Chapter 6
The not-date began as I pulled up to the house and stepped out onto the paved driveway.
Cool night air whispered through the towering palms. The house itself glittered in the dark, all pointed angles, steep gables, and tall arched windows lit gold from the inside.
Pale stone looked silver under the moonlight, and wrought iron curled along the balconies.
A couple of spires stabbed up into the night sky.
It looked like the kind of place that had opinions about your shoes and life choices—beautiful, and faintly threatening, which tracked, considering the owner.
I always went around the back via the side path, never through the front door, so tonight it felt wrong, stepping under the porch to knock.
All the windows blazed. Music thumped from somewhere inside, sounding distant.
I caught my reflection in the porch’s little glass windows and ran a hand over my hair. I’d chosen a nice shirt over black jeans. Not too much. Not a date. Just a . . . whatever this was. I wanted information on Jay. What Theo wanted, I wasn’t sure, but I was about to find out.
The door flung open, and Theo waved me in.
His dark hair was in its natural mop. No curls, but a few licks.
He wore a plain black button-down shirt, and had left it untucked with a few buttons undone at the collar.
His pants were wide-legged and loose, the fabric light and easy, giving hints of a fine body beneath.
He held out a beer, his smile loose and moving on his lips.
“You want a tour?” he asked.
I took the beer and gaped at the cavernous reception hall. A glossy grand piano sat beneath the curved staircase, looking tiny compared to the rest of the space. “Uhm, sure. Do you play?” I asked, nodding at the piano.
“Pfft, not really. It’s mostly for show.”
He took me through each of the rooms, his voice echoing off the walls while he explained how the house had been built long before Coconut Grove was Coconut Grove, back when this stretch was mangrove and mosquitoes and not much else.
The neighborhood had grown up around it, he said, streets bending to make room, the whole city rising on every side while the house just sat there refusing to budge.
Older than most of Miami. A stubborn holdout from a Florida that didn’t exist anymore, the kind of place developers must have circled for a century and never once got their hands on.
He pointed out paintings older than some countries, heavy gold frames, dead Witherbornes staring down from the walls like they were checking my references.
By the sixth room, I’d stopped listening to much of what he was saying, my attention less on the house, and more on the man telling me about it.
He moved easily, gracefully even, and quick. I had to jog a few times to keep up.
His smile was alive tonight, moving as quick as his steps. His eyes were bright too. The whole effect was magnetic. I caught myself staring, pulled my gaze away, and took a swig of my beer.
“You still with me?” he asked.
“Yeah, sorry, I . . .” I trailed off, caught by his smile again.
“I’ve talked long enough about the boring house, huh?”
“No, your house is lovely. I just . . . It’s been a long day.”
“Yeah, doing what?”
“Pool stuff.”
“Right.” He grinned, teeth flashing white. “So, you gonna ask me about Jay or are you building up to it?”
“I uh . . .” I laughed a little nervously. “Am I that obvious?”
We’d made it to the patio and the sunshade.
“That’s why you’re here, right?” Theo asked, walking the length of the pool to the pool house.
The lights blazed inside. The pool house was what it sounded like—a three-room, one-floor building with a glass wall along the pool side.
Inside, it looked like a five-star hotel room with all the luxury fixtures and fittings that were so expensive nobody knew what they cost. Most days when I’d arrived for work, the blinds were down, but tonight they’d been opened right up.
Music played inside. Just background noise. Nothing too loud or shouty.
“I come out here most nights,” he said, sitting on the couch. “The house gets too much. Sit, Owen. Relax. Let’s talk.”
Relax alone with the billionaire vampire in his mansion. Right. And how was I supposed to do that, exactly?
I sat on the second couch, the low coffee table between us, where Theo put his beer now. Relax. Okay. I could do that. I sat on the edge of the cushions, beer on my knee, and willed my shoulders to come down and my heart to slow.
“It wasn’t what you think,” Theo said, leaning back again.
“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” I told him.
“I have a good idea. Let me take a wild stab in the dark. You think Jay and I were a thing, right?”
“No, actually. I mean, I think you liked him. Maybe liked him a lot.”
Theo waited for me to go on, and when I didn’t, he smiled softly. “You notice things, Owen. You’ve got an eye for detail. It’s why you’re good at your job. You’re methodical. I bet it drives your friends crazy, huh?”
