Standing outside the closed doors leading to the ballroom and the waiting groom and guests, Irene glanced down at the bracelet Carrie placed on her wrist while Jackie put a matching necklace around her neck.
“This is nice.”
“Van got this for you,” Carrie stated on an exasperated sigh. “Don’t you remember?”
“Was that the day he got me the Zenith Z-171 PC?”
Jackie laughed and said, “You owe me twenty bucks, Van Holtz. I told you she liked that computer more than the forty thousand dollar’s worth of jewelry your brother got her.”
“What can jewelry do? Do you realize that PC is portable? And it’s battery powered with backlighting!”
“I don’t know why he bothers,” Carrie muttered before stepping away and looking Irene over. She shrugged. “I guess it’s the best we can do.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t listen to her.” Jackie slapped a small bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath in her hands. “You look wonderful.”
A string quartet began to play and the She-wolves started walking into the ballroom single file.
“This is such a waste of time.”
“Irene, suck it up.”
“I have things to do!”
“What? And I don’t? Now stop whining and in ten seconds follow me down that aisle or so help me God, I will kick your lily-white ass!”
Jackie turned around and the pair paused, realizing they had the attention of all the guests.
Forcing a smile, Jackie whispered, “I’m so getting you for this later.”
Then she was off, slowly walking down the aisle, while Irene impatiently and quickly counted to ten. She followed after her friend and several times almost passed her. The third time, Jackie slammed her elbow into her gut, which effectively slowed Irene down.
When she finally reached Holtz’s side, he had tears streaming down his face, but she knew it wasn’t from the beauty of the moment.
“Stop laughing at me,” she whispered.
“Could you look more annoyed?” He laughed, keeping his head down while the priest or reverend or whatever droned about why the hell they were there.
“There are a myriad of things I could be doing at this moment. Useful, life-changing things. This is a waste of time.”
“Excuse me?” The priest/reverend/whatever snapped. “Do you mind?”
“Sorry,” Irene said and then added, “But feel free to pick up the pace.”
Which got a snort out of Holtz.
She lasted a good five minutes before her foot started tapping.
“Cut it out,” Holtz growled, although she had the feeling he was still laughing.
“I’m bored,” she whispered back. “Too much longer and I’m going to start taking things apart. And you know how you hate when I do that.”
“Speaking of which, what happened to my Mercedes?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I came home yesterday and it was nothing but burnt metal.”
“Oh. That. Yes, I wanted to see how engines worked. I walked away for a few minutes to get a glass of orange juice and when I came back…boom.”
“Boom?”
The priest/reverend/whatever cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” Holtz mumbled.
A few more lines about commitment and love and Holtz snarled under his breath, “What do you mean ‘boom’?”
“I was merely trying to see if I could get more speed out of it.”
“How much speed?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been toying with this idea of being able to travel from one country to the next in a car. I figure if you make it fast enough, it might hydroplane.”
“All right, that’s it. Stay away from my cars.”
“But you have so many.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Excuse me!” the priest/reverend/whatever snapped. “This is a sacred and time-honored ceremony, so do you think you two could act like it and shut the holy hell up?”
Annoyed, Irene tapped at the spot on her wrist where her watch would be if those vicious She-wolves hadn’t taken it off her. “Or you could speed it up. I’ve got things to do and your rambling is boring me!”
“Fine!” the priest/reverend/whatever yelled. “Do you?” he asked Holtz.
“Yup!”
“And you?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Ring?”
“Here.” Holtz placed the white-gold band next to the sizable diamond he’d insisted on getting her.
“Good. You’re married.”
“See?” Irene asked sweetly, just to annoy. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”
For a second there, she really thought the man might hit her.
Van watched Irene work the room. For someone enormously bad with normal human relations, she really amazed him when it came to trying to get donations for the university.
He didn’t want her to work, but he knew he had to do something. During the toast portion of the evening, he realized she’d taken his watch off and had the back pried off. A twenty thousand–dollar watch and she takes it apart.
Well, at least giving her a task had calmed her down. And she looked absolutely beautiful. Especially once she took her hair out of that bun. Stray hairs kept slipping out and she finally went to the bathroom and tore out all the pins. But he made a good choice with the dress since she couldn’t be bothered choosing her own beyond stating, “Nothing puffy like Princess Di wore.”
He should be annoyed. But he wasn’t. He loved that Irene couldn’t give a shit about their wedding. Because in the end it didn’t matter. With or without some piece of paper, they were together for life. No one else was as perfect for him as this one blindingly brilliant woman.
Irene walked back over to him but before she could drop into one of the chairs, he pulled her into his lap.
“You doing okay?”
“Yes. Mikolev Thornapple—an actual name, mind you—just promised ten thousand to the science department.” She looked down at him. “Are we going on a honeymoon?”
“Yep. Right after we’re done here.”
“Where?”
“Aruba.”
He had to bite his tongue when she frowned.
