Page 26 of Just Dare Me
The vampire tilts his head slightly. “HerMidnightHighness.”
“Right, of course. Thank you, Alfred. Tell me, did she go for formal dress or casual? I feel overdressed myself, since I actually have clothes on this time. Maybe she told you about when we first met—”
“You are keeping her waiting. Her Midnight Highness doesnotwait.”
As I make my way to the driver’s-side door, I can’t help but get the last word in. “Well, she waits forme, apparently. She waited in the alley, and now she’s waiting in the truck. By the way, I’m only going slow because you said my city is dirty.”
I climb in behind the wheel and slam the door, shutting out the noise of the crowd from the stadium. Dominique is perched on the edge of the passenger seat in a glossy cocktail dress, a fur cape draped across her shoulders and pooling in her lap. Her pose, her Mona Lisa gaze, the lift of her chin—everything is straight out of a fashion magazine photo shoot. I’m already over this meeting. “Don’t you get tired of always being so uptight? Why can’t we just have a burger and talk like normal people?”
“Donotspeak,” she orders.
Something inside me snaps. “Hey! I’m getting real sick of people popping off to me. At home and at work I gotta tiptoe around enough alpha assholes, so I sure as hell ain’t gonna take it from a princess who comes intomycity and thinks she can order me around. Now, see this?” I reveal the tiny metal cylinder in my hand. I flick it with my thumb, raising a large sliver of ash wood. “I’m stressed out, I’m pissed off, and I haven’t slept in days. So you’re going to tell me whatever it is that you couldn’t have just told me the other night in the alley, and you’re going to tell menow, or I jab this thing under your manicured fingernail.”
A hand lashes out from the back seat, gripping my wrist. Another hand snakes out from my other side to clamp tightly over my mouth. I freeze up, my heart thumping wildly. Dominique’s face is a mask of utter hatred. Her eyes glow red. She hisses, fangs bared. “My councilor has just saved your life.”
The hand tightens around my wrist. I drop the toothpick.
Dominique closes her eyes, and when she opens them, the red glow fades away. “You have no idea how much restraint I have expended in not tearing your throat out, not just in this moment, but the other night in the alley. For all our sakes, but against my better judgement, I leave you now. You have ten minutes.” She flings the door open, hops down, and slams it so hard the truck rocks back and forth.
The hand at my wrist relaxes, but the one over my mouth stays firm. A voice behind me says, “Babe, you gotta pick your battles better. She really would have ripped your throat out.”
A familiar voice. An impossible voice.
My eyes dart up to the rearview mirror, where I see his emerald green eyes sparkling back at me, exactly like the night we first met. I’m not sure what kind of move I make after that—like, I twist around, but reel backward at the same time. In any case, my head knocks into the rearview mirror, and my back slams into the wheel, honking the horn. I push the wild hair out of my face.
And he’s there. He’shere, two feet away, pulling a hood back from his beautiful face. A neat wedge of golden hair. Clean-shaven jaw. Eyes crackling with emotion.
And then he smiles a Jay smile, the devastating kind he reserves only for me, like a setting sun at last dipping below the storm clouds, warming the whole world, lighting it on fire.
I throw myself over theback of the seat, and our bodies crash together. Wrapping my arms around him, I squeeze hard, and press my face into his neck, and move my hands up and down his back, as if each new spot I touch him will convince my mind that he’s real.
I do the same with my mouth, kissing his neck, his ear, his cheek, then finding his lips and pressing against them until we’re both out of breath.
He inhales deeply. “You smell like you.”
“So do you. Youfeellike you.”
He brushes hair out of my face and uses his thumbs to wipe the tears from under my eyes. “Itisme,” he says.
“But how? Jay, what’s happening? How did you get away?”
He kisses me long and deeply, wringing fresh tears from my lashes. Then he leans my head back just enough to look me in the eyes. “I didn’t get away. I was never taken.”
“What? But everybody saw you. Beyona had you in her talons. She took off.”
“That’s right. She lifted me out of the cargo hold, straight up and out over the water, and she was so desperate to get away that she didn’t see the Windsor clan already crossing over in boats from their side of the river. They opened fire, clipped her in the wing.”
“She dropped you?”
“From fifty feet up. Hitting the water knocked me clean out. They pulled me into their boat.”
“The Windsor clan? You’ve been with them this whole time?”
“Yes.”
“They kept you prisoner?”
“No. Well, yes, at first. They had no idea what happened. Their master was killed in the bridge explosion. They had so many questions, and I had all the answers. I told them everything.”
