Love Your Entity (2 page)

As an indentured vampire, Ronan had had to kill more humans than he wanted. But that was over. He’d worked hard to develop his vampire self-control. That didn’t mean he wasn’t tempted, not only by her artery but also by her curvy body. His afterlife would be much simpler if she’d just obeyed his compulsion.

He didn’t sense anything different about her compared to other women he’d come in contact with over the decades. Mind reading was a talent he’d developed over time but even that skill was difficult where she was concerned. It was as if he were trying to tune in to a radio station and getting very bad reception with a lot of static.

Instead of the normal clear reading he was accustomed to getting, he could only pick up a few bits of strange thoughts in her head. Deadlines, iceberg images, a woman in a corset. Whoa. Where had that last one come from? Maybe he’d mistaken Sierra’s earlier appreciative looks at his body. Maybe that wasn’t her thing. Maybe women in corsets were her thing.

Not that it mattered. Sierra’s sexual orientation was irrelevant. She had to go and she had to go now. Ronan needed the house to himself. This was his family’s home and therefore it was his if he wanted it, according to Vampire law. And he wanted it.
Badly
. The secret to saving his sister’s soul was somewhere in this house.

Besides, the house was located smack-dab in the middle of Vamptown, a Chicago neighborhood inhabited mostly by vampires. This was no place for a human woman, even if she was one with courage and a surprisingly strong stubborn streak.

“She has to go,” Ronan told Damon.

Nodding, Damon stepped closer to Sierra and looked into her eyes. “You need to leave.”

“No way!” She narrowed her eyes, her increasing anger and frustration very evident. “I don’t think you are being an impartial person in this situation. In fact, I want your badge number so I can report you to your superior.”

Frowning, Damon looked at Ronan. His message was clear. Damon hadn’t had any better luck compelling her than Ronan had. Which, on the one hand, made Ronan feel like he wasn’t incapable after all. But on the other hand, it meant they were stuck with her for now.

“You two work it out,” Damon abruptly told them before turning on his heel to walk out.

As head of security in Vamptown, Damon was no doubt going to check out every detail about Sierra Brennan. Meanwhile, Ronan had a situation to handle.

“What kind of cop are you?” Sierra shouted after Damon.

“He’s the kind with fangs,” Ronan drawled sarcastically. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Chapter Two

Fangs? Sierra didn’t like the sound of that. Did Ronan somehow know that she wrote paranormal books? Her books only featured ghosts, not vampires, but maybe he didn’t know that.

“Hey, I was only kidding about the fang thing,” Ronan said. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“No,” Sierra said. “And I also can’t take you trespassing in my house. Even the cop said I own the house. You can stay in the backyard perhaps.”

“It’s February.”

“Tough tinsel,” she said curtly.

“Is that supposed to be a Christmas joke?”

She lifted her chin and stared him straight in the eyes. “Can’t you take a joke?”

“Sure. What I can’t take is camping in the cold.”

“Tough tin—”

Ronan clapped a hand over her mouth. “Shh. Did you hear that?”

She shook her head.

“I heard it,” Ruby said. “It’s trouble.”

Sierra couldn’t ask what kind of trouble for two reasons. The first being that Ronan had his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t say anything. Then there was the fact that she couldn’t speak to the ghost while Ronan was present.

Ronan sniffed the air and then frowned. “I smell cigar smoke.”

His attention was focused elsewhere yet his hand remained on her, which meant
her
attention was focused on him. Okay, also focused on herself and the feelings he aroused with his touch.

She wrapped her fingers around his wrist to yank his hand away. Or that was her intention. Instead, the feel of his pulse and the warmth of his skin distracted her.

Finally peeling his hand away, she said, “I don’t smoke.”

Right. She didn’t smoke. But
he
was smoking hot and she’d seen him naked. Both those facts were really starting to hit her now.

“I didn’t say you smelled.”

She was supposed to be grateful for that?

“You don’t smell cigar smoke?” he asked.

“No.”

Ruby was standing a few feet away, waving her hands to get Sierra’s attention. “I need you to focus on me.”

