I found this interesting.
“Do people tip them?” I asked.
“Rarely.”
“Why?”
“They’re filthy, ill-bred, unkempt. Most vampires have the capacity to procure the finer things in life and they do, without fail. They don’t have patience for reminders that there might be something less.” I felt my body stiffen as he continued, “And they’re hangers, Leah. Zealots. They make people uncomfortable, vampires but especially the mortals. They’re not only uninvited, they aren’t wanted.”
I looked across the room, taking in the beautiful people who could afford the finer things in life who wouldn’t tolerate the not so beautiful people who had next to nothing.
Then I remembered Lucien tossing his keys to Wats and Wats’s fanatical toadying.
“Do you tip them?” I whispered, thinking he might not hear me, my voice was so low and forgetting he was a vampire, so of course he’d hear me.
“Always,” Lucien answered and I twisted my neck to look at him.
“Really?” I breathed, not knowing why his answer, which was the right answer, meant so much to me.
His eyes roamed my face and I watched the guard go down as they gentled.
“Really, my pet. They wouldn’t eat if it wasn’t for Cosmo and me.”
Without my permission, my body relaxed into his and I faced forward again.
His arm grew tighter around my waist as his mouth went back to my ear. “It doesn’t make us terribly popular with our kind, however.”
“Screw ‘em,” I muttered before I could stop myself and I felt his body shake with laughter as I heard his throat roar with it.
Automatically, my entire being tuned itself to his laughter. Something I hadn’t heard since yesterday morning. Something that seemed to feed me, not like chocolate or some other forbidden treat, but like essential nourishment.
I felt my throat close with fear at the very thought.
In all the time I was with him, a vampire who drank human blood, who was vastly stronger than me (hell, than anyone I knew), who hurt me and humbled me and played my body against me, I’d never felt more fear than at that moment.
He felt it or sensed it, I knew this when his mouth at my ear called questioningly, “Leah?”
I noticed it then. Something else. Something that had been playing at the edge of my consciousness since we arrived.
Actually, two things.
The first wasn’t so much real as it was an undercurrent.
The eyes. The ears. The senses. The attention. Surreptitiously people were watching us, listening to us, probably, as some of them were vampires, hearing our words, smelling my perfume mingled with his woodsy cologne.
I wasn’t the sole curiosity, being new to this crowd.
It was also Lucien. In fact, it seemed to be mostly Lucien.
It was like we were movie stars…
No.
It was like he was a wildly famous movie star, I was his arm candy and we’d gone out to a regular club amongst the common people.
The second thing was what I’d felt at The Selection. The weird drugged feeling. The feeling Stephanie explained was him tracking me, marking me.
“Are you marking me?” I whispered.