“I would say congratulations, especially since I was starting to suspect he doesn’t even have a prick. He’s not known for socializing.”
“What if I told you the mother is half-vampire.”
That got a reaction. Donatelli shot him a startled look. “I’d say that is very interesting, but worth only five grand, tops.”
“Throw in twenty more and I’ll tell you who she is.”
“I don’t need you for that. I can just have someone observe who Atelier is visiting these days.”
“Except my sources tell me that Atelier isn’t seeing anyone these days. No one knows about the child. No one knows about the mother. No one but him. Her. And me.” Ringo swallowed hard. He could smell the blood, thick and warm and laced with that extra tangy mix of alcohol and drugs. His hands were starting to shake.
“When is this bundle of joy due?”
Ringo shrugged. “I’ve said enough.” He stuck his foot on the bottom of the railing, needing the support. Vampires weren’t supposed to feel cold, but Ringo felt the sensation of ice water careening through his veins. He wanted that blood. “I’ll be in town tonight, then I’m leaving tomorrow. Call my cell phone if you’d like to discuss it further.”
Donatelli didn’t reach for the card Ringo gave him, so he tucked it into the pocket of the Italian’s expensive overcoat.
“You realize you have tipped your hand, don’t you?” Donatelli asked him.
Ringo pushed back. “Just the first card. I’ve got four more facedown.”
Not to mention he had lifted Donatelli’s wallet out of his pocket. Ringo and Kelsey’s hotel bill would be compliments of Donatelli that night. Time to move to the Ritz.
“Ever confident. Ever foolish.” Donatelli smiled at him. “Stick to murder for hire. You’re better at that than vampire politics.”
But Ringo just smiled back. “See you around, Donatelli.” He waved and cut across the sidewalk, heading toward Forty-second Street and away from the coffee cup that was calling him.
Kelsey waited until Ringo had left, lifting his hand for a cab. She had been watching from the clothing storefront across the street, hidden among shoppers behind a table of turtleneck sweaters.
Donatelli was still staring at the ice rink, but she didn’t want to risk him walking away, so she moved quickly. He sensed her coming behind him and turned. A smile crossed his face.
“Ah, Miss Kelsey, how good to see you again. I should have known you were hanging about. Where there is Ringo, there is Kelsey.”
Her fear and revulsion fought to gain supremacy, but Kelsey stopped two feet in front of him and screwed up her courage. This man may have ordered her drained of all her blood and left for dead a few months back, but he couldn’t hurt her, not here, not with hundreds of people moving around them.
“Leave my husband alone.”
His eyebrow rose. “Husband? What a surprise. Congratulations, my dear. You are now attached for eternity to a drug-addicted killer. Should I send you a silver soup tureen? Linens, perhaps. Either way, may you have more success with your marriage than I had with mine.”
Kelsey put her hands inside the pouch pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. “I’m serious. Leave Ringo alone.”
“You aren’t taking into account
he
contacted
me
. I was minding my own business, doing a little preholiday shopping and sampling the delights of the city, when he called me.”
Despising the way he talked, the arrogance, the way his finger rolled around and around the rim of the coffee cup in his hand, Kelsey tensed. She knew what was in his cup, as well as the one on the ground. She knew this man was responsible for Ringo’s addiction. “You don’t really believe him, do you? He’s trying to bilk you because we’re broke and we’re on the run.”
Ringo thought he could shut her out of his thoughts, but Kelsey could catch random bits and pieces, enough to know that he had come to Donatelli to sell information. She also knew that he loved her, even if he didn’t realize that’s what it was, and she loved him in return. Unfortunately, his sense of right and wrong wasn’t exactly well developed and he made bad choices. A lot of them. But she could fix this one.
Donatelli sipped his drink. “You know, I find that a fascinating strategy on your part. You’re willing to risk his anger in order to protect him from me. I’m flattered that you are that frightened of what I can do to him. But I don’t think he is making this story up... he couldn’t have created it on his own, or understood the importance of it. Sorry, Kelsey, you can’t make me go away. I am interested in negotiating a sale with your husband.”
People thought she was stupid, a brunette airhead, and sometimes she was. Mostly she was just strange, and she knew that. But both perceptions led people to continually underestimate her.
“I’m thirsty,” she said in a random, whiny voice. She bent down and pulled one of the cups out of the cardboard carrier at Donatelli’s feet.
“Be my guest,” he said dryly. “But one of those three cups has a little extra something added to it. I don’t think I remember which one.”
Having being a drug user herself in the late sixties, Kelsey had no intention of ever going that route again and wanted to ensure Ringo didn’t relapse either. She would be forever grateful to Mr. Carrick for getting her the help she had needed when she’d hit rock bottom, and didn’t intend to see her husband slide backward. But she wasn’t going to drink any of Donatelli’s blood cups anyway.
She just shrugged and stood back up. “I’ll sniff it.” Prying the lid off, she delicately lifted it to her nose. “You do know that when Ringo gets desperate, he is capable of almost anything.”
