And I don’t know if that made me feel better or worse.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“What?”
Pike let out a long sigh and leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. The motion caused his semifitted black tee to rise just the smallest bit—just enough to expose a thin, two-inch trail of jet black hair leading from his very kissable belly button and disappearing into the gathered elastic of his boxer shorts. I licked my lips.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well . . .”
I did my best to tear my eyes from that happy trail, to tear my mind from what lay beneath.
“Tell me about your family.”
Nothing will pull you out of a fantasy like an incredibly sexy man asking you to talk about your family.
“Not much to tell,” I said simply. “Mom, dad, sister, two brothers.” I shrugged toward Vlad. “And Vlad.”
“What kind of name is Vlad? I assumed you were French.”
I felt my beaming grin go from ear to ear. I loved it when a man recognized my elegant French upbringing—especially now, more than a century and a half after the fact. “You did?”
“Yeah. French or Spanish—‘La’ Shay.’”
Well, he was pretty enough to be a little bit dumb.
“My sister married a Hungarian,” I lied. “Vlad is a pretty common Hungarian name.”
Pike’s brows went up. “Interesting. I thought it was Russian.”
It was storybook vampire cliché! I wanted to scream. Which was why Louis LaShay chose to adopt the annoying Dracula moniker later in his non-creative vampire life.
“Look, Vlad and Nicolette are on a date.” I snaked a tongue over my bottom lip, my number one tip in my arsenal of man-without-pants-prep. “Why don’t we stop talking family and start talking fantasy?”
A single eyebrow rose over Pike’s dark eyes and his lips quirked into a smile that stood halfway between innocently interested and sex god with a naughty spot. “Fantasy, huh?”
I nodded slowly, resting my chin on my hands, letting a flow of my dark hair spill over my shoulder. If I had a whipped-cream topped coffee—if I could stomach such a thing—I would trail an index finger through it. Instead I leaned just a touch closer to Pike, letting my long hair tickle his arm.
The temperature in the coffeehouse rose by ten degrees.
“Well . . .” He let his voice trail off in that half-gravelly, all-sexy way, his eyes cutting from mine to wash all over my body with an appreciative grin. “Vlad wants you.”
I squelched a snarl. “That’s disgusting. We’re French nobles! Not Alabama hillbillies! You’re into some sick—”
Pike rolled his eyes and pointed. “No, Vlad, for real, wants you.”
I whipped my head toward where he pointed and this time, didn’t bother toning down the snarl. Vlad stood up and walked toward the restroom; I followed at a furious pace.
“What do you want? Don’t you know I was—” I paused, cleared my throat, and straightened. “Please tell me you’ve called this little summit because you found out something good.”
Vlad shrugged, all unaffected teen. “Sorry I interrupted your attempt at a fang bang, but this is going nowhere. All Nicolette wants to talk about is Christmas in Norman Rockwell-ville and her stupid Barbie Design Studio.”
I arched a brow. “Barbie Design Studio?”
Vlad shrugged. “I don’t know. Apparently Emerson got the Easy-Bake Oven. Look, I’ll give her five more minutes and then I’m taking her home.”
“Five more minutes?”
Vlad whipped out his iPhone. “And this time counts.”
Five minutes—to the millisecond—later, Vlad was tossing a few crumpled bills on the table and opening the door for Nicolette.
I groaned. “So, that was a waste.”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . we never got to talk about your fantasy . . . or your fears.”
I was drained, cranky, and the sickly sweet smell of pastries going day old was making my stomach churn. As sexy as Pike was, the borrowed blood running through my veins was almost gone and all I wanted was an US Weekly and a vat of O Neg. “Maybe another time.”
Pike sucked in a sharp breath. “There is something we haven’t tried.”
I was waiting for him to say sex. Or kissing. And I was cursing myself for wasting all that good blood when it could have been rushing to my—
“We need to look at the bodies.”
Never mind.
“Look at the bodies? What for?” I wanted to know.
