Tainted Blood (10 page)

I could’ve sworn I heard the pounding again, and Oliver paused. He lifted his head from where his lips had been exploring my chest and turned his ear toward the front door. It happened again, and we both heard the pounding this time. Next, I could just make out that his phone was ringing. He stared down into my eyes for a moment, and I could see that he was weighing his options. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, muttering, “Dammit,” under his breath.

I didn’t need to ask, I knew we weren’t going to go any further right then. Something always stopped us. It was like
it
wasn’t meant to happen. He grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to cover my totally naked body. Then he sat up, grabbed his jeans, and slipped them on as he stood. And yes, I got a nice glimpse of his bum.

Very nice indeed.

He pulled the phone from his pocket as the pounding continued at the front door. His phone began ringing again, and he answered, “I’m kinda busy!” Then he hung up.

The pounding on the front door got heavier and louder, and he told me to stay where I was as he headed for the door in nothing but his jeans. I sat up, wrapping the sheet around me and waited, listening, straining to hear over the sound of the music that still played in Oliver’s room.

I heard someone call him sir and say there was a situation. I heard Oliver’s irritated voice responding and telling the person at the door that he wasn’t on duty. I couldn’t hear much after that, so I scooted off of the bed with Oliver’s black sheet wrapped tightly around me, turned off the music player that was on his desk and scooted back onto the bed and listened.

I heard the other voice repeatedly saying, “I’m sorry, sir,” as Oliver reprimanded him about his interruption. Then I heard Felix’s voice boom from somewhere in the distance and knew our night together was for sure coming to a close. My stomach fell.

Damn.

Oliver returned a few minutes later, kissed the top of my head, and whispered, “You look way too sexy wrapped in that sheet.” His smiled down at me as he pulled a T-shirt over his head, then he sat beside me as he put his shoes and socks on.

“You seem about as surprised as me about being interrupted,” he said as I watched him get ready to leave.

I shrugged. “Happens every time, right?” I said as my body hummed, craving more of him but knowing it wouldn’t happen.

He crawled back over me, gently pushing me down onto the bed and kissed me so passionately it took my breath away. Then very seductively, he said, “I’ve waited a long time for you, I can wait a little longer.” His gorgeous, hypnotic green eyes held mine. He very lightly trailed a finger down my cheek. “Someday soon, we will finish this.”

“Promise?” I breathed, trying my best to refrain from begging him to stay.

He smiled crookedly down at me and said, “You know I won’t.” Then he kissed me long and slow, causing every emotion that had been settling back into a frenzy of desperately needing him.

“I’m sorry I have to leave you on your birthday,” he whispered against my lips.

I shrugged, and he smiled down at me again. Then he kissed across the exposed part of my chest, pecked my lips, and kissed my forehead before getting off the bed and pulling his sweatshirt from the closet.

“I’m thinking about taking some vacation time soon. I was thinking that I’d like to take you away from here,” he said as he slipped the sweatshirt on and zipped it almost all the way. “What do you think?” he asked, sitting back down on the bed.

I sat up and held the sheet in place. “Really, where would we go?”

He gave me one of those fabulous crooked smiles he was so good at then shrugged and said, “I don’t know, does it matter? Let’s just get out of here.”

An uncontrolled smile met my lips, and he took that as a yes, which it was.

He told me there had been some sort of situation that needed his attention. He wasn’t happy about being pulled away from me, especially on my birthday, and I reassured him that I understood. He kissed me a few more times then left, leaving my body yearning for more.

I l
a
y there for a while, in nothing but my new necklace and a sheet, waiting for the lingering feelings to fade. Eventually, I put on my jammies and blew out all of the candles, making a birthday wish on each one. I cleaned up the broken glass, the clothes that were strewn about, and cleared the table—taking a quick sniff of my very pretty roses.

