by Jax Garren
He could see Vince assess the same thing as he gave her a quick scan, his smile brighter on his lying lips than in his honest eyes. Vince pulled Charlie forward to introduce him.
Shame filled Javier. Shame and anger that his mother couldn’t get and keep her shit together. He knew addiction was a disease, and it wasn’t entirely in her control anymore. But the child who’d come in second or third place time and time again couldn’t be logical about it.
It was his right to be angry. Or so said every counselor he’d ever been forced to talk to.
“You haven’t met my fiancé yet,” Vince said as Charlie offered his hand. “Charlie Travert, Danielle Carson. Danielle, Charlie.”
It was Danielle’s turn to smile with her mouth and not her eyes. She’d declared a few years ago, when Rhiannon and Vince had first become friends, that she thought it was nobody’s business what people did in their bedrooms. She might believe that, but it didn’t mean she was okay with Vince and Charlie slow dancing in her backyard.
Good thing she didn’t have a choice. Rhiannon’s name was on the lease, and she paid the bills.
Vince held up his and Charlie’s hands, showing off their engagement rings.
To Javier’s surprise, Danielle took their intertwined fingers and pulled them toward her for a better look. “Ooooh. You make them?”
Vince hesitated, surprise showing on his face, before answering, “Yeah, I did.”
“Very nice. I’ll have to order something from you one of these days. I got a cleaning gig coming up. After I get paid, I’ll talk to you.”
She lived her life not just from paycheck to paycheck, but from odd job to infrequent odd job, and every person standing there knew there was no way her upcoming check—if that was even a real thing—would cover Vince’s fee, even with a steep friends-and-family discount that Danielle didn’t really qualify for. On that uncomfortable thought, everyone stood in awkward silence as people drank and danced and laughed around them.
Javier drank more.
From the side gate, Emma and Cash made a grand entrance, turning heads as seemingly everyone stopped to admire the couple. Javier’s insides froze up. Emma was gorgeous in a strappy sundress, her hair half up to show off her beautiful eyes and half down to curl almost to her waist. Her blue eyes were wide and bright, her lips glossed a bubblegum pink. She smiled easily, looking every bit herself and yet as at home here as at Cash’s estate.
The prince observed his surroundings, a sardonic smile on his face. The man could buy the whole block and not notice a dent in his bank account. Not that money solved all problems. Javier still didn’t like Cash, but the day before had given him more perspective.
Emma nodded and headed his way. He braced himself. Welcome to my life. Poverty. Drugs. Danielle, whose shirt is too tight and pants too loose and is barely seventeen years my senior. We’re hosting a block party with a food table including caramel-coated Hot Cheetos. Your fledgling is half illegal immigrant, half white-ish trash, and one hundred percent fucked-up former foster kid.
He wanted to think people looked at the other people around them and saw, well, other people. The one time he’d gotten up the courage to bring a friend home from college had proved him absolutely wrong. Their friendship had ended almost as soon as they were back on campus.
But hey, maybe Emma, with the skills and talents of a gourmet pastry chef, also liked moon pies and tater-tot casserole.
He suddenly wanted to throw up the Everclear. Dopamine. Norepinephrine. Serotonin. It wasn’t helping.
She made her way through the crowd, getting stopped by every dick in the backyard as everyone hit on her. She had her pick of dinner tonight, and he wondered whom it would be. Another guy, just like him, who fell for her pretty smile? Jealousy clenched his shoulders. He had zero right to be jealous. Didn’t stop the feeling from making him want to take a bite out of anyone who touched her.
“I got a new boyfriend,” Danielle announced, oblivious to his strayed attention. “Y’all should meet him.”
Javier careened back around. Rhiannon’s mouth quirked into a frown before she recovered.
She knew. And she hadn’t told Javier about him. Bad sign.
The adrenaline rush of anger made his fists clench, and he took a step closer to Rhiannon. Emma was a badass vampire. She could eviscerate anyone she wanted to as she made her way across the yard. Hell, if she pointed with a raised brow, Cash would likely do it for her for the fun of it. Danielle’s boyfriends, on the other hand… Danielle was rarely enough to hold a man’s undivided attention when he was footing all the bills and paying for her habits. More incentive was needed, like a boy to take his anger out on or a girl who didn’t know how to say no.
