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Chapter 27
About an hour after the orgasm that completely incapacitated her, Lauren was awakened by her phone ringing, and she rolled over and looked at it. Gavin’s image appeared, and she answered without even considering doing anything else. If he was home, he’d have knocked on the door.
“Are you okay?”
“I am. I’ve been back a few hours, but I didn’t want to interrupt you and your lion. Do you want to come to me, or shall I come to you? Nick needs to hear this as well, so it’ll work for me to come to the two of you.”
Lauren felt her brows draw together. “How did you know not to knock on the door? I thought the rooms were soundproof?”
“I asked Apollonius to flash us to you, and he explained why that might be awkward.”
“You didn’t answer my first question. Are you okay?”
“You’ll scent some damage. I was injured but have mostly healed. I will explain in person.”
He sounded terribly formal. Was that because he was injured, or because she’d fucked Nick? Only one way to find out. “We haven’t showered. If you want to come up, you can in about five minutes, or you can wait thirty minutes and we’ll meet you in the dining area, because I’m starving.”
“I will bring food for you and your cat. I’ll arrive in five to ten minutes.”
She hung up, and Nick said, “He’s bringing food for me? That means he isn’t pissed. It’s a…” he shrugged. “I expected him to say he’d meet us in the dining room. Feeding me there would be impersonal, but bringing it here? Vampires only personally feed the people who feed them, or those they care about. I’m one of those people he’ll only ask to feed from in times of battle or war, when he needs the energy of a Rex, otherwise, I send tribute.”
Gavin had told her to do whatever was necessary to repair her relationship with Nick, and she’d taken him at his word. Still, she’d worried a tiny bit he might get butt-hurt over them having sex. It seemed he was going to be okay with it, though, and Lauren’s gut relaxed, when she didn’t know it’d been tense. She didn’t want Nick to know she hadn’t been absolutely certain of Gavin’s reaction, so she aimed the conversation in another direction.
“You send your lionesses to feed him? Do they have to do more?”
“Nathan made sure I had two lionesses who wouldn’t mind being a feed-and-fuck to a vampire. It’s once a month, and they alternate. It’s fine.”
Lauren had the sense she should be upset, but she wasn’t. Gavin was the Master of the City, and it was his right to demand tribute from the shapeshifters he allowed to live in his territory. Sending tribute once a month was standard, from what she gathered, and she trusted that Nathan had, indeed, found two lionesses who wouldn’t mind doing so every other month.
She went to the restroom, took a two-minute shower without getting her hair wet, and then stepped into her closet, where she finished drying off before dressing in stretchy jeans and a t-shirt, with an exercise bra because she didn’t know what the rest of the night would entail. She reached for the boots from her mother’s bootmaker, and rolled her eyes at the vampire, though she was touched at his many attempts to make her feel welcome in his home.
Nick was dressed back in his jeans and shirt when she came out of her closet, and his scent told her he hadn’t showered. She turned the television on so it would rotate through outside views of the coterie house.
Strong, warm arms enveloped her from behind, and she turned to face the lion at her back, but buried her face in his chest. “I don’t want to ever fight with you like that again.”
“Agreed. It’s good to have you back in my arms.”
“And it’s good to be back in your arms. I wish I wasn’t trying to strategize how much we should touch each other in front of Gavin. We aren’t doing anything wrong, and I refuse to hide things from him, and yet…”
“It doesn’t feel as if we should flaunt it? Yeah, I find myself thinking along the same lines. I’m going to have to get used to you touching him, so don’t try to make things easier on me, either. I guess this is a little like jumping into the deep end, all at once.”
A knock sounded on the door. Lauren pulled out of Nick’s arms and opened her door to the vampire who came, as promised, bearing a cart loaded down with food.
She moved between Gavin and the cart to give him a hug, and he gave her a short kiss before pulling the cart inside. “Country fried steaks, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, gravy, biscuits, peach preserves for Lauren, grape jam for Nick.”
The cart had sides that came up, to turn it into a table, and Nick brought two chairs from near Lauren’s window for them to sit and eat. Within moments, he and Lauren were seated and eating, and Gavin was sitting in an armed chair, a few feet away.
“I smell divinity on you,” Lauren told Gavin, “but it isn’t Mordecai. A powerful old god let you feed from him?”
“Apollonius,” Nick said. “Not just blood, but energy. A good bit of both, which tells me you were badly injured.”
Gavin nodded. “The entire estate was empty, but Morella had set booby traps designed to go off if someone flashed in. If Apollonius hadn’t gotten us out in milliseconds, I’d be dead, and he’d still be working on reanimating his ashes.”
“They knew he was coming.”
“Apollonius says he has reason to believe someone inside the Concilio is part of this, so he’s keeping his investigation quiet, but I believe this tells him he hasn’t kept it as secretive as he thought.”
“If you put it out into the vampire community that Morella fled her home rather than risk your wrath, it might bring her out.” Nick mused.
