“I know it seems that way and I suppose anything’s possible, which is why we’re examining multiple options of contact such as an outside food or beverage source that may have been recalled due to tampering at a manufacturing level.”
Dominic interjected, “Hopefully, you’ll get to the bottom of this soon, but nothing can be ruled out when you’re dealing with the caliber of people Nathan and I often deal with. When a person’s resources are unlimited and their need for revenge insatiable, that becomes a recipe for disaster.”
Christian studied the young vampire’s stern features. He was nearly a carbon copy of Dimitri except his jet hair was styled into a spiked, trendy cut and his eyes were the same vibrant emerald green as his mother’s.
By trade, Dominic was head attorney for Davenport Enterprises, but actually his role was far more complex. In a nutshell, he did Nathan’s dirty work. He put the kibosh on any person, government entity or situation that chaffed Nathan’s privileged ass or those in his inner circle.
Nathan’s enemies were legendary. Everyone in this room had nearly been killed by Nathan’s sire, Isabella, so he needed to give credence to the man’s line of thinking. Lives were at stake. “Okay. Say this competitor of yours is behind all of this. Tiffany’s misfortune I can understand, but why would this clinic be a target? Wouldn’t he want to hit closer to home. Meaning Nathan himself?”
Mia supplied that answer, prefaced by a sharp huff. “Christian, you may think you understand our lives, but no offense, you couldn’t conceive it. I can’t tell you how many threats we’ve had such as this to our family and friends. Those awful people make our lives a living hell. Dominic has been extraordinarily dedicated to keeping this family safe. Still it never ends.”
Nathan took her hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“Stop it,” she said and pulled away. “I signed up for this with full knowledge of your crazy and have never had a day’s regret. Irritation, plenty. And for the record I’m not too happy with you right now.”
Nathan laughed. “You never cease to amaze me. I guess my professional life is a bit outrageous at times.” His expression grew sober. “But if it affects our kids, causes any one of them or you to suffer harm, I-I’m not sure I could live with that.”
Mia stepped forward and regained her husband’s hand. “We will deal and overcome like we always do.”
Nathan pulled her into his arms and planted a heavy-duty kiss on her lips. Christian sighed heavily because this conversation needed to get back to the issue at hand—Tiffany. “Do you two mind? There is a killer at large and we need a direction to head immediately.”
Mia pulled away from the intimate embrace and faced him with a determined expression. “Yes, we do, Christian. This awful thing needs to stop. What can we do to help?”
“Nothing that hasn’t already been suggested.”
Nathan glanced at Tiffany with a troubled frown. “Years ago, I would have had every member of this family under guard every hour of every day if it were up to me, but Tiffany’s fought me tooth and nail for years. Chelsie argued her way out of it too and since she’s been residing on campus at Harvard until recently, Mia and I felt she was relatively safe. However, in the advent of this, all bets are off.” He gave Chelsie a firm look. “Both you and Tiffany, in fact the whole family will be under guard until whoever is behind this is dealt with.”
Chelsie adjusted her glasses and pursed her lips. “I don’t like it, but I won’t argue. If someone’s trying to hurt our family and going so far as to take it out on Christian’s patients and my sister, I understand the necessity.”
Christian’s gaze darted from one serious face to another in the room. He could easily believe Nathan the catalyst in the insanity ruling the clinic and Tiffany’s close call with death. The notion infuriated him. If Nathan’s business dealings had caused all of this for Tiffany and his patients…well that might be a pill Christian could never swallow. “How do you plan to find out if this business competitor is in fact behind all of this?”
He’d asked Nathan the question, but Dominic answered, “All criminals leave fingerprints if you will. I’ll start digging a little deeper with the slime bag Nathan and I have in mind immediately, but should you or your partners discover anything that might lead you to believe someone here responsible, let me know. I’ll do whatever I can to help you nail them.”
Danielle who had been silent, wearing a troubled expression throughout the conversation, smiled at her husband and took his hand. “Dominic won’t fail you, Christian, or our family. If this person is related to Nathan, Dominic will find out.”
