Time After Time (Cora's Bond) (12 page)

I’d drunk myself into a light buzz, and I was content to stay there. On the opposite end of the sobriety spectrum, even Christina had been moved to cut off Chelsea’s supply of alcohol, so the latter was now nursing a soft drink and a bad mood while trying repeatedly to put the moves on a massive man who I happened to know was a bona fide bear shifter.

Lisette frowned at her phone.

“Over your drink quota?” I asked. “Or out of storage for selfies?”

“Neither,” she said. “It’s Geoff. He’s here, Cora. He said he tried to text you but didn’t get an answer.”

I pulled out my phone. “I must not have noticed it buzz.”

I’m at the main bar. Lisette posted the schedule for your party on Facebook,
his message said
. I know this may not be the best time, but I really need to talk to you—before your wedding.

I sighed and stood up, nodding to two of the shifters to follow me. Clarissa would be more than happy to come with me, but I didn’t fancy trying to talk to Geoff as her presence turned his brain to jelly.

I wove my way through the maze of tables. Coming around a partition, I saw him, the down-lights glinting off his golden hair as he sat with his back toward me. It was near enough to closing that the place was mostly empty now, and I sidled up to the bar stool next to him and climbed up, my two bodyguards hovering in the background.

He was leaning on the bar, nursing an amber-colored drink in a lowball glass. He looked at me. “Hey, Shaw,” he said, lifting his chin in greeting.

“Hey,” I returned. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, I realized. He’d attacked me under the thrall of the agnate Cosimo. It hadn’t been his fault, but just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even think about him without feeling sick. Now, I only felt the faintest twinge of regret.

I didn’t know what had flipped that switch inside of me or when it had happened—whether it had been the deaths I’d seen or nearly losing Dorian or neither of those. And I supposed that it didn’t matter either way anymore. Now all he was to me was a former friend with whom my relationship could never be the same, a part of my old life that I’d chosen to leave behind.

“The veil suits you,” he said.

I raised my hand to the headband. “Oh, yeah. I forgot I was still wearing it.” I folded my arms on the bar top. “So what’s so important that you had to crash a bachelorette party to tell me? And please, don’t let it be that you love me or that I’m making a big mistake with my life. I know what choices I’m making. Better than you ever could.”

“No!” he said hurriedly. “No,” he repeated in a more measured voice, “it’s not that. Well, okay, so maybe a part of me still wishes that you’d chosen differently, but.... ” He broke off. “I went to your birthday party.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“And I met someone there.” He turned his glass slowly in his hands. “Clarissa.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You don’t want a part of that. You may think that you do—”

He laughed, and it had a darker side than the all-American, golden boy chuckle that I was used to. “I’m not stupid, Shaw. I figured out what she was. And I confronted her about it. Did she tell you?”

I shook my head. “Clarissa isn’t exactly the sharing type.”

“Yeah. Well, she explained a lot of things to me.” He cleared his throat. “Did some things that were better than explaining, actually. And you know what? I’m not dying, but if I passed that test of yours.... Well, let’s just say that whatever odds you were given, it’d be pretty tough to say no.”

“So you understand, then,” I said with a wash of relief.

He treated me to his boyish, lopsided smile. “I understand. It’s terrible what Dorian’s done to you. What they all do to us. It’s terrible because they make us want it so much.”

My heart sank. He understood, all right—understood from the outside, and despised it.

“He’s one of the good ones,” I said softly.

Geoff just shook his head. “None of them are the good ones. Some of them are just the less-bad ones. For your sake, I’m glad you got the second. I don’t know. Maybe we can use them for something better. Maybe we can make changes with how the world’s run. There are others—a lot of others, actually, who think like I do. And maybe we can make a difference.”

“Dorian’s already trying to do that,” I protested.

He shook his head. “No. Dorian’s just wanting a slightly different shape of a heap with the vampires still at the top. But that’s not where they belong. They shouldn’t live among real people. They shouldn’t live
on
real people.”

I knew then that nothing I could say could change his mind, so I chose silence instead.

