Passion Bites: Biting Love, Book 9 (12 page)

“
Mon Dieu.
” He murmured it, his head in the crook of my neck, both our skin damp.

His weight was starting to really flatten me, so I nudged him.

He rolled us over. I lay atop his hard chest, my cheek against his pounding heart, listening to it gradually slow. I gave a brief thought to some vampire legends that said their hearts didn’t ever beat. Apparently, like him showing up in the mirror, that legend wasn’t quite true.

He heaved a breath. My head took a little ride, up-down like a merry-go-round horse. Kind of fun, in a sleepy way.

“I’m sorry.”

That woke me. “Why?”

“I was a little rough.”

I remembered sucking at his fang like a straw. “
I
was a lot rough.”

“I like you spontaneous,” he admitted, soothing a palm along my back.

“Mmm.” I thought about opening my eyes, decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “I like you reckless.”

Time’s beat slowed, hushed, as we lay together. It felt nice. Right. His breathing got soft and regular.

My body cooled, fine where our fronts pressed together but my butt was getting cold. “So what happened last time, besides me getting some and you not?”

“Hmm?” He sounded as if he’d been almost asleep.

“Before we came upstairs. When you wanted to do this and I said ‘after what happened last time?’ And you said
because
of last time. What happened last time?”

He roused. Sat up. I sat up too, but his gaze went over my head. “What happened? I…I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

He shook his head. “Just forgot. We’d better get dressed. The ward looks closed off, but you can never tell when someone will wander through.”

“But…” I cudgeled my brain, trying to figure out how to get him to talk to me, surprised I really wanted—no,
needed
to know. But winkling out deep, dark secrets was Lizelle’s forte. I’d have had more skill cutting it out of his brain with a scalpel despite not being a surgeon.

He snatched up his undershirt and shirt and as he dressed, he refused to say any more.

But what was worse was that he wouldn’t look at me.

The warmth, the rightness…gone. As if it had never been.

I dressed too, quickly, like on a winter morning. Then I made some excuse and left.

Chapter Eleven

I ran back to the lab, cloaked myself in my lab coat and tried to bury myself in work, but my stomach was churning and my brain wouldn’t settle. I suspected my rational apple cart had been upset and emotional apples were tumbling onto the pavement, getting bruised, rolling every which way, getting stomped on, squished into applesauce…

Great. Runaway emotions were making me spout untenable metaphors. There was a meme waiting to be born—When Metaphors Go Bad. I could even picture the little gang tattoos and guns.

Well, Lizelle had started this, with her “tell me about him” and her “I’ll leave you two alone wink-wink”. She could help me out of it.

I found her stripping an empty patient bed. “Isn’t your shift over?”

“Yes. I was just keeping busy until you finished with the blond godling…” She took one look at me, stuffed the linen into a hamper on her cart and shoved the cart into a corner. “Come on.” She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the door.

“Where are we going?”

“First the locker room, to hang up your coat and straighten your face. Your hair is a rat’s nest, your lip gloss is scrubbed off and there are whisker burns on your cheek—and I don’t want to think where else.”

“Um…”

“Here we are.” She got rid of her scrubs as I just stood there, not knowing what to do with my hair, my hands…really, with any of me, until, dressed, she held out a hand for my coat. When I gave it to her, she put it away, took a good look at me and
tsked
. “The scrapes will fade, but your hair definitely isn’t ready to go public. Especially not gossipy MC-style public.”

“I have a comb in my backpack.” I glanced at myself in the mirror—she was right, my hair did look like a bird or something worse had settled in it.

She grabbed a brush from her purse. “This is going to take more than your little comb. Sit.”

She used her mom-voice. Even totally rational mature doctors can’t withstand the mom-voice. I sat.

My behind securely on the bench, she started smoothing bristles along my scalp. The gentle tug took me back, to my grandmother brushing a child’s golden curls, love in every stroke…

“Tell your old pal Liz what happened, hmm?”

“Don’t you have to get home to Una?”

“The babysitter knows I’ll be late because of the party. Tell me.” Her tone was soothing, like the brushstrokes. It wasn’t the girlfriend digging for information, it was the friend seeking to help.

I sighed. “We had sex.”

“You and the golden godling?”

I nodded, careful not to disturb her brushing.

“And?”

“How do you know there’s an and?”

“Because most of the time sex leaves you looking satisfied, not disturbed.”

“Well…it was good. Better than good. Exceptional. But then…I don’t know, he didn’t seem happy, although I know he had a good time. I’m pretty sure I know…” Realizing I was babbling, I dribbled off.

“Let me get this straight. He had a good time, but then got crabby. Did you do your usual ‘Thank you for the nice release of endorphins’ to him?”

I frowned. “No, we actually had a cuddle after. Maybe that was what he didn’t like.” My lips compressed as I thought about it. “Well, if that’s the problem, no more cuddles for me.”