Then I decided to go get all of my presents that I’d left at my apartment and maybe see about having some cake—in the hopes that the smell of mint wouldn’t always make me queasy. No thanks to Carter. Had he not introduced me to that glorious peppermint alcohol—that had not been so glorious on its way back up—I might not get sick to my stomach every time I smelled or tasted anything minty. I even had to change my toothpaste it was so bad.

I slipped on a pair of flip-flops and hurried to my apartment in the cool of the night, in a tank top and my silky, star covered jammie pants. It was pretty late but I figured Kiera, being the neat-freak that she was, would still be up cleaning. I was wrong. I walked into another candle-lit apartment, and Kiera wearing some very skimpy lingerie.

“Oh my God!” she screamed and tried to cover herself. I shielded my eyes and apologized as I quickly closed the door while Kiera grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch and covered herself with it. “Have you ever heard of knocking?” she snapped.

I put my hand down and said, in a rather snotty voice, “It’s my apartment too, you know! Have you ever heard of locking a door?”

She made some offended sound then said, “Well, Carter said he was just stepping out for a minute.” I gathered my gifts as she spoke. “He said he needed to talk to Felix. That’s that really big friend of Oliver’s, right?”

I straightened with an armload of presents as I realized that Kiera was missing a whole section of our lives. A
huge
portion of Carter’s. A portion he was going to have to share with her. It wouldn’t be fair for her to marry him and not know. “Um, yeah. They seem to really get along. Felix and Carter, that is.”

She leaned against the back of the couch with the blanket wrapped around her. “He’s a really big guy,” she stated, and it seemed that the obvious comment was more to herself than to me.

I asked for a slice of cake, and while still wrapped in the afghan from the sofa, she happily pulled a freezer container out with a couple of slices already ready to go. I told her to have a nice evening in a mocking sort of way, and she got all pissy and yelled at me to leave. I knew she knew I was just playing with her. I saw her smile before she slammed the door behind me. I was sure her cheeks were burning, though, but I couldn’t tell due to the dim lighting of the candles.

Carter was just coming up the steps as I was walking away, and he told me he’d walk me back to the apartment. He took most of the gifts and carried them for me, and at the same time, telling me he’d spoken to Felix about Ashton and that Felix was extremely concerned.

“He said we need to keep our distance from Ashton while he looks into it.”

“That’s going to be kind of hard to do considering we sit by him in bio,” I added.

“Yeah, I agree. But he told me that he’d wiped the same memories from both Ashton and Kiera, and he’d planted the same one, too. He said he’d get back to us about it, hopefully soon.”

I opened the apartment door for him, and he dumped my gifts on the couch and told me happy birthday again before telling me to lock the door behind him. He closed it as he left. I locked the door, gathered my hoard, and took it to Oliver’s bed, looking everything over once again.

The vampire Barbie was unsettling. Not because of what it was, but because of who it had come from and what he had said. “Heard you like vampires.” It scared me some that he might know Oliver was a vampire, but the dog comment he’d made toward Carter really freaked me out. He knew something. I didn’t know what exactly, or how much, but he knew something, and whatever it was, it was too much…

Chapter
3
- The
Pumpkin Farm

It was the morning of Halloween, Oliver and I had plans to go to the pumpkin farm with the others that afternoon. I’d fallen asleep on the couch watching TV while waiting up for him the previous night. I had hoped to spend what was left of my birthday with Oliver, but instead, I spent the final hours of my birthday with a taco and reruns on TV.

I sent Oliver a message before I got into the shower, asking him when he’d be home. By the time I got out of the shower, he had responded, telling me that he’d meet me out at the farm.

Carter, Kiera, and I picked Zoey up outside of her apartment then we grabbed some lunch to eat in the car on our way out to the pumpkin farm. I dropped ketchup on my jeans and spilled soda down the front of my white T-shirt, leaving a huge brown-tinged stain. It wasn’t shaping up to be a great day, and that point was proven even further when I stepped out of my car at the pumpkin farm right into a mud puddle, soaking my shoe all the way through.

