surprised.
“It was the woman we saved in Tribeca earlier,” Campbell said as he walked across the room.
“You brought her here?” Sophia looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Why?”
“To impress on her how dangerous it was to get caught out after dark.”
“Harsh,” Billy said, being his typical vampire-of-few-words self.
“Oh, my God, Campbell,” Sophia said. “You don’t think she’d already figured that out? And it’s not as if she was deliberately walking the streets after dark.”
If anyone else had spoken to him like that, he would have told them to back off. But with Sophia it stung because she was the most agreeable member of his team, a bit like their mother hen.
“Way to kick her when she’s down,” Kaja said. “Why not toss her out of the truck a couple of blocks from her apartment and make her run for it while you’re at it?” With an eye roll she walked away with Len to investigate the scene.
Maybe he had gone too far. Sometimes it was hard to judge and balance his vampire and human instincts.
“You owe her an apology,” Sophia said.
“I think what she wants more than an apology is me to stay the hell away.”
“Then call her. Email. Text. Just don’t become so damned hard that you’re not you anymore.” With her words still hanging in the air, Sophia stalked off down the long room after Len and Kaja.
Billy gave him an “I agree with her” look before returning his attention to the smartphone where he was no doubt typing in details about the scene.
Seeing as how everyone else in the room was put out with him, Campbell decided to put his investigative skills to work somewhere else. He started to tell the others where he was headed, but then thought,
Sophia’s words kept hitting his brain like a battering ram as he drove the rest of the way to Tribeca. They kept up their assault as he got out of the truck and started scanning the area where he and his team had fought the other vampires.
He stopped walking and looked up at the sky, sighing. Sophia was right. He’d been a class A jerk. It was a wonder he hadn’t sent the woman into a nervous breakdown. Wasn’t his job to keep people safe, not scare them half to death?
He had to be honest with himself, if no one else. He’d taken her to that blood den to ensure she was terrified of him because once the red haze of his bloodlust had disappeared, he’d noticed just how beautiful she was. Long blond hair. The sense that she had wide eyes even when she wasn’t afraid for her life. Curves in all the right places. She was the type of woman he’d have so gone after back in his NYPD days. And someone off-limits to him now. He’d been damned lucky he hadn’t killed her earlier.
But the fact that she was alive drew him as if she were a siren upon her seaside rock. Not because he wanted to drink from her. No, she tugged on the part of him that yearned to be human again, the part he tried to forget.
As he wandered up the side of the street where she’d been fleeing, something glinted in the reflected glow of a security lamp. He knelt down next to the curb and picked up a cell phone, the same kind the team carried. Had one of them lost it in the midst of the fight?
He palmed it and headed back for the truck. With this area now quiet and no vamps nearby, he wasn’t going to find anything of any use in their ongoing investigation of the blood dens anyway.
When he slipped into the driver’s seat, he plugged the phone into the charger. Then he started the engine and headed back to the cave.
The team didn’t actually live in a cave, but they’d dubbed their underground facility the Bat Cave during one long day of watching—and making fun of—vampire movies. He actually smiled at the memory because it was the day when he’d felt them finally bond as something resembling a family unit. It was important for vamps to find support like that when they couldn’t go back to their human families. It kept them from losing their humanity, as well, and becoming nothing more than animals with ravenous cravings.
He kept his eyes open for any illegal activity as he covered block after block. But after the craziness of the previous few hours, the night had settled into normalcy. The human-owned buildings sat quiet and locked up tight. When he crossed into the more commercial areas, the vamp establishments were bursting with activity. Vampires shopping, working, clubbing and dining out—just as humans did during the day.
When he pulled into the garage, he noticed Matt Calloway, head of V Force Team 2, and another member of his team heading into the garage from the headquarters room.
“I see you’re going for the air-conditioned look,” Matt said with a teasing grin as Campbell slid out of his team’s truck.
“At least we didn’t turn ours upside down,” Campbell said, poking fun at the time Matt had been in hot pursuit of some nasty blood thieves and took a corner a bit too fast and ended up rolling into the front of a store. The vampire woman who’d owned the clothing store had chewed him out for twenty minutes straight.
“Touche,” Matt said as he saluted and headed for his own truck.
When Campbell stepped inside, he held up the phone he’d found. “Who lost their phone earlier tonight?”
Nobody claimed it, so he tossed it to Travis. “Figure out whose it is. Maybe we’ll catch a lucky break and it’ll hold something useful.”
He stepped into his room, shoved off his jacket, which still held the woman’s feminine scent, and pulled a clean T-shirt over his head. “Find anything at the den?” he asked as he came back into the main room.
“Squat,” Colin said, leaning back in his desk chair. “Though Travis is trying to figure out who owns the building.”
“That ought to be easy enough,” Campbell said.
Travis looked up from his computer. “You’d think, right? But someone went to a lot of trouble to hide the owner’s identity. The deed says PMG Inc., but that company doesn’t seem to exist.” Travis’s computer dinged and he looked at the screen. “Looks like this phone belongs to an Olivia DaCosta.”
When he read the address of the Comfort Food Diner, Campbell realized he now had a name to go with the beautiful face. And he had a sneaking suspicion that was going to make her even more difficult to forget.
* * *
Olivia kept waiting to wake up. But no matter how much she paced across her apartment on her twisted ankle, winced at the pain in her back or pinched herself, nothing changed. She really had been attacked by vampires and then been saved by the same species. A bubble of hysterical laughter threatened, but she tamped it down. If she was going crazy, she didn’t want to acknowledge it quite yet.
She noticed the light blinking on her phone and hit the play button.
“Olivia, I just got your message. I was in the shower. Please call me as soon as you get this,” Mindy’s concerned voice said. “I called your cell, but you didn’t answer.”
When the machine beeped and the next message started, it was Mindy again, sounding even more scared this time. “Come on, Liv, call me. I’m freaking out here.”
As Olivia made her way through the messages, they were all from her best friend, each one growing more frantic than the last. Her cell phone was who knew where. She’d lost it sometime between calling Mindy and the cascade of horrible events that followed. She picked up her cordless phone and dialed Mindy’s number.
“Liv?” Mindy sounded on the verge of tears, very unusual for her.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Oh, thank God. You had me scared to death. What happened? How did you get home?”
Olivia let out a long breath. “You’re never going to believe it.”
“Try me. I’ve imagined just about everything waiting here by this phone, praying you were alive.”
Olivia pressed her palm against her forehead as she continued to pace the floor of her living room, unable to sit still even though she ought to have her foot propped up on a cushion and ice packs on all the cuts and bruises. “Someone stole my car, and I got attacked as soon as the sun set.”
Mindy gasped. “Attacked?”
Olivia heard the unasked question. “I wasn’t bitten. Nearly, but I’ve still got a heartbeat.”
“Were you able to get inside a safe building?”
