Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood 8)

Chapter Twenty-five

Lash would later reflect that you never knew who you were going to cross tracks with. You just never knew how a simple decision to go left or right at a corner would change things. a Sometimes the choices didn't matter. Others. . . took you into unexpected places.

At the current moment, however, he had yet to come to that realization. He was just out in farm country, driving along, thinking about the time.

Just a little past one.

"How much longer?"

Lash glanced across the interior of the Mercedes. The prostitute he'd picked up in an alley downtown was sufficiently good- looking and had enough silicon in her to do porn, but Plastic Fantastic's drug habit had left her bony and twitchy.

Desperate, too. So strung out it had taken only a hundred-dollar bill to get her into the AMG on the way to a "party. "

"Not far," he replied, refocusing on the road ahead.

He was disappointed as shit. When he'd played this out in his head, Xhex was bound and gagged in the backseat--much more romantic. Instead, he was stuck with this nasty 'hood rat. But he couldn't fight the reality he was in: he needed to feed and his father was expecting some business to be done and finding Xhex was going to require more time than there was to spare.

Among the worst of the concessions was that this bitch riding shotgun was a human: Far less useful than a female vampire, but he was hoping her ovaries worked in his favor when it came to sucking her blood.

More to the point, he hadn't been able to find one of his kind in a skirt.

"You know," she said with a slur, "I used to model. "

"Really. "

"Down in Manhattan. But you know, those bastards. . . they don't really care about you. They just want to use you, you know. "

Right. First, she needed to forget she'd ever heard the phrase you know. And second, like she was doing so much better on her own up in Caldwell?

"I like your car. "

"Thanks," he muttered.

She leaned over, her breasts bunching up over the pink basque she had on. The thing had grease smudges from dirty hands on the sides, like she hadn't washed it for a couple of days, and she smelled like fake cherries, BO and crack smoke.

"You know, I like you. . . . "

Her hand went to his thigh and then her head went down into his lap. When he felt her rooting around for his zipper, he grabbed a hunk of bleached-blond tangle and yanked her back up.

She didn't even notice the pain.

"Let's not start this now," he said. "We're almost there. "

The woman licked her lips. "Sure. Okay. "

The shorn fields on either side of the road were washed in moonlight and the clapboard houses that dotted the scruffy patches glowed white. Most places had a porch light on and that was it. Around here, anything after midnight was waaaaaaay past bedtime for these folks.

Which was part of the reason it made sense to have an outpost here in the land of hot apple pie and American flags.

Five minutes later, they pulled up to the farmhouse and parked close to the front door.

"No one else is here," she said. "We the first ones?"

"Yeah. " He reached forward to turn off the engine. "Let's--"

The clicking sound next to his ear had him freezing.

The prostitute's voice was no longer fuzzy. "Get out of the car, motherfucker. "