Now Lizelle sighed. She put away the brush, and I missed it.

“The guy I saw in the lab wasn’t looking at you like a convenient lay. He was looking at you like he wanted much, much more. And I’d hoped… Well, I don’t know what happened, but you don’t make friends easily. You especially don’t give your heart easily—now that I think of it, you don’t give your heart at all since high school.”

Lizelle talked about heart a lot, and what she meant wasn’t the vital muscle pumping blood; to her, “heart” meant the binding emotions that made society function. Friendship. Family. Couples.

Needing to put it in words she’d understand, I said simply, “I gave my heart to you.”

“Yes, and I’m honored. But I got inside before the shutters came down. You haven’t let anyone in since.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Alexis.” She took my hands in hers. “I want you to be happy. Luke is the first man you’ve let anywhere near you. If he hurts you, I’ll be right there to kick his butt to the moon. But in the meantime…maybe you should give cuddling another chance. Give
him
a chance.”

“That’s not logical. It was just sex. The fact that he got disturbed after the cuddling means he thought so too.”

“No, cuddling proves you two
connected.
And even if something happened afterward to break that connection—”

“It wasn’t a connection, it was just sex,” I repeated stubbornly.

“Okay, okay.” With a raised hand, she sighed again and heaved herself to her feet. “Look, I figured neither of us was going to get any more work done today, but I can see you need something to keep you busy for a while. Let me check in with my sitter to make sure Una hasn’t sweet-talked her into ice cream for dinner, then we’ll head to Emersons’ and help out with preparations.”

The party.
Meaningless chatter, indecipherable games, confusing decorations. Queasiness rocked my stomach. “I really don’t want to—”

“Yes, but you got the bride-to-be a shower gift, right? Might as well go, at least to deliver her present.” She offered me a hand up and when I didn’t take it said, “Let’s deliver the presents, and
maybe
help with preparations and then you can leave.”

I stared at her hand. “How do you know they’ll want help?”

She laughed. “It’s a party. There are always last-minute errands and decorating and food prep to be done. Come on.”

She made the decision for me by grabbing my hand and pulling me to my feet…and tugging me out the door to the parking lot. Normally I walk to work, even though it’s a couple miles—a Meiers Corners
ve vill be hardy
thing—but today I’d taken my car to Marrone’s labs. I drove us to Emersons’ townhouse on Eighth and Walnut.

When I entered the anchor townhouse with my professionally selected, professionally wrapped gift the store clerk labeled as a “can’t-miss” under my arm, the place was pandemonium. Meiers Corners folk swarmed, decorating, setting out food and standing around gossiping, the chatter a lifeblood almost as important as beer.

The place pumped with the beat of Guns and Polkas, Nixie’s band, on the mp3 player. One hand braceleting my wrist, Lizelle danced us into the front room as the door eased shut behind us. That quickly, it was too late to turn back.

Then, naturally, she opened her hand, setting me adrift, and floated off.

My heart started thudding. I scanned the mob for someone I knew. Nobody. Well, I knew everybody but saw nobody I could really talk to. An arctic wind blew across the tundra of my stomach. Then I thought,
Twyla.
My cousin had to be here, she
lived
here. While almost a decade younger than me in age, nobody could exceed her experience and smarts.

As city admin, cousin Twyla basically ran the city of Meiers Corners, prime minister to the mayor’s king. She was competence wrapped in curves—and honey chocolate skin, while I’m paler than white bread in milk…in a blizzard. Most people were wide-eyed with disbelief that a cool Scandinavian blonde could be related to a black dynamo, until they got to know us.

The crush of bodies made finding my five-four cousin nearly impossible. My heart rapid-fired and my lungs wheezed until I could barely breathe.

Great
caducei
, I was never cuddling with a man again if this terrified little wimp was what it made of me. Time to get past my emotional desire for connection, whatever that was, and use my brain. I took a deep breath, pressed it out. My heart slowed. Maybe I couldn’t
see
Twyla, but then I simply had to figure out an alternate way to find her…like looking for her mountain of a husband, Nikos.

Sure enough, the instant I thought of it, I spotted his military fade haircut, head and shoulders above the mob, in the back of the room.

I started swimming through the crowd toward him. The man could have been a Spartan general—literally, because I think he was a long-lived vampire. My evidence? When I first met him, he was huge. Then six years ago something happened, and he came back older and smaller, crumpled in on himself. But here’s the kicker—since then, he’d gotten younger and regained a portion of his size.

When I finally reached him, more women than Twyla were at his side. Her head, dark hair in a sleek twist, was bent close to a riot of blonde spikes and an explosion of corkscrew curls.

I struggled through the last of the people laying out little nests filled with jelly beans—maybe some sort of arcane ritual for the marriage’s fertility—to approach them. “Hey.”

