by Jax Garren
“This is amazing. They taste amazing. They look amazing.”
The praise made her glow. Impressing Javier was fun. He had high standards. “You look pretty good yourself with your tongue in my cupcake.”
He stilled for a second, then swallowed down a lump of icing.
Fuck me in the mouth. She could smack herself. Instead she kept her smile and smacked his shoulder. “And didn’t that just sound like the dirtiest thing ever. My mouth, I swear.”
Finally he chuckled. “I like your mouth.”
He winced like he hadn’t meant to say that, and she cleared her throat. “Oh, you.” Deflect, deflect… “Nice neighborhood. I like it.”
That shut him down. More than she’d intended. He took another drink from the bottle dangling in his hand. “Sure.”
Frustrated with her inept volubility, she grabbed the drink from him. He looked surprised, then his lips curled up in a challenging smile she didn’t understand.
Damn, he was a cutie when he dropped the pompous thing and smiled all mischievous like that. She took a swig. Fire flooded down her throat, and she forced herself to swallow like a whore with her tenth client. “The hell kind of gasoline you drinking?” No wonder he was smiling. “Asshole.”
He shrugged, amusement still lighting his eyes. “Ask Rhi. She made it.”
“Figures.” She leaned back against the table and, knowing what she was in for, took another sip. “Woo, that smarts. But I wasn’t being snide when I said I like the neighborhood. Sure, it ain’t the fanciest part of town, but look at all this food people brought. That’s good neighbors.” Out on the grass, Rhi was between two strippers from her club, singing and dancing with her drink in the air like a girl should on her birthday. “Everybody must really love her.” She grabbed a piece of watermelon and bit down. The sweet juice ran over her chin, making a mess, and she wiped it off, then licked her fingers one by one. “I still love watermelon. When I was a kid we had a watermelon patch. We’d sell most of them, but we always saved one big one. On some hot day in July, we’d take the afternoon off the farm and head for the creek, sixteen kids and two adults, and we’d go swimming and crack open a watermelon.” Remembering her manners, she wiped her fingers on a napkin. “It’s funny what memories stay with you two hundred years later.”
His shoulders relaxed, and he took the drink back for a sip. “I’ve never heard you talk about your family.”
She snorted. “And I heard so much about yours afore tonight.”
“Dance with me?” He took her hand. The touch of his cool fingers with a gentleman’s soft skin, despite the poverty he came from, sent a flutter in her stomach, like the kind she used to have at twelve years old when a cute boy smiled her way. But she wasn’t a kid, and neither was Javier. Dancing with him would be fun, but emotions were still so high between them, it seemed like courting trouble.
Hell, she wanted to dance, and worrying about the future had never been her style. She tugged Javier forward, pulling him toward the crowd.
Chapter Five
Two hours, a few drinks, and a lot of fun later, Emma rounded the corner of the kitchen and finally found her quarry. Javier had gotten away from her at some point in the festivities, and, determined to continue Project Friend, she’d gone on a quest to find him. Instead of catching him sequestered in a quiet corner for a bite—there sure were enough women here vying for her boy that he’d have ample opportunity—he was washing dishes. “Whatcha doing?”
He wasn’t eating. It was worrisome. The relief she felt, though, that he didn’t have a woman pressed against the wall was uncalled for. She might as well call a spade a spade. She had a crush on her fledgling—which was not going to work, even if the darling, naïve boy wanted it to. She needed to stamp that stupid out, pronto.
Javier turned and his face lit up like he was happy to see her. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him as relaxed as he had been for the past half hour. She had watched the worry lines ease from around his eyes and the tension slough off his shoulders as he danced and drank that god-awful concoction of his sister’s—a concoction Emma might’ve partaken a wee bit too much of herself.
Standing there in the kitchen, his shirt sticking to him and his hair in disarray, he looked nothing like the polished doctor she was used to.
It was cool how he could slide between worlds like that and just fit in anywhere—a doctor one place, an east-side party boy another—a trick she’d never mastered. And, hell, a man doing domestic work? That was just hot.
