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had been unwise to bait him. If Adrian and Caroline were right and he had given up on the search for his soul, he was nothing more to her now than adangerous stranger. And she was nothing more to him than a particularly juicy morsel.
    She forced herself to give his chest another wifely pat, keenly aware of the rock-hard muscles beneath her gloved hand. “If you wish to play another hand of cards, sweeting, I’ll hurry home and rouse the maid from her bed to fix you a midnight supper.”
    The corner of his mouth quirked upward in a knowing smile. “Nonsense, pet. I do believe you’ve roused an appetite that only you can satisfy.” His long, sooty lashes swept downward as he leaned toward her. Too late, Portia realized that he had no intention of tweaking her nose.
    She opened her mouth to protest but his lips were already there, sweeping over hers like molten velvet. The shock was so great that she might have jerked away were it not for the powerful hand that glided up her nape, the strong, sure fingers that wound their way through her upswept curls until she was as bound to him as any slave girl to her master.
    Tugging her head gently backward, he laid waste to her inhibitions with devastating finesse. He brushed his lips back and forth across hers, then gently licked his way into her mouth,ravishing and seducing with each lazy stroke of his tongue. He kissed like a creature with an eternity to devote to her pleasure. He kissed like a vampire.
    Portia clung to his waistcoat, but she could still feel herself falling, tumbling into some dark abyss where only he and the tantalizing promise of his kiss existed. She could barely hear the ribald hoots and catcalls of the hell’s patrons through the roaring in her ears.
    She might have been content to throw herself into that abyss, never to emerge, if not for the sudden sting on the inside of her bottom lip. She didn’t realize she’d been nicked by one of Julian’s fangs until she tasted the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. He tasted it, too. His sharply indrawn breath that wasn’t actually a breath at all threatened to suck the remaining air from her lungs. He jerked away from her as if she had been the one to bite him.
    His nostrils were flared, his pupils dilated. Although he didn’t move a muscle, his entire body seemed to be vibrating with some sort of primitive hunger.
    Portia touched a trembling hand to her lips. Her white glove came away smudged with asingle droplet of blood. Julian closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, they were as hard and opaque as black quartz.
    One of the men cleared his throat, then jerked a shoulder toward the stairs. “You and yer lady can rent one o’ the rooms upstairs for a shilling or two.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” Julian said smoothly, gathering her back into his arms as if they were the most loving of spouses. “I’ve discovered that anything worth having, including your wife, is worth waiting for.”
    To the appreciative chuckles of the crowd, he laid claim to his winnings, including Portia’s velvet choker, and wrapped his coat around her shoulders. Before she could utter so much as a token protest, he had swept her out of the gambling hell and into the night.
     
    Driven forward by Julian’s possessive grip on her elbow, Portia struggled to hold on to her bonnet and reticule and match his long strides.
    His good-natured veneer of charm had vanished, leaving his jaw stern and his profile impenetrable. She could not stop stealing curious glances at that profile. Despite the excesses ofwine and women she had witnessed in the gambling hell, dissipation hadn’t left a single scar on his face. His strong aquiline nose, the sensual cut of his full lips, and his cleft chin possessed the same Byronic beauty she remembered only too well. Byron had been moldering in his Nottinghamshire crypt for nearly two years now, the victim of a mysterious fever and his own excesses, but thanks to the vampire who had