Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (180 page)

“Oh, I had to consider the calories,” I said, patting my rear end.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, front or back,” Quinn said, and the warmth in his eyes made me feel like basking. I knew I was curvier than the ideal. I’d actually heard Holly tell Danielle that anything over a size eight was simply disgusting. Since a day I got into an eight was a happy day for me, I’d felt pretty forlorn for all of three minutes. I would have related this conversation to Quinn if I hadn’t been sure it would sound like I was angling for a compliment.

“Let the restaurant be my treat,” I said.

“With all due respect to your pride, no, I won’t.” Quinn looked me right in the eyes to make sure I knew he meant it.

We’d reached the sidewalk by that time. Surprised at his vehemence, I didn’t know how to react. On one level, I was relieved, since I have to be careful with my money. On another level, I knew it was right for me to offer and I would have felt good if he’d said that would be fine.

“You know I’m not trying to insult you, right?” I said.

“I understand that you’re being equal.”

I looked up at him doubtfully, but he was serious.

Quinn said, “I believe you are absolutely as good as me in every way. But I asked you out, and I am providing the financial backup for our date.”

“What if I asked you out?”

He looked grim. “Then I’d have to sit back and let you take care of the evening,” he said. He said it reluctantly, but he said it. I looked away and smiled.

Cars were pulling out of the parking lot at a steady pace. Since we’d taken our time leaving the theater, Quinn’s car was looking lonely in the second row. Suddenly, my mental alarm went off. Somewhere close, there was a lot of hostility and evil intent. We had left the sidewalk to cross the street to the parking lot. I gripped Quinn’s arm and then let it go so we could clear for action.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Without replying, Quinn began scanning the area. He unbuttoned his suit coat with his left hand so he could move without hindrance. His fingers curled into fists. Since he was a man with a powerful protective urge, he stepped ahead of me, in front of me.

So of course, we were attacked from behind.

I
N A BLUR OF MOVEMENT THAT COULDN’T BE BROKEN down into increments my eye could clearly recognize, a beast knocked me into Quinn, who stumbled forward a step. I was on the ground underneath the snarling half man, half wolf by the time Quinn wheeled, and as soon as he did, another Were appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to leap on Quinn’s back.

The creature on top of me was a brand-new fresh half Were, so young he could only have been bitten in the past three weeks. He was in such a frenzy that he had attacked before he had finished with the partial change that a bitten Were can achieve. His face was still elongating into a muzzle, even as he tried to choke me. He would never attain the beautiful wolf form of the full-blooded Were. He was “bitten, not blood,” as the Weres put it. He still had arms, he still had legs, he had a body covered with hair, and he had a wolf ’s head. But he was just as savage as a full-blood.

I clawed at his hands, the hands that were gripping my neck with such ferocity. I wasn’t wearing my silver chain tonight. I’d decided it would be tacky, since my date was himself a shifter. Being tacky might have saved my life, I thought in a flash, though it was the last coherent thought I had for a few moments.

The Were was straddling my body, and I brought my knees up sharply, trying to give him a big enough jolt that he’d loosen his hold. There were shrieks of alarm from the few remaining pedestrians, and a higher, more piercing shriek from Quinn’s attacker, whom I saw flying through the air as if he’d been launched from a cannon. Then a big hand grasped my attacker by his own neck and lifted him. Unfortunately, the half beast who had his hands wrapped around my throat didn’t let me go. I began to rise from the pavement, too, my throat becoming more and more pinched by the grip he had on me.

Quinn must have seen my desperate situation, because he struck the Were on top of me with his free hand, a slap that rocked the Were’s head back and simply knocked him for a loop so thoroughly that he let go of my neck.

Then Quinn grabbed the young Were by the shoulders and tossed him aside. The boy landed on the pavement and didn’t move.

“Sookie,” Quinn said, hardly sounding out of breath. Out of breath is what I was, struggling to get my throat to open back up so I could gulp in some oxygen. I could hear a police siren, and I was profoundly thankful. Quinn slipped his arm under my shoulders and held me up. Finally I breathed in, and the air was wonderful, blissful. “You’re breathing okay?” he asked. I gathered myself enough to nod. “Any bones broken in your throat?” I tried to raise my hand to my neck, but my hand wasn’t cooperating just at the moment.

