Must Love Vampires Read Online Free PDF Page B

to have found her quarry’s stash of fresh blood yet.
    But she wasn’t a quitter. She’d uncork and taste every one of these bottles, if she had to. And, hey, she only had about four to go, anyway, so she might as well.
    While she worked to open yet another of the unopened bottles, the cat jumped down from the counter and sprinted past her as it raced out of the kitchen. As small as the animal was, the impact of it brushing past her in her current state—yeah, yeah, so she suspected she was well on her way to being tipsy—sent her teetering slightly, even in bare feet.
    She reached out, catching herself against the edge of the counter with her free hand while she carefully balanced the glass of wine in the other. It might only have an inch and a half of crimson liquid floating around at the bottom, but she wasn’t going to risk spilling a drop.
    “Kitty,” she called out, wondering what had gotten into the unfriendly feline.
    Still clasping her glass, she tiptoed around the corner and into the long hallway leading to the rear of the apartment. She knew she should finish up—and probably clean up—in the kitchen before she went snooping around elsewhere, but the idea of following the cat was too tempting.
    Cats were notoriously sneaky and stealthy. They knew all kinds of dark, secret places where they could hide or nap . . . and where their vampiric guardians could hide all kinds of evidence of their blood-sipping, sun-avoiding tendencies.
    Her bare toes dug into the plush, ocean-blue carpeting as she hustled past a couple of closed doorways, one on either side of the hall, and toward the one that was slightly ajar at the far end of the wide corridor.
    “Here, kitty, kitty,” she crooned just above a whisper. “Where did you go, sweetheart?”
    She didn’t know why she was suddenly so concerned about being overheard. She’d just spent thirty minutes, maybe an hour, popping the corks of every bottle of wine in Sebastian Raines’s kitchen stash. At any point during that little exercise in futility, someone could have walked in and caught her in the act. Sebastian himself, or one of his giant, no-neck bodyguards.
    So either the penthouse was empty and she truly was completely alone—not counting the only cat in the world who apparently didn’t think she bathed in tuna juice on a daily basis—or her captor(s) were hiding away, leaving her to her own devices until they were ready to jump out and start giving her the old rubber hose treatment.
    She was sure rubber hoses hurt . . . along with all of the other five hundred methods of torture she could think of off the top of her head. And the ten thousand more that got added to the list if she started thinking about vampires torturing humans.
    Gads, she’d read too many horrific novels and watched too many shows about appalling myths and legends while researching this story. She had fangs and bloodletting and torn jugulars on the brain.
    The door at the end of this particular hall was open a couple of inches . . . just enough for an eight-pound laze-about cat to slip through. Bending at the waist, she put her fingers on the knob and pushed lightly, taking baby steps inside in the slow, hunched-over position she thought would be most nonthreatening to Mr. Hissy-Pants.
    “Come on now, kitty,” she continued to cajole. “There’s nothing to be scared of, and I need you to show me where your master’s bodies are buried. Not literally,” she added with a shiver, mumbling the aside to herself more than the still-missing feline.
    She seriously hoped there were no actual bodies piled up around here. That would be just . . . gross.
    Of course, for all she knew, the billionaire Raines could have a harem of blood slaves chained up in one of these back bedrooms. Or willing ones lazing about on silk sheets all day, simply awaiting the moment he would return to drain them nearly dry—with an accompanying orgasm brought on by sudden blood loss. Or so she’d read about