He rubbed his hands up and down my arms. “I know you do not wish to be with me, that you have turned to Alan, but I have to ask: now that I cannot harm your brain and your control has been restored, do you miss me at all?” He sounded like a very small child.
“Of course I’ve missed you.” I gave him a look that I hoped conveyed the truth of my words. “Alan and I are friends. Our relationship is very different from what you and I have shared. I don’t want to have to choose between you—you each play a unique role in my life. And if you think we had sex last night, you’re wrong. I was sick from drinking too much, and he stayed to keep me company.”
He stared at me for a few seconds then kissed my forehead. “I am glad to hear that.” His voice went soft. “Did you ever have any true feelings for me?” I’d never seen him so vulnerable.
I briefly considered giving a vague answer, so as not to hurt his feelings, but then decided to forge ahead with the truth. “That’s the million-dollar question. I’m still sorting it out.”
“What do you mean?”
“After Anne removed all the vampire influence from my brain, and I was no longer unduly affected by your energy, I didn’t know how much of my attraction to you had been caused by what you are, rather than who you are. I needed to stay away from you so I could figure it out.”
“And have you ‘figured it out’?”
“Not totally, but judging by how happy I was to discover it was you in the bathroom—and not only because you weren’t Lucifer come to finally finish me off—and how much my body is still sending out the welcome committee even though I’m still in charge of my mind, I’d say most of my attraction to you is authentic.”
“That is good to know. Perhaps we could begin again. Would that be possible?” He pressed his lips to mine in a sweet kiss, then took it deeper.
I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on tight. I really had missed him.
We broke the kiss and I stepped back, looking into his gorgeous eyes. “Definitely possible.” And as if to underscore the point, my towel chose that moment to fall to the floor.
He raked his gaze down my body and smiled wickedly. “I could not have planned that better myself.”
I brushed my lips against his. “Are you sure you didn’t put a spell on the towel?” My answering smile morphed into a jaw-cracking yawn that made my eyes water. “Wow. Yikes. Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.” Then I yawned again. The long, hot shower must have done me in.
He raised a brow, and stroked a finger along my lip. “You are exhausted. Our new beginning can wait a little while. Sleep is what you need now.”
No doubt he was right, but I didn’t want him to leave. Being with him felt good. And we had a lot more to talk about. “I guess I am tired,” I admitted, yawning yet again. “But will you lie in bed with me until I fall asleep?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
I crawled into bed, burrowed under the covers, and watched his hair flow like a silky curtain as he leaned forward to remove his boots.
“Shall I turn off the lights?” He moved toward the lamp.
As nice as it would have been to keep enjoying the view of his amazing face and body, my eyes were heavy, and I could already feel myself drifting away. “Yes, please.”
He clicked off all the lights, flipped the deadbolt on the door, then slid into the bed, spooning me from behind. He pulled me against him, kissed my cheek, and whispered, “Sleep.”
Chapter 19
I woke up to a sun-filled room, feeling rested and inexplicably happy. My first thought was of Devereux, and my lips curved into a smile all by themselves. The clock on the nightstand showed 9:20 a.m. I’d slept longer than I meant to, but apparently my body had needed the downtime. No wonder, since everything in my life had been such a mess for the last few days. Hell, for the last few months.
Luxuriating in the quiet, I replayed my conversation with Devereux. A trickle of joy washed through me as I recalled our decision to reconnect. It was wonderful to be sure my feelings about him hadn’t been illusions or vampire juju—that fundamentally they’d been real. Not knowing had dented my confidence and made me second-guess myself about everything.
I knew I’d have to think about Alan and what role I wanted him to play in my life, but for the moment, I simply reveled in feeling good.
Treating myself to a few more moments of blissful relaxation, I rolled onto my back, stretched, and bumped against something solid next to me. “Devereux?” I said, forgetting for a moment that he couldn’t possibly be there since it was daytime. He would have left before dawn. I reached out a hand to investigate the hard mass. It was cold. I snatched my hand back, bolted upright, and turned toward the huge covered lump in the bed.
