him. It would take some doing to fool a vampire, but she’d been around a long time and had the strength necessary. And if it didn’t work for some reason, she’d do what she needed to do to get the information she was after.
She widened her smile and swept her arm toward the door. “After you.”
His nostrils flared as did the red in his eyes. He opened the door and murmured, “No, please. After you.”
She went through the door, aware of Finn’s burning gaze on her. He’d want to know why she’d chased Javier down and, more importantly, why she’d gone into the back rooms with him. The fact that she was going off with a vampire would automatically anger him because of the animosity between vamps and demons. But it wasn’t like she and Finn were exclusive. She never pressed him for details about his comings and goings, because she knew it’d be a waste of breath. By the same token, what she did was none of his business.
Keira pushed back the tinge of sadness that crept over her at the thought. Finn didn’t seem like the kind of demon who craved hearth and home. She sensed a restlessness about him, a desire to shake off the trappings of his current life so he could live the way he wanted to. Perhaps so he could be who he wanted to be, not who the pret world painted him as. And she had a feeling a woman didn’t fit into those plans in any permanent fashion. He was far too self-centered for that.
She walked into the small room that Javier indicated and seated herself on a little leather sofa, crossing her legs and stretching her left arm along its back. A strong scent of cinnamon colored the air, no doubt to help cover up the smell of blood. No matter how hard or how often they cleaned these rooms, blood had a way of lingering.
Javier sat beside her and leaned forward. The scent of peppermint wafted from his breath. He licked his bottom lip, no doubt thinking it made him look sexy. She forced herself to keep a sultry smile on her face as he ran his fingers lightly up and down her arm.
“So, bonita, a little bite to eat first, yes?” He curled his fingers around her wrist and lifted her arm from the back of the couch.
She trilled out a laugh, made sure she was projecting a general feeling of satisfied indulgence, and whispered, “How about you answer a question for me, and then you can have a big bite?” She leaned closer and trailed her right hand from his knee up to his inner thigh, almost but not quite hitting his sweet spot.
“Deal.” His voice came out guttural, barely sounding like that of a man. It matched the predatory gleam in eyes that had gone completely crimson.
“I don’t know if you know it or not,” she said, making sure to keep the soft Irish lilt in her voice, “but I moved here from back east to do more than get away from cold winters.”
“Oh?”
“Aye.” She stroked her fingers back down to his knee and lingered there, letting him feel the warmth of her palm through the fabric of his trousers. “We preternaturals have always had to be so careful. Before our public outing, we had to hide what we were so we didn’t provoke humans into hunting us.”
His lips twisted. “Yes, we have historical accounts to back us up on that one. The witch trials of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and werewolf trials in the sixteen hundreds.” His lips curled back to show his fangs. “And of course they’ve been frightened of vampires from time immemorial.”
“Exactly!” Keira agreed. “And now it’s all ‘Don’t do this or you might make the humans around you aware of what you are. Don’t do that or you’ll expose us all.’” She sighed and started a halting trail back up his thigh. “You’d think that since we’ve become common knowledge things would have changed, but they’ve only gotten worse.”
“Yes, they have.” Javier rested one hand on her left shoulder. The other lay on the thigh opposite the one she currently teased. “What’s your point?”
“My point is… I’m tired of it.” She held his gaze with her own. “We’re stronger than humans. Better than humans. We should be living loud and proud, not denying who we are.” She halted high up on his thigh, still not touching where she knew he