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“Promise me,” he repeated.
“Yes. I promise. Now give me my gun. ” I held my hand out to the front seat expectantly.
“Desmond, please oblige the young lady. ”
I stared at the brunet wolf, my eyes locked on to the odd-colored pools of his own, and saw the unspoken threat there. His eyes told me if I stepped out of line he would be on me. Deep inside a part of me bristled, the internal-organ equivalent to a dog’s ruff going up when alarmed. What was it with these guys? I’d been with them less than fifteen minutes and they’d already gotten more reaction out of my wolf than anyone had in the past twenty-two years combined. I’d been so careful to keep my inner dog collared, I often forgot it was there at all. But it was awake now, and everything happening had it both snarling and wagging its tail.
Traitorous beast.
The wolf named Desmond handed me my gun, and once I was holding it I resisted the urge to point it at anyone. It wouldn’t do me any good anyway. The bullets in the weapon weren’t silver. While vampires were just as prone to silver injuries as werewolves were, I’d learned that when you were using the gun to blow off someone’s head it didn’t matter what kind of metal you were using. My job description almost never included hunting werewolves, so using silver bullets for everyday jobs was an unnecessary expense. It was experiences like this that made me think maybe I should splurge and use silver bullets all the time.
I didn’t point the gun at Mr. Rain or either of his men. Promises were promises after all, so the gun went back into the waist of my pants. Why I hadn’t considered wearing my holster today was beyond me. I’d wanted a quiet night, but it was no excuse for being so unprepared. If there were a Boy Scout motto for bounty hunters, it would be Always Be Armed.
Dominick had left the car and was opening my door from the outside. Desmond and I exited at the same moment, and I had no doubt he would stick to my side like a stretched-out shadow for the rest of the evening. His attitude was doing a lot to tell me that he liked this situation even less than I did. He was taking great efforts to stay close without actually touching me.
Mr. Rain let himself out and rounded the town car to stand next to me. He didn’t have the same apprehension as Desmond about touch. His hand pressed against the small of my back, his deft fingers avoiding my weapon and angling me forward with a gentle nudge. The contact of his fingertips, even through the leather of my jacket and the flimsy cotton of my shirt, sent a shimmering thrill up my spine and all the way down into my groin.
The unexpected intensity of the lust brought on by such a small touch terrified me. Certainly this wasn’t normal. I was not in control of my own desire, and I hated being out of control in any way.
Sandwiched between Desmond and Mr. Rain with Dominick following at our rear, there was no easy way out. We walked towards the building that Dominick had parked in front of, and I immediately recognized its high-gloss black exterior and the cascading wall fountains on either side of the twelve-foot glass doors. The building had been featured in both Architectural Digest and an episode of Lifestyles of the Fabulously Wealthy. I had only seen it in passing, on my way to or from killing something.
Rain. Rain was the name of this six-star beast of a hotel, where room rates started at eight hundred dollars a night and only went higher from there. Realization began to dawn on me, but I still hadn’t put all the pieces together. I knew enough to know that when I fit in the last few bits, I wasn’t going to like the big picture.
A doorman stood in the entrance, looking unfazed to see one small woman being flanked by a pack of men. Pack? Poor but appropriate word choice.
“Good evening, Mr. Rain. Will you be needing the car again tonight?”
“That remains to be seen, Carl. Please have it at the ready,” Rain instructed. The doorman nodded, and I felt a pit building in my guts. “Tell Melvin to ensure that no phone calls are forwarded to the apartment until further notice. ”
We crossed the massive lobby in a few quick strides. It didn’t allow me much time to marvel at the slick black and silver details, but I did notice that the interior walls, much like those outside, were made of black marble waterfalls. The polished elevator doors slid open, and I was ushered inside the mirrored box.
Elevators were a conundrum for me. The vampire in me did not blanch at being encased in a tight space, as the undead are programmed to accept this as a survival requirement. Though I had never been inside a coffin myself, vampires were predisposed to like tight, dark areas. The oft-overlooked werewolf part of me, however, longed to claw at the doors until I was allowed out.
It felt like we rose for an eternity. Mr. Rain’s hand slid under the base of my short jacket and shirt and grazed my bare skin. I wanted to slap him for his forwardness until I realized that the tension had completely drained from me just at the thrill of direct content. His faintest touch had soothed the beast within. My wolf was no longer panicked.
Boy did I ever have questions for this guy.
I’d met werewolves in the past and had killed two out of necessity, but none of them had created this surreal wave of tranquility in me.
“Who are you, anyway?” The words slipped from my mouth in a breathless whisper, all of my abrasive rage lifted from my voice. The other two wolves exchanged a glance.
“I am Lucas Rain,” he said, as if it were just any normal name and he was just any normal guy introducing himself to a girl for the first time.
A breath caught in my throat, and I swayed from the shock of learning his true identity. How stupid could I have been to miss it? Mr. Rain? Rain Hotel? God, I was slipping. This was the Lucas Rain, an intensely private billionaire real-estate magnate.
He had, as rumor held, bought the Boston Red Sox as a twenty-first birthday gift to himself. He never showed his face in public. Page Six only published blurry photos of him in baseball caps or hooded coats.
Models constantly insisted on having bedded him, but none of their stories aligned well enough to establish where he kept his permanent residence. The only thing they could all agree on was he was a vigorous and gifted lover, and never asked for second dates.
Conjecture and mystery surrounded everything about the Rain family. Lucas’s father, Jeremiah, and his father before him, had each been just as secretive and shut-in as Lucas now was. The only Rain descendant who relished the spotlight was Lucas’s sister, Kellen, who put the Hilton sisters to shame with her debaucherous public antics. Lucas was like a ghost, nothing known about him for certain. But here I was, standing side by side with him, and if his touch was any indication, he was more real than any ghost I’d ever encountered.
I also knew the reason he cherished his secrecy as deeply as I did my own. There was something that Lucas had kept hidden from the prying eyes of humankind for his whole life, and I was already in on the secret.
For a werewolf native to New York state and specifically New York City proper, the name of Lucas Rain was held in reverence for a completely different reason, one that would never be published in the tabloid columns.
I was in an elevator with Lucas Rain, the werewolf king of the East.
Chapter Seven