His face filled my scope of vision, and in the dim light of the corner lamp I could see he was pumped. “I’ll kill them if they hurt you,” he growled, and just then, that was delightful news.

“Bitten,” I wheezed, and he looked horrified, checking me over with hands and eyes for the bite mark. “Not me,” I elaborated. “Them. Not born Weres.” I sucked in a lot of air. “And maybe on drugs,” I said. Awareness dawned in his eyes.

That was the only explanation for such insane behavior.

A heavyset black patrolman hurried up to me. “We need an ambulance at the Strand,” he was saying to someone on his shoulder. No, it was a little radio set. I shook my head.

“You need an ambulance, ma’am,” he insisted. “Girl over there says the man took you down and tried to choke you.”

“I’m okay,” I said, my voice raspy and my throat undeniably painful.

“Sir, you with this lady?” the patrolman asked Quinn. When he turned, the light flashed off his name pin; it said
Boling.

“Yes, I am.”

“You . . . ah, you got these punks offa her?”

“Yes.”

Boling’s partner, a Caucasian version of Boling, came up to us then. He looked at Quinn with some reservation. He’d been examining our assailants, who had fully changed to human form before the police had arrived. Of course, they were naked.

“The one has a broken leg,” he told us. “The other is claiming his shoulder’s dislocated.”

Boling shrugged. “Got what was coming to ’em.” It might have been my imagination, but he, too, seemed a bit more cautious when he looked at my date.

“They got more than they expected,” his partner said neutrally. “Sir, do you know either of these kids?” He tilted his head toward the teenagers, who were being examined by a patrolman from another car, a younger man with a more athletic build. The boys were leaning against each other, looking stunned.

“I’ve never seen them before,” Quinn said. “You, babe?” He looked down at me questioningly. I shook my head. I was feeling better enough that I felt at a distinct disadvantage, being on the ground. I wanted to get up, and I said so to my date. Before the police officers could tell me once again to wait for an ambulance, Quinn managed to get me to my feet with as little pain as possible.

I looked down at my beautiful new outfit. It was really dirty. “How does the back look?” I asked Quinn, and even I could hear the fear in my voice. I turned my back to Quinn and looked at him anxiously over my shoulder. Quinn seemed a little startled, but he dutifully scanned my rear view.

“No tearing,” he reported. “There may be a spot or two where the material got a little scraped across the pavement.”

I burst into tears. I probably would have started crying no matter what, because I was feeling a powerful reaction to the adrenaline that had surged through my body when we’d been attacked, but the timing was perfect. The police got more avuncular the more I cried, and as an extra bonus, Quinn pulled me into his arms and I rested my cheek against his chest. I listened to his heartbeat when I quit sobbing. I’d gotten rid of my nervous reaction to the attack and disarmed the police at the same time, though I knew they’d still wonder about Quinn and his strength.

Another policeman called from his place by one of the assailants, the one Quinn had thrown. Our two patrolmen went to answer the summons, and we were briefly alone.

“Smart,” Quinn murmured into my ear.

“Mmmm,” I said, snuggling against him.

He tightened his arms around me. “You get any closer, we’re going to have to excuse ourselves and get a room,” he whispered.

“Sorry.” I pulled back slightly and looked up at him. “Who you reckon hired them?”

He may have been surprised I’d figured that out, but you couldn’t tell by his brain. The chemical reaction that had fueled my tears had made his mental snarl extra complicated. “I’m definitely going to find out,” he said. “How’s your throat?”

“Hurts,” I admitted, my voice raspy. “But I know there’s nothing really wrong with it. And I don’t have health insurance. So I don’t want to go to the hospital. It would be a waste of time and money.”

“Then we won’t go.” He bent and kissed my cheek. I turned my face up to him, and his next kiss landed in exactly the right spot. After a gentle second, it flared into something more intense. We were both feeling the aftereffects of the adrenalin rush.

