Odd Stuff (22 page)

He stilled, and kissed my ear. One of his hands held both of mine imprisoned on the glass and the other cupped my head “I thought we agreed to be even on that score?”

I shook my head, needing, desperate. “I can sense it, you needing it. Take it.”

“No.” He reared as if moving away from me. He shut down whatever connection he had made with my brain. I realized he hadn’t even noticed he’d connected us until I responded to it. 

“This isn’t about that. This is you and me and this thing between us. You are more than just—” I rocked my hips against his, and he moaned into my hair. He began to move inside me, almost as if he couldn’t help it, and I whispered back, “You can owe me one.” 

Then I was too awash in the storm to think. His teeth pierced me, and he moved, and the world behind my eyes exploded into stars. At the same time, his emotions washed over me—joy, release, fulfillment. He hadn’t let himself do this, it was too personal, too much to risk. It would bind us closer than just lovers, but he wanted it. He needed it. He had not been so alive, so real…he wanted me. He needed me. 

All of this while I struggled to suck in air, drowning in the waves of completion that washed over me, leaving me shaking in his arms. He pulled his teeth out of my neck and held me as I shook. We sank to the ground, slowly, drifting as waves of pleasure had me shaking against him. I clamped my teeth in an attempt to stop them from chattering. I ran a hand down his hair, held his head as he held mine. 

Breathing slowed. He kissed my neck, my face, my ear. Then he settled around me, a big man-blanket. We were back on the ground. “Told you that you wanted to get me naked.” He bit my ear. 

“Nah.” My voice was a whisper as I smiled. “I just wanted you to bite me, and it seemed the quickest way to have my way with you was to humor you.”

He laughed into my ear. “Well, now I know it’s true, anyway.”

“What?” I played with his hair. His cell phone rang, and he answered it after fumbling in the pile of discarded clothes with one hand. It must have been Sven, because he said, “How long has it been? Two and a half hours? Okay, ten minutes.”

“What were you saying?” I shoved a hand into my hair.

“Sirens are good in bed.” He kissed me again, lightly.

“We weren’t in a bed. That was a ceiling,” I began, but he interrupted.

“You know what I mean—”  

I broke in. “We are
way
better in a bed.”

 “Remind me to test that theory at a later date.” His brow raised and his voice became suggestive.

“You are the scientist. I am just the experiment, remember?”

He held me, and I closed my eyes. Maybe the Old Mother was right. I wasn’t sure I would call this love, but whatever it was it sure stomped the hell out of any magic I had ever seen.

CHAPTER Twelve

We were playing a heated game of rummy, arguing loudly, when Sven and Vickie returned. You never would have guessed we’d been naked and sweaty a few minutes before. Well, Vickie would never guess. Sven laughed when he came in and saw the smiles on both our flushed faces. Vickie came in a blur of pink, gushing about the movie. And I remembered what tomorrow was. 

She was leaving for the weekend. Cold washed over me in a second.
Her first real visitation. She is leaving.
“Are you packed for tomorrow?” I worked to keep the tightness that threatened to close my throat out of my voice. 

“Yeah, and I am so excited. Dad said he and Karen were getting me a quad, and I haven’t seen Drew for days.” Drew was her new stepbrother. Karen must be the podiatrist’s name. Whatever. I had known it was something like that. 

I smiled my best mom-happy-to-see-you-happy smile. “Let’s go through your stuff to make sure you got everything.” 

“Okay. Thanks, Sven!” She bounced off down the hall, and I avoided both men’s gazes, worried I would see something like pity. 

I checked her bags, put in more underwear, and put her to bed. We read the next chapter in her book, and she fell asleep in my arms. I headed to the kitchen to find Sven and Vance talking.  

I wasn’t ready to face them. I backed up before they knew I was there and went to the living room. So much happened in the past few days, an emotional roller coaster of things. I moved quietly to the window, looking out. 

I slept with a vampire, my best friend was missing, bad guys were after me, I couldn’t sing, and my baby was leaving. I knew I teetered close to running on empty, and not just emotionally—I could feel the last of the siren-juice running out. Back when I never fed it, I didn’t feel like I was missing something. Now there was an aching hole inside of me, a throb as dull as the beginnings of a headache.  

