Twice Bitten (14 page)

My body slow and sluggish as if moving through water, I turned my head and squinted at the clock on his nightstand. “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,” I grumbled, and curled away from him, hitching up my knees and curving my hands into my chest. “Go back to sleep. You can have me at dusk.”

There was a rumbly laugh behind me before his fingers splayed and dipped between my thighs. He kissed my neck, then flicked his tongue against the tip of my ear. “Please, Merit?”

My eyes still closed, I smiled a grin of feminine pleasure. I’m pretty sure that was the first time Ethan had ever said please to me. How was I supposed to say no to that?

But then his voice turned more urgent. “
Now
,” he growled, his erection against my back.

In answer, I slid my hand behind me and around to the small of his back, pressing his body closer.

“If we keep this up,” I said quietly, “we’re going to kill each other.”

He shifted to raise his body over mine, silver eyes staring down at me. “We’re immortal. That would be quite a battle.”

I pushed a lock of hair from his eyes. “An historic battle.”

“A battle for the ages. You could write about it.”

I credited the hour, the fact that the sun was high above us, but that seemed the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I chuckled and soothed my hands down the sculpted muscle of his back. “Far be it from me to turn down a research project.”

I yawned and stretched, still buried in piles of cool cotton blankets, then opened my eyes. Ethan stood beside his bureau, already showered and dressed in unbuttoned black trousers. He had just begun to button the button-down shirt that lay open across his torso. He glanced back, smiled politely, and finished fastening his shirt. “Good evening.”

“Good evening?” I didn’t mean to make it a question, not intentionally, but even I could hear the uptick at the end of the sentence.

Ethan chuckled, then moved to the bed, leaned over me, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. He must have seen the surprise in my eyes. “I told you I wasn’t your father.”

“I clearly wasn’t giving you enough credit.”

“I’m sure that’s not the first time.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, pulled on socks, then slipped into chunky black designer shoes.

I sat up, pulling the comforter around me. “Nor will it probably be the last.”

Ethan snorted and, when he was shoed, went back to the bureau and slid trinkets and change into his pockets. “It’s eight thirty. We’ll need to leave for the Breck estate shortly, so if you’d like to pretty up before we leave, now would be a good time to do it.”

I glanced down at the comforter. “Probably the blanket would be a little too casual.”

“Probably,” he agreed.

“It goes against everything I believe in to ask you this question, but what would you have me wear?”

He perched one elbow on the bureau, then linked his fingers together. “They want us to see them in their natural habitat, so to speak. I assume they’d ask the same of us.”

“Armani for you?”

He gestured at his suit pants and button-up. “And jeans, I assume, for you?”

“But of course. Opportunities to wear denim to the office don’t come along very often in Cadogan House.”

Ethan chuckled, then pushed off the bureau and pulled a black suit coat from a valet stand. “I hear the Master can be such a pain in the ass.”

He definitely had his moments.

Since I very definitely was, I erased the message—and the evidence.

“Good evening, sunshine.”

I glanced behind me at the main staircase as I slid my phone back into my pocket. Lindsey was bounding downstairs, her blond ponytail bouncing as she moved. She was on duty today and clearly prepped for a day in the House’s Operations Room, clad in Cadogan black, her katana belted at her side.

She reached the foyer, then walked toward me and propped her hands on her hips. “You don’t look nearly as tired as I expected. Maybe he
was
the cure for what ails you.”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Mer. We all heard you two at it last night, and some of today, actually. But thank Christ, I say. About time you two did the deed.”

Her approval notwithstanding, a blush powered by profound mortification crept up my face. “You
heard
us?”

She grinned. “You shook the foundations. You threw a lot of magic in the air.”

I was too stunned to speak. It had occurred to me that word might slip out, from Margot or otherwise, that I’d been in Ethan’s apartments. It hadn’t occurred to me that people could have heard us, or felt the magic we’d spilled.

“Dear God,” I murmured.

Lindsey patted my arm. “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s about time you two made the beast with two backs.”

I had to work to form words. “There are so many things wrong with that statement, I don’t know where to start.”

“Start with the details, Sister Sledge. How was it? How was
he
? Was he as phenomenal as we’ve all imagined him to be? Seriously. Spare no details, anatomical or otherwise.”

“I’m not giving you any details. Anatomical or otherwise,” I added, before she could amend her request.

There was disgust in her expression. “I can’t believe you. You make it with the Master and you’re being tight-lipped?” She clucked her tongue. “That is weak. At least give me the goods on the evening-after talk. Are you two official now? Dating? Relationshipping? What?”

“Well, we didn’t really get into the details, but he was still there when I woke up this evening. No evening-after regrets, as far as I know. And he knows I’m not interested in a fling. I’ve made that abundantly clear.” I grinned a little.

She grinned back. “That’s my girl. Way to show him who’s boss.”

“Are we actually debating who’s boss of this House?”

We glanced over simultaneously. Ethan stood at the bottom of the stairs, golden hair around his face, hands in his pockets, newspaper under his arm.

“Good evening, Liege o’ mine. How was your day?”

Ethan arched an imperious eyebrow at Lindsey, then glanced at me. “Nice shirt. We need to make a brief detour before we take on the shifters.”

“
Oh
,” Lindsey knowingly intoned. “You’re going to Navarre House?”

“We’re going to Navarre House,” Ethan confirmed.

