Dark Nights: Mistress of the Underground / The Vampire Affair. Livia Reasoner

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      Her age was probably why she felt so out of place at Club Underground. Everyone else, patrons and staff, including Sebastian, seemed so much younger and more beautiful. Kate was wrong; no one was stalking Paige. No one would want to….

      Then she tilted her head, listening…to the sound of running water. The walls were thick in the old warehouse that had been converted to condos; the noise could not be coming from an adjoining unit. It had to be coming from her bathroom. Her pulse raced with fear. She should have had Kate walk her to the door, as the detective had wanted. But Paige had insisted that no one would have gotten past the doorman in the lobby or her security system.

      She glanced to the alarm panel near the door. The lights were off; someone had already disabled it. How? Only she and Sebastian knew the code, and he’d remained back at the club.

      She fumbled inside her purse for her cell phone. She could call Kate again; she might not have left the parking lot yet. But why would someone break in to use her bathroom?

      She dropped her purse onto the hall table and reached instead for one of the bottles on the wine rack beneath it. As she had back at the club, she intended to use it as a weapon. She lifted it, like a bat, over her shoulder as she stepped inside her bedroom. When she crossed the hardwood floor to the open bathroom doorway, the water sputtered and cut off. Steam billowed from the room.

      Paige tightened her grip on her weapon of choice. Her intruder would need another shower after she broke the bottle over his head.

      But then the man stepped out, water sluicing over his naked skin—all that naked skin. And she dropped the bottle onto the floor. The neck spun until the cork pointed toward him.

      “So today’s game is spin the bottle?” Ben asked.

      “Game?” she repeated, her eyes wide as her gaze traveled up and down his body.

      Ben tensed, every muscle taut with desire at her blatant interest in him. He would have figured he was too worried—and too tired—to want her again. But none of that mattered now. He would want her even if he was dead, which since he’d learned of the secret society had become an inevitable fate.

      “Is this a game,” she asked, “your breaking in here and scaring me again?”

      “I didn’t break in.” But had it been necessary he would have, so that he’d been able to secure the place before she’d come home.

      “Sebastian’s not here,” she said. “He didn’t let you in.”

      “He didn’t need to,” he explained. “He gave me a key.”

      “He gave you a key?” she repeated. “To my place? And he gave you the security code, too?”

      “I guessed the security code.”

      Color flushed her face, making her blue eyes even brighter. “It…it’s just easier to remember,” she sputtered.

      While she was embarrassed that she’d used the date of their wedding as the code, like they had at the home they’d shared, Ben was encouraged that there might be hope for them. At least he had been until he reminded himself that he had nothing to offer her but secrets and danger.

      “Of course,” he agreed, “it’s easy to remember.”

      “So you just let yourself in,” she remarked, then gestured toward the bathroom, “and helped yourself to my shower?”

      “I needed it.” He’d needed to rid himself of the blood and the scent of death that always clung to him when he went to the Underground.

      “Why didn’t you use the showers in the locker room?”

      He turned away and reached for a towel. He ran the terry cloth across his skin before wrapping it around his waist. “Locker room?”

      “At the hospital. You had to leave me at the club to treat a patient, right?”

      He hadn’t given her much of an explanation when he’d had her lock herself inside the office to wait for the detective. But while she’d been looking at the damage to Sebastian’s car, he had seen the mortally wounded vampire and had known someone needed him more than she had.

      “Your patient is stable now?” she asked with her usual concern and compassion.

      He flinched and shut his eyes on the image of Owen lying there with his chest open, the stake protruding from his savaged heart. “I wouldn’t say that….”

      “Then you should go back to the hospital,” she urged him, “and take care of your patient.”

      “There’s nothing more I can do for him,” he said with a sigh. The society of undead buried their own dead. “I wanted to get back to you…to make sure that you’re all right.”

      “I’m fine.”

      “I wish I believed you,” he said, “but you don’t look fine, Paige.”

      She lifted a hand to her face. “I got caught in the rain.”

      He glanced around her to the bedroom window; rain ran in rivulets down the glass, but the sky had lightened as there were only a few gray clouds. As always, he breathed a small sigh of relief during the day. The undead didn’t need him then—unless they’d been out in the sunlight. But the undead were not his only patients; he had other ones—human patients at the hospital, to which he’d often been called away from Paige.

      “You should get out of your wet clothes,” he suggested, intent on taking advantage of the time he had with her.

      Her lips lifted in a faint smile. “Are you trying to get me naked?”

      Even with clothes on, she was naked to him, her face vulnerable as it revealed all her feelings. All her pain and fear.

      His heart contracted with regret for what his secrets had cost them both. “I came here to make sure you’re all right.”

      She turned away from him, toward the window that the rain sluiced down as it had his skin earlier in the shower. “And I told you I’m fine. I reported the vandalism. I have a detective working on the case now. I’ve done everything I was supposed to do.”

      Now he suspected she was talking about something else—something they had never talked about.

      “I know,” he assured her.

      She shook her head. “No. No, you don’t. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.”

      “We’re playing that game again?” he asked. “Strangers?”

      “We’re not playing,” she said with a slight edge, but then she sighed and shook her head. “You’re a burglar, and I’m the homeowner who found you in my shower.”

      He hated the games, hated more that they actually weren’t playing at being strangers. But if playing the game was the only way he could stick close to her, he’d play….

      He would do anything to protect her—even let her go, if he had to…

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