Sera couldn’t believe what he had done. She trembled all over, still reeling from it and her climax. Had she won her game of seduction?
The look in his eyes said no.
He wanted her to leave.
She had been realistic when speaking to her sire about Antoine. She had known that she stood a slim chance with him and had prepared herself for the inevitable rejection. She had been so fixed on her feelings being one sided and him showing no interest in her at all that she wasn’t sure what to do now that he had.
There was one thing she did know though.
He wanted her and she would be a fool to give up on him now.
She wasn’t going to leave, not when she was so close to convincing him to take a chance on her. She had got him on stage and got him to touch her. She knew that if she had just a little more time with him that she might be able to make him see that the desire zipping between them wasn’t an act. It was real.
“I can perform,” Sera said, mustering her confidence so he didn’t hear the nerves in her voice. She smiled and tilted her head to one side, running her gaze over him. The hard bulge in his trousers hadn’t gone anywhere. That was a start. “Just give me a second chance.”
Antoine frowned, his cold eyes turning dark, as though he didn’t like the thought of her having a second chance with Victor. She had to be imagining that.
“But I want to be able to select my partner.” Those words leaving her lips caused his frown to harden.
“An unusual request. I may be inclined to allow it providing you will actually perform.”
Boy would she.
Her smile widened. “I promise I will if I can choose who I perform with.”
The darkness in his eyes deepened and red ringed his irises at the same time as a wave of anger rolled over her. Her smile held. Did he know how jealous he looked? She wanted to ask him but didn’t want him to kick her out. He had no reason to be jealous but the sight of him feeling such an emotion sent her confidence up another notch and gave her the strength to continue.
“Has someone here caught your eye?” he said, little more than a thick growl, and she nodded. “Name them and I will see if the vampire or human is available.”
Something in his eyes said the chosen performer would probably never even reach the stage. He would deal with them savagely for catching her eye. Her confidence skyrocketed and she bravely faced him, nude and still shaking from the climax he had given her. She ran her hand down his chest, feeling the hardness of it through his tailored silver-grey shirt and looked deep into his blue eyes.
“I name you.”
CHAPTER 5
Antoine wasn’t sure that he had heard Sera correctly. He stood on the stage, frowning down into her eyes that he now realised were the deepest most alluring shade of green he had ever seen, and tried to comprehend what was happening. Sera wanted to perform with him, on his own stage, as her audition?
The voice deep in his heart said that this wasn’t an audition. This was a game of seduction.
Sera had been watching him for months now. At first, he hadn’t known it was Sera. Many people looked at him during the course of a performance, but none stared with the intensity that she did. When he had grown tired of being watched, he had located her out of the corner of his eye, surreptitious enough that she would never have noticed it. An elite. He had ignored her after that.
It was only in the course of the past few minutes that he had realised she was his voyeur, and how ironic that he had been the one watching her touching herself when that revelation had come over him.
“I do not perform.” The hard ache in his trousers said to go along with it this one time but his heart warned to end this now, before history repeated.
The theatre was a business, and it was his life now. He had no room for romantic entanglements and no desire to get involved with a beautiful, attractive young elite vampire who’d had him on his feet and gasping to plunge something other than his fingers into her so he could feel her climax.
Antoine shook that desire away.
“No,” he said again but it was weaker this time and he knew she had noticed when the look of disappointment in her forest green eyes briefly lifted.
She was targeting him for some infernal reason.
She had watched him and then devised some scheme to get into his theatre and meet him. Had she even arranged for Callum to be away tonight, or was that fate intervening to bring them together sooner than she had anticipated? He cursed under his breath. He would send Sera home to Elizabeth with a harsh warning ringing in her ears and a note for her sire telling her to stay the hell away from the theatre.
His jaw ticked as he clamped his molars together.
“No.” Antoine backed off a step, angry now that he’d had time to realise the lengths she had gone to in order to ensnare him. He should never have sent Victor away. It was clearly the chance that she had been hoping for. With Victor performing with her, Antoine would have been able to maintain his distance and view her with a critical eye as a performer. He had made a terrible mistake. Letting her perform alone, for his eyes only, had brought it onto a more intimate level. She had reeled him in and he had fallen for her ploy. It wasn’t going to happen again. He would end this farce and send her home right now. “I do not touch elite.”