Time of Death by J. D. Robb Page A

therapy.”
    “Yeah, but mostly I think it’s bull.” Still, she remembered the odd sensation she’d felt when Dorian had stared into her eyes. Her problem, she told herself. Her personal demons.
    “Anyway, the man’s bad news. And he’s got a pattern of victimizing women, wealthy ones particularly.”
    She did a quick run on the bartender and found no criminal on Allesseria. “Bartender’s clean. Divorced, with a kid just turning three.” Eve pursed her lips as Roarke drove through the open gates toward home. “I get her in the box, even alone at her own place, I can break her. She’s lying about seeing Dorian. I could snap her statement in five minutes without him around. He scares her.”
    “He’s a killer.”
    “Yeah, no question.”
    “I mean she knows it, or believes it. You’re capable of snapping her statement, and he’s equally capable of snapping her neck—and with a great deal less passion.”
    “Wouldn’t disagree. I just wonder why you’d say that after one conversation with him.”
    “I would have said it after one look at him. His eyes. He’s a vampire.”
    Her mouth dropped open as he stopped the car. She hadn’t managed to get words working with her thoughts until she’d pushed out of the car, rounded the hood to meet him. “You said what?”
    “I mean it literally. His type sucks the life out of people, and does it for momentary pleasure, just as effectively as any fictional vampire. And he’s just, darling Eve, as soulless.”
    Like her father, Eve thought. Yes, Roarke had seen it, too. He’d seen all of it. There was nothing strange or frightening about recognizing a monster.
    It only meant she understood her quarry.
    Eve stepped in, pulled off her jacket. She gestured toward Summerset, Roarke’s majordomo, who—as he inevitably did—stood waiting in the foyer in his funereal black suit. “I always figured vampires looked like that. Pale, bony, dour, and dead.” She tossed the jacket on the newel and started up the stairs.
    “Will you be having dinner in the dining room like normal human beings this evening?” Summerset asked.
    “Got work, and nobody who looks like you should toss around words like ‘normal.’”
    “We’ll get something upstairs,” Roarke said placidly.
    He strolled with Eve into her office, then immediately whipped around and boxed her against the wall. “I think I’ll start with an appetizer,” he said, then crushed his lips to hers.
    Her blood went to instant sizzle. She could all but feel her brains leaking out of her ears as his mouth ravaged hers with a kind of feral impatience that thrilled. Even as she gripped his hips, he was doing torturous things to her body with those quick and clever hands.
    She gulped in air, and simply gave herself to the wild and wanton moment. And to him.
    She would always give. He knew no matter how much he wanted, she would always be there to give, or take, to meet those endless, urgent needs with her own. Her mouth was a fever on his. A moan poured from her as he tugged her shirt apart, then found that warm, trembling flesh with his lips, his teeth.
    The taste of her incited a fresh and mammoth wave of hunger.
    Her hands yanked at the hook of his trousers as his yanked at hers. And she pressed erotically against him, core to core.
    Her eyes were dark when he looked into them and, for one brilliant moment, went blind when he plunged inside her.
    She matched him, beat for frantic beat, riding and racing the violent pleasure as he dragged her arms over her head, as he pinned them there. As he battered them both over the last turbulent crest.
    Her breath whistled in and out; he rested his cheek on her hair as he caught his own. And in sweet opposition to the force of their mating, he brushed his lips at her temple, soft as gossamer wings.
    “I believe I was a bit more than mildly annoyed by having some poster boy for Dracula hit on my wife in front of my face.”
    “Worked for me.” Grateful for the wall