Others in the room chimed in with agreements. Christian said nothing, but he too felt confidence in Dominic. He’d always been driven and successful in whatever he put his hand to. Christian was grateful for any help he could get.
His gaze slid back to Tiffany. Good luck, Dominic, he thought. Whether he found the person responsible for this or not, Christian wouldn’t rest until the person who tried to kill Tiffany paid in spades.
Chapter 10
As Tiffany came awake, her body felt weighted and achy. No part of her person seemed to want to function, not her eyelids, limbs, especially not her groggy brain. Eventually she managed to open her eyes, then blinked several times. When she could finally focus, she realized she laid in a hospital bed and that fact was punctuated by a horrendously loud, irritating beeping sound. She twisted her head to the left and saw a heart monitor and some thin, colored cords running from it to her, plus a blood pressure cuff had been wrapped around her left arm. There was an IV in the bend of her right arm and a fat, white close pin squeezed her index finger.
“What the heck is going on?” she muttered hoarsely, wracking her brain for explanations. Her throat hurt like hell and her mouth was so dry she felt like she’d been sucking on cotton balls.
Memories started to quickly surface and she recalled being crazy sick, like nothing she’d ever experienced in her life. She remembered the poker hot, stabbing stomach pains which had ratcheted up to such an insane level, she’d wanted to scratch her eyeballs out of her head. At some point between the pain, vomiting and diarrhea, Christian had shown up, pummeling her with all sorts of doctor questions. The last thing she remembered was Christian carrying her to his truck and placing her in the back seat. He must have brought her here. Wherever here was.
On her next inhalation, she caught wind of his familiar, sexy scent and glanced to her far right. She licked her dry lips and grinned. He was crashed in one of those big, vinyl hospital chairs. His arms were crossed over his stomach and he wore jeans, a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and cowboy boots. He had a pillow propped awkwardly behind his head and looked sweet all snuggled into that chair.
Unfortunately, she felt too crappy to enjoy the view.
Tiffany had no idea how long she’d been asleep, but judging from her aching muscles and backside, probably a day or two. The mysteries about what had happened to her mounted and she intended to get answers as soon as Christian woke up. She didn’t want to wake him, but she had to pee and didn’t possess the ingenuity to get there on her own. Too much stuff was attached to her body. Well, she had to get free because she couldn’t hold it much longer.
She lifted the covers and saw she wore a hospital gown, then wriggled her arms out of it and started pulling off the sticky things attached to her chest. That caused the monitor to go AWOL. God! The thing was insanely loud! Her eardrums felt like they were going to burst. “Shut up!” she growled, then swung her feet over the edge of the bed and began tossing the sticky things with the attached wires on the floor.
“Tiffany! Honey, what are you doing?”
She glanced over her shoulder. Christian stood on the other side of the bed gazing at her with an expression of awe and joy like a man who had just had an encounter with the Virgin Mary. “Getting this crap off of me. I gotta pee. And please turn off that screaming thing. It’s making my head pound.”
He chucked then came around, punched a couple
of buttons on the heart monitor, which thankfully caused the screeching to stop. “Shoo. Thanks for shutting off that noisy thing.”
“Your welcome. Here let me help you with those.” He pulled up her gown and began to assist her with the sticky chest things, which was kind of embarrassing. Since he’d probably put them there, she needn’t be prudish she supposed.
Moments later Katie ran into the room with a worried expression, then flashed a bright smile. “You’re awake, Tiffany! How wonderful. Is everything okay, Dr. LaMond?”
Tiffany yanked down her gown and scowled at her. She was just doing her job by checking on her heart monitor, but Tiffany wasn’t too happy she’d picked such an embarrassing moment to do so.
“Everything’s just fine, Katie. I have this.”
She looked a bit suspicious but nodded, closing the sliding glass door behind her.
“That was an odd look Katie just shot my way. She probably thought you were feeling me up.”
