Into the Spotlight Read Online Free Page B

did you do? Malcolm squelched the urge to slam his cousin against the wall in a chokehold and shake the truth out of him. Seventeenth-century interrogation methods were out of fashion and he’d never regretted it more. Instead, he smoothed down the front of his shirt, giving the appearance of all the time in the world and repeated, “Tell me what happened.”
    “Okay, I know it was stupid, but I was hanging out with Elizabeth and Belle, you know, the French twins?” Frederick punctuated every word with a hand gesture. Unfortunately, he inherited Ruth’s nervous tick.
    “Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumber. I’m acquainted.” And how he wished he wasn’t. The bottle blondes were drop-dead gorgeous and barely shared a brain cell between them. They were appealing to every man who didn’t know them, because who didn’t want to sandwich between two highly sexed young vampires who loved to share their men? That is…until they grew bored and moved on to their next conquest. They’d left more than a few shattered vampires in their wake.
    “Be nice.” Frederick’s hands flattened against the table. “They like sex. I like sex. It works out.”
    “Anyway…” Malcolm urged him back toward the topic at hand. The less he knew about his cousin’s “sex life” the happier he would be.
    “Yes, anyway. I’d been staying at the prince’s mansion near Montauk. He often holds court there in the summer, but he’s been in a blindingly bad mood for the last forty years and he gave us all the boot.” Blindingly bad mood was a mild understatement, but Malcolm let that go. The prince of New York was not the issue.
    “So I heard, and…?”
    “So, the girls wanted to come out here to the Arcana Royale. We’d all heard great stories about it, and you know that the prince of Las Vegas has an open-door policy for casino visitors, so we borrowed the jet and flew out.”
    Malcolm refrained from backhanding the younger vampire. Borrowed translated to stealing the Reynolds private plane. Since he approved all requests for actual borrowing and none crossed his desk, he could only imagine that Frederick “persuaded” the pilots, the ground crew and more. But that migraine was a problem for another day.
    “Continue.” He pushed the words past his teeth with a show of magnanimous patience.
    Frederick paused, perhaps evolution warned him that he was treading on dangerous ground because his blue eyes narrowed warily. “You don’t sound particularly friendly at the moment, Malcolm.”
    “You’re still breathing. That’s about as good as it’s going to get, especially if you don’t get to the point.”
    The younger vampire nodded slowly and clasped his hands together, stilling for the first time since he entered the interrogation room. “We got here, we checked in and, no, I didn’t use the family suite. I figured they would call you if I checked into it, and I didn’t want you harshing our buzz.” The familiarity with common slang wasn’t Malcolm’s primary concern, but he understood the gist of “harshing a buzz” and Frederick wasn’t wrong.
    “It was all going great,” Frederick hurried on, thankfully. “But the girls weren’t having a lot of luck at the tables, and I was barely breaking even and they were getting bored…so I persuaded one of the croupiers to throw a few my way.”
    “Frederick…” Malcolm sighed and unfolded his arms long enough to pinch the bridge of his nose. “That’s called cheating.”
    “It was barely breaking even. We lost a hell of a lot more than we won. So now I’m into them for a bit of money.”
    Malcolm tried to ignore that statement. If Frederick was into the Arcana Royale for over one million, then he’d lost more than a “bit” of money. “Where did you get the line of credit?” Because Frederick’s trust was locked and it took Matthias’s or Malcolm’s signature to release funds beyond his monthly stipend which was considerably less than a few million.
    Frederick