Page 70 of Fanged Embrace
“Shhh!” I sliced a hand across my throat, willing her to keep her fucking voice down and hissed, “It’s not like that.”
But Dylan was cackling now, head ping ponging between me and the door and back again. “I can’t believe it.”
“Not a word of this to anyone,” I snapped, jabbing a finger at her chest. The threat would’ve landed better if my ears weren’t burning.
Dylan’s grin widened and her next words sent a fiery heat roaring up my neck. “Dude, you’re falling for the eyewitness!?”
I opened my mouth—shut it again. And I realized, all at once, that I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she was wrong. The realization crashed over my head like a bucket of cold water, clarity hitting bittersweet when I considered what this meant.
Falling for Laurie meant setting myself up for inevitable heartbreak. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if she swung that way, and even if she did… She had more than enough to deal with already. This silly little crush of mine—and that’s all that it was: acrush—was not what she needed right now. Or maybe ever.
It would only complicate things between us. It might even make her pull away. She was committed to walking the pathshe was on, all the way to the bitter, early end she had planned for herself. If it occurred to her that sticking around any longer would hurt me, if she knew how I felt about her, and just how bad it would hit me when I lost her, she’d be gone from my life before I could blink.
So no, I could not bring myself to admit it aloud. I couldn’t speak those words into being.
Dylan was still smirking at me, though, so I clapped back with a question to highlight her own hypocrisy. “Refresh my memory, how did you and Amara get together?”
The answer was simple. Dylan fell for the human woman she was meant to be wringing information out of.Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?Dylan rolled her eyes, but the slight upturn of her mouth remained.
Before she could interrogate me further, the door behind me cracked open a sliver and Laurie poked her head out. “What are you two arguing about out here?”
Dylan’s smirk turned downright diabolical. I shot her a warning glare that promised eternal suffering if she uttered a single word. Thankfully, the preening vamp kept her lips zipped, but her coy smile had me flushing bright red.
“Uh, nothing.” I spun around to face Laurie, planting my hands on my hips and trying my darndest to keep the blushing to a minimum. “Nothing important.”
Laurie looked me up and down like she didn’t believe me at all, narrowing her eyes at the faux smile I held on my face with sheer force of will.
“Riiight.” She dragged the word out, flicking cautious eyes at Dylan before returning her gaze to me. “Well, do you wanna fill Arlon in on the details of the hybrid experiments? You’re a little more clued up on the facts than I am.”
“Yep! Sure, I can do that,” I chirped a little too cheerily, but my feet stayed firmly planted in place.
“Okay…” Laurie’s quizzical stare lingered on me for a beat longer before she angled her chin over her shoulder. “When you’re ready to play nice, we’ll be waiting in there.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. I’ll be right with you.” I nodded too many times while Laurie backed up into the office and returned to her seat in front of Arlon.
I sucked in a steadying breath and stepped up to follow her—and Dylan’s whispered teasing echoed in my ears. “How does that phrase go? ‘Denial is a River?’ Sounds fitting, don’t you agree?”
34
Laurie
Aside from River’s uncharacteristically snippy comments towards Arlon, the day was turning out easier to handle than I initially expected. Getting out of bed had been rough, and swallowing a few bites of breakfast had been rougher still. But I’d managed to make it through the morning without sinking to the floor once, so that was a win in my books.
Arlon seemed to be taking the news of the supernatural surprisingly well, though I could tell a part of him was still quietly upset that I hadn’t trusted him with the truth sooner. The bigger part of him, however—the part that drove him to become a cop in the first place—was determined to get to the bottom of things now that he’d been handed a few more pieces of the puzzle.
Arlon was committed to smoking out the leaders of the organization, and he was willing to work with the Leyore coven to do it. His conviction was impressive.
It had taken me way too long to learn to trust these vampire women, but Arlon was already treating Dylan like his second incommand. The two of them stood together, poring over a detailed map of the city and speculating on the location of the other facilities, while Amara (was that her name?) peered over their shoulders with a furrowed brow.
We’d moved from one office to another after River had filled Arlon in on everything we knew about the supernatural side of the organization so far. This room was bigger and filled with more faces—some familiar, some I’d never seen before, but every single one of them seemed to have a keen interest in me, because I caught them staring every time I raised my head.
River was speaking to one of them, the drop-dead gorgeous woman I recognized from the incident at the facility. Hunter. There was another woman, human by the looks of her, hovering at her side. It took a few minutes of quiet eavesdropping to learn that her name was Addison and that she was, astonishingly enough, Hunter’s fiancée.
A human and a vampire getting together was a possibility I had not considered before.
They weren’t the only odd couple present, either. I recognized another vampire, short and pretty and incredibly loud for her compact size: Maxine. She had a human partner too, a lanky woman with her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail, who seemed simultaneously exasperated by her girlfriend’s ear-splitting volume and also completely infatuated with her. An odd pairing, to say the least.
The last couple included Jordan, the redhead who seemed to be the ringleader of this ragtag group, and her wife, Skye, who was quieter than the former but wielded a commanding kind of presence that had the others perking up their ears whenever she spoke.