What the hell’s that? I scrambled out of bed, tiptoed around to the other side, and stared down at the bulge.
Okay, wait. What happened last night? I was in the shower. Devereux popped in. We talked. I fell asleep.
I definitely heard him lock the door.
Unless the bundle under the covers simply grew out of the mattress like a mushroom on steroids, something was very wrong.
Slowly grasping the corner of the blanket, I tugged it away from what turned out to be a face. And screamed. I jammed my knuckles into my mouth to muffle the sound until I finally ran out of air.
Lying in the bed was a very dead Brown Hat, still wearing his headgear. His terrified eyes were wide, frozen open forever in death.
I lifted the blanket higher and gagged. His throat had been torn out.
Backpedaling fast, I slammed into the wall and slid down hard on my ass. My brain spun. How could the angry guy be in my bed? He’d been arrested at the presentation yesterday. I watched the police take him away.
I stopped breathing as the realization hit me.
Lucifer.
Cold chills swarmed through my body, and I began to shake. The fiend had been in my room. Actually in my physical space. He must have been waiting for Devereux to leave, timing it just right so that he could drop his package before the sun rose. My stomach churned as I thought of him standing over me as I slept. Once again I wondered why he hadn’t just taken me if I was so important to him. And why had he killed Brown Hat? Did he know the man had threatened me? Did he think he was helping me? None of his actions made any sense. Maybe his illness was more complicated than I’d thought.
I jumped up and ran for my phone to call the police, picked it up, then stopped. What was I supposed to tell them? Obviously Brown Hat had been taken from jail. Wouldn’t they assume I had something to do with breaking him out? And killing him? After the events a couple of months back when I’d been a suspect in the Denver murders, I didn’t want to do anything to shine the media or police spotlight back on myself.
Glancing at the dead body, I shuddered at the thought of having slept next to it.
Alan. He would know what to tell the cops. I dialed his cell and immediately went to voice mail. Unwilling to wait for him to get off the phone, I threw on my robe, tied the belt, and headed toward the door. At the last second, I remembered I didn’t have my keycard and grabbed it off the entertainment center. The last thing I needed was to be locked out of my room, wearing a bathrobe, with a dead guy in my bed. I raced out of my room toward the elevator. Alan was one floor down.
The elevator was empty of humans when the doors parted, but the ghostly couple, now engaged in acrobatic sexual intercourse on the floor, took up so much room I had to squish myself against the side wall to avoid the woman’s flailing legs. I punched the button for the floor below mine. “Yes! Yes! Benny! Harder! Faster! Don’t stop!” the woman screamed.
Having to see ghosts was bad enough, but being forced to listen to them was extra irritating.
I didn’t get a chance to find out if Benny followed his partner’s commands and everybody had a happy ending, because thankfully the doors opened. I leaped out and speed-walked down the hall to Alan’s room. I could hear him talking on the phone thr
ough the door. “Alan!” I knocked loudly.
“Hold on. Somebody’s at my door,” he said a few seconds before he opened it. He was dressed in his usual white T-shirt and jeans, his hair standing up in tufts. Dark smudges shadowed his eyes. He took one look at me, and his expression became even more serious.
“Kismet? What the hell? Come in!” He pulled me inside and barked into the phone, “I’ll get back to you as soon as I know anything.” He ended the call and shoved the cell into his pocket.
By this time, the shaking that had started out as a slight trembling in my room had morphed into bona fide quaking. Suddenly freezing, I hugged myself.
He wrapped his arms around me. “What the hell’s happened? Did somebody hurt you? You’re ice-cold.” He released me for a moment to rush over to the bed and grab a blanket, which he wrapped around me before pulling me against him again. “Why are you wearing a robe?”