“What are you looking at?” Ronan demanded.

“Not you,” she assured him.

“Then what?”

“I was, umm … just noticing the vintage wallpaper on the walls here in the foyer.”

“It’s peeling. You’d be better off elsewhere,” he said.

“Is that a threat?” she said.

He shrugged.

Her dwindling patience snapped. “Listen, you, I’ve had a long day and I don’t need you making trouble.”

She didn’t realize she’d been jabbing him in his still bare chest until he took hold of her hand and cupped it in his. “You’re different,” he noted.

Uh-oh. Was he picking up on her ghost-whispering thing somehow? She sure was picking up on his sexy half-dressed-guy thing. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” He dropped her hand. “How about a compromise? We could share the house until your lawyer gets back.”

Sierra was silent for a few moments as she considered her options here. If Damon was right and she didn’t own the land the house sat on, then she might be forced to leave the property, and if she did that then she’d lose it. She had to stay thirty consecutive days and nights from the moment she first set foot inside. The terms of her great-uncle’s will had been very clear on that point.

Which meant that her best bet was probably to work out a temporary compromise with Ronan. “You mean like a written temporary-lease agreement?”

“I’m not sure we need anything in writing.”

“I am
positive
we need it in writing. That way there won’t be any misunderstandings. And if I do agree to this temporary arrangement then rule number one is no nudity.”

“I don’t mind if you’re nude,” Ronan said.

“Well, I mind if
you’re
nude, so don’t do it,” she said tartly.

“If you insist.”

“I do.” She reached into her purse for one of her small notebooks. She found an empty page near the end. “The house has two floors with one bedroom and bath on the main floor and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs.”

“Correct.”

She moved past him to head upstairs.

“Where are you going?” Ronan demanded.

“I’m checking out the upstairs to see which floor I’d like to claim as mine during this temporary arrangement.”

The stairs creaked as she climbed them. Ronan was right behind her, which made her very aware of the fact that she was a well-rounded size-fourteen woman with a butt that she considered to be curvaceous on her good days and too big on her bad ones.

Telling herself that she didn’t care what Ronan thought, she quickly stepped into the bedroom to the right of the stairs.

“Did you hear that?” Ronan said.

She shook her head. All she could hear was her heart pounding in her ears. Geez, if climbing one set of stairs did that to her, she definitely needed a workout routine.

“It sounded like someone closed a door up here,” Ronan said.

“Have you heard strange noises while you’ve been here?” she asked.

“Not until you got here.”

Stung, she said, “Well, clearly I didn’t close a door since I’m standing right in front of you in the middle of the room.”

He looked around suspiciously.

“Maybe the place is haunted,” she said.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he scoffed.

“You sure about that?”

“Why? Do you believe in them?”

Sierra shrugged and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. There was a definite chill in this room that she hadn’t detected downstairs. And there was no sign of Ruby up here. Sierra sensed another presence but saw nothing suspicious. Still, she trusted her instincts. “You can stay up here. There’s no kitchen upstairs.”

“Not a problem,” Ronan said

“You probably eat out a lot, huh?”

“You could say that,” he drawled with an enigmatic look that she found surprisingly sexy.

She opened the bathroom off the bedroom and checked that out. Nothing special there. Sink, toilet, bathtub. “Okay then. But before I print up an agreement, I will need references from you. If they turn out okay then you may temporarily stay up here and I’ll stay downstairs. Hopefully our paths won’t cross very often and we can get this worked out when my lawyer returns. What about your lawyer?”

“I don’t need one.”

She wasn’t about to advise him to get legal representation, a move that might only make her own situation more complicated. While she was certain that her claim on the house and the land would stand, there were ways of dragging things out in court.

She didn’t need more complications.

There was another doorway to the left of the stairs. Sierra turned the rusty doorknob. In her haste to enter, she nearly flattened her nose against the door, which stubbornly refused to open.

“Allow me,” Ronan said.

Reaching around her, he managed to encircle her in his arms under the pretext of opening the door. She could feel the heat radiating from his bare chest through the back of her cotton top.

