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I didn’t respect men like that.
3
COLTER
Jerry was a piece of shit if I’d ever met one, but he had a lot of power in the vampire world, and they looked up to him. If I wanted to create an alliance with the vampires, Jerry was someone I wanted on my team. The vampire was an asset, and far be it from me to get rid of assets if they were doing me some good. I couldn’t stand him as a person. He was full of himself and a kiss-ass. I hated a kiss-ass.
His newassistantwas nothing like anyone else in this whole damn firm. She was feisty as fuck—she hadn’t had to get up in my face for me to know that. She was smart, too. I could see it in her eyes. Deep, dark eyes and dark eyebrows that gave her a sexy, broody look that made me want to push her up against a wall and find out what she tasted like.
I had a thing for brunettes, and she was a fucking wet dream.
There was something else about her, too. Something that made me sit up and notice, but not in a way where my cock was involved.
Liv had an aura. Humans didn’t have that—she had to be some kind of enchanted being, like the rest of us in the room.
Jerry cleared his throat and started some bullshit presentation about how he needed more of my money. I switched off. Lazlo took notes. I would read them if I had questions. Or just ask Lazlo to tell me—make life easy for all of us.
I turned my attention back to Liv. I couldn’t get a read on what she was. Some kind of shifter? No, I would have picked up her scent if she was. We had all kinds of shifters in this city, from dragons, like me, to wolves, like Mykel and his sister, to bears and cats. All the predators you could imagine lived under my rule.
Liv was nothing like them.
She wasn’t a vampire, either. She radiated too much warmth. Vampires were cold, heartless beings. Not literally—they had the organ—but they were full of shit and out for personal gain in a determined, ugly way. There were exceptions, of course. Lazlo wouldn’t have been on my team of confidants if all vampires were egotistical parasites, but Jerry was the perfect example of what a vampire could be.
Vampires and demons were the bane of my existence, causing shit in my town more often than not.
Was she a demon?
No way in hell—demons didn’t look like Liv did. She looked like she’d fallen straight from the Overworld, an angel in my lap. But that was my cock talking.
I wanted to fuck this one. She was perfect in every way. She looked like she could be a real treat, which was more than I could say about the women I’d been through the past couple of decades. They’d become a sea of faces, one after the other, a place for me to get off when I was wired and in need of a release. I didn’t even remember names at this point.
I would remember Liv, though; that shit was for sure. She wasn’t the type of woman I wanted to pull over for a one-night stand. Sure, I’d love to get her horizontal beneath me, but she deserved a date, to be treated right and spoiled…
Pity I didn’t do shit like that. My stepmom had been the bitch to show me the true colors of a woman, and if I wanted to walk the same road as my dad—namely, getting killed by my spouse—then I would take a wife.
No, I wasn’t a fool. I didn’t need to make all my mistakes myself. Life was too short…
I snorted at myself.
“Is something wrong?” Jerry asked, stopping halfway through his presentation.
“No,” I said. “Carry on.”
Mykel looked at me, amused. I pursed my lips.
I wasn’t going to explain that the sayinglife was too shortdidn’t apply to shifters who lived for centuries. I was two hundred and twenty-two. I’d already lived a whole lifetime, and I wasn’t planning on checking out anytime soon.
If this project got off the ground and the machine worked, of course. Without it, I didn’t have all that much time left.
I pushed the thoughts away, focusing on something else. The pretty assistant was a sight for sore eyes, for example.
Not that it mattered if she was anything more than a pretty face.
The fact of the matter remained that women were pure poison, and they were only good for one thing—fucking at arm’s length.
No, getting involved with a woman would only mess up what I’d spent so much time putting in place. That was what it had done for my dad, and fuck if I was going to follow in his footsteps. It had taken one woman to unravel it all. My stepmom had ruined it all when my dad had let her walk over him, and I would never let that happen.
I’d worked my fingers to the bone to create an empire, to make my money, and to become someone who could change the way shit was. I was the alpha in the city. I’d worked my way through the ranks, fighting and killing the right people to get to the top, and now that I was here, I had every shifter in the city—and the few vampires were on board with what I was trying to do—reporting to me.
