Bit the Jackpot (Vegas Vampires #2)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Chapter One

Seamus Fox was a lot of things. Almost four hundred years old.Irish.A vampire.Campaign manager for the residing president of the Vampire Nation.

And baby-sitter.To one paranoid ditzy vampire named Kelsey he’d been stupid enough to give his blood to.

He wasn’t exactly sure how his life had come to this— hand-holding the equivalent of a vampiric preschooler and being the spokesperson for some kind of Undead Unsolved Mysteries.

"I’ve never been to a strip club," Kelsey said. "What are you looking at? You have your serious face on. Likeyou’re thinking."

That made one of them.

Seamus put his glass to his mouth and pretended to take a small sip of the watered-down whiskey. He counted to ten in Gaelic, ripping his eyes off the exotic dancer he’d been watching gyrate with quite a bit of pleasure until Kelsey had reminded him of her presence.Her constant, chattering, needy presence. "I’m just looking for someone."

"Who?"Kelsey shifted her seat closer to his, her long black hair brushing against his arm. "What kind of person do you look for in a strip club?"

Let’s see, a stripper, maybe? Seamus fought the urge to roll his eyes. Kelsey was like a cross between aLabrador , a three-year-old child, and a  p**n  star. She rubbed up against him constantly, asked nine hundred questions an hour, and dressed likeFrederick ‘s of the Damned Hollywood.

And he was stuck with her because he had been the one to give her blood after another vampire had drained her and left her body in President Carrick’s hotel suite. Seamus hadn’t even been sure that it was possible to revive a vampire like Kelsey after a total blood draining, but it had been the only humane thing to do, to try and save her, and it had worked. She was restored to her previous vampirism, but now it seemed like she belonged to him.His pet vampire.

Normally she was an inconvenience, but during work hours he at least enlisted her secretarial skills to keep her busy and out of trouble. And off his lap, where she liked to sit whenever she could catch him off guard and slip her skinny rear end onto his legs. Unfortunately, he’d found he was a bit of a bleeding heart, pardon the expression, and couldn’t bring himself to be cruel to Kelsey. He usually let her perch on his knee for a minute or two until he felt like Santa Claus with fangs and found an excuse to stand up.Annoying—yes.A potentially growing problem—no doubt.But not the end of the world.

But having her with him, now, when he was watching the most sensual woman he’d seen in two hundred years wrap her naked body around a pole, was downright irritating.

"I’m looking for a stripper, Kelsey."

"Oh."

That went around her brain for a second or two. She pulled up the bodice of her clinging red dress. "Why do you want a stripper?"

Because he was still a man with sexual needs, even though he’d spent over two hundred years trying to pretend he wasn’t. But that was no one’s business but his.

In reality he was there to find jodiMadsen, Brittany Baldizzi’s aunt, who worked at this strip club behind the scenes choreographing for the girls now that she had retired from dancing herself. It was a longshot, that Brittany ‘s Aunt Jodi would have a clue as to who her father was, but it was worth asking. Seamus knew the man was a vampire, but he wanted a name.

His original plan had been to leave Kelsey at a table and go off to find Jodi.Straightforward. Get the job done efficiently in a businesslike manner. That was him.Normally. But then he’d seen this woman moving on stage.The shadow dancer. And he’d experienced something he had thought was gone.

Interest.Desire.The need to taste a woman’s flesh, her thick, pumping blood rushing past his teeth, his tongue.The pure thrill of making a woman laugh.Watching her eyes dilate in pleasure.

It all exploded over him again as he turned back and watched the dancer move up and down. A screen hid her, teasing him with only the shadow of her body, the outline of her impressive curves.

He was too old, with too many responsibilities, for this kind of adolescent crap. But damn. She could really work that pole.

Her hips thrust forward, caressing and rocking, her back arching, full br**sts straining forward. Her hair fell freely down over her naked shoulders, and her ankles swiveled in her high heels.

Seamus wrestled with his conscience. He wasn’t here to pick up a woman. He had no time for any sort of relationship, purely sexual or otherwise. Live feeding was never desirable, especially for a man in his position.

" Oooh, you have the hots for her, don’t you?" Kelsey said. "I know that look on your face. That’s a ‘let me do you, baby’ look." Seamus curled his lip at her word choice. He hadn’t done anyone in two hundred years. He had devoted his vampire life to penance for his mistakes. That was his burden, his destiny, and it shouldn’t change now because he was sexually attracted to a stripper.

"Though I don’t see why you want to date a shadow," Kelsey said.On the other hand Didn’t he deserve some kind of release?A little fun in his task-driven life? Having a woman wouldn’t compromise his job as Ethan Carrick’s presidential campaign manager. The only one preventing Seamus from having a good time was himself.

And the yoke of responsibility, the burden of guilt, was slowly crushing him. And he was only three hundred and seventy. By the time he reached a millennium, he’d be a shriveled-up recluse with false fangs living off sheep back inIreland , just to get away from it all.

"Where does the light come from that makes the shadow?" Kelsey asked. "Is she even real or is that like a movie?"

God help him, if there was a God, and he didn’t object to assisting a vampire. Seamus couldn’t do this.Any.More.Just one night of pleasure. That’s all he wanted.Needed.

"I don’t know where the light comes from. But she’s real." His leg bounced along to the thump of the funky bass music as he considered.

If he focused, his vampire eyes could pick up the rounded tip of the dancer’s ni**les, the outline of her plump lips behind the screen.

"I’m bored, Seamus. I want to go home."Speaking of lips. Kelsey’s red- lipstickedlip jutted out in a pout.

For a finale, the shadow went down deep into some kind of bent-leg, spread-thigh maneuver that had Seamus standing straight up. Holy crap, that was hot. "So go home."

Even uptight campaign managers were entitled to some kind of social life and he hadn’t taken blood from a live donor in forty years. Hadn’t had sex in two hundred.

He was going to do both tonight.And to hell with the consequences.

"Where are you going?" Kelsey grabbed his hand and rushed to follow him. "Don’t leave me! They’ll come and get me if I’m not with you."

Kelsey harbored some deep fear that her attacker was going to return and kidnap her. Because Seamus sympathized with her fears, he usually didn’t make an issue out of her clinging plastic wrap behavior. But this was different. His first attempt at seduction in a couple hundred years would be better done without Kelsey following him like a bloodsucking dachshund.