When the kiss broke off and my heartbeat came back to a normal pace, I looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “A message on a coaster? Is that seriously the best you could do?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d be able to get away. Calling or messaging you on your phone could be traced.”
“And being spotted in a nightclub buying me drinks is much less risky?”
“I’m very discreet.”
I managed to smile. “By the way, your handwriting is nearly illegible.”
His mouth quirked. “Yet you figured out what it said.”
“Barely.” I grabbed hold of his black shirt and kissed him again quickly. We were shielded by the very romantic trash holders on either side of us but I still felt nervous that somebody might see us together. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to see you.” His silver-eyed gaze moved down the length of me and back up to my face.
Just as the bartender had described my drink sender, Thierry de Bennicoeur was tall and knee-weakeningly delicious—my words, not his. Dark hair, broad shoulders, full lips, straight nose, stern black eyebrows over gray eyes that sometimes appeared to be silver.
You’d never expect that he was pushing seven hundred years old, a vampire sired during the Black Death plague in Europe in the 1400s.
Not even my closest friends could find out we were still together. Amy and George were total blabbermouths. Since I wasn’t the best secret-keeper in the universe it had been sheer torture to keep my mouth shut.
I had to keep my mouth shut about a lot of things.
I even kept a few things from Thierry.
For example, if he knew that over the last week and a half I’d become Gideon Chase’s personal assistant and general errand girl, he wouldn’t be very happy about that.
And that was an understatement.
He considered Gideon the most dangerous man in the world—and somebody he wanted me to stay far away from for my own safety. But when the burned-by-hellfire leader of the vampire hunters wanted something, he could be extremely… well, insistent was a good word.
Gideon couldn’t find out that Thierry and I were still together, and Thierry couldn’t find out I was currently at Gideon’s beck and call.
Gideon usually checked in with me daily. In fact, he’d sent me to pick up a package for him earlier that day on the other side of the city. I got the impression he knew where I was and who I was with at all times. Just being in the alley with Thierry for a few stolen moments made me extremely nervous and more paranoid than usual. Which was saying something.
“Any luck finding Gideon’s hired guns?” I asked.
His expression was tight. “No. That’s one of the reasons I needed to see you this evening.”
“To tell me to be careful?”
“Of course.” He hissed out a long sigh. “I hate standing back and seeing you in harm’s way like this. It has to stop.”
“It will.”
“Not if we can’t discover his secrets. He has too much power at the moment, even if it’s only lent itself to verbal threats. If he harms you—”
“He hasn’t.” I stroked Thierry’s tense face. “Gideon isn’t going to hurt me.”
“Not until he gets what he wants.”
“Exactly.” I frowned. Wait. That didn’t make me feel much better.
“I will kill him,” he said darkly. “If he harms you in any way, the pain from the hellfire will be a pleasant memory for him.”
“I appreciate the offer of mayhem and torture, really. But it’s best if we stay calm and collected about this.”
“You seem calm and collected enough for the both of us.”
“I’m trying to stay Zen. I do yoga now, you know.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You do?”
“Well, I have an instructional DVD on yoga. Haven’t had a chance to watch it with all the drama going on lately, but I’m looking forward to it.”
“We must find a solution in three days. You cannot sire him.”
Thierry had a black-and-white attitude about pretty much everything. He drew his lines in the sand in permanent ink—and how he felt about Gideon was one of those lines. To him, Gideon was 100 percent evil incarnate. Couldn’t say I blamed him much for that impression. After all, Gideon was the leader of the hunters. They didn’t exactly make our lives a Technicolor musical production number. And Gideon, from everything I’d heard about him, had no problem getting his hands dirty when it came to slaying. He was exactly like Buffy—that is, if she was a six-foot-five billionaire playboy with hellfire scars from slaying a demon. And a tendency to kill things that weren’t actually evil.
So, really, not like Buffy at all.
“I need to get back inside,” I said, “and try to act like everything’s normal—”
Another kiss managed to easily push my words and thoughts away. Thierry could kiss. Six hundred years of practice would make someone an expert, after all. I’d prefer not to give a lot of thought to how many women may have come before me. We both had our romantic histories. His was simply a little longer than mine, that’s all.
By about 650 years.
My heart felt heavy when we parted. This whole situation seriously sucked. Just when I found a man I could be completely crazy about—despite our many differences—and one who loved me in return, we couldn’t be together except for stolen moments like this.
“You shouldn’t try to see me again till this is all over.” I tried to ignore the lump in my throat. “I’m afraid he’s going to find out.”
“Perhaps you should have taken Amy up on the blind date she arranged for you.”
I eyed him. “So Gideon’s not the only one spying on me?”
He smiled. “If you had someone new in your life, or I in mine, Gideon would have no suspicions about us, would he?”
“Good point. But are you trying to say you want to see other people? Because I’m in the mood to kick some ass tonight and it might be yours.”
Amusement slid behind his gaze. “I’m talking about appearances, nothing more. In fact, I think it’s a very good idea.”
“You want me to start dating somebody else?”
“Desperate times call for drastic measures. And speaking of that—” He was quiet for a moment. “You need to know something important.”
That sounded ominous. “What?”