There were only a handful of tables occupied, mostly booths along the back wall of the restaurant. The décor was not extravagant here, but it was pleasant enough. A bar and grill, AJ’s was undeniably on the upscale side, but it wasn’t a stuffy haute cuisine joint. It could get a little noisy here on the weekend nights. Never rowdy, but people still enjoyed themselves.
Brass hardware adorned posts painted a happy shade of Copenhagen blue. Gold and tan accents pointed the way to the well-stocked bar on the right side of the seating area. Mirrors gleamed behind hundreds of bottles, glassware, and the bartender making drinks for a couple of patrons seated along the barstools.
“Zorah, I seated two for you. Table twenty-six.” The hostess said as I bussed one of my empty tables. Sure, we had bussers, but during the slow shifts they sometimes got sent home. And when they were gone, I cleaned my own tables, like today.
After emptying the dirty dishes into a plastic bin back in the kitchen, I washed my hands then returned to the floor and glanced at twenty-six to see what I had to work with.
One man was dressed in a suit and tie, while the other one, whose back was to me, looked more casual. Suits were generally decent tippers. I called them suits. In fact, I had been at this so long, I had a whole system in place for ranking customers in terms of their likely tipping levels. Call it profiling if you like, but without it, I’d probably never survive financially.
Of course, suits or no, making customers wait was not a good way to get tipped. I quickly grabbed the small tablet from my apron pocket, then checked my appearance and made my way over to the new table.
The pair sat across from each other. The one facing me as I approached was a handsome black man around the age of forty, dressed like a typical businessman—probably an insurance guy or a stockbroker, or something like that.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I greeted them as I wrote the table number and scribbled some notes. “Can I get you started with some drinks?”
“We’re ready to order, thanks,” the suit answered. “I’ll have a whiskey sour, and the lamb chops, medium, with steamed vegetables and a loaded potato.” As I jotted the order, I couldn’t help but get caught by his eyes. Though nothing unusual came through in his voice, those eyes were sad. Almost haunted.
“Very good,” I said, finishing with my notepad before looking at the second man. “And for you?”
“Just a glass of Clos du Bois Merlot for me,” he said in a familiar English accent.
I froze, my eyes widening.
My undead Hugh Grant looked up, meeting my gaze and lifting a swept brow. He looked a lot less… dead… than he had yesterday. In fact, he looked a hell of a lot better than I felt this afternoon. I wondered how much of that had to do with my unplanned blood donation.
“Problem?” he asked in a cool, urbane tone.
My eyes narrowed.
I wavered, considering my options, unsure whether I was willing to make a scene at a job I couldn’t afford to lose. A million questions and accusations flew through my head while fake Hugh Grant just sat there, looking at me calmly as several different expressions flitted across my face.
For the most part, I was pretty good at figuring out what people wanted, and how to please them. That tended to happen when you’d spent years learning to satisfy customers for a living, but this guy appeared unmoved and unreadable as I studied him.
“I didn’t expect to see you here today,” I managed at length. “You’re certainly looking… better.”
His dark eyes sharpened with interest.
“Ah,” he said. “So you remember that after all, do you?”
My heartbeat jumped a tick or two, pounding a little harder in my chest. I could feel my face start to flush at his reaction. Not for the first time, I was grateful for my dusky complexion’s ability to hide pink cheeks.
“It’s not really the sort of thing you forget,” I retorted.
Jesus Christ. I was playing one-upmanship games with a vampire. What the hell was I thinking?
Both men remained silent for a moment until the business guy looked over at his friend. “You two know each other, Rans?”
I filed the name away. The vampire formerly known as fake Hugh Grant studied me silently for a moment—taking in my face, my reaction. His serious expression disappeared then, replaced with a smile that was one part reckless and two parts dangerous.
“Not yet,” he said, his accent caressing the words.
I was still burning holes through him with my eyes, and I had to admit that the Hugh Grant comparison really only worked when it came to the voice. My disjointed impression from yesterday had been accurate. He had darkly beautiful features—symmetrical and sharply cut. The effect was softened by the sweep of his very fine, very smooth black hair, which fell into the sort of messy waves that rock stars probably spent hours perfecting.
He didn’t strike me as the type to spend hours in front of the mirror with his hair. He did strike me as the type to get himself shot through the chest and then gatecrash an innocent waitress’s day off to drink her blood. But, of course, I might be a bit biased on the subject.
He tipped his head to one side, still regarding me with interest.
“Meet me after your shift is done,” he said with casual confidence.
I frowned at him, my heart still pounding. “Why would I possibly agree to that?”
It wasn’t that I was afraid of him, exactly, but that didn’t mean I trusted the guy either. Still, something had changed in me yesterday. Some epic, glacial shift inside my soul.
Those ice-blue eyes saw right through me. “You’ll agree because you’re dying of curiosity,” he said. “And because you weren’t supposed to remember me.”
Arrogant bastard. He was one hundred percent right, too. What I was about to agree to was crazy. I couldn’t call the cops about him. I couldn’t even drag some poor coworker along with me to act as backup, unless I wanted them to see me babbling about vampires and gunshot wounds. Yet I was going to do this anyway.
