He frowned. “But that’s demeaning to you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’ll give me a chance to protect you if I need to and allow me to use my animal senses. Plus, it’ll be easier than strolling through the street naked.” I dropped to my knees to change again.
“Ruby,” he began thoughtfully.
I shot back upright, my heart hammering with hope. Was he going to tell me how he felt? “Yes?”
He smiled at me thoughtfully. “Thank you. For everything.”
I could have cheerfully strangled him. I dropped back to my knees and began to shift.
—
People swerved off the sidewalk at the sight of my jaguar form. Michael just smiled and acted as if he always took a massive feline out for an evening stroll. I hoped the bright pink bow collar I’d fashioned out of discarded costume parts would alleviate some of the fear. It looked ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous wearing it, so I hoped it took away a lot of the scariness.
We turned down an alley, and I kept guard as Michael slipped a key from his wallet and then punched in a key code. The door clicked open, and Michael nodded at me. “Come on in.”
I quickly changed back to human form and followed him inside.
We entered a butcher’s shop, and my mouth watered at the overwhelming smell of meat. Even though it was put away in refrigerated cases, I could still smell it, the blood soaking the paper, everything. It was like walking into a buffet.
“It’s back this way,” Michael said, going behind the counter.
I stared up at the security cameras and crossed my arms over my breasts. “Are those going to be a problem?”
“Oh, uh.” He paused, scratching his head. “I guess they will be. Don’t worry. I’ll leave a note for the manager.”
“Won’t he wonder why you’re not on the camera and I am? Totally naked, I might add?”
“A long note,” Michael amended, then gestured for me to follow him. “Come on.”
Reluctant, I followed behind him.
Michael entered the meat freezer, and I tiptoed in behind him. He moved to the back of the freezer and began to run his hand along the back wall. I glanced at the gigantic sides of beef hanging from the hooks, the pork, the splayed racks of ribs. Wow. It all looked… juicy. The thought revolted me even as my stomach growled. My jaguar half wasn’t picky, but the human part didn’t like the thought of gnawing on raw meat.
“Here we go.” Michael’s hand found a seam in the metal wall, and he pushed at an invisible panel. The wall clicked and opened a crack, revealing a dark room on the other side. I followed Michael in and was surprised to discover that this was just a small antechamber, equally as cold as the meat freezer. The room was empty of everything but a windowless door on the far side and a numbered security panel set into the wall.
“The code is eleven twenty-nine,” he said, punching in the numbers. “Just in case you need to get back in while I’m unconscious.”
“Eleven twenty-nine? That’s my birthday.”
He glanced over at me, a hint of a smile flicking over his face. “Coincidence.”
Yeah. I gave his back a skeptical look as he turned toward the door. The panel beeped, accepting the code, and the door clicked, unlocking. Michael held it open for me.
If I was expecting something amazing on the other side, I was sorely disappointed. There was an easy chair, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, a game system on the floor below it, and a single bed on the far side of the room. The blankets were mussed, and the room was small, maybe twelve by eight feet across.
It wasn’t warm, either. I rubbed my arms, looking around. “This is your safe room?”
“One of several.” He moved forward, grabbing DVDs off the seat of the chair and placing them on a nearby rack. “I’ve been moving around in the hopes that Mariah would think I was gone and would get the picture, but she doesn’t seem to be paying attention.”
“She doesn’t seem to be very good at that,” I agreed, then rubbed my arms. “Clothes?”
He looked stricken. “None here. It’s a fairly new setup for me.”
I tried to ignore the chill. As a shifter, I was fairly immune to cold weather, but I was naked, and it felt a bit nippy even to my metabolism. “Mind if I get under your blankets, then?”
“Be my guest.”
I crawled under the covers and wrapped them around my body, noticing that his gaze followed me. “You hungry again?”
“I’m okay,” he said, too quickly. “You?”
“Hungry,” I admitted. “All that meat two rooms over isn’t helping.”
He grinned. “You like your meat raw?”
“Not that raw, but if I get hungry enough, it’ll do.”
He gestured back to the freezer. “There’s ready-made sandwiches out in the deli fridge.”
“Now you’re talking,” I said, smiling at him.
We retrieved a few sandwiches and another bottle of water, and I wrapped myself up in the blanket, crossing my legs and sitting up.
