Albert put the coins back in their pouch. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Brandy climbed the ladder first and Albert took the time to give a wondering gaze back they way they’d come.
Chapter 23
Albert walked Brandy to her car. Some clouds were moving in, and the eastern horizon was beginning to glow with the first traces of dawn. They said little as they walked across campus. Both of them were thinking about the eyeless man and the gold coins.
“Do you think that guy was the one who gave you the box?” Brandy asked as they crossed into the lot where her car was parked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems logical.”
Brandy fished her keys out of her wet purse and unlocked her car door. She slid into the seat and reached over the visor for the pack of cigarettes she kept there. “Thank god,” she sighed and punched in the cigarette lighter on the dash. “I need one of these so bad.” She opened the pack, took one out and put it in her mouth. She then leaned back while the lighter warmed up.
Albert couldn’t see anything through her heavy sweatshirt, but he knew she was not wearing a bra or panties and though he’d had intercourse with her and spent the past several hours looking at her naked, this knowledge still turned him on.
“That was an incredible adventure,” she said. The lighter popped out and she paused to light her cigarette.
“Yeah. It was.” And it was even more incredible because she had gone with him. Being with her was the best part of it all. He almost wished that the adventure could go on forever, just so he could continue to be with her.
She looked at him through the smoke, her eyes sharp and sexy behind her glasses. “Think we should keep this to ourselves?”
“Definitely.”
“Maybe we’ll go back sometime,” she said. She took the pouch from Albert’s hand and opened it, looking at the miniscule treasure within. It was by no means a gangster’s hideout, but it was pretty cool. “Maybe learn a little more about that place.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But he did not think they would. “I’ll do some research on those coins. See if I can find out what they’re worth.”
She handed him the pouch and then leaned back and stared up at the sky while she smoked. Albert did not like cigarettes, considered them poison, but there was something about the way she smoked that was very sexy. Or perhaps it was only the sex room, the lingering after-effects that made everything she did sexy. Or maybe he was just naturally infatuated with her. It was difficult to tell for sure.
“So,” Albert began, feeling nervous. “Think maybe we could go out sometime? See what things are like on this side of the dirt?”
Brandy released a soft, smoky laugh. “Right now, Albert, I don’t want to think about life. I just want to go home, take a hot shower and go to bed.”
“Oh.” Albert dropped his eyes.
Brandy watched his expression darken. “I’ll see you in lab tomorrow. Or…today I guess.” Their class was at ten, so she had time to grab a few hours of sleep before getting back to reality. But there was no way she was going to make it to her early class.
“Yeah. I’ll be there.” He forced himself to look at her, forced himself to smile.
She stepped out of the car and kissed him, her arms around his neck, cigarette glowing in the fading shadows of the breaking dawn. Her tongue slipped between his lips and a spark shot through him from his mouth to the very core of his brain. A moment later, when she pulled away, she said, “Ask me again then, okay?”
“Okay.” He was stunned, unable to even smile. He thought his heart might explode in his very chest, and he knew by her smile that she could see that in his eyes.
“Goodnight, Albert. Sweet dreams. I’ll see you in class.”
“Goodnight.”
Brandy returned to her car and drove away. Albert watched until she was gone and then walked home, his head spinning, his heart swelling. It had been one hell of a night.
###
Don’t miss the next book in this series, available now!
Read on for the entire first chapter of
The Temple of the Blind: Book Two
Gilbert House
Chapter 1
When she saw that eleven o'clock had come and gone, Andrea finally gave up on Rachel’s call. Bitterly, she turned off her cell phone and plugged in the recharger.
It didn't really surprise her that she was hearing less and less from her best friend lately. After all, Rachel had a boyfriend now and a part time job at the movie theater. New acquaintances were requiring more and more of the time that used to be reserved for old and that was perfectly natural.
But the point was that Rachel promised. She said she would call. She said they could talk. But broken promises were becoming the rule rather than the exception lately when it came to Rachel Penning.
It was just a stupid phone call. It shouldn't have even mattered to her. What did she care if Rachel didn't want to chat with her anymore?
But Andrea was feeling unusually lonely lately. None of her friends seemed to have any time for her these days. Boyfriends and jobs and new interests were apparently crowding her right out of their lives. No one could find the time to visit or talk or even send her a quick text most days. And it hurt the most with Rachel, because Rachel had always been the best of her friends, the one she trusted most.
She wondered if it was the loneliness brought on by her friends' disinterest that made her feel so emotional lately, or if she was only hurt so much by their disinterest because she'd felt so extraordinarily emotional. It was difficult to tell. Either way, she was sad. And it was because she’d been feeling so sad that she’d pleaded with Rachel to call her after work.
She logged into her e-mail account, hoping that maybe someone wrote to her, but the only messages were three forwards from Wendy Gavon.
Andrea regretted ever giving Wendy her e-mail address. She never actually wrote anybody. All the girl ever did was forward chain letters and stupid jokes. Sometimes she sent twenty or thirty at a single sitting and just lately things that she’d already forwarded had begun to recycle themselves, suggesting that either Wendy wasn’t actually reading the messages with which she was clogging other people’s inboxes anymore, or that she had the memory of a box of crayons.
She deleted all three messages without reading them.
She should have just gone to bed. It was Wednesday night and tomorrow was another school day, but she didn’t feel like sleeping just yet. In fact, she was afraid that if she crawled into bed right now, she would only start to cry.
She wasn’t sure why she felt so down. Surely she couldn't be this upset over some stupid missed phone call. She was ordinarily a very cheerful person. Perhaps it was simply the common hormones of a teenage girl, her body in perpetual motion, still trying to bridge that seemingly impossible gap between child and woman, physically, chemically and emotionally. This unusual depression in a usually perky and optimistic personality was perhaps nothing more than the emotional equivalent to the pimples against which she and a cabinet full of facial cleansers had been waging war for the past six years.
She browsed the web for another twenty minutes, finding nothing that interested her in the least. She simply wasn’t in the mood for anything she could find on the internet. Finally, she shut down the computer and stood up. She crossed the room and threw herself onto her bed, still feeling as if she might soon cry.