“That’s not small talk,” she said.
It sounded like it was, he thought, but kept it to himself. Somehow, he suspected she deserved better than that guy. Maybe like he’d deserved better than Korine.
He looked around again at the crowd and suddenly wondered if he’d be able to read their thoughts as well. Turning to the little old lady with the cane next to him, he smiled. He casually reached for her hand.
“Hi,” he offered with his most charming smile.
He waited for a vision to happen, but nothing came except her cane. Right across his head.
“Get your hands off me, you pervert. I’m old enough to be your grandmother.” She held up her cane as if to whack him again.
He pulled his hand away. “I didn’t. I wasn’t trying . . . Sorry.”
When he sat back, the beautiful brunette next to him gave him a look and her blue eyes sparkled with what looked like humor.
“What?” he asked her in a whisper.
She leaned in. “Did you get anything?”
“Nothing but a lump.” He rubbed his head. “I wonder why it only happens with us?”
“Hey . . . you . . . you with the cane. I’ll swap seats with you,” Freda, the one who said he looked like Johnny Depp, spoke to the woman next to him.
“Why?” the woman next to him asked.
“Just ’cause.” She grinned back at Cary, wiggling her eyebrows at him.
“You want his hands on you, don’t ya?” The woman pointed her cane at Freda. “You hussy.”
Cary couldn’t believe his ears. “Whoa. I wasn’t—”
“Hey . . .” Freda said, still talking to the woman pointing her cane out. “This might be the end. Why not live a little?”
“I wasn’t trying anything,” Cary insisted.
He heard a sweet sound come from beside him. He looked at the young woman, and she had her hand over her lips, laughing.
“You think it’s funny?” he asked, leaning in.
“Yeah,” she said. “It kind of is.”
He looked at her and her blue eyes sparkled. She was pretty.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he said in a low voice, and he meant it. Seeing her eyes lit up with something besides panic was kind of nice. Suddenly, he realized he didn’t even know her name. In the first vision, her friend had called her by name, but he couldn’t remember it. He’d been a little swept away by the whole Bob reference.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Chloe Sanders. Yours?”
“Cary Stevens.” He held out his hand to her, eager to learn a little more about her. Curious to what vision he’d get next.
She looked at his stretched-out palm and then up into his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
Disappointment did a lap around his chest. She wasn’t the first woman to tell him no, but normally he didn’t give a damn. For some reason, he did now. What was up with that?
He dropped his hand and shrugged, hoping to hide his disappointment. “And here I thought we were getting along.”
“We are,” she said. “But . . . there’s no reason to push it.”
“Push what?” he asked, and looked right at her. Then it occurred to him the reason why she might not want to touch him, and it could have nothing to do with him and everything to do with . . . “Because you saw Marc?”
“Marc?” she asked.
“The boy.”
“Oh. Yeah, I don’t want to see that again.”
But the way she said it told him it wasn’t just about seeing a body. Then, just like that, he understood what it really was. She didn’t want to get close to him. The fact that he wanted to get a little closer to her was odd, because normally he would be the one wanting to avoid any kind of personal entanglement.
Well, besides the kind of entanglement people did when naked. He looked down and cut his eyes slightly over to study her without being caught. As he’d first concluded, she had a great body. A little on the short side. Probably around five feet and five inches, lean with lots of curves. Her breasts were a little small, but considering she wore a tight sports bra that hid a lot, they were probably perfect.
Her long brown hair, worn in a ponytail, looked soft and slightly curly. Her best feature, however, was her face. One of those clean, pretty faces. Large almond-shaped eyes, light blue with darker blue rings. Lashes thick and long. He’d bet she never wore makeup on those. Her nose was cute. Small. Not too small, but perfect. It fit her face.
Her mouth? Sexy. Wide lips, rose colored. He’d bet she could kiss and do all kinds of things with that mouth. Without warning, his mind took him there. To her and him and . . .
“What?” she asked.