“I tried to call you. You need two phones.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” He ran his hands up and down my back, trying to generate heat. “I’ve been talking for hours. Seems our beefy friend escaped from jail last night. I spent some time at the precinct, helping them search for him.”
“He didn’t escape.”
“Yeah, he really did. They think he somehow managed to crawl out through a bathroom window. I can’t believe the cops let him go to the can by himself. Anyway—”
“No, really—he didn’t escape. I know where he is.”
He grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, studying my face. “What do you mean? How could you know where he is?”
“Let me show you.” I tugged him toward the door.
“Kismet, you’re acting crazy. What the hell’s going on? Has all the stress of the vampire crap finally pushed you over the edge?”
“Probably, but I still know where he is.”
“Wait.” He hurried to his bedside table, lifted the gun-in-the-holster he’d shown me via Skype, and clipped it onto his belt. “Okay.”
“Come on.” I opened the door and pulled him into the hallway. Not wanting to watch the sex show in the elevator a third time, I headed for the stairs.
“Why are we taking the stairs?” He stopped and spun me around to face him. “Talk to me. You’re making me nervous. I don’t want to have to put you on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold,” he joked.
“As if.” I tugged him again. “I’m okay, really—it’s just easier to show you than to tell you, and I don’t want to deal with the ghosts in the elevator right now.”
“Ghosts in the elevator?”
He let me drag him into the stairwell, and we raced up to my floor, exited into the hallway, and found my room.
I let us in and pointed to my bed. “This is what I found when I woke up this morning.”
He edged over to the bed, raised the blanket, and then shot his gaze back to me, eyebrows raised, mouth open. “Holy fucking shit. It’s him!”
“I know!”
We both stared down at the corpse of my former stalker.
Alan lifted the blanket farther and leaned in to examine the visible area. “There’s no blood anywhere, so he was killed—and drained—somewhere else.” He looked at me. “Lucifer?”
“Has to be.” Points to Alan that he never considered for a second that I’d had anything to do with the intruder being in my bed.
“Why would the lunatic bring him here? Do you think it’s like when a cat brings a mouse to its owner? Sort of a sick gift?”
“That’s what I thought.” I sniffed. “We’d better do something quickly—he’s starting to smell. We have to call the police.”
Alan hurried over to the other bed and sat on the edge. He shook his head. “The cops are never going to believe this.”
I paced. “What if we tell them the truth? I woke up and found this dead body lying next to me and I ran to your room for help?”
“Yeah, except they’re going to want to know how Jack Kent was able to break into your room, or if he didn’t break in, why you’d let him in voluntarily, or how someone else could dump his body in your bed while you were sleeping without waking you up.”
“Who’s Jack Kent?”
“That’s Brown Hat’s real name, remember? He yelled it out at the presentation. He’s a journalist. Which reminds me—I should try to find out what he was going to print about you.”
“Oh, yeah, Jack Kent. Do the police have his cell? Maybe it could mysteriously vanish from evidence. He kept holding it up, implying his proof was there.”
He threaded his fingers through his unruly hair. “Too bad you and Devereux are on the outs. If you were still speaking to him, we could ask him to erase the memories of all the cops involved and to grab Kent’s phone. I wouldn’t involve him except I don’t think all vampires are as good at mind-clearing as he is.” He rose, walked to me, and gave me a quick kiss. “But I’m okay with him being out of the picture. I like having you all to myself.”
I frowned. Alan didn’t know about my time with Devereux last night, and now things were going to get a whole lot more complicated.
“What did I say?” Alan tapped my nose with his finger. “Your mood just tanked.”
“Devereux isn’t exactly out of the picture.”
He backed up, scowling. “Oh yeah? I know I’m not going to like this, but lay it on me anyway.”
“Devereux came to visit me last night. We talked.”
“You talked?” He gave me a skeptical look. “And?”
“And we worked some things out.”
“Worked some things out. Is that a euphemism for had sex?” The veins on his forehead and neck suddenly became more noticeable, and his face went red.