He hefted a bowl, frosted with the remains of cake icing. “Trying to tackle this before the birthday girl’s stuck with it in the morning.” With deft hands he swiped at the pink sugar crust, dissolving all the mess until the bowl was pristine, like it’d never been dirtied, a miracle of transformation.
That wasn’t meta at all.
“Don’t you think your mama’ll do that? She lives here, right?”
Javier’s face fell. “She does. One would hope she’d do the dishes on her daughter’s birthday.” He turned back to the sink. “One would be foolish, however, to bet on it. I’d give it bad odds, unless somebody brought dope, at which point she’ll have this house pristine in no time. Yay meth.” He didn’t sound enthused.
Emma tottered forward on dance-weary feet. He was upset again. She’d had no idea there was so much family drama. “I’ll help.”
“I’m her brother. I got it.” He balanced the shiny bowl atop a pyramid of clean dishes on a Formica counter the size of an end table. Man, she used to cook in tiny spaces like this. Cash’s enormous kitchen, with his fancy equipment and miles of counter space, sure made things easier. Javier smiled at her again, and she leaned against the cupboard, enjoying that warmth. “You go enjoy yourself,” he told her, nodding toward the outside with his chin.
Instead of obeying, she tugged open creaky, stubborn drawers until she found towels. “We may not know each other much, but we’re family now. Guess that makes me and Rhi family too, so it’s my job as much as yours.”
He shook his head, his soapy hands skimming down a baking tray. “Might want to get to know us a little better before you claim this family.”
The refilled bottle of blooded alcohol was on the counter. She took a drink before tucking into the drying. Best way to convince him his people didn’t bother her was to tell him about her own, and that required a little alcohol. “If they take me, I’ll take them. My mama kicked me out when I was fifteen for being a fallen woman. Next time I saw any of them was six months later, when Jason, my big brother, visited the whorehouse what took me in. I thought he was coming to get me out.” Another drink. She wiped her mouth with her hand and went back to drying a cake pan. “Instead he pretended he didn’t know me while he hired one of the girls. After that I sorta gave up on them.” Some memories still stung, no matter how much time had passed. So she grinned like nothing mattered and made her voice light as a joke. “Your turn. What’s the worst thing your family’s done?”
He opened his mouth in a giant O, like the question caught him off guard. “Uhh…”
She bumped hips with him. “I’m just kidding, hon. You ain’t gotta tell me nothing.”
Javier looked out the window over the sink at the party outside. “The worst thing Danielle ever did wasn’t to me.”
She followed his gaze to find Rhiannon dancing in the crowd with her hands in the air and a blissed-out smile. “Guess that makes it not your story to tell.”
“Danielle did the work to get us back every time CPS picked us up. I’ll give her that.” His hands continued their automatic work. “Sometimes I wonder how much better off we’d have been if she’d quit trying. Rhi might’ve gotten a real family.” Their conversation from the other day about Vince and Charlie adopting took on new meaning. Rhiannon might’ve gotten a family, but where would that have left a brown boy over the age of five?
“CPS is Child Protective Services, right? Most of my girls have been in that.”
He didn’t look a
t her. “Yes.”
“We didn’t have that in my day. Although based on stories from the girls I work with, shit, I ain’t sure that system works for fuck.”
His expression darkened, and that was all the confirmation she needed. But instead of verbally agreeing, he handed her a dish. “So you were fifteen when you started as a, er…”
He looked so distressed by his word choice she decided to help him out. “Whore? Hooker? Pro? In the life, as my girls say now.” It wasn’t a bad phrase. Prostitutes lived a world apart from everyone else. It was funny how some people nowadays romanticized whores of the Old West, like there was something more feminist or otherwise better a few centuries ago about being facedown in a bug-infested mattress while some asshole rammed his cock into a convenient hole. She didn’t see it. Her girls were every bit as strong and capable and desperate and scared as she’d been. Sure, there were folk what had options and chose prostitution because they wanted it, and more power to them. Scarlet, the vampire brothel she sometimes consulted for, was staffed with men and women from that elite neck of the sex industry. But girls who came to it like she had did so because dying on the street was their other option.