Shit. He realized he’d stopped peering at her under his lashes and was downright staring. And even worse, he was sitting in a room filled with senior citizens, who like him, could possibly be dead. And he was fantasizing about her in a way that was about to pitch a tent in his jeans.
“Nothing,” he spit out. He picked up a magazine, set it in his lap to hide the growing body part, and returned to flipping pages the way he had been when she walked in.
Five minutes later, boredom had overtaken him just like before she came in. He’d felt her staring at him a couple of times, but he’d tried to ignore her. It wasn’t working. He sucked at ignoring pretty women. After Korine’s little stunt, he’d vowed to give up women for good.
That hadn’t worked out too well. So he settled on dating only those who wanted the same thing he did—just sex. A good time with no commitment.
Who would have ever guessed that would get old? He hadn’t. Hell, even admitting it to himself sounded insane. But it had.
He closed the magazine and looked at Chloe again, who had returned to staring at him.
“What happened?” he asked.
“With what?” She squinted her eyes in confusion.
“With Jerry. What did he do to hurt you?”
She shook her head, looking uncomfortable with the question. “Nothing.”
“Liar.” He accused. “I saw you when he asked you to marry him. You were in love with him. He might have sucked in bed, but you didn’t care. You were so in love you glowed. He had to have done something, or you’d be wearing his ring.”
He glanced away when a bell rang. Or maybe it didn’t ring, but chimed, like a soft church bell.
“That’s it,” said Beatrice Bacon. “Someone’s going back.” Her faded gray eyes met his as if her announcement affected him. “Time’s up. And you didn’t even get to first base.” Her gaze shifted over to the seat next to his.
He looked back at Chloe, but she wasn’t there.
Vanished.
Gone.
His gaze shot to Beatrice. “What happened? Where did she go?”
“Sorry,” she said.
Damn it. And one thought whispered through his head. He wanted Chloe back.
Excerpt from Reborn
Read on for an exciting preview
of the first book in C. C. Hunter’s
Shadow Falls: After Dark series,
Reborn!
Available now!
Enter Shadow Falls: After Dark, and meet a vampire named Della, who’s about to discover what her own story is meant to be . . .
Della had the perfect life—the family, a boyfriend, and a bright future—until she was turned and abandoned by everyone she loves. She takes refuge at Shadow Falls, a camp for teens with paranormal powers. It’s where she and her best friends, Kylie and Miranda, heal their heartbreak with laughter, and where Della is training to be a paranormal investigator—and she refuses to be distracted. That means there’s no time for romance with Steve, a gorgeous shapeshifter whose kisses melt her heart.
When a new vampire named Chase shows up at camp, Della’s world is thrown into even more chaos. Arrogant and annoyingly sexy, Chase is a mystery . . . and the only mystery Della likes is one she can solve. She can’t solve Chase, at least not while she’s dealing with ghostly haunting
s, vampire gangs and a web of family secrets. Can she prove herself as an investigator and keep her life—and her heart—intact?
Chapter One
The monster charged down the moonlit ally, right at Della Tsang. Even in the dark, she could see its yellowed fangs, its stained claws, and its horns, sharp and deadly. The thing reminded her of a supersized, chubby gargoyle, but in all honesty, she didn’t have a clue what it was.
Not vampire. Too ugly for that.
Maybe a rabid werewolf. She’d heard of them, but never seen one.
She tried to check its forehead to identify its pattern. Every species had one, and every supernatural could read them. This one, however, moved too fast.
One thing she did know, it hadn’t come in peace. The blood-red eyes, along with the look of pure evil, warned Della of its malicious intent.
Two options. Flight or fight, her instincts screamed. Her heart pounded. Only cowards ran. Taking a deep breath, she tugged at the shirt hem of her Smurf pajamas and prepared herself for the attack.
Smurf pajamas?
What was she doing in an alley wearing . . . ?