I traced a heart on the glass where my breath fogged it then rubbed it away and leaned my head on the cool glass.

The smeared glass showed lone figure across the street. Lit by the sign above a bar, I could him leaning on a wall, his very stature suggesting boredom. Auburn curls shone like blood in the night. I noticed he wore a long black trench coat and seemed to be looking up at me. “Chance,” I whispered to myself. I touched the glass. 

Something passed between us. Knowledge is the best way I can describe it, like he knew all my secrets and watched, waited. 

But I wasn’t sure what he waited for. 

Which is stupid.
Max’s hireling couldn’t know me. No one knew
all
of me. 

He smiled and tipped his hat. It was a fedora.

I pulled my fingers on the glass into a fist.

He blew me a kiss and faded into the shadows.

I stood there, heart racing. Did he know where Mia was? Should I go and ask? Was he still down there, looking up, watching me?

Had he been watching me before I spotted him? 

A hand touched my back. I jumped and squeaked like a girl. 

“Shh.” It was only Vance. Probaby a sign or symptom of how crazy my life had gotten that I thought the words, “it was only” in reference to a vampire. 

I slid into his waiting arms, and he folded me close. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I put Chance out of my mind. “It’s hard to let Vickie go, is all.”

“Mmm.” He kissed my head and held me. I think he knew there were no words to soothe a mother’s aching heart. “We will head to Canada in the evening. When the sun sets, I’ll come pick you up. Sven is going to pack some things Mia might need. Bring a change of clothes with you.” 

All this was said while he slid his hands to my butt and built a line of fire across my jaw. “You haven’t been reading my mind anymore, have you?”  

He looked at me. “You asked me not to.”

“And you are just going to respect that?”

“Trust. It is something you do if you want a relationship to work out. I’d like this to work out.”

“We don’t really have a relationship. We have only known each other a few days…well, nights and—” 

“Don’t tell me you aren’t romantic enough to believe in love at first sight?”

I glared at him. “Don’t tell me you are?”

“Why not? I have seen a lot of people before and never have I felt this instant need to be around one.”

“Okay, bloodsucker, that is called lust.” I punched at his chest, trying to take the sting from the words.

He frowned. “I have lusted many women, some more beautiful than you. I know what lust is and it is not this. This is more than that, I think.”

“You don’t know that.” I shook my head, stubbornly.

“Lust can be sated. Lust can dry up once you have gotten the object of your desire.”

He cupped my breast and caught my ear in his teeth. “Do you feel dried up, already, siren?”

Need nearly buckled my knees. I concentrated on breathing. “So, we haven’t gotten our fill of each others bodies yet and—” 

“Sven went to bed. Vickie is in bed. Let’s go to bed and see if I can give you your fill and maybe then you will admit this is not just lust.”

“Insatiable, aren’t you, vampire?”

“I have only just begun to make you sing, siren.”

I glanced out the window one last time before he swept me away. There was nothing to see there, but the night. 

~

Morning dawned. I stretched in the big, black-sheeted bed and noticed that there were only two pillows on it, the rest lost to the floor at some point in the night. My body ached, muscles sore and lethargic.  

Vampire boyfriends keep you up all night. I blinked at the clock, which read ten. I suppose because they sleep all day, but I hadn’t guessed they could keep you busy all night. 

Oh, he had. A mixture of laughter and sighs, need and fulfillment which had, as promised, made time itself pause. His eyes were burned into my brain. I thought I knew every inch of his wonderful male body better than I did my own. Hugging a pillow, I pinched my eyes closed and wished he was still there, wrapped around me. He’d left when the sun was getting ready to rise.  

I could still feel him, holding me, whispering words of love. Making me feel needed. His trust was a gift, but at the same time a burden. He trusted me enough to respect that I wanted him out of my head. But him being out of my head allowed me time to build walls. So when he linked us, I could keep parts of me hidden. Parts I wasn’t ready to share. 

Like the knowledge this would end when I got Mia back.

