Nicole Peeler - [Jane True 01] (19 page)

“Our world is… complex,” he explained. “Among us are beings who have
lived for centuries, so you can’t imagine how deep the intrigues delve.
Gretchen’s firm represents the big guns. They’re only deployed by our most
powerful beings under the most important circumstances. Why a member of that
firm would be in Rockabill, of all places, investigating the death of a
halfling is beyond me.” He frowned. “And how Manx ended up in a halfling’s
trunk is even more worrisome. Jakes could never have killed a mature goblin,
not without an army to back him up. But why either of them was here in the
first place is the greater mystery. I already thought it was strange that the
Alfar asked me to investigate Jakes’s murder, and this is one plot twist I
really don’t like.”

The expression on Ryu’s face, however, was not just troubled; there was
also the faintest hint of enjoyment playing over his features as he
contemplated the situation.
He loves this
, I realized.
Not the
murders, obviously, but the intrigue, the complexity.

“How old are you, Ryu?” I interrupted, curiously.

“Sorry?” he asked, as if waking from a dream. I repeated the question.

“Oh, in human years I’m very old, but for my kind I’m still an upstart,”
he answered, smiling.

I waited until he answered my question. “I’ve lived about 270 human
years,” he said, watching for my reaction. “Does that bother you?”

“It’s strange,” I answered him truthfully, after a moment of thought.
“You’ve seen so much… done so much. It’s intimidating,” I admitted. “But sexy,
too,” I clarified, trying to appear bold as I met his golden eyes.

It must have worked, because the next thing I knew he was bundling me
into my jacket and into the Porsche. I barely had a chance to say good-bye to
Sarah and Marcus and to ask them to tell Amy I was sorry we missed her. We
abandoned our untouched drinks.

“Will you spend the night with me?” Ryu asked, as he peeled out of the
Sty’s parking lot like he was going to put out a nursery fire. His fangs were
already peeking out at me and I found the sight of them incredibly…
stimulating. While I rummaged around my purse for my cell phone, I marveled at
how quickly I’d gotten used to my vampire lover.

I had told my dad I wouldn’t be there for dinner again that night, and
I’d been almost offended by how pleased he seemed at that information. But I
still felt incredibly awkward telling him I wouldn’t be home at all that night.
I don’t know how much he had known about Jason and me, as the sex talk had been
handled by Nick and Nan, and he’d made it clear when I turned eighteen that I
was an adult and responsible for myself. But I was still his daughter and I
didn’t know how he’d react to my spending the night with Ryu.

He did take a deep breath when I told him I wouldn’t be home until
tomorrow. “That’s fine, Jane. Thanks for letting me know. Just… be careful,” he
said, uncomfortably, “and I’ll see you in the morning. Do you have the weekend
off?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye honey, I love you.”

“I love you too, Dad,” I said, and hung up my phone.

I gave Ryu the thumbs up, and if I’d thought he was driving fast before,
now it felt like he was attempting to break the sound barrier. We must both
have been determined to get as much from our little affair as we could.

His rental cottage was clean and simple, decorated in a vaguely
Hamptons-esque style with lots of white paint and navy-blue accents. Not that I
saw much of it before I was in the bedroom, Ryu hurtling us through the air to
land on the mattress with a thump that rattled the bed.

He stripped off at the speed of light and had me nearly naked in equally
record time. I was really turned on by his very evident need, but it was also
pretty funny. Suddenly, as if just remembering something, he got up to fish
around in his wallet. When he held up a condom, I nodded. He sighed, tossing it
down next to my knee. I ignored his disappointment; until I had confirmation I
couldn’t end up with babies that had my eyes and Ryu’s fangs, we were keeping
things wrapped up.

He was back at my side in a flash, tearing off the rest of my clothes
while I giggled. “Honey, slow down. You’re going to hurt yourself… we’ve got
all night.”

“…not enough time,” he panted, finally wrestling off my recalcitrant
underpants and then donning his latex armor. His body covered mine, his hand
slipping between my legs. I gasped, both at his touch and at the slick proof of
my own unmistakable excitement. “Time later for more time,” he murmured, using
his knees to prize my thighs apart while licking at my neck in what I had come
to realize was the vampire version of fang foreplay. “Time for many more times
tonight,” he concluded, as he bit, taking me roughly at the same time. The
pleasure was almost unbearable.

And he wasn’t being coy. That night we had both world enough and time to
roll around quite satisfactorily for many hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
ell me
what happened to you,” Ryu said, his voice quiet in the dark. “I want to hear
it in your own words.”

I stiffened in his arms. Now was the time for cuddles, not the dropping
of bombs.

“What?” I asked, hoping he meant something else.

“Tell me about your friend dying. And what happened to you after.”

I groaned internally. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about. It
was more than a little weird telling the person you’d just had sex with about
your very first—and only—lover. But it would be hell telling Ryu about Jason’s
death and what came after. Trying to put into words the depth of my grief was
impossible. And I doubted if Ryu—who had compared humans to fireworks, after
all—could ever understand what I was trying to get across to him.

I shifted, turning over to lie on my side away from him. But he wasn’t
letting me get away that easy.

“Tell me,” he commanded gently, as he shifted with me into spooning
formation.