Javier’s bemused smile brought her back to the present. “I will use your term of choice.”
She shrugged. “I ain’t got a term of choice. And I was thirteen. Mama waited till word got around town to kick me out.” She stacked the dried plates neatly, wondering where they went. “Didn’t kick me out when I started bringing home extra flour and sugar. But, you know, heaven forbid the neighbors look down on us any more than they already did.”
He stared at the water in the sink, and thankfully didn’t offer any platitudes about how young she’d been or how horrible that was. It was life. He wouldn’t look at her, though. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to keep his face straight or if his opinion of her had changed somehow.
Damn him if it had. It was what she’d had to do to eat, and fuck anyone who thought less of her for it.
Fuck all the men in the world for thinking it was okay to be a john and shameful to be a whore.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “She let her boyfriend beat me to near death when I was fourteen.” He pointed to two of his lower incisors. “These are fake. He knocked them out.” He pushed the neckline of his shirt back to show the top of a tattoo on his shoulder. She remembered it from their night together, a snake wrapped around a rod. “If you look, you’ll see burn marks in the shape of a cross. Cigarette butts. I got the Rod of Asclepius in medical school to hide them. There are more burns on my right foot and left thigh, but those aren’t all from that night. Everything else healed.”
Everything physical, he meant. “Damn,” she muttered. So much pain.
He breathed out, and a smile, the kind that looked like more pain than any frown, made him so handsome. “I wasn’t upset about the pain. It’s not like she could’ve stopped him, and we needed a place to live. The thing I can’t forgive is that the night he almost killed me, she didn’t take me to the hospital. She didn’t want him to get arrested.” He squirted more soap onto the sponge and squeezed it, sending bubbles slathering over his knuckles and down his wrist. She admired his calm, as if they weren’t talking about the worst moments of life. “If Rhi hadn’t snuck out and called 911, I would’ve died. She was ten. At the hospital we both got picked up. Again.”
“Not the first time CPS took you?”
He washed the final dishes efficiently. “That was the fifth, and the closest she ever came to losing us for good.”
“Wow.” She’d had no idea. None whatsoever. He seemed so…impenetrable. “You must be mighty proud of yourself.”
A grin flashed over his face and disappeared. “Why, because I’m a poor kid made good? Beat the odds and whatever?”
“Yeah.”
The sink was empty of dishware, and he pulled the drain, letting the water run out. The grin returned, and this time it stayed. “Am I arrogant if I say I am proud?”
He was so damn precious. Emotion she couldn’t define welled inside of her, and she slammed into him, wrapping her arms around his waist so she could squeeze him. “I got me the best fledgling ever. I don’t care no more if you don’t want to be a vampire. I’m glad I didn’t let you die on that ugly carpet.”
He laughed as his arms wrapped around her, squeezing tight. Like every time a man held her, a wash of anxiety ran through her. Trapped. But in two breaths it dissolved into nothing, the smell of soap and alcohol—he was always so clean—chasing away the scum of fear.
“Question,” came a voice from the open walkway to the living area. She turned enough to see Rhi, drunk as a skunk and carrying her shoes. “If a sire and her fledgling have sex, is it incest? Or do vampires worry about that?”
Javier let go with one hand and grabbed the sprayer.
Rhi squealed as her brother chased her to the hallway with a stream of water.
“Sorry about her,” Javier said, voice low and rumbling through his chest. It felt nice, like a kitten purring.
“Bite her! Bite her!” Rhiannon chanted, poking her head back around the wall.
Vampire fast, Javier aimed and turned on the sprayer, hitting her smack in the forehead. She shrieked and laughed and ducked behind the wall. This time her footsteps skittered down the hall and away.
“You should be glad you didn’t keep up with your siblings.” His arm came back around her, and he stroked her back. “They’re pains in the ass.”
