by Lexi Blake
“Don’t, baby.” Daniel kneeled down and pulled me into a hug, settling me on his lap. “Don’t cry. I won’t push anything. I won’t mention it again. Just don’t cry, Zoey.” He held me for a while but dawn was coming, and it didn’t care that I needed his arms around me. “I have to go to bed, Z. I hate that. I pray every dawn that I’ll wake up and I’ll turn over and you’ll be next to me. I’ll tell you about the really crazy-ass dream I had and we’ll laugh. I’ll get up and go to class, and we’ll graduate and get married. We’ll have kids and yell at ‘em and cry when they leave home. We’ll spoil our grandkids, and we’ll be happy.”
I thought about it all the time. I dreamed the same dreams. My head rested against his chest. “It’s a nice thought, Danny.”
“It’s a comforting lie. I’m never gonna wake up.”
He kissed my forehead and lay down in the dark, heavy plastic that would protect him from the sun. I forced myself up.
“That life is dead, Danny. It’s gone,” I whispered as I started to zip up the bag. “Until we let it go, we can’t move on. We have to find a way to move on.”
He nodded, but I could see the dawn stealing his strength, his life. His eyes were closing. “I love you, Zoey.”
And then he was dead until the night came again. I leaned over and kissed his lips while they were still warm. “I love you, too, Danny,” I breathed against his skin.
I zipped him up the rest of the way and prepared for bed. I climbed in next to my husband. I laid my head against the cold bag and let my arms wrap around him. It was the longest time before I managed to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
“OMG,” Neil said from the back of the van. “Then we decided to go to the lake, and you won’t believe what we did there.”
I would. I could take a big old guess. It involved various sexual practices that Neil was going to go into way too much detail about. Apparently in the last week, Neil and Chad had decided to reenact the entire Kama Sutra, gay supernatural edition, in various semi-public places. And Neil liked to chat. He’d been chatting for the last five hundred miles.
“Should I tell your gay husband a few tales, sweetheart?” Dev asked from the passenger seat. He didn’t actually look at me. He was laid out as languidly as he could stretch his long, lean body in the confinement of the van. He wore jeans in deference to our cover story, his glorious eyes covered by a pair of aviators, and his lips curled into a wry smile.
Since that night when he’d driven his demons out, I saw him differently and it hurt. Loving Dev made him even more beautiful. Maybe I could have handled it if loving him had cut one centimeter of Daniel from my heart, but it hadn’t. My heart had an enormous capacity for disaster.
“You should keep your mouth shut around my gay husband if you ever want to do any of those things again.” Our little road trip was turning into a game. Who could make the human blush the fastest? So far Neil was leading by a mile, but only because Dev had kept his mouth shut to this point.
Dev turned to me and gave me a look that made more than my heart race. “I haven’t had sex in this state. I really want to be able to check that off so I’ll hold my tongue, unless you’d like to hold it for me.”
“I totally am!” Neil exclaimed. “I’m your gay husband. Does that mean we’re involved in a four-way? Or would it be five if we count Chad?”
“We are involved in a no-way.” The last thing I needed was more men in my love life.
We’d been on the road since the ungodly hour of seven a.m. Sure, that’s when most of the world is heading off to work, but I was nocturnal. My husband was a vampire so no daytime there, and my lover owned a nightclub. Dev wasn’t a morning person either. I slanted a curious look at my boyfriend. “Just how many states have you had sex in?”
He thought for a moment, tallying some ungodly number in his head. “Forty-two. But I’ve done it on all the Hawaiian Islands, and that should count for something.”
“Did you and your girlfriend take a tour or something?” It was the first time he’d mentioned any other woman. As the current girlfriend, I was naturally curious about the women who came before me.
