CHAPTER ONE
“Her.”
“Her what?” Water sloshed as Mario, all six feet six of him, stepped out of the sunken hot tub behind the sofa where Stefan stared at the flat-screen television on the wall.
Stefan half watched his friend’s reflection in the monitor as Mario reached for a pristine Egyptian-cotton towel before collecting his half-consumed glass of wine and sauntering to Stefan’s leather sofa. Stefan knew without looking that little pools of water marked Mario’s footsteps across the marble and onto the cashmere carpet.
“I said, her what?” Mario parked himself on the end of the leather sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. Stefan’s feet were already there in leather boots that disappeared beneath his jeans. Mario plopped his wineglass on the coffee table, slopping over a crimson drop.
Mario always drank red wine. He’d been Italian for six hundred years, he said, and couldn’t break the habit. Whether he meant drinking red wine or being Italian, Stefan never knew.
Stefan gestured with his remote. “Her.”
Her was a late-twenty-something, tall woman with red hair scraped back in a sloppy ponytail and wide green eyes taking in every bit of Transylvania Castle’s lobby. She wore a light cotton dress good for the baking temperatures of Las Vegas in July. Her limbs were bare, her feet in sandals. She carried a duffel bag over her shoulder as she walked through the casino, heading for the check-in desk.
Mario grinned in appreciation. “So you do have taste.”
Stefan took a swallow of vodka, the liquid tracing a fiery trail to his stomach, and didn’t answer.
The monitor showed feed that came through the security cameras trained on the lobby and casino forty-seven floors beneath them, piped to Stefan’s penthouse at his request. He could assess his guests, watch for people who shouldn’t be there, and generally make sure everyone staying at his hotel was having a good time.
This particular guest interested him very much. As she moved past the Coffin Bar and out of the frame, Stefan picked up the phone on the coffee table and spoke to his security team. “Give me camera three. Zoom in on the red-haired woman in the white dress.”
The view changed to the clear lobby space in reception and the stream of people coming to check in, ready for their vampire fantasy weekend. The picture remained fixed a moment, and then the focus widened and blurred, the camera zooming to Stefan’s woman.
It caught her just as she stepped up to the reception desk and smiled at the young man behind it. Stefan’s blood warmed. Her crooked smile lit her eyes as she slung her duffel bag on the marble-topped counter and unzipped it. The way she spilled out pens, packets of tissue, books of matches, and various other jetsam was nothing short of adorable.
Stefan spoke into the phone. “Zoom closer.”
The camera obeyed. Her round face and locks of flyaway red hair filled the screen, the light catching the gold flecks in her green eyes.
Mario laughed. “You twisted bastard.”
“Have the desk clerk send you her name,” Stefan told security.
“Yes, sir.” Through the phone, Stefan heard him tapping computer keys. He saw the red-haired woman nod, then speak. Though there was no sound, he knew she was giving him her name.
“Meredith Black,” the security man said in his ear.
“What room?”
A pause, more tapping of keys, another pause, and the security man’s deep voice. “Ten twenty-two.”
Mario’s dark brows shot up. “Planning a midnight visit?”
Stefan spoke into the phone again. “Give her tickets to Vegas Vampires, vouchers for the restaurants and bars, and an invitation to meet me in my penthouse. I’ll give her dinner.”
“Yes, sir.”
Stefan quietly set down the phone and returned his gaze to the screen. Mario stared at him, his long black hair dripping rivulets of water onto the leather sofa.
Then his coffee-colored eyes widened in understanding. “Oh,” he said, voice subdued. “You mean it’s her.”
In a thousand years of existence, Stefan had never been much for slang. He preferred precise speech to Mario’s idioms that changed every decade. But Americans of this century had a phrase that he thought summed things up very well. He tossed back the rest of his vodka and slid the glass across the teakwood coffee table.
“Damn straight,” he said.
The desk clerk had slicked-back black hair, a high-collared cape, and a mouthful of vampire teeth that made him talk with a lisp.
“Welcome to Tranthylvania Cathle, Mth. Black. You’re in room…” He broke off, frowning at the terminal on the lower tier of the counter. “Room thhen thwenny-thoo.” He slid an electronic key in a cardboard folder across the black marble. His cape moved and flowed as he plucked brochures and papers from various parts of his desk. “And vouthers for Have a Bite Rethrant, the Coffin Bar, and Fangth for the Memorieth, our gift thop. Two free pathess to Vegath Vampirth, the all-male revue—eight and eleven every night and a matinee on Thunday, dark on Mondayth.”
Meredith gazed at him in surprise. “What happened? Did I win a prize or something?”
