“Fine,” I said testily, “you think. It’s what you’re good at. I’ll act.”
I was down the hallway before he could come up with an answer to that. But, as I knew he would, Bobby caught up to me. He just needed proper prodding.
I used the very bottom of my skirt to turn knobs and keep from leaving fingerprints. It had the side effect of revealing a fairly indecent amount of leg. Bobby, silently working the other side of the hallway, was flatteringly distracted. I even thought for a second that he was going to ditch the plan in order to check out my lack of visible panty lines when a door opened to him. There hadn’t been many doors so far—the building was long, but not terribly wide—but it was a surprise, since all the others so far had been locked.
“Bathroom,” he reported.
We didn’t find a basement, but there were stairs leading up to a second floor, which we wasted no time exploring. The only open rooms there were the kitchenette Sid had mentioned and a full bath. It looked like the second story had been set up as a small apartment, in case the owner of the pawnshop wanted to live above it.
“I can start picking locks,” I offered. I’d been really good at that in spy school, which stood to reason. I could do amazing things with eyeliner and an eyebrow pencil. Lock picking was just a different kind of precision work.
“Or I could tumble the locks with my mind,” Bobby countered.
“Show-off.”
“Just want to impress my girl.”
My heart got all gooshy when he said things like that, which was just stupid. I was my own girl, thank you very much.
“Okay then, wow me.” I crossed my arms beneath my cleavage to impress him right back.
Bobby’s eyes flared. “You know,” he said, “I’d much rather be searching you than this place.”
My whole body heated up. I could picture him pushing me up against the hallway wall, kissing me to within an inch of my unlife, and finally sinking his fabulous fangs into my neck as I held him close. I pictured me trailing fingernails down his back, wrapping a leg around him … Either Bobby was picking up on my thoughts or his fangs were totally on my wavelength already. They slid down into place as I watched. It would be so easy to turn fantasy into reality.
I couldn’t believe I was going to be the voice of reason. “Sid’s going to be waiting for our call. We’d better get a
move on.”
“When this is all over—” he promised. He didn’t say anything more, but the images that filled my head were, well, beyond. My resolve wavered and I took a step forward, but Bobby’d turned back to the door, resisting temptation. Damn him. Oh right, too late.
Here’s the kicker—it was all for nothing. The whole place, top to bottom, was completely sanitized, a shell, an empty place where secrets might visit but weren’t allowed to live. We learned that Maya wore bikini briefs and that Sid was all about the tighty whities, which I could have told you without even looking. Beyond that—nothing. The Feds apparently ran a paperless office, and they’d taken their laptops with them. We didn’t find so much as a disk or a thumb drive.
“Craptastic,” I said, finally admitting to failure.
“Maybe there’s nothing to find,” Bobby soothed.
“Maybe not here, but somewhere.”
He took me in his arms and kissed the top of my head, which he could do since even in my spiky heels I barely made it to five foot three, and he was almost six feet tall. It felt good. Too good. If I wasn’t careful, I’d come to really crave him, and if there was one rule I lived by—beyond moisturize and never let them see you sweat—it was that the balance of power had to be maintained. Mine, that was. But I was starting to forget why losing myself in someone else was such a bad idea. My mother had taught me that counting on anyone else, even my own parents, was madness. That way lay dependency and vulnerability and other SAT words, but this was Bobby. He’d never been anything but good to me. Maybe in a decade or century or so he’d start taking me for granted. When the time came, I’d hit him upside the head with a clue-by-four. But for now … I melted into him and let him hold me. I even held him back. Fiercely.
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” he asked finally.
I pushed away reluctantly to look into those wicked blue eyes. “Would you?”
“Not if I thought I was right.”
“Exactly.”
He kissed me on the tip of my nose and then met it with his own. “How about that shower? Maybe we should disobey orders. Taking it together would save time and other resources.”
