Dead and Dateless (32 page)

Like who in Damien’s name was her mother and why would she want me followed?

And, more important, had Gwen started dating again?

FYI—in addition to being a hot, happening
vampere,
I’m also Manhattan’s newest primo matchmaker.

She peeked around the corner once more, camera poised, and my instincts screamed for me to shift into Supervamp mode, make like my last client fee, and disappear.

Fast.

Our species, and the dozens of Others out there, hadn’t survived thousands of years by keeping a high profile. We exercised caution and kept to ourselves and avoided cameras at all cost.

I paused and made a show of adjusting my shoe (snakeskin Prada stiletto), and gave her my best profile.

Hey, we’re talking
stiletto.
As in mucho P-A-I-N. I simply
had
to wiggle my toes.

And ease my own conscience. What can I say? I’ve got a soft spot for potential clients. Even more, I’m a jumbo marshmallow when it comes to potential clients with bossy, overbearing mothers (DO NOT get me started).

The camera clicked a few times, and I morphed from white ball of fluff into determined
vampere.
I stepped forward, my feet moving so fast that I emerged from my back-alley route a half block away, walked into the massive high-rise near the heart of Times Square, and sailed onto the elevator before Gwen had a chance to blink, much less follow.

Did I mention that born vamps are superfast in addition to being total hotties?

While I wasn’t opposed to giving her a few pics so she didn’t go back empty-handed, I hadn’t taken a back-alley route for the great scenery. The last thing—the very
last
thing—I needed was to be caught dead (or undead) in a place like
this.

I stepped off the elevator at the eighth floor and walked into the lobby of KNYC, a local cable net work near the NBC studios responsible for several home-grown news programs, a handful of talk shows, and the recent reality smash
Manhattan’s Most Wanted
.

MMW was a local version of
The Bachelor
that paired up one of the city’s most sought-after males with fifty marriage-minded, crème de la creme females and let him weed them down to the One.

At least that was the idea. The last guy—a Wall Street financier—had narrowed his bevy of bombshells down to the One Who’d Taken the Rock and Hauled Ass. She’d pocketed the cash and headed for Mexico, and the financier ended up on Dr. Phil.

Plush gold carpeting cushioned my stance and eased the pressure on my tootsies. Pale yellow walls decorated with gold deco mirrors surrounded me. Cinnamon-colored leather chairs traced the perimeter. Several tables overflowed with magazines. A man stood near a glass doorway marked
Studio A,
a head set hooked around his neck and a clipboard in his hands.

The only man in a room that otherwise overflowed with single, successful, smart, attractive,
desperate
women.

Talk about a target-rich environment.

I’d taken on several vamps and weres over the past few months, but Others were much harder to pair up than your average human. There was too much emphasis on orgasm quotients and fertility ratings for vamps, and alpha mates and lunar cycles for weres. Since I’m an equal-opportunity matchmaker—one with an addiction to MAC cosmetics and enough credit card bills to make the national deficit look like chump change—I’d decided to beef up my human client list.

I smiled, reached into my leather Prada clutch for a stack of cards, and stepped toward the first cluster of females.

I was just about to slide a card into an attractive woman’s hand—twenty-five, nurse, fed up with losers with great big egos and tiny penises—when I heard the deep, familiar voice.

“Help me.”

Dead and Dateless
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2007 by Kimberly Raye Groff

Excerpt from
Your Coffin or Mine?
by Kimberly Raye copyright © 2007 by Kimberly Raye Groff

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B
ALLANTINE
B
OOKS
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Your Coffin or Mine?
by Kimberly Raye. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

www.ballantinebooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-49729-1

v3.0