The sound of a throat clearing brought me back into my right mind as effectively as if Officer Boling had thrown a bucket of cold water on us. I disengaged and buried my face against Quinn’s chest again. I knew I couldn’t move away for a minute or two, since his excitement was pressed right up against me. Though these weren’t the best circumstances for evaluation, I was pretty sure Quinn was proportional. I had to resist the urge to rub my body against his. I knew that would make things worse for him, from a public viewpoint—but I was in a much better mood than I had been, and I guess I was feeling mischievous. And frisky. Very frisky. Going through this ordeal together had probably accelerated our relationship the equivalent of four dates.

“Did you have other questions for us, Officer?” Quinn asked, in a voice that was not perfectly calm.

“Yes, sir, if you and the lady will come down to the station, we need to take your statements. Detective Coughlin will do that while we take the prisoners to the hospital.”

“All right. Does that have to be tonight? My friend needs to rest. She’s exhausted. This has been quite an ordeal for her.”

“It won’t take long,” the officer said mendaciously. “You sure you’ve never seen these two punks before? Because this seems like a real personal attack, you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Neither of us knows them.”

“And the lady still refuses medical attention?”

I nodded.

“Well, all right then, folks. Hope you don’t have no more trouble.”

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” I said, and turned my head a little to meet Officer Boling’s eyes. He looked at me in a troubled way, and I could hear in his head that he was worried about my safety with a violent man like Quinn, a man who could throw two boys several feet in the air. He didn’t realize, and I hoped he never would, that the attack had been personal. It had been no random mugging.

We went to the station in a police car. I wasn’t sure what their thinking was, but Boling’s partner told us that we’d be returned to Quinn’s vehicle, so we went along with the program. Maybe they didn’t want us to have a chance to talk to each other alone. I don’t know why; I think the only thing that could have aroused their suspicion was Quinn’s size and expertise in fighting off attackers.

In the brief seconds we had alone before an officer climbed into the driver’s seat, I told Quinn, “If you think something at me, I’ll be able to hear you—if you need me to know something urgently.”

“Handy,” he commented. The violence seemed to have relaxed something inside him. He rubbed his thumb across the palm of my hand. He was thinking he’d like to have thirty minutes in a bed with me, right now, or even fifteen; hell, even ten, even in the backseat of a car, would be fantastic. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it, and when he realized that I’d read all that clearly, he shook his head with a rueful smile.

We have somewhere to go after this,
he thought deliberately. I hoped he didn’t mean he was going to rent a room or take me to his place for sex, because no matter how attractive I found him, I wasn’t going to do that tonight. But his brain had mostly cleared of lust, and I perceived his purpose was something different. I nodded.

So don’t get too tired,
he said. I nodded again. How I was supposed to prevent exhaustion, I wasn’t sure, but I’d try to hoard a little energy.

The police station was much like I expected it to be. Though there’s a lot to be said for Shreveport, it has more than its fair share of crime. We didn’t excite much attention at all, until officers who’d been on the scene put their heads together with police in the building, and then there were a few stolen glances at Quinn, some surreptitious evaluations. He was formidable-looking enough for them to credit ordinary strength as the source of his defeat of the two muggers. But there was just enough strangeness about the incident, enough peculiar touches in the eyewitness reports . . . and then my eye caught a familiar weathered face. Uh-oh.

“Detective Coughlin,” I said, remembering now why the name had sounded familiar.

“Miss Stackhouse,” he responded, with about as much enthusiasm as I had shown. “What you been up to?”

“We got mugged,” I explained.

“Last time I saw you, you were engaged to Alcide Herveaux, and you’d just found one of the most sickening corpses I’ve ever seen,” he said easily. His belly seemed to have gotten even bigger in the few months since I’d met him at a murder scene here in Shreveport. Like many men with a disproportionate belly, he wore his khaki pants buttoned underneath the overhang, so to speak. Since his shirt had broad blue and white stripes, the effect was that of a tent overhanging packed dirt.