“The bite on the veranda was a public display. I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you, but for me to feed from Ernesto’s granddaughter in front of him, and on his own ship, made a very strong statement, and since we don’t know who it is yet-”
“I get it, I get it. You did the caveman dance, and we’ve covered our bases. Everyone knows who I ‘belong’ to.” She rolled her eyes.
“Exactly,” he said with a smile. “And, I’ll confess, my blood was running after the interrogation. If I was human, you could say it was an adrenaline rush.”
“Okay then,” she cleared her throat. “Next time go punch something instead of biting me.”
“I just had,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Oh.”
“Yes, ‘oh.’”
“So…” she hesitated. “Is the guy who attacked Mano dead?”
He paused before she heard his satisfied voice. “Ashes in the Pacific.”
They exchanged a look Beatrice didn’t want to think about too closely before he changed the subject. “So…how was your conversation with Ernesto?”
Her head fell back against the seat and her eyes drooped. “That was exhausting.”
Giovanni smiled. “You did extremely well for your first small taste of vampire politics, Beatrice.”
“That was a
He chuckled and reached for her hand, stroking the back of her palm with his thumb. “A small and rather friendly dip in the shark pool.”
“Okay, well, it was interesting, but I could go on a vamp politics diet for a while, if you know what I mean.”
“Fair enough. There’s no reason I can think of for us to go back in the near future.”
Beatrice must have dozed in the car, because when she woke Giovanni was lifting her from the passenger’s seat and carrying her into the kitchen.
“What time is it?” she asked with a yawn.
“Around four in the morning.”
“Good thing I don’t have to work tomorrow.”
He walked through the kitchen, still carrying her in his arms. Beatrice curled into his chest and thought of the first ride she’d made into Cochamo when he’d held her for hours in front of him on the rocking horse.
“Gio?”
“Yes?” He turned down a long hall she knew contained the guest bedrooms.
“If I stayed with you tonight…could we just sleep?”
His steps faltered, and she heard his heart give a quiet thump.
“If that’s what you want.”
“I miss you,” she whispered as her eyes closed again. She burrowed toward the comforting smell of his skin. “I miss how warm your arms always are.”
He paused in the hallway before he turned and walked up the stairs.
Beatrice didn’t remember much except for his hands as they removed her shoes, the low buzz of his skin brushing against hers, and the comfort of being enveloped in his scent as he pulled the sheets around her. She heard him moving around the room before his long arms enfolded her and he nestled behind her in the bed. He whispered in her ear as she faded to dreams.
“I love you, Beatrice.”
Chapter Nine
“If you’re really from Texas-”
“Is that something people lie about? Being from Texas?”
“-then why don’t you have an accent?”
Beatrice turned to Giovanni. “Is he serious?”
He shrugged. “I suppose so,” he said, looking at Ben’s curious face. “We’ve never been, he only met Caspar and your grandmother when they came to New York to stay with him.”
They were sitting in the belly of Lorenzo’s old plane, which now was stripped of its more ostentatious details. It sported a decent library, two twin beds, and the same couches, though Giovanni had made sure they’d been recovered. When he had inherited Lorenzo’s converted cargo plane with the reinforced compartment that allowed him to fly, he had no idea it would be put to so much use.
Though he had spent much of the past year in New York and Los Angeles settling legal matters with Ben and preparing to reenter Beatrice’s life, he had spent the four years previous flying across Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, rebuilding old alliances and searching unsuccessfully for her father.
“I didn’t know my grandmother and Caspar went to New York!”
He nodded. “They came in August when I…” When he had flown down to Cochamo, unable to resist seeing her. The farther he had pushed her to the back of his mind in their years apart, the more he had been able to successfully concentrate on preparing himself for the conflict he knew was coming.
But as the prospect of seeing her neared, he became almost desperate. Though Isabel had verbally lashed him, he hadn’t been able to resist lurking around the house to try to catch a glimpse of her or a hint of her scent.
As soon as he mentioned August, her eyes hardened, Giovanni knew she realized what he was talking about. Luckily, Ben was still chattering, so she wasn’t allowed to shut herself off like she so often did.
“Will there be cowboy hats? Do I get one? No, that would probably look stupid. But maybe…Gio, have you ever worn a cowboy hat?”
“I never wore a cowboy hat when I lived in Texas,” he said.
Ben and Beatrice looked between each other, their eyes glinting. “That wasn’t a ‘no,’” she said with a sly smile.
He shrugged, thinking back to the time he had spent in Argentina with Gustavo and Isabel in the late 1800s. “It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a cowboy hat.”
They both started laughing and Ben finally choked out. “You-a cowboy-Gio wore a cowboy hat!”
“I’m trying to imagine it, Ben, but I just can’t,” Beatrice snorted.
“It wasn’t a western hat-it was a gaucho-style hat. Everyone wore them.”
Her eyes lit up. “But
“It wasn’t a cowboy hat.”
“I bet it was a black one,” Ben said.
Beatrice nodded. “Definitely black.”
He rolled his eyes and opened a book, attempting to ignore them, but in reality, his heart lightened to see them laughing together. Though he never said it, Ben had been dreading the idea of Beatrice disrupting the tentative family ties the two of them had formed.
“And you know, the sun thing isn’t totally true. He once chased me out of the house about twenty feet during the day when I was trying to run away in New York. He didn’t burst into flames, he just got really sunburned and a little smoky around the ears.”
She cocked an eyebrow at Giovanni. “Smoky ears, huh? I’ll have to remember that.”
“And then he fell asleep really hard after he had two bags of blood, and he kept saying your name over and-”
Like lightning, Giovanni reached across the small compartment and grabbed Ben’s hand. The boy slumped over, instantly asleep, and Giovanni sat back in his chair as Beatrice gaped at him.
“Did you just use mind voodoo to shut him up?”
