Insatiable

No wonder he hadn’t been able to wipe away the memory of him: She was clearly

disturbed. It was complete bedlam in there.

“Jonathan,” Mary Lou was saying to the brother, “I know you’re good with electronics.

My friend Becca just got an iPhone and she’s having a dickens of a time downloading some of

the, what do you call them? Oh, right, apps. Do you think you could help her?”

The brother looked at Becca, a large-bosomed young lady wearing a snug-fitting red

sheath dress, and said, “Absolutely.”

The girl watched her brother go without comment.

Vampire, Lucien couldn’t help overhearing her mind screaming. Lucien, prince, slayer,

dragon, death.

An image of a red tote bag with a jewel-encrusted dragon slithering down one side of it

flashed into Lucien’s mind, an image he could make no sense of whatsoever.

Not that he’d understood any of it.

“So it turns out,” the girl spun around to say to him as soon as the brother was gone,

“you’re the prince I’ve been hearing so much about?”

He smiled at her politely—he was perfectly well aware of the devastating effect his smile

had on human females—then took her by the arm and pulled her gently to an unoccupied

corner of the terrace, saying something about what a shame it would be for her to miss the

view.

He thought perhaps he could reason with her, even psychotic as she was.

“I haven’t told my cousin’s wife about what happened outside the church,” he explained

to her quickly in a low voice when they were well away from everyone else. “I didn’t want to

alarm her. No woman wants to hear about a colony of bats loose in the neighborhood….”

Of course he wasn’t going to mention the Dracul.

“I haven’t told Jon, either,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, surprising

him. “Well, at least…not the part about you.”

“That was probably wise,” he said. “We don’t want to worry our loved ones.”

She lowered her dusky gaze and appeared to be looking into the windows of the

apartments below them instead of into his eyes. He had to admit he found her quite charming

and had to warn himself to be careful. She was human and, judging by the cacophony in her

mind, mad.

Which was a shame, since she was so lovely.

“Especially,” she said, “since no one got hurt.”

“Then we agree,” Lucien said, “we won’t mention it. To anyone.”

“I told my best friend about it,” she said, finally looking up at him. “She doesn’t believe

me. She thinks I dreamed it.”

Maybe the situation, he thought, wasn’t as dire as he’d initially supposed.

“Who can blame her?” he said. “The whole thing is a little hard to believe, don’t you

think? Bats on the Upper East Side. Absurd.”

“Not as hard to believe as the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for why

you weren’t hurt,” she said, leaning on the brick wall of the terrace. “Since I know I didn’t

dream it.”

Vampires, he knew she was going to say. He wasn’t certain how he was going to proceed

when she did say it. It had been so long since a human had found them out…a human who

wished them harm. Other than the Palatine, of course.

That this disturbingly pretty, but unfortunately insane, girl should have done so was a

little upsetting.

Even more upsetting was what he was going to have to do to her, by his own decree, if it

was true that she knew.

“And what’s that?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“I think you’re an angel,” she said, smiling up at him sunnily. “And there was a miracle

outside of St. George’s that night.”

Chapter Twenty-three

8:00 P.M . EST, Thursday, April 15

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A

New York, New York

P rince Lucien Antonescu didn’t like being called an angel.

But then, Meena realized belatedly, not many men would. “There was no miracle,” he

kept saying insistently. “And I’m no angel. Of that I can assure you.”

“That’s not true,” Meena said. She was teasing him. He struck her as a man who hadn’t

been teased often in his life. He seemed extraordinarily serious. “You risked your life to save

my own, and then you disappeared without even letting me give you proper thanks. That’s

pretty angelic.”

“I think your friend is right,” he said to her as one of the caterers brought them flutes of

champagne on a little silver tray, “and you’re confabulating your dreams with reality. They

were only a few little bats—”

“You said that the night it happened,” she reminded him with mock indignation. “It

wasn’t true then and it’s still not true. It was possibly the most horrifying thing I’ve ever been

through in my life, and I still say it was a miracle you got by without a scratch. But if you want

to keep minimizing it, go ahead. We can just talk about banalities like everybody else. How

long are you going to be in the city, and have you been to see any good shows yet?”

He stared at her, his expression surprised. Then he burst into laughter. “I haven’t,

actually,” he admitted. “I’d only just arrived the night we met, so I haven’t been here long.

What do you recommend?”

Meena sipped her champagne. She felt as if her mind was going a thousand miles a

minute. What were the chances of Lucien— her Lucien, the one she’d met outside St. George’s

Cathedral—and the countess’s prince being one and the same person? This was going to be so

perfect! She needed to find out everything she could about him so she could write up the

perfect character description with which to hit Sy.

Not, of course, that her prince was going to be an exact replica of Prince Lucien. For one

thing he was too young for Victoria Worthington Stone. They’d need to find someone a little

older to play a suitable romantic match.

Not that Cheryl wouldn’t have gone for Lucien in real life, of course. She would have, in

a New York second. Any woman would. Look at him! He was perfect…that profile, those

impressive shoulders.

But whoever played him would definitely need to be more gray around the temples and

have…glasses. Yes! That was it! A vampire slayer, or whatever it was they were called, should

definitely be wearing glasses.

“I beg your pardon?” the prince said, looking down at her rather intently with those

gorgeous dark brown eyes of his. “Did you say something?”

“No,” Meena said. The directness of his stare unnerved her. It was almost as if he could

read her thoughts. Or see through her dress.

Still, he was the sexiest man she’d met in a long time…whom she hadn’t had to urge to

give up his motorcycle.

“I mean, I was just wondering what you do,” she said. “I know that’s a rude, New Yorky

thing to ask. We’re all obsessed with what other people do for a living. But I’m really curious.

I mean, what does a prince do all day? Do you make a habit out of rescuing damsels in

distress, or was I just in the right place at the right time? Do you have a castle? Do you joust?”

He continued to look bemused. He seemed to find her very bewildering. Meena

wondered what women usually talked to him about. It seemed natural to her to ask a prince

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