High Society (The High Stakes Saga #3)

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because guys like you should learn the art of self-control,” I argued. Maybe I was tired from landing. Maybe it was worry about Eve. Maybe I was just sick of dealing with the constant threat of being drained. I’d lived with it my whole life and it was getting old. I was sick to death of worrying about something I couldn’t control.

“How is Eve?”

“Why do you care?” I bristled.

“I don’t,” he answered, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Good, then I don’t need to answer you,” I shot back, stepping around him. He stepped in front of me again. “She’s fine, okay?” I growled. Before I could react, he grabbed my bleeding thumb and licked the wound. I wrenched my hand away, trying not to gag at the intimacy of the gesture. “That was… gross! Don’t ever lick me again without asking first. And in case you’re wondering what I would have said if you did ask, I would have said hell no. That was nasty.”

I couldn’t stop wiping my thumb on my waistcoat. Yuck.

Asa laughed. “Would you find it so disgusting if it were Terah who tasted your blood instead of me?”

“Absolutely not, but you, sir, are not Terah. I mean, I would find it repulsive to a point. She’s not nice. Like, at all – but she is hot. And by hot, I mean pretty, in case your ancient ass needs a translation. Good Lord, I’m standing in a dark kitchen babbling and you’re really hard to figure out. I figured you’d kill us if Enoch wasn’t around to rein you in, but here you are letting us stay here, and feeding us, and killing our clones.”

He ignored my rambling. “Your blood tastes strange,” he remarked coolly. “And it does differ from your clones’ slightly. I thought you might need that information moving forward.”

“Why are you helping us? As far as I recall, we weren’t exactly friends the last two times we saw you.”

Asa turned his back to me and stared up at the night sky. “Have you ever hated someone so much that you would literally do anything to make sure they suffered at your hand?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered without hesitation.

“War puts things into perspective for a man. Does that not make us soldiers in the same battle?” He glanced at me over his shoulder.

“It depends on whether we share a common enemy.”

“Do you know what you’re doing with the thing you tore from the clone’s hand?”

I quirked a brow. “Much more than you.”

Asa nodded. “I imagine so. I wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”

I wasn’t about to give him a crash course in circuitry and implantation. He would use any knowledge we fed him against us, and Asa was always hungry for more information. Time to change the subject.

“So, do you always creep around outside at night, or is this an intriguing new hobby?”

“Oh,” he grinned, “you never know where I might be lurking. Has Eve mentioned that I need her help? She still needs to play the part of my doting fiancée while the three of you are in this time.”

“Why?”

“One, because people would question where my fiancée went, and we don’t want them digging around for information. Two, because someone tried to kill my darling fiancée last week, and I want to know who it was and why.”

That was news to me. “What happened?”

“She was taking a stroll after dinner. Someone – she believed it was a man – had hidden themselves in the garden. He walked out from between two tall hedges and stabbed her in the stomach.”

My abs flinched, remembering the pain that tore through me when Abram ran me through.

“His face was concealed, so I’m not sure if he was human or vampire. I assume human, since a vampire could have just attacked and fed on her, not to mention that her blood didn’t send him into a frenzy.”

“He could’ve been targeting you by extension.”

“Perhaps. But I have no quarrel with anyone I know of.”

Well, that was hard to believe, given how charming he was. “Then maybe she did something to set him off, and you just didn’t know about it. It’s not like she was honest about what she was doing here. She’d been trying to bait you into biting her.” He cocked his head to the side and pondered the idea. Maybe the clone thought one of his direct sires’ bites would be the next best thing to his. “You must have enemies, Asa. The vampires you sire in this age aren’t like those from ours. I have a theory on that, which I’m not going to get into, but I’m just saying that if their lifespans are long, it could be a vamp from your past come to make you pay for something you did back then.”