Christian cleared his throat. “Right now, you’re my patient, Tiffany. And I don’t give a shit what she or anyone else thinks. Neither should you. It’s your health I’m concerned with at the moment.” He righted her gown the rest of the way then gazed down at her with a worried look. “How do you feel, Baby?”
She winced, still so miserable the nice endearment barely registered. “Like death warmed over. I ache so bad, my head’s pounding and my throat feels like I swallowed a package of razor blades. What the heck happened to me?”
He swallowed, his adam’s apple bobbing, his expression guilt ridden. “Christian? What happened? How long have I been here?”
“I had to intubate you and that procedure is rough on the throat.”
“Intubate? What’s that mean?”
“We’ll discuss everything in a moment. Let me get you to the bathroom.”
Her bladder wasn’t going to argue with that. He unhooked the line running to the needle in her left arm, ripped off the blood pressure cuff, then helped her stand. “Are you dizzy?”
“No. Sore and stiff is all. Just get me to the damned bathroom before I explode.”
He chuckled, then obliged. Once relieved, she exited the tiny rest room and found him pacing outside wearing that weird guilty expression again, which stymied her because she’d never seen him like this. Whatever bug had gotten the better of her, must have been bad.
She walked back to the bed and plopped down on the edge. “So, what happened? How long have I been here?”
He stared at her for several moments, swallowed hard, then replied. “Four days. Tiffany, you were poisoned.”
She gawked at him, unable to wrap her mind around the words he’d just spoken. “You can’t be serious.” But his expression was dead pan, which explained why he’d been acting so strange. “How? With what?”
“A cocktail of sorts, primarily arsenic and cyanide. I suspect you ingested it. At some point, I’ll need to go over in detail everything you ate or drank the day you fell ill and several prior. When you feel up to it.”
She raked a hand through curls as tangled as her brain then glanced at the floor. This made no sense. She was a nobody. A computer geek. Who would want to kill her? Then again, maybe there was no logical reason. The V clinic’d had three mysterious miscarriages. Were they connected? “Has this happened to anyone else?”
Christian nodded. “Several of my patients who miscarried were also poisoned with the same substances.”
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. No wonder he looked so exhausted and serious. He had a homicidal epidemic on his hands. It made no sense. Who in their right mind would want to harm pregnant ladies? Or her for that matter. “Do you have any idea who could be responsible?”
He shook his head. “Noah, Asa and I are trying to get to the bottom of it, but unfortunately we have no solid leads yet. Nathan feels the person responsible could be connected to him, but I doubt it. I think it’s someone here. Did anything unusual happen the day you got sick?”
Tiffany blinked a few times as she thought back to that awful day. “Well, I had an episode in the break room with Blake that morning. He was asking me way too many personal questions, particularly about us and I blew up on him. I can’t say it was my finest hour, but he’d been asking for an ass chewing.”
Christian chuckled. “I heard all about it from him. Tell me your side. What did he say to you?”
Tiffany didn’t really want to answer because Blake’s questions had embarrassed her, but she also knew where Christian was going with this and if Blake had poisoned her she’d see him hung out to dry for it. “The gist of it was that he thought we were an item. I told him we were just friends then he asked me why I let you bite me in a real judgmental way. That’s when I lost it.”
Christian nodded. “I figured it had to be something like that. Was there anything else he said that bothered you?”
Tiffany tapped her chin, thinking. “Yes, he said vampires and humans sometimes marry without the human becoming vampire. I didn’t know that so I asked questions. I just got the feeling he wasn’t cool with that. Maybe I’m wrong. You think he could have done this to me and to the others don’t you, Christian?”
He gave her an indecisive frown. “I don’t know. You must have consumed the poisons here. At any time did he bring you food or drink or did you leave a plate or beverage alone with him?”
