I arched up against the weight that held me down, deliberately rubbing against unmistakable evidence that his body disagreed with him. “Really? I’ve never had any complaints.”

Anger and heat flashed in his suddenly storm-colored eyes, but his response wasn’t what I’d expected. One moment to the next, something changed. It was nothing I could name, beyond a collection of gestures: one eyebrow rising in an elegant arch, a barely there, Mona Lisa tilt to his lips, a slight fall of lashes as long as a girl’s. Inconsequential details, but the air between us suddenly went electric, as quickly as if he’d thrown a switch. I was straining toward him before I knew it.

I clenched every muscle to halt the movement, while Louis-Cesare, damn him, was smiling. He slid a hand across my shoulder to my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair as he cupped the back of my head. I don’t like feeling overpowered, and when it happens, I fight back. But I wasn’t fighting now. I’d let him maneuver me into position and now I was letting him touch me. I remember thinking, Oh, no, he isn’t—even as he pulled me the rest of the way up. He dropped his other hand to my waist, settled my body firmly against his own and kissed me.

Such perfect pressure on my lips, such a skillful tongue in my mouth . . . it had been a long time since I’d been kissed with expertise and passion. A warm tongue expertly twined around my own, sending signals all over my body. I hadn’t paid much attention to the brief embrace in the car. I’d been stunned and freezing, and more interested in the Fey than in Louis-Cesare. He had my full attention now. A strong hand slowly moved downward until it gripped my backside, pressing me close.

I told myself not to respond, but my body wasn’t listening. My hands, no longer restrained, were pulling him closer, my fingers twisting in the decadent softness of his sweater, and I was kissing him savagely. I was furious with myself, knowing in a moment he’d push me away, but even knowing, I couldn’t seem to stop. My left leg hooked itself over him, pulling him hard against my body, and we began moving against each other, craving friction, craving intimacy.

Then he shifted, just right, and a jolt of bone-dissolving pleasure wracked my body. My breath squeezed out of my throat in a broken, shaky groan as his lips found my ear. The tip of his tongue began to trace the whorls delicately, a barely-there sensation in stark contrast to the feel of him, huge and persistent, pressed hard against me.

“Dorina.” He delicately licked along the soft curve, slowly, down to the lobe, which he caught between his teeth sharply enough to make me gasp. Then his tongue plunged inside, tracing the inner channel and leaving a slight wetness when he withdrew. His breath over the moist center made me shiver helplessly. “Neither have I.”

It took me a second to realize what he meant; then I was assailed by a vision of strangling him until he turned more purple than my hair. The maddening, adjective-inspiring, devious son of a bitch! I managed to get a foot into his stomach and pushed hard. Because of the awkward angle, he didn’t end up sailing down the aisle again, but it did send him forcefully back into his chair.

When he made no immediate attempt to get up, I righted myself and moved away a few steps on the pretense of picking up my joint from the table. I needed it to steady my nerves, and I preferred having something to look at besides him. I realized I was shaking, and it pissed me off. One kiss and my brain almost trickled out my ears! It had simply been a long time. A very long time, I realized, since I’d known the taste of another’s breath in my mouth, the feel of a nipple hardening under my tongue, the way that muscle at the top of the thigh jumps when you bite it. . . .

I sat down and took a long drag. For once, Claire’s skillful concoction didn’t seem to be working. “That was fun,” I drawled offhandedly, amazed that my voice sounded so normal. “Of course, the last vamp who kissed me ended up with a stake through his rib cage.”

I swear, I didn’t even see him move. Before I could blink, he was bent over me, hands braced on my shoulders, forcing me back against the seat. I caught his wrists, my grip as hard as I could make it, and we paused, staring at each other.

I don’t know what I looked like, but Louis-Cesare’s pupils were dilated, wide and dark, and his lips were parted. I felt my body react to the heat in that stare, and a shiver spilled through me. It was probably just my usual perverseness kicking in—Daddy’s pet vampire was the last person I should even think about getting involved with, so of course my libido had latched on to him.

“Do not provoke me, Dorina.” The voice was harsh, but not entirely steady. So, he wasn’t as unmoved as he’d like to appear. It wasn’t much of a victory, but at the moment, I’d take what I could get.

“Don’t provoke you?” I stared at his lips. I couldn’t help it; we were close enough to kiss. Do it, my pulse was beating. Do it, do it, do it. “Why, are you really that easy?”

