Chapter 3
Theo sauntered into my tiny apartment, flopped onto the couch, and lay there, like a cat who didn’t belong but lived here now.
“You saved my life, you know,” he said, after a few minutes of pretending to be asleep again.
“I doubt that.” I hastily stuffed dirty socks, underwear, shirts, and whatever else I’d left strewn about my place into a heap on the bedroom floor, and then casually glided back into the main living area that also doubled as my kitchen.
My apartment had two main rooms and a tiny bathroom.
Not really big enough to hide my dirty laundry.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on at your place and I don’t want to. After you sleep off whatever you’re going through, we’re done. We don’t ever need to speak to each other again.”
“Okay.”
I’d expected something sassy back from him, but he just sighed and lay there, eyes closed. A little pale, maybe.
Was he suffering? He had passed out. Now he was here, I should probably make sure he wasn’t going to pass out again. “Do you need anything for the sunstroke? Tylenol?”
“A fresh vein?” he grumbled.
“Uh . . .” I rolled my lips together and looked away, at the wall, the TV, the blinds that were bent and didn’t close properly. “I don’t think—”
“Don’t worry, pool boy,” he chuckled. “You’re not my blood type.”
“Oh. Good. I mean, not good for you, I guess. Is blood a thing I can order from DoorDash?”
“No. But coke will take the edge of.” He arched a hopeful eyebrow. “You got any?”
“Coke as in Coca Cola, or . . .” He rolled his eyes. “Right, the other coke. Uh, no. I do not have that either. And I don’t think DoorDash does drugs.”
He shrugged. “You look the type, is all.”
Wow. “I look like a drug addict?”
“Yeah, ’zactly. Not the sleazy ones, the flashy ones,” he drawled, the consonants going soft. He was going under.
Flashy? How had he gotten that from my boring work clothes and slightly southern accent. I tried very, very hard not to be flashy. I was the opposite of flashy. Flashy was definitely not my deal. Drab. Dull. Boring. Not flashy.
Not anymore.
“Don’t die on my couch, okay?”
“Not planning on it . . . Just need to . . . sleep.”
I busied myself in the kitchen, pretending I had important things to be doing, and when I glanced over a little while later, his breathing had gone soft, his chest rising and falling. He really was out cold, but genuinely sleeping this time.
I leaned back against the countertop and frowned at America’s most infamous vampire heir.
He was trouble, that much was obvious. But after today, it wouldn’t matter.
The job was still salvageable. I just had to keep my head down, stay away from Theo’s family drama, and collect my paycheck.
Body in the neighbors’ pool? Not my problem.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and thumbed a message to Bet.
Guess who I got on my couch?
The dots bounced immediately.
Is it a dog?
Bet was the only person in my contacts list who I spoke to on the regular. She was also my community correction officer.
Kinda, but he’s not staying
I took a quick snap of the sleeping Theo—she wouldn’t spread it around—and sent it over.
That’s Theo Winterborne! How?!
Long story
Hey, Owen, that’s not what I meant when I said you need some friends
He needed a place to crash
Be careful
You know me
I do, that’s the problem
I put the phone down on the counter, propped my head on my hand, and watched Theo sleep.
While Theo slept, I did some googling.
Theo was the eldest of the two brothers, set to inherit a family fortune rumored to be worth billions. He was also well known for his headline-grabbing antics.
Most vampires, since they’d come out as a race ten years ago, kept to themselves in the old cities like New York, or back in Europe.
They went to the theatre, bought shares in tech companies, and generally stayed out of the spotlight.
Their coming out hadn’t been a smooth process.
The religious backlash had almost turned into a full-blown war, but once people started to realize they’d always been among us, and that their coming out meant we could see what they were up to, the religious fervor had mostly gone underground.
But in some states, it was still active, and generally, vampires continued to have a hard time integrating into society.
Kinda like how a wolf might feel showing up to an all-sheep party.
So, while they’d come out, most vampires stayed in the background, not making waves, just trying to get by.
Theo didn’t do quiet, though. He was everywhere, all over socials, A-list actor parties, attending the Met Gala in ridiculous attention-grabbing outfits with heels and more bare skin than fabric.
He was famous for being the vampire. But his homelife was rumored to be a car wreck.
His mother, Geraldine, had made herself into a successful businesswoman and politician, leaving a trail of missing people on each rung of the ladder.
Bentley wanted his brother out of the way so he could inherit the fortune.
