“What kind of name is that?”
“Apparently, it’s the one my mother gave me.”
She pointed at his face and twirled her finger before her. “What’s that stuff beneath your eyes? It sparkles.” She gave him a sideways sneer. “Are you a freakin’ faery?”
“Such vitriol drips from your pretty mouth. What have the sidhe ever done to you?”
“Nothing.” She paced some more. “Everything! Just get out, will you? This is my place. Go find your own hovel.”
Vail leaned his elbows onto the butcher-block counter behind him and smiled as sweetly as he could manage. He didn’t do sweet, but he could get close to amiable if he tried.
“I don’t think so. I’d like to hang around and have you introduce me to your kidnappers.”
“If you know I was kidnapped, my mother must have sent you. Did you come to rescue me? To bring me back to Mommy and lay me before her sacrificial altar?”
Vail tutted. “You have mother issues?” Even saying it cut into his heart. If anyone had issues regarding their mother …
“I’m not telling you anything.” She stopped before the bed, stared at it a few moments as if it might bite her, then plopped onto it and, shoulders high and straight, fixed an innocent gaze on him. “Get out, Vail the faery.”
“I’m not sidhe. I’m vampire.”
She scoffed. “Could have fooled me.”
“Why, thank you. I take that as a compliment.”
He strolled toward her. The efficiency apartment was small and open, so it was but ten strides to stand before the bed. Squatting, he clasped his hands between his bent legs. “Now, about your kidnappers. I assume the introductions are not going to happen, because the guilty party is sitting right here, before me.”
She looked aside. A pale beam from a distant streetlight glimmered through the window and highlighted her long, elegant nose, narrow face and chin. Vail believed the ice princess label; she wore it gorgeously. Her eyes were deep blue, almost—no, not violet. That was a color he had only seen on faeries.
“There are no kidnappers,” he ventured. “Are there?”
“You think you’re so smart?”
“Actually, let me lay it out for you.”
“Oh, please do. I’m all about the faery tales tonight.”
“Then look at me, please.”
He waited, but she tilted her head away from his gaze. Vail slid a palm along her cheek, the light getting trapped in his iron rings, and forced her head up. He gripped her chin firmly, and she flinched, but not out of his grasp.
“We can make this rough,” he warned, “or we can do this nice and sweet. Which do you prefer?”
If she said rough, he’d lose it right here. Vail was not immune to an attractive woman. Very well, so she was sexy. It was those damned white teeth, clear eyes and a touch of impudence. Nothing else. Couldn’t be the soft, panting breaths that indicated she was still winded from her adventure eluding him. And it most certainly was not her scent that seemed to curl into his brain and dally with the smarts he’d claimed to possess.
The fact she was vampire kept him from shoving her onto the mattress and drawing his tongue down her long, slender neck and to the full mounds of her breasts that peeked above the low neckline of her shirt.
“Tell me what you think you know,” she said through a tight jaw. She shoved his hand from her face, and fixed her hard gaze on him. “Vail.”
“I work for Hawkes Associates,” he said. “You know about them?”
She nodded, but stiffly. She wasn’t about to drop the tough-girl act. If she was a thief, like the rest of her family, then she’d probably honed some excellent avoidance tactics.
“Your mother hired us to track down her kidnapped daughter. Seems she—that is, you—had been taken from the Santiago mansion only minutes before you were to meet the Lord of Midsummer Dark for some kind of exchange. Taken, in a valuable faery gown. Mommy wants back her daughter and the dress. You following me so far?”
She jutted up her chin, defiant, but gave a curt nod.
“Seems you, Lyric Santiago—” he liked that she flinched when he recited her name “—were supposed to go along with the Lord of Midsummer Dark, the dress, I assume, being some sort of pseudodowry.”
“Where did you hear that? I was only delivering the thing. There’s no way I’d go near him again …” She shut her mouth.
Again? She had been in Zett’s presence before? A fact to note. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him. And he didn’t want her to do so—it was more interesting this way. He liked watching prey squirm.
“Funny thing, though.” He thumbed his jaw, drawing out the moment and also inhaling her scent, which had deepened with her rising anxiety. Uncomfortable? She may be an ice princess, but he could thaw her out quick enough. “That dress was stolen from Hawkes Associates not ten days ago. Now, who do you think is tops on the suspect list?”
“You think I stole that ugly gown? Ha!”
“Ugly?” He stroked the side of his thumb along her cheek. She did not flinch, but he felt her muscles tense under his touch. Something about this scenario didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t pinpoint what, exactly. “I was told it was fashioned from faery diamonds, the most incredible and dazzling gemstone in the known world. Or unknown world, matters as they are.”
His thumb strayed to her lips, full, pink and soft, worth a kiss— Vail suddenly realized what he was doing.
What the hell was he doing? That had not been a harsh touch, but one of—admiration? Wib.
He stood, shoving his hand in a pocket. “You don’t like diamonds, Lyric?”
“They’re not so spectacular.”
“I imagine so, for one of your profession. You can steal them if you want them, eh?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“That has yet to be proven. What happened to the dress?”
“It’s a gown.”
“Gown. Dress.” Vail leaned over her. A tendril of blond hair swept his hand. It felt like summer. He fisted that hand behind his back to keep from touching her again. “What did you do with it?”
“They took it from me. And left me here.”
“‘They’ being these imaginary kidnappers of yours?”
She nodded. Liar.
“So you didn’t steal it?”
She shook her head.
“Nor did anyone in the notorious Santiago clan steal it?”
