Page 40 of Bourbon & Blood

“Gotcha,” I murmured out loud for his benefit, and I hit the buzzer by the door to pop the door downstairs. I heard the buzzing through the line and the latch of the door disengage.

“Save this number,” he told me before ending the call.

I saved his number while I stood there, waiting for him to reach my front door. I still jumped when he knocked twice, even though he didn’t do it very hard.

I opened the door to see him standing there with two other men and I swallowed hard. Both of them were imposing in their own way and only one of them was one of the men he’d been with at the bar the night before, the one with the neck so thick it almost made his head seem too small for his body. I wasn’t saying that to be mean, it was just true.

“Um, hi,” I said faintly and stood aside, letting them in. All three walked into mine and Maya’s apartment and the open, high-ceilinged space, suddenly seemed much smaller for their presence.

“I just woke up,” I said, and La Croix turned his head to follow my movement as I shut and leaned up against the inside of the door.

“This is Cypress,” he said, leaning his head over to indicate the taller man with the neck as thick as a damn tree trunk. I nodded carefully in Cypress’s direction and he nodded back. His hair was close cropped and brown, as though his head had been shaved and was in that phase of growing back, where it was just about to tip into the point of being a head of hair. Still too short to grab onto while he went down on you, but long enough it was there.

I tried not to let myself blush at the errant last thought that I’d had… I mean, hadn’t I just given myself lock and stock to La Croix? Technically, I didn’t get to think that way anymore about anyone else,did I?

I didn’t know how any of this was supposed to work, and considering the one person to ask was Maya, and that I was doing this specifically to find her? Yeah… yikes…complicated.

“An’ this here is Saint,” he said. Saint was slightly taller than La Croix but not as tall as Cypress. His long dark hair was pulled into a ponytail, and his dark beard was trimmed neatly along a strong jaw.

All three of them were ridiculously muscular, all three practically wearing the same thing – sturdy black boots, roughly worked in and stained jeans, and those black leather vests with the patches all over them. Cypress wore a gray sleeveless shirt up under a black wifebeater. Saint had on a clean white tee with the sleeves rolled up shorter, but La Croix? La Croix wore only the ink under his skin.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said and kept my back pressed to the door.

Intimidation radiated from the three men like an oven and I didn’t know what to do. I was both scared and intrigued and the conflicting emotions were at war with one another to the point that I didn’t know which would win over the other.

I did have to say, I hadso many questionsfor La Croix and I was more than slightly disappointed that the other two men accompanied him. I mean, I wasn’t comfortable asking them in front of anyone else.

“So, um, what did you need from me?” I asked when the silence stretched between us post-introduction.

“Your friend got a laptop or anything?” Saint asked.

“Oh, yeah, in here,” I said, and I led the way into her bedroom. Saint took a seat at her desk and woke the machine up.

“Lemme call our guy. See if he can get this opened up,” he muttered, reaching for his phone. I reached past him and keyed in her PIN and the screen flowed from the lock screen to her open email which was the last screen I’d had the machine on, the morning after she’d disappeared.

Saint looked up at me. “Thanks,” he said. “Mind writing that down for me?”

“Sure.” I pulled a pen from the cup on the corner of her desk and jotted it down on the notepad for him.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can leave me to it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Um, I know it’s the afternoon, but coffee anyone?”

“We’d like that, cher,” La Croix said and I swallowed hard, not sure what to make of the term of endearment.

“Okay.”

I went into the kitchen. Cypress stayed, standing behind Saint while he got someone on the phone and worked at Maya’s laptop. La Croix followed me to the kitchen.

I went to the coffee pot and threw the old down the sink, turning on the tap to wash the pot before fixing new.

La Croix leaned back up against the counter a little closer than was comfortable, his dark eyes wandering over me.

“You sleep like that?” he asked me, cocking his head.

“Usually,” I replied softly.

His expression was unreadable, but certainly didn’t telegraph pleasure. I looked down at the army-green tank top and the blue and white vertically barred men’s boxers I had on.

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