Wow, Bobby offering to disobey orders. I met his smoldering gaze, then gave him a once-over from his fully erect canines to his fully erect … libido … and back up with a seductive grin.
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to save any time.”
His answering smile could have started a five-alarm fire in a flood zone. “I think you’re right.”
7
In the interest of time, we reluctantly decided on separate showers after all.
When I got out of mine, my phone was vibrating on the cotside table, indicating a message that turned out to be from Dr. Charles Orloff, DDS. The message said that he had dinner plans, but he really wanted to meet around ten p.m. at some kind of wine bar on Vine.
I called back to make it a date, and almost forgot what I was going to say when a nearly naked Bobby entered the room, all glistening from his own shower with nothing but a tiny white towel around his waist that he had to hold closed with one hand. I’d, ah, sort of used the big ones on the rack for my body and hair and not returned them. They were, in fact, still in use.
“Want one of mine?” I asked, as I waited through the dental doc’s voicemail greeting to leave my message.
Bobby, smiling in sweet seduction, took a step forward. My mouth went dry, the message beeped, and Bobby helped himself to the towel I was using as a turban, spilling my dark hair all over my face and shoulders.
I blew the hair out of my face and glared at Bobby as I struggled for words. “Hey, Hunter,” I said in my sexiest voice. “It’s a date. See you there.”
I hung up and brushed the hair out of my face to glare more effectively, but Bobby didn’t notice. He was too busy using the stolen towel to dry his dripping hair. I lunged for it and snapped it away. He lost his waist towel trying to grab it back with one hand while hiding himself with the other. I laughed at the sight, but the laughter quickly changed to appreciation of the view. I held the big towel up and away, hoping he’d come in for it, totally unprepared for his fake-out and grab for my body towel. I’d have caught it if my free hand hadn’t still been holding my cell phone.
Suddenly the tables had turned. I was totally buck naked. I squeaked and reached for the sheets on the nearest cot, gripping them to me like I was some girly-girl heroine. Bobby laughed. “Got you!”
“I got you first!”
My phone played out the first few notes of the Su Surrus song Bite Me. “Damn,” I said. With that ring tone, it was either Sid or Maya. Could they know what we’d been up to? Had we tripped some silent alarm? Crap!
I answered before it could go to voicemail. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound breezy and innocent.
“You do know your phone has a GPS, right?” Sid asked without preamble.
“Um, I guess. I’ve never really thought about—”
“So I know you haven’t left yet,” he cut in. “Don’t make me separate you two.”
If I’d had any air in my lungs, I’d have sighed in relief. He thought we’d been fooling around. I mean, more than we actually were. He didn’t know what we’d really been up to.
“We’re leaving now.” I gave Bobby a significant look, he gave me a raised brow—so cool, that—and I knew he was picking up on everything with his super-vamp hearing.
“You’d better be.” Sid hung up again without even a good-bye.
“How quickly can you be ready?” Bobby asked.
I grabbed pre-stocked clothes out of the closet
, scrunched my nose at the button-down mom-blouse and black slacks, and started to dress. “Five minutes, as long as you drive.”
“What does that have to do—oh.” Smart boy, my Bobby.
I’d seen an emergency supply of makeup in the bathroom. In a moving car, with no reflection, it would be tough to apply, but I’d manage. Failure was not an option. I wouldn’t have time to blow-dry my hair, but as long as I could brush, flip, mousse, and scrunch, I’d be fine.
Bobby followed me toward the bathroom to keep me on track, but he didn’t have to worry. I scooped up my supplies and turned. “Ready.”
“Really?” he asked. He got over the surprise quickly and slipped an arm around my waist to steer me out the door before I could change my mind. Like I wouldn’t know what he was up to.
Dion’s place … or at least, his place before he’d gone to ground … had an air of neglect about it. Like no maid or maintenance guy had ever brushed away the cobwebs that seemed like a topcoat to the house’s formerly white trim. The rest of the house was gray, occasionally patched with mis-matched, putty-toned stucco. The gardens had been turned over to the weeds, and the lawn was more thistle and clover than grass.
