Читать книгу Dressed To Slay - Harper Allen - Страница 10

Better take another time-out here.

The thing is, our fiancés weren’t irresistible. Lance had a beefiness about him that even his Armani suits couldn’t conceal, and Todd had boyishly tousled chestnut curls that Kat and I suspected were the result of a body perm. Tash swore they were natural but even so, his eligibility stemmed more from his tax bracket than from devastating good looks.

As for Dean, the two times we’d done the horizontal mambo together I’d nearly nodded off while he’d sat on the edge of the bed folding his boxers and meticulously cuffing his silk socks into flat balls, as if he were packing for camp. When he’d finally joined me, I’d realized that watching him fold his clothes had been the thrilling part, and for the next five and a half minutes—oh, please, every girl checks her watch when she’s with a man like Dean—I occupied myself by weaving a highly creative fantasy that included a couple of gorgeous firemen from the Maplesburg FD, a cop whom I’d flirted out of giving me a speeding ticket the previous day and the sexy mechanic who’d worked on Popsie’s Mercedes the time I’d borrowed it and done something unfortunate to the steering. They’d been hot. Dean and Todd and Lance weren’t.

Except now they were. Dean’s open shirt revealed washboard abs that almost rippled as I looked at them, instead of the incipient little paunch I was used to seeing on him. His thinning blond hair was thinning no longer, but swept back from his forehead in a thick golden cascade that ended up somewhere around his collar. His cheekbones were more prominent than I remembered, hard slabs that matched the new firmness of his jaw.

This last one almost broke through my reverie. Dean’s weak profile had always been his least attractive feature, even trumping his hair. In the dim recesses of my mind a feeble alarm bell rang, telling me that if Dean Hudson the Third had suddenly acquired bone structure a supermodel would sell her soul for, something was really, really wrong with this picture. Instead of listening to it, I impatiently shut it off as my gaze strayed south of Dean’s belt. I sagged against the hall armoire.

My boyfriend had a package. I blinked, shook my head in disbelief, and looked again. It was still there. My boyfriend had a real, honest-to-God package, and it wasn’t the kind that came wrapped up in pretty paper and ribbons, it was the kind that usually came wrapped in a well-worn pair of Levi’s on a bad-boy biker in my daydreams. Dean’s investment-banker suit trousers were straining over the unmistakable bulge, and even as I watched, his zipper notched down a trifle.

I heard a tiny moaning sound, realized it was coming from me and sank my teeth into my lower lip in an effort to get control of myself. Beside me, Tash was making the same kind of low moan.

“So adorable of you boys to drop by.” Kat came up behind us, her sex-goddess drawl tinged with regret the way it always is when she’s about to puncture a male’s hopes. “But you’ll have to take rain checks all round, sweeties. You don’t—”

Her drawl cut off abruptly. I heard her swallow, heard her moan like Tash and I had, and then I heard her huskily ask Lance if he felt like a nightcap…and just as she did the mute button on the alarm bells in my head suddenly released.

“No!” I turned swiftly to her. “Whatever you do, don’t ask them in, Kat! They’re—they’re—” My protest sputtered off as I tried to figure out why I was making it.

“We’re what, honey?” Dean’s voice had a sexy note I’d never heard in it before. “A little bit drunk? A little bit horny?” His eyes, their normal pale blue now a glowing sapphire, met mine and again I felt heat lapping over me.

“A little bit…dead,” I said faintly.

I didn’t know where the words had come from. Confusion filled me, and I opened my mouth to begin an apology—but then I stopped.

Because just for a second I saw what was really standing on our doorstep.

Unbuttoned shirts fluttered open around three rotting chests. Lank clumps of hair barely covered brown, parchment-looking scalps. Even as I watched, Dean leaned casually against the doorframe and a chunk of greenish flesh detached from his fingers. They hadn’t been dead long enough to have become putrid corpses, of course. I realize now that what I saw in that instant was the essence of their deadness.

But the way they looked wasn’t the worst part. That came when I glanced down and saw what remained of their feet: Dean’s in polished Brooks brogues, Lance’s in Italian slip-ons, Todd’s in the ergonomically correct German loafers he swore were the only shoes that could stand up against hard hospital floors.

Admittedly, Todd’s uber-shoes always made me want to fling my hand across my eyes and cry, “The horror, the horror!” but not this time.

Because this time they were hovering an inch or so off the ground…and so were Dean’s brogues and Lance’s slip-ons.

And then they weren’t. All three of our gentlemen callers were standing on solid ground, and as my gaze traveled upwards I saw everything else was back to normal, too. They shimmered. They were gorgeous. They were walking wet dreams and they were here for the fabulously fortunate Crosse triplets. And even if that wasn’t normal, suddenly it seemed so to me.

“A little dead?” Beside me Tash gave a breathy laugh. “Don’t mind her, Toddie. Meg’s been chugging back Kat’s appletinis all evening.”

“So how about it, big guy?” Kat looked through her lashes at Lance. “You up for it? A nightcap, I mean.”

“And anything else you’re offering, beautiful,” her impossibly handsome fiancé growled back. “You inviting us in?”

