiskey to know his body couldn’t give a shit that Charlotte was completely wrong for him.
“Do you dance?” she asked suddenly.
Torr looked from Charlotte to the dance floor. The sideshow was gone, replaced by pulsating lights that illuminated very clearly the lack of clothing on most of the Stage West patrons.
It was the exact kind of song he would never, ever expect someone like Charlotte to dance to. A mix between power noise and industrial techno, the beat was raw, erotic even. And definitely not Charlotte.
But damn if she didn’t down her third drink and hand him the empty glass, staring at it with her disapproving teacher look.
