I wanted to talk to Lachlan about everything, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.
He hadn’t said anything about my being pregnant yet.
I should say something. I’d kept it from him, and he was probably waiting for me to say something about it, and I didn’t know how.
And besides, I was terrified that the tranquilizer dart had done something to hurt the baby, and I didn’t know how I could even know if that was true.
The first step to making jalapeno poppers is to cut the tops off the jalapenos and hollow out the the peppers, discarding the seeds. That was what I was working on. I was wearing plastic gloves, because it was really hard to wash the spiciness off your skin.
I stood over the sink. In between finishing each pepper, I looked over my shoulder at Lachlan.
Sometimes he was looking at me. Sometimes he was just staring into his drink.
This time, he was doing the latter. But he spoke. “Penny,” he said in a hoarse voice, “you have to promise me that you’re telling the truth, that you didn’t kill Alastair.”
I whirled. “I thought we established that already.”
“Just… seriously, if there’s anything else you’re keeping from me, now is the time to let me know.”
I parted my lips. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was pregnant.”
He looked up at me. “No, I get it.”
“You do?”
“You were afraid. You were in denial about it. You were horrified that it had happened, and you didn’t want to face it.”
“It’s not that,” I said, trying a small smile. “I don’t feel horrified about the baby. I feel… lucky and excited and glad. But to ask you to… well, it’s a lot to ask of you.”
“Of me?” He pointed at his chest. “I’m not the one who’s pregnant.”
“Yeah, but…” I shrugged and went back to the jalapenos. “I mean, I want a baby. I’ve always wanted one, and I guess it’s sort of… I mean, if the baby is okay, that is, because you said that the tranquilizer dart might—”
“You should make a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “It’s only that the darts haven’t been tested on pregnant women, not that they’ve ever been shown to have adverse effects.”
I turned.
He was on his feet, coming closer to me.
“You looked that up,” I said. “You knew we would get arrested, and you looked that up.”
He nodded. He was right next to me now.
I let my gaze flit over his chest, his broad shoulders, up to his beautiful, haunted face. Then I picked up another jalapeno and started hollowing it out. “It’s a lot to ask you to be in a relationship with a woman who’s pregnant with… with another man’s…”
“Hey.” He grabbed my chin and made me look at him. “You can’t think that I would feel threatened by that. Besides, he’s dead.”
“Well, we only just found that out.” I moved out of his grasp. “I’m only saying that if you wanted to back out of this, I would understand.”
“Back out of…?” He gestured back and forth between us. “You mean break up.”
I nodded.
“You want to break up?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Because you haven’t seemed to want me around much lately.”
“But we talk,” I said. “We talk on the phone.”
“Then one day you show up in tears and then you jump me,” he said. “So, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not that you think I might want out, but that you maybe want out?”
“No,” I said again. “I’m just…” I shrugged at him. “It’s hormones.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Okay.”
I had finished hollowing out the jalapenos. I went over to the stove, where I had some sausage browning. I stirred it. It looked pretty good, mostly ready. I’d give it another minute. “How long have you known?” I opened the refrigerator and got out a tub of whipped cream cheese.
“Not long,” he said. “I guess I put it together after we made love.”
“Because of my boobs.” I set the cream cheese down.
He laughed, actually blushing a little bit. “And because of how you reacted to the information from the PERK, and the fact that you never seemed to be drinking wine anymore. Or coffee. I just… put it together.”
“And you didn’t say anything.” I stirred the sausage again.
“I figured you’d tell me eventually.” He let out a breath. “You were obviously far enough along that you weren’t planning on terminating, so it was going to become apparent at some point anyway.”
“You’re pissed at me.”
“I was,” he said. “Kind of. Because it seems like you’re always running from things, pushing things away, and that I seem to be one of those things. But… I don’t know, after that Roxbone experience, I’m just glad to be free of that place.”
I turned off the burner, and gave the sausage one last stir. Then I turned to look at him. “So, you’re saying that you don’t want out?”
“No, I don’t want out,” he said. “I’m not saying I can be…” His jaw twitched and he looked at his hands. “I want you, and I want to be part of your life and if there’s a kid involved, that’s okay with me, but…” He raised his gaze to mine. “The last time I tried to be a stepfather, it went badly.”
“Lachlan, you can’t think—”
“Just don’t call me…” He moved back into the living room and got his drink. “Call me an uncle or a friend or a… whatever you want. But I don’t think I can be…”
I swallowed. “Okay,” I said quietly.
And there was silence between us.
I got out a bowl. I dumped in the sausage and I dumped in the cream cheese. I began mixing the two together. “I don’t think I can handle it if there’s lots of drama with us, though. We can’t be back and forth and on and off and fighting and insecure and all of that. I need stability here.”
“Then you have to trust me,” he said. “You have to let me in.”
I turned back to him, frustrated. “I do let you in.”