BING!…Bing!…bing…I firmly shut off the irritating bells that kept fading in and out in my head as Kat replied.

“As tempting as the three of you are, lover, I don’t think my darling sisters would appreciate me poaching on their turf. I’ll let them hand out their own party invitations.” She crooked a pink-polished nail at him, gave him her most smoldering look and began sauntering back into the living room.

Lance looked at Todd and Dean. “The crooking-her-finger thing—unspoken but a definite legal invite, right?”

“Hell, don’t look at me.” Todd raked strong surgeon’s fingers through his chestnut curls, and even as Dean’s locked-and-loaded state sent erotic shivers down my spine, I indulged myself in imagining what Dr. Todd’s dexterous fingers could do to a girl. “I’m the schmuck who figured if a nurse’s aide was batting her eyes at me, I had the green light to hustle her sweet ass into the laundry cupboard and give her my best bedside manner, and we all know how that turned out. Sure, the little tramp was fired, but I almost got hauled up before the hospital board. I’d say the crooked-finger thing’s a tease.”

“That was a no-means-no situation, Whitmore.” Dean saw me watching him and gave me a devastating grin before turning to Lance. “Unlike our groping friend here, Zellweger, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a shot. See what happens when you try to cross the threshold.”

I can’t explain it. Tash says she can’t, either. We both stood there and listened to this conversation, and neither one of us found anything weird about it. All I felt was a kind of dizzy impatience to get Dean alone and out of his clothes, and I couldn’t understand why they were still standing there.

Neither could Kat, apparently. “Come on in and help me whip up more appletinis, gorgeous,” she murmured as she passed by on her way to the kitchen with the empty pitcher dangling from her fingertips. “Why waste time making nice with the brat and the brain when you could be with the only Crosse sister who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue in three seconds flat?”

“That’s my cue, boys.” A sharklike grin on his face, Lance stepped over the threshold and into the house. “Think you can perform that trick without the cherry, babe?” he asked as his hand slipped around to Kat’s tush.

Kat, who’s made it clear in the past that she doesn’t appreciate being handled like a melon being tested for ripeness, gurgled sexily. “I can try. Let’s find some privacy while your dreary future sisters-in-law are deciding whether they’re women enough to handle what their fiancés can give them.”

“Women enough? What a total bitch!” Tash sputtered in outrage as Kat led Lance down the hall into the kitchen.

My attention was temporarily diverted from Dean. “But being obviously bitchy isn’t like Kat. Do you think she’s—”

“She could be right.” Todd’s superheated look at Tash held a hint of dubiousness. “If you’re still set on waiting until after the ceremony tomorrow, princess, I can respect that. I think I’ll head on back to the Hot Box, okay?”

“The Hot Box?” Tash’s gaze narrowed. “Listen, Pookie, whatever my cherry-stem-tying slut of a sister says, I can show you a whole lot better time than some boob-job recipient in a G-string. Get in here and I’ll show you.”

Okay, the Crosse triplets could never be mistaken for Jo and Beth and Amy of Little Women. I mean, even now I was storing away the intriguing tidbit Todd had let slip about Tash rationing out the sugar until she was well and truly Mrs. Doctor. Tash had given the impression that her prowess in bed was so amazing her formerly tomcatting fiancé didn’t have the energy to look at other women anymore. But there’s a line we don’t cross, and both Tash and Kat had just jumped eagerly over it. First off, we never diss each other in front of anyone else—not seriously, that is. Secondly, we don’t use what Grammie calls “gutter-talk.” Bitch didn’t quite make that category. Slut did. And Kat’s slam about us not being women enough was unforgivable.

So, as a panting Tash yanked Todd into the house, I reached out to do the same to Dean…and then let my hand drop. I turned to watch her flounce up the stairs, Todd so close behind her you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between them.

Weak-kneed lust warred with sisterly concern in me. I credit Grammie’s steel-under-marshmallow upbringing with the fact that concern won, at least, temporarily. “I should go after them,” I sighed. “If she’s been holding out all this time only to let Kat goad her into it at this late date, she’s going to hate herself in the morning.”

“Sooner than that.” Dean’s voice was velvet. “Honey, let her and Todd play doctor while you and I occupy ourselves with our own game. Wanna start out on the sofa, maybe move to the floor when things start heating up?”

My mouth went dry and every other part of 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 bitch!” He grabbed me by my hair. My feet flew out from under me, but as I fell I felt a tug at the back of my head and I was free. I saw Popsie’s revolver sticking out from underneath the sofa, and stupidly I reached for it again. It caught on something but I didn’t let that stop me.

“What the hell?” As I twisted around to face Dean I saw his rage-filled expression temporarily replaced by one of pure male bafflement. I took in the object he was holding and pure female irritation temporarily replaced my fear.

“It’s a hair extension,” I said coldly. “I had some woven in for the wedding.”

He let it drop, his brief flash of non-undeadness falling away with it. “Maybe they’ll bury it with you. Or maybe there won’t be enough of you to bury when I’m finished.”