“Anyway,” he said, slapping down a tip as he slid off the bar stool and squared his shoulders. He was taller, broader than I remembered him being before. “I just wanted you to know that I’ll be at your wedding—not because I’m happy for it but because I’m happy for you. Because you’re alive. And whatever else happens in the future, I want you to know that I’ll never regret that you’re alive.”

And with that, he turned and walked away.

I sat at the bar alone, not knowing what to think, and let the minutes slide by, until an unmistakable presence roused me from my stupor.

“Dorian.” I said his name as I turned to face him. “I’m sorry. Did I make you come in for me? I should have set an alarm—”

“No, I’m early,” he said. His collar was open under his suit jacket, and his hands were thrust into his pockets as her approached the bar.

My heart sang to see him, and it shocked me again to realize just how much I loved him. That I was even capable of that much love for anyone.

“You looked sad just then,” he said. “Where’s the party? I was expecting to interrupt a scene of debauchery the likes of which has not been witnessed since Nero’s court.”

“You witnessed Nero’s court?” I demanded, catching his hand and squeezing it in mine as I slid off my bar stool.

“No, but I have friends who have told me stories,” Dorian said. “Do you need to say goodbye to your friends?”

I craned to peer around the partition at them. Christina had managed to woo a patron into a booth with her and was busily doing things with him that I didn’t care to look too closely at, while Chelsea was snoring gently against the body of the bear shifter she’d tried unsuccessfully to seduce. The four agnates, Clarissa, Rebecca, Raymond, and Dalton, were already alert to Dorian’s presence, and they stood up with their cognates and made their excuses. My other friends were talking and laughing with one another, all except Lisette, who stood a short distance away deep in conversation or argument—it was always hard to tell which, with Lisette—with a curly-haired guy.

“I can send them all a text,” I said, not wanting to get drawn into one of Lisette’s animated discussions. “Let them know we’ve gone.”

“Good evening,” Raymond said to us as the group of agnates and cognates reached where we stood.

“Thank you very much for the invitation, Cora,” Paquita added. “It was interesting seeing how much human customs have changed over the years.”

I smothered my smile at the diplomatic phrasing. “Thank Lisette,” I said, nodding at my friend. “And I should be thanking you, not the other way around—for coming to the bachelorette party and also for agreeing to be in my bridal party.”

“You’re welcome, and have a good night,” Paquita said, and then they were gone, four of the shifters trailing behind.

“Good night,” Marie said as she walked out under Dalton’s arm with the other unfamiliar shifters in their wake.

Clarissa just shot me a broad wink on her way out, and Rebecca gave us both a nod.

I finished typing my farewell message and fired it off. I saw Lisette’s emphatic motions pause for an instant as my message arrived. She pulled out her phone to read it and then turned to give me a grin and a wave across the rapidly emptying bar.

I raised my hand in return as Dorian turned and led me away.

“I’m honestly not sure if that was just the wildest bachelorette party ever or the tamest,” I said, leaning against his body. The drink I’d sipped had left my stomach feeling warm, my face ever so slightly flushed.

“I am led to understand that such parties at times have ended in arrests,” he said dryly.

I angled my head to look up at him. “So why were you okay with it?”

“Because I trusted you,” he said. “And besides, Clarissa came along, if her help was needed. And the guards.”

I giggled. “When Clarissa is the person you send to keep people out of trouble, I think you may need more reliable friends.”

He hugged me against his body. “But there are two Clarissas. Don’t you know? The cleverly dangerous one, and the dangerously clever one.”

The limo from the week before was waiting for us at the curb as we stepped out of the club, Jenkins standing at the door. Dorian handed me into the car, and I scooted across the bench to make room for him.

“All things considered, though, I’d rather have you,” I said.

He swung into his seat and plucked the veil from my head, discarding it on the floor of the car. “It’s a good thing, because I’m the one you have.”

I leaned over impulsively and planted a peck on his lips—or at least, what was meant to be a peck, because as soon as our lips met, it turned into anything but that.