Louis-Cesare flinched as if I’d slapped him. His expression changed, and for a split second he actually looked stricken. No, I thought. No, no, no. I felt like I’d twisted a knife in my own gut, when I should have felt triumphant. What the hell?

Louis-Cesare abruptly pulled away. He ran a hand through his hair and stared at me while I tried to get my breathing under control. When he finally spoke, it was nothing I’d expected to hear. “Why did you say that Lord Dracula will come to us?”

I searched around the carpet by my feet and found my joint. I took another much-needed drag before answering. My pulse was pounding hard enough that I could barely hear, but Louis-Cesare already had himself back under control. His sweater had recovered from our little tussle without anything so déclassé as a wrinkle; other than for slightly mussed hair, he looked like nothing had happened.

Damn vampire.

God, he could kiss, though.

“Because three people put him away last time, but only two are family,” I managed to say evenly.

“Then, logically, he should go after—”

“I wasn’t finished. His warped idea of logic only makes sense if you know his history. Radu betrayed him half a millennium ago, leading a Turkish army to force him off his throne. He spent years in exile, plotting revenge. By the time he got back, Radu had joined the life-challenged segment of the family—he’d picked up a bad case of syphilis and Mircea brought him over because at that time there was no cure. But was that good enough for Drac? Hell no.”

I stubbed out joint number one after using it to light number two. I was going to need to score some weed in ’Frisco at the rate things were going. It wouldn’t be as good as Claire’s stuff, but hopefully she’d be back tending her highly illegal herb patch soon. “The only reason he didn’t take Radu out immediately was that an assassin in the pay of some local nobles got in a lucky shot. Unfortunately, Daddy chose to bring Drac over instead of leaving him to die. And as soon as he rose, he started in on Radu as if nothing had changed. He wasn’t strong enough to kill him, being only a baby vamp, but he didn’t let that stop him from hiring others to attempt it.”

“But that did not succeed.” Louis-Cesare looked like he had forgotten to whom he was speaking for a minute, and actually seemed to be listening.

“Nope. But Drac doesn’t get over things. Didn’t as a human, doesn’t now.”

“Yet he did give up eventually. Radu is quite well today—”

“Because of luck,” I said flatly. “I don’t know what you were told, but Drac never did stop his games. He was finally locked away because it came out that he was the one who set a mob on Radu in Paris, leading to a very nasty imprisonment for your sire that almost got him killed.”

“I know.” Something about the way he said it made me glance up sharply, but there was nothing in his expression to tell me anything. I wondered exactly when he and Radu had met, and under what circumstances. It was possible, I decided, that Louis-Cesare might know more about Uncle’s stint behind bars than I did. But I knew better than to ask.

Most of the older vamps carry a lot of baggage. Humans are amazingly adaptable, able to reinvent themselves when times change, but vamps have a harder time shrugging off the centuries. Some cope by keeping their function constant over the long haul: Mircea is the Senate’s chief diplomat, for example, and has been for some time. The world might change, but people’s basic natures don’t, so their lives have a sense of continuity. Others, like Radu, drift along in some kind of denial, trying to recapture a past in which they felt at home. And some, like Drac, never stop trying to make the world over in their image. I really didn’t care which category Louis-Cesare fit. His baggage was his problem; I had enough of my own.

“And then, when Drac escaped a little over a century ago, what do you think was the first thing he did?” I continued. “Went straight back on the hunt as if nothing had changed. We were able to catch him again by using Radu as bait.”

“No.” Louis-Cesare sounded adamant. “I will not allow my old master to be subjected to that level of risk—”

“Radu is perfectly safe, at least for the moment. He isn’t Drac’s chief target anymore. Don’t misunderstand—I’m certain he’ll get around to him in time—but his isn’t the first name on the list.”

Shrewd eyes that were, thankfully, back to blue, met mine. “And who does have that honor?”

I watched my smoke being pulled into odd patterns by the plane’s air-conditioning. “You’re looking at her.”

Chapter Five

The Electric Hedgehog is a punk cybercafe run by a couple of British guys Kristie knows in a backstreet near the Bay. It’s a funky little place where you can log online, get a body piercing and buy some weed under the table, all at the same time. One-stop shopping; I like that.

Believe it or not, I hadn’t come just for the weed. I also needed a safe place to meet the rest of the team and Kristie had suggested the Hedgehog’s back room. It was a testament to the very different attitudes and styles of its two owners. While the front was all black walls and neon graffiti, the back was hippie coffeehouse chic, with vintage shag carpeting and Che Guevara posters.