Bobby used his mojo to tumble the locks. He called it telekinesis, but mojo sounded way more Austin Powers, and since we were international vampires of mystery …
Even knowing that the place was supposedly empty, that Dion’s uncle was AWOL and Dion in the wind, Bobby called a “hello” into the house as we entered. Ever polite was my guy. When no one answered, he closed the door behind us.
But the place wasn’t completely deserted. Something skittered across the floor in front of us. I shrieked and turned back for the door.
“Relax,” Bobby said, grabbing my sleeve. “It was just a spider.”
“Just? Just?” I answered, my voice rising. “It was the size of my thumb.”
“Okay, look, plug your ears.”
“Why?”
“Trust me.”
I plugged, feeling totally stupid standing in the middle of a spider sanctuary with my only weapons in my ears.
Bobby yelled at the top of his lungs, jumped up and down a few times, and generally behaved like he’d lost his mind.
I stared. When he didn’t seem ready to erupt again, I lowered my hands. “What was that all about?”
“That was me announcing that we were the biggest, baddest dudes in the place and that anything with more than two legs ought to run for the hills.”
“What hills? This is Florida.”
“The figurative hills. Anyway, anything with a self-preservation instinct won’t dare to scare, okay? We’re all safe and sound.”
I looked around, making sure not a creature was stirring. “Oo-kay, but if anything attacks, I’m counting on you to kill it. I don’t do insects.”
“Technically, a spider is an arachnid—”
“Bobby,” I snapped.
“Right, you don’t care. If it moves, I kill it. Happy?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” I finished, because everyone knew fine was the last word, and I wouldn’t let him have it.
Anyway, we were standing in an entryway covered in bookshelves. They were everywhere we looked, lining every wall, bookending both sides of the television. The house had an open floor plan, so from where we stood we could see straight through the curtainless sliding glass doors to the enclosed sun porch. I half expected to see books stacked sky-high on the patio … lanai … whatever they called it here, as well. Instead … well, I had no idea what I was looking at, really. There were work tables set up on pairs of sawhorses all throughout the room, with machines set out on them that would have sent the Burgess Brigade into flights of euphoria. They looked like high-tech steampunk engines with exposed wires, gears, gages, and flaps. Around them, a machine shop had exploded. Parts and tools were everywhere. Covering some of them were books that had wandered away from the shelves, set wide open and face down, pages being mashed. Bobby gasped and moved toward the gadgets, eyes reverent, like a kid coming into a double-decker candy shop.
“You take the patio,” I said generously, since he’d have a way better idea than me of what we were looking at. “I’ll, uh, find Dion’s room.”
Bobby nodded distractedly, already mesmerized.
Off the living room were two alcoves that led to short hallways. I picked the closest. There were three rooms off of it. The bathroom in the center had “bachelor pad” written all over it: standard white walls, no decoration, matte-black shower curtain, faded black towels, stubble in the sink, and shaving cream, razor, aftershave, deodorant, toothbrush, and crusted-up toothpaste tube scattered about the counter.
The toilet seat was up, of course. The overriding smell was sweat and aftershave. In short, it was just like thousands of other bathrooms without a woman’s touch or any chance of inviting one.
I closed the door quickly, before the shaggy shavings could rise up against me. To the left was a room Dion and his uncle apparently used as an office. There were filing cabinets lining one wall with papers sticking out every which way and more stacked on top. Another wall held a desk with more paperwork, a computer, webcams, speakers, and two printers … or maybe one was a scanner. Anyway, more gadgetry than I could decipher. Since paperwork didn’t require a password, I started with the low-tech, sitting at the desk in order to sort. The stack to the right was gobbledygook. At a guess, Dion’s uncle was some kind of work-from-home computer consultant. The correspondence was all geek to me.