He had openly hired people to kill Theo in the past, and wasn’t shy about it, calling it harmless fun.
The press loved it. Sibling rivalry at its most bloody.
The father, Leander, wasn’t in the press much, and when he did appear in public, it was usually on his wife’s arm.
Quiet, compared to the others, Leander had been the one who hired me when I’d answered an ad on Facebook.
We’d spoken over the phone but not met in person.
It all made for a life that suggested a quiet day on my couch was probably exactly what Theo needed. But a day was all he was getting.
I did not want to be anywhere near his brand of drama.
I had my own troubles to deal with. And I’d been doing just fine.
Apart from the crippling debt, a past I’d rather forget, and a criminal record around my neck that meant my college degree and high-flying job experience were worthless. So yeah, all good thanks.
I headed out for groceries around three p.m., and left a note for Theo with my number on it in case he wanted me to grab him anything from the store.
When I got back, he was sitting on my kitchen counter, hair wet from the shower, scrolling through his phone, alarmingly comfortable in my humble life.
I knew he’d be there, waiting for me, but part of me had hoped he’d be gone.
The new Owen part. Sensible. Professional.
Then there was the other part, the lonely part, who’d wanted him to stay.
And also the other other part that really wanted him to stay.
In my bed. I wasn’t acknowledging that part.
Yeah, it definitely would have been easier if he’d gone.
But Theo didn’t do easy, as I was about to find out.
“So . . . we got a problem,” he said.
“Uh, no. No ‘we’ anything.” I dumped the bag of groceries on the side. “Don’t tell me. Don’t wanna know.” I pulled a can of Diet Coke out of the bag and slid it across the counter toward him.
He pulled his gaze from his phone and tracked the can. “What’s that?”
“I figured you might need it?” He’d asked for cocaine. Maybe that was close enough. “They used to put cocaine in it.”
He looked up through his lashes. “Used to. Like . . . a hundred years ago.”
“Yeah, well, now it has sweeteners. Those are just as bad.”
His lips twitched. “You don’t know much about vampires, huh?”
“Never had much call to. Still don’t need to.” I checked the time on my phone. “When do you leave?”
I watched his face soften, and his eyes go a little bigger. “Yeah, about that—”
“No.”
He stopped and smiled, trying to use that smile to lever under my defenses. “You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Doesn’t matter, it’s a no.” I smiled my sweetest smile to fend off his sly one.
“Okay, sure.” He hopped off the counter, slipped his phone into his pocket, and stepped inside my personal space, making my tiny kitchen shrink around us.
I got a waft of my own shampoo off him, and had to blink to stop my thoughts from tumbling over and my body getting all interested in the slab of sexy male within kissing distance.
No. Nope. Heck no. Wasn’t thinking about his lips.
How they made a mouth shaped like a little bow.
How the skin of his neck might feel between my teeth.
How firm his body would feel under my roaming hands.
What it might feel like to have his hands on me.
To walk him back against the counter, and get all up and all over him, to hear him gasp, and oh-kay . . .
I looked up, catching his gaze. His dark eyes stayed on mine a second longer than was polite, like they had in his garden. What did he see? I wasn’t much to look at. Sandy hair, Florida tan from working outdoors. Blue eyes from my mother. Average, boring. Definitely did not have a nipple ring.
“Yeah, so . . .” He cleared the croak from his throat and stepped back. “Your kitchen’s real small, you know that?”
“Yeah, so is my paycheck. It’s like there’s some kind of correlation.”
“My bathroom is bigger than your whole place. I’ll have to show you sometime. Anyway—” he rushed on, before I could refuse, and ambled into the living area by my tired couch. “So, the body we saw . . . Yeah, turns out the dead guy was the local pool boy.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
He blinked. “You knew?”
“Yeah. While you were out cold in the shrubbery, the creepy guy in the black robe offered me the dead guy’s job.”
Theo’s dark eyebrows pinched together. “Wow. You work fast.”
Now he was making out like I’d made a calculated business decision “I didn’t—it wasn’t deliberate.”
“You accidently took the dead guy’s job while his body was floating in the pool?”
“No, I mean yeah, maybe. It happened fast. I wasn’t really thinking.”
He stared for a beat, thoughts working behind his eyes. “Wow, okay, so . . . anyway . . . After you kidnapped me—”
I leaned against the kitchen counter and folded my arms. “After you stowed away in my car.”
“We definitely left together.”
“No, we definitely did not.”