Love Me Forever. Rosemary Laurey

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СКАЧАТЬ enough?” Kit asked. “I’d like to get back to Dixie before dawn.”

      “She still sleeps throughout the day?”

      Kit grinned. “Let’s say she’s livelier at night.”

      Justin refused to feel the pang at his friend’s words. Kit deserved Dixie after what they’d gone through together, but it underscored his own solitary state.

      Sitting with an unread book open on his knees after Kit went upstairs to his companion, Justin tried to assess his own feelings and had a darn hard time of it. For decades, he’d mourned the loss of Gwyltha, felt an empty pang whenever he thought of her. Suddenly the pain had faded and all he could summon up were distant good memories.

      If Vlad could give Gwyltha what contented her, so be it. Justin could hardly believe his own thoughts, but he meant them. He’d used up all his hurt. He hadn’t lied to Kit in saying he was untroubled at meeting Vlad. All that mattered now was that he establish a clear territory for Kit and Dixie, and that Stella accept his disguised “gift.”

      “Have you heard what happened last night?” Stella’s neighbor, Mrs. Zeibel, stopped her as she got out of the car.

      “What happened?” There was always trouble in this neighborhood.

      “Young Sid Day got himself arrested.”

      Stella wondered how they’d slept through it. “When? What happened?” Might as well know the worst.

      “Over at the Stewart School. Four of them caught taking computers and suchlike.” Mrs. Zeibel clucked her tongue and frowned. “Those boys. I don’t know. Their poor mother.”

      Their poor mother was no doubt resigned to having her sons arrested. She had to be to keep going. Between Sid getting arrested again and the younger one, Johnny, always hanging around with the drug dealers…Stella sighed. This was no place to raise a child. She only stayed because she’d promised her mother to take care of her house. Dumb promise.

      No point in worrying about it now. She had plenty to do now that she’d dropped Sam off at school, but when she shut the door behind her, the man in Dixie’s store yesterday was foremost in Stella’s thoughts. Justin Corvus! She said his name under her breath as she scraped oatmeal off the cereal plates. It suited him. Polished, smooth—but not in a nasty way, good-looking to the point of dangerous, eyes that did strange things to her thought processes and as for that voice…He could talk her out of her panties in a heartbeat. No, he couldn’t! She had too much self-preservation instinct for that!

      She laughed aloud as she reached for the drying cloth. Who was she fooling? Men like that dated bankers and lawyers, not dry cleaner clerks—and just as well. The last thing she needed right now was another complication in her life.

      Chapter Two

      Justin half-wished he still possessed the ability to take slow, relaxing breaths. He hadn’t felt this nervous in centuries. Why did it matter so? All he had to do was deliver a box. Delivering was the easy bit. It was what to say afterward that bothered him. “I long to taste your rich-scented blood,” would not be the thing to say, but he had this awful fear of blurting it out anyway.

      Abel, help him! He wasn’t a randy youth or an untried fledgling. He was a master vampire. He had more than enough control to converse with a mortal for ten minutes. Didn’t he?

      “You okay?” Dixie asked as she handed him a slip of paper with a roughly drawn map to Stella’s house. “Want me to take it?”

      “No!” Hell, he’d all but snapped. “I’ll be fine, Dixie. You need to rest. You’ve been up all night.” Sewing for Sam…and him.

      “So have you!”

      “I have the advantage of centuries.”

      She grinned. “No one would ever guess!”

      “No one ever does, Dixie.”

      She looked up at him, her green eyes alert as if catching his mood. “I can easily deliver it. The sun’s not bright and it will only take ten minutes.”

      “I want to, Dixie.” As if he’d have her run his errands. He tucked the map in his pocket and the black-edged box under his arm.

      “Take the car.” She held out the keys.

      “I thought it was close. I’ll walk.”

      “No.” She pushed the keys into his hand. “You want to appear mortal, right? Drive.” He made to hand them back, but she shook her head. “A few blocks south of Thurman, the neighborhood changes. It’s not the sort of area where people go strolling for pleasure. Drive in and drive out is what anyone else would do.”

      In that case, what in Hades were a single woman and schoolboy doing living there? “Okay.” He closed his fist over her car keys and hoisted the black-and-white box closer. “Thanks, Dixie.”

      “Just be sure to tell her she can pay me whatever she’d have spent on another costume.”

      “Will do.” He curled his hand over the knob and opened the back door. “Bye, and thanks again.”

      “And remember to stay on the right side of the road!” she shot at him as he stepped out the door.

      Justin unlocked Dixie’s car, and then realized he’d opened the wrong door. Would he ever get used to this? He placed the box on the passenger seat and walked around the bonnet and unlocked the driver’s side. By the time he finished readjusting the seat and fiddling with the rearview mirror, he could have walked there! But Dixie’s caution worried him. She was most definitely not a woman to get overly nervous, and if she thought an area risky…

      He’d soon find out.

      Her directions were easy to follow and precise, and her warnings about the area were spot on. As he turned left onto Lubeck, he couldn’t miss the boarded up, dilapidated house on one corner. Now that really did look like a place for Hollywood vampires or ghouls to lurk! The house across the way wasn’t much better, but it was inhabited. Two shaven-headed young men lurked on the sagging porch.

      Justin checked house numbers. At least Stella’s was a distance down the road. Two blocks down. Heck, he was thinking in the lingo. He pulled the car into the curb and looked around. Her house was shabby but tidy-looking. She had no sagging sofas in the front garden, nor did she have a rusty, disused water heater decorating her front porch like one of her neighbors. Stella’s front steps were flanked with a pair of pumpkins, and a cardboard cutout of a green-faced witch hung on the front door. Obviously a witch didn’t mean the same to her that it did to Kit and Dixie. Stella was fortunate.

      He took the steps two at a time and rang the bell. And waited. And waited. He sensed a heartbeat behind the locked door. “Who’s there?” Stella asked.

      “Justin Corvus, Ms. Schwartz.” As if she’d remember!

      “From the Vampire Emporium.” Only Dixie could come up with that name for a shop the size of a shoebox. “Dixie sent something she thought Sam might use.”

      He heard a bolt slide back and a lock turn. The door opened a few inches and Stella peered out before releasing the chain lock. “Come СКАЧАТЬ