“Really?”
I sighed. “Okay. Okay, fine. I get what you’re saying.” I turned back to the cream cheese and sausage. “And I think we need to keep our magic charged.”
“What?”
“The blood bond,” I said. The cheese and sausage looked well mixed. I took the bowl over to the jalapenos. Time to get stuffing. “I think you should bite me.”
“We don’t know what that would do to the baby.”
“I think it would be okay. When you do it, you seem to be able to sense how much to take, right? So, if it’s going to be a bad thing, I think we’d both sense it right when you bit me, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I guess I was pretty good at stopping after we were bonded. But… I don’t know, it makes me nervous.”
I held out my wrist to him. “Just try.”
“Right now?” he said. “Aren’t you, uh, making appetizers?”
I stripped off my plastic gloves and crossed the room to him. “Right now. Just do it.”
He licked his lips. He took my hand and traced his finger over the inside of my palm. And then he used my hand to pull my body right up against his. His mouth went to my neck.
I felt the tickle of his lips there, and a quiver went through me. I gasped.
He suddenly tightened his grip on me, crushing our bodies close. He kissed my jaw.
I reached up to wind my hand around his neck, turning my face to meet his lips with mine.
And we were kissing. Fierce, hard kisses, like he was the wind, and he was rushing into me.
I held on tight, opening my mouth to him, swept away. My whole body felt awake and ready, every inch of me more sensitive than usual.
He pulled back, sucking in audible breath, his teeth against his lips.
I could see his fangs.
His face was full of some kind of wild desire for me, but somehow there was softness there.
And my heart felt like it was going to burst. This was what I had wanted all along, I realized. I had just wanted him, wanted his arms around me, wanted to lose myself with him, but I’d been afraid to ask him for it, and I had wasted time, so much time…
He closed his eyes, resting his forehead against mine. His breathing was harsh.
I shut my eyes too.
His fingers brushed my neck.
Thrills of pleasure burst through my body.
And then he bit me.
We were caught up in a hurricane, hot gusts of wind blowing around both of us. The wind tore us apart, put us back together, we were a mixture of each other’s parts, scattered but whole, interconnected. Everything was intense and bright and strong.
And in the center of the whipping wind was…
The baby?
A tiny spark of something aware and awake. No language, just emotions like color… blue relief to be away from the cold place, yellow comfort snug inside me, pink love reaching for me with tiny hands.
Lachlan pulled away. “What the fuck?”
I staggered on my feet.
He steadied me.
I looked into his eyes. “Did you feel it?”
He nodded. “I did.”
“The baby. It’s okay,” I said. “It’s alive. It’s aware. It feels.”
He turned away from me. He picked up his drink. His hands were shaking.
I sank down on the couch, my hands on my stomach in wonder.
“You should still see a doctor,” he said in a choked voice. “Is that… is that even normal?”
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Fine.” He knocked back the rest of the drink.
I furrowed my brow. He seemed really freaked out. “I have regular doctor’s appointments anyway.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well… well, good.”
* * *
“Look, I am just saying that at this stage in development, the baby doesn’t even have a placenta, so it should not be so advanced as to… communicate with us,” Lachlan was muttering into his coffee. It was the next morning, and we were at the Flamingo for breakfast. Apparently, Lachlan had stayed up all night searching online about fetal development.
“Okay,” I said.
“Alastair had weird… dragon-sacrifice power, and—”
“Nothing’s wrong with the baby,” I said, feeling shocked that he’d even suggest that.
“No, I’m not saying…” He took a slug of coffee. “Just maybe you could ask your friend about it.”
“Who?” I said.
“The mage that runs this place? Ophelia? She’s the one who knew about our blood bond, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so. But she doesn’t even know I’m pregnant,” I said.
“So?” he said. “Tell her.”
I leaned back in my chair. What if he was right? What if something was wrong? What if whatever Alastair had done to himself had bad effects on him and mutated his sperm or something?
I was horrified at the thought of it.
“Hey, Penny, don’t,” said Lachlan, reaching across the table.
“Don’t what?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.
“So, how did you mean it?”
“Just that you should be sure that… Oh, hell, I should know better than to say something like this to a pregnant woman.”
“You should,” I said, now feeling really angry with him.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”
“Done this?”
“Been in a relationship with a woman who’s pregnant,” he said. “I forgot how… delicate it all is.”
“What’s delicate?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” he said, letting out a noisy breath.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’m just worried about you is all,” he said. “I want to make sure that everything is okay.”
I chewed on my lip. “What if something is wrong?”
“It’s not. And I’m sure Ophelia will tell you the same thing.”
“I’m going to go find her,” I said.
“We haven’t even ordered food,” he said.
“There’s a buffet.” I pointed.
He looked at the buffet. “Has there always been a buffet?”
I rolled my eyes, getting out of the booth. I strode away from the booth, scanning the place for Ophelia.