Neil erupted in fits of hysterical laughter. I turned briefly to watch him lean back against his dead boyfriend’s body bag. We’d bought the van with cash thanks to our lovely two million, which I absolutely rolled around in before putting it in my safe. It was already a good buy. It was perfect for lugging around vampires in body bags. Unfortunately we’d had to take out all the rear seats because we were also carrying our equipment, which included computers, night vision goggles, some really cool motion detectors and, of course, a complete traveling arsenal. I drove five miles below the damn speed limit the entire way because I didn’t think highway patrol would appreciate any excuse I came up with for the guns and dead bodies.
Neil continued his laughter, but Dev merely smiled knowingly.
“What?” I was not in on the joke.
“It’s the thought of Dev having a girlfriend,” Neil said, finally calming down. “You have no idea what his reputation is.”
“Was,” Dev corrected quickly. “What my reputation was.”
“He was a total manwhore.” Neil settled against the sleeping body again. Chad was smaller than Daniel, so we managed to spread him out a little. Daniel, we’d had to kind of cram in, and then we needed some place to put the luggage.
“Manwhore?” I kept my eyes on the road. I wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it didn’t sound like a good way to refer to one’s boyfriend.
Dev sighed. “Yeah, I guess that would work. Forty-two states, forty-two different women, and like I said, six in Hawaii alone. I don’t apologize for my past, sweetheart. I’m part fertility god. It goes with the territory.”
“Wow.” I couldn’t compete with his breadth of experience, and he knew it. Dev and I had gone over my sexual history, which before him had included only one other man, and he was currently zipped into his daytime coffin.
“Sorry, Zoey.” Dev took off the sunglasses, his emerald eyes fixed on me. “I thought you knew. I wasn’t real big into exclusivity. When I left the sithein, I enjoyed the human world for a while. I also enjoyed several werewolves, a couple of shifters, and some of the more exotic creatures on this plane. I was just having fun.”
“Finding monogamy difficult?” I was more than a little intimidated at that recitation. I knew Dev’s little black book was probably bigger than mine, I just hadn’t realized it resembled a phone book. The culture he grew up in was different, but maybe I should have put a little more thought into it before I’d jumped into bed. Faeries are very sexual creatures and Dev more so than most given his unique ancestry. It might have been naïve on my part to think one woman, and an inexperienced one at that, could keep him satisfied.
“Not at all,” he replied intensely. “I told you a long time ago I would give you what you need. You need commitment. I haven’t slept with anyone but you since we met. I have no intentions to.”
Neil had fallen silent, probably in the belief that the minute I remembered he was there, I would put the kibosh on the entire discussion. He seriously underestimated my need to keep Dev talking. Besides, he was my gay husband, and I’d end up telling him everything later on anyway.
I stepped on the gas as we entered the rolling foothills of the Ozarks. The trees were a canvas of oranges, reds, and browns. The scenery was beautiful, and I didn’t really care about a bit of it.
“What if I didn’t need commitment?” I needed to set that pothole to see if he would fall in.
His eyes became suspicious slits. “Then I would figure out what it is you do need, and I would give it to you. I still would have no intentions of sleeping with other women. I’m content where I sleep now. I don’t need a ton of women, Zoey. I just need the right one.”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I was happy neither of the boys had wanted to drive. The fact that I had something to stare at was very helpful. “And you treated all your former
girlfriends with such kindness?”
Dev grimaced and his hand played with the five-o’clock shadow on his face. He’d started the day clean shaven, but the hours had pulled that sexy beard out of his skin. I loved it. He hated it because it proved him less a Fae than he would like to be. “See, you keep putting an ‘s’ on the end of the word girlfriend. You are trying to be jealous of women who never existed. I slept with a lot of women, but I didn’t have relationships with them. They were fun and I like to think I pleased them, but I never had any intention of permanence with them. Let me make this plain. In the six years since I left the sithein, I’ve had exactly one girlfriend. Her name is Zoey, and right now she is being a pain in my ass.”