“It seems jammed,” he said. He was so close that his voice resonated through her like the bass turned full throttle on a sound system in a muscle car.

She had three options. She could try to duck under his arm but that would mean rubbing against his body, probably not the best idea. She could try again to open it herself. Or she could tell him to forget it and say they’d try the room later.

That seemed the best option but she couldn’t resist giving the knob one last try, which meant putting her hand over his.

The door gave way so suddenly she almost tumbled onto the floor. Ronan grabbed hold of her, preventing her from falling.

“I’m okay,” she told him and herself.

Quickly moving away from Ronan, she studied her surroundings. A big window faced the front of the room and a set of French doors with a tiny balcony was at the back. The room was very large but had nothing in it aside from a large framed black-and-white photograph on one wall, of a middle-aged man smoking a cigar. He had a receding hairline, a bulbous nose, and heavy jowls. His smile was more sinister than cheerful.

The cold came creeping in. She could feel trouble here, but she didn’t know if her attraction to Ronan was to blame or if it was something else. The cold certainly didn’t come from Ronan. There was definitely another presence up here. But she had other things to deal with first, including the female ghost downstairs.

Sierra told herself that she could do this. She would write up a very carefully worded agreement and have Ronan sign it today.

“If you’ll give me three references, I can check them out right away,” she told Ronan.

She returned downstairs and checked the rooms on that floor. A large parlor in the front led into a dining room toward the back of the house. The few pieces of furniture dated to that period. No modern Ikea pieces here.

The kitchen was dated and could use a good scrubbing.

The bedroom faced the front of the house and was on the other side of the central staircase. It was large and clean. Hardwood floors had been worn to a warm patina by generations of feet.

There was no furniture in the room. Her cousins must have taken their beds with them when they left. They were twice her age and she wasn’t close to them so she didn’t know any of the details of their stay. The only reason they’d given for not staying in the house was that “Life is too short.”

“I’ll take the ground floor. You may temporarily stay upstairs. I’ll write out a
temporary
agreement,” she told Ronan, deliberately repeating the word. “That doesn’t mean that I in any way think you have a right to stay here or have any rights to this property. But it is February, as you said. And it is cold outside. I just want to be clear so you don’t get your hopes up.”

Ronan didn’t deal with hope. He’d hoped that he could break free during the many decades of his long indenture, but that hadn’t happened. He’d hoped that his sister had been spared the curse that his sire had cast on her soul, but that hadn’t happened. So he didn’t believe in hopes and dreams. He dealt with facts. And the fact was that he had to get his mission accomplished. Failure was not an option.

Sierra was plucky, he’d give her that. Nothing he’d done had thrown her for long. Granted, she’d been surprised to find him naked, but she’d bounced back and hadn’t been intimidated. He didn’t know why she couldn’t be compelled. That was a problem. And he didn’t need more problems.

He’d check in later with Damon to see what the head of security in Vamptown had dug up on her.

Ronan couldn’t even flash his fangs at her because there was no way to make her forget what she saw. He certainly wasn’t going to kill her. He’d seen and done enough killing over the past ninety-seven years.

He had to keep the fact that he was a vampire a secret from her.

When he’d lived here as a human, he’d no idea that he was in the midst of a vampire enclave. The talk instead had been about the increasing hostilities in Europe and the possibility that America would be drawn into the war over there.

“Why weren’t you wearing any clothes earlier?” she abruptly asked him.

“I was changing.” Changing from a resting vampire to an awake one.

Since arriving in Vamptown, he’d been put through a vamp inquisition by the vampire council before they’d approved of him staying. Only after that had he been given the rules.

No killing of humans.

No sharing info about Vamptown.

Not that he’d been given much info worth sharing. He had access to blood, but wasn’t told where it came from. He’d been given a tattoo on the back of his neck and told he’d be able to handle sunshine in two weeks’ time. He still had one day before he got there, so he spent most of his daylight hours in total darkness. Apparently he was old-school that way. He had a casket stashed in the basement.