“Yes, yes, we do. Great, that’s just great.”
As Nate rushed in with the yes-please-thank-you on that, he tried to plaster some nonchalant on his face. Otherwise, he was liable to look like he’d won the lottery: If she was volunteering, not only could he spend time with her, but she had to be staying. Right?
Wouldn’t that be awesome.
“Are you going to leave the plans?” Rahvyn asked. “Because there is a staff meeting going on downstairs and I do not believe anyone is going to be available for a while.”
“You know, I think I’ll wait.”
“They just began. But I can tell them you were here?”
Trying to be casual, and not a heartbroken loser, he shrugged. “Oh, okay, I guess I can leave them on the kitchen table—”
“Thank God, we can go to the club,” Shuli said under his breath. “We’ll come back at the end of the night.”
“Club?” Rahvyn looked at Shuli. “As in a private organization you belong to?”
“It’s a place to go where there’s music and dancing.”
The male made a show of tucking yet another silk shirt into the waistband of his pressed slacks. Shuli had two uniforms: the Izod-polo-and-khaki-shorts look, which he wore to work or when he was kicking around his parents’ mansion, or this smooth, sexy, urban stuff that some of the guys on-site last night had called Bradtastic. Whatever that meant—
“May I come with you?”
Wait, what? “Ah…” Nate tried to picture Rahvyn in the same space with a shitload of drunken, drugged-up humans. “I’m not sure whether it’s your scene or not.”
Translation: That is definitely not your scene.
With a sharp pivot, Shuli turned his back to Rahvyn and bugged out his eyeballs, all what-are-you-doing-my-guy.
Nate pushed him aside. “It can be kind of rowdy. You know, loud. ’Cuz there’ll be a lot of people there—and they won’t always be like us, if you get what I mean.”
“I am not afraid of humans.” She folded the paper and put it on the coffee table; then got to her feet. “And I should like to get out and see a little of the world. I am feeling trapped here.”
Clapping his palms together, Shuli looked like he would have spiked a football if he’d had one. “Great, let’s go. I have my car.”
As the male headed for the exit, Nate rubbed his jaw, a ball of not-a-great-idea churning in his gut.
“Shall we?” Rahvyn said.
“I’ll take care of you,” he mumbled. “Don’t worry.”
“Oh, I am not worried about my safety.” She smiled at him shyly. “But I appreciate your concern.”
Well… if that didn’t make a male feel ten feet taller, he thought as he went into the kitchen and put the plans on the table.
But this was still not a great idea.
“So where is this ‘club,’？” Rahvyn asked as he returned to the living room.
“Downtown, and Shuli does have his Tesla tonight.” Because it was hard to pick up humans with only thin air as transport. “Unless you’d like to dematerialize?”
“Tesla? You mean that electric car I have seen on the television? I have never been in one before.”
“They’re the best,” Shuli announced from over by the door. “You’re not going to believe how smooth they are. You’ll never go back.”
“I have never been in any car, actually.”
As Shuli looked surprised, Nate felt the same way. And yet when he’d gotten free of that lab he’d been held in, cars had been a revelation for him as well. God, he really wanted to know her full backstory—and feared it, too.
“Would you like to ride in one tonight?” Nate asked. “It’s your choice.”
Rahvyn leaned a little closer to him so she could see through a window out to the driveway—and she smelled so amazing, all clean laundry, soap, and shampoo. He wished he knew the brands she used, but it would be way stalkerish to ask, and way too pathetic to buy the stuff just to have it in his own home—
As her hair slipped off her shoulder, he wanted to touch the white fall of waves. Run his fingers through the strands. Feel it… on his naked chest…
“Yes, please, I would like to ride in it,” Rahvyn said. “As long as you shall be with me.”
* * *
Darkness was a vampire’s freedom.
As Balz dematerialized away from his mountain hideaway and headed for Trade Street, he was in a rush, and not just because he had the afterburn of what felt like a kilo of cocaine still racing through his veins. It turned out, if you did enough blow, that whole thirty-to-forty-minute buzz routine skated into a perpetual high. Of course, your bonus prize was a scrambled brain and a body that might as well have been hooked up to a car battery for all the spasms and twitching.