by Janice Jones
“Alex,” she said, extending her hand to him.
Her grip was strong and warm, just like he’d expected it to be. “Michael.”
Her brown eyes danced when she smiled. When he released her hand, he could still feel the warmth in his.
“How long have you been here, Michael?” she asked.
“Not long,” he replied.
“And how do you like working for the Mistress?”
“It’s interesting,” he replied.
Her eyes narrowed as if she were seeing through his lie. Then she relaxed against the cushions again with a small grin.
“Yeah, interesting,” she almost whispered. “But why would she send you to me?”
“Who says she did?” he answered.
“You did.”
“When did I say the Mistress sent me to you?”
“At the bar,” she stated, then stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed one ankle over the other.
Michael figured she put the barrier between them, a way to keep him at a distance as she picked him apart. Instead of letting her have her way, he picked up her legs, moved closer and placed them in his lap.
“You assumed that,” he replied. “I never said it.”
She shrugged. “So why did you come over then?”
“Because I wanted to,” he said as his hand slid slowly over her calf.
Her skin was smooth and soft—something she didn’t appear to be. It surprised him that she let him touch her that way. But maybe that’s what she expected from him. Wouldn’t an employee make every effort to comfort his or her client before they got down to business? Wouldn’t an employee touch, caress a client if they needed to?
“Lose a bet?” she asked, then his brain came back to her.
“No,” he frowned. “Why would you say that?”
There was that childish shrug again. “First thing that popped into my head. Too many martinis, I guess.”
“Then no more alcohol for you tonight,” he chuckled.
She stared into his eyes and he swore he felt some presence inside his head for a second. Then it was gone when she lifted her legs to remove them from his lap. He grabbed them with one arm, holding them against his body. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want to let her go.
“Closer,” she whispered.
He did as he was told, as any good employee would do. When she was practically in his lap, he could smell her perfume and the martinis on her breath as she exhaled. His forearm rested across her knees as his hand lightly gripped her thigh. The strong muscle tightened under his grip as they stared at each other in silence. Then she surprised him.
_______________
Alex didn’t know why she moved her lips inches from his, but they looked so inviting, she couldn’t help herself. And she wanted to know why. Jason waited for her, would wait for her all night. This guy was paid to entice her, wasn’t he? The ease at which he approached her, all polished and polite, that was his job though, right?
“Tell me the truth Michael,” she whispered on his lips.
“Okay,” he whispered back, then kissed her softly.
“Why did the Mistress send you to me? You’re a vampire, right?”
“Yes,” he answered with another soft kiss. “But she didn’t send me to you, I swear.”
Alex kissed him back this time, and when she pulled at his bottom lip with her mouth he moaned. With his tie in her fist, she felt his hand slide down her thigh then pull her into his body. “Be careful, Michael, Bianca doesn’t like freelancers, you know.”
His body stiffened and the playful grin on his lips turned to a weird smirk as he eased away from her. He politely moved her legs from his lap and straightened his tie.
“I didn’t mean to offend you, Ms. Stone,” he said.
Alex folded her legs back underneath her butt and shook her head.
“You didn’t, but I’m just letting you know how this game is played.”
He chuckled and blushed. “Thanks.”
“Relax,” she laughed. “I enjoyed our talk, thanks.”
Alex slid close to him again. As she slipped her feet back into her shoes, she placed a hand on his knee. “Maybe next time, we can do more than just talk,” she grinned. “About me, I mean.”
“Can I buy you a drink, sometime?” Michael said. “Outside this place, that is.”
“I’m leaving in the morning,” she replied.
“Too bad,” he said as he helped her to her feet.
“I’ll be back in a couple of weeks though. I don’t see anything wrong with having a friendly drink.”
“Sounds good,” Michael smiled down at her as he held out a card with an embossed number on it. He nodded behind her as she took it. “I think the Mistress is ready for you.”
As much as she wanted to, she didn’t look back. As she made her way toward Mistress Bianca, she held tight to the stark white card, took a deep breath and smiled at her hostess.
Chapter 39
“Good to see you again, Alexa,” she smiled as Alex placed a soft kiss on each of her cheeks.
As she turned, Alex followed the Mistress out the French doors that led to the gardens. When they reached a small table set for tea, Bianca waited for Alex to sit before she took her seat that faced the door.
“It appears you may have an enemy inside your organization,” Mistress Bianca sighed as she poured two cups of tea with a delicate hand. The Mistress could report bad news as if reporting the weather.
“You mean traitor, don’t you?” Alex said.
Mistress Bianca shook her head as she dropped one sugar cube in each dainty cup. “A traitor simply reports the news to bring about the destruction. An enemy will participate in it.”
“Which one?” Alex asked. “It can’t be the vampire. That would be too obviously easy to figure out.”
Her laugh was quite elegant, Alex had always thought. She added a small bit of cream to her tea which Alex declined.
