His eyes flicked to Jean-Claude, to me, to my leather coat forgotten on the floor. “I am sorry to interrupt your evening, but I thought it would come better if the Executioner delivered the vampire to the police rather than us. I think the reporters will listen to you when you say we did not condone this, and you are honorable enough to tell the truth.”
“Are you saying the rest of the police aren’t?”
“I am saying that many of our law enforcement are distrustful of us and would be only too happy to see us lose our status as citizens.”
I’d have liked to have argued, but I couldn’t. “I’ll drop him off for you and I’ll make sure the press knows you delivered him.”
“Thank you, Ms. Blake.” He looked at Jean-Claude. “Again, my apologies; I was told that the two of you were no longer dating.”
“We aren’t dating,” I said, a little too quickly.
He shrugged. “Of course.” He looked back at Jean-Claude and gave a smile that said more than anything that they didn’t quite like each other. He liked interrupting Jean-Claude’s evening. They were two very different kinds of vampire and neither really approved completely of the other.
Malcolm stepped over the struggling, gagged form of the other vampire and went out the door with his deacons. None of them even looked back at the vampire chained on the floor.
There were a flock of waiters and waitresses in their skimpy uniforms, huddled in the doorway. “Take this vampire and load him in ma petite’s car.”
He looked at me, and I got my keys out of the leather coat and tossed it to one of the vampires. One of the women picked the chained vamp off the floor and tossed him over her shoulder like he weighed nothing. They closed the door behind them without being told.
I picked my coat off the floor. “I have to go.”
“Of course, you do.” His voice held just a little bit of anger. “You have let your desire for me out and now you must cage it again, hide it away, be ashamed of it.”
I started to be angry, but I looked at him sitting there, head down, hands limp in his lap, as dejected as I’d seen him in a while, and I wasn’t angry. He was right, that was exactly how I treated him. I stayed where I was, the coat over one arm.
“I have to take him down to the police station and make sure the press gets the truth, not something that will make the vampires look worse than they already do in all this.”
He nodded without looking up.
If he’d been his usual arrogant self I could have left him like that, but he was letting his pain show, and that I couldn’t just walk away from. “Let’s try an olive branch,” I said.
He looked up at that, frowning. “Olive branch?”
“White flag?” I said.
He smiled then. “A truce.” He laughed, and it danced over my skin, “I did not know we were at war.”
That hit a little too close to home. “Are you going to let me say something nice, or not?”
“By all means, ma petite, far be it for me to interrupt your gentler urges.”
“I am trying to ask you out on a date.”
The smile widened, his eyes filling with such instant pleasure that it made me look away, because it made me want to smile back at him. “It must have been a very long time since you asked a man out; you seem to be out of practice.”
I put on my coat. “Fine, be a smart alec. See where it gets you.”
I was almost to the door when he said, “Not a war, ma petite, but a siege, and this poor soldier is feeling very left out in the cold.”
I stopped and turned around. He was still sitting on the desk trying to look harmless, I think. He was many things: handsome, seductive, intelligent, cruel, but not harmless, not to body, mind, or soul.
“Tomorrow night, pick a restaurant.” One of the side effects of being his human servant was that he could taste food through me. It was the first time he’d been able to taste food in centuries. It was a minor power to share but he adored it, and I adored watching him enjoying his first bite of steak in four hundred years.
“I will make reservations,” he said, voice careful again, as if he were afraid I’d change my mind.
Looking at him, sitting on his desk all in red and black and satin and leather, I didn’t want to change my mind. I wanted to sit across the table from him. I wanted to drive him home and go inside and see what color of sheets he had on that big bed of his.
It wasn’t just the sex; I wanted someone to hold me. I wanted some place safe, some place to be myself. And like it, or hate it, in Jean-Claude’s arms I could be perfectly who and what I was. I could have called Richard up and he’d have been just as glad to hear from me, and there would have been as much heat, but Richard and I had some philosophical differences that went beyond him being a werewolf. Richard tried to be a good person, and he thought I killed too easily to be a good person. Jean-Claude had helped teach me the ultimate practicality that had kept me alive, helped me keep others alive. But the thought that Jean-Claude’s arms were the closest thing I had to a refuge in this world was a sobering thought. Almost a depressing one.