you searching for?” Basil asked, as if he were her friend and wished to help.
“I came for a drink,” Selena said, sliding a look at him.
“Yet, you are not drinking it.” His mouth turned up slightly. This time his eyes sparkled with mirth.
He was right. She tried to raise the glass to her lips, but she couldn’t. What if the drink was laced with something that would make her pass out? Make her more vulnerable than she already was in a dance club full of vampires, any of whom could possibly be renegades? Any one of them who might think he was on her terminal list?
“The drink is safe,” Basil said, as if reading her mind.
But she knew he couldn’t. Her hesitation at drinking it was what clued him in.
Human males were so unobservant, she had concluded early on. But vampiric males and hunters had the same intuitiveness that nearly all females had, whatever their kind.
She was not afraid. Trying to keep her hand from trembling, she lifted the glass to her lips, but the man with the dark brown eyes and the short-cropped hair suddenly appeared beside her and bumped against her arm. Before she could stop herself, she dropped the glass on the floor, shattering it into a hundred pieces and quashed the swear word that rose to her lips.
“You will leave here, huntress,” the man whispered harshly into her ear, his hand grasping her arm in a decisive grip. “And never return.”
Having been thrown out of so many hunter establishments over the years because of constantly being on the outs with the League, she wasn’t surprised to be treated similarly here. Well, especially here.
She raised her chin and gave him a slight smile. “Apology accepted.”
His eyes widened slightly, and for an instant, his threatening posture dissolved.
Seeing his surprise, she couldn’t help that her smile broadened. As a kid, she’d learned to deal with other hunters who treated her meanly, just by doing the opposite of what they expected. It threw them off-guard. It seemed the trick worked on vampires too. Glancing at Basil, she found him glowering at the other man, but she assumed whoever the roguish-looking guy was, his spilling her drink saved her from some kind of trouble.
Yet, defiance stirred deep inside her, and she would not be bullied into a hasty retreat.
“Wanna dance?” she asked the man she assumed had saved her butt.
For an instant, he stared at her with a modicum of disbelief, but then the condemning look returned. “You would not do the moves justice.” Yet despite his harsh words, he took her arm and led her to the floor.
Chapter 2
When the vampire took Selena to the dance floor—led would not be quite the way to describe it, more like he practically lifted her off her feet to get her there—his action surprised the hell out of her. She’d expected him to sneer at her, then move away. And when he didn’t, a strange quiver of intrigue raced through her blood when his fingers held her arm tightly in his grasp.
Did he think she would change her mind? She wanted to. She’d been a fool to enter the dance club once she’d figured out who the clientele was despite wanting to meet Twilight.
Walking onto the parquet floor, the colorful strobe lights shining greens, blues, yellows, and reds dancing across its surface, she felt her nerves tingle with apprehension. The notion had flitted across her brain that if she had to do this, she’d expected other dancers—as crowded as the floor was—to hide the two of them from view. Not that she couldn’t dance. But dancing like some of the others had? And with a vampire? No way.
She reminded herself the vampires had probably been with their mates, and this one wouldn’t expect her to dance in that manner with him. She didn’t care one whit whether she had any of a vampiress’s exotic moves or not. She would not back down.
Everyone cleared the floor as if they were specters fading into the mist—or in this case, the dark building where colorful lights flashed all over them, the dance floor, Selena, and her dance partner.
She was left standing in the middle with tall, dark, and vampiric, and no matter her bravado, she wanted to melt into the parquet. Even the music had stopped, and she felt her lioness heart shrivel into a mouse’s as the whole building was cloaked in absolute silence.
The man’s mouth turned up slightly at the corners, but the humor