“I fink I see Lady Godiva over dere. Better chat with her while she still ‘as ‘er knickers on.” His turquoise velvet jacket was swallowed by the black tuxedoed crowd like a peacock sinking into a murder of ravens.
“Hanna.” Mark’s voice was as heavy as the monoliths arching overhead.
“Mark.”
My fingers were caught up in an icy grasp from behind as cool lips pressed a kiss against my knuckles.
I spun around to find a man bent over my hand.
“Lady Hanna.” My first thought was to wonder how he knew my name. The second, how the speaker could force entire words out of a mouth puckered tighter than a nun’s ass. Tall, dour, and silver-haired, he looked more like a ruler dipped in black paint than a human being. His unfortunate choice in monotone clothing served only to highlight the fine dusting of snowfall at his shoulders and wrists from skin that was clean, but exceptionally dry.
He reminded me of someone. I struggled for a moment fighting to drag the image haunting my mind’s depths to the surface.
A butler.
That’s who he reminded me of. A starchy, glowering, stoop-shouldered servant perpetually disapproving of people with more power than he had.
Behind the black-clad bony arch of the “Butler’s” back, a servant stood at attention. If you threw a marine and a biker into a blender with a dash of rock star and baked the resulting batter in a blast furnace, the guy hovering at the Butler’s elbow was about what you’d get. He wore a tight black shirt stretched over an amateur body builder’s physique, jeans, motorcycle boots, and a smirk that would frighten predators and charm prey. Not human. But not a vampire either.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” The knuckle-kisser’s pale, milky blue gaze slid from Mark to me.
Mark’s eyes fastened on the spot on my hand the Butler had kissed. “Tiberious Klaudios Epaphroditos,” he said, pronouncing the name like the Latin classification of a flesh-eating virus.
“Klaud,” the man corrected, offering me his long, spidery fingers.
“Hanna,” I said. “Lady isn’t necessary.” His cold flesh felt like a loose glove over spindly bones beneath my brief grip. I let go quickly, plagued by the vision of his skin sliding away in my hand.
Klaud followed my gaze over his shoulder and rewarded me with a smile that looked like it required the help of gears and pulleys. “This is my servant, Crixus.”
The full lips that found my knuckles were as smooth as the voice was rough. And hot.
Literally.
Heat sank through my skin and found the veins below, where it sent a vibration up my arm, down my shoulder, through my chest, and then found its way south. Tightness gathered at the place where my femoral arteries fed the nerve-rich flesh between them. When the first spasm found me, my eyes flew wide. This couldn’t be happening.
Crixus smiled, rising.
The sensation didn’t relent. It redoubled. My shallow breath became a pant. Another spasm. And another.
I swayed on my heels as an orgasm expanded outward through my body like the ripples on a pond. The familiar rush of wet heat didn’t follow, and I was grateful. Abernathy would have smelled it.
Why are you panting? Mark’s voice was an earthquake in my skull.
Stupid cors—
Think louder! Mark’s voice arrived in my mind.
Dude. I can hear you too?
It would seem so, came the terse reply.
I worked on slowing my breath. Pulling air into my lungs slowly, softly.
“The Emperor Nero wishes he could have been here this evening,” Klaud said, interrupting our mental conversation with his verbal one. “He was most eager to meet you.”
To my embarrassment, this handful of words still carried enough power to sting a blush to my cheeks. The Emperor Nero was eager to meet me? “Me?” I asked. “Why?”
Klaud’s pupils flared in time with the throbbing of my pulse within its corseted tourniquet. “It’s been centuries since an heir was brought to Castle Abernathy. Why, the last time—”
“Is none of your concern,” Mark interrupted. His look was colder than the heart that failed to beat in Klaud’s chest.
Heir. I had barely begun to accept this word as applying to me. Bound by blood as the process seemed to be, it wasn’t a stretch to include my mother and grandmother within the label. But there had to be other heirs. From other bloodlines. Were there any now? Was Mark protecting them the way he protected me?
“Who was the last heir you brought here?”
Mark seemed as irritated as Klaud was pleased by the question. “Hanna, this isn’t the