I saw her coming out of the kitchen, and I ran over to her.
“Penny, child,” she said. “You look worried.”
“Do you sense anything… off about me?” I said.
“No.” She furrowed her brow.
“It’s only that you sensed the blood bond, and I wondered if you might have noticed anything else.”
“I haven’t,” she said.
“Would you be able to tell if something was wrong? Like magically?”
“Well, there are spells that I can do to assess—but why are you asking me about this?”
I shifted on my feet. “Okay, well it’s kind of a long story, or just… I’m sort of pregnant, and Lachlan and I—well, Lachlan was… drinking my blood, and it was like we felt the baby, and it was communicating with us.”
“Lachlan is a vampire, how are you pregnant?”
I shut my eyes. “Well, the thing is—”
“Oh,” said Ophelia. “That bastard Alastair. When he captured you?”
I looked at the floor.
“Penelope, you poor, sweet—”
“Can we not feel sorry for me?” I said. “Can you just find out if something’s wrong?”
“Sure,” she said. “This evening. You come by my place. I have some things I can try.”
* * *
“So, I had an idea,” I said. “About someone who might have killed Alastair.”
“Oh?” said Lachlan. We were walking back to the hotel from the Flamingo after breakfast.
“I was thinking that the people he worked with were probably pretty annoyed with him for getting arrested. It would have been gossip fodder that he had kidnapped me and all of that. It would have made the company look bad.”
Lachlan considered. “And maybe someone might have thought that the company would be better off with Alastair out of the way.”
“They would have known that he was single minded, and that he never would have stopped going after me.”
“Unless they stopped him.”
“That’s good,” said Lachlan. “That’s really good. It’s a place to start.”
“So what do we need now?” I said. “A list of his partners at the company?”
“We could probably whittle it down a bit,” he said. “We need to find out where they were the night that Alastair disappeared.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s a secretary that has access to everyone’s schedule. I used to call her to find out if Alastair would be free for events. I could try her.”
“Okay,” said Lachlan. “Let’s do that.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Twenty minutes later, we were in Lachlan’s car, heading down Atlantic Avenue to go and see Bertram Kingsley. He was the only one of Alastair’s partners who wasn’t at a big benefit dinner the night in question. The reason he wasn’t around was because he liked to spend weekends in Sea City.
He was perfect.
I watched the traffic, hoping against hope that this would turn out to be easy. We’d nail Bertram, find evidence, bring it to the police, clear our name, and I would never have to worry about being pregnant in Roxbone or anyone taking my baby away from me.
Lachlan was quiet. His sunglasses obscured his handsome face, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
I had meant what I’d said the night before about not wanting drama between us. I didn’t. But I was also getting the impression that Lachlan was not nearly as cool with the whole pregnancy thing as he was letting on.
We drove north, which was where all of the dragons lived, up near
the border of Delaware. The south side of the city was where my hotel was located, and that was where the mages, vampires and drakes tended to congregate.
With the traffic, the drive took even longer than it usually would. We seemed to catch every red light.
But eventually we pulled into a housing development with beach front housing. We parked in a cul-de-sac and went up to one of the houses—which was tasteful decadence, just like all the dragon houses.
No one answer when Lachlan knocked on the door, so he knocked again.
We waited.
And then finally, the door was pulled open by a man that I sort of recognized from various work functions with Alastair. He was older, although how much I couldn’t be sure. Dragons had very long lifespans, and a dragon looked about the same at a hundred years old as he did at two hundred.
He looked us over. “Sorry, the maid went home sick. Can I help you?”
“Hi,” said Lachlan. “I’m Lachlan Flint, and this is Penny Caspian.”
Bertram squinted at me. “Hey, you’re Alastair’s mate.”
“I was,” I said.
“What are you doing here?” said Bertram. “Because I thought they arrested you for his murder.”
“We’re innocent,” said Lachlan. “We were actually wondering if we could ask you some questions?”
“Why would I do that?”
Lachlan’s face twitched. I could tell he missed his badge. “Maybe because if you refuse, you’re going to the top of my list of suspects?”
“Okay, so what?” he said. “Who are you? You cops?”
“We’re not working in an official capacity,” said Lachlan. “Not exactly. But we are the team who solved the Dragon Slasher case, so you don’t want to be on our bad side.”
Bertram rolled his eyes. “What do you want to know?”
“Where you were the night that Alastair disappeared,” said Lachlan. “That was, um, May twenty-seventh, late night.”
“I was at a benefit dinner,” said Bertram.
“No,” I said. “See, you weren’t, because I called and checked with Tracy, and she said that you skipped the Silborne dinner and came here.”
“I was at a benefit dinner here in Sea City,” he said. “For sickle cell anemia. At the Grand. And I stayed late and closed the bar. By the time I was on my way home, I was hearing the news about how Alastair’s house was burning down.”
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