“I was going to put it a little more diplomatically.”
“We’re stuck with each other for the holiday, McCoy. And our assignment.”
“And Lady Juanita’s party,” she added. He hadn’t sounded unpleased by the prospect of their being together. If he wasn’t, she wasn’t.
“Stupid Clan pretensions,” he complained. He finished his hamburger in a quick bite. “We might as well get back to the Bleythin office. Maybe we can find a lead before we have to go and curtsy to the local queen.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Eden looked up from the computer screen as the pair of Dark Angels entered the office. She sat behind her desk and studied them quickly, before they took any notice of her. Piper had his hand cupped around McCoy’s elbow as she walked slightly ahead of him. McCoy accepted this possessive, protective gesture without seeming to notice it.
Good.
She could report to Laurent and Sidonie that the bonding was proceeding on schedule. Which she didn’t exactly rejoice about. Yes, she was bonded to a Prime, and was retired from her stake-wielding days—not that a stake was all that useful, but there were traditions to uphold. Now, a crossbow with a silver-tipped bolt, especially the new high-tech type bow that—but she had a twinge of misgiving about watching Piper with the mortal woman. Not that you could stop a bonding, especially not when it hit like a hurricane. Not that her misgivings were his fault, but would blood tell? At the point the pair were in the bonding process, spearing him between the eyes with a silver-tipped arrow would do as much damage to the witch as it would the Prime.
Of course, he looked inoffensive enough, with those soulful dark brown eyes, and the deep voice she’d thought sounded familiar when she’d first heard it. The more she looked at him, the more Eden saw the image of her father as a young man.
She wished her beloved Laurent had told her straight out what Piper was instead of giving her the choice to look up his ancestry herself if she wanted to. How lovely that her bondmate encouraged her to make her own decisions. Enticed might be a better word, the manipulating—
“Sorry we were gone so long,” Dee McCoy said after the door closed behind the pair. Dee came toward the desk. “Are you all right, Eden? You look a little dazed.”
Look who’s talking, Eden thought. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the pair had been up to in the hours they’d been gone.
She got her head back into the moment. “I am a little dazed.” She pointed at the computer screen. “The thumb drive you left me wasn’t encrypted, but what I’m finding in the files is making my head swim.”
“Magical mumblings?” Piper asked.
Dee gave him a withering look.
Maybe they weren’t as bonded yet as Eden thought.
Dee turned her attention back to Eden. “Let me have a look at the files.”
Eden stood and gestured to her chair. “Please.” Once Dee was seated at the desk, Eden approached Piper. It took him a moment to take his attention from Dee to notice Eden was there.
“I had a look at records of recent earthquakes,” she told him. “This is an extremely active earthquake zone with tremblers happening every day.”
“It’s hard to see a pattern?”
“It is for me, as I’m not a seismologist. But,” she went on, “it did occur to me that you and Dee have been near the epicenter of every tremor which has occurred in the last couple of days. Is this a coincidence?”
“I doubt it.” He gave a quick, protective glance toward Dee. “We need to find out what it means. McCoy!” he called.
Dee put up a hand. She didn’t look up. “Give me a minute.”
Piper looked back at Eden. She knew that exasperated look.
“Man, you look like my father.” She winced as the unbidden words burst out.
The vampire took a step closer to her, his expression full of shock and anger. A spark of red glowed deep in his eyes. “What are you talking about?” The words were a menacing whisper.
Eden hadn’t consciously decided to confront Piper, but she might as well get on with it now. “I checked the vampire hunters’ Prime database. We have always kept genealogical records of our adversaries. Not that we’re always that forthcoming about our own backgrounds,” she added. “My dad’s mom, for example. Grandma never told anyone who dad’s father was.”
“It wasn’t me,” Piper said.
“No. My grandpa was named Melchor Leviathan.”
Piper flinched. “Melchor’s dead!”
“What’s wrong?” Dee demanded. She was standing next to Piper instantly.
