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Mircea laughed and leaned over to wipe some strawberry jam off my cheek. He hesitated, and then put the finger in his mouth, licking it clean. And I felt an unexpected pulse of pure lust tear through me.
Damn it!
Just when I’d thought he was going to behave himself!
Who was I kidding? This was Mircea. That was behaving.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone appreciate their food so much,” he told me, as if nothing had happened.
“You ought to spend more time with Fred,” I said sourly.
“I beg your pardon?”
I drank wine resentfully. “Your vampire Fred? You ought to see him over a dish of—”
I stopped, because Mircea was suddenly looking at me strangely. And then continued to do so without commenting, without moving, without even breathing, for a long moment. He looked like a film that had been paused, or a man frozen in time. It was eerie.
Especially since he wasn’t one of the vamps who went out of their way to emphasize the difference between themselves and humans. Some made a point of never breathing, rarely blinking, and not bothering to turn their skin anything other than dead white. They moved with a boneless, silent grace that sent the hair ruffling at the back of your neck, because humans didn’t walk like that. Some of the most extreme had fingernails they allowed to grow into long, gnarled talons, bodies that were sometimes morphed in weird ways by their master powers, and eyes that glowed inhuman colors all of the time, not just when their power was up.
Or when they were too distracted to mask it.
I studied Mircea’s face, but there was none of that in evidence. I’d seen him once without the constant glamourie he wore, but he had been strangely beautiful, not hideous. Terrible, but in an awe-inspiring, otherworldly kind of way: glowing, alabaster skin; inch-long fangs; and eyes of flaming, molten lava.
They weren’t lava right now. They weren’t even the glowing cinnamon amber that he usually let people see when his power was rising. They were their normal brown velvet, like his skin had its usual golden sheen and his hair—still down around his shoulders—was the characteristic rich mahogany.
Yet there was something different about hi
m.
I’d no sooner had the thought than he abruptly got up and left the table, and then the room, still without a word.
I just sat there for a moment, nonplussed.
Then I followed him.
Mircea’s suite at the consul’s wasn’t anywhere near as large as his old rooms at MAGIC. Maybe because he had an apartment in New York and usually stayed there when he was on this coast—and considering what went on around here normally, I didn’t blame him. Or maybe because the consul’s sprawling court was seriously overcrowded these days, hosting a ton of senators and their retinues from around the world, all of whom thought they deserved a palace of their own.
So instead of a multi-roomed, self-contained mansion filled with servants and retainers, he had what amounted to a regular one-bedroom apartment, although it looked like he needed more space. Because the living room was full of . . . I had no idea. It looked like Augustine’s shop had exploded in here.
There were gorgeous bolts of material everywhere, gleaming or glittering in the ambient lighting. There were soft furs flung over couches and couture hanging from racks. There were boxes of every shape and size piled almost as tall as me in perilous towers, some with more expensive stuff spilling out of the sides.
But none of it said “Augustine.”
“Who’s Claude?” I asked, checking out a little label. It was on a jungle-print dress covered in elaborate embroidered birds, toucans and macaws, one of which flew off and perched on my shoulder. It had weight like a real bird, but was only two dimensional, which is probably why it kept cocking its head at me, trying to get a better view.
Until it flew off to perch on a lampshade instead and sat there preening its sequined feathers.
Mircea looked up from rummaging in a box. “A French designer. We raided his shop recently.”
I looked around. Augustine would be pleased to hear it, no doubt, but why did the senate need to steal their couture? I asked Mircea as much, and received a cocked eyebrow in return.
“We didn’t steal it. We confiscated it, with proper remuneration, of course. Claude now has the distinction of being the only designer in the world to sell out a collection before it was even shown.”
“That doesn’t explain why you wanted it,” I pointed out, although some of it was pretty impressive.
And pretty sneaky, I realized, as a beaded monkey leapt off a nearby coat and grabbed my bracelet—
And made off with it!