Heads lifted. The blonde spikes belonged to Nixie Emerson, punk rocker. The curls topped five-nine of long, lean Irish-Latina, Elena Strongwell, Meiers Corners’ top detective and all cop.

At their center was the person they’d been talking to—a yard-and-a-half tall human combining Elena’s mop of dark curls and Bo Strongwell’s strong jaw.

Elena’s son. I glanced at her face and even I could read the worry there, reminding me she was no longer simply all cop—she was all mother too.

“Oh good,” Twyla said. “Alexis is a doctor. She helped when Ric got sick.” She named my brother-in-law. “Maybe she can examine Rorik and set your mind at ease.”

The mention of Ric brought vampire overtones to the conversation. Officially, nobody admitted I knew about them, but Twyla probably realized it.

Elena flashed quick brown eyes at me. That was definitely a mother’s worried expression mixed with the cop’s shrewd gaze. “You’re a pediatrician?”

“ER. I often work with children, though. If you want a referral, I stitched up Sarah Jane Steel’s arm yesterday. How old is your son?”

“Nearly six.” She half-knelt next to him. He was very big for his age, above the ninety-fifth percentile. “Honey, why don’t you go play with Tyge?” That was Twyla’s son. “He’s with Jaxxie and her friends.”

Rorik clapped his hands and ran off.

Elena turned to me. “My son…he may have special needs.”

Any other parent, and I would have known that meant learning or emotional disabilities. But the fact that Twyla specifically brought up Ric’s poisoning meant this was probably a vampire issue.

“I understand. I’d be happy to take a look.”

“The sooner the better,” she said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do once full-day school starts. Can we bring him into the ER?”

“The sooner the better? Why don’t I run home to get a few things and examine him now? While I do, call your doctor to okay my access to Rorik’s records.”

Really, it was mostly concern for a worried mom prompting me. Honest. The fact that it would get me out of this mob was just a bonus.

“We can use our suite,” Nixie said. “I’ll have Julian watch the kidlets with Lady Gabsalot while we’re occupied.”

“Lady who?” Elena said.

“Zinnia’s here.” Nixie made a face. “Nice woman, but I wish she’d give the ‘poor benighted people of the night’ thing a rest. I’ll owe Julian for sure, but for you, worth it. Everyone, meet me downstairs in five.”

On the way out I deposited my present on a table already heaped with packages that were pure art in gift wrap and bows, blue and silver and a smattering of pastels. My glossy red paper and red velvet bow looked a tad gaudy sitting among them.

I left the townhouse and crossed through green yards to get a few things to add to my backpack, phoning Rorik’s doctor for his last blood workup and physical on the way. She’d already heard from Elena and I asked her to send the results to my phone.

After stuffing a few extras into my backpack, I returned to the Emerson townhouse and swam again through the crowd, which had amazingly actually gotten thicker in the meantime. I shuddered to imagine what it would look like when the actual shower started.

As I made my way down the stairs, I reviewed what I knew. Rorik was the son of Elena Strongwell, who was definitely human, and Bo Strongwell, a powerful Viking of a man who almost certainly was a vampire.

Which meant what Elena was probably worried about was how much of the vampire had swum upstream with Bo’s sperm. It didn’t seem possible, especially given the lab results, but the boy was extraordinary in every way.

I tapped my memories of working on the vampire toxin’s antidote. Five years ago, my brother-in-law, Ric, had been poisoned. I didn’t know the details, but Ric was one sick puppy.

My sister finally brought me in on the case, without telling me in so many words it was a vampire poison, using phrases like “Ric normally heals anything” with “almost miraculous speed”. Gotta love v-euphemisms.

I’d figured out the “poison” was actually a protein enzyme that hijacked Ric’s v-healing. In a nutshell, my theory said that vampires were made up of human cells supported by vampire cells—although nobody had ever seen a vampire cell because tissue samples were purely human, but with holes. I thought the v-cells must disintegrate when removed from a living host. Anyway, the vampire cells normally healed the human cells, but the poison blocked communications between vampire and human cells, thus blocking the healing.

Between my sister, the Meiers Corners Blood Center, a lab at the University of Iowa sponsored by some rich-as-sin mucky-muck in Coralville and little ol’ me, we formulated an antidote, another enzyme that blocked the blocker.

It hit me. Rich, helpful mucky-muck… Crap, our benefactor was Luke’s boss.

I’d figured out from Ric’s episode that not much was known about vampire physiology. Which explained why Elena was willing to let me, an outsider, examine her son.

Nixie waited for me at her door and waved me inside. The living room was lined by several bookshelves, many crammed with books bearing Latin titles etched in gold. One held a guitar case with a couple big amplifiers on the shelf below.

Elena’s son waited on the couch. Nixie nodded at the boy, then went to sit at a coffee table in the corner, where Elena and Twyla were trying to stay out of the way, but I could tell by their anxious glances it was hard.