It used to. When I’d had friends. They’d been the kind of friends who’d loved my methodical mind so much they’d used it for their own gain, and then they’d used me.
“We’re not so different,” Theo added.
“Right.” I laughed. “We have so much in common. I forgot to mention my second house in Connecticut and the German sports car I don’t own.”
“No.” His smile slipped down. “I meant we’re lacking in friends, right? You . . . because you’re you. And I don’t have friends, because—”
“You’re an asshole?”
He laughed, bright and loud. “Wow. There it is! The brutal honesty. You just say it as it is, huh?”
“I try not to bullshit people. I had enough of that . . . before . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to tell him too much about before. Was that why he’d asked me over? So he could learn about my past?
“Jay was a friend,” he said, sobering. He dropped his sparkling gaze to the beer on the table, then sat forward again, scooped up the beer, and took a drink.
After he’d lowered it, his fingers tapped on the glass.
“Maybe my only real one. You think people wanna know who I am? They don’t give a shit about me.
They want the house, the money, influence, the story, or they just wanna fuck a vampire because every TV show and movie ever has told ’em it’d be wild. ”
“Is it?” Holy sheet, that one had escaped my brain-to-mouth filter. “I mean—I didn’t mean—that’s not what I meant.” That had been exactly what I’d meant.
His eyebrows shot up, then he laughed, a real, honest laugh. “If you’re like this after one beer, I can’t wait to see you after six.”
That wasn’t happening. “One is enough. I’m driving.”
“You can crash here.” He gestured at the pool house around us. “Nobody will bother you. No one comes out here.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Theo’s gaze settled on me again, while he turned over something in his mind. How much to tell me, maybe. “Jay was a good guy, like you. Boring too, also like you. You’d have gotten along.”
I huffed at that. If only Theo knew the person I’d been. I dropped my smile before he could read too much into it.
“Could have talked about pools all day,” he added.
“Pools are actually very interesting,” I said, because apparently the brain-to-mouth filter was offline again.
“People think it’s just water in a hole, but it’s not.
It’s a closed system. Everything affects everything else.
Sunlight burns off chlorine, rain messes with the alkalinity, leaves add phosphates, bodies change the chemistry.
Uhm, human bodies, I mean. Living ones. Mostly.
And if the pH drifts too high, the chlorine’s basically useless, but if it drops too low, the water starts eating metal, grout, skin .
. .” I glanced at Theo’s blank face and realized he absolutely had not asked for a science lesson.
“So. Yeah. Pools. Wet and blue. That’s the main thing. ”
He does not care about pools, dumbass.
His grin grew. “That’s what I mean. Most people would treat it like some side gig, but for you, pools are serious. You’re serious.”
He said it like it was a good thing, and I didn’t know what to do with that. Another smile, another drink. I was going to need another beer soon, if I didn’t slow down.
Theo’s gaze had dropped, tracking lower. Was he looking at my throat?
“Anyway . . .” He looked out the wall of windows at the pool. “I liked Jay. We’d come out here, smoke weed, and talk.”
“Did Jay have any enemies?”
Theo snorted again. “Not subtle, are you?”
I chuckled. “I’ve been told that before.”
“I like that. Your honesty. Like it a lot.” That long gaze again. He didn’t blink, that’s what made his long glances so intense.
Oh-kay.
“I’m surrounded by people who lie to me all day,” he said, smiling but not meaning to. “My family are the worst for it. Sometimes I just need someone to tell me how shit is, so I don’t get lost in my own fantasy.”
“Your life is a lie?”
“Not my life. Me.” He looked up and blinked slowly.
“Whatever . . . I’m not drunk enough for this.
You’re a good listener. I hate it. Makes me wanna talk.
” He flopped back, legs spread, and gazed out at the glowing pool again.
“Last thing I said to him was how I wanted out of this TV drama. Then he was gone.”
The sadness and loss in his voice was real. And if I believed him, then he really was alone. “You knew he was dead in your neighbors’ pool that morning, that’s why you sent me over there?”
Theo dropped his gaze. He’d draped his arm over the back of the couch cushions, and tapped his fingers there now. “Yeah. But I don’t know who did it. The neighbor, maybe. Bentley, probably. But he’d take great pleasure in telling me if he had. Also, he’s a shit liar.”
“He’d do that? Kill someone to get to you?”
“Absolutely. He once massacred my snail farm. Dead snails everywhere. It was fuckin’ brutal.”