“You are nothing if not a keen observer of the obvious. He is not the threat, but I know I don’t have to tell you to be careful around all of them.”
Alex took a sip of the tea as Bianca watched. Then she did the same, only she held the pretty cup in her pale fingers instead of placing back on the saucer as Alex had.
“I haven’t had to be this careful in a long time. It’s pretty exhausting honestly.”
“One of them is filled with rage,” Bianca continued. “Like you were once. Only this rage is fueled by jealousy and hate. That’s hard to reason with.”
“I’m not in the mood to be reasonable,” Alex answered. “Someone tried to shoot me and blow me up. Reason is in my rearview at this point.”
When Mistress Bianca took Alex’s hand, she felt the slight tremble. What little color she had drained away. Alex moved closer to her and look into her green eyes.
“Get out of this, Alexa,” Bianca stated then released Alex’s hand.
“I can’t.”
Her green eyes darkened to black at the answer. “Why not?”
“If I do this, if I go to this conference and track down this killer, I’m done. For good. The contract is fulfilled. I can’t walk away from this now, Bianca.”
Mistress Bianca straightened her posture again. She waved at the attendant at the door and he removed the tea service quickly and almost quietly. When they were alone again, Bianca lowered her gaze.
“At first I thought it was silly nonsense—Hellclaw returning to this century,” she sighed with a shake of her head. “Now I’m afraid it’s true.”
Alex wanted to smile, to make her feel better. She wanted to Mistress Bianca’s overactive imagination to be just that, her imagination.
“No one is left from that clan,” Alex said. “I was there, remember?”
Mistress Bianca’s eyes m
et hers. “Do you think I don’t know about Tristan? He’s been out for three years! What do you think he’s been doing all this time, Alexa? Reading?”
“Three years is a long time, Mistress. If he were going to come after me, why wait?”
“Because he doesn’t know it’s you he’s after,” she shot back. “The only weapon that can kill someone as old as he is will be delivered to you in Texas in a few days,” she said as she wiped her hands on the linen napkin from her lap. “Find him before he finds you, and this time, kill him!”
That was the end of the conversation as far as Mistress Bianca was concerned. She rose from her chair and left Alex alone on the patio.
_______________
Apparently his brothers had gone out without him. But Michael really wasn’t in the mood for the Brothers Gale do Vegas anyway. He watched the television on mute. The strangeness from tonight still hung on for some reason. To see Alex Stone at Ashblood jarred him too. He expected her to be aloof and superficial, like most rich human women. Instead he was surprised at how ordinary she seemed to be. Now he tried to shake the feeling she left him with.
Stretched out on the couch, Michael let his mind drift. His father had always stressed the importance of guarding his thoughts in public settings, especially at Ashblood Manor. On the off chance there would be a telepath somewhere in the building, the secrets he kept would be safe. It would be rare to run into a telepath with the ability to read the pure, but it could happen. And tonight, he felt some sort of push at his barriers in Alex’s presence. No one had mentioned her being a telepath before. Nothing in her biography suggested that ability either. So what did he feel from her?
Maybe he was just so relaxed that he had let his guard down too much. Or maybe the thoughts he heard weren’t hers, but his own. Those thoughts told him to be cautious. Alex’s secrets would come out eventually. They also told him that a threat existed that would challenge everything he believed about the human race. If the whispers in chambers were to be believed, the Romanian conference was only the beginning.
He shook his head and sighed. If he told his family his suspicions, they’d laugh and ask how much he had to drink tonight. Alex was human—nothing more. No way could she read minds, and even if she could, no human telepath possessed the power to read a pure blood vampire, as far as he knew.
When he heard a door open and close from above followed by light footfalls on the wooden stairs, he sat up and smiled when his father came into view.
“I thought that was you,” Conner smiled back as he took a seat in the fluffy chair across from Michael. “How was your evening at Ashblood?”
“Good,” Michael replied. “But you look beat, old man. What’s wrong?”
“Long day,” Conner answered. He crossed his legs and stared at Michael in an odd sort of way. When he raised an eyebrow at him, Michael chuckled.
“She asked after you,” he said. “Hopes you’re doing well.”
Conner sighed. “I was more interested in Alex Stone’s meeting with her, but I hope you gave her my best.”
“I did, but I couldn’t get close to that meeting,” Michael answered. “And before you ask, Mistress Bianca didn’t offer any information. She won’t break her own rules about privacy, Con, not even for you.”
Conner placed his hands in his lap as he continued to stare into Michael’s eyes.
“She broke her rule of no business at the manor for her, didn’t she?”
“Not really,” Michael said matching Conner’s posture. “It looked like a friendly conversation to me.”
Conner appeared annoyed at that answer. Michael could tell he was suspicious of both the meeting and the Tracker team, but he couldn’t prove anything right now. Maybe he shouldn’t have let Conner know he had run into her there.
“And Ms. Stone,” Conner picked the conversation up again. “Did she indulge herself in Ashblood’s many delights?”