He was on me before I had chance to do anything more than thumb back the hammer on the revolver, but as I felt my ribs start to give way under the pressure of his embrace when he pulled me to him and went for my neck, I knew it didn’t matter. Gun or no gun, from the moment I’d invited him into the house I hadn’t had a chance of getting out of this alive. From the absence of screams coming from the kitchen and the upstairs, Kat and Tashya hadn’t had a chance, either.

The thing that had once been Dean Hudson the Third crushed me to its chest, the tips of its teeth poised against the thudding pulse in my neck. I closed my eyes, prayed Grammie wouldn’t be the one to discover her granddaughters’ bodies, and felt my former fiancé go in for the kill.

Which is when Popsie’s old revolver went off.

The explosion was deafening, even muffled as it was by the fact that the gun was jammed between us. Dean jerked backwards, his gaze mocking. “You’re supposed to be the smart one, Megan, but you’re just as blond as your sisters, aren’t you? I already told you, I can’t be killed with a—”

Surprise crossed his chiseled features. He opened his eyes wide, looked down at the still-smoking hole in his pumped left pec, and then looked back at me. “Fuck!” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I only had eternal life for a couple of hours, damn—”

He didn’t finish his sentence because his mouth turned into dust. His mouth and every other part of him, to be exact. For a moment dust-Dean just stood there. Then the dust lost its shape and fell in a greasy heap to the floor by my hair extension.

The only reason I can give for what I did next is that I was in shock. Instead of fainting dead away or throwing up or forcing my rubbery legs to move, I bent down to look at the Dustbuster-fodder my ex-fiancé had turned into. The thought flickered briefly through me that I should feel something at Dean’s demise, since to quote my earlier words to Tash, I’d been planning to do the till-death-us-do-part thing with him.

Except death hadn’t parted us. Not even his undeath had, although his becoming a vamp had definitely widened the chasm. But if the events of this evening hadn’t happened and we’d spent our whole lives together, there would have been a big, empty gap where our marriage should have been. As Kat had admitted about her and Lance, we’d just been a means to an end for each other. As I peered closer at what was left of Dean, I realized all I felt was relief that I’d killed him before he’d killed me.

His remains were as yawn-inducing as he’d once been—just a greasy pile that looked like something Smokey the Bear would want you to kick sand over if you were on a camping trip, except for the misshapen silver blob capping the lead bullet in the middle of the ashes. The melted blob was attached to the one of the silver chains Tash and Kat and I had torn off our necks earlier this evening. They’d obviously ended up under the sofa when I’d grabbed the Sheraton table, and one of them had tangled around the barrel of Popsie’s revolver.

I was looking at a homemade silver bullet, I realized slowly, and somewhere under the sofa were the materials for two more. If Lance and Todd hadn’t sunk their fangs into my sisters’ necks yet, I might still save them.

Even as the wild hope ran through me, I dropped to my knees and began feeling under the sofa. I snagged one chain, scrabbled farther under the sofa to snag the other and leapt to my feet. The next moment I was racing to the kitchen, dropping the first chain and cross down the barrel of Popsie’s revolver as I ran.

“Nuh-uh.” The scornful tones of Tash came from halfway up the staircase. “Bullets don’t work. Neither does Mace, as I found out. You gotta use one of these, apparently.”

She held up a broken length of wood. From the pineapple carving that topped it, I recognized it as part of one of her canopy bed’s posts but I didn’t waste time with questions.

“Throw it here! I’ll use it to stake Lance—”

“Sorry, sweetie, I already took care of him.” Kat’s drawl sounded a little ragged around the edges and her Alexander McQueen bustier top was destined to join my ruined skirt in the garbage, but she mustered a weak smile as she brandished a broken wooden mixing spoon. “I thought you two might need backup, but it looks like all three of us did good on the vamp-slaying, no?” She made a little moue with her lips. “Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever say. I don’t know about you two, but I really need normal right now. Anyone up for a little drink—”

“Foolish!”

The thickly accented rumble came from the doorway. It says volumes for the Crosse triplets’ state of alertness that we simply stared at the figure who had delivered it instead of rushing at him with our weapons. Tash recovered first.

“We deny you entrance to our home’s threshold,” she said swiftly. She frowned. “And that means to our home, too, if you need it spelled out. Like, you can’t come in. You need our permission and we totally withhold it and deny it and—”

“Did you remove holy protections out of vanity? Did you think they were simple baubles?” As our unexpected visitor thundered across Tash’s babbling he stepped forward and entered the house. “I believed those who bore my blood would have more wisdom, but I was wrong. Your foolishness almost brought you death!”

Whoever he was, since he’d been able to enter without our permission, he wasn’t a vamp. He looked to be about Popsie’s age or maybe a little older, and his accent sounded Russian. A homespun cloak was flung over his shoulders and a heavy gold ring glinted on his left hand, but the most striking thing about him were his eyes. They were dark and piercing, and right now they were regarding us with less disapproval than when he’d entered.

“However, your courage and skill saved you, so I pray is still hope for you.” He swept off his cloak and inclined his head in an oddly formal gesture. “Forgive me, I have not properly presented myself. My name is Anton Dzarchertzyn…but if is easier, you may call me Grandfather Darkheart.”