Page 6 of Golden Eagle

By the time he was out of sight, someone had taken his place on the stool. A female someone.

She smelled of perfume, sweat, deodorant, and the sticky-sweetness of alcohol – not in an unpleasant way. She propped her elbow on the bar, slid the dregs of her pink cocktail toward Sasha, and smiled at him. One of her dress straps slipped a little down her shoulder. Her hair was black, black, black, her lips the pink, pink, pink of ripe grapefruit.

There was a part of Sasha that would always feel like the blushing boy Ivan had dragged into a prostitute’s home back in Moscow. But he’d had plenty of years fielding advances at this point; just because he’d never done anything about his interest in sex didn’t mean it wasn’t there, lurking warm and insistent beneath his skin.

“Hi,” she said, voice pitched soft enough that he wouldn’t have heard it above the crowd if he wasn’t a wolf.

“Refill?” He scooped her glass up as she nodded, but he hesitated. Just a second. Her eyes were fixed to him in that way that spoke oflatersand hotel sheets and fingernails digging into skin.

“Thank you.” She made a point of brushing her fingers over his when he passed her a fresh glass.

He knew, in that moment of skin on skin contact, that if he asked for her number, she’d give it readily. And not because he’d compelled her – he couldn’t do that. But because his too-long pale hair and wasp waist did something for some women. “Boy toy,” one customer had called him before.

This customer bit her lip. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he said, because he couldn’t reasonably pretend to be much older than he looked. His ID said 21, anyway.

“Hmm,” she purred. “You busy later?”

The thing was…Sasha wasn’t made of stone. He wasn’t immune to the promise of sex, the heady idea of it, of being, the way he’d always craved, with another person, and not just his hand and a few vague fantasies.

He just didn’t want to have sex withher.

But…

His gaze dropped to the bar, to the section where, beneath, in a plastic bin, he collected cocktail napkins with women’s numbers. And he thought of Nikita – spike of pain in his chest, shortness of breath – and the way he hadn’t smiled in the weeks since they’d returned from Virginia.

“Maybe,” he hedged, and did his best to give the woman a sultry look. Was that something women wanted from men? Sultry? Whatever. “You see, I have this very handsome friend…”

~*~

Nikita smelled him first; thus was the vampire’s curse. Fresh sweat, bourbon, and his own personal markers. Nikita tensed – he was leaned back against the wall, arms folded, already strung so tight that he hadn’t known it was possible to tense further. He managed, though, as Lanny slipped between two tables and walked up to him with a wide, overdone grin.

“Nik. Dude.” He extended a hand for a fist-bump.

Nikita pretended he didn’t know what that meant, tucking his hands a little deeper into his armpits.

Lanny studied him, a single moment of sharp focus that plainly said,You’re not fooling me, man. Nikita heard it in his head in Lanny’s obnoxious New York accent. Then Lanny glanced over at the hulking George, who stood to Nik’s left. George was a bouncer who, unlike Nik, actually looked the part: six-seven, neckless, bulging with muscles.

“This guy,” Lanny said to him, grinning, jerking a thumb toward Nikita. “Total sourpuss, you know?”

George grunted something noncommittal.

“So, hey, this place is jumping,” Lanny continued, looking up at George–

Lookingat him, Nikita suddenly noticed with a start. His dark eyes blown wide, all pupil. The subtle shift of his voice, the dropping into a lower, velvety register, moved across Nikita’s skin unpleasantly, like the buzzing of insects.

“Maybe you should go keep an eye on the dance floor, huh?”

George blinked, and then, slowly, pushed off the wall and shifted away through the crowd, head-and-shoulders above the patrons.

Lanny turned around and slumped back against the wall in the place George had vacated, breathing out a gusty sigh. “Shit. That’s hard. I think I pulled something in my brain.”

Nikita was too disturbed by the realization that Lanny had been practicing to take the obvious joke bait. “You’re getting stronger.” It didn’t leave his mouth as a compliment.

Lanny shrugged with his face and his shoulders. “Alexei’s been showing me some things. Said it might come in useful.” He turned to Nikita, smile wry. “Never know when you might have to storm a castle, you know?”

“Why are you here?” Nikita asked.

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