I smiled and chose to continue to watch the road. I knew what his expression looked like. It would be that slightly put-out look he got any time I tried to get him to talk about his past. Well, he better get used to it because we were about to spend a lot of time together. I intended to find out a few things. There was a voice in the back of my head sending out a warning. This was why you didn’t sleep with the people you worked with. This was why you tried to keep those relationships on a business level. My father’s best friend had been George Donovan, Daniel’s father, and a master thief. Dad didn’t work with George. I wasn’t following my father’s sound advice.
“You need to take this exit.” Neil looked down at the road atlas. After we bought our trusty new van, Daniel had made sure any identifying marks, including the GPS that came with many new cars, were wiped out. We lived off the grid, and when the grid tried to encroach, we were pretty ruthless about beating it back.
It was another hour until we reached our destination. I pulled the van into the small cemetery we’d found. I spent much of the last week trying to plan a tight heist. I was thwarted by the fact that, while Felicity knew who had the Revelation, she wasn’t sure where it was being kept. For someone who, at least according to legend was all-seeing, she really didn’t know shit. What we did know was that the Revelation was held by one Mary Jo Renfro. She was the owner and operator of the Hideawhile Bideawhile Bed and Breakfast, situated in a very remote section of the Ozarks. There was next to nothing out here, and that B&B was the only place to stay for thirty miles. They specialized in honeymoons. We came to the conclusion that me, my husband, my lover, my gay husband, and his boyfriend would probably stand out if we decided to ask for a group rate.
It’s always easier to have truly excellent intelligence. More likely than not the intelligence a client gathers is crap at best, complete lies at worst. There’s a reason the client is paying top dollar for services. If the item was easy to steal, the client would more than likely steal it for themselves and save on my rates. In some cases, there’s information the client would prefer to keep to themselves. This usually ends in me having to think on my feet. In my line of work, you have to be flexible and you have to do your due diligence. Daniel, while pressing firmly for all due diligence in our collection of information, was not happy about the flexibility required to do so.
Mary Jo Renfro, owner of above mentioned B&B, also owned a small farm four miles north of her business. It was off the beaten track and therefore a fairly decent place to hide one’s valuables. The Revelation had to be in either the B&B or on the farm. It was perfectly logical to split our resources in order to pin down the location of the item. The question then had been who would go where? It made sense that Dev and I would book a room, and Daniel, Neil, and Chad would check out the farm. Reason dictated that Dev and I made the only believable newlywed couple as Daniel couldn’t be seen during the day, same thing with Chad, and Neil was hopelessly, helplessly incapable of looking like he wanted to sleep with me.
While all of this was the reasonable conclusion, it didn’t make my husband a happy man.
His accommodations for the duration of the job weren’t going to put him in a better mood. The cemetery was a small place with no more than fifty headstones, all of them from the turn of the century. There were two small mausoleums, each etched with the name of what I suspected would be some local family of note. The cemetery had fallen into disuse and disrepair. It was far enough away from everything that I was sure visitations, even for artistic purposes, were rare. It was exactly what we needed. It would provide adequate cover for our vamps during the daylight hours. That didn’t mean Daniel would be happy about sleeping in a graveyard, especially while Dev was sleeping in a heart-shaped bed with me.
I parked the car near the larger of the mausoleums, and Dev and Neil immediately got out to stretch. There was a second car parked behind the smaller building, and I silently thanked Daniel’s friend Nathan, who had driven the car up here two days earlier. Newlyweds seldom drove minivans. The sedan was just another layer of cover. Dev and I still had to drive a couple of miles north to make it to the B&B, but I wanted to make sure the boys were settled in before we left. We didn’t have long to wait as the sun was going down even as I parked the car.
“Zoey!”
I got out of the car and slid the side door open. Daniel was awake, and he really wanted out of that damn bag. Neil saw me and went to the other side of the van to wake Chad.
“I’m flying next time.” Daniel growled as he shoved the luggage off his legs and scrambled out of the car. When Danny mentioned flying, he wasn’t talking about the type of flight that involved deciding between coach and first class. He could fly all on his own. “Where’s your boyfriend?” He snarled the question.