Michael shook his head with an embarrassed smile. Conner looked disappointed.
“Were you expecting her to?”
“Maybe,” Conner answered with a sigh. “She’s too good to be true, don’t you think?”
Michael stretched his arms over his head, then laced his fingers together behind it. “Maybe she is.”
“What . . . too good?” Conner frowned.
“Would that be so strange?”
Conner laughed. “She’s done bad things, very bad things in the name of national security,” he said. “Some still whisper when they speak her name. I want to know why this fear still exists.”
He’d never known his father to take this much interest in a human. Every time her name was mentioned, he bristled. Every report brought a frown to his face; every dead end, anger.
“What is it, Con?” Michael asked. “What do you want to know that hasn’t been discovered? She was an active member of Night Command. She helped to bring Hellclaw down. You have to respect that.”
Almost instantaneously, Conner’s cool demeanor turned cold and hard. Michael could swear the temperature dropped a few degrees too.
“Where did she come from?” he growled. “Why are people so loyal to this woman? She has markers all over the country—maybe the world. Why? People who would rather go to their graves then be beholden to anyone, including me, are indebted to her. Someone like that demands attention. Someone like that shouldn’t be dismissed because she’s human.”
Then he was calm again. Instead of pushing the subject, Michael kept quiet for a few seconds. “Maybe I can find out why,” he finally said.
Conner’s eyes narrowed on him. “How?”
Michael sat forward then placed his elbows on his knees. “I’m having dinner with her before they leave for Romania in a couple of weeks.”
A small grin formed on Conner’s lips. “How did you manage that?”
“Well,” he grinned back. “We talked at the manor and I asked, so . . .”
The sound of his father’s laughter eased the tension in the room. Conner mirrored Michael’s posture on his chair. “She agreed to dinner with you?”
“Drinks, actually,” Michael replied. “Don’t sound so surprised. I do know how to talk to women, you know.”
“You don’t usually ‘talk’ at Bianca’s, Michael,” Conner continued to smile. “I’m surprised she didn’t try to kill you or accuse me of having her followed.”
Michael scratched at his head and squinted, “Yea . . . about that.”
“What?”
“She thinks I work for Bianca,” he replied. “At the manor.”
To bring a smile to Conner’s face made Michael happy. After weeks of dead ends and dead bodies, it felt good to see his father smile again.
“Just be careful,” Conner said as he stood. “She won’t be very happy when she finds out who you really are.”
Michael rose and stepped into his father’s arms. The vise-like embrace signaled his father’s pride in a job well done. But at some point she would find out the truth, then he would be in real trouble.
Chapter 40
The hospital room was pretty much a walk-in freezer. Outside the airtight entrance was a black parka, hat, and gloves. She slipped the coat on, zipped it then pulled on the gloves and hat as the nurse placed her hand against the square bio-pad to open the door.
“Please keep this brief,” she warned. “He’s still very weak.”
Alex nodded, stepping closer to the bed chamber. When the door closed, she heard the lock engage again to seal her in with Oren.
She could see her breath as she braced herself against the frigid cold. Glad for the thickness of the coat and hat, she would take the nurse’s advice and be quick. He might not mind being a popsicle, but she did.
A whining noise that came from the floor got her attention. The big machine, flashing blue lights, pumped and cycled clean blood through his entire body. All t
he monitors tracked his heart rate and lung functions. They were both below human levels, which meant he was healing just fine.
As she stood next to the plastic chamber, she fixed her eyes on his face. Half of it was blistered, but healing slowly. The half that took most of the blast was missing whole chunks of skin. She could see his actual cheek bone, part of his nasal cavity and his lower jawbone clearly. It was hard to believe the sight but she couldn’t turn away from it. His veins, muscles and tissue were repairing themselves with the help of the blood being pumped through his system. Her eyes moved down to the pink skin of his right shoulder. So smooth and slick, the skin blown off by the blast was growing back before her eyes. The skin on his right arm was cracked and dry from the process. Soon it would be as if nothing had ever happened.
His lower half was almost completely healed and covered by a paper thin sheet. There were patches of dry leathery skin on his stomach, but for the most part he was good.
When his fingers twitched, Alex looked at his face again.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up,” he croaked. He let out a long hard breath she assumed was an attempt at a chuckle. His lungs did a weird little dance and the beeps on the monitor freaked out too. Then he was still again.
“No problem,” Alex replied. “I just have a few questions, if you’re up for it.”
His head nodded slowly. His eyes rolled in her direction when she stepped closer to the side of the chamber. She could see the bloodshot orbs through transparent eyelids. The lashes and brows were gone.
“You picked up a box before the explosion.”
Oren’s bright pink tongue darted out to lick at his cracked lips. “. . . I got a phone call.”
“From who?”
His head rolled left then right. His thin lipped mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Alex pushed her hands into the pockets of her coat and worked one from a glove, “From who?”
“Jason will kill me,” Oren rasped and coughed.