She didn’t have to think hard on that one. “Yes. I sat down to lunch with both Blake and Katie. I was about halfway done with my veggie burrito when I got a call back from a software dealer. I left to take the phone call in my office, but when I got back to the lunchroom both Blake and Katie were gone. In fact, everyone was gone. Christian, if he messed with my food— If he did this to me and to those patients of yours I’ll kill him.”
Christian’s features darkened. “You’ll have to stand in line, Darlin’. But I don’t want to jump to any conclusions just yet. I have a surefire way to find out if he’s responsible though.”
“What’s that?”
“Enchantment.”
Tiffany didn’t know much about that particular vampire gift because her mom and sister Dannie had never learned the skill. “Are you sure it will work?”
“Positive. I’m very proficient at the task and he’ll never know or rather remember that I probed his thoughts and asked him pointed questions. He’s off today, but he’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll deal with him then. Right now, you’re wellbeing is all I’m concerned with.”
“I’d have to say I feel pretty darn good for someone poisoned with arsenic and cyanide. Am I going to be okay, Christian?” She didn’t know much about the poisons other than somehow, they ate up a person’s insides. She didn’t feel sick to her stomach any longer, just sore in her joints and muscles.
“Right as rain, Darlin’, but there’s more I need to tell you.”
“Sure shoot. I want to know everything that happened.”
He paused there and squeezed his eyes closed for a few seconds. “Darlin’, you were dying and I uhm…” He paused again and cleared his throat. “I had to make a drastic, split second decision in order to save your life.”
He appeared both guilty and despondent which scared her. Her heart began to thunder in response. “Drastic how? What did you do?”
“I turned you.”
Tiffany’s mouth popped open and she glared at him. He couldn’t have. She didn’t feel any different. She lifted her arms and looked herself over, not even sure what she was looking for. Then it dawned on her why her hearing seemed so amplified. Christian’s voice although low and soft sounded louder than normal and her head still throbbed from that screaming heart monitor machine. “No. No it’s not possible.”
“It is, Tiffany. I’m so sorry. I know how you felt about—”
She cut him off. “If this is true— It can’t be. It just can’t.” She darted back into the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. “Oh my God! No!” Her eyes were now a rich shade of amber and they had that weird sparkling thing
going on common to all vampires. Fear and anger shot through her body like a rocket. How dare he do this to her when he knew how she felt about becoming vampire.
She heard Christian sigh and approach her. “Tiffany I had no choice. You were dying. It was the only thing I could do to save your life. Just let me explain what was happening to your body in that crucial moment.”
She didn’t care what had happened, because right now because she felt like she had died. Inside. Christian had betrayed her, turning her when he knew full well where she stood on the subject.
She slowly turned and faced him wanting to haul off and belt him more than she’d ever wanted to hit someone in her life. “Who the hell do you think you are playing God with my life? You had no right!” She shoved him out of her way and began to look for her clothes, yanking out drawers of a utilitarian dresser with a speed and strength that definitely wasn’t human.
“Tiffany, I couldn’t let you die.”
She stopped her search and swung toward him, finger pointed. “Yes, you could have. If it was my time to go, then it was my time. You knew how I felt about becoming vampire. It was not a life I wanted. I’ve accepted the fact my mom and Dannie were turned and my whole frickin’ family are pretty much vampires, but that didn’t mean I wanted to join the club.”
“Calm down, Tiffany and look at this thing logically. You’re still you, okay? In a slightly altered body, yes, but if I hadn’t taken the measures I had, the body you had that night would be laying in a morgue right now.”
Tiffany glared at him, so angry at the moment she didn’t know what to believe, what to feel or think. The only real thing in her head right now was getting the hell out of this place.
She stalked over to a little closet, pulled the door open and spotted on a shelf the sweats and hoody she’d been wearing the night he’d foisted this nightmare on her. She grabbed the pants stepped into them, then ripped off the hospital gown and replaced it with her sweat shirt.
He sighed again, then came around in front of her. “Tiffany, I can’t let you leave. You’re nowhere near ready to go home. You aren’t fully recovered and I have more tests--”
Dark Experiments Page 13