“Because my pasty butt does so well in the sun?”
Laughing, Van nipped her shoulder. “Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Scotland. We’ll be staying at lovely castles and B&Bs…all of them near very old, very interesting libraries.”
“You don’t mind me spending tons of time in stuffy old libraries?”
“Not if you promise to tell me anything interesting you learn…and you give me regular sex.”
“That is a promise I can commit to.”
“Figured.”
Suddenly Irene gently clasped his face between both her hands and kissed him. “As you may or may not know,” she said against his lips, “nearly 41 percent of all marriages end in divorce in this country. But I feel we’ll beat those odds simply because we’re so freakishly unusual and unstable enough to make this work. Especially with your unique DNA strain and my less-than-enthusiastic interest in legal actions of any kind.”
“Irene, you sweet talker, is that your way of saying we’re perfect for each other?”
“Yes. Wasn’t I clear? Also, we love each other and that’s most important. Because, really what is perfect? What does that—”
And Van kissed her before she could head down that longwinded road, happily wondering to himself how he ever got so lucky.
Epilogue
Twenty years later…
Irene waved and forced a smile until the last SUV disappeared down the road. Then she stormed into her house, slamming the door behind her.
Holtz reached for her. “Doc—”
“Not a word!” she snarled before heading up the stairs and going straight to her daughter’s room. She practically kicked the door open and the little viper didn’t even look away from her PC. N
o, that wasn’t right. Her Apple computer. Oh, the shame!
“How dare you!”
Finally startled away from whatever she was working on, Ulva Van Holtz turned in her chair to face her mother. “How dare I what?”
“Why did you tell her she was pregnant?”
Ulva blinked in confusion. “Because she is pregnant.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’m not sure what the issue is.”
“You simply can’t say whatever comes to your mind. And stop telling my students you found flaws in their thesis.”
“But you say whatever comes to your mind.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then I believe I am unclear on what your point is. And I did find flaws. In fact, she should rethink those last ten chapters altogether.”
Irene stepped closer to her daughter, with the possible intent of wringing her neck, but the two females stopped arguing when the Van Holtz men stumbled into view. Holtz held both his sons in his arms—upside-down.
“What are you three doing?”
“Nothing,” they replied in unison, which meant “something.”
“Papa says we can go over to Aunt Jack and Uncle Paul’s.” This said with her son’s sweetest smile. Not even twelve and already a heartbreaker.
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“I’ve already called,” Holtz admitted. “They said they’d love to have them over.”
“Well, with their other ten thousand children, what’s three more?”
“I’m not going,” Ulva said with a haughtiness that annoyed Irene no end.
“Yes. You will. Or you won’t play Warcraft again until the second coming. Do you understand?”
“Fine. I prefer Aunt Jackie’s company to anything I find around here anyway.” And then Ulva turned back to her computer, effectively dismissing her.
Irene went to choke her, but Holtz grabbed her hands and dragged her out of the room.
“Pack your backpacks for a couple of days. The driver will be waiting in ten minutes.”
“That girl is driving me insane!” Irene snarled after slamming the bedroom door.
“She didn’t mean to make things difficult for your student.”
Irene gave a dismissive wave and began pulling out the laundry. “I mean, did you see that poor boy? He’s like nine feet tall, two thousand pounds, and he looked absolutely terrified.”
Holtz stretched out on the bed. “He wasn’t terrified. He just knew it would be a painfully long drive home.”
“You can get that smirk off your face, Van Holtz.” She dropped the laundry basket by the bed and crouched next to it to retrieve his socks. “I saw the looks passing between you two. And how do you get your socks so far under here?” She knelt down and reached under the bed.
“Sorry, baby.”
“You’re so anal retentive about the mess in your precious kitchen, but you and your damn socks…”
“I know. It’s so sloppy. I don’t know what I’m thinking.”
Socks in hand, Irene sat up, blinking when she came face to face with Holtz. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“I still think you put these socks under here just so you can stare at my butt.”
“Dr. Conridge! What a horrible thing to say.” Then he gave her that grin. The same grin that, even after all these years, still knocked her on her proverbial ass.
Of course, the fact that he still wanted to watch her butt amazed her like the discovery of uranium. And it was one of the reasons she didn’t let the cleaning staff touch their laundry.
“And stop telling people I set your car on fire and stabbed you. Did you see that poor boy’s face?”
“But you did do those things.”
“They were accidents,” she growled.
“So you say. And Conall Víga-Feilan is not a boy. Although why he’d involve himself with a midget, I’ll never know.”
“Miki Kendrick is not a midget. And he’s with her because she’s brilliant and dangerously unstable.”
“Like you?”
“I am not dangerously unstable. Those tests proved it,” she groused.
Laughing, Van grabbed Irene’s arm and dragged her onto the bed. He pinned her to the mattress, arms above her head. “I’ve got an idea, doc.”
“What?”