I found one of my old crumpled up hoodies in the trunk of my car and zipped it up to cover the soda stain on my top. There was nothing I could do about the ketchup on my pants or my muddy shoe.

I searched the grass field, which was the farm’s parking lot, for Oliver’s SUV as we made our way to the entrance but didn’t see his car. I did, however, manage to step in another puddle, this one soaking both shoes and even a couple inches of both pant legs. Apparently, it had rained sometime during the night, making the pumpkin farm a muddy mess. It was overcast, the day had a dreary feel to it, and I had the sinking feeling that it would not be improving.

I grumbled about my damp feet for the first ten minutes and then moved on to bitching about other things that nobody seemed to care about. My only current happiness, in my damp and gloomy state, was the caramel apple on a stick that I’d purchased from a vendor dressed as a black cat. But only moments later my little piece of happiness was ripped away when some kid in a clown costume ran past me, bumped me hard, and knocked my caramel apple out of my hands. I watched it roll across the ground, and being cold and miserable, I considered dropping to my knees and crying.

I picked up the apple from where it
lay
, covered in strands of hay and dirt and tossed it into the trash while Carter told us that this incident only confirmed his suspicions that clowns were pure evil. Clowns and spiders. Those were his two big fears. Not some big-ass misshapen dog that had attacked him and altered his life forever, or the fact that Ashton may know too much about all of us. It was clowns and spiders that scared Carter. I imagined that a spider dressed as a clown would do him in. Normally I’d laugh at my own absurd thought, but my friends were making me sit through some stupid pig race, and I wasn’t finding anything humorous at that dreary moment.

While my friends, especially Carter, cheered on some poor little pigs, each wearing a different colored shirt with a number on it, I called Oliver. He answered quickly and told me that he was sorry for running late and would be there soon. We exchanged I love yous then hung up.

Some nervousness settled into the pit of my stomach when I thought about seeing him. We’d been naked together. Totally freakin’ naked! It was weird to think that when he looked at me, he could picture me totally naked and be totally accurate. I tried to reassure myself that it had been somewhat dark in the candlelit apartment, and he wasn’t able to get that good of a look. Then I reminded myself that he was a vampire with excellent eyesight in and out of the dark.

Zoey called my name, bringing me back to the present. The pig races were over, and my friends were ready to head over to the corn maze.

I fell in step beside Zoey and asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You just seem a little preoccupied and well, grumpy.” She gave me a little smile, one that showed she was afraid I might be easily set off.

I couldn’t help but laugh. It was that or cry. “Yeah, sorry. Been kind of a frustrating day so far.”

“It’ll get better.” She smiled again, not looking so anxious this time, then she looped her arm through mine, and we trudged through the muddy grounds of the pumpkin farm until we were at the entrance to the corn maze.

I truly hated that maze. We’d done it every year for the past four years, and every year I’d somehow gotten lost. I grumbled and protested a little but in the end we showed the guy working the entrance our wristbands and began our journey through a maze of cornstalks.

Both of my feet were damp and muddy, and I was shivering and hugging myself for warmth. Zoey had ditched me to chat with Kiera about wedding stuff, and Carter was busy hopping over every mud hole he could find. A group of people passed by up ahead, and one of them took a step back to look at us. I realized too late that it was Ashton. I think I would’ve tried to hide had I know hiding wouldn’t have been the reason I got lost this year. “Hey guys!” he called, and Carter stopped hopping.

Carter glanced back at me, and I saw a spark of nervousness ignite. Zoey, her arm linked with Kiera’s, stopped so suddenly that it caused Kiera to slip. Zoey pulled Kiera upright before she could hit the ground, and Ashton watched too closely. Zoey was stronger than she looked. Stronger than she should be. Her natural vampire powers had begun surfacing, and this was one of those times she used them without thinking.