“Yes, he is,” Eden said. “I only recently discovered that I have vampire genetics. When I asked around my family about this, grandma told me about her and Melchor. She told me that he captured her when she was hunting him, that what happened next wasn’t exactly rape, and when she escaped, he let her. For a Tribe Boy he wasn’t such a bad guy, apparently.”
Piper stood stone still, thunderstruck. “But—”
“Eden, my love, are you ready to go?” Laurent asked, coming from the back of the office.
She fervently wished he’d showed up before she opened her big mouth. He came up beside her and she grabbed his hand. Eden gave Laurent a bright, relieved smile. “We better hurry,” she said. She tugged him toward the front door. “We don’t want to be late.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“What was that all about?” Dee asked as the door shut behind the other couple.
“Nothing.”
His tone a was total flatline, his face a blank mask. But not his eyes.
Dee’s arms went around him. He stiffened, but he didn’t reject her, even when she pressed him closer to her body. She tried to give comfort, knowing he couldn’t ask for what he needed. She didn’t know how she was aware that his normally slow heart rate had risen to racing.
After a while, he touched her, putting his hands awkwardly on her shoulders. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “Don’t ask.”
“Then simply tell me.”
Piper pulled away and turned his back on her. His muscles weren’t tense as steel anymore, but he was anything but relaxed. His voice stayed flat. “You heard what the female said.” He turned to look at her. “She was lying.”
“I heard some of what she said.” Dee grew annoyed on the other mortal woman’s behalf. “Her name is Eden Wolf. Why would she lie?”
“Who knows why mortals do anything?”
She laughed harshly. “You aren’t a child so don’t be childish.” It might be dangerous, what with the fangs and claws and supernatural strength and speed he could use against her, but she couldn’t let him get away with this attitude. “You may not like living among mortals, but your kind is stuck with it, more every day. You have to understand us if you intend to survive.”
“I’ve had these lessons, female.”
“I’ll put a curse on you if you call me that again. How would you like a permanent hard on?”
“You give me that already!”
She smiled.
He smiled.
“If you’re thinking about throwing me back on the desk and having me you can stop thinking it right now,” Dee told him.
“It would relieve my tension,” Piper said. “You want to help me with that.”
“You want to distract me from a conversation you don’t want to have.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll only bring it up later.”
Piper had begun to relax, but now all the tension returned. Dee looked into his pain-filled eyes. She held his face between her hands when he would have looked away.
“Tell me what hurts. Let me help.” She was desperate to help. His pain was hers. She didn’t know how this had happened, but it was true. She didn’t completely trust him. She didn’t completely like him. But his welfare was the most important thing in the world to her.
This attraction to Piper wasn’t only lust.
This sucks, Dee thought. “Talk to me, Jake,” she said. �
��Didn’t you recently tell me it was lonely not having blood kin?”
“Yes, but—” He began to restlessly circle the room, a dangerous, trapped animal.
Dee perched on the side of a desk. She watched and waited.
Eventually, he came to stand in front of her. “It’s against everything the Tribes believe, what the woman told me. We don’t mate with mortals!”
“We?” Dee questioned. “You aren’t a Tribe Prime, Jake.”
So he kept telling her. So he tried to believe. She was the one who’d suspected he wasn’t loyal to his vampire Family. What he was was one conflicted dude, and Eden’s revelation had just made his confusion worse.
Dee spoke carefully. “You have a Leviathan relative. Maybe you don’t want to see it that way, because it isn’t the Tribe way. But Tribe Primes are people, too. By that I mean, no member of any culture follows the rules and regulations of their people all the time. Your brother had an affair with a mortal rather than making her into a sex slave. I would call this a good thing.”
“You are mortal. Of course you would.”
“You are Family Prime. You should agree with me.”
“Yes. I should.”
“I would also say his behavior toward Eden’s grandmother was evidence of your brother taking a reluctant step toward the survival of your Tribe.”
