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He grinned, almost loopily, like a hausfrau who’d had too many glasses of wine at a book-club meeting. “Really? Because I detect a nice, tangy note of feminine arousal in the room. And I don’t think it’s coming from me.”
I leaned closer than was probably advisable when dealing with an out-of-sorts creature of the night. I growled. “I know vampires are supposed to be the Space Mountain of the sexual carnival. But I have made it a point not to become directly involved in anything in your world, and that includes …”
“Behaving in the manner of a deranged howler monkey?” he offered blandly, cocking his head to the side and studying my face.
I dropped my head in defeat, groaning. “Gigi.”
“Your eyes are such a lovely shade of blue,” he said, tilting my chin so he could stare up at me. I blushed, busying myself with putting away the wet washcloth. And then he had to ruin it by squinting and asking, “Have you always had four of them?”
“Four what?”
“Eyes.”
“Hey, are you OK?” I asked, placing a hand against his cheek. His skin felt clammy, damp, like my own after a fever had broken.
Vampires weren’t supposed to get fevers.
“Cal?”
Waving his hand in front of his face, as if he’d never seen his own fingers before, he asked, “Where was I?”
“Howler monkeys.”
He gave me a lopsided grin. “It was the last thing I heard before I …”
“Passed out,” I supplied.
He frowned. “Vampires don’t pass out.”
“They do if they’ve been poisoned and severely weakened.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You enjoy pointing that out, don’t you?”
I smirked, and his own lips curled at the sight of it. “A little.”
—
When Cal inevitably dozed off again, I checked my calendar. I had a few deliveries to make the next day, not to mention picking up Ms. Wexler’s dry-cleaning and meeting the contractor who was installing a sizable blood chiller in Mr. Kraznov’s kitchen pantry.
I had three missed calls from clients, not to mention an obscene number of e-mails. Working my way through the requests, complaints, and demands, I took notes and filed them in my day planner. I made lists and a to-do spreadsheet.
Still, if he didn’t improve, I wasn’t comfortable leaving Cal alone in the house while I went to work. He wasn’t well. What if he got worse or threw up on something irreplaceable? I doubted he would be amused if he woke up unattended. He would probably consider it a violation of our verbal contract.
I was going to have to call my backup—Jolene Lavelle, a friend of Jane’s who sometimes filled in for me. Jolene, a stay-at-home mother of twins, was happy to have a reason to leave the house during the day. And riding around in the car was the only way she could get her babies to nap in the afternoons. It was a win-win.
Crap.
Jane.
I’d planned Jane Jameson’s wedding to her sire, Gabriel Nightengale, the year before. A recently turned librarian who’d opened an occult bookshop, she was a handy reference for new vampires in the area, and it was always interesting to see what sort of mess she’d created for herself.
For instance, on the night of her wedding, she was kidnapped by an angry redneck bent on revenge. I spent several hours coaxing her family into staying at the wedding site by opening the bar early, creative use of charades, and finally, hiding as many purses as I could within the depths of Jane’s house so they couldn’t leave. I endured passive-aggressive insults, threats of an “ass whipping,” and several attempts to recruit me into selling Tupperware. And that was just from Jane’s cousin Junie.
When she found out about my “heroics” in dealing with her relatives, Jane pledged her eternal friendship to me—which takes on a whole new meaning when it’s coming from a vampire. Funny, brilliant, and just awkward enough to make my job interesting, she was one of the few brides I actually wanted to maintain contact with after the ceremony. I went into her shop, Specialty Books, on occasion just to touch base. And there had been a few movie nights, a disastrous excursion to a night spa, and a failed attempt to start a book club. We never managed to get the book discussion going because Jolene got distracted by the snacks.
And because Jane had signed on as one of my day-walker clients, I’d delivered a case of Faux Type O to her house a week before. Jane, her husband, Gabriel, and her recently turned teenage protégé, Jamie, drank it on a regular basis. Cal said that most of the affected bottles had been reclaimed by the Council, but what if a bad one got mixed in with her delivery? What if she drank it around her very human friend Zeb? Or Jolene or their twins? Or God forbid, her living family members? I couldn’t risk my friend getting hurt or hurting someone she cared about over something as stupid as vampire PR.
On quiet feet, I crept toward the far side of the house. Glancing down the hallway and listening for sounds of stirring from Cal’s room, I surreptitiously dialed Jane’s number. On the other end of the line, I heard a yawn and a string of curses while Jane bobbled her cell and dropped it on the nightstand before finally putting it to her ear. “Yello?”
