Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the Moon\Immortal Obsession (27 page)

Chapter 2

I
t wasn't the first time Madison Chase had downed one too many drinks lately, and by the look of things, it wasn't going to be her last.

She had accepted a martini from the guy dressed in head-to-toe leather at the bar and a shot of something foul from the stiff in the business suit who smelled faintly of clove cigarettes. Some people thought drinking was sexy. She wasn't one of them.

She had tossed those drinks back like they were water and should have been pain-free by now, but the never-ending ache inside her still hurt like hell, not in the slightest bit blurred by alcohol.

Tonight was no different from all the rest of the past three days: roaming around, tempting fate by taking too many chances. Clearly, she was headed for a breakdown if she kept this up. All the signs were present. She just couldn't seem to back off from the wave of momentum sweeping her up.

She might be placing herself in jeopardy by wandering alone in an unfamiliar city, in another country, at night, but an uncanny, persistent idea suggested that a solo recon might turn up information about what had happened to those missing college girls from the States—the reason for ten American television crews, including her own, taking up residence.

An even more important objective, and the reason for this club-hopping, was the search for her brother, who'd been MIA for a full three weeks.

Hopefully, if her stars were in alignment, she'd find Stewart, her fraternal twin. She just needed to do some of her sleuthing after-hours and alone, since the camera crews usually following her around tended to scare people off.

Plus, there was no plausible way to explain to the network guys that she was almost supernaturally aware of her brother's presence in this part of London because the uniqueness of the bond between twins defied explanation.

Stewart Chase, her womb-mate, and younger than herself by only one minute, felt close enough to reach out and touch. His life force seemed to float in the air, whispering things just out of hearing range.

Madison searched the faces closest to her, finding nothing familiar. Yet she knew she'd be the one to find her brother, if anyone could. Respected Florida attorneys like her twin didn't just disappear when sent by their firms to pursue the legal details of a headlining missing girls' case. Neither did most attorneys believe in the paranormal, she'd be willing to bet.

“But you do,” she said to Stewart, wherever he was.

The discovery that he had hidden certain aspects of his life from her had been a shock. More surprising still was the magnitude of the secretive research her brother had gathered on the existence of monsters. Stewart thought that monsters had taken over jolly old England's capital, as well as other cities like it, in the manner of a spreading plague.

Monsters. The kind with fangs.

Vampires, for God's sake.

After cracking the password on his laptop and sifting through Stewart's files, she had learned that her brother had been obsessed with the undead for a while. So, was she to conclude that someone that smart and savvy had become mentally unstable in the past year or two, hiding a loose mental screw from her and everyone else? Although gray, aged London was a place where any gothic idea might seem possible, vampires would be the underworld's dirtiest little secret society.

Stewart had listed this nightclub in his notes.

“Absurd. Disgusting. To hell with you, baby brother, for bringing this up and for vanishing without a trace,” Madison muttered, worried her instincts were wrong this time about sensing him near her. Worried also that in sharing genes with Stewart, and thinking about vampires, her own mental screws might someday loosen.

She was here on company time. Her ticket to ferreting out why so many people had gone missing in London in the past month had been presented to her in the form of a golden opportunity not to be missed. Accepting the network's assignment to follow the story of four missing Yale grads, now officially being dubbed in the media as the
Yale Four,
had been a timely move.

And though the streets outside of this club were creepy at night, London's hotspot of the moment, called
Space,
was teeming with people.

Conscious of eyes turned her way, Madison again searched the area around her. The guy in the business suit raised his glass. Shaking her head, she said beneath her breath, “Not going to happen. Not with you, buddy.”

She turned her attention to the dance floor. If her brother's research had any merit, this was one of the most dangerous clubs in London for humans, and run by a vampire community whose roots ran deep.

That was nuts, of course. Most of the people here seemed normal enough, and were having a good time. Still, the only way she could maintain any hope of getting her brother back was to explore all scenarios that might explain his disappearance, and those included the most fantastical ones.

So, if she were to
try
to believe her brother...

“What the hell is a vampire supposed to look like, anyway? Other than exposed fangs, how would anyone tell them apart from anyone else?” she muttered.

Stewart's notes said that some vampires blended fairly well with the human population. Then again, rumors about vampires in nightclubs could just as easily be a well-planned advertising campaign for thrill seekers to get off on, and completely make-believe.

This was her third club, in as many nights, looking for Stewart and his monsters. The number three was supposed to be charmed—some kind of supernaturally charged digit. With that in mind, Madison continued to scrutinize the faces around her, picking out likely candidates for fangdom in the crowd. Males seemingly too sober, too intense and darkly expressionless as they lurked in the shadows.

There were a few.

However, slightly suspicious males were also the usual fare for dance clubs, so how in hell could Stewart have been sure of what was what? How could she?

Monsters should be required to wear bells
.

And okay, now that she had stooped to considering monsters, Madison wondered how someone with a loose mental screw could tighten it.

Her gaze dropped to the table beside her. Another drink would make the tally what? Three? Four? One awful-tasting alcoholic beverage for every monster she thought she perceived around her. Just to take the edge off the game. For more fighting spirit, in case there was any way Stewart had been right, and there actually were vampires everywhere.

“Another drink is definitely the way to go,” she said to herself.

Grabbing a glass off the table, Madison sipped the contents, realizing she was walking close enough to the edge of an abyss to see the steep drop. Why? Because it was impossible to delete from her mind the part of Stewart's research proposing that death didn't have to be the end of existence.

And if anything bad had happened to her brother because of his ridiculous beliefs, some part of her actually hoped he was right. Without Stewart, she felt like only half of a whole. At the moment, a tired, ornery half.

