Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #4)(3)

“Oh, really. What’s your name?”

“Not important.” She held out her hand. “Come on, Butch, a.k.a. Brian, last name O’Neal. Come back with me. Forget for a while whatever makes you hammer those shots of Lagavulin. I promise you, all that self-destruction will be waiting for you when you get back.”

Man, he really wasn’t psyched about how much she had on him. “Why don’t you tell me your name first.”

“Tonight you can call me Sympathy. How ’bout that.”

He eyed her from bangs to boots. She was wearing leather pants. No surprise. “You happen to have two heads there, Sympathy?”

She laughed, a low, rich sound. “No, and I’m not a she-male, either. Yours isn’t the only sex that can be strong.”

He stared hard into her cast-iron eyes. Then looked back at the private bathrooms. God…this was so familiar. A quickie with a stranger, a meaningless crash between two bodies. This shit had been the cash-and-carry of his sex life since he could remember—except he didn’t recall ever feeling this kind of sick despair before.

Whatever. Was he really going to stay celibate until he kicked it when his liver corroded? Just because a female he didn’t deserve didn’t want him?

He glanced down at his pants. His body was willing. At least that part of the math added up.

Butch slid out of the booth, his chest as cold as winter pavement. “Let’s go.”



On a lovely tremble of violins, the chamber orchestra glided into a waltz and Marissa watched the glittering crowd coalesce in the ballroom. All around her, males and females came together, hands linking, bodies meeting, stares locking. The mingling of dozens of different variations on the bonding scent filled the air with a rich spice.

She breathed in through her lips, trying not to smell so much of it.

Escape proved futile, however, which was the way things worked. Though the aristocracy prided itself on its manners and style, the glymera was, after all, still subject to the race’s biological truths: When males bonded, their possessiveness carried a scent. When females accepted their mates, they bore that dark fragrance on their skin with pride.

Or at least Marissa assumed it was with pride.

Of the hundred twenty-five vampires in her brother’s ballroom, she was the only unmated female. There were a number of unmated males, but it wasn’t as if they would ever ask her to dance. Better that those princeps sit out the waltzing or take their mothers or sisters to the floor than get anywhere near her.

No, she was forever unwanted, and as a couple twirled by right in front of her, she glanced down to be polite. Last thing she needed was for them to trip all over each other as they avoided looking her in the eye.

While her skin shriveled, she wasn’t sure why tonight her status as shunned spectator seemed a special burden. For God’s sake, no member of the glymera had met her stare for four hundred years and she was used to it: First she had been the Blind King’s unwanted shellan. Now she was his former unwanted shellan, who had been passed over for his beloved half-breed queen.

Maybe she was finally exhausted with being on the outside.

Hands shaking, lips tight, she picked up the heavy skirt of her gown and made for the ballroom’s grand archway. Salvation was just outside in the hall, and she pushed open the door to the mistresses’ lounge with a prayer. The air that greeted her smelled of freesia and perfume and within the arms of its invisible embrace there was…only silence.

Thank the Scribe Virgin.

Her tension eased marginally as she went in and looked around. She’d always thought of this particular bathroom in her brother’s mansion as a luxurious locker room for debutantes. Decorated in a vivid Russian czarist motif, the bloodred sitting and primping area was kitted out with ten matching vanities, each makeup station holding everything a female could want to improve her appearance. Extending out the back of the lounge were the private lavatory chambers, all of which were done in the scheme of a different Fabergé egg from her brother’s extensive collection.

Perfectly feminine. Perfectly lovely.

Standing in the middle of it all, she wanted to scream.

Instead, she bit her lip and bent down to check her hair in one of the mirrors. The blond weight, which reached the small of her back when down, was arranged with watchmaker precision on the top of her head and the chignon was holding up well. Even after several hours, everything was still in place, the pearl strands woven in by her doggen exactly where they’d been when she’d come down to the ball.

Then again, standing on the fringes hadn’t really given the Marie Antoinette job a workout.

But her necklace was out of whack again. She jogged the multitiered pearl collar back into position so that its lowest drop, a Tahitian twenty-three-millimeter, pointed directly down into what little cleavage she had.

Her dove gray gown was vintage Balmain, one that she’d bought in Manhattan in the 1940s. Shoes were Stuart Weitzman and brand-new, not that anyone saw them under the floor-length skirt. Necklace, earrings, and cuffs were Tiffany, as always: When her father had discovered the great Louis Comfort in the late 1800s, the family had become loyal customers of the company and had stayed that way.

Which was the hallmark of the aristocracy, wasn’t it? Constancy and quality in all things, change and defects to be greeted with glaring disapproval.

She straightened and backed up until she could see her whole self from across the room. The image staring back at her was ironic: Her reflection was of utter female flawlessness, an improbable beauty that seemed sculpted, not born. Tall and thin, her body was made up of delicate angles, and her face was absolutely sublime, a perfect combination of lips and eyes and cheeks and nose. The skin over it all was alabaster. The eyes were silver blue. The blood in her veins was among the very purest in the species.