“That once we get the kids off, we spend the next forty-eight hours completely naked.”
“You act like only the kids live in this house.”
“Trust me. The Pack will find other places on the territory to stay this weekend.”
“Ogre.”
“When it comes to this pussy, you’re damn right.”
She sighed thoughtfully. “It amazes me how that kind of talk sexually arouses me.”
Holtz leaned down and nipped her breasts. “It amazes me that I find you saying that so goddamn hot.”
Irene’s back arched as he sucked on a nipple through her T-shirt and the lace of her bra.
“Perhaps you’re delusional,” she groaned.
“No. I just love knowing this pussy belongs to me and no one else. Doesn’t it, doc?”
“It seems to. I find all other men repulsive.”
“And it better stay that way,” he teased, grinning up at her, his chin resting against her breastbone. “I don’t share what’s mine.”
Digging her hands into his hair, Irene pulled him up until they were face to face. “Wolves.” And she gave him that smile no one ever saw but him. “So damn demanding.”
“Geniuses,” he sighed back. “So damn hot.”
WICKED WAYS
Cynthia Eden
For Megan and Laura—thanks, ladies,
for all that you do.
One
Miranda Shaw had understood that she was on the date from hell ever since the appetizers were served at the too-expensive restaurant and she’d caught sight of the tiny bugs crawling over her cocktail shrimp. But she didn’t truly realize just how bad the situation was until her date took her home and then attempted to bite her with two-inch-long fangs.
“Oh, my God!” She caught sight of the teeth just in time. She’d thought Paul Roberts was just in macho-aggressive mode. Moving in for a lick on her neck. Miranda had fully intended to jerk away from the guy before he made contact—
Then she saw his teeth.
Oh, hell, no.
The scream that burst from her throat should have deafened him. Or at least broken one of the lovely glass picture windows that lined the front of her house.
But it did neither.
When she tried to run, Paul grabbed her arms, holding her tight. “Don’t make me hurt you,” he growled, and Miranda wondered if she were in the middle of some kind of really, really vivid nightmare, because there was no way that her boring, all-I-can-do-is-talk-about-myself date had just sprouted those deadly fangs.
Things like this so didn’t happen in nice, normally quiet Cherryville, Florida.
She twisted her body, trying to break free, but the guy’s grip was too damn strong. Shit. “What are you—Ow!”
His teeth had pierced her neck. Torn the skin. She shoved at him again, harder, and those teeth of his just seemed to cut deeper into her flesh.
Then she heard the muted sound of him swallowing.
He’s drinking my blood. The freak is actually drinking my blood.
Weakness began to trickle through her body. His hold was too powerful. Fear made her dizzy. This shouldn’t be happening. She’d done everything right. Talked to the guy over the Internet for a good two months before she’d met him in person.
He wasn’t supposed to be some kind of blood-drinking psychotic!
He was grunting now and making little moaning sounds, and she was pretty certain that she was going to pass out. At any moment.
Then the weirdo would probably kill her.
Not the way she’d been hoping her night would end.
I’m not going out like this. Her neck was on
fire. Her body quivered. But her Grandma Belle hadn’t raised a quitter.
Miranda managed to lift her knee and ram it as hard as she could into the jerk’s balls.
He stiffened against her, lifted those terrible teeth for just a moment—
And Miranda twisted like a snake, managed to break free of him, and then lunged for the door.
Just a few more feet…
If she could get outside, she might be able to get help. Or maybe her new neighbor, the only neighbor she had in the boondocks, would be able to help her and—
Paul grabbed her by the hair and hauled her back. She shrieked as he pulled her, reaching up with her hands and clawing his wrist.
“You’re going to be so damned sorry, you bi—” His snarled words ended in a gasp when her front door was literally kicked open.
Miranda blinked, stunned and damn grateful to see her neighbor of five days, Cain Lawson, standing in the doorway. Over six feet three inches of pissed-off male. Tousled coal-black hair. Handsome face etched into lines of fury.
He glanced first at her, then at the psycho still holding onto her hair with a death grip. Miranda was on her knees, scratching and clawing, and she didn’t think it was necessary, but she still screamed, “Help me!”
Then the really, truly unthinkable happened. Cain’s lips pulled back from his perfect white teeth and damned if those teeth didn’t look far too long and way too sharp for a human’s.
“Get the hell away from her, vampire!”
Vampire? No, that wasn’t right. Vampires weren’t real and—
And blood was still dripping from the wounds in her neck.
She chilled as goosebumps rose on her flesh.
Date. From. Hell.
Paul laughed, a high, grating sound, and his hold tightened.
She’d be lucky to come out of this situation with her life, not to mention her hair.
“You get the hell out of here, before I decide to kill you, too,” Paul snarled.
Then his hands were on her throat. Only his fingernails felt too sharp. Like knives. Miranda stopped breathing, afraid that if she so much as moved, he’d slit her throat right open.
When He Was Bad Page 15