“I might agree—if my brother hadn’t committed suicide by Clan Boy when we were hunted down after Levi—” His mouth snapped shut. He shook his head. He pressed fingers against his temples.
His pain and sense of confused betrayal touched Dee through the growing connection between them.
Dee fought off the curiosity to find out the details of what happened to separate the three brothers, why the Clans had declared a Death Hunt against them. The vampire Clans loathed the Tribes, but sanctioned their existence because there were so few vampires in the world. The Clans’ policy was to tolerate what they abhorred for the sake of their gene pool. A Tribe had to do something truly, unforgivably evil before the Clans came after them.
“You and your brother each made your own decision when you were given the choice to die or change. You lived. I won’t tell you you have nothing to be guilty about, even though I don’t believe you do. Guilt is something you inflict on yourself. Get over it or not.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that insight.” His sarcastic tone was diamond hard and cutting. “I know it was Melchor’s choice, and I was a coward not to join him.”
“Ah, but then you wouldn’t be here for me to nag and bitch at. Or you wouldn’t be here to learn that you have a great-niece and are not alone in this world.”
“I should kill this niece. Tribe Primes do not have female relations.”
“They do now. You do, at least. And didn’t our friend Laurent start out as a Tribe Boy?”
“I do not want to talk about Laurent Wolf.” He practically snarled the words. “I don’t want you paying attention to that—Clan Boy.”
She ignored his dislike of the other Prime. “Now Laurent has a mom and a sister and a wife and a whole Clan to love him. You have the Pipers, and blood kin, too.”
And me, she thought, but hoped he’d acknowledge this himself. Or not. Maybe it was better not to acknowledge this thing between them. Except they’d been doing that for months, and ignoring it hadn’t helped at all.
This is about Jake Piper’s own personal hang-ups right now, Dee reminded herself.
“Maybe you need time to think this through.” She gestured toward the door. “Go for a walk. Get your head together.”
He looked toward the exit.
Dee couldn’t stop the laugh as a realization struck her.
Piper’s attention swung back to her. “What’s so funny?”
“Your niece is bonded to a Prime you can’t stand.”
“I couldn’t stand him before I had a niece!” He wasn’t amused at all. “I don’t have a niece!” he shouted, and stalked out the door.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I think he thinks too much,” Laurent responded to Dee’s worried comment about Piper. His gaze briefly caught Dee’s in the rearview mirror. She was in the backseat. “Primes are better off letting their women do the thinking. Right, hon?”
Eden turned in the passenger seat to look at Dee. “I didn’t mean to wreck his world, but I thought he had a right to know.”
“Piper’s a big boy,” Dee said. “He’ll learn to cope.”
Dee hoped so, but she wasn’t sure. Jake Piper had walked out of the Bleythin office, taken the SUV, and hadn’t been seen in the hours since. Nor had he answered his phone or acknowledged texts and emails after she gave in to worry and tried to reach him. He hadn’t called, texted, or emailed. Dee fought the urge to go after him as long as she could, sure she could trace him by following her instincts. When her worry grew so much that she gave in to the urge, she was stopped by Eden and Laurent. At first physically, but eventually they talked her into waiting it out.
Too soon it was time to change into their party clothes and head to the Wolf Matri’s Citadel, a mansion in La Jolla. That was the way of the supernatural cultures these days, hiding in plain sight. They pulled up at the door from a long sweeping driveway. A valet drove the car away after they got out. Dee paused to take deep breaths of the aura of power and money surrounding the place before stepping into the entry hall. Clan vampires were the royalty of the supernatural world, and their wealth came from very, very old money indeed.
The air of the circular entry was rich with the scent of roses. Vase upon crystal vase of roses rested on tables around the walls.
“Solstice gifts for Lady Juanita,” Laurent said.
“Did we remember to send flowers?” Eden asked. “By we I mean you.”
“Yes, dear.” Laurent led his bondmate toward a vase of golden yellow roses. “Blooming sunlight for our Lady Juanita.”
