Chapter 24 #2
“Okay,” I said without hesitation. If there was one thing I’d learned over the past two weeks, it was that Luther might be suspicious by nature, but once he was on your side, he was really on your side. “Where is it?”
“Boston,” he drawled, his gray eyes on my face, as if he fully expected me to have a reaction to it. I hadn’t told him anything, so that had to be a figment of my guilty imagination. The word hit like a slap, like cold water splashing down my spine.
I shook my head immediately. “I can’t go back there,” I told him, and dread coiled through my belly at the thought.
It had been so hard to keep it together the past few months before I got here.
The desperate job-hunting, as I was forced to search further and wider to even get a response.
No museum or library would have me; I’d even tried auction houses as a consultant and been turned away.
My savings had almost been gone by then, I had not just desperate, I’d been about to lose my home.
Until Mayor Hightower—Grandma Liz—had reached out to me.
His brow furrowed as he considered my answer and the probably slightly panicked edge to my tone.
I saw concern in his gray eyes, but a shiver shot down my spine as if he were trying to peer a little too deep into my soul, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let him in.
“Why?” he asked when I didn’t say anything further but hovered there beside the table and him.
I glanced toward the doorway out of habit, toward where Drew had been standing, but it was empty now.
My cheeks burned anyway. I really didn’t like this story; I’d been an idiot all around, falling for my nerdy, handsome boss before I realized what a jerk he was beneath the handsome, mild-mannered exterior.
“I… dated my boss,” I said quietly, as if saying it out loud were somehow worse than living it.
“At the preservation lab. It was a mistake, of course. I should have known dating my boss was a terrible idea. When I ended it, he didn’t take it well, and things got…
inappropriate. I got angry.” A humorless laugh escaped me.
“I kicked him in the groin.” There, that was it, the big reason I’d taken a random job at a supposedly tiny, unimpressive library to attempt to salvage my career and soothe my frayed nerves.
Luther blinked once, as if he couldn’t quite believe what I’d said.
His gaze traveled from my face down to my sneaker-clad feet, as if he were trying to figure out which one I’d used to kick David.
It was actually kind of funny. I knew I’d seesawed between this shocked hesitation and angry sass with him, but I doubted he had ever once thought I’d be capable of physical violence.
“He fired me,” I continued a bit more boldly when he kept staring, but any hint of judgment remained masked by his surprise.
“And then he made sure I couldn’t get hired anywhere in Boston again.
” Not just Boston—pretty much any major institute had been out.
Everyone wanted references before hiring, and my jerk of an ex was my reference.
He made sure nobody wanted me. Grandma Liz might be the only person who hadn’t called David to check on my work ethics, or perhaps she had, but she’d seen right through him. I could see that happening.
The air around us shifted as the last of my sentence hung between us.
Luther’s eyes glowed faintly silver, edged with something dangerous.
He’d never shown me much of the other side of him, not yet, but now, a hint of fang flashed as his lips parted.
“This man,” he said softly, “will not escape consequences. Trust me on that, darling.”
Instead of fear at the sight of something so dangerous and otherworldly, I felt wonder, even acceptance.
This town had already taught me that some monsters were happy to be your best friend or your most passionate lover.
Perhaps I really had found my place when I answered Grandma Liz’s ad at my lowest point in life.
“Really? You want to kick his ass? Perhaps we’d better avoid him, then…
” I said with a smile. The light in his eyes flashed, then dimmed, and his mouth tilted up at the corner—not quite a smile, but amused—although I sensed that his anger had not abated.
When I pulled him down for a kiss, he came, mouth brushing mine so very tenderly that I knew he wanted me to know that he cared.
Plans formed quickly after that, but I didn’t realize how fast Luther could move when he felt the situation warranted it.
We weren’t leaving that weekend or tomorrow; no, we were traveling today.
In short order, I found myself saying goodbyes to people in town.
Gwen hugged me tight when I ran by the B&B to tell her.
She was sorting tools in the basement so she could refinish the library table tomorrow.
“I heard you guys had a lead, so I figured I’d take care of the table while you were out! ”
Grandma Liz, at the town hall, was neck-deep in her own research, it appeared, on the computer.
She made a funny sight, leaned in close with a beautiful hand-knitted scarf around her shoulders.
I expected glasses perched on the tip of her nose, but apparently, werewolf eyes didn’t need that kind of help.
She waved Luther and me away like we were pests.
“Yes, yes, go, you lovebirds. I have a lead of my own to chase down.”
Belfry insisted on coming, despite Luther’s gentle reminder about the Boston coven and the other familiars he despised that lived there.
We need my protection, Belfry declared, a mutinous look in his beady black eyes.
I had discovered him waiting by the car with a huge (for a bat) satchel full of silk vests in various shades of red.
Luther made no further comment, but picked up Belfry’s luggage to put it with our own.
I found myself returning my rental car at the nearest airport a few hours later.
Then, boarding a first-class flight beside a vampire and a bat nobody even looked twice at.
I was pretty sure you couldn’t just take a bat across state lines, but Belfry might as well have been invisible to the staff.
As the plane lifted into the sky, Luther curled his fingers around my hand and gave a gentle squeeze.
The dread building in my stomach twisted with something else: hope.
For the first time, I believed I might be able to face Boston again. With him.