Page 40 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

“I’m far from perfect,” I assured him. “Just ask Poppy. She’ll tell you anything you want to know. All the dirty details.”

He turned back to the titles he was browsing on the shelf in front of him, but I caught his grimace before his face turned away from me. “I get the sense that your sister doesn’t like me much.”

“Poppy likes you just fine. She helped out with the locator spell for Lee’s wife, no questions asked.” Actually, she’d had plenty of pointed questions and choice comments. But those had been about my sanity, not Bryan’s. Poppy liked him just fine.

Bryan shrugged, but at the mention of our mission—what we were actually in the city to accomplish—his expression darkened fractionally.

“Doesn’t mean she likes the idea of her twin brother dating a vampire,” Bryan muttered.

We both froze at the same time as his words registered.

Bryan whirled around to face me, his eyes going wide with alarm. “Oh, wow. No. I don’t know why I said that. I meant, in theory. Like, if we ever did go on a real non-platonic date.” He let out a shuddering breath, wincing. “Jeez, I’m such a jerk. Please just put me out of my misery.”

Somehow, rather than making me upset, his words reminded me that, while Bryan might have been a vampire, he was still just a regular guy, too. He hadn’t been trained from birth on the supernatural. And this was another glimpse of who he was, beneath all the pain and darkness. He was a bit of a nerd. And he had virtually no game with guys whatsoever.

It made my heart clench up to see it—to see him—maybe for the first time.

“I have a better idea,” I informed him. “Since we’re playing hooky from what we came here to do for the moment, I will gain vengeance for your foolish words by destroying you and burning your kingdom to the ground. You will bow before my dark power.”

He blinked at me, his jaw dropping. “Err, what?”

I winked at him, grinning. “I’m very competitive when it comes to board games. Ethan, Poppy, and I used to play. I didn’t quite flip the board, but it came close.” I paused, swallowing. The thought of those simpler times made me miss my sister and my best friend like a physical ache, but I pushed those feelings away. I would see them again soon enough, wouldn’t I? After a moment had passed, I added, “You said there’s a back room where we can play. Let’s go duke it out. Let’s be ordinary weirdos for a little while.”

“Oh my God,” Bryan said faintly, still staring at me. But after a long moment, his lips twitched and then his smile became a grin just as big as mine. “Tobias Hawthorne, you’re totally a nerd.”

I beamed back at him. “Yup. Sure am.”

*

Bryan had understated the size of the back room, which wasn’t just one room, but two. They were connected by a large rectangular archway. Both rooms were massive and filled with long tables. The room on the right had groups of people playing trading card games at the tables, complete with play mats and dice and fancy looking deck boxes. The room on the left was mostly empty except for a handful of people in the far back intently playing a complex-looking board game.

Beside me, Bryan let out a happy sigh and went straight for the shelves crammed full of used board games. I trailed behind, watching him.

Absent-mindedly, he chewed on his lower lip, his eyebrows sliding together, as he studied the titles before him. He paused for only a few moments before he started making some selections. He pulled three games off the shelf, one after the other, balancing them in one hand like a waiter in a fancy restaurant, then turned to me.

“Where do you want to sit?”

I immediately pointed to a spot that was a good four tables from the large group of people playing a board game in the back, but still well away from the opening that led into the store proper and also from the kitty-corner passageway into the other game room. I felt certain that nothing bad was going to happen to us in here, but just in case something or someone with harmful intentions toward us stepped into the room, we’d at least have a moment’s warning. I took a chair that faced both of the openings into the room.

Bryan slid into the seat on the opposite side of the table. He considered me for a long moment. “You’re always so methodical,” he said, but the warmth in his voice let me know it wasn’t meant to be an insult. “About everything. I bet it would have taken you at least twenty minutes to pick out a game.”

“At least,” I agreed. “I would have picked a game I wanted to try, but I would have read all the reviews first. And maybe even watched a YouTube gameplay video or something.”

“You’re that kind of nerd, then?”

“I totally am.”

“They make gameplay videos for board games?”

“They make videos for pretty much everything. Board games included.”

“I’m pretty much a vibes person,” he informed me, taking the top cover off the nearest game. He started dealing cards that had cute cartoonish cats drawn on them. “That goes for everything. Food, books, movies, games, whatever.” His voice went a bit softer. “Or, I guess, I used to be.”

Desperate to stop him from sliding back into a dark headspace, I gestured at the boxes of games on the table next to us. “You still are, clearly. You picked these in record time.” I read the title of the game he’d selected for us to start with, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “And it seems that your current vibe is ‘Exploding Kittens.’”

“I used to play this with my family. We’d do dinner and board games every Sunday night, even after my sister and I both started college.” Bryan paused, then flashed me another smile. It was dimmer than before, but it still reached his eyes. “It’s a lot of fun. And yeah, I guess I am still a vibes person about some things.”

“I’m a sucker for the classics, myself,” I told him. “Monopoly, Parcheesi, Sorry!, Clue…” I smiled and shook my head. “When we were growing up, Ethan was our best friend, but he couldn’t do any magic. So, Poppy and I did regular things with him. It was board games and pizza and cheesy monster movie marathons, whenever his mom or someone else in the coven made him feel bad. It became a regular thing for us.”

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