She’d never heard someone called a pain in the ass with so much love. It was a damned stupid thing to say, and yet her mouth opened up anyway. “You can bite me if you want.”
One of his arms tightened as the other kept that gentle stroke, up and down in a soothing motion that made her feel cared for.
It wasn’t a stupid thing to say. He was her fledgling, and she needed to take care of him. Before, she’d been so worried about what was going on between them. Maybe she should worry more about making sure he got something—anything—in his stomach that wasn’t from a bottle. The man was nigh chilly as an ice cube. It was her job to take care of him, and she might suck balls at it, but somebody needed to try. He deserved it.
“You don’t need to offer that. I’m doing fine.” His words were polite, but the strain in his voice was obvious. If she looked up, would she see fangs dropping in?
Probably.
“Look, you can’t hurt me. I’m a vampire. Anything you do’ll be all healed up in a jiff.”
His body, so soft and calming, turned stiff and awkward, but he didn’t let her go, just shifted from one foot to another.
Time for the hard sell. She picked her head up and gave him a flirtatious smile. She was good at those. Convincing men she wanted it was something she had a lot of practice with.
And yet, one look in his dark eyes and she had to look away, suddenly shy for reasons unfathomable. “Come on, Javi. Don’t make this hard on me. Just let me give you this. Please. I want to.”
She did, too. The thought of his teeth made her cheeks flush and her mouth dry. Which was weird as fuck, because last time she’d donated—and the time before that and before that—things had been so cool and rational. A pragmatic bite on the arm to assuage a platonic hunger between vamps in a tight spot.
Javier was so quiet, though, and his hands had stilled their gentle rhythm. She looked back up at him. He looked lost and so hungry, and she wanted to make it all go away. Make him happy and whole. No one could heal the damage of a lifetime, but she was good at putting a little Band-Aid of bliss over even the largest of wounds. She ran a finger down the curve of her neck. “Somewhere in here. I trust with all your schooling you know a good place to do it.”
The darkness of his eyes turned into voids as deep as space. Sure enough, his teeth were out, and his words garbled slightly over them with the accent of someone who wasn’t used to their intrusion. “I can’t just lean over and bite you. You’re looking at me and…” He blew out a breath.
“Well that is a problem easily fixed.” Just like she would with a nervous client, she turned until her back was to his front and his arms crossed over her middle. He was hard as a brick behind her, and she felt a little guilty for causing it. But he needed to eat. And she wanted to take care of him. She tilted her head to the side, exposing herself. “There you go. No peeking from me.”
“God, Em…” His words were a hot breath on her jaw. He was going to do it. Her heart beat in anticipation as his lips dragged slowly, oh so slowly, across her skin. Every nerve ending lit up in ways that made her dizzy and impatient.
It would hurt. Getting stabbed, even with tiny needles, didn’t feel good. She shouldn’t anticipate it like this. And yet each breath on her skin and the shifting press of his lips drove her expectancy higher.
He sucked in a breath through his teeth, and his stiff body melded against hers. “Tell me if I’m out of line. I’ll stop.”
“Aw, Javi, you’re so sweet.”
One of his hands left her abdomen and clutched her skirt, bunching it up and pulling it higher. “No, I’m not sweet.”
“Oh.” One fang traced a pattern across her shoulder as his hand swept up the skin of her thigh. “Oh, my.” She stiffened up, which was weird because she was used to pretending.
He stopped, cool fingers pressed gently into her thigh, not moving up or down. Vampires used sex as a lure for prospective donors, exactly like she’d done with him. For most vampires it was instinct, hard to untangle one drive from the other—an instinct driving her fledgling right now.
For her, though, the exchange was always business as usual. She got dinner; her client got an orgasm, paying in blood instead of coin.
But this time she was the client. She was in charge. They stood still for a moment, his cool touch sending heat through her. As sweet memories of his fingers and the way they’d caressed her with reverence clogged her judgment, she heard herself whisper, “Keep going.”
