Shit shit.
“—what kind of shape were you in last night?”
Damn it. My head hurt, but I’d walked right into that one. And worse, I couldn’t seem to think clearly enough to come up with a good lie.
“I’m fine,” I said lamely.
“You could be lying in a puddle of blood, missing a head, and you’d say that!”
“Actually, if I was missing a head, I wouldn’t be able—” I stopped, because Claire didn’t look like she thought that was funny. I tried again. “You’ve seen me beat up before—”
“Not like this!”
“Yes, like this.” I turned back to the sink, wetting a washcloth, hoping some of the stains on my face were just dirt. “I’m a mercenary for hire, Claire. I stick my nose in where people don’t want it and they try to chop it off. It goes with the territory—”
“Bullshit!” she said furiously. “I lived with you for two years and saw you hurt less than in the last damn month. Two weeks ago, you were almost blown to pieces! A week after that, you were brought home in terrible shape by that vampire—”
“His name is Louis-Cesare and I was mostly just hungover—”
“—and now I find you like this?”
The washcloth felt pretty good, but when I took it away, the face looked about the same. Still purple, but…moister. “Okay, I’ve had some bad luck lately.”
“It isn’t luck, Dory! It’s those things.”
“What things?” I asked, because I am stupid.
“You know what things! Vampires.” It was just a word, but the tone made it an insult. I tended to forget that Claire was a teensy bit speciesist. She seemed willing to accept the fey in all their many types and permutations, but vamps were another matter.
Of course, a fey hadn’t kidnapped and almost killed her, either. “The guys who grabbed you were on the wrong side,” I reminded her.
“There is no side, Dory! Or if there is, it’s their own—their good, their interests. I don’t even know how you got home like this!”
“I brought her,” someone said quietly. And Claire and I both jumped, because neither of us had heard the approach of the handsome auburn-haired vamp in the doorway.
Claire also gave a little shriek, but it sounded more like outrage than shock. “How did you get in here?”
“I walked,” Louis-Cesare said, not helping matters.
But he didn’t look much like he cared. In fact, his expression was pretty scary, although fear wasn’t really the primary emotion I was feeling as he came up behind me. A hand went to my face, turning it up to the light.
“There are wards,” Claire said, glaring at him.
“Hm.”
“And a garden full of fey!”
“So there are.” The words themselves weren’t insulting, but the tone had the same casual arrogance that regularly got him into trouble with all kinds of people. Like a certain redheaded half-fey, who looked like she was about to knock his hand away.
But she didn’t, maybe because she saw the same thing I felt—the swelling in my bruised mouth going down as a calloused thumb swept across it, the lip returning more or less to its correct shape, the heat pooling low and intense in my—
Okay, maybe not that last part.
But it wasn’t the excitement that worried me as our eyes met in the mirror. Hands came up to frame my face, big and warm and soothing, like the thumbs stroking along my cheekbones. It should have really ticked me off—the conceit of it, the more than a hint of possession, the presumption that he could just walk into my bathroom anytime he liked and—
And I didn’t care. I wanted to turn in to the feel of those hands, wanted to sink into all that warmth, wanted to preen like a cat being stroked, wanted—
Wanted.