While I ate, he turned the easy chair toward me and watched as I devoured sandwiches. “You want my shirt again?”
“I’m good for now.” Plus, his shirt would smell way too much like him, and having it rub against my skin again might give me ideas. Time for a distraction. “So,” I said between bites, “you going to tell me your story?”
“My story?” He looked blank for a moment, then laughed.
He was so handsome that I stopped chewing just to stare at him, my heart pounding. That laugh brought back so many memories and filled me with intense longing.
“You mean how I got turned?”
Not trusting myself to speak around the knot in my throat, I nodded.
He raked a hand through his hair, and it stuck up. “Well. After I, uh, dropped out…”
When we’d broken up . . . I said nothing, letting the awkward silence fill the room. What could I say? Yeah, when you caught me banging that guy? And then you quit school?
“I decided that I should see the world,” he said. “Took my Pell Grants and decided to tour Europe.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Transylvania?”
“Madrid, actually. I met a very lovely Englishwoman named Gemma who was touring the Continent. We took to spending time together while I was in Spain. She was fun and carefree and loved to laugh. I needed that, back then.”
Fun and carefree English Gemma. I hated her. That bitch.
“I spent most nights drunk, trying to for—” He shifted in his seat and paused. “Well. I wasn’t in a good place, so I didn’t much care what happened to me. Gemma was a bit of a party girl and a drinker, so I partied and drank with her. One night, I was on a bender, and I passed out in her room early, skipping the party. When I woke up the next evening, I found out that she had turned me into a vampire.”
“Turned you against your will? That’s awful!” I immediately burned with hatred for her. That bitch.
“Well, she hadn’t meant to,” Michael said with a rueful, affectionate smile that made my heart thump with a different kind of beat—jealousy. “Turns out she’d been sipping from me here and there when we were necking, and I’d made her drunk. Too much alcohol in my blood, and she lost her inhibitions. When I passed out in her room, she’d been unable to resist and drained a bit too much. I was in danger of dying, so she turned me instead.”
“This is a pretty rotten story,” I told him. “Did you hate her?”
He shook his head. “Nah. She was truly apologetic. Anyhow, she took me under her wing and taught me how to survive as a vampire. Then, when I had the hang of things, she gave me a nice settlement and sent me on my way.”
“You should have staked her,” I muttered.
“It’s not like that,” Michael said. “I like being a vampire. The feeding’s tricky at times, but it’s opened up an entire new world that I didn’t know even existed. I have new abilities, and I’ve met fascinating people I would have never met otherwise. I don’t regret it.”
I regretted it for him, though. He should have been living in the suburbs by now, with 2.5 kids, a dog, and a cubicle job or something. “You didn’t stay with Gemma?”
He shook his head. “Not long. She didn’t want a partner, just a drinking buddy. We parted on good terms. After she left, I traveled through Europe and Asia, visiting some of the vampire havens along the way. After a couple of years of that, I got bored and decided I wanted to come back to the States. And since I’m new to the area, I joined the dating agency.” He shrugged. “It’s uneventful, I’m sorry to say.”
He’d traveled the world and been turned into a vampire. I’d been working at the local storage unit and wishing I’d had the guts to stand up to my parents back when I had the chance.
He smiled over at me. “What about you? Living it up since college? What did you get your degree in?”
I chewed on my lip. Tell him the truth? Lie? I sighed after a moment and decided to go for the totally unglamorous truth. “I dropped out a few days after you did. I was… struggling.”
“I see,” he said, but it didn’t sound judging. “You didn’t go back?”
I shook my head, regret washing through me. “No. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I decided to work instead.”
“Where do you work?”
“Cool Storage,” I said, and then snorted. “I’m a security guard. Funny, huh?”
“Why? I think you’d be amazing at whatever you put your mind to.”
His admiring tone bothered me. I gave him a bitter look and flicked my fingers, as if brushing off his compliments. “No, you don’t. You think I’m a loser because I’ve been stuck in a dead-end job in the same city since you last saw me. I didn’t get a degree, I don’t have a family, and I’m resorting to meeting men through a dating agency, even though I should be able to find someone easily since shifter women are rare. Yet here I am, on the lam with a vampire on a date that won’t quite end. A vampire who dumped me four years ago, I might add.” I tightened the blankets around my body and resisted the urge to turn my face to the wall. “Kind of a shitty date, if you ask me.”