The Quick and the Undead: Volume 1 (Tombstone, Texas)

by Kimberly Raye

  And so Boone had given the employees a thank you and a big, fat bonus not to vote for the town ever again. Under the pretense, of course, that in order to support their premium vacation rates, they needed to maintain a feel of exclusivity. That, and he’d used his most intense vampire gaze to impress upon them the importance of discretion.

  What happened in Tombstone stayed in Tombstone.

  Even death and destruction.

  The thought struck, reminding him of the worry that still drifted up and down his spine. He stiffened.

  “You haven’t felt anything strange lately, have you? Anything ominous? Like a bad omen?”

  “I did run into Belle before I came in here. She was storming out of City Hall and she seemed pretty ominous.”

  “I’m talking a gut feeling.” His gaze locked with Clay’s. “You’re not sensing anything, are you? Like something unpleasant headed our way?”

  “No.” Clay’s relaxed stance disappeared and he leaned forward in the chair. “What’s wrong? You feeling something?”

  “It’s not really a feeling.” More like a dream. A crazy, obscure dream that he shouldn’t be having in the first place because he was a freakin’ vampire. “It’s probably nothing.” He left Clay staring after him as he walked toward the door that led to an adjoining room.

  Where waltzing into the jail itself was like stepping back in time, entering the next room seemed more like an express trip to the future.

  The space had been remodeled to include a state-of-the-art communications system that boasted digital Internet and Wi-Fi courtesy of a private satellite system, and a scrambler to eliminate cell reception for the guests and maintain an Old West feel. Unlike the oil-lit wall sconces that lined the primitive jail, fluorescent lights illuminated every corner of the upgraded area. A large digital gun safe boasted a cache of modern weapons, as well as pearl-handled Colts and antique Winchester rifles. They had enough firepower in town to stop an army.

  Of men, that was.

  But one bloodthirsty vampire?

  Boone could only hope.

  If there was any truth to the dream.

  Maybe that’s all it had been. Just a wild and crazy nightmare brought on by inadequate sustenance. Sure, he fed off sex. And the occasional bag of blood. But he hadn’t had anything fresh in ages. The lack of proper nutrition was finally starting to take its toll.

  That would explain why none of the others had felt anything out of the ordinary. Why Clay was standing in the doorway, eyeing him as if he’d grown an extra head.

  “You all right, boss?” the deputy asked.

  “Fine.” He just needed to get a grip on his hunger and rein in his overactive imagination. Tombstone had been open all of a few months. Boone and his buddies had anticipated an eventual encounter with another vamp, maybe even a hostile one, but they hadn’t counted on it being this soon.

  Particularly since they’d done very little advertising. Most of their business so far had come through the few personal connections that Boone had made with local travel agents specializing in Texas vacations.

  While business was looking up for the foreseeable future, they had yet to snag a feature on Travelocity or Expedia, nor did they want one.

  Low key.

  Hardly noticeable.

  Unless someone was really looking.

  “Saddle up,” he told his deputy. “It’s time to get to work.” He punched in the combination and opened the safe door. He grabbed his gun belt and Colts, and then fastened the leather around his waist. Before he could give in to the urge to reach for the 9mm Glock sitting nearby, he closed the door and turned away.

  A bar fight. That’s all that was on the agenda tonight. Which meant he’d better head over to the saloon and brief Seth on the advantages of not going overboard before the fun began.

  Of course, since he was headed that way, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to talk to Maddie while he was there. She was the only other female vampire in town. And while he knew he needed to give up the notion that something was creeping into Tombstone, he figured he might as well feel her out.

  Just to be sure.

  “WHY ARE YOU calling from a landline?”

  “Because there’s zero cell reception here,” Riley told Andrea Marlow, her assistant and the closest thing to a bestie that Riley had ever had. Not that they’d ever had a sleepover or braided each other’s hair. But they did meet for lunch once a month to go over website specifics and vent over the latest breakup.

  Andi’s latest breakup, that was. Riley kept things minimal when it came to the opposite sex. No relationship meant no breakup. And no breakup meant no jealous ex.

  Andi, on the other hand, had a habit of hooking up with Mr. Use ’Em and Lose ’Em, and so she’d yet to be the one to break anyone’s heart. Rather, she was the one getting her heart broken.

  But at least she was in the game, still playing the field, still waiting for her knight in expensive Gucci to swoop in and whisk her away in his Mercedes.

  Talk about an overrated fairy tale.

  “There’s no Internet here either,” Riley added, her anxiety mounting. “You’re going to have to blog for me. I already did a post from the airport Starbucks this morning. You just have to cover the next seven days until I get back to civilization.”

  “But I don’t blog. That’s your thing. I just maintain the website and add a few pics here and there.”

  “This from the girl who’s been after me to take a few trips of her own?”

  “Taking a trip and living it is a hell of a lot different from writing about it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you specifically what to write. I give it to you and you give it to everyone else.”