Fuck the Declaration of Geneva. Javier would surgically remove this man’s genitals and then his fingers and let him bleed out in a ditch if he was one of those boyfriends.
The man his mother dragged forward, though, didn’t seem like the wannabe gangsters or the Confederate-flag-waving ignoramuses she typically clung to. His light brown hair was a little wild, his full beard neatly trimmed. His clothes, a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves and fitted jeans with cuffs, were clean and neat. Deep dimples and smiling blue eyes threw Javier off. He looked too happy to be dating Danielle. Where was the drama she was drawn to? It had to be there, which just meant he was better at hiding it than most of her exes.
“Ramsey,” he said, offering a beefy hand for Javier to shake.
Javi took it and squeezed a little warning into the greeting.
Ramsey looked at his hand, brows quirking in confusion. “Been sitting in a refrigerator, son?”
Javier’s spine shot straight, and he forced the anger down. “I’m not your son.” His fangs started to drop, a natural vampire reaction whenever emotions were high. One more stupid piece of his body out of control, and that frustrated him even more. He shut his mouth to hide them.
“Javier Tomás…” Danielle muttered in reproach.
But her boyfriend smiled and put a possessive arm around her waist. Or maybe it just looked possessive to Javier. He was pretty sure he was irrationally upset for the situation. The downward spiral happened every time he came back here—wherever “here” was at the moment, she moved so damn often. Every time he saw Danielle, it was like he was stuck at thirteen and pissed off as hell. No more prefrontal cortex for him. Only confusion and rage.
“It’s okay. He’s right.” Ramsey’s smile came back, again looking awfully earnest. “I don’t mean anything by it, but a man deserves his name.”
More awkward silence. Just breathe. Acetylcholine, epinephrine, GABA, glutamic acid…
Ramsey pulled a crushed packet of cigarettes from his back pocket and offered them around. Danielle and Rhi took one. Javier stared at the pack. He hadn’t smoked since he’d graduated from med school and had promised himself his irregular habit was done for good, part of the life he’d left behind. Smoking was for poor people. Quinoa was for successful people. That and cocaine, but he wasn’t going there, either. At the moment, though, the soothing power of nicotine called stronger than it had in months, and it wasn’t like he was going to contract lung cancer. He was a fucking immortal.
On the other hand, Emma was working her way through the crowd, and he didn’t want to smell like acrid tar. If Emma had a cigarette, he would too. He shook his head, then drank more as Ramsey pulled out a lighter and lit three cigarettes.
“So you’re the doctor? Your mom’s mighty proud of you.”
No, she wasn’t; she was mad at him for deserting her. But instead of the normal passive-aggressive guilt trip, Danielle rubbed his shoulder with a friendly touch. “He ain’t just any doctor. He’s an ER doctor, like on TV, but he works with children, saving their lives.”
The man looked impressed. “That is something.”
Javier crossed his arms, discomfited. “I’m a fellow in the neuropathology department at East Side Children’s Hospital.”
Danielle nodded like that was wha
t she’d said, when they were totally different things. He worked in a lab, not an ER. He glanced at Rhi. She took a quick drag on her cigarette and bumped hips with him. “It’s my party and I’m going to dance. Toodles!” One arm around Vince and the other around Charlie, she charged for the floor, leaving Javier alone with Danielle and her new lumbersexual, the weirdly nice guy.
He needed an escape. He could grill Rhi on Ramsey later. Right now a simple introduction had him losing the controlled man he’d worked so hard to become. The angry kid inside him still wanted to beat the shit out of anyone his mother dated—just in case.
“Ramsey, show him the thing.”
The thing? Oh, this was going to be good.
For the first time, Ramsey’s face darkened. “He doesn’t want to see that.”
“I think it looks funny.” Danielle’s hands went to his sleeve, trying to roll it up farther.
