Dressed To Slay. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ me felt hot and wet. “The floor?” I repeated huskily.

      He held out his hand. “You’ll need room to go crazy while I lick every inch of you. You’ll need even more room to go out of your mind when I give you your big present, little girl.”

      I ask you: who listens to a line like that with a straight face? Okay, all of us, at one time or another, but inside we’re doing a mental eye-rolling, if not actually gagging. But gazing adoringly at Dean, I bought into it unquestioningly.

      “Big…present?” I extended my hand. His fingers folded over mine tightly enough that I winced, but somehow the pain was exciting. “So what are you waiting for? Come in and let’s start unwrapping it.” I felt the standing-on-a-cliff sensation shudder through me for the second time that evening, gave his hand a tug—

      And felt my bones turn to ice as my sisters’ screams tore through the house.

      I ripped my hand from Dean’s and yanked open the hall armoire’s doors. “Hit the alarm monitor beside you!” I shrieked, reaching to the back of the hat shelf. “Someone’s broken into the house! Tash and Todd must have walked in on someone upstairs and maybe Kat and Lance surprised someone else in the kitchen!”

      Where I came up with the double-set-of-intruders scenario is still a mystery to me, but at the time my glamyr-fogged mind seized on it as the only possible explanation for my sisters’ screams. My fingers found the objects I was looking for at the back of the hat shelf—Popsie’s ancient revolver and the box of ammunition that went with it. A few summers ago he’d insisted all three of us receive qualified instruction on how to handle it, overriding Grammie’s objections with the argument that in the time it took for the police to arrive, knowing how to use a gun could save us from being raped, or worse. Bullets spilled to the floor as I loaded it. “I’ll take the kitchen, you go upstairs for Tash! The police should get—”

      “You really are as dumb as I always thought you were, aren’t you?” Dean gave the armoire a careless push. It gouged its way across seven feet of Colonial heart-pine floorboards before coming to a halt in front of the alarm keypad on the wall by the open front door. The next moment he’d batted Popsie’s revolver halfway across the room. “Get the picture now, sweet thing?” he asked in the velvet voice that only minutes ago had been turning my knees to rubber.

      I stared at him, my mind not processing the fact that he’d one-handedly shoved across the floor a piece of furniture that had taken four able-bodied men to move when Grammie’d had it delivered. “What’s the matter with you? We’ve got to help Kat and Tash!” Without waiting for his reply I ran to the living room, grabbed the gun from where it had landed on the sofa and began sprinting to the kitchen.

      I hit the floor so hard that one of my shoes flew off. Pain pierced my left butt cheek as a heart-pine sliver inserted itself through my skirt into my tush. I looked up in shock.

      I’d run full tilt into Dean’s washboard abs…which was impossible. He’d been standing a good fifteen feet away from me as I’d started my dash into the kitchen from the living room. He hadn’t run from the hall to intercept me or somehow leapt those fifteen feet, he’d simply been at the door one moment and in front of me the next. In the split second between those two positions he’d slid sideways…not across the floor but through the air, like a chess piece being moved by an invisible hand onto a more offensive square.

      As he looked down at me, I saw space between his feet and the floor, but when he spoke, the fact that my fiancé was defying the laws of gravity fell to second place in the creepy sweepstakes.

       “Forget your sisters, bitch! Help yourself!”

      His voice was still velvet, but now it was dirt-stiffened velvet. It was velvet that had been used as a corpse-cloth and was stained with unidentifiable fluids. And if that sounds as though I was still feeling the effects of the appletinis, all I can say is that by then I was stone-cold sober and desperately wishing there was a stiff cocktail within reach to numb my senses. All five of them were telling me stuff I didn’t want to know, and my sixth sense had gone to Def-Con One with the alarm bells again.

      “Uh-uh.” From my seat on the floor, I forced the words past my stiff lips. “You can’t be. They don’t exis—” Dean’s canines, razor-sharp and gleaming, lengthened past his bottom lip and I couldn’t deny the evidence any longer.

      My fiancé was a vampire. And if he was, then it was perfectly possible that Lance and Todd were, too. Kat and Tashya were still screaming, but even as I decided to make it a triplet thing, Dean lunged.

      He hadn’t been a vampire for very long, as I’ve since learned. Maybe his newbie status was the reason for his coordination being off just enough that I had the chance to roll out of his way. I cracked my kneecap a good one against the Sheraton table in front of the sofa, scrambled backwards on my splinter-stabbed butt, and suddenly realized I still clutched Popsie’s revolver. I cocked it and fired.

      If any goth-types reading this are thinking, God, how stupid can this chick be not to know vampires can’t be killed with lead? I have two things to say to you. One: I hoped the books and movies were wrong on that; and two: a couple of black dresses are admittedly a good starting point for a wardrobe, but at a certain stage, why not consider adding a few pale neutrals?

      The books and movies weren’t wrong on the lead bullet thing. Dean looked down at his six-pack torso where the entry wound was already closing up. “It’s all true.” His voice had gone back to sounding sexy, but it wasn’t working on me anymore. I glanced frantically at the Sheraton table, which in the past I’d dismissed as a fake antique Grammie had paid too much for, but which my newly-appreciative gaze now saw as a flat surface supported by four legs that might just work as stakes. “I’ve got a ripped body, a full head of hair and I can’t be killed. This is the best investment I ever made in my life!”

      “Correction—you can’t be killed by an ordinary bullet.” I jumped to my feet, hoisting the Sheraton table and smashing it against the floor. The table leg I held broke free. “But from all I’ve heard, a stake’ll do the job just fine!”

      Not the snappiest line, but the best I could manage under the circumstances. Dean’s expression was one of unholy glee, unholy being the operative word. His eyes no longer looked sapphire, but black, and the snarl erupting from him didn’t sound like anything human.

      I plunged my makeshift stake into his heart.

      That was the plan, anyway. The problem was that Grammie’s Sheraton table turned out to be the real deal and not a sturdy fake. Even as I drove the leg against his muscled chest it broke, leaving me with a stub of worm-eaten oak in my hand.

      Dean snarled again and attacked.

      I had one quick glimpse of his face, distorted by rage into something out of a nightmare, and then his right palm came blurring toward me. It connected with my cheekbone so solidly that my head whipped sideways and the rest of me followed. I fell onto the sofa, bounced once and tumbled to the floor.

      “She said there was a price!” He yanked me up by my blouse. It ripped and he transferred his grip to my shoulder, his fingers digging into me like knives. “We’d get everything we’d ever dreamed of in exchange for killing you three and I’m not about to let you screw up my part of the—”

      My knee came up instinctively. Here’s a tidbit of information you might thank me for one day: vamps react to a kick in the family jewels just the way any human creep would. Dean gave a high-pitched scream and doubled over. I turned to run.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