“Complimenth of Mr. Erickson, owner of the hotel. He requeths that you dine with him tonight.” He cast a doubtful look at her crumpled cotton dress that had lasted her the drive to Las Vegas from Santa Fe. “A bellman will thow you the way after you retht from your trip and change.”
Meredith raked the tickets toward her and started stuffing them into her already overstuffed duffel bag. “Oh, he must have finally decided to give me an interview. I called at least twenty times. This whole hotel is going to be in the sequel to my first book.” She dug into the bag, dislodging the vouchers she’d just shoved in along with crumpled napkins from roadside restaurants and a little cross on a chain, a joke gift from her mother because she was going to a vampire hotel.
At last she found what she searched for and hauled out a hefty hardback book. The black cover showed her name and the title in gothic-looking letters, “Meredith Black, Vampires in Myth and Legend.”
The next clerk over, a woman in bust-lifting black spandex, glanced at it in interest. “I read that. It was fascinating.”
“Thank you.” Meredith blushed, as she always did when given compliments on her book.
She stuffed everything back into the duffel bag, wrestled the zipper closed, then opened it again to dig out the key she’d accidentally shoved inside. Grinning ruefully, she slung the duffel over her shoulder and trotted away to find the elevators.
Transylvania Castle was laid out like a typical Las Vegas hotel—huge casino in the middle with restaurants and shops and elevators in the back. The layout forced guests to wander past rows and rows of slot machines, roulette and craps tables, blackjack and pai gow tables, and baccarat tables set behind carved Gothic arches for the high-dollar gamblers.
Huge cobwebs, dangling spiders, and glow-in-the-dark skeletons hung from a soaring black ceiling that pumped cold air and spooky music onto the tourists and dedicated gamblers. The occasional evil laughter gloated over the ring of slot machine bells and the steady chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk of falling coins.
Meredith glanced into the Coffin Bar on the edge of the main casino, where gamblers rested and smoked before venturing out to try their luck again. The lighting was murky, the bar itself was shaped like a coffin, and a cauldron of dry ice bubbled on one end of it. The tabletops looked like headstones, and the legs of the tables and chairs were shaped like chains. The bartender had forgone a Dracula costume for the black leather bad-boy look. Meredith peered at him with interest as she sauntered by, and he gave her a wink and a smile.
This place could fill half her book. She was calling it Vampires in Modern Popular Culture. She planned to write about the fervor with which people had pursued anything vampire ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula hit the shelves a hundred or so years ago. The craze that never seemed to go away gave the world vampire hotels, vampire romances, vampire TV shows, vampire erotica, vampire nightclubs, vampire gangs, and vampire counseling. If there were as many true vampires as people who believed in them or wanted to be them, the world would be overrun.
Damn good thing none of it was real.
She at last found the elevators in a recessed hall in the rear of the hotel. The elevator doors were embossed to resemble iron gates, and dry ice flowed across the black marble floor. The throng of tourists waiting to ascend to their rooms wore everything from Bermuda shorts to traditional vampire garb to dominatrix Goth.
Meredith enjoyed the dark décor of her floor when the elevator spilled her out, the black walls and bloodred carpet, the open mouth with fangs painted around the peephole of her door. It was so cheesy she had to laugh, which she imagined was the point. She looked forward to meeting the man who’d thought all this up.
Stefan Erickson. The enigmatic owner of the hotel had made instant millions when it opened ten years ago, and the tourists showed no sign of abating. No one knew much about Mr. Erickson. According to his staff, he was rarely seen by his guests, nor did he grant interviews.
She’d looked him up when she began research for this book and repeatedly tried and failed to get in touch with him. She’d decided to come out to the hotel anyway and have a look around, and if he didn’t like what she said about it, too bad. He’d had his chance.
Interesting how he’d suddenly reversed course and actually invited her for the interview as well as giving her all kinds of freebies. Was it so she’d praise his hotel and bring him more business? He’d discover that Meredith wasn’t so easy to manipulate. Defiant, everyone called her, except her mother, who called her stubborn. Once Meredith had decided on a course, she didn’t let anyone change her mind.
Inside her room, Meredith assessed herself in the Gothic-framed mirror and decided the clerk’s hint about cleaning up was a good one. Her dress looked the worse for the long drive up and down mountains and across baking deserts, her nose was sunburned, and her throat was parched.
In the mini-refrigerator she found two bottles of blood—at least, they said “Blood, A Refreshing Drink.” She opened one and sniffed cautiously, then took a sip. Cherry cream soda. She smiled and drank. The hotel really knew how to go for the yuks.
An hour later, she had showered and donned a yellow cotton dress hastily pressed with the room’s iron, her hair still damp. A bellboy dressed in Dracula attire knocked on the door and told her to follow him.
