“It’s Janie Parker,” Amy said with obvious disgust and outrage. “Can you effing believe it?”
I couldn’t. I really effing couldn’t.
Janie had recently been my bodyguard, hired to protect me from hunters due to my unfortunate and false reputation. In the end, I learned she’d been lying about who she was, and that she was actually a freelance mercenary who wanted revenge on me for killing her crazy hunter brother in self-defense—which is where my Slayer of Slayers rep had originated.
She’d redeemed herself by saving my butt in the end, but we definitely weren’t BFFs. The last I’d heard, she was engaged to another friend of mine, Quinn, after a super-fast romance that took even me by surprise.
Quinn used to be a vampire hunter, but he’d been turned into a vampire and had had a very difficult time dealing with that transition. To put it extremely mildly. I considered him a very good friend, although he’d originally wanted more from me than friendship. I tell you, if I hadn’t fallen hard for Thierry, Quinn would have gotten more. Even though as a hunter he’d tried to kill me a couple of times, he was a good guy. And damn hot, too.
He’d left town. Janie had left town. And I heard that they’d hooked up, which surprised me on many levels. The last I’d heard, they were going to come back here to get married.
By the look of Janie macking on my man, I’d say those plans were canceled.
I was going to kill her. And him. Not necessarily in that order.
But, no. No. There had to be more to this.
Thierry had suggested “seeing other people for appearance’s sake” last night, hadn’t he?
How it would help to convince Gideon that there was nothing between us anymore and that I’d definitely followed through with his explicit order for us to break up.
If there was one thing I didn’t have the time or patience for at the moment, it was being part of some lame vampire soap opera in the making. But I had started thinking that dating others might throw Gideon off our scent, so to speak.
I wondered if the pictures of him and Janie had anything to do with making everyone think we were definitely seeing other people. But if Janie was with Thierry right now, then I wondered where—
“Hey, Sarah,” a male voice over my left shoulder said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
I recognized that voice. And so did Amy. She looked past me with a shocked expression, which slowly turned into a wide and bright smile before her gaze moved to me again.
“You sneaky little devil,” she exclaimed. “Of course! This all makes sense now. Why didn’t you tell me you were back together? This is so wonderful!”
A man slid into the seat next to me. “Sarah likes to keep her secrets, doesn’t she? But yeah, Amy, we’re together and never been happier. Make sure you tell absolutely everybody you know, okay?”
She was already keying in a text message on her cell phone. “Way ahead of you. George is going to go ballistic when he hears about this. Ballistic!”
I slowly turned to look at Quinn. The shock at seeing him again out of the blue like this was enough to knock me completely speechless.
Quinn looked exactly the same as the last time I saw him, which, since it was only a month ago, wasn’t surprising. He had dark blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and a very attractive boyish charm about him even though I knew he was now forever thirty. He dressed casually in faded blue jeans and under a black leather winter jacket he wore a green T-shirt that fit his muscular frame perfectly.
I was used to seeing him rather unhappy and angsty, but today he had a smile on his face wide enough to partially reveal his fangs.
“You look gorgeous, Sarah,” he said, and then before I could say a word in reply or greeting, he leaned forward to kiss me.
My eyes widened and I heard a clicking sound as Amy took our picture.
He looked at her. “Good to see you, too, Amy.”
“Ditto.” She was beaming. “You have no idea how happy I am right now. I always thought you and Sarah were perfect together. I was totally on Team Quinn. It’s good to see she finally clued in to who her real Mr. Right is.”
“You’re obviously very savvy when it comes to love,” he told her. “That’s definitely what
I like most about you.”
“When I heard that you were getting married to Janie—”
He waved a hand. “Rumors.”
Her forehead creased. “But you told me yourself. When you called a couple weeks ago, remember?”
“Oh, right.” He coughed. “Uh… let’s just say that Janie and I had a change of heart. It happens. No hard feelings on either of our parts.”
“Awesome.” She slid the phone back into her bag. “Well, somebody’s feeling like a third wheel. I’m going to take off and leave you two lovebirds to it.”
“Um…” I began awkwardly. “Wait a minute, Amy—”
Quinn reached down to take my hand in his and he squeezed it. “We’ll see you later, Amy.
Thanks for taking care of my angel while I’ve been gone.”
She grinned. “No problem!”
She left with a few more excited glances over her shoulder at the two of us.
“She’s sweet,” Quinn said after she’d left the café completely. “A natural blond, right?
You should probably keep an eye on her in the future. Wouldn’t want her to hurt herself.”
“Quinn—”
“Come on.” He stood up. “Let’s go for a romantic walk outside, shall we?”
“But, Quinn—”
He squeezed my hand again and this time it actually hurt.
Okay, I got it. Shut up, Sarah.
We left the coffee shop and walked slowly down the street, hand in hand. I eyed him from the corner of my dark sunglasses. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“Not here,” he whispered, then picked up his pace. “Somebody might be following us. All you need to know is that we’ve started seeing each other again and all is well with the world.”
“Who contacted you?”
“Who do you think?”
Thierry, of course. Instead of being impressed by his planning skills, the thought that he’d done something like this without even giving me a heads-up kind of pissed me off. That man kept too many secrets from me—about the Red Devil and now this with Quinn and