“Okay. I’ll come,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. “I get off shift at six… but I have a couple of conditions.”
FOUR
“CONDITIONS?” THE VAMPIRE echoed, watching me with well-hidden amusement. “Very well. Name them.”
“I’ll only meet you in a public place,” I said, thinking fast.
“Of course,” he replied easily. “There’s a bar across the street. It should be well enough attended after six p.m.”
I nodded. “All right. Make it six-thirty, though.”
“Fair enough. And your additional conditions?”
I’d been mentally running through the list of people I knew decently well. It hadn’t taken long. “I’ll be arranging check-ins with a friend. If I don’t contact her every ten minutes, she’ll call the police with my description and have them come to the bar.”
I wasn’t entirely sure that the police would even agree to do something like that, but I made myself hold that glacier-deep gaze evenly, my chin tilted up, fake confidence oozing from every pore.
He probably didn’t buy it any more than I did.
“Very sensible,” he replied, without any overt indication that he was mocking me. “We have an agreement, then. You get my friend his lamb chops, and I’ll meet you across the street at six-thirty, ready to hold a conversion in neat, ten-minute increments between phone calls.”
All right, so he probably was mocking me. I could still be the bigger person here.
“Certainly,” I said in my brisk waitress’s tone. “I’ll get this into the kitchen right away. Can I get you some bread while you wait?”
“That depends,” he said. “Is there garlic butter?”
His companion gave a soft snort. “We’re fine without bread, thank you,” said the man in the suit, shooting Rans what I took to be a quelling glance.
The corners of Rans’ eyes crinkled. “Yes, quite. Though that merlot can’t come soon enough. I do so enjoy a nice, full-bodied red.”
I shot him an unimpressed look and pivoted on my heel.
Despite the early hour, the restaurant started filling up. I delivered the merlot and the whiskey sour, and later, the lamb. My interactions with table twenty-six were the picture of professionalism, but those speculative blue eyes were seriously throwing me off of my mental game. Was the other guy a vampire, too? Did vampires request that their lamb chops be cooked to medium? Did they eat lamb chops and steamed vegetables in the first place?
The pair took their time, but didn’t linger unnecessarily once the one-sided meal was finished. I presented them with the check and took the businessman’s proffered credit card, making a mental note of the name—Guthrie Leonides—as I ran it. He signed the receipt when I returned to drop it off with his card, and I watched the two of them from the corner of my eye as they prepared to leave.
Rans pulled a green bill from his pocket and dropped it on the table, then the two of them headed for the door, not looking back. I glanced at the clock in the kitchen to see how much time I had before my six-thirty meeting.
It was three forty-five. A little less than three hours to go.
“I can do this,” I whispered as I walked to their table to pick up the receipt and the tip.
A hundred dollar bill sat next to the empty wine glass.
My eyes grew wide at the tip lying crumpled on the table. The man who had broken into my house to drink my blood yesterday had just left me a hundred-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar meal. I blinked down at the wrinkled Benjamin. He might be a supernatural neck-rapist, I thought, but at least he wasn’t a cheapskate on top of it. I picked up the bill and put it carefully away, along with the signed receipt.
“I can do this,” I repeated, turning my attention toward cleaning off the table. I had about two and a half hours left to convince myself that I wasn’t lying through my teeth.
* * *
Six p.m. came and went. I clocked out, changing clothes in the restroom and putting my uniform in my backpack to be washed before my shift tomorrow. The last couple of hours hadn’t been enough time to convince myself that what I was about to do wasn’t the dumbest idea I’d ever had. That wouldn’t stop me from doing it, though.
Sometimes, you just had to live dangerously. I mean, how else was I going to find out what the hell was going on here? I’d been bemoaning my inability to track this guy down. Then he had quite literally walked into my restaurant and sat down at one of my tables. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that it could be a coincidence in a city of three hundred thousand people. On the other hand, I’d have to be nuts not to jump on the opportunity it presented.
I tossed my bag on the counter by one of the sinks while I scrolled my phone for a safety call. Although I didn’t have a ton of close friends, I at least had a couple of people I could turn to in a pinch. Like Vonnie. She was one of the few people I spent any significant amount of time with whom I both liked and trusted. She was also a volunteer at MMHA, which was how I’d met her.
Honestly, we didn’t have a whole lot in common beyond that. Vonnie was a single mom, and I was just… single. But we got along well enough. Enough for me to trust her with something like this.
“Hey, Zorah,” Vonnie answered on the third ring, a bit of surprise coloring her tone. “What’s up?”
“I need a favor,” I said, trying one-handed to get my hair under some semblance of control.
“Sure,” she said amiably.
“So, I met this guy…” My voice trailed off as I tried to figure out what I would actually say. Possibly I should have put a bit more forward planning into this call—not that Vonnie really needed to know the details of how I met Rans. “Anyway, he wants to meet at a bar on the Landing in a few minutes. But of course, I don’t know him that well, so… can you be my safety call tonight?”
“Happy to,” Vonnie said. She sounded overly cheery, probably excited at the idea that I had a date.
