Burnt Offerings (Vampire Hunter 7)

If I'd known what to say to him, I'd have sent the wereleopards out of the room so we could talk. But God help me if I knew what to say. Until I had time to think about things, the talk could wait. In fact, it had better wait. I hadn't expected to still be able to feel something for Richard, or him for me. I was sleeping with another man, in love with another man. It complicated things. Just thinking that made me smile and shake my head.

"What's so funny?" he asked. His eyes were so hurt, so confused.

"Funny?" I said. "Nothing, Richard, absolutely nothing." I fled to the downstairs bathroom to change. This was the biggest bathroom in the house, the one that had a sunken marble tub. It wasn't as big as the one Jean-Claude had at the Circus, but it was close. White candles encircled the head and foot of the tub. Untouched, fresh, new, waiting for nightfall. He'd chosen peppermint candles. He loved scented candles that smelled eatable. His food fetish was showing.

There was a second card taped to the stem of a silver candlestick. There was nothing on the outside of the envelope, but call it a hunch. I opened it.

The note said, "If we were alone, ma petite, I would have you light them at dusk. And I would join you. Je reve de toi." The last was French for "I dream of you." This one wasn't even signed. He was such a confident little thing. According to him, I was the only woman in nearly four hundred years to ever turn him down. And even I had finally lost the battle. Hard not to be confident with a track record like that. Truthfully, I'd have loved to fill the tub, light the candles, and been waiting na**d and wet for him to rise for the night. It sounded like a very, very good time. But we had a house full of guests, and if Richard was staying the night. we were going to behave ourselves. If Richard had dumped me for another woman. I wouldn't have taken it quite as badly as he was taking it, but I couldn't have stayed in a house and listened to him have sex with the other woman. Even my nerve wasn't that strong. I certainly wasn't going to put Richard into that position. Not on purpose.

I had to make two trips back and forth into the bedroom from the bathroom. First, I forgot a normal bra. A strapless bra was just not meant to be worn this long. Second, I traded the shorts I'd grabbed first for jeans.

I was very aware of Richard watching me as I came and went. Zane and Cherry watched both of us like nervous dogs that expect to be kicked. The tension was thick enough to walk on and the leopards could feel it. The tension was more than physical awareness. It was like he was thinking very hard, and I could feel it, a building pressure that had a lecture at the end of it, or a fight.

I ended up dressed in a pair of new jeans in that wonderful dark blue color that never lasts, a royal blue tank top, white jogging socks, and white Nikes with a black swoosh. I shoved most of the old clothes into the dirty clothes hamper and folded the dress on top of it. The dress was, of course, "dry clean only." I tucked the Firestar down the front of the jeans. I had an inner pants holster for it, but it was in the bedroom. I didn't want it badly enough to go back in there right this second. I felt like I was tempting fate every time Richard and I passed each other. Eventually, he'd insist on talking, and I wasn't ready. Maybe for this particular talk, I would never be ready.

I folded the borrowed coat over my arm with the Browning hanging heavy in one pocket. The machine gun I kept on my shoulder like a purse. When the bedroom cleared out, I'd put the machine gun in the closet. The trick about having this many loaded guns is that you don't dare leave them lying around. Lycanthropes are great in a fight, but most of them don't seem to know one end of a gun from the other. There's something about a gun just lying around, especially one as nifty as a submachine gun that tempts people. There is an almost physical itch to pick it up, point it, go bang-bang. You either make a gun safe, unloaded or locked up, or you keep it on your body where you can control it. Those are the rules. Deviating from the rules is what lets eight-year-old kids blow the heads off their baby sisters.

I went into the living room. Gregory was gone from the couch. I started to assume he'd been carried to the bedroom, then walked into the bedroom to make sure. Be damn silly to let Gregory get snatched from my living room and not notice it.

Cherry and Richard were tucking him into the bed with Zane's help. Gregory had woken enough that he was whimpering. Richard caught me peeking in the doorway.

"Just making sure Gregory was all right," I said.

"No, you were making sure that the bad guys hadn't gotten him," he said.

I looked down, then up. "Yeah," I said.

We might have said more, but Gregory woke up as they put his legs in traction. He started screaming. Lycanthropes metabolized drugs incredibly quickly. Cherry readied a needle full of a clear liquid. I fled. I don't like needles. But truthfully, I didn't want Richard to lecture me over the guns. His being a lycanthrope wasn't our only problem. Richard thought I killed too easily. Maybe he was right, but I'd saved his ass more than once with my quick trigger finger. And he'd endangered me more than once with his squeamishness.

I went back down the stairs, shaking my head. Why did we even bother? We had too many important areas that we disagreed on. It wouldn't work. So we lusted after each other, even loved each other. It wasn't enough. If we couldn't find a way to compromise on the rest of it, we'd just end up cutting each other apart.

Better to just make the break as cleanly as possible. My head agreed with the logic. Other body parts weren't so sure.

I followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen. It was a lovely kitchen, if I ever cooked or entertained. It was all dark wood cabinets with a large island in the middle with hooks above it for cooking pots and pans. I didn't own enough kitchen stuff to fill one whole cabinet let alone the rest of the gleaming expanse. Of all the rooms in the new house this was the one that made me feel most like a stranger. It was so notwhat I would have chosen.

Ronnie and Louie were sitting at my small two-seater kitchen table. It sat on a raised platform in a three-sided bay of windows. The area was meant for a full-sized dining room table. My little breakfast-nook set looked like a temporary measure. Except for the flowers. The flowers took up most of the small table. The flowers were another addition.

I didn't have to count to know that there were a dozen white roses and one lone red one. Jean-Claude had been sending me white roses for years, but ever since we made love for the first time there had been a thirteenth rose. Red, crimson, a spot of passion lost in a sea of white purity. There was no card, because there was no need for a card.

Jamil leaned against the wall near Ronnie and Louie, sipping coffee. He stopped talking when I entered the room, which meant he'd probably been talking about me. Maybe not, but the silence was thick, and Ronnie was very busy not looking at me. Louie looked at me a little too hard. Yep, Jamil had been spilling the beans.

I didn't even want to know before I had some caffeine in me. I poured coffee into a mug that said "Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that bothering me before I've had my first cup of coffee is hazardous to your health." The mug had been at the office until my boss accused me of threatening the clients. I hadn't picked out a new mug yet. I had to find something suitably irritating.

There was a sparkling new espresso machine on the cabinet by the coffeemaker, with another card. I took a sip of coffee and opened this one.

"Something to warm your body and fill this empty cuisine." The last was French for "kitchen." He often did that in notes, as if even after a hundred years in this country he still sometimes forgot the correct English phrase. His speech was flawless, but many people speak a second language better than they write it. Of course, it could be his backhanded way of teaching me French. It was working. He'd write a note, and I'd hunt him down and ask what it meant. Having French sweet-nothings whispered in your ear is great, but after a while you wonder exactly what he's whispering, so I asked. There had been other lessons, but nothing much that I could share in public.

"Nice flowers," Ronnie said. Her voice was neutral, but she'd made herself very clear on the subject of Jean-Claude. She thought he was a pushy bastard. She was right. She thought he was evil. I didn't agree on that one.

I sat down at the far end of the octagon, back to the wall, head below the level of the windows. "I don't need any more lectures today, Ronnie. Okay?"

She shrugged and sipped her coffee. "You're a big girl, Anita."