Elizabeth Hunter - A Hidden Fire

His mind raced, trying to find something to say that would break through the coldness in the air, but he couldn’t. Taking their kiss too far had been his mistake.

“Of course,” he said quietly. “I’ll let Caspar know to expect you sometime tomorrow.”

She was silent again when he glanced at her profile. Her face was impassive, and her eyes were shadowed as she stared into the night.

“The notes about the Lincoln documents are on the desk. Since I found them, I’m going to take some time off. I need to help my grandmother with some things.”

He pushed back the protest that sprang to his lips and gritted his teeth. “Of course. How many days do you need?”

She shrugged. “I’ll let Caspar know.”

As they pulled up to her grandmother’s house, he saw her gather her purse and release her seatbelt. She opened the car door and exited the Mustang as soon as it had stopped. He looked over at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Beatrice…” he began, trying to forget the feel of her lips against his.

She paused, bending down to meet his eyes, as if daring him to protest.

He opened his mouth, but words escaped him when he met her dark stare.

“Good night, Dr. Vecchio.”

She shut the door firmly. He watched her walk to the small house and go inside then glanced down the street, looking for the surveillance vehicle that was supposed to be watching. Noting the license plate of the unobtrusive minivan parked down the block, he leaned his head back and sighed.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the feel of her lips against his and her sweet taste. Her body fit against his perfectly; he indulged himself in the memory of her small breasts pressed against his chest and the feel of her hands stroking his jaw. While he enjoyed sex with the women he usually fed from, he never pursued any sort of personal connection with them farther than a shared, fleeting pleasure.

With Beatrice, he realized the lines were beginning to blur. Reminding himself of his purpose in pursuing the girl, he shoved down the more tender feelings that threatened to surface.

Giving one last glance to the light that filled the room on the second floor, he revved the engine to a low growl and pulled away.

Houston, Texas

February 2003

“You’re sulking.”

“Am not.”

“Yes, you are.”

Her grandmother eyed her from across the kitchen table. Isadora set down her book and looked at her granddaughter with a raised eyebrow.

Beatrice looked down at her toast. “How was your date with Caspar?”

Isadora smiled. “It was wonderful. It would have been much more pleasant if we hadn’t spent half the night talking about you and Giovanni sulking in your respective corners.”

“Hmm,” she hummed. She couldn’t suppress the satisfaction she felt hearing that Caspar said Giovanni was sulking, too.

She hadn’t seen him for two weeks. Not since the night she was forced to face the hard truth that Giovanni, polite and cultured as he seemed, sucked on strange women’s necks for sustenance and probably did a lot of other things she didn’t want to think about. The night she had been informed that she was viewed as a kind of property or pet in his world, no matter how he tried to sugarcoat that fact.

The night he’d kissed her. And she’d kissed him back.

And what a kiss it was, she thought with a sigh.

Remembering it was enough to raise her temperature. The way his lips had moved against hers, and the barely perceptible shiver she’d felt from him when her tongue touched his fangs. His arms. The heat. His hands on her back…she shook her head and tried to push back the memory, but she could feel herself blushing as she sat at the table with her grandmother.

She cleared her throat. “I doubt Giovanni is sulking. Caspar just likes to pester him.”

“How long as he worked for Gio? Caspar talks about him like he’s known him his whole life.”

She didn’t know the whole of Caspar’s story, but she knew Giovanni said they’d been together since Caspar was a boy.

“You’d have to ask him. I think he may have worked for Gio’s family.” There, that was vague enough. She’d let Caspar fill in whatever details he wanted.

While her initial promise to set Caspar and her grandmother up on a blind date had been in jest, the more Beatrice had thought about it, the more it made sense. When she’d asked Caspar about it, he’d been enthusiastic at her attempt at matchmaking. They’d gone out the night before and Isadora was glowing.

“Well, he’s lovely. And has such a wonderful sense of humor.”

“Unlike his boss,” she muttered as she drank her coffee. She may have said it, but she knew it wasn’t true. Though he had a dry, acerbic wit, Giovanni’s humor was one of the things she liked most about him.

And she couldn’t deny she liked him. Though she had been attracted to him from the beginning, the more she learned, the more she was drawn to him. He could be so aloof, but she was beginning to see the “opposite of frosty” side Carwyn had told her about weeks ago.

That kiss, she thought again as her grandmother chattered on about her date.

“Beatrice, you should go back to work. You’re avoiding him. Does this have anything to do with feelings you may have developed-”

“Nope,” she lied, cutting her grandmother off. “No feelings. He’s my boss. I’m just taking some time off. I have some projects that need my attention, Grandma. And I don’t want you and Caspar gossiping, okay? I’m just…taking some time off. That’s all.”

She gulped down the rest of her coffee, ignoring the almost laser-like stare she knew her grandmother was giving her.

“Well, aren’t you full of shit! Also, Caspar and I will gossip about anything we please.” She smiled sweetly at Beatrice, who finished up her toast and stood to leave. “Working tonight? It’s-”

“Wednesday. Yeah, night hours.” She had taken the previous Wednesday night off like a coward but refused to avoid it any more. She’d just suck it up and ignore her conflicting feelings for the man…vampire…whatever. After all, she was a professional.

“Have a nice day, Mariposa. I’ll see you tomorrow. I have a date with Caspar tonight.”

“Cool. Have fun. Don’t do anything…you know what? I don’t even want to know or imagine. Bye!” She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and walked to the door.

She spotted the minivan parked down the street as she backed out of the driveway. It followed her down the street, always keeping that careful distance she’d become accustomed to. At first the ever-present family car had freaked her out, but when she noticed Giovanni giving them a satisfied glance when he saw them one night, she knew it had been his doing.

First, it had pissed her off. Then, it had freaked her out. But the more she thought about how many things had changed in her world, and the danger that Giovanni and Carwyn had hinted at, the more the thought she could get used to having someone keeping an eye on her safety.

She glanced in her rear view mirror as she took the exit for the university. Yep, she thought, still there .

She wasn’t dumb; she’d known Giovanni had an ulterior motive for hiring her, but she was also willing to put up with it if he could really find her father. It wasn’t until the letters had arrived that the gravity of the danger she was in began to sink in.

If her father had been killed because of something he found out about these books, who was to say her life wasn’t in danger, too?

“What the hell kind of mess did you get me into, Dad?” she wondered for the thousandth time as she pulled into one of the crowded lots. She wondered if her father even knew he had put her in danger. She wondered if he thought about her at all.