If only it were that simple, I thought. Hell, I could hardly remember the last time I had a date. Or even a one-night stand, for that matter.
Okay… that was a lie. I did remember, as much as I tried to forget.
It was two months ago, with Dan. Things were going well between us, actually. We’d been seeing each other for about a month. As per usual when I was pursuing a serious relationship, I’d refrained from sleeping with the guy until I thought things were solid between us. We had several things in common, and I was feeling confident that we had a future together.
Of course, it only took two sexcapades for things to turn south. He stopped meeting me at work. Stopped texting. Stopped calling. Didn’t return my texts or calls. Finally, I got a single text telling me that he just didn’t feel like we were compatible, and would I please not contact him anymore. The sad part was, it had been one of the more civil breakups I’d had over the past ten years.
At this point, I was starting to wonder if I was just really bad at the horizontal mambo, or if something was wrong with me mentally, or what. I always felt better when I had a sex partner. I was happier. I even felt physically healthier. And most of the time, I could find a guy to date easily enough when I put my mind to it. Hell, half the time I seemed to attract men even when I didn’t want to.
But as soon as I slept with them?
Bam.
Dumped.
The universe was obviously trying to tell me something. But unless the message was ‘LOL, you suck,’ I just wasn’t getting it so far. One of these days, though, it’d be nice to find someone who didn’t run for the hills the moment after they shagged me.
“Zorah?” Vonnie’s voice broke through my haze.
“Yeah, sorry. What were you saying?” I asked.
“I asked, who’s the hunk?” Vonnie’s smile could be heard right through the damned phone speaker.
Focus, girl. “Oh. Just a guy I met, um, at work.”
“Awesome. If all goes well, I expect a full report, all right? Have pity on the single mother. I’m dying for juicy gossip.”
“Deal,” I said. “Here’s hoping I won’t need your rescue services this evening. I’ll be at Studio 88 on the Landing. I’ll check in every ten minutes, and let you know when I’m leaving the bar.”
“Wow, you’re not kidding around, are you?” Vonnie said, laughing. “I’m sure it will be fine. Okay—you’re running out of time. Go get him, tiger. If you miss a text, I’ll text you and give you a minute to reply before I panic. Talk to you later.”
I took a deep, steadying breath. “Thanks, Vonnie. You’re the best.”
We hung up. I slipped the phone in my pocket for easy access, and started a list in my head of all the things I wanted to ask this guy, repeating it to myself over and over so I wouldn’t forget anything. After all, it could be the first, last, and only shot I had at my interview with a vampire.
Anne Rice, eat your heart out.
At twenty-five past six, I sent Vonnie a text letting her know I was about to meet my date, because telling her I was about to meet the man who broke into my house yesterday would have been too weird—even for me. She wished me well. I took a deep breath, threw my bag over my shoulder, and headed across the street.
Every nerve inside me was taut. My hands were shaking.
I stared at the glass doors leading into to Studio 88. Were the damned butterflies doing cartwheels in my stomach just due to nerves over what kind of answers I might be about to get to my questions… or was I walking into a trap I’d never come out of?
Maybe my imagination was running away with me again. If this guy had wanted to kill me or kidnap me, he could have done it yesterday at my house with nobody around. But he hadn’t. He’d even reassured me that he wasn’t going to hurt me—though I intended to have a word with him about how shitty I’d felt afterward.
If he was supposed to be a terrifying creature of the night, he wasn’t a very good fit for the role. And why the hell did he leave me a hundred-dollar tip? Who does that?
I blew out a breath.
Vampires, apparently. Next time, I’d make a point of offering him a second glass of Clos du Bois.
“Stop it,” I admonished myself. I could do this. I’d said so a hundred times today, and that meant it had to be true. Right?
I inhaled slowly, taking in the mix of scents floating around the Landing. The Mississippi was behind me, a cobblestone street was beneath my feet, and a vampire lay before me, assuming he’d showed up as promised.
One step at a time. Shaking off my nerves, I reached for the glass door of the lounge and pulled it open. The second I crossed the threshold, I saw him. He sat alone at a small table in the back corner. Sipping a glass of red wine, just like earlier.
The lounge was dimly lit, giving it a cozy atmosphere. Candles in holders burned on several tables, and soft jazz emanated from speakers inset into the vaulted ceiling.
As though he’d somehow heard my restlessly circling thoughts, he turned his head and looked right at me. I stood tall under that cool blue gaze—or as tall as I could at five-foot-four, anyway. I kept my shoulders square and my chin up, refusing to show anything other than confidence.
Even if I didn’t feel very confident, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him see it. With my lips turned down in a scowl and my head held high, I strode through the bar toward the dark, handsome stranger.
Rans stood as I approached, nodded a silent greeting, and pulled out a chair for me. That threw me off, but I was determined to keep my cool. I let him seat me, unused to being on the receiving end of that sort of effortless chivalry.
“You came,” Rans said. “I’m glad.”
I settled my backpack on the floor at my feet, not ready to give ground. “You should know that my friend is on standby, as promised. She’s going to call the cops if I don’t check in every ten minutes.”
Rans let out a faint huff of what might have been amusement.
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