  “Where have I heard that before?”

  “Don’t tell me Brad broke it off.” Brad was the latest in Andi’s long list of knights.

  “He said my past intimidated him. That I’ve slept with too many men and I’ve got too much baggage.” Her voice broke. “How can I not have baggage when I can’t keep a man for more than a few months?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with baggage.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You travel light. Not even a carry-on.”

  Now.

  Riley had been only nine when her mother had died, but she’d stepped up anyway to take care of her dad and three-year-old sister because he’d been too grief-stricken at first to do either. Later, he was too busy drowning his troubles in a bottle of Crown Royal, and so the role as caretaker had continued. She’d cooked. She’d cleaned. She’d helped with homework. She’d nursed her sister through colds and the flu. She’d poured coffee down her father’s throat every morning so that he could at least make it to work every day. And then she’d poured him into bed later that night after he drank himself into a stupor watching Leno.

  By the time she’d hit twenty-four and seen her sister off to college and her dad into an early grave, she’d been so tired and overworked that she’d been more than ready to hand the reins over and let a man take care of her for a change. She’d wanted someone to make her a cup of coffee once in a while, to cook her the occasional breakfast. A man she didn’t have to babysit or worry over. A man who could take care of himself, and her.

  Talk about the impossible dream.

  Still, she’d believed it at one point. And she’d regretted it every moment since.

  Not that Andi was privy to Riley’s past. In the two and a half years that they’d been working together, Riley had yet to share any details about her ex. Sure, Andi knew there was something in her history that made her gun-shy when it came to men, but she’d never tried to pry.

  Instead, she did her damndest to get Riley back on the horse, as she called it, whenever Riley headed to Chicago where she had a small apartment just two floors up from Andi.
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br />   “Just go out with him once,” Andi had pressed more times than Riley could count. But once with the wrong man was one too many. She didn’t want to date. To forge a relationship. To give up her power to some man, only to have him use it against her.

  She ignored the apprehension that whispered up her spine and focused on the reason for her phone call. “I just started the feature on the zip line tour through the Catskills. We’ll be running entries on that until the end of the week.” That’s how her blog worked. While she posted daily, she featured the previous week’s excursion and, therefore, stayed one week ahead.

  She’d initially come up with the system for safety’s sake. When she’d first split with her ex, he’d been extremely angry. He’d been determined to drag her back into the relationship where he’d been the boss. The alpha. He’d been a control freak who’d called the shots in any and all situations, and so it had come as no surprise that he’d stalked her to the point that she’d had to file a restraining order against him.

  When that had failed, she’d taken her safety into her own hands and left town. She’d been scared back then. And broke. She’d managed to afford a bus ticket to Chicago, not for any reason in particular other than she’d always wanted to visit. Particularly after she’d seen so many brochures on the windy city when she’d worked part-time at a travel agency the summer after her high school graduation. She’d scraped together enough cash for that first month’s rent, and that’s when she’d met Andi. Her business had grown out of necessity to make the next rent payment. She’d needed a way to pay her bills and outrun her past, and so ExtremeVacations.com had been born. The posting delay had been on purpose. To stay one step ahead of Phil, should he eventually connect her to the website.

  Three years had passed since she’d split, and he’d stopped looking for her as far as she knew. His last phone call to her sister, who still lived in California, had been more than a year ago.

  Maybe he’d finally given up, or found someone else, or gotten himself squashed by a massive beam on one of his construction jobs.

  Hey, a girl could dream.

  At the same time, until she knew something for certain, she wasn’t going to get careless. She’d made a few phone calls to the police department back in Santa Barbara where she’d been living at the time she’d met him, but they had no clue as to his whereabouts. No one did. Sure, the proof was in the pudding. He’d stopped tracking her and so that had to mean he’d finally give up. Still, she’d fought too hard to get away from him. She wasn’t going to slip up now.

  Even if three years on the road was starting to take its toll.

  “I’ll get all my notes together and call you later this evening,” she told Andi.

  “I’ll be here. Right here in my same old apartment, watching the same old reality TV because not everybody can be living the dream.”

  “Yep, I’m living it, all right. I had two packs of peanuts for lunch and spent the entire plane ride next to a woman who told me all about her last gallbladder surgery. She gave me so many details, I could probably do the operation myself if you’re ever in need.”

  “Very funny. You can talk all you want, but it’s got to be more exciting than what I’m doing. And speaking of exciting, are there any cute guys in town?”

  “There are always cute guys.”

  “Any that you might be interested in?”

  “I’ve been here all of forty-five minutes.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?”

  Yes, and it sucked.

  “Bye, Andi.”

  “Have fun.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “No, have some real fun. The kind that involves a super hunky cowboy and lots of juicy details. If I can’t have my own Mr. Perfect, at least I can live vicariously through you.”

  “Not gonna happen. The only thing juicy on my agenda is homemade peach cobbler.”

