I suspect some culinary disaster to greet me when I find him beyond the bar counter, but instead he’s just smiling tenderly my way.
“What?” I ask.
“You’ve come up with something villainous, haven’t you?”
I scoff and cross my arms. “Excuseyou. I’m a saint.”
“Mmhm.” He lowers his gaze back to whatever he’s working on. “A little saint, playing amid her murderboards.”
“There hasn’t been a murder, so these can’t be murderboards.” I roll my eyes back to my data. The facts. The speculations I need to find proof for or disregard.
My heart flutters at the sight.
This is…so much fun.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had this much fun.
“Did you and Wynn set a bed on fire?” I ask. “Like. Intentionally?”
“Nothing like a little bonding arson with my future brother-in-law, right?”
Yes, then.
My goodness.
Dominic is crazy. Crazy like me. Crazy like my family. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
I continue, “And is there a possibility that you paid for the replacement, even though that old guest bed was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down, and it’s entirely possible someone died in it?”
“Well, to be sure I wasn’t supplied any specific details of that nature… Ironic, though, isn’t it? For someone to have died in the bed that had to die for me to wind up sleeping in a casket?”
“That’s not an answer to my question. The mattress December picked was five thousand dollars.”
“Pocket change for an ancient evil like myself, I’m sure.”
A few nights ago, I reviewed my perfect male lead binder after bringing it home from book club and getting dinner started. While it’s true December dreadfully meddled withmanyparts of it, thefinancial securitytrope was purely my doing.
Dominic might have money.
Which begs a question I don’t usually bother with, considering it’ssmall talkthat feels somewhatinvasive, but I say, “Dominic, what do you do for a living?”
“Drink blood.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be so easy.
It wouldn’t be fun at all if it were so easy, though.
“I mean, what schemes have resulted in your amassing of such monumental wealth? Youdolive in a castle, after all. A castle shrouded in glamour and dark forests. How did you afford the land?”
“It sounds like magic afforded me the land, does it not?”
I suppose. But that solution feels much too cheap.
I come out and say it. “Are you rich?”
“What isrich?”
“Could you afford a yacht?”