“Privacy screen,” I muttered against his mouth as Jenkins got into the front of the car. Dorian reached beside him and hit a switch, and the divider slid silently up.

The trip to Dorian’s house wasn’t half as long as I wish it had been.

T
he music swelled around me as I flipped through the Instagram pictures from the bachelorette party. The photos were somehow vaguely disappointing in their interchangeability. There I was, complete with paper crown, tiara, and Bride shirt, holding various mixed drinks that I’d hardly sipped as my friends mugged for the camera with varying levels of ridiculousness.

It looked exactly like thousands of other bachelorette parties, which I supposed had been at least a part of the point. And yet I still had the feeling that it had had something special, something unique about it that couldn’t be captured by phone cameras and retro filters. It was the end of an era for me, a transition to something that was more meaningful than what the snapshots could reveal.

It had also been the scene of the most epic mechanical bull ride ever, even if I hadn’t been the one on the device’s back.

Christina and Chelsea had littered all the pictures with comments and hashtags already, and both Sarah and Hannah had replied to a few. Lisette, who was usually quite the social butterfly, tended to be a bit less active on Instagram—not the least of which was because her sister and brother both followed her and would happily rat out anything that she did that was in the least bit questionable to their parents. But she was oddly quiet even for Instagram, and a quick hop over to Facebook showed no activity on her account since the party last night.

I frowned until I remembered the big finance exam we both had the next week. Lisette had a lot more self-discipline than I did, and when a test was coming up, she went into social media lockdown until she was confident that she was ready for it. That could account for it—after the party, she must have felt the need to hit the lockdown early.

I texted her anyway, asking her what time she’d gotten back to the dorm. Whatever kind of social media fast Lisette went on, she never stopped answering—and sending—text messages.

There was a knock on my bedroom door just as I hit send, and I flipped over to the house app to check who it was just as the door opened.

Dorian, of course.

“You could have waited until I told you to come in,” I said.

“I could have,” he agreed. “But I didn’t.”

“You won’t,” I retorted. “I wait until you answer, you know.”

“I don’t know why. This house is yours as much as it is mine.”

I snorted and leaned back in the chair, stretching my feet out on the ottoman in front of me.

“So what is that?” he asked, sitting across from me and nodding to the sounds coming from my phone.

“Listening to our wedding music,” I said. “Jane sent the rest of Tan Dun’s composition. Of course, it’s all computer-generated right now. The real orchestra and choir are still in rehearsals. Lisette always jokes that her life should have a soundtrack. She won’t, maybe, but our wedding will.” I held up a finger playfully, as if to forestall some comment that Dorian didn’t actually seem inclined to make. “And two bands to play classical and popular standards, Jane tells me, once the reception begins in earnest.”

“Is that what she says?” Dorian asked. “And what do you think about that?”

I allowed myself a smug smile. “I think it’s pretty awesome. I think our whole wedding is going to be pretty awesome.”

“One week away,” Dorian said.

“I know. I find it hard to believe. A week, and then...I’ll be Mrs. Dorian Thorne.” I smiled a little self-consciously. “You know, I haven’t really thought about that. Taking a new name, I mean.”

“If you wish to keep your own—” Dorian began.

I shook my head. “My name comes from my father, and I never met him. My Gramma’s last name was Lowden, and she’s the one who raised me. Of all the things I’ve done that I’m most afraid might cut my connection to my friends and my past, that doesn’t even rank in the top fifty.”

“And what are those other things?” he asked, more seriously this time.

I set my phone next to me, letting the slightly tinny music from the speakers keep playing. “Well, for one, there’s marrying a blood-sucking vampire rather than a nice human boy with a white-collar job who wants to live with me in a twenty-first century marriage of equals as we both pursue our careers.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “That.”

“Minor detail, I know,” I said. “And then there’s the fact that I’m not going to go to the graduate university of my dreams.”

Dorian didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. For one long moment, all he did was look at me, his blue eyes so sharp I thought my soul would bleed. Then one dark wing of a brow twitched, and he said, “So what are you going to do instead?”