  “That’ll work, too.” Andi’s suddenly small voice struck a nerve and Riley knew that the latest breakup had bothered her more than she cared to admit.

  “You really liked him, didn’t you?” Riley asked.

  “What does it matter? He dumped me. Men.” She huffed. “I swear they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

  Amen to that.

  Riley eyed the man standing nearby, waiting for the phone. He wore a blue golf shirt, tan Dockers, and a look of impatience that said if he didn’t get to check his stock portfolio in the next five seconds, he was going to flatline.

  “Listen, I’m really sorry about Brad, but I need to let you go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Okay.” Andi sniffled. “Get a side of ice cream,” she added before Riley had a chance to disconnect.

  “What?”

  “With the cobbler. Nothing drowns out misery better than ice cream.” The statement was followed by the creak of a drawer opening and then the popppp of the fridge. “I think there’s a pint of fudge brownie calling my name. Later.” Click.

  “It’s all yours,” Riley told the man as she slid the phone into its cradle, even though she’d really wanted to call her sister, too.

  He nodded, whisked by her, grabbed the receiver and started punching buttons. Within seconds, he was talking to someone named Marv about the DOW close that day.

  She thought about waiting, but then her stomach grumbled and she decided to call Kara later when she dictated her post to Andi. It wasn’t like her sister was waiting by the phone.

  No, Kara never waited on Riley because she never knew when her older sister would call or show up.

  She couldn’t know.

  Not while there was even the slightest chance that Riley’s ex was out there, still looking for her.

  She left City Hall and started down the planked sidewalk toward the hotel. The sound of music drifted from the saloon to her right, and she debated drowning her nerves in a glass of wine instead of a peach cobbler. It was an internal argument that lasted all of two seconds—she’d watched her dad do the exact same thing for years and she wasn’t in any hurry to land in an early grave courtesy of liver failure.

  Just as she was about to pass the saloon, a chair flew through the swinging doors and sailed through the air in front of her.

  She came up short and barely managed to duck before another chair followed. She lost her balance and pitched sideways toward the dirt street.

  A split second later, she found herself flush against a hard male body. Her breath stalled. Her head snapped up and she knew, even before she found herself staring up into bright, familiar green eyes, that it was him.

  Hard muscle? Check.

  Raw strength? Check.

  Yep, it was Mr. Tall, Dark, and Bad-to-the-Bone, all right.

  And forget good. He felt great pressed up against her. Right.

  Uh, oh.

  Chapter Four

  SAY SOMETHING, her brain screamed as the seconds ticked by and she simply remained there. Feeling him. Staring at him.

  He looked even better up close.

  Beneath the brim of his black Stetson, his green gaze gleamed hot and bright and knowing. Stubble darkened his strong jaw, and circled a mouth that was both sensuous and cruel at the same time, before creeping down the column of his throat. Dark hair streaked with burnished gold brushed the top of his shoulders. He had the hard look of a man who’d seen more than his fair share of bad in the world, and the raw edge that said he thrived on that fact. He stood well over six feet, his shoulders broad and massive beneath the worn leather duster, dwarfing her and making her feel so very small. The sun had long since set, and oil lamps lit the wooden walkway. The flames created a flicker of shadows that played across his face and accented his rugged features.

  A sizzle of excitement went through her and she damned herself for forgetting th
e all-important fact that he was everything she didn’t want in a man.

  If and when she waded into the dating pool again, she’d be looking for an easygoing, mild-mannered, nonthreatening type of man. A guy who had no problem with letting her take the driver’s seat. A beta, or so Andi called them.

  This guy was exactly the opposite, from the strong, sure way he held her, to the knowing light in his eyes. And damned if she didn’t want to lean even closer.

  “I’m so sorry—”she started to say, but he cut her off.

  “Not a problem, sugar.” His grin was quick and easy and oh, so sexy, and suddenly all the hard edges softened. “Not at all.” He stared at her for a few frantic heartbeats before a thought seemed to strike. “Are you okay?” He leaned back enough to drink her in from head to toe and a rush of warmth rolled through her. “You didn’t get hit, did you?” he asked, as if he truly cared.

  As if.

  The cynicism filtered through, pushing away the warmth, and she became keenly aware that he was still standing much too close for comfort.

  Close enough to stir up a wave of self-consciousness as she glanced down and noticed her pink Hello Kitty T-shirt two sizes too big and baggy jeans. Shapeless. Unattractive. Perfect for getting comfy on an eight-hour plane ride from New York, complete with two layovers and a boarding delay.

  For running into hot alpha men? Not so much.

  Then again, she wasn’t in Tombstone to meet men, much less hunky alphas. She was here for her blog. Her business.

  “The chair didn’t hit you in the head, did it?” he asked, having satisfied himself that she hadn’t lost a limb. His attention shifted back to her face as he searched for bruises. His expression went from tense to murderous “I swear I’ll kill Seth with my bare hands if he conked you in the noggin. He’s supposed to put a stop to the fighting, not feed the chaos.”