I blinked back tears. I would have to leave when she came back. I couldn’t stay near all of the supernatural stuff and hope not to sing. Something would come up, I would have to sing, and I couldn’t afford to risk it. 

Besides, while he was open, letting me see even the darkest parts of him, I still kept parts hidden. Parts of me that he could never know because I was so much worse than just siren. I am truly a monster. 

But that was all mine to know and mine to keep. If he found out, if anyone found out what my father and mother created, Vickie and I were dead. Night and day creatures would come for us. Our deaths would be critical because what I represented was a threat to both worlds. 

The whole point of creating me, if my mother was to be believed, was to make something that could rule everyone. A super race—vampires, witches and all things magic would be unable to stand against me—so, they’d band together to try to destroy me. I knew it. It was why I worked so hard to stay under the radar, to be as normal as possible, to not be what I was made to be. 

I rolled over in the bed and shoved my feet off the edge. It was useless to sit around worrying about something I was never going to let happen anyway. Better to spend these last precious moments with my child before she left me.

Shuffling into Vickie’s room, I found the bed empty so I fixed the A-B-C coverlet. Picking up a few small pink articles of clothing, I pitched them into the hamper. I would have to do laundry sometime this weekend. 

There was a note on her dresser, so I picked it up and groaned. Why had I agreed to do thirty handmade things when it was unlikely I would have either the time or the creativity to create one? 

I picked up some naked Bratz and naked Barbie dolls engaged in a hedonistic orgy on the floor near the window. Putting them back in the Tupperware tub where they lived like plastic sardines, I looked around her room. It had the sweet smell of her shampoo, and I breathed it in, knowing I would come back to do so again when she was gone. 

I shuffled back out, sock-clad feet silent on the carpet. Sven leaned on the counter and talked to Vickie. She was animated and telling him what he had missed in not seeing the first movie from whatever sequel they had seen the night before. 

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. I told Vickie to finish her breakfast and moved to the living room with Sven. The giant of a man wore a pink fuzzy robe I hoped he’d borrowed from Mia and bunny slippers.

He burst into tears and I patted him, awkwardly. When he slowed down, he said, “I don’t know how you are taking all this so well. Mia is gone, and you two are going off on your rescue mission and that baby is going back to your jerk ex-husband and his homewrecking wife, and it is all just too much!”

“One day at a time, Sven. That is the single mom motto. You really like kids, don’t you?”

“Oh, I never knew how much. She is so fun and blunt, and she makes you laugh!”

“Yeah, that’s Vickie.”

“Honey, I never thought I would offer to do such an unsophisticated task, but if you need a sitter when you get a job around here, you call me. If you need to run around with Vance or anything… She is just a joy.”

Now, I blinked back tears of my own. For one, I wouldn’t be here to take him up on it. For two, it was hard not to love a gentle giant with a penchant for pink and ten-year-olds. I was going to miss him, too. 

So, I merely hugged him and went back to talk to Vickie. I followed her room to room. She was alight with life and bubbling with childish enthusiasm.

Too fast, the day was gone. It was four o’clock and time for her to leave. 

I loaded her and her Bratz suitcase into the car, as well as an assortment of toys she couldn’t make it a weekend without. We pulled out and headed to the mall food court, where her father and I agreed to exchange her for visitations.

We ordered slushies and soft pretzels and sat talking and touching. Knowing she was leaving made it hard for me to resist brushing at her hair with my fingers. Touching her soft cheek. Holding her small hand in mine.

And then he was there. His button up shirt and creased slacks screamed cold and imposing, his full lawyer mode. The often-worn, lip-pursed expression melted somewhat when he scooped her up, and she covered his face with kisses. I watched them. When he held our child, love shone in his eyes, and he most resembled the man I had married. We had been so young and stupid. 

When his eyes met mine, some of that might have been in my eyes, because he shut down and put Vickie back on her feet. 

“You look good, Jane.” He knew I hated being called Jane, but he was a lawyer, and they did not refer to other adults by childish nicknames. I didn’t figure it was a try at starting a fight. We had stopped fighting long ago. It was more ingrained habit than anything else. “Glad to be back home?”