“Aren’t we all.” Donatelli had dark eyes, and they narrowed, as he clearly tried to guess what game she was playing.
“Not everyone. Like, I don’t know, Gwenna, for instance. She’s not capable of evil, is she?”
That got the reaction she was hoping for. “What the fuck does Gwenna have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know.” Kelsey blinked. “But she’s in Vegas again.”
Donatelli opened his mouth then snapped it shut. He gave a deliberate shrug. “Why do I care if my ex-wife is visiting her brother?”
“I don’t know. But I thought it was weird that she was hanging out with the French guy that no one likes. The one who helped Ringo. She seems so quiet. But I guess they make a good couple.”
Kelsey was lying through her teeth. She doubted Gwenna even knew Atelier, but her objective was simply to get Donatelli back to Vegas, so by default she could get Ringo back to Vegas, back where there were other vampires to run interference. Back where she could keep her husband away from the drug blood.
“A couple? That’s ridiculous.”
But he looked unconvinced and angry, grip tightening on his coffee cup. Kelsey just gave a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe they’re not a couple. I guess they could just be having sex.”
Donatelli’s eyes flared with hatred, the cup in his hand collapsing, blood spilling all over his really pretty light brown coat. Kelsey jumped back, a red splash landing on her arm.
“Damn it,” he said, dropping the crushed cup right as a woman to their left started screaming.
Kelsey turned, saw her pointing at them, at all the blood on Donatelli’s chest, while she shrieked in terror. There was movement, people coming toward them. Reacting instinctively, Kelsey backed up, right into Donatelli, intending to run. But before she even realized he was doing it, he had his arms around her.
Then she was up and over the railing, free-falling down onto the ice rink. She heard the shouts, saw scrambling movement as skaters dashed out of the way.
When she landed, on her shoulder and back, with a crunch of nausea-inducing pain, she looked up at the railing.
Donatelli was gone.
And she hoped like hell he was headed back to Vegas.
That was worth breaking half the bones in her body.
Corbin gave a quick apology to Sam and the class, grabbed Brittany’s cell phone off the floor, and headed out after her. He deleted the picture she had taken, glancing briefly at the disturbing image of Austin in the air with nothing holding him. The lack of a reflective image for a vampire was something he had never been able to fully explain with science.
Brittany was sitting on a bench wiping at her eyes.
“Hello,” he said, sitting down next to her.
“Hi.” She sniffled, her voice wobbly, mouth turned down.
“I am sorry.” Corbin turned her cell phone around and around in his hands.
She sighed. “It’s not your fault. I just wasn’t expecting that. And I don’t feel good. My stomach is upset. That’s why I came in the room in the first place.”
“Shall I take you home then?” He put his hand on her knee, not knowing how to fix this. He didn’t even understand fully what he felt for Brittany, and he had no comprehension of how to handle their relationship. Didn’t know what was expected of him, or what he was entitled to.
“Actually, I think I’ll call my sister to come and get me. I want you to finish the class.” She stared out the window in front of them at the dark parking lot.
There was a distance in her voice and he didn’t like it. “I am trying to be normal,” he said, frustrated.
“I know.” She turned to him and gave him a wan smile. “And I’m trying to pretend I can be a soccer mom. I never thought I was trying to defy my childhood, but I think in some ways all I’ve ever wanted as an adult was to just be normal. I mean, I became a dentist. Can you get any more suburban than that? But the thing is, Corbin, we can try, but we can’t change the core of who we are. You’re a vampire, and in my heart, I’m still a wild child, happy-go-lucky daughter of a stripper. We can’t change that, and I guess, ultimately, I don’t want to. But I’m not sure being parents meshes with who we are.”
Corbin squeezed her knee, his heart searing at her words. He had failed her by the simple fact that he was not the man she had expected to meet and marry. He was not the man who could give her that completely innocuous bourgeois existence. Regardless of her feelings toward him, he would always represent the loss of that dream. That made him very sad, very sorry.
But he also disagreed with her.
“The ideal parent is not based on where you live, or what you can provide your child with. A good parent is simply one who loves his child and teaches them values and boundaries in a nurturing environment.” He hadn’t been watching
Supernanny
religiously for two months without learning a thing or two. Or how to articulate what he suspected he had known instinctually.
He turned to her, touched her chin, brought her gaze around to his. “We have that,
ma chérie
. If we were bad parents, we would not worry this much. But we worry, because we care. And ultimately, that is the most important thing our child needs. Two parents who would do anything for him or her.”
Big fat tears spilled out of her eyes. “You’re a good man, Corbin Jean Michel Atelier,” she whispered.
He kissed her forehead. “Let me take you home.”
“No, you should stay. You’re learning a lot.”
“That is true.” He gave a rueful smile as she pleased him by dropping her head down onto his shoulder.
It was a comfortable feeling, her resting on him, and they sat in contentment. Silent, but together.
And after Alexis had picked Brittany up fifteen minutes later, Corbin strode back into the classroom. He had to do this. He had to show Brittany they could be
normal
parents, whatever normal might be defined as.