He led her to the elevators at the end of the hall, and they rode back down to the lobby, two elderly ladies giggling when he showed them his fake fangs. Downstairs, he led Meredith through the casino to the other side of the hotel, past the theater for the Vegas Vampires, and stopped in front of an ordinary-looking door that he opened with a key card.
Beyond that was another cool hallway, this one tastefully decorated in marble and glass, holding an elevator with polished gold doors. Soft guitar music floated through the air to coat the silence. Not a vampire theme in sight.
The elevator opened with the bellboy’s key card, and he gestured Meredith inside with his white-gloved hand. “This elevator only goes one place, the penthouse.” He indicated the two buttons, one marked P, the other L. “Mr. Erickson will let you in when you get there. This is the only way down too.”
“He must like his privacy.”
The bellboy slanted her an ironic glance. “He must. He rarely comes down and lets very few people go up. Good luck.”
He punched the button and withdrew his arm as the doors closed, leaving Meredith alone in a little gold box with a bench. Gently and smoothly, the elevator rose.
What would she find at the top? she wondered. An old man puttering around his penthouse trying to relive his glory days? A wannabe vampire convinced he had to drink blood to stay alive? Or a savvy businessman who knew people couldn’t resist coming to stay at Dracula’s castle?
The elevator let her out in a foyer decked out like an eighteenth-century anteroom. The high arched ceiling was embossed with gold-leafed curlicues, the floor was green and white marble, the curved-legged table probably a costly antique, the mirror over it huge and heavy. The double door she faced had curved panels picked out in gold and lavish door handles shaped like cherubs’ wings. A round brass doorbell hung on the wall next to the door. She pushed it, expecting a foghorn sound like on The Addams Family, but she heard nothing.
Whoever was inside probably heard nothing either, because she stood for a full five minutes while nothing happened. She pushed the bell again and waited another five minutes.
A little annoyed, she turned around to take the elevator down again and discovered that there was no button to call it. A slot for an electronic card rested on the wall next to the elevator doors, a red light blinking quietly.
She made a noise of exasperation. Without a key card, she was stuck. No phone in the pretty anteroom either, so she couldn’t call the front desk and tell them to let her the heck out of here.
“Oh, fine, Mr. Erickson, see what I write about your hotel,” she muttered. She was hungry and tired, and Erickson leaving her cooling her heels in front of his door was nothing short of rude.
She rang the bell again, and then when she got no response, she tried the door handle. To her surprise, the door slid smoothly open.
Now she felt stupid. And more annoyed. If Mr. Erickson had wanted her to simply come in, the bellman should have told her.
She’d never been in a hotel penthouse and assumed they’d be pretty decadent, but what she found took her breath away. Beyond the front door, the foyer stretched at least a hundred feet in front of her, continuing the green marble and the high ceiling of the anteroom. Doors lined each side, and the end of the hall sported a huge mirror—not a wall full of glass, but an actual framed mirror that was at least one and a half stories high. In front of this mirror an ornate wrought-iron staircase wound upward to an opening in the ceiling.
Meredith padded slowly down this hall, her sandals whispering on the marble. Each ornate double door looked like the rest and gave her no clue what lay behind it. When she peered up the stairs, she could see nothing but darkness.
She opened the door at the foot of the stairs and stopped in astonishment. Behind it was a living room—at least, she supposed it was a living room but a hell of a lot more lavish than the cozy room with sofas and chairs she shared with her mother in Santa Fe. Two long glass walls, closed against the heat, showed an outstanding view of the high mountains beyond Las Vegas—the beginnings of the Sierras. Sunshine lit the room but did not overheat it.
The floor was marble slashed with vibrantly colored deep-pile rugs. A sunken tub with whirlpool controls held a place of honor in the middle of the room, above which was suspended an ornate chandelier. In another area, lush leather sofas faced a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. A portion of the wall next to the television stood open to reveal every kind of electronic audio and video device known to man. A bar stood in another area of the room, small but well stocked with bottles and cut crystal glasses. The main drinks of choice seemed to be bloodred Italian wine and clear vodka.
But the room was empty. Beyond the glass wall on the shorter end of the room was a large outdoor area with a deck and full swimming pool. The deck had been landscaped with bougainvillea and orange trees to disguise the fact that it sat on the roof of a hotel. The wall around it was high for safety and aesthetics, but not so high that it blocked the view of the mountains to the west and the entire Strip stretching north.
The pool had what people in Santa Fe called an “infinity edge,” which meant that the far end didn’t have a lip, but the water blended across an edge and spilled into a hidden basin below. When you sat on one end of the pool, it looked as though the water went on forever. Comfortable-looking chairs and lounges stood around the wooden deck, and a water system sprayed a cooling mist over it all to combat the hot summer sun.
