Any Way You Want It Read Online Free

times. Hell, maybe millions. He’d been in New Orleans, working on Bourbon, longer than was probably safe. But then, this was a city of transients. People didn’t stay here long enough to notice that he hadn’t changed one bit in the last ten years. And the return visitors were usually too drunk and into their partying to really give his looks much thought.
    This was a strange place, where he could be the center of attention and be invisible all at the same time.
    He glanced over to a group of revelers on the dance floor. Five woman, scantily clad, flashing legs and cleavage, and working very hard to get him to notice them.
    He smiled. Predictably, they giggled and whispered to each other and began dancing more determinedly. More leg. More cleavage. The usual.
    And while that was good—Ren did enjoy women—the best part was that he could spend the night with one of them, maybe more than one of them, and then they went back to their lives. Ren would be nothing more than a vague memory—just as they were to him.
    Bourbon Street was famous for the best time you didn’t remember. And that worked out well for him. The people were predictable, and he could easily get lost amongst them.
    Plus the atmosphere here effervesced with energy, with life, which made it very easy from him to survive. He breathed in deeply, pulling the vitality in the air deep into his body, feeling it fill him.
    Human life force, which fed him.
    Women, sex, and human energy. This darkened, run-down bar provided all the necessities he required.
    His gaze moved back to the woman at the bar. But what about that one? There was something very different about her. And not just her rather conservative clothes and lack of exposed skin.
    He smiled. Although that was different.
    No, what intrigued him was that when he’d been playing the keyboards, something he rarely did, he could have sworn she’d actually recognized the piece. He’d been fooling around while the rest of the band set up, and on impulse, began to play a sonata he’d written when he was only fourteen.
    He’d played the piece publicly only once—for his father’s birthday gala. Not that anyone in attendance had known the smug, pompous bastard was his father. And that Ren was not just his father’s favorite discovery, a child prodigy, a performing monkey.
    Ren had played the piece—honestly believing his father would be so impressed that he would announce to the ton that the gifted child seated before them performing his heart out was, in fact, his son. But dear Daddy hadn’t, and Ren had thrown the piece away—because while his father loved his music and his talent, he’d never had a moment’s love for his illegitimate son.
    Ren frowned slightly, even though his voice remained positive as he sang, telling the audience that any way they wanted it, that’s the way they needed it.
    He couldn’t even say what made him think of that song tonight—not the Journey song, which he sang every night he worked. That sonata. He hadn’t thought of the piece in decades. Longer than that.
    Yet he’d impulsively played it, and when he’d looked up, the curvy strawberry blond had been standing right in front of the stage, staring up at him like she was seeing a ghost. Wide-eyed, shocked. And he could have sworn he saw recognition in her eyes, too.
    Ren finished singing, offering a routine thank you to the crowd swarming the bar.
    “Dude, what’s going on tonight?” his lead guitarist, Drake, leaned in to ask. Drake was a vampire, too, but Drake was a run-of-the-mill bloodsucker, while Ren had the dubious distinction of being a lampir, an energy sucker.
    Ren frowned at his bandmate. Okay, with his goatee grown long, head shaved except for a long queue ponytailed on the back of his head, and a skull shirt, Drake was far from run-of-the-mill.
    And he’d been a pirate in life.
    “What do you mean?” Ren asked, not following Drake’s comment.
    Drake frowned, which made him look almost