Nice choice, Dee thought.
She wandered away from the couple to go from bouquet to bouquet, enjoying the colors and scents, and reading the gift cards by each vase. She was particularly drawn to an arrangement of roses of such a deep red they were nearly black, except for one pure white rose in the center of the bouquet.
“Nice,” she said. She read the card. Her heart lurched, and head spun.
“You are glowing with pleasure,” said a man beside her.
Dee turned a stunned smile on the stranger. He was tall, well-built, dark-haired, and impossibly handsome. A Prime, she supposed.
“He remembered,” she told the stranger. “Whatever else that fool male is up to, he remembered to be polite.”
“You sound like a proud mother.” The stranger took a step closer.
“He’s not my son.”
“But he’s not here, and that’s what matters. There are living flowers out in the garden. Forget about your boy and come to the garden with me.”
Dee laughed.
Primes were incorrigible. She was used to dealing with their sexual advances. This one was trying to be more smooth than the horny commandos she spent her life around. And avoiding, dodging, and joking with. Clan and Family boys might be horny and persistent, but their mamas, sisters, aunts, and elders raised them to take “No” for an answer.
Unlike Tribe Boys.
She expected this thought to sour her pleasure at Piper’s gift to the Matri, but, no, it only make her more pleased with him. Yakov Piper had proved himself a perfect gentleman in their time together. He had issues. He was terribly confused about who and what he was at the moment, but he hadn’t given in to any dark temptations. Not yet, anyway.
“You are thinking about temptation,” the Prime beside her said. “I hope you’re thinking about me.” He ran a finger along her jawline.
“You’re laying it on a little thick, Carlos,” Laurent said as he came up behind the other Prime. He glanced at Dee over Carlos’s shoulder. “Forgive his technique. My young cousin here hasn’t been out of the crèche that long.”
“I think
he’s cute,” Dee said.
“Does that mean—”
“No,” both Dee and Laurent cut Carlos off.
Laurent offered an arm each to his lady and to Dee. “The garden is nice,” he said as he led them from the entry.
Carlos followed along. “You’re lovely,” he said when Dee gave him a look. “And unaccompanied,” he added to Laurent’s look. “I have rights.”
“The Law of the Hunt,” Laurent intoned. “Fetch the ladies champagne and I’ll let you hang around.”
Carlos took a left and they continued on through a large, crowded room toward the wide patio doors on the other side. Dee noted that the majority of the drop-dead beautiful women wore black. As did the men who crowded around them. The ratio was about four to one male to female. She’d heard that vampire females used to keep harems, or that Primes fought for mating rights. She could understand why both practices might have been part of Prime culture. She wondered if it was true, and why things had changed if it was true. As much as she liked collecting facts, she supposed it would be rude to march up to one of these goddesses in sexy black dresses and ask. After all, the rough and ready Prime members of the Angels weren’t all that forthcoming about themselves to their non-vampire buddies. It was kind of odd knowing more about Tribe Primes then about Clan and Family ones because of the things Piper had told her, when her vampire friends were from Clans and Families.
It always came back to thinking about Piper, didn’t it?
They stepped out of the Spanish-style house into a garden courtyard: a private area with a central fountain, trees, flowers, benches, and a wide, tiled patio where couples were dancing to music provided by a string quartet.
If you want to call that dancing, Dee thought after studying the sensuous, erotic way the dancers moved together. Couples coupling with their clothes on is more like it. Other couples moved in the garden shadows; there was nothing furtive in their moans and gasps. A couple perched on the edge of the central fountain. The female’s short skirt was hiked to her hip, and a Prime caressed her pale thigh. No one paid them any attention. Dee looked away.
Vampires were very sexual beings, she reminded herself. The sights and sounds as well as sensual energy pervading the place were quite a turn-on for a little old mortal girl like her. As if she wasn’t already nursing a simmering longing for Piper. Where was that Prime, anyway?
Primal Cravings Page 12
