Sherrilyn Kenyon - Night Embrace

"It's not Steve."

Sunshine paid him no attention as she turned Starla to face him. Both women stared at him lying there on the bed as if he were some inanimate curiosity.

Talon moved the pink sheet up higher over his waist. Then, suddenly self-conscious, he moved his bare leg under the cover as well, and bent his knee so that the center part of his body wasn't quite so obvious underneath the thin cotton.

Still the two women stared at him.

"You see what I was telling you?" Sunshine asked. "Does he not have the most incredible aura you've ever seen?"

"He's definitely an old soul. With Druid blood. I'm sure of it."

"You think?" Sunshine asked.

"Oh, yeah. We need to talk him into letting us do a past-life regression and see what we come up with."

Okay, they were both nuts.

"Women," he said sharply. "I need my clothes, and I need them now ."

"See," Sunshine said. "See the way his aura changes. It's absolutely living."

"You know, I've never seen that before. It's really different." Then Starla drifted out of the room as she flipped through the magazine.

Sunshine was still wiping paint off her hands. "Hungry?"

How did she do that? How could she shift from one topic to the other and then back again?

"No," he said, trying to keep her on the main point. "I want my clothes."

She actually cringed. "What happened to the tags in your pants?"

Talon frowned at the odd question. He was keeping a rein on his irritation and temper, but something about being around this woman made it difficult. "I beg your pardon?"

"Well, you know they were covered in blood…"

A bad feeling settled into his stomach. "And?"

"I was going to clean them, and—"

"Oh shit, you washed them?"

"It wasn't the washing that damaged them so much as the drying."

"You dried my leather pants?"

"Well, I didn't know they were leather," she said softly. "They felt really soft and strange so I thought they were pleather or something. I wash my pleather dress all the time without it disintegrating and shrinking like your pants did."

Talon rubbed his forehead with his hand. This was so not good. How on earth could he get out of her apartment in the middle of the day with no clothes on?

"You know," she continued, "you really shouldn't cut the tags out of your clothes."

It had been a long time since he had felt real, deep aggravation, but he was starting to feel it now. "Those were custom , handmade leather pants. They never have tags."

"Oh," she said, looking even more sheepish. "I would have bought you some more, but since they didn't have tags in them, I didn't know what size to buy."

"Great. I live to be stuck in strange places, naked."

She started to smile at him, then pressed her lips together as if thinking better of it. "I have some pink sweatpants that really wouldn't fit you, and even if they did, I'm sure you wouldn't want to wear them anyway, would you?"

"No. Did you wash my wallet too?"

"Oh, no. I took it out of your pants."

"Good. Where is it?"

She became quiet again and a feeling of doomed dread consumed him.

"Do I want to know?" he asked.

"Well…" He was beginning to hate that word since it seemed to portend doom for him and his belongings. "I put it on the washing machine at the Laundromat with your keys, and then I realized that I didn't have change for the washer, so I went to the change machine. I was only gone a second, but when I got back your wallet was gone."

Talon grimaced. "And my keys?"

"Well, you know when you wash just one thing it unbalances the machine? Your keys ended up getting jarred off the top of it and they went down a small drain."

"Didn't you get them back?"

"I tried, but I couldn't reach them. I had three other people try, but they're gone too."

Talon sat in stunned disbelief. Worse, he couldn't even get mad at her since she'd only been trying to help him. But he really, really wanted to be mad.

"I have no money, no pants, no keys. Do I still have my jacket?"

"Yes, it's safe. And I saved your Snoopy Pez dispenser from the washer too. And your boots and knife thing are right here," she said, holding them up from the floor by the bed.

Talon nodded, feeling strangely relieved by the knowledge that she hadn't destroyed everything he'd had on him last night. Thank the gods his motorcycle had been left by the Brewery. He shuddered to think what she might have done to it. "Is there a phone I can use?"

"In the kitchen."

"Could you please bring it to me?"

"It's not cordless. I always lose those things or I drop them someplace and break them. The last one I had ended up drowning in the toilet."

Talon looked uneasily at the woman and the faint sunlight in the room. He wondered which one of them was the most lethal to him.

"Would you mind pulling down the shades?" he asked.

She frowned. "Does the sunlight bother you?"

"I'm allergic to it," he said, falling into the lie Dark-Hunters used when caught in similar situations.

Although he doubted if any Dark-Hunter had ever found himself in a situation similar to this one.

"Really? I've never known anyone allergic to sunlight before."

"Well, I am."

"So you're like a vampire?"

The word hit just a little too close to home. "Not exactly."

She moved to the window, but when she pulled the shade down, it fell.

Gray sunlight spilled across the bed.

With a curse, Talon shot into the corner, narrowly missing the pale sunbeams.

"Sunshine, I…" Starla's voice broke off as she entered the room and caught sight of him standing naked in the corner. She eyed him in an odd, detached way, as if he were an interesting piece of furniture.

Talon and modesty were strangers, but the way she stared at him made him damned uncomfortable.

In spite of the sunlight, Talon grabbed the pink blanket off the bed and clutched it to his middle.

"You know, Sunshine, you need to find a man like that to marry. Someone so well hung that even after three or four kids, he'd still be wall to wall."

Talon gaped.

Sunshine laughed. "Starla, you're embarrassing him."

"Oh, believe me, that's nothing to be embarrassed over. You ought to be proud. Strut it. Trust me, young man, women your age would love to have some of that."

Talon snapped his gaping jaw shut. These were the strangest women he'd ever had the misfortune of being near.

Gods, get him out of here.

Starla looked up at Sunshine in the window. "What are you doing?"

"He's allergic to the sun."

"It's so cloudy outside, it's almost dark."

"I know, but he says he can't be in it."

"Really? So you brought home a vampire? Cool."

"I'm not a vampire," he reiterated.

" 'Not exactly,' he said earlier," Sunshine said. "What's not exactly a vampire?"

"A werewolf," Starla said. "With his aura, it makes sense. Wow, Sunny, you found yourself a werewolf."

"I'm not a werewolf."

Starla looked really disappointed by the news. "What a pity. You know, when you live in New Orleans, you expect to meet the undead or damned at least once in a while." She looked back to Sunshine. "You think we should move? Maybe if we lived over by Anne Rice we might catch sight of a vampire or werewolf."

Sunshine replaced the shade. "I'd be happy to see a zombie."

"Oh, yeah," the older woman concurred. "You know, your dad said he saw one out on the bayou right before we got married."

"That was probably the peyote, Mom."

"Oh. Good point."

Talon's jaw went slack again as he looked back and forth between them. Mother and daughter? They certainly didn't act that way, and Starla didn't look that much older than Sunshine, but there was no denying the similarities of their features. Or the oddity of them both.