I closed my eyes and thought, until Ryu gently nipped my shoulder. So I
sighed and started at the beginning, secretly hoping that I could make the
beginning into the whole story. I started with my parents, and how they met. I
told him about Nick and Nan, our amazing proto-hippy neighbors who had been
like family to me. They had a son and daughter. The son was Stuart’s dad and
the daughter had fallen off the rails and gotten into drugs pretty heavily.
She’d rather dramatically abandoned her little boy, Jason, in the train station
in Chicago and his grandparents had taken him in. Obviously Jason was sad about
his mother. But between my own parents and Nick and Nan, we were both as loved
as two kids could be. And we’d come to love each other just as passionately. I
don’t know when it started; it was like we’d always been connected. We were
everything to each other, and our relationship evolved with us. But as children
we were like twins—so close you’d think we’d shared the same womb. And then
when we were six my mother disappeared, as well. At the time, Rockabill was a
village where no one was divorced, or had a baby out of wedlock, or—gods
forbid—abandoned their own flesh and blood. If Jason and I had been close
before, now our attachment was almost preternatural.

“Jason and I understood each other, and we felt like it was us against
the world,” I concluded, turning around so Ryu and I were nose to nose. He
smiled at me encouragingly, but I took the opportunity to take his bottom lip
between my teeth and give it a little nibble. Then I kissed him hard, opening
my mouth to him as his tongue sought mine. Until he called my bluff and
withdrew his lips with a determined shake of his head.

“I want the whole story,” he reminded me, his voice low and soft.

I shook an imaginary fist at him, gathering myself to begin.

“Jason and I shared everything,” I said, “except for one secret.”
Reminding myself to breathe, I continued. “I never told him about my swimming.
Because swimming is, in my family, as closely guarded a secret as incest,
alcoholism, or infidelity are in others.” My voice broke, despite my attempt at
levity.

The rest came out in a rush. “So, really early one morning, I went to
the beach for a swim. I left my clothes in my cove and I just dove right in.
But Jason must have gone to the cove, too, or followed me from my house, or
something. Anyway, he couldn’t have known I would be okay. It was winter, the
water was freezing, and there was a storm, so it was really rough. He must have
thought I was drowning.” Fat tears rolled, scalding my cheeks. “He must have
been trying to rescue me.” My voice broke, and I couldn’t continue. I shut my
eyes. I felt Ryu’s fingers brushing away my tears but I was miles away,
reliving my awful memories.

I saw myself coming out of the water after a refreshing swim to find
another set of clothes next to mine on the beach. I remembered how it felt when
I knelt down to investigate, and what it felt like the moment I realized that
it was Jason’s Patriots sweatshirt with the distinctive maroon paint stains,
Jason’s battered old North Face jacket, and Jason’s favorite pair of jeans. I’d
never forget the emotion I felt at that moment, not that there was a name for
it. I know that the German language makes new words by stringing together
descriptive phrases until the required idea or emotion is properly expressed.
If we did that in English, the word for what I felt while standing there
clutching Jason’s battered hiking socks would be a word made up of some
terrible combination of total devastation, unholy terror, and the overwhelming
need to find out that he was okay, that this was just a trick or a mistake.

“You know the rest of that story,” I said, my voice rough. I kept my
eyes shut. “I searched for hours for him, and then I finally found him in the
Sow. After a while he came to me. I thought that meant he was still alive and
had swum. But he was cold and his eyes were staring.” I shuddered and Ryu’s
arms tightened around me protectively. “I got us to the beach somehow. I was
exhausted. I just collapsed with him and blacked out. Then I woke up to
emergency services bundling me into an ambulance and Jason into the coroner’s
van. He was dead and I was nearly so.”

Ryu nodded, stroking a hand down my side. “You used a tremendous amount
of energy to pull him out of the Sow. Nell said everyone felt it for miles, but
they had no idea what could have happened or who it could have been. They never
figured it was you, since you were not supposed to have anywhere near that kind
of capability. Your panic just brought it all out. When we lose control like
that, it’s very dangerous—releasing that much power can drain us to the point
of death. You were lucky to have survived.”

My lips went tight and my gut clenched. “Lucky?” I asked, oh so
rhetorically. “I don’t think I was lucky. What I lived through after Jason’s
death nearly broke me.” Ryu frowned at me but I wouldn’t let him interrupt.

“The drowning and near-drowning of two local teenagers was big news.
We’d grown up around the ocean; we knew we had no business being in it when it
was like that. Jason was dead and I was comatose for a few days, so everybody
just went ahead and made up what happened. People said Jason and I had a
suicide pact, or that it was an attempted murder-suicide, or suicide attempt
and botched attempted rescue. Because Jason had been so perfect, and I was who
I was, it was the last idea that people latched onto. Jason was too
alive
to want to kill himself, and he was certainly too good to want to kill me and
then off himself. So, he must have stumbled across me mid-suicide attempt and
tried to save me. And, in that ultimate ironic twist that is the stuff of great
news ratings and terrible made-for-TV movies, I lived and Jason drowned. The
media loved it,” I concluded, bitterly.

“Who would say such things?” Ryu marveled. “Especially about children?”

I snorted derisively. “Confronted with cameras, most people will say
just about anything to be that little talking head on the news. And nobody ever
liked me anyway. So the kids at school were more than happy to flesh out the
motive for my attempted ‘suicide.’ Jason was beautiful, a star athlete, and
really popular despite our relationship. No one had ever understood our
connection. So people, namely this girl named Linda Allen and Jason’s cousin,
Stuart, told the media that Jason had outgrown me. That he was breaking
whatever hold I had over him. That he only hung around with me now because he
pitied me.” My voice had grown frosty with rage and Ryu’s eyes narrowed in sympathy.