I blinked. When he’d said “detour,” I’d immediately imagined grabbing a hostess gift; a trip to Navarre House wasn’t on the list. I’d never been there before, and the idea of going now didn’t thrill me. And why not, you ask? Brief review: I’d be facing down an ex-boyfriend for the first time since our official breakup, while on the arm of the boy he’d thought I’d been cheating with, and only hours after I’d actually had sex with him.

Fabulous
.

“Does she know?” Lindsey asked, bobbing her head toward me.

“Standing right here. Do I know what?”

“I’m going to tell her,” Ethan said. “But we’re short on time. I forgot to call Luc—please tell him I want to talk before dawn to review plans for the convocation.”

“Aye, aye, Liege,” she said, but leaned in to me before she walked away. “Seriously, well done. And I mean that.”

I grinned after her and raised a quizzical gaze to Ethan. “What do I need to know? And why are we going to Navarre?”

He gestured for me to follow him, then headed toward the basement stairs. When I fell in line beside him, he pulled the paper out from under his arm. It was a copy of the day’s
Chicago Sun-Times
. He flipped it open, then turned it my way.

“Oh, my God,” I murmured, pulling the paper from his hands.

The headline on the front page—the
front page
—read, PONYTAILED AVENGER SAVES PATRONS IN SHOOT-OUT. A picture of me helping Berna into the ambulance was set below the headline. And there was one more surprise—the byline. Nick Breckenridge was listed as the author of the article.

As I carefully took the basement stairs behind him, I read through the first part of the story, which discussed the shooting and my emergency work. So far, so good. But I had no idea why Nick Breckenridge, of all people, had written it. It wasn’t that writing a front-page story wasn’t his thing; he was an investigative journalist with an impeccable reputation. He just didn’t like me very much.

“How—why?”

“Perhaps you turned the Breckenridge tide—from animosity to a cover story.”

We stopped beside the basement door. “This can’t be hero worship. You know how Nick feels about me.”

“You heard Gabriel’s hesitation when he mentioned the Breckenridge House. Maybe, like, Nick and Gabriel are still on the outs. Gabriel did apologize, after all. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about Nick’s pissing off vampires.”

“Okay, but convincing a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter to write a story glorifying a vampire—a vampire he isn’t particularly happy with—would take a lot of pushing. I’m not sure Gabe would want to waste political capital on me. Besides, I can’t imagine he’d put pressure on Nick to put us on the front page of the
Sun-Times
. Gabe doesn’t want that kind of attention. It would raise too many questions about why armed vampires were in the bar, or risk the paparazzi’s thinking it was some kind of new vampire hot spot. He definitely doesn’t want that. There has to be another reason.”

And that mysterious reason made me wonder what price I’d have to pay with Nick. I wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse if he wrote the story because he got an unsubtle nudge from his boss. “Probably about the same way I’d feel if I got a nudge from a Master,” I muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. What does this have to do with going to Navarre House?”

“The story gets considerably nastier as it goes along.”

“What kind of nasty?”

“It reminds the reader that the vampires of Navarre House weren’t nearly as, shall we say, philanthropic as Cadogan vampires.”

“It talks about the park murders?” Those were the results of Celina’s murderous escapade through Chicago’s parks . . . and the U of C campus. I was supposed to have been victim number two, at least before Ethan found me.

He nodded. “That’s why Morgan wants to see us. Since you’re featured in the story and were friends with Nick, he probably assumes we had something to do with its creation.”

Calling us friends gave my relationship with Nicholas Breckenridge a lot more credit than it deserved.

Ethan punched in his code, then opened the basement door.

“And how are you feeling about said article?” I asked, following him into the garage.

“Well, evidently I’m dating the Ponytailed Avenger, so I feel pretty good about that.”

I stopped to offer him a snarky look. When he walked past me to the car, smug grin on his face, I rolled my eyes. But I hardly meant it. He had said “dating,” after all.

We were on the road a few minutes later, silence reigning in the Mercedes as I finished reading the story. The article read like a primer on Cadogan and Navarre, from the Houses’ leadership positions to their histories. It also mentioned that a woman named Nadia was Morgan’s new Second. I hadn’t known he’d promoted someone. On the other hand, I hadn’t really thought to ask him about it.

That omission probably said a lot about our lack of potential as a couple.

“Where’d the information come from?” I asked, glancing up to realize that we’d moved from Hyde Park to Lake Shore Drive. Navarre was located in Chicago’s Gold Coast, an area of chichi townhouses, condos, and mansions near the Lake and north of downtown Chicago.

“That was my second question,” Ethan answered darkly, “right behind wondering what impolitic acts our young Master of Navarre might take upon seeing it.” He glanced over at me. “Have you talked to him recently?”

“Not since the fight.”

There was a moment of silence in the car, the tension evident by the faint
hum
of magic. “I see,” he said.

There was disapproval in his voice. I tensed, anticipating an argument. “Is there something you’d like to say about that?”

When he looked over, his expression was mild. I couldn’t tell if it was forced or not.

“Not at all,” he said. “But it might add to his irritation at having seen the story.”

I thought back to the things Morgan had said in our last two conversations, the accusations he’d thrown, the condescension in his tone. “Yeah, he’s probably not going to be in the greatest of moods.”

“Any suggestions?”

“Barring a complete attitude adjustment, did you happen to bring along any of those chocolate mousse cake thingies?”