The cobwebs in her mind cleared and she vaguely realized the third option. She could wake up.
A dream. Not real.
But even waking herself to escape felt cowardly. Della Tsang was no coward. So she allowed the nightmare to pull her in deeper and watched and waited as the monster heaved closer. She had mere seconds.
One.
Two.
Three.
The creature smelled of death. The huge beast barely got within a foot of her when it leapt up, twisted in midair and pounced down behind her. Della hadn’t completed her turn when the creature latched on to her shoulders. She felt a pain in the base of her neck as if a claw or fang had punctured her spine. Grabbing behind her, she buried her fingers into a mass of loose-feeling skin, and with every ounce of strength she had, she hurled the creature over her shoulder. “Take that, you obnoxious lard ass!”
A loud thud brought Della fully alert. Jackknifing out of bed, her heart pounding in her throat, she saw her pillow, the object she’d just mistaken as Obnoxious Lard Ass and thrown across her room, sticking half in and half out of her sheetrock.
Correction. Not her sheetrock. Her parents’ sheetrock!
She was home on a mandatory parent weekend. Home? The word sank into her mind like a splinter.
This wasn’t her home anymore. Shadow Falls was home. The camp/boarding school that the outside world thought was a place troubled kids got sent to, but in reality was a place supernatural kids went to learn to deal with being . . . supernatural.
Kylie, Miranda and all her friends were her family now. This place . . . She glanced around her old room, filled with old memories. This was where she came to be reminded of everything she’d lost.
She glanced back at the pillow and the freaking hole in the wall.
Crap!
Catching her breath, she tried to think how she would explain this to her parents.
Looking on the opposite wall at her dresser with the attached mirror, a plan emerged. A little furniture rearranging and the hole would be hidden. She glanced back at the pillow, and when she moved her head a sharp pain pinched in the very top of her neck. Right where that damn monster had gotten her in her dream.
She reached up to rub the pain away and felt the cool stickiness. Pulling her hand around she stared at the blood. What the heck?
Reaching back again, she felt a large pimple at the very base of her skull. Perhaps the pimple had simply been hurting and brought on the crazy dream. The smell of her own blood reminded her she hadn’t fed in two days. But bringing a bag of blood home with her was too risky.
The last time she’d come here, she’d caught her mom rummaging through her things. Her mom had looked up guiltily and said, “I’m sorry, I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t any . . . I have to worry about your sister.”
“You don’t worry about me anymore?” Della had asked. It hadn’t mattered that her mom thought she was doing drugs, it was that she didn’t worry about her anymore that hurt the most. Then she’d left the room before she had to listen to her mom’s heart beat to the lie she was about to tell.
Pushing the past back, she grabbed a tissue from her bedside table to stop the bleeding. In a few minutes, she tossed the tissue in the garbage, pulled the pillow out of the wall and picked up the dresser and hauled it across the room to hide her dream-induced oops.
Standing back, eyeing the newly placed piece of furniture, she sighed in relief. They would never know—or wouldn’t know now. Someday her dad would find it, and he’d probably call her and tell her again how disappointed he was in her. But hell and pain later was better than hell and pain now.
Glancing up, she saw herself in the mirror and had an epiphany. She might face monsters—in her dreams and even in her real life—but the thought of facing her parents, of seeing the sheer disappointment in their eyes again, turned her into a spineless little girl.
Every change that had happened to her since she’d been turned into a vampire had been seen by her parents as a form of rebellion. They believed her to be an unappreciative, uncaring teen—probably on drugs, possibly pregnant—and out to make their lives miserable. But better to let them believe that than to believe her a monster.
Sometimes she wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to take the easy way out and just fake her death like most teens in her situation did. Losing her family would hurt like hell, but wasn’t she still losing them? Day by day, bit by bit, she felt them distancing themselves from her. They barely talked to her anymore, hadn’t hugged her in so long Della couldn’t remember what it felt like. And there was a part of her that missed them so badly she wanted to scream that it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t asked to be turned.
