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go somewhere we can work in private.”
    “Stay here,” Jonas said. “We’ve got business at the club.”
    She nodded to him and waited for the couple to say their goodbyes. Blane walked out of the small gym without so much as a backward glance. Her heart felt heavy as he disappeared through the doorway. Some part of her wanted him to want her, as ridiculous as that was.
    Emotions were getting the best of her again. There was no logical reason to feel so drawn to him and so in need of his regard. He was, as far as her family and status were concerned, too far beneath her for a real relationship. And he thought the same of her, making it an impossible, reckless fantasy.

    * * * *
“What was that?” Jonas said, catching up to Blane in the hallway outside his room.
    “Leave it alone, J.” Blane flung open his bedroom door, turning his back on the vampire.
    He didn’t owe him an explanation, and he wasn’t going to offer one.
    “She bit you?” Jonas laughed. “That’s a first.”
    He grabbed a shirt from the foot of the bed. “I’m warning you. Back off.”
    Jonas propped against a chest of drawers near the door. “What are you going to do?
    Attack me because I asked about what I just walked in on? I think that after everything you’ve

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    learned about me, you can humor me with a little info.”
    The fratello had a point. Blane had been around for Jonas’s obsessions with Tori and Elena, before he changed her. This was nothing by comparison.
    Still, he didn’t want to talk about it.
    “Sorry, J. I don’t want to have this conversation,” he said, opening the door to the bathroom. “I just want to take a shower and go to work.”
    Jonas nodded. “Understood. But keep in mind who she is. As a smart man once told me,
    ‘Dangerous game you’re playin’, fratello’.”
    Blane knew his own words just as they bit him sharply on the ass. He’d said that to Jonas when he’d witnessed something happening between him and Tori after she was bound to Michael. At the time, he’d thought Jonas had a death wish. Now, he was beginning to understand. That forbidden fruit cliché was starting to sound like a very, very accurate proverb.
    “I’ve got work to do,” he muttered, then walked into the bathroom.
    By the time he emerged, Jonas was gone. He didn’t see him at the club either, and he was grateful. It gave him time to refocus on his job. By midnight, he was working the crowd with his usual mix of sarcasm and excessive flirtation. There were the regular patrons who didn’t take him seriously, and a few new girls who weren’t sure whether to take him seriously or not.
    When he went for his break at two, one of the latter slid up beside him at the bar. “I feel like you’re trying to avoid me.”
    He glanced down to see a woman with short brown hair and an even shorter red skirt, then turned his attention back to the blood and vodka he’d been nursing. “I’m not avoiding anyone.”
    “In that case, why don’t we go back to one of the private rooms?”

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    Blane smirked. On any other night, he’d have done exactly that and enjoyed every minute of it. Tonight, though, the idea sounded a little monotonous. How many nights had he spent in those rooms with faceless women?
    “Well?” She slid a hand down his arm.
    He watched her hand moving over his, warm blood beating just beneath the surface.
    There was warmth there. Not from love or even affection, but food. He was a predator, feeding on the blood of humans. Nothing would change that. If he could take it in a way that gave them pleasure, that’s what he’d do.
    And he was hungry.
    Pushing away from the bar, Blane grabbed the girl’s hand and led her down the corridor to the private rooms created for fetish exploration. The last on the left was his favorite—the boudoir room designed for lingerie and shoe fetishes.
    The human moved to the couch and sat, watching him with big doe eyes. She looked the part of prey, and it made the beast within