“No!” But I didn’t say sex might have happened if I hadn’t been so tired.
“Right. I’m supposed to believe that?” He returned to the edge of the bed and sat. “I thought we were working things out.”
I joined him and took his hand. We both stared at the carpet for a few seconds. “I’ve been honest with you, Alan. I care about you and Devereux—you’re both important to me—but I’m not going to make a commitment to anyone right now. I don’t know what I want to do, because the dilemma is still the same: if I work with vampires, I’ll have to drink the blood of the elders yearly and do other things just to keep my brain healthy. If I don’t work with them—supposing they would even let me walk away—how do I have a normal life, knowing what I know?” I looked at him. “And until Lucifer is caught, my life is shit. This really isn’t the time for a love triangle.”
Looking sad, he met my eyes, then shifted his away quickly. “You’re right. We didn’t make any promises to each other. We said no attachments, just one day at a time.”
I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Yes.”
“I can still do that.” He straightened and lifted his chin, his skin returning to its normal color. “And getting back to business, I have an idea for what we can tell the cops about why you didn’t hear anyone come into your room.” He leaped up and trotted toward the bathroom. “Didn’t you tell me you sometimes have trouble sleeping, so you occasionally take a sleeping pill?”
“Yeah. Very occasionally, if I haven’t been able to sleep for a few nights. Why?”
I heard him rummaging through my toiletry bag.
I didn’t want to pass Brown Hat—I couldn’t get used to thinking of him as Jack Kent—again, so I waited on the edge of the bed, instead of checking to see what Alan was doing.
“Yes!” He returned a few seconds later carrying a prescription medication bottle. “This will work.” He held out the bottle.
I took it. Zolpidem, otherwise known as Ambien. “My sleeping pills? How will these help?”
“You can tell the cops you were so upset by what happened at the presentation last evening that you came back to your room and took a sleeping pill or two, which knocked you out until this morning.” He walked to the nightstand and set the pill bottle there. “Let’s call the police and
get this over with. Why don’t you get a half-glass of water and put it by the pills, just to make things look more realistic?”
While he dialed the police on his cell, I averted my eyes and walked past the dead guy into the bathroom to get the water.
“Lieutenant Fitzgerald, please. Yeah, this is Special Agent Alan Stevens. Thanks. LT? I have some news about Kent. You’re not going to believe this. …”
I closed the bathroom door, deciding to take the world’s quickest shower before I slipped on some jeans and a light-blue sweater. When I came out with the glass of water, Alan was standing over the corpse again, which he’d re-covered with the blanket. I set the glass on the nightstand, then settled on the other bed.
“The police will be here any minute. You’re going to have to be a great actress, because they’re already suspicious.” He moved to the couch and sat. “You’ve got to admit this is pretty fucked-up. If we take vampires out of the equation, how could a dead body end up in a locked—occupied—room in a busy hotel?” He tapped his fist on his knee. “Maybe we can sell them on the possibility that Kent had an unhappy accomplice here in the hotel—someone who broke him out then killed him, dumping him in your room to make you look guilty.” He leaped up and paced. “Damn. I’d never buy that.” He sat next to me. “Really, Kismet, this is all going to be on you. I’m just the person you told first, so it won’t really help if I come up with any possible scenarios—I can’t make it look like I have any agenda or that I’m trying to shield you.”
There was a crisp knock on the door. “Police.”
Alan and I shared a look. I crossed my fingers and held them up as I moved to the door.
“Doctor Knight?” A tall, muscular, olive-skinned officer held out his badge. His uniform must have been custom made. He looked like a body builder. “I’m Officer Angelino.” He pointed a thumb at the average-height wiry man with the crew cut standing next to him. “This is Lieutenant Fitzgerald.”
“Please, come in.”
Blood Therapy (Kismet Knight, Ph.D., Vampire Psychologist) Page 28