Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82480 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 330(@250wpm)___ 275(@300wpm)
But that wasn’t going to happen, was it.
She wasn’t in clinical shock. She was just… mortified.
“Yes, I am bleeding,” he said. And then he answered the question that was on her face. “Yes, he is right.”
Anne just stayed where she was, staring down at him like she’d lost touch with reality. Then again, she had her bare feet on the smudge mark created when her ex-boyfriend had been sent back to the Omega… and her current boyfriend, a vampire, was bleeding out in front of her refrigerator.
No, wait, guess he was by her oven.
And not that he was her boyfriend.
The sheen of tears that glossed her eyes was the worst condemnation of him and his actions that he could imagine.
“I’m sorry, Anne,” he choked out. “I didn’t know how to tell you, what to say—”
“Who do I call?” she cut in roughly. “Your house? Do I call your butler? And please, don’t lie to me about some boss. You’re the one who lives there. Who do I call to get you help.”
“Give me the phone, I’ll do it—”
“No, I’ll make the call.”
She turned around and took a receiver off a wall-mounted cradle. As her trembling finger dialed the number he’d given her on a piece of paper the night before, it struck him that she must have memorized the sequence.
And dearest Virgin Scribe, he wished he could go back to the moment when they’d been standing by the box van just before she’d left. He’d insisted she call if she needed help and she had looked up at him as if he were some kind of hero.
“Hello?” she said abruptly. “Ah, Fritz? This is Anne. Darius has been stabbed by—I don’t know what it is, it’s gone… now… I, well, he needs help. He’s been stabbed and I can’t take him to a—so what do I—”
She fell into an mmm-hmm. And followed that with another one. “My address is—oh, you know it already. All right. Thanks, and I hope you—find someone fast. To come here. There’s a lot of blood.”
As she hung up, her eyes returned to Darius, and he realized that he might have been the one who’d been stabbed in the gut… but she was the one who had died.
And it was all his fault.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As Anne rehung the receiver on its prongs, she realized what was wrong. Well, okay… there were a lot of things that were wrong, but now she remembered one specific inexplicable.
Darius’s back.
When he had taken off his shirt upstairs, and she had put her arms around him… there had been no bandages. And as he had left her room to go see about the noise, there had been nothing marring his smooth skin. No burns. No scars. Not even a blemish or discoloration. Nothing.
As if he hadn’t been lit on fire the night before.
She hadn’t noticed it at the time. And there had been so many other things she had dismissed or been too distracted to track: The deference the butler had paid him. The way Darius had, in fact, never smiled widely or flashed his front teeth. The vague disclosure about what he did for work. And then there had been those other men who had shown up—
And that broken jar with the black inky stuff that had smelled… exactly like Bruce just had. Right before he’d up and disappeared, right in front of her eyes.
What the hell was happening in Caldwell.
“Vampire,” she said weakly.
“It’s not what you think.”
“You’re right, because I thought you were…” As she threw up her hands, she noticed she still had his gun in her palm—and shouldn’t that have shocked her? Well, it didn’t. It was barely a blip on her radar considering everything else. “I thought you were like me.”
“I am.”
“You are not. Not in any way.” She laughed in a bitter fashion. Then closed her eyes. “And you lied to me, too. God, I’m such an idiot—”
“Don’t say that—”
“What do you call a woman who traded in someone like Bruce for… whatever the hell you are? And to think I was worried about a wife and two kids? Jesus. I had no idea the real problem was fucking Dracula.”
As he cursed under his breath and dragged a hand through his hair, she fanned the air in front of her nose. “This stench is the same as what was around the vase I dropped at your house—and that is your house. Isn’t it. Isn’t it!”
Her voice was getting louder, but like she cared about that?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry. You keep something like this from me? I mean…” As her anger crested, she knew she had to get control of herself, and took a deep breath. “Even after what I told you… about how Bruce lied to me—and oh, my God, what the hell did he turn into? What happened here? What—”