“She’s not alone.” Boaz could say this much and make it true. “She’s got me.”
Mr. Whitaker fell silent, and Boaz imagined the man’s stare drilling through his spine, weighing his intentions. But when he turned, Mr. Whitaker had fallen asleep on the table with his head braced on his forearms.
Heart heavy for the burden Adelaide had carried for so long, Boaz plated up the meal and set it on the table. He covered it with a paper towel and jotted down instructions on how to reheat it. He worried if he put it in the microwave, Mr. Whitaker might not be able to find it given his present condition.
After the coffee finished, Boaz set a cup of plain black next to the plate, grabbed his keys, and exited the house. Willy sat where he’d left her, and he patted the motorcycle fondly. She was a beast compared to Jolene, his first bike, but then he wasn’t a high school kid anymore either.
Waiting until the Bluetooth in his helmet synced with his phone, he gave the voice command to dial Parker. “You run that plate for me yet?”
“Believe it or not, I didn’t have to.” Parker rustled papers. “Abernathy’s rusty skills with the ladies paid off. The driver gave him her card. I pulled her info from there.”
The ID wouldn’t have mattered as much to him a few hours ago. It hadn’t been until Adelaide got in the car with the mystery vamp that his gut started cramping.
“Cassandra Desmond.” Parker clicked a few keys. “Lives up by the lake.”
Rubbing a hand over his stubbly jaw, he prodded Parker. “Got her address?”
The detective rattled off the information, and Boaz memorized it. He wasn’t overly familiar with the area, but that’s what GPS was for, and he plugged in the information after he hung up the phone.
The ride over was short, only partly due to speeding, but the Ferrari wasn’t in the driveway. Wherever Addie and Cassandra had gone, they hadn’t come here. He doubted they had gone Zumbaing either.
While he was here, he might as well take a look around the property.
Vampires tended to shun technology, older ones anyway, so odds were against Cassandra having a security system in place. But she was a bounty hunter, and that job tended to blow back on you eventually. She might be savvy enough to anticipate the day the hunter became the hunted.
Just in case, he removed a charm from the saddlebag on his bike, tossed it on the ground, and crushed it under his heel. The charm would distort any surveillance and cover his butt. It wouldn’t help with his scent, but since they hadn’t met, maybe she would write it off as belonging to a utility worker or deliveryman. Packages galore littered her front porch, so he might get lucky on that front.
The house itself was small but elegant, tucked back on several acres of wooded lot that abutted a lake. It was the kind of house a single person with plenty of money and no plans to marry or have kids bought to indulge themselves in weekend getaways to the country. Except, according to Parker, this was the vampire’s full-time residence, or had been for the last several years.
The glimpse he’d gotten of Cassandra made him think of nightclubs and city lights, not lightning bugs and pine trees, but vampires reinvented themselves every so often. She might be adjusting to a new persona or preparing to embrace a new one.
The simple thing would be to ask Addie, but she had gone out of her way to exclude him from whatever activities she had planned for the night and denied him an introduction that would have segued nicely into the questions he had for Cassandra.
He had no proof Cassandra was involved in the murders, but he had a hunch, and he never ignored those. Too bad his gut was telling him his bride-to-be was in this up to her lovely neck, which meant it was a good thing Addie had invited him to stay with her for the duration. It would make keeping tabs on her, and her friend, that much easier.
The voice in his head chanting this might be his out, that he might crawl back to Grier yet, he silenced. Hope had never gotten him anywhere, and he would never wish anything bad on Addie. That his thoughts had spun in Grier’s direction so fast shamed him. But that didn’t change the fact Addie was up to something with a bounty-hunting vampire, and it was his job to find out what before another victim lost their undead life.
Ten
“Boaz knows,” I muttered, resisting the urge to glance over my shoulder. “He freaking knows.”
“I doubt it,” Cass demurred. “He doesn’t strike me as the knowing type.”
Angling my head toward her, I considered yanking her bouncy ponytail to get her attention, but vampire. She would bite me, I would punch her, and it would go downhill from there. “He’s a sentinel, an Elite, which implies he has some skill.”
They wouldn’t have let him spearhead a murder investigation that crossed state lines otherwise.
“Or that he banged his instructor.”
From the rumors I had heard about him, I couldn’t defend him on that point. Honestly? I didn’t want to think about it. Which is probably why Cass kept throwing it in my face. “I can’t afford for him to get tangled up in this.”
The Whitaker family name was the only reason he approached me with an offer of an alliance—I mean marriage—in the first place. The whole hanging-with-vampires-and-working-as-a-bounty-hunter thing would torpedo that. I couldn’t let it happen. His family, and their money, was the only ticket out of this vicious cycle of poverty for me and mine.
“You could always dump him and come live with me. I could take care of you and your father.” She slanted her eyes toward me. “I wouldn’t ask for anything you weren’t willing to give Boaz.”
So sex, sex, sex, and light housekeeping. Maybe blood on