“What are you doing?” The voice shattered the somber silence.
Della swung around. With her supersensitive hearing, she could normally hear her younger sister turning over in her bed. How had she not heard her slip into the room?
“Uh, nothing,” Della answered. “What are you doing up?”
“I heard you . . .” Marla’s eyes widened. “You moved your dresser.”
Della glanced back at the piece of furniture. “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep and I just . . . thought I’d freshen things up in here.”
“That thing’s heavy!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been eating all my veggies.”
Marla frowned. “You barely eat anything at supper. Mom’s worried about you.”
No, she isn’t, Della thought.
Marla looked around again. “Did you ask Mom if you could rearrange your room?”
“Why would she care?” Della asked.
Marla shrugged. “I don’t know, but you probably should’ve asked.”
Della bit the edge of her lip, realizing that before she’d been turned, she probably would have asked for permission for even something that mundane. Chalk up one positive thing for living at Shadow Falls. Holiday and Burnett, the camp leaders, ran a tight ship, but they gave the students enough rope to either swing on or hang themselves. So far, Della hadn’t gotten hung. Well, not hung too bad. And in the past six months she’d grown to like her independence.
Marla walked closer. Her pink nightshirt only came down to mid-thigh. Della realized her sister was changing—growing. Now fourteen, she’d lost the little-girl look. Her long, dark hair was blacker than Della’s. Of the two of them, Marla looked more like their father. More Asian. That should make Dad happy, Della thought.
“Are you okay?” Marla asked.
Before Della realized what Marla intended to do, she’d touched her. Della pulled away, but Marla held her arm. “I’m fine.”
Marla made a face. “You’re still so cold. And you don’t act like yourself anymore. You’re always frowning.”
Because I’m hungry! “I’m fine. You should probably go back to bed.”
Marla didn’t move. “I want my
ol’ sister back.”
Tears stung Della’s eyes. A part of Della wanted her back, too. “It’s late.” She blinked, dispersing the watery weakness. At Shadow Falls she seldom cried, but here, tears came easier. Was it because here she felt more human? Or was it because here she felt like the monster she knew they’d believe her to be if they knew the truth?
“Dad’s so worried about you,” Marla continued. “I heard him and Mom talking the other night. He said you reminded him of his brother. He said he got cold and became difficult. Then he died. You’re not gonna die, are you?”
Della pushed her emotions aside to digest what Marla had said. “Dad didn’t have a brother.”
“I didn’t know about him, either. So I asked Mom later, and she said Dad had a twin but he got killed in a car accident.”
“Why doesn’t he ever talk about him?” Della asked.
“You know how Dad is, he never talks about things that hurt him. Like he never talks about you anymore.”
Della’s heart clutched. She knew Marla hadn’t said it to be mean, but damn if the words didn’t slice right into her heart. She wanted to curl up into a pathetic little ball and just sob.
But she couldn’t do that. Vampires weren’t weak or pathetic.
• • •
Two hours later, the sun still hadn’t risen, and Della lay there, head on her monster pillow, staring at the ceiling. Not sleeping wasn’t unusual. But now it wasn’t just the normal nocturnal tendencies keeping her burning the midnight oil. The pimple on her neck throbbed. She ignored it. It would take more than a pimple to bring her down.
She remembered an old saying her mom used to tell her: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
Her mom was so friggin’ wrong.
You know how Dad is, he never talks about things that hurt him. Like he never talks about you anymore. Those words broke her heart.
She lay there feeling the night ease by and then she remembered something else Marla had said. He said you reminded him of his brother. He said he got cold and became difficult. Then he died. Marla’s words kept flowing through her head as if they were important. Della suddenly bolted up when she realized why. Did he mean cold literally? Or cold as in distant? Could her uncle have been . . . a vampire? Did he fake his own death to save his family from knowing the truth?
Divorced, Desperate and Daring Page 32