The stack to the left seemed to be personal—nothing very interesting until I came to the flyers for inventors’ shows, parts and component swaps, denials of patents and angry, half-written letters of protest. I didn’t understand all the technical stuff that was rattled off, but Dion’s uncle—Eric Ricci—quickly devolved from scientist to nutbar as his letters went on. The gist from the Patent Office seemed to be that his devices didn’t work, and his responses boiled down to “Do too,” and accusations of crazy government conspiracies publicly denying and privately stealing his plans.
“Hey, Bobby!” I yelled. “You’ve got to see this!”
He was at the other end of the house, but vamp senses had their perks. He was with me in seconds.
“It’s crazy,” he said from the doorway, as if reading my mind. “He’s got notebooks filled with specs and data, dozens of machines, but none of them seem to function.”
Wow, were we on the same wavelength or what?
“They don’t. Look, notes from the Patent Office, paranoid rants back. Dion’s uncle was totally delusional.” I held up some of the massive paperwork.
“Find anything about a second home? A studio? A storage space even?”
“Not yet, but look at all this crap. It’d take a year and a team of forensic … uh, paper-ologists to go through it.”
“Paper-ologists, huh?”
“Whatever.”
“Well, they’ve got us, so we’d better get to it.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’ll take the cabinets,” he offered.
An hour later, he’d moved over to the computer, but his mental mojo didn’t work on encryption, just physical barriers, and we struck out. I was starting to go a little nuts myself.
“Why don’t you finish up here, and I’ll move on to Dion’s room,” I said finally, because right now, even eau de teenaged boy seemed preferable to paperwork.
“Uh huh,” he answered, distracted, as if he’d actually found something interesting in the wreckage.
I escaped before he could pull me back in. The last door off the hallway was Dion’s, if the lack of machinery was any indication. He had a loft bed and the usual sorts of furniture—dresser, armoire open to expose a television and gaming system—but it was impossible to get to any of it without wading through pants, socks, Tshirts, dishes, and things I seriously didn’t want to identify but that reeked
of athletic supporter. It looked like someone had hit the eject button on his laundry hamper. In all, the house wasn’t quite Hoarders-level insanity, but Clean Sweep would probably have a field day.
“Uh, trade you,” I called out to Bobby.
He appeared in the doorway, took one look around, and let a wolfish grin spread across his face. “Bet I’m looking pretty good right about now.”
“You’ll look even better if you take over. Seriously, anything could be living under here,” I said, indicating the top layer of filth.
“Not if it needs to breathe.” His nose crinkled in a totally endearing way. He was just too ridiculously cute, really. “Come on, we’ll tackle it together.”
It might have been the first time in my life I was completely uninterested in being in a bedroom with Bobby. If there was a little black book, the police had already found it. There were no real estate listings with tell-tale Sharpie circles, no Google maps or mysterious phone numbers on napkins, no mad manifesto … it was a wash, and I said so.
“Well, crud,” Bobby said, “crap” being apparently a little too edgy for him, and “shit” not even an option. “I do not want to check in with Sid empty-handed. Where to next?”
“Do you have the address of the vanishing vampiress from the club?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s hit it. Call it women’s intuition.”
“You have that?”
I gave him a glare. “Hello, I’m a woman. It’s like our own special superpower.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he was a guy. What did he know?
The vanishing meet-and-greet girl from the Tower—or Bleached Blond Vampiress (BBV), as I’d chosen to call her—turned out not to live in Tampa but in a nearby town called Lutz, which I wanted to pronounce like the ice skating move, lutz, as in klutz without the k. Bobby said it was supposed to rhyme with “shoots,” which made me wonder why they didn’t just spell it that way then. While we were at it, I told him, the whole English language could totally use a makeover. In tough economic times, didn’t it make total sense to drop the silent “k” from knife, and the “p” from things like psychology? Just think of all the paper that could be saved. I mean, books would be, like, a third shorter. Complete financial sense, right?
Fangtastic Page 7
