“My room,” he said. “King bed. Huge. You stay on your side. I’ll stay on mine.”
It had made sense in his head. From the look on her face as she spun back around, he wasn’t sure it had made sense out loud.
“You must be kidding,” she said. “Do I know you? Do I know anything about you?” She threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, right, I do. I know you carry an effing big knife that suddenly isn’t anywhere to be seen! I know you dive into random street fights! I know you were bloody when I met you and you’re bloodier now!” She gave the hotel a determined look, her mouth pressed tight in thought. “I bet they’d let me use the phone. I bet the cops would take me to a YMCA. Or something.”
“Lice,” he said, sighing. “Don’t stay, then. But if you would help—”
“Right,” she said skeptically. “Now you need help? Or now you just want to lure me up— Hey...hey. Are you fainting?”
The second time she’d said that, dammit. “Not fainting,” he told her, watching the world go wavery and grey. “Passing out.”
“Gah!” she said, making it there in time to keep his head from clunking on pavement—a distant, pleasant and living pillow. With excellent form. “Stop that! Okay! What’s your room number?”
As impatient as her voice came to his ears, her hands stayed gentle at his shoulders, touching his face. “God, you really are hot. C’mon, then, big guy. Hotel, you, me. Let’s go be a cliché.”
Chapter 3
Think, Gwen Badura, she told herself. Think about what you’re doing.
Because here she was in front of the hotel room where the man named Michael MacKenzie, AKA Mac, slumped wearily against the wall. She routed through his pockets for the room key.
He didn’t look like trouble.
He barely looked conscious.
It didn’t mean he’d stay that way.
First a police report...then how many hours till I sleep? At a shelter. With lice.
Ugh.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she told herself. Out loud. Firmly. And then just shrugged when he gave her a bleary and questioning look, finally producing the card key. She took it from him, pushed it into the lock, and flicked the handle open.
Whew. The decorating theme du jour must have been garish.
But the bed was indeed huge. And there was a little fridge and an even smaller microwave, and the bathroom with its separate sink area didn’t greet her with any smells, drips, or puddles of untoward water.
Mac headed straight for the fridge. She closed the door behind them, far too aware of the absence of things—not throwing her purse on the bed, her overnighter beside the closet. At least she had the cheapo toothbrush the hotel had given her on the way in.
You’re doing the right thing.
And not just for her. She watched as he pulled a small plastic bottle from the fridge, broke the cap seal, and gulped it down. Some sort of protein drink, as best as she could read upside down.
Well, at least it wasn’t blood. The way things had gone this evening, wouldn’t it be just her luck to have hooked up with a vampire? And would it truly have been any less believable? “You don’t drink blood, do you?”
He startled, spilling the last of the drink down his chin, and looked at her. For an instant she thought she might have seen guilt as he wiped the back of his hand over his chin, but then he said, his voice gone hoarse with fatigue, “Do you just say whatever comes into your head, then?”
“Gets it out of the way,” Gwen said promptly. “Besides, the best defense is a good offense.”
Right. And she’d learned it early. If she was going to poke her nose into the gut feelings that so often drove her, it was easier to prod the situation right out into the open. That way she could see just what she had to deal with. “You didn’t say no, by the way. About drinking blood.”
He tossed the bottle into the minuscule wastebasket beside the fridge, practically filling it with that single item. “I don’t, no.”
While she was pondering that unexpected response, he peeled his jacket off and dropped it over the straight-backed chair beside the ubiquitous token desk. “Bed,” he said, gesturing at it. And then a nod at the closet. “Extra blanket, extra pillow. I’ll hang out on top of the sheets, if you’d like.”
Yeah, she’d like. She grabbed the items, then belatedly thought to say, “Hey, I should do that. I mean, I’ll sleep on top.”
She stopped herself, her back to him, feeling the warmth suffusing her face. “If you’re a gentleman,” she said, “you’ll pretend I didn’t say that.”
The noise he made might have been amusement. “Relax,” he said, albeit through a rustling noise. “Beautiful as you are, I have my own plans for the night.”
She whirled on him, bedding in hand, mouth open on words already lost.
“Sometimes I say what I think, too,” he told her. He regarded the bloodied shirt in his hand and tossed it toward the wastebasket.
“Um,” she said, over the top of the pillow. And stood there as he took his newly stripped torso over to the sink, not quite sure if she was stunned by the beauty of said torso, muscle strapped over muscle and tightly defining the form of him, or by the damage done to it.
Okay, maybe you can have your way with me after all.
But thankfully, she didn’t say it out loud this time.
And thankfully, it wasn’t in her nature to mean it if she did. No one-night stands on irresponsible road trips with men picked up in a diner for her. No, sirree.
She did, however, drop her armload onto the bed, and by then it was clear enough he intended to do nothing more than rinse his mouth, splash water onto his face and let the rest of him quietly finish bleeding on its own.
“Oh, no,” she said. “You need to clean that...those...” She waved in the general direction of the bruises and abrasions and— “Is that... Did you get stabbed?”
“Huh.” He twisted to look at his ribs beneath his arm. “Maybe. A little.”
She found herself speechless. Pointing at the cut and its oozing blood and the stains all over his skin, gesturing at the sink and the water, unable to fathom his reaction to the entire situation. Finally she grabbed the desk chair and dragged it into the bathroom, pointing at the wound.
“You,” she said. “You’re delirious. That’s what. Sit there. I’m going to see what’s what. If I had my purse I’d have Band-Aids, but I don’t suppose—”
“It’ll be okay,” he said, gently—surprisingly gentle at that, in spite of his bleariness. Reassuring, as if she had been the one who’d been hurt—beyond the sting of skinned palms that were truly hers to own. “Nothing here is that bad. I just need some sleep. You need some sleep. Things will look different tomorrow.”
“My purse,” she muttered, “will still be stolen.” But she reached for the hotel washcloth—which would surely never be the same after this—and ran the hot water, ripping the teeny bar of soap free from its wrapping.
He hesitated another moment, just looking at her—enough so she stopped what she was doing to look back, finding herself rooted there. Just long enough to realize what the expression on his face meant—that he did find her beautiful, that he did want her, and that his hand, rising, was going to curl around the back of her head and twine through her hair and—