“Anything. Signs of struggle, bruises, cuts—something the police may have missed.”
“I certainly don’t have a whole load of faith in breathers but I figure the cops—and the coroner, or medical examiner—would probably have found, photographed, or scraped off anything of evidentiary importance.”
“Did you say breather?”
I grabbed my purse and stood up quickly. “Sure, breather. It’s what everyone calls the cops in San Francisco. You know . . .” My mind raced. “They ‘breathe’ justice?” I turned on my heel. “I’ve got to go.”
I felt Pike’s hand close over my forearm and the strong warmth sent a shiver of gooseflesh all over my body. He pulled me closer and my breath caught in my throat, the tight anticipation all at once amazing and uncomfortable. His lips brushed over the part in my hair, then barely touched my earlobe. “Meet me tonight.”
My body felt like warm Jell-O as his command oozed through me. I swallowed, batting my eyelashes in that slow, bedroomy way that Elizabeth Taylor created and I mastered. “Where are we going?”
“The morgue.”
It’s official: I’ve been living with Sophie Lawson for way too long.
It’s never dark in the city. It’s also never without a population or a pulse, which was why I was wearing a form-fitting black Shoshanna Lonstein dress (I forgive her for the Seinfeld marriage debacle; we can’t always avoid the starter husband) with six-inch platform heels in blazing blue for my evening sojourn to the morgue. Besides the fact that I would never be caught dead (again) in anything velour or with a drawstring, the ensemble was a perfect cover: New Yorkers might mistake me for a socialite or a supermodel, but a morgue burglar? Not a chance.
Pike looked me up and down and despite that fact that our upcoming “date” revolved around the officially dead, his appraising grin shot a little zing down my spine. “Well you look like you’re ready to catch a killer.”
Vlad crossed the living room, gave me a once over, and muttered, “Or hepatitis.”
The Lower Manhattan City Morgue sits like a fat, ugly beehive among other government-owned fat, ugly beehive buildings.
I suppose there isn’t a lot of support of a morgue makeover.
It was easy enough to slip inside and easier still to scurry around unbidden—vampires have no scent, nor any discernible weight, which means no footsteps, no creaky floors to give us away. And also the man at the front desk was asleep.
I waved Pike through and we scurried down the dimly lit hall.
“Okay, stay out here and stand guard.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m going in. You stand guard.”
Pike sighed. “Do you have any idea what you’re looking for?”
“Look, Pike, my roommate is basically a private investigator who is dating a detective. I have inadvertently been on more stakeouts, snuck through more morgues, and flopped around with more dead bodies than all the NYPD put together.”
“I don’t know why, but I’m kind of aroused right now.”
“You’re sick.” I yanked open the storage-room door. “Stand guard.”
Inside, I was pleased to see the bodies were stored in an orderly fashion (did I mention we vamps are a little bit OCD?). I was able to find Reginald and stretch him out on one of the exam tables in record time, gingerly placing a file folder over his flash-frozen man bits—I could only investigate so many things at once. I checked out the red-purple bruises circling his neck—not entirely certain what I was looking for—and was walking my fingers toward a tiny red pinprick behind his left ear. “Interesting,” I whispered to my dead audience. The pinprick was minuscule and could have been a broken blood vessel or a mole for all I knew, but I knew how to find out. I pulled Reginald’s file and did a quick scan. The bruises were listed, as well as a hernia scar, a hair weave, and a little tattoo on Reginald’s derriere. There was no mention of the pinprick.
I left Reginald laid out and went to find Emerson. She wasn’t listed on any of the drawers and I gulped, staring at the heavy metal door for the “overflow” body storage. There are very few things that give me the heebie-jeebies, but walking into a room where the dead are laid out and stacked like bakery goods made my stomach lurch—and not in a good way. I sucked in a nerve-steadying breath and stepped into the walk-in freezer, jamming a Gross Anatomy book in the doorway. I had seen one too many television shows where the main characters get locked in a walk-in and end up freezing to death or eating their weight in ice cream.
