Page 81 of Blood and Buttercups

“Hello, Piper.” Reid reaches over the desk to shake my hand. “It sounds like you’ve had a rough intro to the pre-vamp life. We’ll get all the details surrounding your attack, and then we’ll get a hunter on your case, all right?”

“Are you head of the conservators?” I ask, confused.

“No, I lead up our Colorado division of the investigation department.”

“But Noah—I mean Montgomery—was…”

“Demoted?” Reid supplies. “He’s still one of mine, even if the higher-ups sent him back to the nursery—no offense.”

“None taken.” I settle into a chair.

“We passed Cassian on the way in,” Noah says as he sits in the chair next to me. “He thinks Piper is from his line.”

Reid cringes and then quickly schools his expression, shaking his head. “You’re not having any luck, are you, Piper?”

Thankfully, I don’t think he expects a response.

“All right, let’s fill out the basics.” He turns to the computer and then scowls. “Why is this file still locked? I sent a request to IT before I left Denver.” He shoves his laptop to the side and shuffles through the mess for a pad of paper. “I’ll figure it out later. All right, Piper. Let’s start with the basics. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a flower farmer.”

He tears his eyes away from the paper. “A what?”

“I grow flowers in my backyard and sell them at farmer’s markets and to local stores. I have a little shop online, too, and I do subscription bouquets.”

“You’re a gardening vampire?” he says dumbly.

“Pre-vamp,” I correct. “Stage One. I can eat vegetables.”

“Good thing, too,” Noah adds, “because she’s a vegetarian.”

Reid rubs his hand over his face, looking tired. “Why would a vampire turn a nice flower girl like you?”

I clasp my hands on the table. “He made it sound like he wanted to be together. Romantically.”

“We know who it was, but he’s not in the database,” Noah adds.

Reid gives Noah a sharp look. “You don’t have access to the database right now.”

“I paid Daniel in donuts.”

“You’re going to get yourself fired, Montgomery.”

My bodyguard shrugs like he couldn’t care less.

“Who is it?” Reid asks, pulling a pad of scratch paper in front of him.

“Ethan Brennan of Brennan Properties.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Probably because he’s not in the system.”

Reid grunts.

“We have his phone number, too, and you should probably print out the texts he sent Piper. Might be a good idea to make a paper file as a backup, since I suspect that even if you can get past the security restriction, all this is going to get deleted again.”

Reid scowls at Noah. “I’m going to take care of this, but I need you to back off. I don’t want to lose one of my best hunters because he can’t keep his nose out of places it doesn’t belong. This kind of behavior is exactly what got you demoted in the first place.”

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