It was right then that I remembered Daniel could listen in on daytime conversations when he wanted to. It was an easy thing to forget because he looked really, really dead during the day. He’d only mentioned it once, and that was a long time ago. My earlier conversation with Dev came back to haunt me.
“We need to get out of here, Danny.” I tried to reason with the jealous, pissed-off vampire. “We need to check in and get settled so we can look for the package tomorrow.” I mentioned business in the hopes that Daniel’s professional side might come out.
“Quinn!” Daniel yelled as he planted his feet solidly on the cemetery ground.
There wasn’t even a small part of me that thought Dev would take that as a smart-man’s cue to run. He wasn’t that guy. He was the guy who walked straight up to the angry vampire and smiled. “Hey, Dan, nice ride?”
“You motherfucker,” Daniel spat, invading as much of Dev’s space as he possibly could. “I swear to god, if she gets sick I’ll kill you.”
Dev dropped the arrogance, his brows coming up in a look of complete confusion. “What the hell are you talking about, Donovan?”
“I’m talking about you being a walking, talking venereal disease,” Daniel snapped. “I’m talking about you sticking your dick into anything that moves.”
“Whoa, slow down there.” Dev always gave as good as he got. His face flushed with anger. “I’m a fucking faery. I might not be full blooded, but I’ve never so much as had a cold, you idiot.”
“I don’t like my wife being one of hundreds.” Daniel continued to try to back Dev into a corner, which in the cemetery consisted of the mausoleum.
“I don’t like my girlfriend needing a fucking blood transfusion every time she has to be in the same room as her vampire husband. Do you like draining her, Daniel? ‘Cause you seem to do it on a semi-regular basis.”
“Hey!” I yelled, trying to bring some reason to the situation, but Dev was plowing through, apparently thrilled at the chance to get some stuff off his chest.
“While we’re talking about it,” Dev said with an arrogant smile on his face, “I’ll put your mind at ease. I wear a condom when I screw your wife. Not because I’m worried about contracting anything. I know how sweet Zoey is. I would never hurt her, so until we decide to make a baby, I’ll wear a condom. You might be shooting blanks, man, but I assure you I am not. When she’s ready to get pregnant, I’ll fill her right up.”
I groaned because Dev really had Danny’s number. There wasn’t a single more hurtful thing
he could have said. It wasn’t surprising when Daniel roared, picked up Dev by his shirt, and tossed him across the cemetery. My green-eyed boy flew about a hundred feet before a tree stopped his progress. He landed with a thud but, dipshit that he was, he got right back up, shaking off bits of bark.
“That the worst a vampire king can do?” Dev sneered. “I’ve been in better bar fights.”
Chad moved toward Daniel. I prayed he wasn’t going to protect his master by taking out Dev.
Neil stopped him as quickly as he could. “What are you doing?”
“Stopping the fight,” Chad replied as though it were a foregone conclusion.
Neil shook his head as though Chad really was naïve. “You want to stop two really hot guys from putting their hands all over each other and maybe getting a little bloody and ripping some clothes off in the confusion?”
Chad stopped and smiled devilishly, proving that even blood-oathed vampires had priorities. “Put like that it seems like a stupid thing to do.”
I wasn’t getting any help from the gay guy contingent.
Daniel stalked his prey, fangs gleaming in the evening gloom. This had to stop. Danny could kill Dev without even thinking about it. I started to run up behind him, fully ready to plead for my dumbass boyfriend’s life, when I was knocked to the ground, my hands grabbing at dirt. I rolled out of the way, instinct taking over. I was surprised to see I’d tripped over some really thick vines that seemed to have a life of their own. The vines moved like snakes, winding this way and that. When I looked up, Dev was on his feet, his hands to the side, fingers spread wide. The thick vines were stalking their prey even as Daniel made his way to Dev. The vines were shiny and green, like new spring plants, but it was almost winter.
“I will kill you if you knock her up,” Daniel said. “Fuck any deal we had, Dev. She’s not one of your baby mamas, and I’m sure with the life you’ve led, you have plenty.”