Javier relaxed. The man must have a spider bite or something she wanted him to look at. It happened all the time now. Just that little reminder that he was a doctor gave him something to hold on to. “It’s fine. I’ll look at it.” He forced his best professional smile, full of reassuring confidence.
Ramsey grumbled about it being nothing—and it probably was—but he let Danielle roll up his sleeve. He hissed in pain as she got it over a bandage. “I wrapped it up best I could. You’d do better,” Danielle muttered, her cheeks turning pink in embarrassment. Why her crooked bandage embarrassed her when Javier had come home from school more than once to find her with a damn needle in her arm and not a trace of a blush was beyond him.
No, he wasn’t thinking about that. He was Dr. Reyes, and Dr. Reyes didn’t get angry.
Danielle pulled the bandage off, revealing a mess so bad Javier had to control a grimace. The festering wound, centered around a small black scab the size of a freckle, was not like any insect bite, spider or otherwise, Javier had ever seen. Contusions and oozing pustules surrounded the scab—an allergic reaction to something he’d shot up maybe? But the weird part, the thing he couldn’t find any explanation for, was the way his veins had turned black and emanated from the wound like spiderwebs trailing up his arm to his neck. Javier had never seen anything like it. He forced his voice to stay light. “That’s impressive. How’d you get it?”
“Work injury.”
Danielle rubbed his other shoulder. “Ramsey’s a foreman. Builds fancy houses on the west side. Maybe one day he’ll build you one.”
Hell no. One of Danielle’s boyfriends was not building him a house. Ever. Javier kept his smile in place. “How exactly did it happen?”
Ramsey took his beefy arm back and slapped the bandage back on carelessly. “Accident. A pipe fell off the second story and landed end down. They’d just cut it, so it was still hot.”
Javier nodded. The brief look he’d gotten wasn’t completely inconsistent with that, if the pipe was really narrow. Though it seemed unlikely, at the hospital he’d heard stranger explanations that were true. Didn’t explain the black lines. “You should get an appointment to have that looked at. It’s infected, and you’ll want antibiotics. Infections can get out of control surprisingly fast if you’re not proactive.”
“Told you,” Danielle said, smacking him on the chest. “That ain’t normal.” She nodded at Javier. “Thanks, baby.”
Javier shot her a death look.
She snorted and rolled her eyes in a dramatic production. “Thanks, Javier.”
The smell of cinnamon brought his attention away from his mother. Emma was behind him. She leaned in, touching her cheek to his jaw in an intimate greeting that made his skin tingle. She might be unreliable, but his body didn’t seem to care about that. It just wanted her. Her hands splayed out, one holding a present and the other a Tupperware rectangle. His stomach growled at the thought of Emma’s baking. It wasn’t blood, but what she could do with sugar and butter might be the next best thing.
“I brought cupcakes,” she announced. The clear plastic lid revealed expertly crafted white and brown frosting swirls. Each cupcake had been decorated with a different confection—sandwich cookies, peppermint, chocolate chips, and coffee beans. He turned his attention to the table of food with its beanie weenies and cheap sheet cake. He liked beanie weenies, particularly when drowned in ketchup, a secret he’d guarded scrupulously through med school. Successful people liked hummus. Little things like that seemed petty, but they made a huge difference in the way people looked at you. Emma’s offering was meant for a different party, and while most people here would love and admire the cupcakes, some would laugh and ask what sort of snotty attitude somebody must have to bring that, because grocery store sheet cake with its Crisco-based icing was not only good enough for them, it was what they liked.
Class warfare went both ways. Granted, one side had all the money, so the war was going poorly for the half in this yard.
Still standing too close—not that she had much choice in the crowd—Emma bumped his hip and asked, “How you doing?” The question sounded casual, but he didn’t think it was. She could tell his heart rate was up. Damn vampire senses.
He took the cupcakes to give her a free hand. And because he wanted to get one before they were all snapped up. “Fine.” He couldn’t look at her as he lied. To his surprise, her free arm slid around his waist. Her touch didn’t have the wandering slide of a come-on, but the firm pressure of moral support.