Meredith approached the glass wall, wondering how a person exited to this Eden of a pool deck. She didn’t have to wonder long because as she reached the glass it slid obligingly open for her.
She stepped out into cool paradise scented with orange blossoms. Her bathing suit was sitting downstairs in her bedroom, but the pool was so tempting that she wanted to strip off her dress and do a little skinny-dipping. After all, there was no one up here, and it would serve Mr. Erickson right for inviting her and then forgetting about her.
She would wade in it, anyway. Meredith slid off her sandals and stepped down onto the ledge that ran around the entire circumference of the pool. The water came to her knees, cool but not too cold. She felt like Goldilocks: it was just right.
She wandered around the ledge, sandals in hand, holding her skirt out of the water. Whoever had created this place had done a marvelous job. This was how the rich lived, she thought, while the peons of the world eked out existences in apartments and houses they could barely pay for. Oh well, if you have it, why not spend it?
She looked back at the penthouse. The glass was not reflective, as she might expect in a hot climate, but she remembered how cool the living room had been. The glass was probably thick enough not to need reflectivity. She could see into the room next to the living room, which also opened onto the deck. It appeared to be a bedroom, also devoid of life.
She moved around the pool so she could stare inside. The bed was huge, the room as ornate and plush as the living room, but she saw nothing weird in there. No mirrors on the ceiling or heart-shaped beds or swings or stripper poles. As rich as he was, Erickson didn’t go in for kink. At least, not obviously.
The water felt wonderful. She wouldn’t put this in her book, but she’d tell her mom, who’d love it. “There I was, enjoying myself in a lavish penthouse pool on top of a Las Vegas hotel. All I needed was Raoul the pool man to come along and give me a hot-oil massage and chocolate-dipped strawberries and champagne.”
The afternoon burned hot. It was about five o’clock, which around here meant baking time. The temperature had been a balmy 110 degrees when she’d arrived at the hotel, and the forecast she’d heard on the car radio said they expected to hit 117. Felt about that right now. In spite of the misting system, the sun seared right through her dress.
She was never sure if what she did next she did on purpose or accidentally on purpose. She slipped on the ledge and plunged down into the cold waters of the pool.
She surfaced, sputtering, spouting water and wet all over.
Meredith wiped the water from her eyes, slicked back her hair, and looked up to see Raoul the pool man standing on the edge.
Her gaze started at strong feet in flip-flops, firm, tight legs in bronzed skin, well-muscled thighs below shorts that hung low on his narrow hips. Up to a flat abdomen and hard torso in a tight white T-shirt, bronze-colored arms covered with wiry gold hair, and the hollow of his throat touched with perspiration.
Viking-gold hair, burnished with the sun, skimmed across wide shoulders. He had a model’s face—sharp cheekbones, square jaw, sensual, flat mouth, high brow. Yep, he had everything.
Dark sunglasses hid his eyes. Not just any sunglasses, some designer brand you had to custom order from a chichi boutique. So maybe Mr. Erickson paid Raoul the pool boy a good salary.
Those flat dark sunglasses trained on her from a long way up, about six and a half feet above the pool deck, and the slow smile that spread across his face confirmed that the dress plastered to her body hid absolutely nothing.
“Did you bring a towel?” he asked.
His low, rich voice heated the roasting air, his English a tiny bit accented.
Meredith blushed. “I fell in.” She sank down in the water, clutching the edge of the pool, trying to conceal her hardened nipples.
His smile widened. “Next time take the dress off and enjoy yourself.”
Next time? The pool was gloriously cool, the water licking her like a lover. She suddenly imagined herself stroking back and forth, water sliding into intimate places, while he lounged on the pool’s bench and watched her. His hair would be dark with water, the sunglasses fixed on her, his bronzed flesh touched by the sun.
She gulped and beat away the heady vision.
“I have plenty of towels and robes in my bathroom,” he was saying. “Through the bedroom. I will show you.”
He started to turn around. Meredith’s eyes widened, and she ducked below the lip of the pool. “Um, could you get me the towels first?”
The man turned back, smiling and drop-dead sexy.
“Very funny,” she growled. “Are you Mr. Erickson? Or are you really Raoul the pool man?”
“I am Stefan Erickson. And you are in my pool, Ms. Black.”
She flushed. “I didn’t think anyone was home.”
His smile could have melted butter on a cold sidewalk. “That is obvious, unless you make it a habit to walk into a perfect stranger’s apartment and jump in his pool.”
“I fell in. There’s a difference.” She gritted her teeth. “Stop laughing and get me a towel, and I promise I’ll say nice things in the interview.”
A crease appeared between his brows at the word interview, but he turned away and called into the apartment. “Mario, bring some towels and a robe. I’ve found a mermaid in my pool.”