The decibel of the music raining down from overhead speakers drowned out her thoughts. With the burn of alcohol in her throat, Madison closed her eyes and picked up the rhythm of the beat. Moving her head and her hips, she began to wind her way through the people on the dance floor, heading for the center of the room where something other than fear, sadness and regret would hopefully, for a time, give her some peace.

Regretfully, that peace remained as elusive as ever. Someone still watched her. She picked up on this, she assumed, with the special sense of connection to others that some twins possessed. Whoever this particular watcher was had a gaze like a laser beam that made her feel as if she were naked.

She glanced up at the balcony and found the culprit. Her breath caught. Behind the ornate railing stood one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen. Every working woman's version of a wet dream.

Tall and broad-shouldered, the wickedly handsome observer leaned against a pillar with a self-assured, languid pose. Immaculately dressed in black, a visually stunning contrast of fair hair surrounded his sculpted, angular, aristocratic face.

Having noted his interest, Madison figured that any other woman would have run right up to that balcony and handed him her hotel key, desiring his touch and to hear his haughty British accent. Happy to have been singled out by such a creature, they'd have wished for a kiss, a condom and the luck of being chosen as his one-night stand.

Any
other
woman.

She didn't have time for that sort of nonsense, or for anything other than this one dance. It was after midnight, and she'd be on camera in the morning. Plus, finding this guy observing her so intently, her inner warnings about him automatically upgraded to full alert.

He was staring at her rudely. Something in his expression made her imagine he possessed the ability to read her mind, and that what he found there was amusing.

Blinking slowly to break contact and announce to him that she had no intention of accepting his unspoken invitation, Madison ignored the rise in her pulse that he was causing. No one on the planet was that good-looking. She should know; she had interviewed a lot of movie stars up close.

What would Stewart have said about him?

Maybe this guy's beauty was unearthly because he actually was unearthly?

Though that seemed ridiculous, she took Stewart's reasoning one step further.

Maybe one of her brother's secretive research subjects had just crystallized, and the awe-inspiring male exterior encapsulated something not so fine at its core. Hidden inside that full, slightly insolent mouth of his, could be a pair of long, pointed teeth.

Thanks, brother.

Madison now regretted the drinks, and vowed to never touch another one. Defiantly, she whispered to the man on the balcony, “If there are such things as vampires, though, there'd be no doubt about you.”

Disturbed that her brother's extraordinary inner world had folded into her own, she gave herself over to the dance, keeping an attentive eye on the other men that were ogling her as if she were an appetizing after-dinner snack.

* * *

St. John settled his shoulder against a pillar and stared down from the balcony, his gaze riveted to one particular woman on the dance floor. He had found the woman in silver. When a sensation long dormant in his chest stirred, he hardly recognized it as a bead of honest interest.

Her hair was bloodred. A brilliant, fiery riot of untamed curls that glowed like bonfire flames in the dimness. Hair like that was the colorful embodiment of passion, intelligence and sex. Moist with sweat, several silky strands clung to her pale neck like crimson streams leaking from a puncture wound as she danced, dead center in the room and in the middle of the fifty other gyrating bodies, on the gritty stainless-steel floor.

St. John had never seen anything like her, or the way she moved. She waved bare, slender arms over her head sinuously, with her eyes closed, as if caught up in a trance. Her hips swayed in time to the heavy bass beat of music in a fluid, seductive display.

As she wove intricate patterns with her body in the tight area she'd carved out for herself, heat rose from her in visible waves. All that heat and flame in one sleek outline made it easy for him to assume he wasn't the only male in this club whose gaze was fastened on the sultry redhead. Certainly not the only one with fangs.

No being with functioning genitals, either dead or alive, could have failed to be drawn in by Madison Chase's enticing performance. This close, he would have recognized the American newscaster anywhere.

His fangs remained lengthened and ready for action, which meant that the rogue vampires were here, and nearby. A subtle scent of well-turned soil pervaded the area below, underscoring the rising drifts of sweat and expensive perfume.

The five bloodsuckers he'd seen on the street had been lured from the anonymity of the crowd and onto the outskirts of that dance floor. He sensed them as cold spots in the overheated room. They were bits of darkness broken off from the night outside, misplaced black holes with no perceivable pulse of their own. Deviations among the world of the living, and nothing at all like him, though their eyes and instincts were also trained on the redhead they had followed here.

Bloodsucker presence in this club was unacceptable. Problem was, he was finding it difficult to concentrate on that situation. His body had already started pulsing in time with Madison Chase's.

Rather than searching out the specifics of the creatures he had tracked here, he continued to stare down at her. The sexy femme's solo performance was an added bit of trouble. The fact that rogues had also zeroed in on the lithe dancer leaned toward a notable multiplication of the problem.

That nagging something he'd sensed in the back of his mind while outside, on the street, had reappeared in the form of a woman. He wasn't sure why her presence affected him, beyond the obvious fact that Madison Chase was nothing short of magnetic.

His reaction to her was visceral and soul-stirring. But he had seen Chase on broadcasts and heard her on the radio, and knew why she had come to London, along with all the other television crews from around the globe.

Madison Chase, famous for her determined attitude of withholding nothing newsworthy from the public, could turn out to be a royal pain in the backside if she persisted in nosing around where she didn't belong. It would be even worse if she were here to track vampires and their body counts, taking up where her brother had left off.

Damn, though, if she wasn't a tantalizing half-naked problem, and keen to his well-honed senses.

The parts of her that weren't bare were skimpily covered in a mesh concoction of silver sequins and spandex that was anything but modest. Calves, knees and most of her shapely thighs were exposed. She wore impossibly high-heeled shoes that sparkled and made her long legs seem endless.