If she hadn’t smelled so good, the connection might be comforting.
“Ooh! Ain’t those beautiful,” Danielle announced. She smiled at the cupcakes, then smiled at them, her gaze zeroing in on their intertwined arms with obvious delight. “I’m Danielle, Javier’s mama. And you are?”
Emma returned her smile, her face lighting up in unfeigned pleasure. “Most excellent to meet you, ma’am. I’m Emma. Javi and I are…” She glanced up at Javier, her voice trailing off as she had no reasonable explanation for their relationship.
Danielle, of course, took her silence the wrong way and nodded vigorously.
“I know her from the hospital,” Javier added quickly. “She volunteers with an organization that helps exploited children.”
Emma shot him a brief look of confusion but didn’t contradict it. It was a better explanation than I bought her a drink, we had sex, and she turned me into a vampire. It did nothing, however, to dim his mother’s excitement. Great.
“Present!” Rhiannon swooped in and snatched the red package with a golden bow from Emma. “This is for me, right?”
Emma laughed. “Unless you know some other birthday gal around here I should give it to?”
“Nope. Can I open it?”
“’Course.”
Unlike her normal present-ripping exuberance, Rhi actually looked at the wrapping. “Pretty.” Carefully she removed the bow and twined it around her wrist into a bracelet. Then she decimated the paper, strewing it around them like confetti. Inside the box was a mobile made from a miniature broom with crystals hanging off of it. “Oooh! Lapis. Moonstone…” Rhiannon went on to name the stones.
Emma relaxed at her obvious pleasure. “The woman who sold it to me said it was charged and everything, but I wouldn’t know nothing about that, so hopefully she was truthing.”
Rhiannon closed her eyes and held one of the stones. Her breathing quickened and she grinned. “Oh yeah. She was truthing. This is awesome!”
Ramsey scowled. “Is that witchcraft?”
Rhi didn’t look at him as she dangled the mobile from her thumb and watched it spin. “Yup. I’m a witch.”
He took a step back, his expression like that of a man who’d swallowed too many Warheads. But Danielle pressed his arm again, and he held his tongue.
Danielle didn’t look too thrilled either, though, as she fingered the cross around her neck. She thanked Jesus every time she quit using, then apologized to him whenever she started again. Javier sometimes wondered if Christ got prayer whiplash.
“I’m going to set these down.” Javier lifte
d the cupcakes and headed for the food table, towing Emma with him. He’d been publicly nice-ish to his mother. Duty done.
“Your mama seems nice,” Emma offered, trying to guess what had set her fledgling off. When she’d approached, his heart rate had been faster than a resting human’s, a dead-ass sprint for a vampire. The fact that his fangs were in check was a testament to his willpower. She’d known vampires with decades on him who couldn’t control them that well. It was impressive.
“She can be.” His words were curt as he moved aside a cheese tray and a pot of rice and beans to make room for her cupcakes. “These are beautiful.” He sounded genuinely impressed.
“Thanks.” She grinned as she looked over the spread. “I think I win first prize at the cupcake fair, if I do say so myself.”
His chuckle was uncomfortably low and under his breath. “Definitely. Can I have one?”
He was embarrassed. It was weird; he was always so smooth and collected. “Well, I know you like cinnamon. So I’d rec one of these two. This here’s Mexican chocolate, if you want cinnamon with chocolate. And you’re like three-quarters Mexican or something, so it fits. And this here’s a bacon cinnamon roll, if you’re craving breakfast.” She tapped her lips. “How do you do with meat?” A lot of vampires, herself included, developed an intolerance for it. Ironic, that.
“I do okay. Red meat less so, but nothing else has caused me a problem.” Javier picked up the Mexican chocolate. “But I’ll take the cupcake of my people.” He licked the icing, and any trace of his frown disappeared.
She poked him in the side. “You have happy food face.” She loved to be the cause of that look. Food was a way of caring for people. You fed them good food, and they knew you cared. With all the fighting they’d done, it was good to have cupcake-induced peace.
